When Fascism Comes to America...And What It Means, Advocates, and Represents...(For Real)...

"Fascism has come to the USA. It is happening here. The question now is whether the people of the United States have the necessary critical thinking skills, moral compass, and political courage to reverse the rise of fascism in our country before further harm is done, or will we be like the characters in Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel; the people in Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy; and the people in current day Russia, China, and North Korea and allow our system of government to devolve into a full-fledged fascist dictatorship..."

--Bill Durston, "When Fascism Comes To America", Common Dreams, April 3, 2025

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-fascism-america 

U.S. President Donald Trump announces that his administration has reached a deal with elite law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher, & Flom during a swearing-in ceremony in the Oval Office at the White House on March 28, 2025. (Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

 
When Fascism Comes to America
 

The list of common characteristics in the study of 20th-century fascist dictators and their regimes includes 14 categories in all, and Trump and his MAGA disciples have already exhibited characteristics in most of these categories.

by Bill Durston
April 3, 2025
Common Dreams

There's a relatively obscure quotation, sometimes attributed to the 20th-century American author Sinclair Lewis, that reads, "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

Although no one’s actually sure that Sinclair Lewis ever wrote or said this, his 1935 novel, It Can't Happen Here, centers around a flag-hugging, Bible-thumping politician named Berzelius (”Buzz”) Windrip. Despite having no particular leadership skills other than the ability to mesmerize large audiences by appealing to their baser instincts (and to bully those people who aren’t so easily mesmerized), Windrip is elected President of the United States. Shortly after Windrip takes office, through a flurry of executive orders, appointments of unqualified cronies to key governmental positions, and then a declaration of martial law, Windrip quickly makes the transition from a democratically elected president to a brutal, fascist dictator. The novel’s title, It Can’t Happen Here, refers to the mindset of key characters in the novel who fail to recognize Windrip’s fascist agenda before it’s too late.

The question now is whether the people of the United States have the necessary critical thinking skills, moral compass, and political courage to reverse the rise of fascism in our country before further harm is done.

Written almost a century ago during the rise of fascism in Europe prior to World War II, It Can’t Happen Here is disturbingly prescient today. Buzz Windrip’s personal traits, his rhetoric, and the path through which he initially becomes the democratically elected U.S. president, and soon afterward, the country’s first full-fledged fascist dictator, bear an uncanny resemblance to the personality traits and rhetoric of Donald Trump and the path through which he has come thus far to be the 47th President of the United States, and through which he appears to be on course to become our country’s first full-fledged…. But no! It can’t happen here! Or can it?

Trump’s uncanny resemblance to the fictional dictator in Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel is disconcerting. The far more important concern, though, is the degree to which Trump resembles real-life fascist dictators, past and present. A study of notorious 20th- century fascist dictators, including Hitler and Mussolini, concluded that they and their regimes all had several characteristics in common. (The current regimes of Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China, and Kim Jong Un in North Korea also share these characteristics.)

 
Fascist Dictators Encourage and Condone Violence Against Their Political Enemies

After losing the 2020 presidential election, Trump urged a large crowd of supporters on the morning of January 6, 2021 to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” After the violent assault on the Capitol had been going on for more than three hours, when Trump finally posted a video message urging the rioters to go home, he told them, “We love you, you’re very special.” On his first day back in office in 2025, he granted clemency to the more than 1,500 rioters who were charged with crimes related to the attack on the Capitol, including rioters convicted of assaulting police officers and rioters with past convictions for other violent crimes, including sexual assault.
 

Fascist Dictators Blur the Distinction Between Private Business Interests and the Public Good and Put Wealthy Business Leaders in High Governmental Positions

At the beginning of his second term, Trump appointed Elon Musk, reportedly the world’s richest man and the CEO of companies that have received tens of billions of dollars in federal funding, to head the ad hoc “Department of Government Efficiency,” with the power to summarily fire vast numbers of federal employees without cause and to potentially steer federal funding away from other companies and toward his own.

 
Fascist Dictators Promote Bold-Faced Lies and Other Propaganda

Some of Trump’s most notorious lies include his claims that he won the 2020 presidential election; that the January 6, 2021 insurrectionist attack on the Capitol was a “day of love;” and that the Ukrainians themselves, not the Russian invaders, are responsible for starting the war in Ukraine. The Washington Post catalogued more than 30,000 other demonstrably false or misleading statements that Trump made during his first term as president. Currently, a special team within the Trump administration is spewing out pro-Trump propaganda at a prodigious rate on social media, including a portrait of Trump wearing a golden crown with the caption, “Long Live the King,” via Elon Musk’s “X” platform.

 
Fascist Dictators Promote the Myth That Their Citizens Are Being Threatened by Scapegoats

Trump’s favorite scapegoats are undocumented immigrants whom he frequently refers to as “criminals,” “gang members,” and “killers,”and who he claims are stealing jobs and benefits from U.S. citizens. In fact, undocumented immigrants do the work that most U.S. citizens are unwilling to do; they pay far more in federal taxes than they receive in federal benefits; and, unlike Trump himself, they are convicted of committing serious crimes at a lower rate than the U.S. population as a whole.
 

Fascist Dictators Put Grossly Unqualified Sycophants in Key Governmental Positions

The many grossly unqualified sycophants who Trump has nominated or appointed to key government positions in his second administration include Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a favorite Fox News interviewee who has himself been accused of alcohol abuse, sexual misconduct, and mismanagement of nonprofit financial funds, and who has spoken in defense of U.S. soldiers charged with war crimes; Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who seeds doubt concerning vaccine effectiveness and promotes other medical quackery; and FBI Director Kash Patel who endorses the “deep state” theory and who has previously described jailed January 6 insurrectionists as “political prisoners.”

 
Fascist Dictators Exhibit Flagrant Sexism

Trump boasted in a 2005 video recording about not only groping women and kissing them without their consent, but about an incident involving a married woman in which, in his own words, “I moved on her like a bitch.” He added, “I failed, I admit it, I did try and “f—k her.” Trump called Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” during their final 2016 presidential debate; he has repeatedly referred to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) as “Pocahontas;” and he entertained a joke during a 2024 campaign rally implying that past Vice President Kamala Harris once worked as a prostitute.

The list of common characteristics in the study of 20th-century fascist dictators and their regimes includes 14 categories in all, and Trump and his MAGA disciples have already exhibited characteristics in most of these categories. One common characteristic not mentioned in the study is the fact that all the 20th-century fascist dictators met ignominious ends—but not before they had caused enormous damage, including the deaths of millions of innocent people.

Questions about what fascism might look like when it comes to the United States of America and whether it can or cannot happen here are no longer merely hypothetical. Fascism has come to the USA. It is happening here. The question now is whether the people of the United States have the necessary critical thinking skills, moral compass, and political courage to reverse the rise of fascism in our country before further harm is done, or will we be like the characters in Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel; the people in Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy; and the people in current day Russia, China, and North Korea and allow our system of government to devolve into a full-fledged fascist dictatorship.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:



Bill Durston



Bill Durston, MD is a U.S. Marine Corps combat veteran of the Vietnam War, decorated for "courage under fire." After completing his military service, he became an emergency physician. He retired from working in the ER in 2014, but continues to volunteer as a preceptor at a student-run clinic associated with the University of California Medical School that provides free medical care to underserved members of the community.

IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS:

Black Movement: African American Urban History since the Great Migration
Edited by Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar
‎The University of North Carolina Press, 2025

[Publication date: April 15, 2025]

The Great Migration of African Americans from the South to northern and western cities between 1915 and 1970 fundamentally altered the political, social, and cultural landscapes of major urban centers like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit, and changed the country as well. By the late twentieth century, Black people were mayors, police chiefs, and school superintendents, often at parity and sometimes overrepresented in municipal jobs in these and other cities, which were also hubs for Black literature, music, film, and politics.

Since the 1970s, migration patterns have significantly shifted away from the major sites of the Great Migration, where some iconic Black communities have been replaced by mostly non-Black residents. Although many books have examined Black urban experiences in America, this is the first written by historians focusing on the post–Great Migration era. It is centered on numerous facets of Black life, including popular culture, policing, suburbanization, and political organizing across multiple cities. In this landmark volume, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar and his contributors explore the last half century of African American urban history, covering a landscape transformed since the end of the Great Migration and demonstrating how cities remain dynamic into the twenty-first century.

Contributors are Stefan M. Bradley, Scot Brown, Tatiana M. F. Cruz, Tom Adam Davies, LaShawn Harris, Maurice J. Hobson, Shannon King, Melanie D. Newport, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Brian Purnell, J. T. Roane, Chanelle Rose, Benjamin H. Saracco, and Fiona Vernal.


REVIEWS:


“An extraordinary collection by a stellar roster of scholars. It not only marks a very significant milestone in the study of African American and US urban history; it also establishes a compelling baseline for the next generation of innovative scholarship.” —Joe William Trotter Jr., author of Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America


“Contribute[s)] meaningfully to the discourse on African American urban histories and beyond.”—Carl Suddler, author of Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar is Professor of History and the founding Director of the Center for the Study of Popular Music. He is the author or editor of several books, including Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity, Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap, and The Harlem Renaissance Revisited: Politics, Arts and Letters. In 2018 he released Keywords for African American Studies with co-editors Erica R. Edwards and Roderick A. Ferguson. He is currently editing a book on African American urban history. Dr. Ogbar’s articles appear in the Journal of Religious Thought, Journal of Black Studies, Souls, Centro, and Radical Society among other academic publications. He has been invited to write for the New York Times’ “Room for Debate” and The Daily Beast, among other publications. Raised in Los Angeles, California, Ogbar received his BA in history from Morehouse College and his MA and Ph.D. degrees in history from Indiana University.Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar is professor of history at the University of Connecticut.

King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South
by Jeanne Theoharis
The New Press, 2025

[Publication date: March 25, 2025]

 

 

A Ms. Magazine Most Anticipated Book

From the New York Times bestselling author, a radical reframing of the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr.

“Theoharis shows us through penetrating research and sensitive, scholarly insight that Dr. King not only was keenly aware of the history of antiblack racism in the North, but battled it from the very beginning of his career.”

 —Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The Martin Luther King Jr. of popular memory vanquished Jim Crow in the South. But in this myth-shattering book, award-winning and New York Times bestselling historian Jeanne Theoharis argues that King’s time in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—outside Dixie—was at the heart of his campaign for racial justice. King of the North follows King as he crisscrosses the country from the Northeast to the West Coast, challenging school segregation, police brutality, housing segregation, and job discrimination. For these efforts, he was relentlessly attacked by white liberals, the media, and the federal government.

In this bold retelling, King emerges as a someone who not only led a movement but who showed up for other people’s struggles; a charismatic speaker who also listened and learned; a Black man who experienced police brutality; a minister who lived with and organized alongside the poor; and a husband who—despite his flaws—depended on Coretta Scott King as an intellectual and political guide in the national fight against racism, poverty, and war.

King of the North speaks directly to our struggles over racial inequality today. Just as she restored Rosa Parks’s central place in modern American history, so Theoharis radically expands our understanding of King’s life and work—a vision of justice unfulfilled in the present.

REVIEWS:

Praise for King of the North:

"Theoharis depicts a complex, radical King whose fight against Northern racism alternately inspires and infuriates. . . . A powerful must-read that sheds new light on King and the Civil Rights Movement."

—Kirkus (starred review)

"An exemplary history that forces readers to reassess their assumptions about America’s racial reckoning."

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Just when you thought you knew everything about MLK, Jeanne Theoharis comes along and proves you wrong. Within these gripping pages we meet a public King who is well aware of Northern racism and is concerned with addressing it throughout his public ministry."
—Lerone A. Martin, Martin Luther King Jr., centennial professor and director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University

"Theoharis delivers another revelatory, meticulously documented account that revises our fundamental assumptions about American history, with critical implications for our future. This indispensable book is a vital resource for all who seek to ‘make real the promise of democracy.’"

—Alondra Nelson, Institute for Advanced Study

"King of the North is a revelation—a much-needed book that shifts and enhances our appreciation of MLK's radical vision."
—Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of King: A Life

"With insightful precision and narrative power, Theoharis shows that the struggle to end Jim Crow was by every measure a national movement. For the first time in a King biography, Coretta Scott King’s active partnership in the struggle is made clear. King of the North is a revelation."
—Barbara Smith, co-founder, the Combahee River Collective

"Fresh, electric, grounded in its research and yet radical in its scope, King of the North is a modern masterpiece."
—Steven W. Thrasher, author of The Viral Underclass

"A groundbreaking history. With deep research and brilliant insight Jeanne Theoharis illuminates new parts of Martin Luther King Jr.’s revolutionary legacy that speaks to our disturbing present. A must-read."
—Peniel Joseph, author of The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X

"A distinctive and urgently needed account of an often-under-appreciated side of Dr. Martin Luther King. Theoharis reveals new depth and complexity to the quieter dimensions of his thought in the shaping of a national and global synergy of Black political power."
—Patricia J. Williams, author of The Alchemy of Race and Rights

"In this gripping history, King of the North provides a powerful reminder that the civil rights struggle always involved more than segregation in the South. Those who seek to carry on King’s legacy today would be well-served to read this vital book."
—Kevin M. Kruse, professor of history, Princeton University

"King of the North is a compelling, carefully researched account of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s largely invisible but important and impactful activism outside the Jim Crow South. Theoharis’s feminist analysis of Coretta Scott King’s unrelenting activism forces readers to see their partnership/marriage anew, as well as other women freedom fighters who were critical to the success of the contemporary Black freedom struggle throughout the U.S."
—Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Comparative Women’s Studies at Spelman College

"Jeanne Theoharis redirects our collective gaze from the racial regime of the South to his time in the North, and the people, political campaigns, and repressive circumstances above the Mason–Dixon line. That reframing alone is enough of a reason for you to pick this book up, but Theoharis’s spotlight on the intimate depths of the intellectual union he shared with his wife, political partner, and spiritual and intellectual compatriot Coretta Scott King is the reason you will not want to put it down."
—Noliwe Rooks, author of A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit: The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune

"Theoharis demonstrates how King, with equal spiritual and political precision, cut at the heart of systemic racism’s stranglehold on the American body politic. King of the North is a necessary and exceptional addition to the canon of King scholarship."

—Dr. Lester A. McCorn, president of Paine College

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

 

Jeanne Theoharis is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of City University of New York. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and winner of the 2014 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work Biography/Autobiography and the Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. Her book has been adapted into a documentary of the same name, executive produced by Soledad O’Brien for Peacock where Theoharis served as a consulting producer. Her young adult adaptation with Brandy Colbert, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks for Young People, was included in the Best Books of 2021 by the Chicago Public Library and Kirkus Reviews. Her book A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History won the 2018 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize in Nonfiction and was named one of the best Black history books of 2018 by Black Perspectives. Theoharis’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, The Nation, Slate, The Atlantic, and many more. She is also the author of King of the North (The New Press) and lives in Brooklyn.


America, América: A New History of the New World
by Greg Grandin
Penguin Press, 2025

[Publication date: April 22, 2025]

 

 

A New York Times bestseller

“An extraordinarily ambitious book . . . America, América reads at times as the historical equivalent of the great epic novels of Gabriel García Márquez.” —Irish Times

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, the first comprehensive history of the Western Hemisphere, a sweeping five-century narrative of North and South America that redefines our understanding of both

The story of how the United States’ identity was formed is almost invariably told by looking east to Europe. But as Greg Grandin vividly demonstrates, the nation’s unique sense of itself was in fact forged facing south toward Latin America. In turn, Latin America developed its own identity in struggle with the looming colossus to the north. In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Grandin reveals how North and South emerged from a constant, turbulent engagement with each other.

America, América traverses half a millennium, from the Spanish Conquest—the greatest mortality event in human history—through the eighteenth-century wars for independence, the Monroe Doctrine, the coups and revolutions of the twentieth century, and beyond. Grandin shows, among other things, how in response to U.S. interventions, Latin Americans remade the rules, leading directly to the founding of the United Nations; and how the Good Neighbor Policy allowed FDR to assume the moral authority to lead the fight against world fascism.

Grandin’s book sheds new light on well-known historical figures like Bartolomé de las Casas, Simón Bolívar, and Woodrow Wilson, as well as lesser-known actors such as the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda, who almost lost his head in the French Revolution and conspired with Alexander Hamilton to free America from Spain; the Colombian Jorge Gaitán, whose unsolved murder inaugurated the rise of Cold War political terror, death squads, and disappearances; and the radical journalist Ernest Gruening, who, in championing non-interventionism in Latin America, helped broker the most spectacularly successful policy reversal in United States history. This is a monumental work of scholarship that will fundamentally change the way we think of Spanish and English colonialism, slavery and racism, and the rise of universal humanism. At once comprehensive and accessible, America, América shows that centuries of bloodshed and diplomacy not only helped shape the political identities of the United States and Latin America but also the laws, institutions, and ideals that govern the modern world. In so doing, Grandin argues that Latin America’s deeply held culture of social democracy can be an effective counterweight to today’s spreading rightwing authoritarianism.

A culmination of a decades-long engagement with hemispheric history, drawing on a vast array of sources, and told with authority and flair, this is a genuinely new history of the New World.


REVIEWS:


“An extraordinarily ambitious book . . . America, América reads at times as the historical equivalent of the great epic novels of Gabriel García Márquez.” —Irish Times

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, the first comprehensive history of the Western Hemisphere, a sweeping five-century narrative of North and South America that redefines our understanding of both

The story of how the United States’ identity was formed is almost invariably told by looking east to Europe. But as Greg Grandin vividly demonstrates, the nation’s unique sense of itself was in fact forged facing south toward Latin America. In turn, Latin America developed its own identity in struggle with the looming colossus to the north. In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Grandin reveals how North and South emerged from a constant, turbulent engagement with each other.

America, América traverses half a millennium, from the Spanish Conquest—the greatest mortality event in human history—through the eighteenth-century wars for independence, the Monroe Doctrine, the coups and revolutions of the twentieth century, and beyond. Grandin shows, among other things, how in response to U.S. interventions, Latin Americans remade the rules, leading directly to the founding of the United Nations; and how the Good Neighbor Policy allowed FDR to assume the moral authority to lead the fight against world fascism.

Grandin’s book sheds new light on well-known historical figures like Bartolomé de las Casas, Simón Bolívar, and Woodrow Wilson, as well as lesser-known actors such as the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda, who almost lost his head in the French Revolution and conspired with Alexander Hamilton to free America from Spain; the Colombian Jorge Gaitán, whose unsolved murder inaugurated the rise of Cold War political terror, death squads, and disappearances; and the radical journalist Ernest Gruening, who, in championing non-interventionism in Latin America, helped broker the most spectacularly successful policy reversal in United States history. This is a monumental work of scholarship that will fundamentally change the way we think of Spanish and English colonialism, slavery and racism, and the rise of universal humanism. At once comprehensive and accessible, America, América shows that centuries of bloodshed and diplomacy not only helped shape the political identities of the United States and Latin America but also the laws, institutions, and ideals that govern the modern world. In so doing, Grandin argues that Latin America’s deeply held culture of social democracy can be an effective counterweight to today’s spreading rightwing authoritarianism.

A culmination of a decades-long engagement with hemispheric history, drawing on a vast array of sources, and told with authority and flair, this is a genuinely new history of the New World.

Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful
by David Enrich
Mariner Books, 2025
 

[Publication date:   ‎March 25, 2025]

 

 

 

 New York Times Bestseller

"Authoritarian governments abroad have long used legal threats and lawsuits against journalists to cover up their disinformation, corruption, and violence. Now, as master investigative journalist David Enrich reveals, those tactics have arrived in America.” — Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen

David Enrich, the New York Times Business Investigations Editor and the #1 bestselling author of Dark Towers, produces his most consequential and far-reaching investigation yet: an in-depth exposé of the broad campaign—orchestrated by elite Americans—to silence dissent and protect the powerful.

It was a quiet way to announce a revolution: In an obscure 2019 case that the Supreme Court refused to even hear, Justice Clarence Thomas raised the prospect of overturning the legendary New York Times v. Sullivan decision. Though hardly a household name, Sullivan is one of the most consequential free speech decisions, ever. Fundamental to the creation of the modern media as we know it, it has enabled journalists and writers all over the country—from top national publications to revered local newspapers to independent bloggers—to pursue the truth aggressively and hold the wealthy, powerful, and corrupt to account.

Thomas’s words were a warning—the public awakening of an idea that had been fomenting on the conservative fringe for years. Now it is going mainstream. From the Florida statehouse to small town New Hampshire to Donald Trump's White House, this movement today consists of some of the world’s richest and most powerful people and companies, who believe they should be above scrutiny and want to silence or delegitimize voices that challenge their supremacy. Indeed, many of the same businessmen, politicians, lawyers, and activists are already weaponizing the legal system to intimidate and punish journalists and others who dare criticize them.

In this masterwork of investigative reporting, David Enrich, New York Times Business Investigations Editor, traces the roots and reach of this growing threat to our modern democracy. With Trump’s emboldened right-wing coalition committed to demonizing and punishing those who attempt to hold them accountable, Murder the Truth sounds the alarm about the looming war over facts, laying bare the stakes of losing our most sacrosanct rights. The result is a story about power in the age of Trump—the way it’s used by those who have it and the lengths to which they will go to avoid it being questioned.


REVIEWS:

“David Enrich makes a compelling and alarming case in this very important new book.” — Rachel Maddow

“With the new administration already seizing every opportunity to strong-arm the press, and with stiff spines in short supply among leaders of major media organizations, Murder the Truth makes for an unfortunately urgent warning…This is a story not just about political and legal shifts, but about the power of money.” — Washington Post

“David Enrich is a keen observer of the intersection of money, power and politics… [A] granular and disturbing read.”

— The Guardian

“The story Enrich has unearthed is engaging…Enrich takes readers deep into other interesting First Amendment legal battles, showing how each one could chip away at Times v. Sullivan.”

— Boston Globe

“[Murder the Truth] feels especially timely in the current political climate, amid questions of whether owners of newspapers and TV networks will stand up to a president who’s long demonized the media—and whether the conservative-majority Supreme Court could upend libel laws in America.” — Vanity Fair

“Please read this important book while we still have the liberty to publish and enjoy such tomes.” — Philadelphia Inquirer

“[This] book reads like a thriller. I read the entire thing in a day because it’s so captivating. It’s the perfect primer on the right wing’s war against free speech. If you’re looking to learn more about free speech and how Trump and the far right are seeking to weaponize our speech laws to silence dissent, this book is a must read.” — Taylor Lorenz, User Mag

“A most fascinating and comprehensive chronicle of this new threat to journalism…The ultrawealthy are feeling emboldened to file lawsuits against journalists and their publishers, perhaps inspired by Donald Trump’s giddy disregard for a free press. In his new book, ‘Murder the Truth,’ David Enrich forecasts a dangerous endgame.”

— William D. Cohan, Puck News

“Urgently relevant… Enrich is an indefatigable investigative reporter as well as a gifted storyteller.” — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“In his tightly reported book, Enrich shows how we got here. The story is not without nuance: not every plaintiff he describes is unsympathetic; not every critic of Sullivan is on the political right (and some who might like to keep the precedent in place are). In the end, though, he paints a clear picture of a right-wing crusade to weaken press protections in order to blunt scrutiny of the rich and powerful—one that is already exerting a devastating financial and emotional toll on American journalists, even as Sullivan remains the law of the land.” — Columbia Journalism Review

"Authoritarian governments abroad have long used legal threats and lawsuits against journalists to cover up their disinformation, corruption, and violence. Now, as master investigative journalist David Enrich reveals, those tactics have arrived in America. Murder the Truth is a timely and essential study of how these favored legal tools of repressive regimes are being regularly deployed in the United States to conceal the truth, discredit the press, and benefit anti-democratic forces." — Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen

“This important book is about an attempted murder. With readers as witnesses, we see small newspapers killed, and editors and publishers terrorized by legal assaults from public officials who demonize the press as Enemies of the People. Yet as this riveting narrative shows, the ultimate target is the Supreme Court’s landmark New York Times vs Sullivan decision, which erected a First Amendment wall to protect journalists from being silenced by those in power. David Enrich’s engrossing, carefully reported account is vital to help prevent this murder.” — New York Times bestselling author Ken Auletta

“This is the deeply reported, richly narrated story of a war on honest journalism that disturbs the interests of the wealthy and powerful. David Enrich takes us behind the scenes of a concerted right-wing campaign to destroy news organizations financially — but the ultimate goal is to overturn New York Times v. Sullivan, the linchpin of libel protection for reporters who err in good faith. Nothing less than the future of accountability journalism is at stake." — Barton Gellman, New York Times bestselling author and three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“A chilling deep dive . . . an unsettling look at a dire threat to democracy.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[Enrich] elucidates the complex legal challenges to fact-based journalism brought against long-established media and independent outlets by hungrily litigious politicians and corporate executives...With thousands of publications now defunct, Enrich’s probing analysis brings crucial attention to this endangered tenet of a functioning democracy.” — Booklist (starred review)

"A revealing look at a campaign intended to stifle the First Amendment in favor of those in power." — Kirkus Reviews

“Startling and deeply researched”

— Nieman Lab

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

David Enrich is the Business Investigations Editor at the New York Times and the bestselling author of Dark Towers and Servants of the Damned. The winner of numerous journalism awards, he previously was an editor and reporter at the Wall Street Journal. His first book, The Spider Network: How a Math Genius and Gang of Scheming Bankers Pulled Off One of the Greatest Scams in History, was short-listed for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year award. Enrich grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, and graduated from Claremont McKenna College in California. He currently lives in New York with his wife and two sons.

 

Public Intellectual, Political Theorist, Educator, Author, and Activist Charisse Burden-Stelly On the Legacy of Grass Roots Black Radicalism and Building Genuine Solidarity in the United States and Beyond on Behalf of Anti-Fascist Struggle and A Truly Transformative Vision of a New Society and World

https://hammerandhope.org/forums/george-floyd-black-politics  

Black Politics and Mutual Comradeship: A Manifesto
by Charisse Burden-Stelly
Hammer and Hope
Number 6
Spring 2025 

Now is the time of monsters. From ongoing genocide in Gaza and Sudan, the foreign-backed forever war in Congo, and Western occupation and recolonization of Haiti to capitalist greed and state violence against immigrants, unhoused folks, and racialized people in the context of the fires ravaging the Los Angeles area, it’s difficult to feel optimistic about the state of politics in 2025. This feeling of dread can be only partially attributed to the Trump regime, given that these catastrophes started, intensified, or ossified under Joseph R. Biden. As the U.S. government continues to make a mockery of democracy and justice by, for example, putting a bounty on the head of the democratically elected president of Venezuela while threatening sanctions on the International Criminal Court for issuing righteous arrest warrants for Israeli war criminals, it can seem naïve to believe that if we organize and fight, we will indeed win. But this is precisely what must guide Black politics in 2025: steadfast belief that the truth is on the side of the oppressed, unshakable faith in peoples’ power, and abiding hope that the masses can organize and unify. As mutual-aid collectives, migrant cleanup brigades, student organizers, anti-imperialist organizations, worker uprisings, and tenants’ unions have demonstrated, even if we are resource poor, we are people rich — and this means we have the raw material for victory.

There are manifold examples in Black politics of this dialectic between radicalism and repression. In 1951, radical Black organizers charged the United States with genocide. Many were subsequently jailed, prohibited from international travel, and blacklisted. This defiant act, codified in the “We Charge Genocide” petition, was rooted in a practice of mutual comradeship — radical African descendants’ ethical, epistemological, and political practice of collaboration, reciprocal care, and learning in community that was in turn rooted in radical work, organizing, and movement building on behalf of the racialized, colonized, and oppressed. It is a form of relation aimed at protecting and preserving not only movements and organizations but also one another. It entails the lateral and intergenerational practice of legacy maintenance — including archiving, commemoration, public remembrance, and truth-telling — predicated upon the enduring commitment to, advocacy for, and protection of those who, because of their radical praxis, are intentionally erased from popular memory, obscured, and/or silenced. Every aspect of charging genocide, from the conceptualization, drafting, and editing of the petition to its circulation, publicizing, and filing before the United Nations, was collaborative and required a community of comrades. Likewise, the complainants and their supporters raised national and international consciousness about genocidal aggression against Black people and its relationship to world peace, and cultivated international solidarity while navigating attacks from the Subversive Activities Control Board and the U.S. State Department alongside criticism from politicians and scholars who reduced “We Charge Genocide” to subversion.

We are five years beyond the uprisings in response to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the summer of 2020. That world historical moment buoyed the spirits of activists, organizers, and freedom fighters; politicized people in real time; sharpened and cultivated resources of dissent and solidarity; and renewed revolutionary optimism about the possibility of a world beyond policing, anti-Black racial oppression, and ruling class domination. Since then, we have experienced vehement “whitelash,” right-wing reaction, and efforts to build a “cop nation,” while our political methods, organizations, ideas, curricula, rights and liberties, and very bodies are under intense assault. This vicious drive was intensified after Hamas launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent upheaval that engulfed the world, not least on U.S. college and university campuses. With violence and repression reminiscent of, and in some cases exceeding, that meted out against racial justice protesters in 2020, power brokers — police officers, university administrators, elected officials at all levels of government, those with the power to hire and fire — sought to crush anyone and everyone who stood up for Palestinian self-determination and by extension, liberation for all oppressed, exploited, and marginalized peoples.

Given this reality, radical Black politics in 2025, vivified by mutual comradeship, must charge the United States, its Western partners, and its opportunistic vassal states with its manifold atrocities. We charge genocide for the destruction of life worlds from Gaza and Sudan to the domestic colonies of the United States. We charge ecocide for climate catastrophe, spurred by capitalist plunder and white supremacist inhumanity, that inequitably impacts oppressed people who contribute the least to ecological devastation. We charge scholasticide for the destruction of universities in Gaza, the militarization of our campuses, and attacks on veracious curricula at all levels of education. We charge epistemicide for the destruction of ways of knowing that guide stewardship of the land, respect manifold ways of being, and uphold People(s)-Centered Human Rights. We charge femicide for the ongoing attack on women’s bodily sovereignty, unchecked violence against racialized and colonized women and girls, and the devalorization of oppressed genders to uphold the patriarchal objectives of capitalist racism and Wall Street imperialism.

Importantly, this radical Black politic, this practice of mutual comradeship, must be rooted in organizing aimed at revolutionary transformation — the painstaking work of cultivating and sustaining unity, discipline, and coordinated action. More and more people are being immiserated, reduced to bare life, and subjected to premature death. The historical task of those of us committed to a world beyond capitalist racism is to make evident the overriding choice of our time: socialism or barbarism — that is, political and economic democracy or social and material sufferation. Of course, this is no easy task. Antagonism and alienation, distraction and despair, individualism and indolence pervade our social relations. Nonetheless, trying together is our only option.

The Alliance of Sahel States, pan-African and socialist parties, anti-imperialist formations, mutual-aid and abortion networks, bail funds, abolitionist organizations, migrant brigades, student intifadas, and progressive unions, to name a few, are already modeling aspects of radical fightback and mutual comradeship. But we need more. As we enter an epoch of advancing fascistic revanchism, people in Black politics must out-organize, be more united, and have more class solidarity than the elites who are quite literally invested in our demise. Mass struggle can and must be the basis for disempowering and expropriating the hoarders of the good life. Unified and organized Black working-class and poor people in particular can be a seismic force against the current vision of the world that is crushing the majority.

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


Charisse Burden-Stelly is an associate professor of African American studies at Wayne State University. She is the author of Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States and the co-editor of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing. She is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace and Community Movement Builders. 

 

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Black Scare / Red Scare 2025 with Charisse Burden-Stelly:


Millennials Are Killing Capitalism Live!

Streamed live on April 10, 2025

 
Counterinsurgency

 

VIDEO:  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkT580jvJXc&t=26s

 

  

 

04:46 - How Has The Current Climate of State Repression Made You Reflect on Black Scare / Red Scare?
13:53 - What is the Structural Location of Blackness? 17:39 - What is the Structural Location of Palestinians in Relation to US-Led Imperialism?
19:23 - What Does "Communism" Mean in relation to Anti-Communism?
24:40 - Wall Street Imperialism and Peace
31:41 - The Levers of State Repression in US Capitalist Racist Society
38:29 - Marco Rubio's Deportation Justification for Mahmoud Khalil
40:18 - Why is "Foreign-Influence" Constituted as a Threat in the US?
46:45 - Sectarianism Helps the State / Anti-Communism Doesn't Save Folks
53:14 - "True Americanism" is a Spectrum
58:16 - Is An "American Marxism" a Contradiction in Terms?
1:01:58 - What Does Real Decolonization Look Like? 1:03:17 - How Does Capitalist Racism Differ From Racial Capitalism?
1:05:46 - What Does It Mean To Decolonize Oneself? 1:10:15 - What is an "Outside Agitator?"
1:13:00 - The Difference Between Anticolonial and Decolonial/Decolonize
1:16:17 - Organizing and Avoiding Cooptation & Cross-Class Alliance

How does the history of anti-Black, anti-communist governance in the US shape the tactics currently being deployed against Pro-Palestinian protesters? And what lessons might we glean from this history that are relevant today? In this episode we will talk about the recent crackdown on anti-imperialist, internationalist, Pro-Palestinian figures utilizing multiple levers of state power. Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly, author of the book Black Scare / Red Scare will situate these current events within the long duree of anti-communist and anti-Black governance, the interconnected Red Scare and Black Scare that she examines over the course of decades within her book. We will use her work to illuminate some of the history of processes of denaturalization, deportation, and more. And to talk about current struggles around political speech, and the ability to protest against US imperialism and zionism. We will talk about counterinsurgent tactics and strategies developed against figures like Marcus Garvey, Benjamin Fletcher, Claudia Jones, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others as we see folks today like Momodou Taal, Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Yunseo Chung and more are facing today. 

 

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Please watch Life. Study. Revolution. with Dr. Layla Brown and Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly on Black Liberation Media: • Life. Study. Revolution. 

 

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Outstanding Political Journalist, Public Intellectual, Author, and Social Critic Jamelle Bouie On The 21st Century Roots Of Why Right Wing Political Violence Is A Very Troubling 'Mainstream issue' of Deep Concern and Scrutiny in Fascist America Today

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/21/opinion/political-violence-right-wing.html

Opinion

 
Right-Wing Violence Is Not a Fringe Issue


A vigil in Minnesota for Melissa and Mark Hortman. Credit: Galen Fletcher for The New York Times


by Jamelle Bouie
June 21, 2025
New York Times

It is simply a fact that the far right has been responsible for most of the political violence committed in the United States since the start of the 21st century, with particular emphasis on the past 10 years of American political life.

There was the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., where a far-right extremist killed a counterdemonstrator. There was the 2018 Tree of Life attack in Pittsburgh, where a shooter killed 11 people (all of whom were Jewish) and wounded six others at a synagogue. Echoing the so-called great replacement conspiracy theory, the perpetrator blamed Jewish people for bringing migrant “invaders” into the United States. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered,” he posted on the social media website Gab, a haven for online white supremacists. “Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

There was also the 2019 slaughter in El Paso, where a shooter targeted Latinos — killing 23 people and injuring 22 others — after posting a manifesto in which he condemned “cultural and ethnic replacement” and a “Hispanic invasion” of the United States. Nor should we forget the 2022 Buffalo supermarket attack, in which still another shooter citing the great replacement conspiracy theory targeted members of a minority group, killing 10 people (all of whom were Black) and wounding three others.

In a piece written just after the Buffalo shooting, my colleague David Leonhardt, citing data from the Anti-Defamation League, observed that out of 450 killings committed by political extremists from 2012 to 2022, about 75 percent were committed by right-wing extremists, with more than half connected to white supremacists. “As this data shows,” he concluded, “the American political right has a violence problem that has no equivalent on the left.”

What’s critical for us to understand that this isn’t a problem of the fringe. Not only was President Trump permissive of right-wing violence throughout his first term — consider his reaction to the violence in Charlottesville — but after losing his bid for re-election, he also led an organized effort to overturn the results, culminating in a riot in the Capitol. And what was one of his first acts back in office? He pardoned the rioters, in as clear an endorsement of violence on his behalf as one can imagine.

In the years since the Jan. 6 attack, supporters of Trump, honoring his demands to “stop the steal,” engaged in a campaign of intimidation and harassment toward election workers. Trump himself used one of the attacks — the assault on Paul Pelosi, the husband of a former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi — as fodder for jokes and entertainment. Speaking of entertainment: There is also much to be said about the right-wing media ecosystem, where prominent voices indulge and even endorse violence against their political opponents.

None of this is to say that political violence can’t come from the political left. We have seen two instances over the past month of violence with a left-wing valence: In Washington, D.C., a man gunned down two Israeli Embassy staff members, and in Boulder, Colo., a man threw Molotov cocktails at demonstrators calling for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza, injuring twelve people.

Even so, the point is that the preponderance of political violence in the United States comes from extremists on the right, one of whom has been charged with attacking two Minnesota state lawmakers last week — State Representative Melissa Hortman and State Senator John Hoffman, both Democrats — killing Hortman, her husband and her dog and wounding Hoffman and his wife.

The man accused of the shootings, Vance Boelter, has been identified as a Trump supporter and an adherent of a far-right Christian movement. He was motivated, it appears, by his opposition to abortion, which makes him one of many men in recent memory who have killed in the name of “life.”

All of this taken together shows us why it is important to not treat this bout of political violence as a generalized problem of American political life. It is, instead, a specific problem of a specific ideological tendency: one obsessed with the maintenance of rigid hierarchies of race and gender and willing to defend them by any means necessary.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

 

Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie