Letter from a Reader 6.27.25

What happened when an MSNBC analyst came to my ruby-red town

Barbara McQuade and Attack from Within / Seven Stories Press

Note: My Letters from a Reader are normally for paid subscribers, but this one’s free to all. Wouldn’t you see it as bit cheeky if I paywalled a post about free speech?

On Wednesday night I went to talk by the law professor and MSNBC analyst

Barb McQuade

in an unlikely place: the Methodist church here in Mayberry on the Bay. I say “unlikely” because the Methodists, like most congregations in town, lean right. Left-leaning speakers typically head for the Unitarian church. You might expect the Methodists to welcome a Fox News host sooner than an MSNBC analyst even if the talk was sponsored by the nonpartisan League of Women Voters.

Well, who knew? Hundreds of enthusiasts turned out to hear McQuade. Some had driven over from Mobile in a thunderstorm, and they gave her a brief standing ovation after her talk in a cavernous community room of that Methodist church in my ruby-red Alabama town. A small portrait of Jesus hung on a wall above the crowd and looked pleased with what he saw.

McQuade was promoting her recent Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America, and her remarks took the form of an interview with

Cynthia Tucker

, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former editorial page editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the National Association of Black Journalists’ 2006 Journalist of the Year, who teaches at the nearby University of South Alabama.

Cynthia Tucker and The Southernization of America / UGA Press

Tucker co-wrote a book I liked, The Southernization of America, which argues that the racism and white supremacy of the South have metastasized, and I’d have been happy to hear more about it. But she admirably resisted any impulse to steal the show and kept the focus on Attack from Within, which argues that the spread of intentional lies is hurting the country and which proposes ways to limit its harms.

As a critic, I’d read a lot of books on topics related to McQuade’s, including one of the best-known: Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen, which shows how autocrats from Hitler and Mussolini to Putin and Trump have used propaganda and other tools to subvert democracy. Attack from Within is more America-centric than Strongmen and may hold few surprises for anyone who’s read that or similar books.

But McQuade made several excellent points.

There’s a difference between ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’

As McQuade defines it, disinformation is the deliberate of spreading lies in order to dupe people. Misinformation is the unwitting spread of those falsehoods or other untruths. Either can occur in print, on social media, or elsewhere.

‘Declinism’ is a dangerous form of fear-mongering

“America is going down the tubes.” “Our country will only get worse.” “Life in the United States was so much better in the good old days.”

Statements like these exemplify what McQuade and others call “declinism,” a belief that life in America has become so bad it won’t get better on its own. Declinism reflects an unusually deep or irrational pessimism that aids demagogues who play to people’s worst fears. It feeds the belief that “drastic times call for drastic measures,” McQuade said, and can lead people to accept what they otherwise wouldn’t.

It’s time to reconsider Section 230

If your local newspaper calls you a liar, you can sue the publisher. But if somebody calls you a liar on Facebook, you generally can’t sue Meta, just the poster of the lie.

That’s because of Section 230 if the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which shields online platforms from being sued for content posted by their users. The internet has changed so drastically in the past three decades that this provision may no longer fit our new realities, McQuade said, and changes in it might help to protect against the harms of disinformation.

These are just a few points McQuade made in her lively and wide-ranging comments, and not necessarily those she might have seen as the most important. You’ll find more on Attack from Within in this interview with McQuade in the Guardian and in this review of her book on Kirkus, which also reviewed Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen.

Over the years, I’ve come to dread an aspect of talks by authors: the frequent speechifying during the question-and-answer period by audience members who grab the mike and deliver a master’s thesis. So I also appreciated Tucker’s tactful attempt to preempt it: “Please keep your questions brief—and make sure they’re questions.”

Thanks to McQuade and Tucker for their stimulating crowd-pleaser, and especially to the League of Women Voters for its faith that both speakers might find audience in deepest Trump country.

---

What ‘Letters from a Reader’ are: My Letter from a Reader is a more or less weekly commentary on literary and media events for paid subscribers. I say “more or less” weekly, in part, because I live in a Gulf Coast hurricane zone prone to power outages, tornado warnings, and states of emergency caused by flash flooding. A letter may appear late if I have spent too much time sitting in a bathtub with a pillow over my head or early if worthy news breaks.

My background: I’m an award-winning critic and journalist who’s been the book columnist for Glamour, the book editor of a large newspaper, and a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle. My reviews or other articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Newsweek, Salon, and many other print and online media. I’ve taught writing at two large U.S. universities and spoken at many writers’ conferences.

The purpose of Jansplaining: In this newsletter I try to show—through spirited reviews and commentary—the best and worst of books and the media. I celebrate the winners and fault the sinners in related fields, whether they’re editors, publishers, and authors or the journalists who cover them. My inspirations include Dorothy Parker, the late Phoebe-Lou Adams of the Atlantic, and the baseball umpire of yesteryear who said, “I calls ’em like I sees ’em.”

How you can help: I live in a small town in Alabama, and much of my income from paid subscribers goes to buy books and reading materials unavailable on a timely basis from our wonderful but limited library, which recently had all of its state funding revoked for refusing to bow to the demands of pressure groups like the Moms for Liberty. When that happens, you help to support not just my work but that of the authors whose books I buy in order to review them here. Thank you!