A revealing—and disturbing—analysis of a dangerous threat to American democracy.
An international security scholar teams up with a psychologist specializing in radicalization to explore the QAnon movement.
QAnon, a congeries of conspiracy theories whose origins lie in a curious blend of popular culture, science fiction, and deep-rooted antisemitism, has swept up millions of people of varying ideologies and levels of education. Bloom and Moskalenko quote David Gilbert from Vice News: “There are highly educated people that fall into these movements, and it is dangerous and remiss to pigeonhole QAnon followers according to educational attainment or social status.” Even so, write the authors, QAnon is a magnet for the mentally ill, particularly people suffering from PTSD, one manifestation of which is “the feeling of not belonging.” Other forms of anomie and detachment are evident throughout the movement. An unusually large segment of members are women, who “have been at the forefront of white racist movements for the past 100 years.” Such women have been responsible for numerous crimes, and those involved in QAnon were well represented in the attack on the Capitol of Jan. 6, 2021. Oddly, the authors note, there are connections between QAnon and the fuzzy New Age movement, which shares a mistrust of corporations, government, and the media and a view that all are dark forces bent on poisoning minds and bodies. With the canonical doctrine that Democrats are satanic pedophiles and that Donald Trump is the only person on the planet who can combat them (and their “Jewish space lasers”), we’re on the dark side of the moon indeed. And it just gets weirder, but more urgent, with QAnon planks that paint Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey as agents of a movement meant to destroy the Constitution and enslave those who don’t share their liberal views. The authors close with the note that the madness is contagious and that QAnon views have spread to dozens of other countries.
A revealing—and disturbing—analysis of a dangerous threat to American democracy.Pub Date: June 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5036-3029-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Redwood Press/Stanford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
