An eye-opening look at how a fringe effected a hostile takeover of a once-mainstream political party.
MAGA is coming for democracy, but first it’s coming for the GOP.
“Our audience does not hate these people,” said Steve Bannon of Democrats. “But they hate the RINOs.” In his first book, Washington Post politics reporter Arnsdorf notes that, since the 2020 election and the 2022 midterms, when Trump-approved candidates lost nationwide, it was Republican boards, commissioners, and judges who fended off challenges. There were Republican governors and operatives in places such as Pennsylvania and Arizona who counted the votes that lost Trump the presidency in 2020. “Even Trump’s own vice president refused to help him block the official certification in Congress,” writes the author. Consequently, one of MAGA’s chief goals is to take over all those downstream positions so that loyalists can force out moderates and never-Trumpers and fill the ranks with true believers. Never mind that true believers are very much in the minority and that the fringe is broadly unpopular. Never mind, Arnsdorf writes, that they “disconnected from the rest of the country.” In their campaign to capture the GOP, they have been successful, helped along by election deniers and Capitol stormers for whom loyalty to Trump is the only litmus test. Ironically, as one longtime Arizona GOP operative told Arnsdorf, most of the recruits into the far-right movement, as well as candidates for local posts such as precinct commissioner, rarely or never voted before 2020, while local MAGA darling Kari Lake was an Obama supporter before seeing greener pastures in Trumpland. Given MAGA’s remake of the GOP, with no small help from QAnon initiates, it’s small wonder that most of the candidates being fielded at every level are MAGA approved and that the Republican Party is what Bannon calls “a revolutionary vanguard” for the extreme right.
An eye-opening look at how a fringe effected a hostile takeover of a once-mainstream political party.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780316497510
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
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
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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