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Allow Me to Retort

A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution

Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
2 of 2 copies available

MSNBC legal commentator Elie Mystal thinks that Republicans are wrong about the law almost all of the time. Now, instead of talking about this on cable news, Mystal explains why in his first book.

"After reading Allow Me to Retort, I want Elie Mystal to explain everything I don't understand - quantum astrophysics, the infield fly rule, why people think Bob Dylan is a good singer...." (Michael Harriot, The Root)

Allow Me to Retort is an easily digestible argument about what rights we have, what rights Republicans are trying to take away, and how to stop them. Mystal explains how to protect the rights of women and people of color instead of cowering to the absolutism of gun owners and bigots. He explains the legal way to stop everything from police brutality to political gerrymandering, just by changing a few judges and justices. He strips out all of the fancy jargon conservatives like to hide behind and lays bare the truth of their project to keep America forever tethered to its slaveholding past.

Mystal brings his trademark humor, expertise, and rhetorical flair to explain concepts like substantive due process and the right for the LGBTQ community to buy a cake, and to arm listeners with the knowledge to defend themselves against conservatives who want everybody to live under the yoke of 18th-century White men. The same tactics Mystal uses to defend the idea of a fair and equal society on MSNBC and CNN are in this book, for anybody who wants to deploy them on social media.

You don't need to be a legal scholar to understand your own rights. You don't need to accept the "Whites only" theory of equality pushed by conservative judges. You can listen to this book to understand that the Constitution is trash but doesn't have to be.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 11, 2021
      The Nation contributor Mystal debuts with a pugnacious and entertaining critique of conservative interpretations of the Constitution. Contending that the Constitution and its amendments “were designed to create a society of white male dominance,” and that conservatives “use the law to humiliate people, to torture people, and to murder people,” Mystal refutes the idea that the First Amendment protects people from being “canceled” for “spew racist, sexist, or homophobic slurs,” and notes the irony that Republicans who express outrage over “cancel culture” didn’t speak up when Peter Thiel financed a series of lawsuits against Gawker and Donald Trump’s Justice Department harassed a woman who laughed during Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s confirmation hearings. Elsewhere, Mystal points out that Republicans passed gun control legislation when they were concerned about the Back Panthers openly carrying loaded weapons, contends that the conservative justices on today’s Supreme Court are hypocritically using the same logic of “unenumerated” constitutional rights they’ve critiqued in liberal decisions “to gut labor laws and regulations on businesses,” and argues that laws restricting access to abortions don’t make sense “if you assume that women are people and thus deserving of equal protection.” Buttressed by Mystal’s caustic wit and accessible legal theories, this fiery takedown hits the mark.

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Languages

  • English

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