Courage and Consequences: Profiles of conscience, risk, and retaliation in this world during the Twenty-First Century by James J. Devine is a timely and provocative work that updates the framework of John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage for an era of unprecedented state power, corporate retaliation, and digital surveillance.
Devine argues that modern systems of power-governmental, corporate, legal, and technological-have industrialized the instruments of consequence. Dissenters today face not merely electoral defeat or social exile but imprisonment, financial ruin, extradition, and the weaponization of legal systems against them. The book profiles six categories of courageous actors-government whistleblowers, press freedom defenders, environmental and human rights advocates, defenders of democratic institutions, public officials who broke with their own party, and ordinary people showing collective courage in healthcare, election work, immigration, and conflict zones. It seeks to honor people around the world in a new century and about subjects JFK could not have foreseen just 70 years ago.
Written for readers concerned with civil liberties, press freedom, and the health of democratic institutions, Courage and Consequences serves as both a warning about the concentration of power and an argument for the ongoing necessity of conscience-driven defiance and dissent. It embraces the difficulty of judging contested subjects while insisting that the courage to act-whatever history's final verdict-deserves recognition.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James J. Devine is a political strategist and writer who has been called "unbalanced" by Tucker Carlson. New Jersey state Senator Joe Cryan-who used government computers to send 150+ emails to a lobbyist asking for twisted sexual sadomasochistic bondage fantasies during taxpayer-funded working hours-called Devine, "a sleaze ball, the worst in politics." Convicted Bridgegate mastermind David Wildstein-who closed the George Washington Bridge for retribution-routinely describes Devine as a "political gremlin". For three decades, the much-maligned journalist and activist has published New Jersey's oldest newspaper in continuous circulation and continues to fight for truth, justice, and the American way as he endeavors to stop Trump, fix the economy, and save the world.
