A dispiriting picture of deepening political polarization.
A close look at far-right activism among the younger electorate.
Drawing on more than 200 interviews conducted between 2018 and 2022, journalist Spencer produces an eye-opening report on the rise of ultraconservatism among young people, focusing intensively on three figures: Cliff Maloney (b. 1991), who rose to become president of Young Americans for Liberty; Charlie Kirk (b. 1993), founder of Turning Point USA; and Candace Owens (b. 1989), celebrated as a “Black YouTube sensation” and often appearing on Fox News. The movement promotes the anti-government, free-market ideas common to the far right. While Young Americans for Liberty aligns with libertarianism, Turning Point USA focuses on culture wars issues: anti-abortion, pro–gun rights, and climate change denial. Owens, promoting a stance she calls BLEXIT, is “unapologetically dismissive when others claimed Black victimhood” and pointed out “systemic racism.” Stop complaining about the impact of slavery, she has exhorted, and look to the future. After the election of Donald Trump, the movement’s rhetoric became increasing infused with expressions of cruelty, homophobia, and ethnic stereotyping. Besides chronicling the spread of right-wing views among young people, Spencer underscores Republicans’ enthusiastic support of strategic advice and significant amounts of money. Though ambitious, outspoken, and hardworking, the movements’ leaders would not have been able to gain widespread influence and attract followers without funding by wealthy, powerful conservatives such as Charles Koch and Robert and Rebekah Mercer, among other billionaires. YAL’s “Win the Door” campaign, aimed at electing ultraconservative candidates in state races, and TPUSA’s savvy deployment of online outlets fed into Republicans’ game plan—which, Spencer advises, could well serve as a model for Democrats, who historically have ignored young, progressive activists. Bringing just as much energy and determination as their conservative counterparts, these young people, writes Spencer, must be heard as well as supported wholeheartedly.
A dispiriting picture of deepening political polarization.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-304136-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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