Thomas Chatterton Williams is a well-known essayist and author, now age 44 and resident in Paris rather than the United States since 2012. A biracial black man, he regularly dissents from prevailing conventions and intends this book, his third, to be "an unsentimental assessment of the social justice left, and the agenda-setting institutions that repeatedly caved and pandered to its excesses" in the three-plus years following the May 2020 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He seeks "to