MONEY, LIES AND GOD: Behind the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by Katharine Stewart is a look at the interlocking relationship between the big-money men who underwrtie groups such as Moms of Liberty and the Claremont Institute and the various flavors of extremists determined to give us theocracy, misogyny or white supremacy; while they may not agree on what the future looks like, they know it will exclude anyone who doesn’t accept that hierarchy is good. Well, okay, they agree on one thing, men should be in charge.
This isn’t new material to me but Stewart does an excellent job connecting the dots and looking at the grey eminences who shell out plenty but without the attention David Ellison or Charles Koch get. She also looks at why there’s no similar effort on the left and concludes most rich liberals either give to the Democrats or to specific causes (while I’m not rich, that’s certainly how I roll) whereas right-wingers are building a mass movement. She concludes the odds of not becoming fascist are not great, but not yet hopeless — there’s more people on the liberal side, the right wing is divided and so on.
I loved Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionists so discovering his CROOK MANIFESTO was set in the 1970s I figured it would be a fun read — and I was curious how he’d handle the setting (I do write quite a bit set in that era). The story — part two of a trilogy, which I hadn’t known — focuses on three episodes in the life of Harlem storeowner and part-time fence Ray Carney. In one, a crooked cop drags him into a scheme; in another Carney’s buddy Pepper becomes security man on a blacksploitation film; in the third, Carney gets an unwelcome involvement in arson and crooked politics.
Not for the first time, I notice other authors are more willing to throw in “I’ll have to google that” details about the past, like a line that a group of women “look like some of those Laugh-In girls” (Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In had been a satirical sketch comedy hit a few years earlier). And Whitehead definitely did something right, as I kept reading to the finish. At the same time, I can’t say I was deeply engaged — there were whole chunks of the crime drama that I found boring and skipped. I doubt I’ll look for the other trilogy parts.
