“This is truly a stupid time to be alive,” Noah Rothman writes in his brilliant and urgent debut book, Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America. He’s talking about how people who fly the banner of “social justice” gin up a never-ending torrent of frivolous, neurotic, incoherent controversies over identity. He’s right; it is a stupid time to be alive. But Rothman’s book makes it a little less stupid.

While I was reading Unjust, the controversy du jour was about Liam Neeson. At a publicity event, Neeson mentioned that, many years earlier, someone close to him was raped and all he knew about the assailant was that he was black. Neeson revealed that he spent a fuming week pacing and hoping to be attacked by a black man so that he could take some violent revenge. The actor, who is a sort of cultural avatar of vengeance in his movie roles, had reflected honestly on a profoundly traumatic and evil emotional reaction he had, but which he did not act on, and which he regretted. Nevertheless, strangers who appointed themselves the police of public morality attacked him for being a racist. This fits within the narrative of Rothman’s book.