PositiveWashington PostFor the reader inured by the drip-drip-drip of stories of brazen corruption over the course of years, it is bracing to see a half-decade’s worth of reporting so carefully distilled ... This is not, however, merely another addition to the annals of Trumpology. Beginning with the rise of Mussolini and concluding with the present era, Ben-Ghiat attempts to portray the ways democracies die in the arms of authoritarians, and the common traits that enable these downfalls ...at times, the chapters can feel jigsawed together — patchworks of examples undergirding premises stretched thin by all they are forced to contain ... Ben-Ghiat’s study of corruption as a tool of strongman rule is more successful. She has a gift for bringing together details that are both poignant and startling, laying them out with particular aplomb when delving into the orgiastic misdirection of funds into authoritarian coffers ...The book was written and released before the 2020 election was decided, but Ben-Ghiat’s description of the end days of strongman rule fits, with eerie precision, Trump’s erratic, bellicose final weeks in office.
Bari Weiss
PanThe NationThe book is meant to have a mass appeal...written from the viewpoint of someone who claims to speak neither to the right nor the left—nor, as she terms them, to \'the braying mob\' ... what I have found to be true—and resonant—in this slim volume, whose brevity belies the immensity of its purpose: to strike a blow against an ancient and deadly prejudice. While the majority of its points are poorly argued and alarmingly ahistorical, I have unearthed precisely two on which the author and I agree ... Yet I must admit my stash of Alka-Seltzer has been depleted by the agita of reading the rest of Weiss’s book ... For someone who is just 35, Weiss sounds an awful lot like an old fashioned cold warrior, and her anticommunism has the stale smell of a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing room about it ... Ultimately, Weiss’s sole gift as a thinker is her ability to smuggle right-wing talking points into the perspective of a self-described \'reasonable liberal\' ... Yet the arguments her book endorses are hardly reasonable. Rather, they demand a racialized paranoia from Jews concerned about anti-Semitism. In the end, her vision of the world undermines the possibility of solidarity between Jews and others who are marginalized, thereby cutting out a powerful locus of allyship. All told, How to Fight Anti-Semitism is a book that launders prejudice under the guise of fighting prejudice. It also renders a real and frustrating problem—the existence of anti-Semitism on the left—flat and parodic.
Anna Merlan
RaveThe NationWith restrained but eloquent prose, Merlan unblinkingly documents our age of conspiracy. The book is filled with bizarre situations—Merlan moves from a conspiracy-theorist cruise to UFO conferences to Pizzagate rallies—and the author’s droll voice buoys us through it all, bringing in expert commentary and academic research along the way. While primarily focused on a conspiracy-drunk right wing, the book doesn’t confine itself to one side of the political aisle; nor does it focus only on theories broadcast and consumed by white audiences. Rather, the through line of the book is an investigation of the impacts that this kind of thinking can have on both its proponents and those unlucky enough to become fixations ... Merlan casts a merciless look at the Alex Joneses and Sean Hannities and Newt Gingriches of the world, who spread lies about a dead young man for clicks and political convenience. But her narrative is augmented by a tender, thoughtful treatment of the agonies undergone by Rich’s family ... Republic of Lies paints a portrait of epistemic breakdown, in which American discourse is riddled with unbridgeable chasms ... Against this formidable social trend, Merlan offers herself—a rock-steady narrator with a ready command of history, nerves of steel, and incisive social insights—as both guide and antidote ... a comprehensive sketch of where the rifts lie, and how much the paranoid American mind has changed in the age of instant communication.
