A convincing argument to extend truth in advertising laws to the presidency.
A former federal prosecutor calls for laws regulating lying about stolen elections and other such calumnies.
A former member of Robert Mueller’s team of legal investigators, Weissmann enjoys the distinction of having been singled out by Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, for revocation of his security clearance (“Having been out of government since 2019…the entire exercise was a performative show of retribution”) and President Trump himself, who called him a “bad guy”—a step up from Stephen Miller’s “degenerate.” All that’s water off a duck’s back, but what truly bothers Weissmann is the fact that “there is no criminal law that makes Trump’s election fraud lie illegal.” There’s plenty of precedent for legally punishing lying of other kinds: There are perjury laws and laws interdicting lying to Congress and falsehoods told to various financial investigative bodies (some of which figured in Trump’s 34 felony counts). A case of signal importance, testing the edges of the First Amendment, is the Stolen Valor Act, punishing anyone who for personal gain lies about having won, say, the Medal of Honor. And then there are the examples of other countries, to say nothing of most individual American states: Germany’s law that punishes Holocaust denial, Brazil’s imprisonment of Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro for having not just lied about his electoral loss but also attempting to mount a coup, with Brazilian law holding that “the right to truthful information in elections supersedes an unfettered right to free speech when deliberate falsehoods are made that threaten the democratic order.” In that spirit, Weissmann proposes amending the Constitution as a safeguard and disqualifying those who perpetrate intentional election denial from running for elected office for some set term of years. And he backs up his case with a strong conviction: “When lies about election integrity go unchecked and become party orthodoxy, we are no longer voting in a democracy.”
A convincing argument to extend truth in advertising laws to the presidency.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9780316601306
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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