Many readers will doubtless be familiar with some of the tales of intimidation told in Kimberly Strassel’s The Intimidation Game: How the Left is Silencing Free Speech. Strassel’s great accomplishment is to bring them all together in one place. She identifies a national phenomenon and fleshes it out with exacting details and fresh reporting you’ll find nowhere else (on the John Doe cases in Wisconsin, for example). The Intimidation Game is alive with heroes—True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht, the incomparable Cleta Mitchell, Brad Smith, Hans von Spakovsky, Clarence Thomas, J. Russell George, Lisa Nelson, Erik O’Keefe. And villains as well—Lois Lerner, Bob Bauer, Eric Burns, Chuck Schumer, Barack Obama. It all makes for an important book and a stimulating read.

Strassel paints a frightening picture of an America where your treatment by the IRS depends on your politics. It’s an America where people in high places use government agencies—the IRS, the FEC, the SEC and the FCC—to go after their political opponents. An America of cover-ups, Fifth Amendment pleas, and contempt citations when Congress attempts to investigate. It’s an America where individuals and companies are singled out, harassed, humiliated, and intimidated for donating to particular causes or organizations. It’s an America of small business boycotts and protests at the homes of CEOs whose companies take the wrong side in a political argument or belong to the wrong group.