CITIZENSHIP: NOTES ON AN AMERICAN MYTH, Daisy Hernández reflects on a cultural sea-change

CITIZENSHIP: NOTES ON AN AMERICAN MYTH
DAISY HERNÁNDEZ
The Hogarth Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A provocative, personal, blazingly intelligent examination of one of the most vexing questions facing the United States today—who is, and should be, a citizen?

“How did ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ turn upside down to where we are today? Everyone needs to read this book, citizens and non-citizens alike. Brilliant!”—Sandra Cisneros

"The most comprehensive book on citizenship/immigration I've ever read. A must-read!"—Javier Zamora

In this one-of-a-kind book, Daisy Hernández fiercely interrogates one of the most complicated subjects of contemporary life and citizenship. Braiding memoir, history, and cultural criticism, she exposes the truths and lies of how we define ourselves as a country and a people. Turning to her own family's stories—her mother arrived from Colombia, her father a political refugee from Castro's Cuba—Hernández shows how the very idea of citizenship is a myth and part of the stories we tell ourselves about the American soul and psyche.

Reframing our understanding of what it means to be an American, Notes on Citizenship is an urgent and necessary account of the laws, customs, and language we use to include and exclude, especially those who come from Latin America. With her scholar's mind and memoirist's gift for narrative, Hernández weaves a story both personal and national, while reckoning with our country's ongoing debate about who belongs and providing fresh ways of thinking about citizenship. At once bracing, fearless, and tender, Notes on Citizenship is a powerful portrait of one family's experiences in the borderlands of citizenship and an honest illumination of the country in which we live.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The Supreme Court has heard oral arguments on the deeply contentious topic of ending the age-old concept of "birthright citizenship," very much in the current regime's sights for elimination. Based on the Justice's tenor of questioning the Justice Department's counsel, I don't feel the regime can count on the ruling being in their favor.
This collection of essays has as its core a desire to think through how citizenship has changed in practice. The US Constitution defines citizenship in the Fourteenth Amendment, and it's pretty unambiguous about it. (That same amendment gifted us with the legal horror of corporate personhood.) It's been a longstanding desire of racist, fascist scum to make the idea of citizenship into a conditional grant...which, if anyone though about it for a single minute, would mean there's no citizenship for anyone at all.

Author Daisy thinks through the various ramifications of this terrible idea. Once a right is "granted" it can be taken away. That is why every time a law is passed that limits a right, like birthright citizenship, you...you personally...are at risk of losing whatever right it is. If this kakistocracy has not taught you the lesson that believing "they wouldn't/can't do that" is a dangerous illusion, read Author Daisy's essays. They can, and they will, and even court orders will not force the scum to cease and desist from illegal, immoral behavior. Look how many losses in court have been dealt the regime; yet no sign of meaningful compliance, compliance with the *intent* of the orders and laws, exists. This is, in other words, a coup against the form of government we take for granted.

Read these essays, even though the collection feels thematically scattered, because each essay is very clearly argued, and makes excellent points. It is a slowly unfolding disaster but it is unfolding...it's time to pull your socks up and do the work of citizenship.

Follow Author Daisy's example.

JANUARY 6TH: 24 HOURS AT THE CAPITOL: An Oral History of the January 6th Insurrection; THE CONSPIRACISTS: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging

24 HOURS AT THE CAPITOL: An Oral History of the January 6th Insurrection
NORA NEUS
Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The 24 Hours in Charlottesville author offers a minute-by-minute account of the January 6 riots through the never-before-heard stories of those who were there Neus’s progressive lens goes beyond mainstream reporting to reveal important truths about racial justice and the US white nationalist movement

Drawing on the collaboration and support of Tim Heaphy, chief investigator of the U.S. Congress’s January 6 Select Committee; on exclusive access to the United States Capitol Historical Society’s oral history project on the insurrection; and on her personal contacts on the Hill, Nora Neus reconstructs what it was actually like in and around the Capitol during those 24 hours. Her narrators include high-profile politicians and maintenance workers, Capitol Hill residents and White House photographers, police officers who defended the building and insurrectionists who have since disavowed their actions.

Police officers recall the insurrectionists screaming at them and calling them traitors. Staffers remember “walking over pools of blood” as they ran for their lives. A young Asian-American staffer recalls locking herself in a room just feet from the rioters, mentally preparing to be raped. A mostly Black janitorial staff began cleaning the blood of insurrectionists off the marble floor on the Capitol before the building was even officially secured.

January 6 was a well-planned attack coordinated largely right out in the open, the threat of which lawmakers and government officials underestimated in part because it was coming from white people. Neus will examine the underlying racial implications of not only the attack itself, but also in the planning and coordination of the response.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A deeply, deeply disturbing book about a searing and fateful moment in US history. No one wants to think about it this way but I'll say it openly: J6 was the Fort Sumter of the white supremacist rebellion. It's approaching a new inflection point with midterms threatening to expose the lies that undergirded felonious yam's 2024 election. We can expect more violence, and with a better prepared kakistocracy in place.

You're a citizen. If you're not, you still have a stake in what happens in the country that holds the planet's future habitability in it silos and missiles. Inform youself so you will know what to pressure your government officials to oppose, prevent if possible, and agitate for serious effort to neutralize.

It was, and is, possible for angry white men to plan and execute a coup attempt and get away with it because unexamined privilege, unacknowledged dominance, is finally being challenged. At this moment, the allies at the top are fumbling issues important to the aptly-named "base" so there is a window of opportunity we can not afford to bungle our handling of.

I encourage you, since you were not there on the grounds of the United States Capitol building on the sixth of January in 2021, to read these first-hand accounts from those who were. Calling this event a riot is inaccurate, diminishing both the intent of the perpetrators and the severity of the impact of their actions. Read about the planning...took place in the open, remember...the execution of this failed Putsch, the actions of the traitors. The awful things done, the horrifying behavior.

Now realize the sitting president, in his last Constitutionally sanctioned term, has issued many pardons for these men.

Do not assume the midterm elections will proceed as usual. Sound the alarm in your community for poll-watchers to be defended...and defended against. Do not sit it out because you're tired, because you don't think "They" would dare to do that.

Did you imagine "They" would dare stage a coup attempt? Because "They" did.

Openly. Without consequences.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE CONSPIRACISTS: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging
NOELLE COOK
Broadleaf Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$28.99 hardcover, preorder now for delivery 6 January 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: How do ordinary women become extremists?

Leafing through photos from the January 6 insurrection, extremist researcher Noelle Cook was struck by how many women looked like her: middle-aged white women in puffy coats. Women were not on the fringes of the extreme right, she realized. They were radicalizing each other, and the pandemic was changing them. So who were the women of J6? And why did some of them believe in shape-shifting reptilians and the health benefits of colloidal silver?

This is the world scholars call conspirituality, in which New Age religion, online wellness culture, and extremism blend and become laced with antisemitic and racist theories. With acute attention to the emotional lives of women and research on conspiracism, Cook introduces us to Tammy, who believed storming the Capitol would help take down a global cabal of pedophiles. We also meet Yvonne, convinced she is a starseed destined to lead others into the fifth dimension. We visit a trade show where vendors hawk everything from quantum healing devices to government cover-ups, and trace the movement's roots to a nineteenth-century mystical philosophy.

With arresting detail, The Conspiracists draws us into the lives of conspiratorial women to explore how and why women are becoming radicalized. Women are crafting entire worlds, Cook argues, and we ignore these worlds at our own peril. As misinformation spreads and extremism intensifies, The Conspiracists does not seek to excuse women's conspiracism but rather to understand it. Otherwise, we have no hope of countering its force.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I am quite openly an atheist. In a world where how you pray and to whom can get you murdered, that is not the safe option.

One of the most powerful repulsive forces in my eyes against all religions, everywhere and of every stripe, is that this book's subjects are not unique to any one tradition...apart from the socially acceptable psychotic break that is labeled religion.

That statement will offend many. I've had a psychotic break recently, a reaction known to occur to people who take Levaquin (albeit very, very few of them, lucky me) as I did for pneumonia, so I speak from my own experience: If inanimate/invisible things are speaking to you, are counseling you about Reality, are imbued with consciousness or intelligence or both, you are experiencing a psychotic break...not a divine visitation or revelatory vision.

I'd treat the women profiled in these pages with the care and concern I received during my own psychotic break, gently attempting to lead them back to consensus reality. It's not always effective but it's worth trying. In profiling these women, Author Cook is not demeaning them, not saying (as I have) they are experiencing a mental-health crisis, not presenting value judgments outright...again, like I have done. She traces the women's sense of being abandoned, unconsidered, as they travel further and further into what most of us see as conspiracy-theory aberrations. It is a truth we as a society do not want to face head-on that huge swaths of our population are in the grips of this factually supported idea of themselves as abandoned, hard done by. In the face of that existential crisis what else is there to do but reach for some explanation, some reason? They already know there is no justification or excuse for their situation. There must be a "why," because there always is.

It's facing up to the vile, selfish cause of the nightmarish cruelty enacted on them that makes conspiracy theories so appealing and so successful. As these ordinary women's descent (as I see it) into aberrant thinking and acceptance of "alternative facts" demonstrates, the need to have a "why" is the most powerful inducement of conspiracies and delusions...of all sorts, in all times.

The absence of trust in what I see as trustworthy authority structures, eg science, has been carefully cultivated for more than a generation. (You can look up the research on your own.) It's led many people into a more general mistrust of what was once mainstream information economies that we relied on to build our consensus about the polity we live in. That vacuum, as the women profiled demonstrate in their adherence to beliefs not demonstrably truthful, is filled by the Othered communities they've chosen to fill the void. In those Othered communities there is stability, there is fellowship, there is belonging and validation the unempathetic outsiders do not offer.

I certainly don't offer empathy and understanding to people who believe they're messiahs, or that there are lizard people secretly controlling the world. Scorn and contumely by the dumpsterload, yes; understanding and empathy, not a smidgin. Hence my need to engage with this book: being Right is being part of the problem that's led to these fractures developing during the time of immense societal stress we're experiencing. In a quest not to unknowingly respond to others' delusional thinking, as I see it, with behaviors that will only worsen the problem I've identified, I seek my usual trusted source of advice: Experts who share my vision of the world more than they don't.

January 6th looms. It is a midterm election year, and there is widespread opposition to the current regime. A foreign war has been launched.

The omens do not portend a smooth course ahead. Conspiracists, you aunties, cousins, and grandmas, are likely going to support a radical alteration of the country's governance...despite the signs pointing to that course leading to repression and violence and immiseration. Beliefs that "They" are the ones who will suffer and be punished for "Their" misdeeds, that this horror will lead into a glorious Golden Age of Truth and Rewards for those who believed, are going to be dashed...are being dashed by the entire Epstein files debacle. Marjorie Taylor Greene, with whom I share nothing except the Constitutionally-guaranteed right to trial by a jury of my peers, has admitted she was wrong to hold her conspiracist beliefs.

It's a process we cannot hasten and widen in scope without understanding its roots. That was the point of Author Cook writing this book. Stand ready to escort the conspiracists back into consensus reality by learning how and why they left it.

THEM: The best time to pay attention was twenty-five years ago; second-best is now

THEM: Adventures with Extremists
JON RONSON
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link
$18.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the bestselling author of The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry and So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

Them began as a book about different kinds of extremists, but after Jon had got to know some of them—Islamic fundamentalists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen—he found that they had one oddly similar belief: that a tiny, shadowy elite rule the world from a secret room.

In Them, Jon sets out, with the help of the extremists, to locate that room. The journey is as creepy as it is comic and, along the way, Jon is chased by men in dark glasses, unmasked as a Jew in the middle of a Jihad training camp, and witnesses international CEOs and politicians participate in a bizarre pagan ritual in the forests of northern California.

Them is a fascinating and entertaining exploration of extremism, in which Jon learns some alarming things about the looking-glass world of "them" and "us". Are the extremists on to something? Or has Jon become one of THEM?

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM THE PRIME LENDING SERVICE. USE THEM OFTEN, THEY PAY AUTHORS FOR OUR USE.

My Review: Twenty-plus years on, this book isn't obsolete.

I've never typed a sadder, more fraught sentence in the entirety of my life. Details are outdated, but that in no way invalidates Author Ronson's analysis (though it chops a half-star off...time for a new edition!)

Alex Jones was utterly exposed as the lunatic bigot he really is in this book long before Sandy Hook blew that closet door off its hinges, and yet this complete careful takedown had no effect on his ability to convince people to invest in his idiocy.

In his experience, detailed in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (q.v.), people have taken old-fashioned social organization with them into the digital age. The conspiracy theorists of today have a long lineage of hatred for the Jews, a long-standing mistrust of Authority (except of course for themselves; after all, they know The Truth℠, everyone else is a sad little dupe of Them), and no longer have to have a public owning of their nutjobbery.

Emotional dysregulation is far easier to run out of control in parasocial interactions with authority, or authoritative, figures. These are ever-more common events in our social lives as more and more time is spent in internet-mediated contact...post-pandemic there is a huge increase in time spent in and effect of parasocial relationships, which is only exacerbating the ongoing radicalization of younger men in Western society.

Author Ronson, trained as a journalist, is very much a careful observer of the people he speaks to; he does not come right out and say "that was a lie" but he very carefully notes what tells an observant listener and/or reader what marks something out as, in fact, a lie. Staying alert to subtext is, after all, a big part of a journalist's brief...another reason why "They" want fewer trained journalists in the world. It's part of a truly unnerving perversion of the truism that all of us together are smarter than any one of us alone...phrased best by Mark Twain: "When you set aside mere names & come down to realities, you find that we are ruled by a King just as other absolute monarchies are. His name is The Majority. He is mighty in bulk & strength ... He rules by the right of possessing less money & less brains & more ignorance than the other competitor for the throne, The Minority. Ours is an Absolute Monarchy." (Mark Twain at Large, Arthur L. Scott, p. 96-97.)

The jaws of the trap "They" have spent fifty years building, slowly and carefully, are springing shut. I do not know if there is still time to wedge a stick of sturdy truthtelling in them.

I'm sure gonna give it a whirl.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THEM: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal
BEN SASSE
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing American Adult, an intimate and urgent assessment of the existential crisis facing our nation.

Something is wrong. We all know it.

American life expectancy is declining for a third straight year. Birth rates are dropping. Nearly half of us think the other political party isn’t just wrong; they’re evil. We’re the richest country in history, but we’ve never been more pessimistic. What’s causing the despair?

In Them, bestselling author and U.S. Senator Ben Sasse argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, our crisis isn’t really about politics. It’s that we’re so lonely we can’t see straight—and it bubbles out as anger.

Local communities are collapsing. Across the nation, little leagues are disappearing, Rotary clubs are dwindling, and in all likelihood, we don’t know the neighbor two doors down. Work isn’t what we’d hoped: less certainty, few lifelong coworkers, shallow purpose. Stable families and enduring friendships—life’s fundamental pillars—are in statistical freefall.

As traditional tribes of place evaporate, we rally against common enemies so we can feel part of on a team. No institutions command widespread public trust, enabling foreign intelligence agencies to use technology to pick the scabs on our toxic divisions. We’re in danger of half of us believing different facts than the other half, and the digital revolution throws gas on the fire.

There’s a path forward—but reversing our decline requires something radical: a rediscovery of real places and real human-to-human relationships. Even as technology nudges us to become rootless, Sasse shows how only a recovery of rootedness can heal our lonely souls.

America wants you to be happy, but more urgently, America needs you to love your neighbor. Fixing what’s wrong with the country depends on you rebuilding right where you’re planted.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM THE PRIME LENDING SERVICE. USE THEM OFTEN, THEY PAY AUTHORS FOR OUR USE.

My Review: I'm allergic to old-fashioned neighborliness, community-building exercises, the idea that living in the same zip code says something fundamental about my connection to people.

In days of yore, that would've marked me out as weird. Now that makes me...for the first time in my adult life...mainstream. And what did Mark Twain say about about agreeing with the majority? "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect)."

I doubt I can change much, but others? There's hope for them and by extension all of us.

That Author Sasse is a Republican should tell anyone who knows me everything I need to convey by reporting positive agreement with his prescription for what ails the US body politic. (Also, per Wikipedia, Senator Sasse: "{o}n February 13, 2021, ...was one of seven Republican senators to vote to convict Donald Trump of incitement of insurrection in his second impeachment trial."} Go former Senator Sasse!)

The anomie and isolation of seemingly the majority of young people is absolutely terrifying. What Author Sasse posits as solutions earn all my four stars. His framing of the problems we face is resolutely inside the educated elite PoV one would expect from a lifelong academic and former Senator. Only in the funhouse mirror of US politics is this man in any way a centrist. He is also not wrong.

Many of the rights and norms Author Sasse identified as under threat in this 2018 book, eg the inalienable rights of all individuals including habeas corpus, and the freedom of conscience and the right to exercise it in private life (the Dobbs decision rises before my appalled eyes),have been explicitly targeted by the current administration. It's been a long, slow process to dumb down and distract people away from the assault on our institutions of trust and collective action. Look at Project 2025's digital ghosts.

A big part of that process has been the demonization and politicization of Others. When someone is Other, they're not protected like you should be, or protected from you like they should be. A long and successful campaign to convince people "They" are a threat to decency and rightness has been waged by the real "Them" the actual political operators of the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and so on.

Destroying the people's willingness to see each other as real, decent people who might disagree on things but who nonetheless have a lot in common, or divide and conquer, has been the colonizer's, the fascist's, the authoritarian's cornerstone strategy for millennia. It hasn't stopped working yet.

You, as an individual, have to stop falling for it in order to defeat it.

Read some of Sasse's ideas and try them out.

SEDITION HUNTERS: How January 6th Broke the Justice System, a primer on how to build a useable dossier

SEDITION HUNTERS: How January 6th Broke the Justice System
RYAN J. REILLY
PublicAffairs Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$32.50 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The January 6th attack is an unprecedented crime in American history. Sprawling and openly political, it can't be handled by the traditional rules and norms of law enforcement—threatening the very idea of justice and its role in society.

The attack on the Capitol building following the 2020 election was an extraordinarily large and brazen crime. Conspiracies were formed on social media in full public view, the law-breakers paraded on national television with undisguised faces, and with outgoing President Donald Trump openly cheering them on. The basic concept of law enforcement—investigators find criminals and serve justice—quickly breaks down in the face of such an event. The system has been strained by the sheer volume of criminals and the widespread perception that what they did wasn't wrong.

A mass of online tipsters—"sedition hunters"—have mobilized, simultaneously providing the FBI with valuable intelligence and creating an ethical dilemma. Who gets to serve justice? How can law enforcement still function as a pillar of civil society? As the foundations of our government are questioned, the FBI and Department of Justice are the first responders to a crisis of democracy and law that threatens to spread, and fast.

In this work of extraordinary reportage, Ryan Reilly gets to know would-be revolutionaries, obsessive online sleuths, and FBI agents, and shines a light on a justice system that's straining to maintain order in our polarized country. From the moment the police barriers were breached on January 6th, 2021, Americans knew something had profoundly changed. Sedition Hunters is the fascinating, high-stakes story of what happens next.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Keep up the good work, join the good work, do not stop shadowing the 1500 pardoned criminals in all these ways. We cannot afford to lose sight of the ugliness despite the shift at the top. We are not off the hook or out of danger by any stretch...the examples and the morals pf these folks are not to be betrayed now by not continuing the good work they did despite the betrayal at the very top.

“The essence of a democracy is that each citizen gets to express his views, exercise his choice with the right to vote,” {a judge} said. “What you were trying to do was undo the indisputable result of other people’s votes and to do it by force. And you were trying to stop the singular thing that makes America America, the peaceful transfer of power. That’s what "stop the steal’ meant. And that’s exactly the opposite of what the Constitution means.”

“Over the course of...thirty months, about 594 defendants pleaded guilty to at least one federal charge, and another ninety-eight were found guilty at contested trials. Of the 561 defendants who were sentenced, 335 were given periods of incarceration. At that point, online sleuths said, nearly 1,000 additional Jan. 6 participants who committed chargeable conduct at the Capitol had been identified, but not yet arrested. (emphasis added) That number included more than 100 rioters who were featured on the FBI’s Capitol Violence webpage.”

Do you listen to true-crime podcasts? Today's the day to try your hand at sleuthing. There's no reason to let your skills get rusty while the current regime is in power. Those in power are not going to do the sleuthing now when they wouldn't then. It is worth remembering that literal hundreds of tips that January 6th was going to get bad were given to law enforcement...and ignored. Use your internet skills to keep tabs on these people, keep watching what they say they're going to do, and believe them when they say out loud what their plan is.

It might not prevent whatever is planned, but good records will always help a reckoning come about.

It really is up to us. Read this (overcomplicated, if well-sourced) book to see how effective collective action can be.

HARBINGERS: What January 6 and Charlottesville Reveal About Rising Threats to American Democracy

HARBINGERS: What January 6 and Charlottesville Reveal About Rising Threats to American Democracy
TIMOTHY J. HEAPHY
Steerforth Press (non-affiliate Amazonn link)
$9.99 ebook editions, avalable now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A crucial, clear-eyed assessment of what connects the 2 most influential moments of political violence in recent American history, and where we go from here
An unparalleled firsthand account from the foremost expert on American political violence, crucial for readers of Liz Cheney’s Oath and Honor, and How Democracies Die

This dramatic, revealing book offers an insider account of the planning and aftermath of the racist riot in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017, and the insurrection at the US. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

As the lead investigator into both tragic days, Tim Heaphy has an absolutely unique perspective. Readers will travel alongside Heaphy as he organized his team and structured the massive investigations they were about to take, as he interacts with politicians and members of law enforcement, interviews planners, perpetrators, and bystanders, gathers and sorts evidence, and compels and records testimony in order to create a record for today’s voters as well as future generations.

In his page-turning book, he shares what he saw and came to understand about what those events say about state of American democracy. He examines how and why they took place with the hope that understanding the contexts of these events will be a crucial and helpful step toward avoiding similar episodes of political violence in the years ahead.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The manifold failings of the astonishingly huge, well-funded, and deeply entrenched domestic surveillance industry are laid out in this book.

I was taken aback on how much there was about the surveillance state I was correct to be paranoid about, and how little it did to prevent these acts of political violence from going ahead, or even getting off the ground. This is something that gives me the gravest kind of worry for the US as a still-slightly-functional civil society.

I will not tell you this is the most deft or entertaining read of 2025. It's dry, it's pedantic, it's explanatory not exciting. This being what it needed to be to convey its burden of information...and I use the term advisedly...I won't downrate it for being its proper self. A louder, more emotionally charged voice becomes part of the clangor of 2025's soundscape. I know more now than I did before I read this book about the ways and means used by the rebel forces within the US to bring about their desired repressive, totalitarian replacement government.

Project 2025 should have scared y'all a lot more than it did. I'm guessing most of you won't read this important informative book. Whatever your reasons are, they're not excuses. Very bad things are coming. Resisting them will be a lot of work and involve significant effort.

The option is passive acceptance.

Choose wisely.

THE ENGAGEMENT: America's Quarter Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage & PROUD BOYS AND THE WHITE ETHNOSTATE: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination

PROUD BOYS AND THE WHITE ETHNOSTATE: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination
ALEXANDRA MINNA STERN
Beacon Press
$24.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A critical analysis of the intellectual productions of the alt-right—necessary reading for all who seek to counter its appeal and expansion.

The "alt-right" has sadly become a household term. From a loose movement that lurked in the shadows in the early 2000s, it has achieved a level of visibility that has allowed it to expand significantly through America's cultural, political, and digital landscapes. But the alt-right is also mercurial and shape-shifting, encompassing a range of believers and ideas that overlap with white nationalism, white supremacy, and neo-Nazism. It provides a big and porous tent to those who subscribe to varying forms of race and gender-based exclusion.

In Proud Boys and the White Ethno-State, historian Alexandra Stern begins with the premise that alt-right literature, most of which exists online, should be taken seriously as a form of intellectual production that has distinct lineages, assumptions, and objectives. Applying the tools of historical analysis, cultural studies, and other interdisciplinary approaches, she explores its conceptual frameworks, language, and narratives. In doing so, she is able to probe the deeper meanings and underlying constructs, concepts, and frameworks that guide the alt-right and animate its overlapping forms of racism, xenophobia, sexism, and other social hostilities.

Like George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant, Proud Boys and the White Ethno-State is a key tool for combating today's white supremacist ideologies.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: What?! A four-star political review at Christmas?! That...that's not what you do, Sirrah.

Let's say I've still not learned my lesson. Political stuff is very much not what most people I know want to read, at least at this time of year. Y'all should read it because...never mind. No one's going to eat their spinach because I said to.

What I *will* say to the two or three whose noses are as yet unwrinkled and eyes still open is that the author delves deep into the cesspit of this reprehensible "ideology"'s apologetics. She does so without coming across as minatory or dismissive, as I do. She clearly shows what the "reasoning" is behind this claptrap and, being an academic, points out where it's deficient in its grasp.

What makes that so very valuable is that we, the unconvinced but still engaged, don't have to experience the awfulness of a people trying to talk themselves into believing they are Superior. I can barely type that sentence without wanting to laugh while barfing.

Anyway. The point of me reviewing it is to say you definitely would learn a LOT about the January 6th events if you read this; you would understand a lot more clearly why the movement is moving peristaltically through the Body Politic of the US; and your grasp of what is at stake in 2024 will impel you to action in place of apathy.

Learn what you don't know that you don't know.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE ENGAGEMENT: America's Quarter Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage
SASHA ISSENBERG
Pantheon Books (Non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK FOR 2021!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR - The riveting story of the conflict over same-sex marriage in the United States—the most significant civil rights breakthrough of the new millennium

On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state bans on gay marriage were unconstitutional, making same-sex unions legal across the United States. But the road to that momentous decision was much longer than many know. In this definitive account, Sasha Issenberg vividly guides us through same-sex marriage's unexpected path from the unimaginable to the inevitable.

It is a story that begins in Hawaii in 1990, when a rivalry among local activists triggered a sequence of events that forced the state to justify excluding gay couples from marriage. In the White House, one president signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which elevated the matter to a national issue, and his successor tried to write it into the Constitution. Over twenty-five years, the debate played out across the country, from the first legal same-sex weddings in Massachusetts to the epic face-off over California's Proposition 8 and, finally, to the landmark Supreme Court decisions of United States v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges. From churches to hedge funds, no corner of American life went untouched.

This richly detailed narrative follows the coast-to-coast conflict through courtrooms and war rooms, bedrooms and boardrooms, to shed light on every aspect of a political and legal controversy that divided Americans like no other. Following a cast of characters that includes those who sought their own right to wed, those who fought to protect the traditional definition of marriage, and those who changed their minds about it, The Engagement is certain to become a seminal book on the modern culture wars.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I disagree with the publisher's decision to use the phrase "same-sex marriage" in the sales copy. It's not about the sex organs of the people involved. It's about the equality of access to the benefits of the legal state of marriage to all people who wish to avail themselves of it.

If marriage is a cornerstone of a properly functioning society, then what is the justification for denying access to it to the people who wish to engage in it? If your church doesn't choose to solemnize or recognize marriages between people of different faiths, or skin colors, or the same sex, no one can force you to do so. It's against the law that separates church from state.

Your personal fantasyland has no place in the county clerk's office where marriage licenses are issued.

If that's not how you see it, you're wrong.

This book's almost a thousand pages and there's a LOT to learn in here...the role of activists in changing the public conversation is delightfully thoroughgoing...and there's a lot of good reasons to learn it. What gives me pause is the sheer heft of the tome! I very definitely have a dog in this fight and it was still a serious commitment that I took a long time to fulfill. As the current Supreme Court has shown us, there is no such thing as established law when the scum of the Earth want to resist things changing in ways they're not comfortable with.

Might be time to get your eyes around this well-written and thoroughly sourced and closely argued tale of how Justice was finally served.

The Kindle edition's so cheap and it's SO much easier on your wrists...plus they've made checking endnotes a whole lot simpler in modern Kindles as well. A great bargain!