Reading

The Echo Machine: How Right-Wing Extremism Created a Post-Truth America by David Pakman
I read this mostly before bed, which was not a good idea, as it gave me heart palpitations. It details the rise of the anti-intellectual movement that is the far right. This anti-intellectualism has culminated in one man—someone who highlights people’s fears only to frame himself as the sole solution—with fanatical followers determined to avoid reason and facts at all costs, convinced they’re privy to information that apparently no one else has. (Which reminds me of another book I recently read and LOVED, Helter Skelter.) One of the far right’s most corrosive tactics is dressing up opinion as fact. Take COVID. You can dislike the vaccine and think the mandates were wrong. Those are opinions. But whether the vaccines reduced the risk of hospitalization, critical illness, and death is something we can actually measure—and they did. Pakman argues that attacks on higher education are part of the same anti-intellectual pattern. Much of his argument comes back to critical thinking and media literacy: the ability to stop and ask, Is this actually true? How do we know? What is the evidence? A populace equipped with those skills is much harder to persuade with fear and misinformation. (The right claims they’re against a person’s education because they want to shield them from the supposed liberal ideology of academia. You would think their followers would be offended by the inherent message: you’re not smart enough to think for yourself.) And once facts give way to slogans, strange contradictions become possible—like railing against “socialism” while happily relying on government programs yourself. “One Trump supporter,” Pakman writes, “interviewed by Right Side Broadcasting Network, complained about the ‘socialist’ policies of President Biden and Democrats, while simultaneously explaining that ‘fortunately’ he is on Medicare, and also has VA benefits as a veteran—a stunning cognitive dissonance.” The broader point I kept seeing is that politics shouldn’t work like fandom. You can like a politician and not vote for him/her. Personality is not policy, and slogans are not arguments. A “beautiful plan” is not a health care plan, and shouting commie! at every dissenting voice is just exasperating for everyone. Pakman’s prescription is essentially more thinking, not less of it: better education, greater media literacy, more willingness to interrogate our own side, and a return to some shared standard for determining what is true. After so many pages explaining how we got so far away from that, I appreciated that he ended with some ideas for getting back. Great read.

Catch the Devil by Pamela Colloff
When I finished this book I felt sick to my stomach. James Dailey was sent to Florida’s death row for the 1985 murder of 14-year-old Shelly Boggio, despite there being no evidence tying him to the murder (unless you count as evidence a career conman’s incentivized testimony). In 2019, Governor Ron DeSantis signed Dailey’s death warrant. Soon after, the American Bar Association submitted a formal letter requesting clemency for Dailey. Florida’s Catholic bishops pleaded for his execution to be stopped. Organizations like Witness to Innocence and The Innocence Project have advocated on Dailey’s behalf. Even Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty filed an amicus brief in support of his petition to the U.S. Supreme Court. No matter. Florida has a tough-on-crime image to protect—inmates languishing on death row due to jailhouse testimony be damned. Quite literally. Florida has executed 15 people so far in 2026, with additional executions scheduled. Colloff’s book is about Jim Dailey’s case, but it is also about what happens when a legal system capable of killing someone relies on testimony from people who have powerful incentives to lie. Anyway, you will not be able to put this book down.

Misc:
Another book I could not put down was Bill Browder’s Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice—a memoir about Browder’s experience doing business in Russia, the torture and murder of his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, the brutality of Putin’s regime, and his subsequent campaign for sanctions against Russian officials. I also read The Four Cardinal Virtues by Josef Pieper and A Second Chance: A Federal Judge Decides Who Deserves It by Judge Frederic Block, which were both excellent.