Reviews with content warning for War - Anthem

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Anthem by Noah Hawley

6 reviews

znorth's review against another edition

challenging dark sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

1.5

Anthem by Noah Hawley desperately tries to be a challenging, edgy commentary on the current state of politics and people in the United States. Anthem covers many serious topics with little to no nuance or strong message to leave the reader with at the end.

Let's start with what this book is marketed to be:

Something is happening to teenagers across America, spreading through memes only they can parse.

At the Float Anxiety Abatement Center, in a suburb of Chicago, Simon Oliver is trying to recover from his sister’s tragic passing. He breaks out to join a woman named Louise and a man called The Prophet on a quest as urgent as it is enigmatic. Who lies at the end of the road? A man known as The Wizard, whose past encounter with Louise sparked her own collapse. Their quest becomes a rescue mission when they join up with a man whose sister is being held captive by the Wizard, impregnated and imprisoned in a tower.

Right off the bat, Anthem presents itself as two very different books. The first part reminded me of The Measure by Nikki Erlick. The second seemed similar to The Institute by Stephen King. I was interested to see how the two concepts would work together. The publisher's description does not tell you about the American Civil War that breaks, the massive climate disasters, the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the many points in time when the author breaks to monologue about the state of the world as he sees it. The description fails to give the reader a clear picture of the book.

For the first quarter of the book, there are two main ideas:

Teenagers are committing suicide because of something supernatural. (A11)
Teenagers are committing suicide because the world is a mess and they feel that hope is lost.

Anthem throws out those ideas for something else.

Right-wing extremists attack the congressional building and state houses across the U.S starting a state of anarchy and civil war. The suicide epidemic and A11 are pushed to the background in favor of an attempt at societal commentary. The West Coast is a sea of fire and smoke.

Every crisis you can think of is happening at the same time and is amplified by 10. I get that Hawley was attempting to shock the reader with a dystopian future that is uncomfortably close to the current state of affairs. I also understand that the complete tonal shift is, I hope, supposed to happen to really drive the point home. Unfortunately, the end result feels like two entirely different books that ended up in the same manuscript. One of those two books is in the publisher's description, the other is not.

For the most part, I enjoyed this book. What ruined it was the random interludes of author's commentary on the state of the world, the overly descriptive violence, and how disjointed this book was. There is an entire section where Hawley stops the book to tell you that he is sorry for how grim the world he made is but that he's just doing his job as the author. The descriptions of gun violence are overly detailed and give description of bullet sizes entering and exiting parts of bodies. Graphic descriptions of viscera, blood, and internal organs after injury. I get that the nation has been thrown into anarchy and that violence is the state of anarchy. Those descriptions were never necessary to the plot.

Surely the characters are this books saving grace right? Not really. The characters are monoliths. Louise is a 15 year-old black girl that grew up in a broken home in a suburb of a large U.S. city. She's a child who has been sexualized by every man around her, so that must become her identity and tool to make her story move forward to its conclusion. Simon is a leaf in the wind being blown from one plot point to the next by whatever apocalyptic tragedy Hawley throws at him. Most of the other characters are hidden behind code names. The only character I liked was Duane, and he had almost little to no impact on the book.

Here's what I say that's positive about Anthem. It's vivid and packed with action. The world is largely believable. All one needs to do is turn on the news to see stories about Right-wing nuts doing god knows what protesting the next thing their supposed to be angry at, or news about wildfires. There is a reflection of anxiety in these pages that is very real and present. If that were the thesis of this novel from the start, I'd rating this higher.

Content Warnings

puddinghead's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

vlawton's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

Content Warnings

sakusha's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.0

All quotes and citations are from the wide print edition.

Summary: There’s an epidemic of teens committing suicide. A few kids escape from a cushy mental institution to follow the words of a kid who claims to be god’s messenger. On their way to his promised utopia, they have to free some illegal immigrants and rescue a young woman from a rich pedophile, killing anyone who stands in their way, stealing whatever they want “because it’s funny” (546), and blaming their parents and republicans for why they have to do everything they choose to do.

My comments: Long book, but easy reading and entertaining. I disliked it for its liberal bias though. Note that I am not a republican or conservative. I’m a centrist. But liberals/democrats have become extremists ever since Trump was elected. Their hatred for him has pushed them over the deep end. They are no longer the tolerant party, but the intolerant one, calling for censorship, cancelling, firing, boycotting, name calling, or assassination to anyone who disagrees with them.

The author perpetuates and encourages division, not only among the races, but also between adults and children. He paints adults as the problem (169, 172, 173, 317) and glorifies teens as pure, innocent victims who only steal and kill in the name of the greater good, who love and protect their siblings even at the cost of their own lives (151). Unrealistic—I know from experience that most teens do not care about their siblings. Example: I remember asking my friend why her little brother had a large wound on his forehead. She rolled her eyes and said something like, “How should I know?” Another problem with the book is that it rants about all the problems of the world while presenting little to no solutions.

The author says how empathy is so important (658). But empathy “can be used for good, or for ill. As Adam Smith once wrote, to feel empathy for someone who has been wronged is to feel anger or hatred toward those who’ve wronged them. So if I want to make you angry, I just paint you a picture of a poor victim and the person or people who abused or manipulated them” (662). That’s exactly what this author did. He painted liberal kids as innocent victims and conservative adults as evil monsters.

“This idea of fairness exists nowhere else in the animal kingdom” (x). How would we know? We don’t know what animals are thinking; we don’t speak their language. But it is true that life isn’t fair. Humans try to make things fair. The author seems to use the whole book to argue that capitalism causes inequality and that’s why there are so many problems; life would be so much better with forced equality. Well, communism has been tried before and results in more poverty and suffering and murder than in capitalism! Boo phooey! He uses kids to push his opinion, kids who think their lives in privileged America suck so bad. Try living in communist Russia, Venezuela, or China and see what real suffering is. These kids don’t know how good they have it because they never lived through true suffering.

What examples does the author give of our poor youth suffering? Claire, one of the first to kill herself, chooses as her suicide note, to complain for four pages that her parents named her Claire (37-41). OMG, how dare we not anticipate in advance when our newborn baby girl is going to hate her name! Obviously our baby girl wants a name that will please her when her boyfriend says “fuck me!” (39) Claire has a superiority complex, thinking all the angels in heaven share her wretched name (41). Claire was made to sound more intelligent than an adult as she argues against following her parents’ rules and that a family should be a democracy in which children have power equal to parents (30, 32). The author has the father unrealistically insist that she say “yes, sir,” which hardly any modern parent demands these days (31). “In the Oliver household, this was what passed for love” (32). The author is implying that adults are too demanding on kids by imposing rules on them and should lighten up, never yell at them (36), let kids do what they want, because they’re smarter than us, they should have equal say with us, and if we don’t do these things we do not love our children. The author’s kind of childrearing is why kids grow up entitled brats who need trigger warnings and safe spaces and get offended & outraged over every little thing. Affluenza (49) is a good term for what they’re suffering from. They have it so good, they don’t know how to be grateful.

The author’s own (presumably white) daughter is on two different kinds of anxiety medication (656), so we shouldn’t be taking parenting advice from him. His daughter “didn’t want to grow up” (656). That’s normal and doesn’t require drugging your kids. He criticizes opioid use while hypocritically drugging up his own kid unnecessarily. If she got addicted to the drugs, he’d be the type to blame the company instead of accepting some blame himself. He’s the one allowing the drug into his child’s body.

Claire’s brother Simon “is a 15-year old boy from a wealthy family with a dead sister and parents so corrupt they believe the only point in life is to make and spend small pieces of paper, even though every dollar they make seems to be killing someone” (233). “His parents are monsters” (611). Making money is corrupt and monstrous? Well then that makes everyone corrupt and monstrous because everyone wants money, including the liberals and communists! Because when they collect taxes, they’re collecting money! And your money is what they’re really after! Not your prosperity! The author of this book is probably pretty wealthy, and I doubt he donates every dollar he makes, or even 50% of it. In other words, he’s a hypocrite. As for opioids killing people, what’s the solution? Ban the drug so then people have to resort to heroin? Heroin is already illegal, but people still get their hands on it. Alcohol and cigarettes kill people too, but people willing use them anyway. And they’re still legal. You can’t protect people from themselves, but you can hold them accountable for their choices. And yes, hold the drug companies accountable too when they intentionally push drugs on people which they know are unsafe. Start by making vaccine companies liable again.

Paul says adults are arrogant to think they can control the young; he wants to rescue children from this “arrogance of power” (173). “People are corrupt. Adults. They live in a world of hypocrisy. They will do anything to be rich, to get laid, to have power” (587). (As if teens are any different?) “Adults see children as a tool in their wicked schemes” (317). (Really, all adults?) Adults used to sacrifice kids to save the village from a dragon or god’s wrath. The book says the sacrifices chosen were undesirable kids (360), but in every sacrifice account I’ve heard, it was the most beautiful virgin who got chosen. This is only the first of many things the author got wrong. Regardless, why should we care about these individual sacrifices when Paul says we should care about the collective whole over the individual? Can’t have it both ways.

What’s the solution to the problem of these arrogant adults imposing their will upon the children who know better? Let kids do whatever they want (621)? Imagine what a success that would be! Duane basically says don’t follow your family’s rules or take care of any responsibilities, because your parents are hypocrites who can’t keep their own commitment to each other; they get divorced (169). So what’s the solution to this problem? Ban divorce? Stay in unhappy relationships? Duane goes on to say, “I guarantee you that 99% of so-called abolish the government types are just getting back at Mommy and Daddy or their broken home” (169). He’s probably insulting conservative types here, ignoring that antifa is also an abolish the government type. But what does that make Duane and his gang of kids? They break laws and want to start their own utopia. Sounds anti-government to me. But I guess that’s mommy and daddy’s fault too, huh? Even though Simon’s parents never divorced....

(The author only mentions Antifa once in the whole book, and it’s only to say that “blond heads” peer out their windows to see if Antifa has “come to destroy their American freedoms” [637]. In other words, Antifa is just a myth, an irrational fear by white people, not a real threat. Republicans are who we should really be afraid of.)

Duane says divorce is why people distrust authority (293). I can tell you right now that I don’t trust authority and never did as far back as I can remember. My parents never got divorced. If anything, these liberals are too gullible and just conform to the dominant viewpoint they hear. They don’t question it. The founding fathers distrusted authority too; that’s why they put checks and balances into the constitution. Why did they distrust authority? Because they knew monarchs abused their power. It had nothing to do with divorce. But the author tries to place all the blame on parents rather than on government. Can’t turn your country into a communist one if there’s distrust in the government. But get people to stop trusting their parents, and then they’ll be more likely to place their trust in the government.

“Our adult brains had been wired to see the world the old way” (110). In other words: we old fuddy-duddies are backwards and ignorant. The children are progressive, they know what’s up. We should learn from their enlightened ways and reject everything we knew to be true. Actually it’s not the children who are coming up with the ideas of racial discrimination, white privilege, or transgenderism. It’s adult liberals who push it on the kids in schools and media. Then some of the kids adopt those things like a trend and pressure each other to conform to them. “Where did my daughter go?” wonders Margot about her sweet little girl who turned into an anorexic (139). Anorexia is another thing brought on by school peers and media. They likely wouldn’t think a normal body weight was fat otherwise. The mistake of the parents is letting their kids be raised by school and media instead of doing the raising themselves as parents should. If there is truth of self, it will come to people naturally, not be taught to them. Today a large percentage of the population claims to be LGBT. If such large numbers were truly LGBT, wouldn’t we see the same percentage throughout human history? But we don’t. Because for many people who claim to be LGBT today, it’s just a trend, a counterculture fashion statement like being punk or goth or emo. Just another way for young people to feel unique while they ironically conform to just another group.

The author criticized anti-government types, but he’s all for the government when he criticizes Avon who raised his son with no birth certificate or social security number. “What happens when the boy wants to go to school or get a job? What happens if he wants to travel outside the country and needs a passport?” (346) That stuff doesn’t bother liberals when they want to let undocumented immigrants live here without a SSN. Felix wrote to his dad, “I want to pay taxes” (507). Ha! Who realistically wants to pay taxes? Do the illegal immigrants want to pay taxes? No! That’s why they don’t want to become citizens! So liberals think the immigrants should live here with no demands being placed upon them by the government, but natural born citizens should follow all the government rules. Complete freedom for the immigrants, and the reverse for citizens. That makes so much sense.

“Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities” - Voltaire. Great quote. It’s absurd to think that a society can be successful with forced equality. Humans are selfish just like every other animal, and them working to pursue their own selfish interests is what brings about the greatest prosperity for the greatest number. Communism is a happy theory but doesn’t work in practice because it has the underlying assumption that people will work for the benefit of the collective whole, which they will not because they are selfish beings. Communism working is “wishful thinking” (353).

An absurdity Paul tells Simon to get him to kill people: “The myth of our species is that we are individuals first, but that’s a lie” (320). “We are, all of us, born hopeful, joyful, and kind” (316). No we’re not. We’re born selfish babies. Kids have to be taught to be kind. “We don’t want to fight—and worse, fight our own parents” (316). No, most kids push their boundaries with their parents to see how much they can get away with. If the parents give in, the kids keep pushing. Modern kids lack discipline of earlier generations, that’s why they feel entitled and keep pushing for more—in the case of this book, to take over the world and kill anyone who stands in their way. “God understands” (316). The Biblical god said to honor and obey one’s parents. That god also said thou shalt not kill. He would not approve of these children’s behavior at all. He also wouldn’t approve of all our technology either. The Biblical god wants us to suffer to atone for original sin. I’m not saying that’s right; I’m saying the author is mistakenly using God to condone what these kids are doing.

The author seems to have so little knowledge of the Bible that he doesn’t even know that the name Paul is Biblical (102). “Forget the Old Testament with its dour preachers and afterlife rewards” (200). The Old Testament doesn’t have afterlife rewards; that’s the New Testament that does. The author thinks that the Bible was amended for Christ to condone slavery; “he had created Africans to free his followers from endless toil” (589). It’s historical fact that slaves existed in Biblical times, but they were not African slaves in Israel. The Bible does condone slavery, because it was part of the culture then. No amendment was needed. There is nothing in the Bible specifically about Africans. It’s possible the writers of the Bible didn’t know of any Africans except for Egyptians. The author has a radio host mention Joshua 1:7 as proof that God “wants you to revel in unfathomable wealth” (515). Joshua 1:7 is about success/prosperity, not necessarily money. Sloppy writing to not look up a verse before using it in your book. The Bible says money is the root of all evil, and that spiritual wealth matters more than material wealth. Jesus was not in favor of hoarding wealth; he was in favor of helping the poor and giving as much as he could.

The author seems to know as little about prison as he does about the Bible. “In prison the best [Avon] could do on his hot plate was Spam on toast” (510). Prisoners are actually fed very well—3000 calories a day. The author is also wrong about Amazon workers “working long hours for low wages” (554). They actually work 4-8 hour shifts for $15+ an hour. If they work overtime, they get paid time and a half, just like any other US job. It’s sloppy writing to know so little about what you write. I guess it’s the liberal way. Just assume the readers will take your word for it.

“Parents sit on folding chairs . . . Recording young Sasha or Liam or Nicole’s musical efforts onto a digital medium, never to be seen again” (3). Good point - why do people record so many photos/videos if they aren’t going to look at them again? But adults are not unique in this; kids also take a bunch of photos/videos they don’t look at again.

The author filled the book with diverse characters: Louise is bi (88), Simon and Duane are gay (and conveniently have a crush on each other [622]), Duane and Hadrian are hapa, Remy and Louise are black, Girlie and Rose are Asian, and the evil people are all white, mostly male. The white characters are all wealthy, dumb, and evil except for Avon who is just evil and dumb (505) and lives poor by choice. Democrats complain that white men have all the privilege, and they make it so in their stories too, reinforcing stereotypes to push the POC victim narrative.

Louise complains about being raped even though she chose to put herself in that situation, then gets angry when boys laugh about it (188). Simon says he doesn’t, and Louise explains it by saying “You’re gay” (189), as if the only evil guys are straight, and gays are incapable of evil. The author had to make Simon gay so he could be classified as an oppressed innocent victim. He couldn’t be one of the heroes otherwise. You’re either a victim or a victimizer in the author’s liberal mind (292).

Like a typical liberal, the author makes everything about race. Remy is a well-off black man, but is self-consciously aware that he doesn’t fit in an affluent white neighborhood (7). “The clowns” separate the “whites from the coloreds” (323). In the real world, a civil war would start right now because of fraudulent election results or government corruption/overreach, but this author makes the war in his book “a race war” (627), delegitimizing the legitimate concerns of conservatives and making them out to be just plain dumb hateful racists. Avon is a white supremacist (511). Louise thinks she’s being discriminated against, kept down, called the N word, followed and lusted over by privileged men because of her race (83). “When they brag of her death, all she will be is her color” (326). The author points out when she’s “the only one with any melanin in her skin” (85). Why does this matter? Liberals make things about race when it is on no one’s mind but theirs. Only a small minority of the US population are actually white supremacists, but liberals want us to believe that all republicans are. Louise thinks all black people are anxious, and that they are unique in this affliction, and a white person could never understand (89). That’s a racist attitude. Anxiety could affect anyone, and there is nothing that is true about ALL people of a particular race. Not being racist means treating people equally, not seeing people as a color, different from the rest. Liberals contradict themselves when they claim to want equality, when when it comes to racial issues they want to elevate blacks, Hispanics, and LGBT, while pushing down whites, Asians, straights, and cis-genders.

Simon is a white boy with anxiety. Understandable that he’d have some issues since he saw his sister’s dead body. But the author makes his anxiety about global warming and the “guilt of being rich and white and male” (154). If his anxiety really stemmed from the latter, then it’s liberals’ fault for making kids feel that way. Young white kids are not to blame for their ancestors being slave owners decades ago. Also, do liberals ever acknowledge that it was also the white race that ended African American slavery? No thanks for that, huh? The white northerners should pay reparations to the black race even though they had nothing to do with their slavery and even helped free them?

And it may be useful to know that when a black man back then got freed and became a farmer himself, he also used black slaves! So slavery was not necessarily because of racism, but simply because farmers wanted cheap labor. And companies today do similar—they outsource as many jobs as they can to less developed countries so they don’t have to pay US minimum wage to their workers. Those sweat shop workers make your clothes, toys, jewelry, and your overpriced electronics! Remember that, hypocrites! You might as well be perpetuating slavery with every non-US purchase you make! It’s not a white people problem! It’s a greed problem! Greed is human nature! Greed is what the liberals feel when they want to take from the wealthy, because they’re jealous they can’t make wealth on their own! So don’t think you’re any different, liberals! “The rich, you see, have always used wealth to buy solutions to their problems” (360). And the poor want wealth for the same reason. “The rich don’t do anything unless it makes them richer” (361-362). Wrong; some rich people waste their wealth on stuff that makes them lose money. “The wizard” would have more money if he didn’t spend it on multiple mansions and girls to have sex with. He spent on average $547,500 a year on girls (631).

The author seems to complain about how areas that used to be predominately black became gentrified, driving out the existing community (134-135). Why are they being driven out if they already own their home in the area? Leaving by choice? Why? Because they don’t want to be around white people? Sounds racist. Why is it a bad thing to have the races mix? If that’s a problem, what’s the solution? Segregation? Liberals want to find a problem with things so badly that they end up going full circle, wanting the original things they were protesting against decades earlier!

“Africans were hunted, captured, and shipped to America to be slaves” (112). Africans were not the only ones to be slaves in the world or to be oppressed in America. Slavery ended a long time ago, but the liberals keep reviving the issue to stoke racial division. Asians were discriminated against in the US, and yet they rose to be more successful than whites. Just takes brains and hard work. “The witch” tells Simon, “If the poor were so smart, they wouldn’t be poor” (415). That’s a good point actually. Because smart people can make good choices and work to earn money to get out of the poverty. They can get scholarships, go to college, and get a good paying job. Some wealthy people just inherit their wealth, but stupid people don’t keep their wealth for long, because they waste it all on stupid stuff.

The author acts as if humanity’s horrible history is the reason why kids are so anxious and mentally messed up. Humans have been committing atrocities for centuries, and kids have learned about it for as long as schooling has been compulsory. It is nothing new. So the real cause of children’s modern problems can’t lie with humanity’s cruel history.

The author blames kids using alcohol and drugs on the atrocities of human history too (113). Most kids do not care about the history they learn in school. They are indifferent to strangers dying a long time ago. They care about the here and now, how to get and keep friends. And alcohol and drugs is one way to do that, because it has been encouraged and glorified in media for decades. It didn’t used to be part of our culture before 1960. And there were plenty of human atrocities kids learned about before 1960 for kids to get depressed or anxious or guilty about back then. But they didn’t care then, and they don’t care now. The *author* cares, and he’s trying to push his opinions through unrealistic underage characters.

The author also implies the reason for drug use is environment. “If [Bathsheba] stayed here she would be smoking by thirteen, drinking by fourteen, pregnant by fifteen” (378). As if kids have no choice about whether they smoke, drink, or have sex. There is always a choice no matter your environment. I had an alcoholic parent and went to school where everyone was doing drugs & having sex to be cool. I still chose not to do those things! No one holds a gun to your head forcing you to do drugs. Sex is a choice too, except in the case of rape, and if that happens, that’s why there’s abortion and why it should be kept legal. “You act like the world is filled with rational choices” (379). It is. You blaming others for your own choices is like saying you’re just a piece of sand getting blown by the wind. No, you are a conscious being with free will. You choose what you do.

The author even blames porn watching on racism (108). “84% of boys and 54% of girls in our children’s generation had watched some form of online pornography before their eighteenth birthday” (108-109). So what’s the solution? Ban porn? Ban the Internet? I’m sure that in non-American countries where there are no racial tensions (because almost everyone in the country is the same race), young people are still watching porn. The author defines cuckold as “a man who stood by helpless while another man, usually a Black man, had intercourse with his wife” (108). Actually, the dictionary defines it as the husband of an unfaithful wife. Race is not part of it at all, but the author makes it about race.

Why does the author capitalize “Black” but not “white”? This is yet another way liberals try to elevate blacks while putting down whites. They don’t really want equality. They want blacks to feel superior and whites to feel guilty and small and insignificant. And isn’t that black supremacy? If you’re truly against racism, you’d be against supremacy feelings of any race.

Prophet Paul seems to be the author’s ideal person. Paul is always calm (441, 445, 495) and knows the right path to take (469). He is humble and says “I’m not important enough to name” (69). Is the kind of utopia the author envisions one in which people have no names? We’re all numbers like in Ayn Rand’s “Anthem”? How ironic the books have the same name but are at opposite ends of the political spectrum!

The author also has Randall Flagg be unrealistically calm under pressure (482) while Felix is unrealistically the panicking one (450, 495). Flagg survived a school shooting; he should have PTSD. Felix was raised to expect the unexpected, so he should be prepared for the chaos and violence. But the author instead makes his liberal kids calm and his conservatively raised character panicking, to paint the former as better than the latter.

Paul is unrealistically smart for a teenager. He educates his adult interviewer about the word “hyperobject” (442). He says, “There is evidence corroborated in multiple countries that suggests if a man or woman has not had intercourse by age 25, there is a reasonable chance he or she will remain a virgin at least until age 45. My point is, look around, you have a population of adolescents, who in any other decade would be fucking their brains out, but instead, we’re on TikTok” (71). So the author is saying it’s preferable for teens to be fucking their brains out? I’m confident that the majority of today’s teens are still doing so. Even if they weren’t, so what? Lowering population would be great for improving the health of the planet which the author is so concerned about. If teens being on TikTok instead of fucking is a problem, then what is the solution? Ban the Internet? Parents keeping their kids away from TikTok or the Internet in general? Then the poor children would cry and complain that mommy and daddy are so mean and out of touch with the times! “We drive them to playdates and buy them smartphones, installing software so we can monitor their Snapchats and TikTok accounts for inappropriate conent, then show them how 6,000,000 Jews were killed in concentration camps during WWII” (112). Solution? Shelter the kids from history? Easy to state the problem. Harder to offer the solution.

The author repeatedly beats us over the head with global warming catastrophes (19, 46-47, 67). He writes as if hurricanes never happened before, and they’re only happening now because of human-caused global warming (394). He conveniently has the story take place in summer and in the southern states so he can mention all the 100+ degree days. What about the freezing temperatures in the winter, south and north alike? That goes ignored by global warming pushers. The author has 15-year-old Simon constantly thinking of facts about the earth dying because of humans. That’s unrealistic. The average kid worries about crushes, drugs, sex, homework, and looking cool. It’s not the average kid worrying about climate change. It’s liberal adults who worry about it because the liberal media (like this book) pushes that narrative. But the wealthy liberal hypocrites still fly their private jets and buy multiple mansions with huge carbon footprints. Even Bernie Sanders, who I used to like. That’s the sad truth about democrats—they pretend to care and be unselfish, but behind the scenes they are just as money & power hungry as anyone else. Is the author using his wealth to help the planet? Or is he buying fancy cars and mansions and flying on private jets and buying new tech gadgets that he doesn’t need, including a new cell phone every 1-2 years? My guess is he’s just another hypocrite pretending to care. Leftists want the common people to make all the sacrifices for the good of the planet while they live in luxury and don’t sacrifice anything.

“In India the simple act of breathing outdoors is equal to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. Pollution has been linked with increased mental illness in children and dementia in adults” (155). Again, what’s the solution? Are you going to stop buying new stuff every year, limit your own intake? Are you going to stop driving a car? You better not be smoking or drinking, poisoning your own body by choice while claiming to care about the health of people or the planet.

Paul says, “the identity remains, even though the behavior has stopped” (71). If that’s the case, then what’s the point in rehabilitating criminals? Might as well just execute them. Paul goes on to say, “In the case of our screens, we’re not to blame” (71). A major theme of this novel is how the kids are innocent victims, not to blame for anything. I disagree. No matter what our circumstances, we always have choices and should be held accountable for those choices. Drugs, Internet, and video games are addictive, but people use them by choice. Not everyone gets addicted to them when trying them, and not everyone has to try them just because they exist. People can choose not to try. Parents can choose not to buy.

Paul says, “There are two great motivators. Love and fear. . . . In the 1990s politicians began to harness the power of fear to create a different kind of America. A nation of perpetual fear—fear of crime, fear of race, fear of government. Then came the Twin Towers and the never-ending War on Terror. They warned us that everything we believed in and everyone we loved was in constant danger. Fundamentalist Islamic terrorism. Mexican rapists. Rental vans plowing through crowds in European cities. Active shooters. Autism from a doctor’s needle. In 2016 that fear brought us the God King and his troll army, the great plague and the fear of literal death. ‘Wear a mask!’ ‘Liberate Michigan!’” (74)

So much is wrong about this paragraph. Motivation is brought about by self-interest. Breaking that down further, there is reward and punishment. Fear would fit into the avoiding punishment motivation. Acting out of love is another selfish act, but a person is unlikely to love everybody, more likely to love a few and act out of their best interest. Which is why we have wealthy people using their wealth on their loved ones instead of charity. Which is why left wingers want to eliminate the wealth of individuals, stealing it for the sake of the public good, when in reality those left wingers secretly want to steal the wealth for themselves and their own loved ones!

Using fear as a motivation didn’t start in the 90s. It has gone on throughout human history in probably every country. This author writes like a child, thinking the newest generation is the only one to suffer or experience these things. Its human nature. The powerful always try to control others, and fear is an easy way to do it. Nothing new.

Fear of crime? We have always been afraid of that. Fear of government? That was the whole reason why America was founded and immigrated to.

Capitalism uses reward to motivate people—profit. If you take away the reward system (profit) by eliminating capitalism and replacing it with communism, what is there left to motivate people? Punishment—which is why communism results in an oppressive authoritarian government arresting, beating, threatening, killing people in order to keep them working for no reward. A communist government can’t use reward to motivate people, because it eliminated profit. So the only thing left to motivate people is punishment or fear. And yet this is what the liberals think they want. Their envy for the wealthy leads to them wanting a state of fear.

Fear of race? Race relations in America were much improved from the 1970s up until around 2016. They only got bad again because of liberals stoking division, trying to use race as the reason for as many disputes as possible, and magnifying those disputes when found. The author does this magnifying too: “Experts pointed to the drained public pools of the 1950s, where white suburbanites had physically drained and paved over their beautiful newly built public pools rather than share them with Black families” (108). If this really happened, it was one isolated incident, just like an anecdote of a child getting autism after a vaccine, which the author dismisses. If you look at the overall picture and see a statistical graph, you will see that race relations were improving over the years, even before LBJ became president.

Some Mexicans are rapists, and to deny this is burying one’s head in the sand for FEAR of being called racist. Men of all races have been rapists. Mexicans are not immune.

Autism from a doctor’s needle - the flip side of this is the FEAR of catching diseases like chicken pox, measles, mumps, etc. which were all common childhood illnesses in 1950 and harmless for almost everyone. FEAR of illness is used to pressure people to vaccinate. Wearing a mask is done out of FEAR of a virus. Another mostly harmless one.

Trump, who the author calls the god king, doesn’t have a troll army any more than liberals do. There are trolls of all political affiliations, but throughout the book the author writes as if all trolls are republican.

The author annoyingly refers to many of the characters and most of the villains by nicknames instead of using their real names. “The troll” was a privileged conservative white boy who recruits girls for “the wizard” who is a rich white pedophile in his 60s, probably based on Jeffrey Epstein (92, 160, 369). “Goblins” are security guards for hire (198). “The witch” is some vague evil old woman who pays Rose to take care of her and Simon (414). She tries to brainwash him with conspiracy theories, which Simon’s dad supposedly wants, which I found far-fetched (423). Some other enemy aggressors called “clowns” call the heroes “faggots and race traitors” (326). Later in the book, there’s “Heavyset” and “Pimply” (598). Using these nicknames instead of real character names dehumanizes them, encouraging readers to view them as objects we are not to sympathize with. “The Jew isn’t human and can therefore be eliminated without guilt or shame” (344). Don’t worry about shooting those people; they’re just “ogres” (304). Paul says, “Ogres are creatures of dirt and sin. Venal and small-minded. Brutish and leering. They eat children and torture their mothers and fathers” (313). (Children eaters? Like the pedophiles of PizzaGate that liberals think conservatives made up?) The author repeats “ogre” three times on one page in single sentences to brainwash you into seeing the victims the kids are shooting as monsters: “Ogres. Ogre. Ogre” (304). I just noticed that the word “ogre” is in the word “progressive.” Haha.

Like Epstein, the wizard pays the girls for massages which often lead to sexual things. The girls come voluntarily and most repeatedly (633), and yet we’re supposed to view them as victims. Remember this when liberals fight for MAPS (minor attracted persons), decriminalizing “sex-work,” and lowering the age of consent or eliminating it entirely. We’re supposed to empathize with Louise when she wants revenge on the troll & wizard (554), when she cooperated with them of her own free will (188-189). How about taking some responsibility? It’s not parents’ fault for “being distracted” (189); that doesn’t force a child into the arms of a pedophile. Louise sought the troll and wizard out by choice; she knew what she was getting into (189). If kids obeyed their parents, the kids wouldn’t be sneaking out of their home to have sex with strangers. People like Epstein/the wizard only manage to have sex with minors because the minors are willing to do it for pay. If they weren’t willing, he’d have to rape girls to get his fix, and then he’d go to prison for a long time, and his victims really would be innocent.

Louise is a hypocrite. She doesn’t want to be called kitty-cat (555), but she called her therapist kitty-cat. She doesn’t like it when boys squeeze her ass, but she squeezes Simon’s (623). She hates when whites are racist against her, but she’s racist against them (554). She thinks they’re all Jew haters, “muscle car drivers plowing through crowds of peaceful protesters, all the minivan drivers with their Blue Lives Matter bumper stickers, all the cops they worship” (554). Defunding the police resulted in more crime; does that make you happy? If black lives matter, why is it wrong to say blue lives matter? Every life is precious, according to Paul. You only want black lives to matter? That’s racist. Whenever a mass shooting happens and a white is to blame, the liberal news dwells on it for a long time. But they pay no attention to the daily shootings that happen in Chicago or Detroit by black people. This is racist. In case you readers didn’t know, blacks hate Jews and commit acts of violence against them much more than whites do: https://www.investigativeproject.org/8240/black-on-jewish-violence-marks-the-new-new-anti

Paul says in the story of the Pied Piper, the problem is not that a man is stealing children. The problem is corrupt adults who think “they can get whatever they want for free” (172). Not sure how he twisted the story to come up with that explanation, but if the problem is not a man stealing children, then why are they going after the wizard? He didn’t obtain his girls for free; he paid them. And if it’s a problem that people want stuff for free, then why does the author and his protagonists (including Paul) complain about capitalism and advocate for collectivism?

Paul justifies his crimes by saying: “Do you know what a criminal is? Someone who rejects morality and ethics. Someone who puts their own needs above the needs of society. . . . We’re fighting for something here, a greater good, this human agreement—balance, community, civilization. Our parents have surrendered. They can’t or won’t commit to creating a collective system based on sharing, based on the idea that every human life is precious, that we can’t sacrifice any of God’s children in the name of progress. They can’t or won’t agree that we are stronger together. That diversity strengthens the species. That power without empathy is a sin” (249). Wrong. Morality and ethics are opinions. Legality is different, defined by a country’s government; when you break the law, you are a criminal, even if the law is immoral by your own morality. Sharing benefits the receiver but not the giver. If every life is precious, then what about the aborted fetuses? What about the people Paul and his gang kills? What about the people who die from vaccines for the greater good?

Diversity actually objectively weakens the whole. In Hawaii, the dominant race brought in multiple races together to do the slave work, because they wouldn’t get along if they were different races and spoke different languages. When people are too different from each other, they tend to not want to hang out with each other. Then they don’t unite to overthrow an oppressive leader. Amazon’s CEO wanted a diverse workforce so they wouldn’t unionize. Liberal politicians want diversity so that the people won’t unite to rise against the government; the races will be too busy fighting amongst themselves.

Paul’s further justification for shooting people: “We didn’t ask for this world, friend. Prejudice and intolerance. Sixty million refugees. But we will make it our own. And to do so, those who own it now must die. . . . If we wait too long, we’ll be stamped into adults who walk the same walk and talk the same talk as those who came before. Who hem and haw and say ‘it’s complicated,’ even when talking about the simplest things. Think about the Greatest Generation, raised on sacrifice and patriotism. And of their children, the Me Generation, forged in opposition, obsessed with personal freedom. And of their children, Generation X, raised in comfort and prosperity, a generation of man-children, more consumer than citizen. These are our barriers to self-definition, to liberation” (314). In other words: The old generations were raised on sacrifice, liberty, comfort, prosperity, & consumerism. WE were raised in comfort, prosperity, and consumerism. In order to obtain LIBERTY, we must SACRIFICE. Same words! Paul (and the author) seeks to divide and conquer, acting like the old generation is so different from the new, when the truth is we’re very much the same. Avon thinks, “the path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of he selfish and the tyranny of evil men” (511). The same words could be coming out of Paul’s mouth; he also thinks he’s righteous and fighting against selfishness, tyranny, and evil. Avon thinks that the cops/FBI are “agents of oppression,” (640) just as liberals think POC are being oppressed. The irony is that liberals claim to want equality when they really try to paint people as unequal: black and white. “There are no gray areas when it comes to survival” (315). “What we called justice didn’t work for any fucking body” (611). So no guilty person has ever gone to prison? Uh-huh. Simon tells the wizard, “We can’t move on. None of us, because you’re preying on us, you and the others, turning our grief into cash, keeping us angry, keeping us fighting, keeping us divided so you can take our children and bleed us dry” (652). No, girls came to the wizard of their own will. It’s liberals who are keeping us angry, fighting, and divided. And this author is obviously targeting young readers, encouraging them to see themselves as victims and their parents and other (conservative) adults as their oppressors. So if anyone is trying to “take the children,” it’s the author of this book.

Louise tells Simon, “Come on, kid. You’re overthinking this thing. You can’t reason your way out of a holy war” (250). In other words: don’t think, don’t use your reasoning skills; just believe us and do what we say. What a great message to send to kids. If the GOP were saying it, liberals would raise a big stink. But since it’s liberal kids saying it, that makes it A-okay!

“Human beings invented [the taser], the way they have invented all weapons meant to incapacitate or kill—without a care in the world” (441). Human beings meaning adults. Who says they didn’t have a care in the world? That’s the author trying to demonize weapon makers. He ignores the fact that without weapons, police can’t enforce laws and militaries can’t defend countries. He ignores the fact that he has the children in his book use plenty of weapons to kill others.

“We have always been a nation at war. Or not always, but for 20+ years now, since the planes hit the towers” (574). “Our youngest adult generation has never known a time in which their country was not at war” (576). War isn’t a new problem. Before 9/11, there was the cold war, the Vietnam War, WWI and WWII, the civil war, etc. And other countries have their own histories of war. Some of the US wars were started by the US, but some were retaliations. What’s the solution? Abolish the military and let ourselves get attacked and invaded? Americans are actually lucky, because even though we have often been at war, the wars have usually not been fought on our own soil. We bomb other countries, while ours mostly never gets hit. The draft has been gone for decades. Today’s kids don’t have to fight in the military. They don’t have to worry about bombs or grenades in their cities or yards. And yet the author pushes this idea that “for them, combat is normal. . . . [They] come to accept war as [the] natural state of being. So we strap on our guns and fight” (576).

In a rare glimmer of objectivity, the author describes the absurdity of liberal thinking: “In the Cooks’ [his nickname for liberals] restaurant, new diners are made to pay the bill for old meals because historical debts can never be repaid. In the Cooks’ restaurant, those with more and punished and those with less are praised. See, the Cooks believe that the rich should give their seats up to the poor, often forgoing their own meals entirely, so that those who didn’t call ahead, who didn’t make a reservation, who can’t afford to order an entree or dessert, should get the all-you-can-eat buffet, free of charge, until the very function of a restaurant—to feed customers in exchange for money—has been repurposed and the people who have the most eat the least” (116).

But the author doesn’t seem to see the parallel when his ideal moderate president (presumably Biden) who replaces “the god king” says, “I have also signed an executive order drafting all medical and psychiatric professionals to form a new corps of first responders and asked them to suspend their private practices to work instead for the good of all Americans, no matter the cost” (78). This is communist and slavery - working without pay. How do you realistically expect those professionals to feed their families when they have to work without pay? Liberals only think of the victims but don’t seem to realize they make the non-victims into victims with their so-called solutions. “But there is only so much we can do. Your children are not the property of the United States government” (78). Oh, how unfortunate, huh? Things would be SO much better if all the children were raised by strangers! Another communist dream in the name of equality. Go read “Agenda 21” by Glenn Beck to see how that plays out.

Paul: “People talk about freedom, but how can we be free when we are sicker and poorer and more afraid than we’ve ever been? Free to do what? What about freedom from poverty, freedom from health care debt, freedom from the drugs we have to take to numb the pain of all the freedom we don’t have?” (227-228) People do not have the RIGHT to sit on their butt and make no effort whatsoever and think that the government/world owes them free stuff. You have the FREEDOM TO WORK and to KEEP the fruit of your labor (as opposed to slavery and giving all you work for to your landowner or king). Most jobs now pay $15/hour or higher. There is no excuse for poverty. You can get a job and work. You can choose to save. Make smart choices (exercise, eat healthy, avoid drugs), and chances are you will not be in health care debt. There are no drugs you HAVE to take. It’s a choice. All the drugs people take CONTRIBUTE to the reason why people are so sick. They are not the CURE. If Americans are sicker than they’ve ever been, then obviously the medical system is not helping them and they’d be better off not taking any “medicine.” 70% of Americans are overweight, and it’s because of their own choices. Being overweight leads to other health problems. And no, people are not “poorer than they’ve ever been.” Americans today can rely on food stamps to keep them from starving. In the past before this author was born, the poor got no freebies. They worked for their food or they starved. During the industrial revolution, adults and children alike worked 12-18 hour days in factories, risking life and limb! There was no minimum wage! In 1986, Ayatollah Khomeini forced kids to “walk through minefields detonating mines to clear a path for the Iranian army” (317). “In Africa, ragged militias capture boys as young as six and train them to kill, feeding them brown-brown, a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder” (317). Half of India fucks children (571). And you American kids today think you got it so bad?

The author claims to not be on a political side (336), yet it’s so obvious he is on the liberal one. When he writes about people speculating on why kids are killing themselves, he writes two sentences about the conservative point of view (lack of religion) while he writes a fat paragraph explaining the liberal point of view (mass shootings) (107). The author breaks a fiction rule by using his own literal voice to speak to the readers in the middle of the story, apologizing for including guns in his story. He uses as his excuse, “But this is a story about America. At last count there were more than 420,000,000 guns in America (population 330,000,000)” (337). So he blames conservatives for why he had to include guns in his story, for why his liberal teen heroes have to use guns. Ever heard of choice? Ever heard of peaceful protest? It worked for Gandhi and MLK. By the way, liberals are in favor of banning guns, but they don’t seem to realize that most blacks love guns. (Or that most blacks who die by gun violence are shot by another black.) Its not only rednecks who love them. Blacks and rednecks actually have a lot in common. But liberals only criticize rednecks because they want to blame whites for everything and push the idea that blacks are innocent victims.

The author makes fun of every conservative complaint, like “untraceable fraud” regarding Biden’s “victory” (25). All the crazy republicans taking over the capitol “believe that something has been stolen from them, that they are outcasts from the respected majority” (491). If Biden’s victory wasn’t fraudulent, why were the democrats pushing for mail in voting in every state (yet had no problem with people continuing to go into grocery stores) and then didn’t want recounts or audits and didn’t want republicans present during recounts? There is plenty of evidence of democrat fraud, but they don’t want to admit to it because they wanted Trump out no matter what evil they had to resort to. All of the capitol protesters “believe that they have suffered a lifetime of hatred at the hands of a powerful elite. They are victims of a vast conspiracy” (491). Sounds like liberals, thinking POC are forever victims, having suffered generations of hatred at the hands of powerful rich whites.

“Before they’re old enough to drive or drink or vote, [kids] have learned about slavery and the holocaust. They’ve learned about colonization, voter suppression, and civil war” (111). The author thinks this is a problem. So what’s the solution? Not teach kids these things? I notice the author mentioned voter suppression but not voter fraud. It’s a liberal belief that votes are being suppressed. If the author were truly objectively, he’d mention the conservative viewpoint that Biden won by fraud. Or do schools not teach about election fraud because the schools are liberally biased too?

The author tries to blame everything on conservatives. Freedom and making money are evil (233, 318, 371, 401, 577). Conservatives in the book have no sympathy for the liberals’ kids killing themselves and just laugh about it (396). (So no conservative kids are killing themselves? How would liberals react if they did?) Everyone at the January 6th protest is summed up in a couple “clowns” who took selfies and pooped on the stairs and wiped it on the wall (324). We’re to assume they’re conservative. (Nevermind that left-wing Antifa went there to stir up trouble just to have it blamed on republicans.) “Patriots beat police officers with flagpoles” (25). (What about all the violence caused by Antifa? No mention of that. Most patriots “back the blue.” It’s the left wingers (in recent years) who hate the cops and want them defunded.) It’s a redneck who calls Paul a faggot (69). (Why not a black person? Black people never call others faggots? Yeah right!) The author makes Texas sound like a wasteland of abandoned towns, run-down homes, & racist whites who look for reasons to shoot black kids (136, 224). (Has the author ever been to TX? I have, and it wasn’t like that at all. TX has large urban cities, well-kept suburbs, and in the rural areas I went through there were hundreds of energy generating wind turbines for miles! I saw a black family in a grocery store, and nobody gave them any trouble.) Joe Rogan and Howard Stern are supposed to be evil for some reason (163, 571). (Not sure what Stern’s crime was, but Rogan’s is letting conservatives speak their opinion on his podcast, I guess. What happened to freedom of speech?) The author encourages the idea that all conservatives are irrational extremists who dress up as revolutionary cosplay warriors and believe in Q (187, 467, 484, 491). People who believe that Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self-defense are the same primarily white, racist “young Republicans” who “torture prisoners and giggle,” “throwing fascist salutes” and wave confederate flags and swastikas (486-487, 490). The heroes make fun of Q believers who say “trust the plan,” while the heroes hypocritically blindly trust Paul’s plan, call him a prophet, think he can hear the voice of God, and break laws and kill people in the name of his plan (327). Conservatives have “nostalgia for a world that never existed” (186). (How would kids know it never existed? They haven’t been on the planet more than 20 years. They don’t know what it was like the 1950s. The author was born in 1967, so he doesn’t know either. Take the word of the elders who lived through it. Things *were* objectively better back then for most people, including blacks. Back then, blacks aspired to be successful through hard work [and often achieved success!], not star in a music video with infantile clothing and sluts dancing around them, rapping about drugs, money, sex, and using profanities every chance they get, including the N word which they claim offends them so much.) The author thinks conservatives care so little about the health of the planet that they will intentionally waste things; Simon’s rich dad says that he keeps “the heat on in the Hamptons house full blast in winter, even when we’re out of town. I actually like eating half my meal and throwing the rest away. I prefer it, seeing all that expensive meat scraped into the trash, mixing with the plastic and metal” (404). That’s not even realistic. I guess we’re supposed to assume that he & the wizard are conservatives just because they’re rich white guys. I bet Jeffrey Epstein was actually a liberal though. (According to Wikipedia, he donated over $139,000 to democrats and only $18,000 to republicans.) So are Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and almost much every other rich guy in America. But they still have their mansions and fly in private jets!

“Modern America has some of the highest rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness in human history. This isn’t my opinion. It’s statistical. Things are worst in the cities, and among the wealthy.” - Paul (62). Well then the democrats must be doing something wrong, since they’re in charge of the large cities!

The author criticizes pharma companies that pushed opioids and intentionally got people addicted to them, yet is not skeptical at all about pharma’s liability-free vaccines, dismissing autism claims as just another ignorant, irrational conservative fear, lumped in with flat earth theory & holocaust denial (33, 345, 423).

“It was, of course, just a few years earlier that the COVID-19 plague had swept the planet, locking us in our homes, dooming the elderly and the infirm to panicked suffocation” (25). It wasn’t covid that locked us in our homes; it was government. Covid was hardly a plague; the science says it had a 99% survival rate for people under 70 years old. Those over 70 had a 95% survival rate. That’s a relatively harmless plague.

The author makes fun of the 34% of the population who “have gone to war against tiny pieces of fabric worn across the nose and mouth. . . . So they have declared war against these pieces of fabric, even as scientists present evidence that those same tiny pieces of fabric will protect them from a deadly virus sweeping the globe, killing millions” (333). As if scientists can’t be corrupted, lie, or fabricate evidence? “I could show you six different scientific papers I funded,” brags the wizard (372). “To sell people cancer and lung disease, you have to do more than bury the truth. You have undermine the idea of truth itself” (342). So big tobacco can lie, but big pharma can’t? Cigarette companies can lie about cigarettes not causing cancer, but Fauci can’t lie about masks being protective? Nevermind that Fauci first said they wouldn’t help, then told the public that they would. Nevermind that the virus still spreads among the masked. Nevermind that the box of medical masks says on the box “does not protect against covid-19.” Nevermind that every place that mandated masks did not see a decrease in covid cases. Nevermind that the vast majority of people who caught covid survived. Nevermind that Fauci, Pelosi, Newsome, Lightfoot, and other liberals don’t wear a mask when they think no one is looking. Sounds like they knew that the deadliness of covid and the efficacy of masks were “kayfabe . . . That thing we all know is fake that we agree to call real” (500-501).

Why do liberals care if anti-mask people don’t wear a mask? They’re only putting themselves at risk. If your mask protects you, then you have nothing to worry about. The maskless will die! Except they didn’t. The covid rules were never about protecting health. It was about getting people to fear and comply. And 66% of people fell for it hook line and sinker! The author says the covid deniers “lie dying in hospitals from a disease they argue does not exist. . . . And irony without humor is violence” (334). “It would be funny if your death weren’t imminent. The lie is violence. You are its victim. Your injuries are psychological, emotional. Your condition is called anxiety” (335). So fear them, hate them! Their choice to not cover their face is violence toward you! Can’t you tell this is brainwashing?

The author makes fun of conservatives who believe in “alternative facts.” “Proof is irrelevant” (324). There was scientific fact about masks not working, and there being effective treatments for covid, but the liberals didn’t want to believe it, because they trust the government over anybody else (as long as it’s being run by a democrat). They wanted to censor those opinions even when they came from experts. “Reality has become a personal choice” (334). Oh, like how a man can claim to be a woman and force you to believe it and use his new name and pronouns “or else”?

The author has the witch say, “All those children who were scared of the dark invented a thing called science and a word called truth” (418). That’s an “alternative fact” if I ever heard one. Kids didn’t invent them; adults did. But I guess the author wants us to believe adults have contributed nothing to society, and that adults (or at least the conservative ones) are anti-science and anti-truth.

Another false fact: Paul wants us to believe that “all pain is emotional,” not physical; “whiplash isn’t so much a physical injury as a form of PTSD” (445). I beg to differ. If you get your fingers slammed in a door, the pain is physical. Denying physical pain exists is denial of one of the most basic truths. Trying to make all pain emotional is just suiting the author’s agenda of trying to argue that everyone’s depression, anxiety, fear, and taking offense is just as harmful as someone punching you in the nose. He and other liberals want to magnify your minor complaints, making everyone a complainer about how they’re a victim of something, so they can get angry and blame everyone else for their pain instead of looking inward and trying to fix their problems.

“The talking heads of right-wing media denied that suicide was a problem” (28). Actually, in the real world, it’s the right wing saying that suicide and other mental illnesses have skyrocketed since forced government lockdowns and business/school closures. It was the left denying these problems because their fear of the virus trumped their fear of anything else.

“In China, the government has rounded up more than 1,000,000 Uighurs and forced them into ‘reeducation camps’” (112). Meanwhile in the US, liberals propose putting Trump voters and the unvaccinated in reeducation camps against their will. In other developed countries like Canada and Australia, they’re already doing that to the unvaccinated or covid positive. Liberals point the finger at everyone but themselves.

“Somewhere around 2016, [republicans] abandoned that truth in favor of the Truth of Massive Tax Cuts. As a result the Other Party of Truth [democrats] became the Party for Reduced National Debt” (115). No, Democrats have never been in favor of reducing debt as far as I know. Republicans have always been in favor or reducing costs, and that includes taxes. The liberals like to complain about Trump’s tax cuts because it helped the wealthy, but they ignore that it also helped every taxpayer, even the minimum wage earner! I guess the democrats prefer taxes be raised on everyone. Easier for them to say “free this, free that, for all!” And hope that the lower classes don’t notice that they get less take home pay from their jobs.

Duane tells Simon that conservatives are traumatized, unhealthy, not clear-minded, not well-rounded people, and that’s why the conservatives made up QAnon, Pizzagate, and democrats being pedophiles with sex dungeons (292), despite the fact that THESE KIDS ARE TRYING TO RESCUE A GIRL FROM A PEDOPHILE. So is “the wizard” just a conspiracy too? Or are we just supposed to assume that everything conservatives think is wrong, and no democrat could ever be a pedophile?

The author criticizes Bathsheba’s father for teaching her practical skills, survival drills, and subsistence farming (376) despite Paul’s utopia involving subsistence farming (469), and in order to get to that utopia they have to use practical skills and survival skills. Not sure how Paul expects his gang of liberal kids to put in the hard work to “build houses and grow their own crops” “with no electricity” in Alaska (469, 587) when they’ve been raised on relative lazy luxury, and people in their party vote for universal basic income so they don’t have to work. Louise is a clean freak, and Simon and Story are spoiled rich kids. Bathsheba and Felix would probably end up doing all the labor since they have the knowledge and strength for it, plus experience with hard work. And they likely wouldn’t get paid for it, since profit is evil (589). So they’d be slaves. The other kids would just be leeches. Their society would break down pretty quick. It’s be nice if the author wrote a sequel which shows how dysfunctional Paul’s utopia is. But that won’t happen unless he chooses to #walkaway from the democrat party.

“All utopias from Plato’s Republic to George Orwell’s brave new world of 1984 have had one element of construction in common: they are all societies from which change is absent” (590). That’s because utopias are supposed to be perfect, and any deviation from perfection is imperfection. But I don’t see how Paul’s utopia would be any different.

The book indirectly blames conservatives for the craziness of illegal immigrants kept in cages too (246, 249). It was Obama who chose to separate children from adults, because he thought it wasn’t right that the kids were kept in jail. Would you be happier if they were kept in jail with their parents? The author points out that the kids are kept in cages in un-air-conditioned huts (246). Why should people breaking the law get a nice place to stay? Should US tax payers pay to keep illegal immigrants comfortable, in addition to the free food and water they get (306)? The illegal immigrants choose to come over here. They know the risks and what they’re doing is wrong. They do it anyway. So they get what they deserve. If they hate being in un-air-conditioned cages so much, they can choose to stay in their own country. And if their own country is worse than an un-air-conditioned hut, then there should be no complaining.

“No person is illegal” (248). A person entering the country without permission is breaking the country’s law. Every country has borders and rules for entering and citizenship. Why should the US be any different?

To make readers feel sympathy for illegal immigrants, we’re told the sad story of poor innocent victim Javier (306-310), as if all illegal immigrants are equally innocent. Some immigrants are rapists, criminals, murderers, drug smugglers, racists, and homophobic, just as any group of humanity can be. But democrats like this author want us to believe all the immigrants are innocent so we’ll be okay with letting them in, hoping we ignore the rise in crime, homelessness, and taxes to pay for their government benefits.

Liberals like to talk like America is so bad. “A nation of victims and victimizers” (292), as if America is unique in this. If the US is so bad, why are people so desperate to get here? And why do the democrats want them to come to a horrible country? Because democrats want their votes of course! To secure their power! They promise to help the poor, and once they’re in office they don’t do anything that doesn’t benefit themselves! This point was made clear when the democrats didn’t want Cuban immigrants coming here. Because the Cuban immigrants were fleeing communism, so they wouldn’t become democrat voters! Leftists only want immigrants likely to vote democrat!

Louise complains about how bad America is: “[Adults] had their chance, and what did we get—Mexican babies drowning inside their daddy’s shirts. Rising seas and bump stocks. Shit. We got shit” (250). Way to focus on the negative. You also got skyscrapers, automobiles, toys, cell phones, plentiful food and clothing, free education for all, medicine, computers, TV, airplanes, refrigerators, dishwashers, video games, “art, gleaming metropolises filled with stylish independent thinkers” (376). America was the leader of the world, the birthplace of most modern innovation and invention, the country people around the world wanted to immigrate to for its prosperity and hope of a better life (and still do). It was capitalism and the free market which made it prosperous. It’s not a perfect country, but it’s better than most other countries on the planet, and these ignorant kids think they can do better.

The witch asks Simon, “Is this the life you want? Where the weak murder the strong? Where those who can’t take care of themselves make rules for those who can?” (416) That’s exactly what the kids are doing in this story. Kids with anxiety, OCD, delusions of grandeur, and other mental problems murder rich people and want to rule over them.

The kids complain about being poor, and they complain about being rich. You just can’t please them. “You can remove every obstacle to happiness and they’re still miserable” (401). Simon says about being rich: “It’s—confusing. Being rich is the same as thinking everything’s free. No one ever says ‘We can’t afford that’, so how am I supposed to know that boats or houses or watches cost money? Or that money is a thing that exists in finite supply? My father has so much hidden away in offshore accounts, I can’t imagine an object or an experience I Could want that I couldn’t have without a second thought. That makes everything free. So you grow up defective or, like, handicapped. You look around and see everyone else is fighting, struggling, but you don’t understand why. How can they be hungry when everything is free?” (288)

But communists like Paul *want* everything to be free. Simon is 15, and he doesn’t know things cost money? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Any elementary school student who knows their numbers would notice that things in the store have price tags, and that the parent pays money to get the stuff. The author thinks teens are so dumb that they think everything is free for everybody just because their parents are wealthy, and at the same time the author thinks that these dumb teens can start a country better than any ever created before.

The author says when parents give birth to three or more kids, they can no longer effectively manage their kids; when population gets too large, it becomes harder to manage (663-664). So what’s the solution? Child limit laws?

Another error made by the author: Not capitalizing “native” on p.245.

Some interesting things:

“In the original Greek, the term apocalypse is translated as an unveiling. It describes a moment in time when something long hidden is finally revealed” (230).

I like the point made about how money can make you more powerful than a king. A king only rules one country, but a wealthy person can be powerful wherever they go and not be responsible for taking care of citizens (629).

Content Warnings

jennsbookshelves's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad tense fast-paced

5.0

Content Warnings

ashleysbookthoughts's review against another edition

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dark tense fast-paced

2.5

I loved Hawley’s book, Before the Fall. So when I saw that he had a new novel coming out that was kind of a dystopian critique of America, I was excited. The jacket description of this book is bananas, but it begins as a compelling, insightful critique of America and how divided we’ve become.

But then it devolves into a bit of a mess. I think I get what Hawley was trying to do. He’s attempting to satirize the current state of America. But I think his point and his narrative get bogged down by the fact that he’s trying to do too much. There’s no issue that isn’t included. We get everything: the political divide, climate change, opioid epidemic, social media, COVID, the Me Too movement, Q-Anon, gun violence, the war in Afghanistan, and more. There’s even a Jeffrey Epstein type character.

To his credit, Hawley acknowledges within the text that the world he created is “ridiculous,” but his points still come across as heavy-handed. It isn’t helped by the dialogue, which is often clunky. There are too many metaphors; people don’t talk like this.

Somewhere in here, though, is a good story. I was invested throughout and anxious to see where it was going. Unfortunately, the problem, to quote from the book: “Simon sighs. It’s all so vague.”

Content Warnings

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