REBOOT — Read Books - Fight Fascism
12 must-read titles to better fight our war, originally published January 22, 2023
***Rebooting key reports from the archives. This report was first published on January 22, 2023 — nearly a year ago. It was the first in my ‘Fight Fascism’ toolkit series. If you appreciate my work, please consider sharing with your networks and taking out a paid membership.***
When I launched this magazine two months ago, I promised it would be an anti-fascist fanzine - a place where I would celebrate the great work of those committed to doing the labor of democracy. This labor is most visible in the books written by the guests we have had on RadPod, and the authors I have interviewed for Byline Times and its weekend Supplement.
What follows are my recommendations of key books to help us fight against the fascist creep occurring globally.
How Fascism Works - The Politics of Us and Them, by Jason Stanley
I view Jason’s book as the bible for how to best understand our war. With a great deftness and simplicity that can only come from deep intellectual wisdom, Jason explains the key components of fascism - among them, unreality, conspiracy theories, victimhood, the mythic past, anti-intellectualism, law and order, propaganda, and sexual anxiety.
Publisher’s Description: As the child of refugees of World War II Europe and a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda, Jason Stanley has a deep understanding of how democratic societies can be vulnerable to fascism: Nations don’t have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics… By uncovering disturbing patterns that are as prevalent today as ever, Stanley reveals that the stuff of politics—charged by rhetoric and myth—can quickly become policy and reality. Only by recognizing fascists politics, he argues, may we resist its most harmful effects.
After reading his book, I found it much easier to recognize fascist tropes, and call them out for what they are, and who and what they are trying to impact - category by category. My side by side comparison of Trump’s 2024 announcement speech to the categories delineated in Jason’s book takes the wind out of his fascist sail.
Jason’s final quote in the book is beautiful: “By refusing to be bewitched by fascist myths, we remain free to engage one another, all of us flawed, all of us partial in our thinking, experience, and understanding, but none of us demons.”
Swoon.
More here:
RadPod interview with Jason
My Byline Times print interview with Jason
My fascism and big business explainer inspired by Jason’s work
Strongmen - Mussolini to the Present, by Ruth Ben-Ghiat
The power of Ruth’s expertise and profound knowledge of Italian fascism has made her one of the fiercest warriors in the fight against authoritarianism. She is continually on the frontlines doing play by plays on the fascist maneuvering globally, while also anticipating each move in advance. Her book is vital in mapping the patterns, so we are not shocked and can expose the tactics with a ‘lucid’ lens.
As I wrote in Byline Times two years ago:
Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s latest book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, details the precise moment in time when fascism was born.
“World War One was this cataclysmic change,” she told Byline Times. “Multiple empires fell, including the Russian Empire, the Hapsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire. It created death on a scale no one had seen before. It created wounds no one had seen before because of new weapons.”
In addition, the Great War led to a profound crisis in maleness.
“It created this entire class of men who were damaged, many were killed, and it created this huge crisis of masculinity,” she said. “So fascist rulers came up during this crisis period of unrest and instability in their individual countries and Italy was first. They had this ‘right versus left’ civil strife, and Mussolini appears. And he’s milking this strife, but he’s also saying ‘I can fix it. I can bring order’. And that’s why he got invited into power.”
We have a new crisis in masculinity, one manufactured on Telegram and on Infowars, as a way to exploit young men to turn to the right. In Strongmen, Ruth offers preventative medicine by revealing the playbook. Everything we see now has been done before - from violent militias to truckers waving flags - it all started in Italian villages with malevolent goons trying to hide their corruption.
Publisher’s Description: Ruth Ben-Ghiat is the expert on the "strongman" playbook employed by authoritarian demagogues from Mussolini to Putin―enabling her to predict with uncanny accuracy the recent experience in America and Europe. In Strongmen, she lays bare the blueprint these leaders have followed over the past 100 years, and empowers us to recognize, resist, and prevent their disastrous rule in the future.
For ours is the age of authoritarian rulers: self-proclaimed saviors of the nation who evade accountability while robbing their people of truth, treasure, and the protections of democracy. They promise law and order, then legitimize lawbreaking by financial, sexual, and other predators.
As I wrote in the conclusion to our first interview:
Ultimately, as Mahatma Gandhi once noted, all tyrants fall: “For a time, they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall.’
As Ruth writes: “History shows the importance of keeping hope and faith in humanity and of supporting those who struggle for freedom in our own time... We can carry with us the stories of those who lived and died over a century of democracy’s destruction and resurrection. They are precious counsel for us today.”
Countering the next strongman on the horizon will take radical love, a willingness to proactively defend democratic freedoms, and to never again assume that it can’t happen here, wherever here may be.
As Ruth always says, never underestimate the American people.
More here:
Russia’s War on Everybody - And What It Means for You, by Keir Giles
You may not be interested in Russia. But Russia is interested in you. By opening his book with that statement, Keir is toying with a famous line by Trotsky about war, and it sums up his brilliant book on how Russia wages war on the West, and why we are still in denial about the scale of it.
I have been interviewing Keir ever since a Twitter follower sent me his Handbook on Russian Information Warfare published by NATO in 2016. His ability to cut through all the noise and focus on Russia’s cloak and dagger threats makes his latest book among the most important tools in our fight.
Publisher’s Description: Russia has been waging a clandestine war against the West for decades. Hostile acts abroad, from poisoning dissidents to shooting down airliners, interfering in elections, spying, hacking and murdering, have long seemed to be the Kremlin's daily business. But what is it all for? Why does Russia consistently behave like this? And what does it achieve? In this book, Keir Giles explains how and why Russia pushes for more power and influence wherever it can reach, far beyond Ukraine – and what it means not just for governments, but for ordinary people. Bringing together stories from the military, politics, diplomacy, espionage, cyber power, organised crime and more, Giles describes how Moscow conducts its campaigns across the globe, and how nobody is too unimportant to be caught up in them.
One of the greatest services of the book is there is no room left for denial - Russia’s hybrid warfare leaves no one unscathed. His point that we need leaders to step up and admit we are under attack to be able to defend ourselves is our battle cry.
More here:
RadPod interview with Keir
My report on the rolling insurrections with Keir
My thread on his NATO Handbook of Russian Information Warfare
His 84-second explainer on the characteristics of a Russian propagandists
How to Stop Fascism - History, Ideology, Resistance, by Paul Mason
Paul Mason is one of our favorite RadPod guests for his whip-smart insights, grasp of history, and willingness to point out that fascism is a failure of capitalism - it is up to us to be the change.
Publisher’s Description: His book offers a radical, hopeful blueprint for resisting and defeating the new far right. The book is both a chilling portrait of contemporary fascism, and a compelling history of the fascist phenomenon: its psychological roots, political theories, and genocidal logic. Fascism, Mason powerfully argues, is a symptom of capitalist failure, one that has haunted us throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. History shows us the conditions that breed fascism, and how it can be successfully overcome. But it is up to us in the present to challenge it, and time is running out.”
“We are dealing with an utterly rational sociopath,” Mason said of Putin, on our show. He also noted that we need antifascist laws, antifascist law enforcement, and “how the role of democracy isn’t to facilitate fascism but to stop it.” He could not be more correct.
More here:
I still cannot believe we got Nancy MacLean on RadPod to give us the best summary of her stunning research. Her reporting is the critical link to the far-right factions in America’s destruction of democracy. As Nancy explained, “the Koch cadre is trying to protect capitalism from democracy” by destroying democratic freedoms by any think tanks necessary.
Her book reveals a 60-year targeted effort to dismantle and eliminate democracy by adopting James Buchanan’s ideas about government in an attempt to ensure white male landowners would retain power. Her ability to forsenically leave no footnote unexplored is why this book is so critical to understanding the fight of billionaires v. all of us.
Publisher’s Description: Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.
In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.
One of the profound takeaways from Nancy’s work is the need for deep structural reform, which she noted was a key reason to work hard to retain the House and the Senate away from far right extremists. We need to keep working.
More here:
To prove the importance of Unger’s work, this book was studiously ignored by most corporate media. To give the book the mass audience it deserved would be to admit failure on every journalism front. The Fourth Estate is supposed to hold the corrupt to account, not act as fluffers. And act as fluffers they did in 2016, during the run up to the Trump installment plan.
Unger, a New York investigative reporter, has published multiple books on the ties to Trump and Russia, but American Kompromat zeroes in on the long game of Trump’s cultivation, and how all of those in his orbit were also infected by the Russian mob.
In my first interview with Unger for Byline Times, he relayed that what is most distressing in America are the things that are legal.
In that interview two years ago, he said: “My view is we have got to prosecute Trump to the fullest extent of the law, otherwise it makes this behavior acceptable. Where he was brilliant and the Republicans were brilliant was in normalizing one fiasco after another. The end of the checks and balances, any oversight by Congress, even if you look at the prosecution of (former Trump campaign manager) Paul Manafort. He was convicted of bank fraud and tax fraud but, excuse me, he took $75 million dollars from the Russians to implement all their policies, which were completely against America’s interests and he wasn’t prosecuted for that? Doesn’t that make him a spy of some sort? All you have to do is observe the FARA? That makes it legal to do everything on behalf of an adversary?”
Unger relayed the long history of former intelligence agents lobbying for the Russians, who viewed that as legalized bribery.
“The big thing people don’t see is this is a war. It’s a war without bombs, bullets, and boots on the ground, but it’s with cyberwarfare, it’s with disinformation, and all these bizarre things like QAnon,” he told me in the interview.
Publisher’s Description: “Based on exclusive interviews with intelligence officers in the CIA, FBI, and the KGB, thousands of pages of FBI investigations, police investigations, and news articles in English, Russian, and Ukrainian. American Kompromat shows that from Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, kompromat was used in operations far more sinister than the public could ever imagine.
The book addresses what may be the single most important unanswered question of the entire Trump era: Is Donald Trump a Russian asset? The answer, American Kompromat says, is yes, supporting that conclusion with the first richly detailed narrative on how the KGB allegedly first ‘spotted’ Trump as a potential asset, how it cultivated him, arranged his first trip to Moscow, and pumped him full of KGB talking points.“
The colossal failure of our times is not fighting harder to evict Trump faster from his disastrous installation into the White House with the help of the Russian-state. But the fight continues.
More here:
Shadow Network - Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, by Anne Nelson
Anne Nelson’s Shadow Network did more to expose the roots of the dark money group, the Council for National Policy, than any reporting to date.
Publisher’s Description: In 1981, emboldened by Ronald Reagan's election, a group of some fifty Republican operatives, evangelicals, oil barons, and gun lobbyists met in a Washington suburb to coordinate their attack on civil liberties and the social safety net. These men and women called their coalition the Council for National Policy. Over four decades, this elite club has become a strategic nerve center for channeling money and mobilizing votes behind the scenes. Its secretive membership rolls represent a high-powered roster of fundamentalists, oligarchs, and their allies, from Oliver North, Ed Meese, and Tim LaHaye in the Council's early days to Kellyanne Conway, Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins, and the DeVos and Mercer families today.
She traces how the collapse of American local journalism laid the foundation for the Council for National Policy's information war and listens in on the hardline broadcasting its members control. And she reveals how the group has collaborated with the Koch brothers to outfit Radical Right organizations with state-of-the-art apps and a shared pool of captured voter data - outmaneuvering the Democratic Party in a digital arms race whose result has yet to be decided.
My friend and brilliant OSINT investigative researcher Brent Allpress contributed to our understanding of the CNP, by revealing its membership so sleuths like Anne can continue exposing the threats the group presents to democracy.
One of my most chilling investigations for Byline Times was a report on Anne’s work, where we revealed the targeted attacks on our voting systems and such ‘othering’ disruptions at our school boards and election systems. Collectively, we make progress each time we report, but the attacks are ongoing, and Anne left me with these valuable words:
“We can’t all do everything, but we can each do something.”
More here:
My first interview with Anne
On Tyranny - Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, by Timothy Snyder
I keep my copy of On Tyranny on my bed at all times, like a talisman against fascist evil. I clutch the small volume like a set of pearls - break glass in case of emergency. It’s all there in the Table of Contents - among my favorites:
Do not obey in advance
Defend institutions
Be wary of paramilitaries
Believe in truth
Investigate
Stand out
Be calm when the unthinkable arrives
Be as courageous as you can
Publisher’s Description: The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. On Tyranny is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.
“History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have,” he writes.
Why it is critical to read, know history, gain knowledge, take action.
Killer in the Kremlin, by John Sweeney
It’s interesting as I write these summaries to note that the work I do as civic duty has led me to become friends with some of the greatest thinkers, fighters, and most courageous inspirational writers of our times - John Sweeney, among them. The veteran war correspondent has been on the front lines of battle zones for decades, and is currently reporting from Ukraine.
His latest book is an eviscerating account of Vladimir Putin, who he almost threw up on when he lobbed a question at him out of turn. In his Killer book, he vivisects the Putin myth and tells the cold truth about the genocidal dictator.
Publisher’s Description: In Killer in the Kremlin, award-winning journalist John Sweeney takes readers from the heart of Putin's Russia to the killing fields of Chechnya, to the embattled cities of an invaded Ukraine. In a disturbing exposé of Putin's sinister ambition, Sweeney draws on thirty years of his own reporting - from the Moscow apartment bombings to the atrocities committed by the Russian Army in Chechnya, to the annexation of Crimea and a confrontation with Putin over the shooting down of flight MH17 - to understand the true extent of Putin's long war.
Drawing on eyewitness accounts and compelling testimony from those who have suffered at Putin's hand, we see the heroism of the Russian opposition, the bravery of the Ukrainian resistance, and the brutality with which the Kremlin responds to such acts of defiance, assassinating or locking away its critics, and stopping at nothing to achieve its imperialist aims. In the midst of one of the darkest acts of aggression in modern history - Russia's invasion of Ukraine - this book shines a light on Putin's rule and poses urgent questions about how the world must respond.
I am of the mind that the only way we respond is to stop supporting the oil and war economy, which is truly the root of all evil.
More here:
RadPod interview with Sweeney
Laboratories of Autocracy - A Wake-Up Call from Behind the Lines, by David Pepper
I actually have the pleasure of reading an advance copy of David’s latest book this weekend, because David is on fire to wake people up from a slumber that is catastrophic for democracy - the war on our statehouses.
As Laboratories of Autocracy states, we must put aside distraction and go on offense. David is like America’s coach, videotaping white boards, mapping out strategies, doing everything in his power to make sure Americans see all the moves by extremists using statehouses to impact democratic wreckage.
Publisher’s Description: Laboratories of Autocracy shows that far more than the high-profile antics of politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Jim Jordan—and yes, even bigger than Donald Trump’s "Big Lie”—it’s anonymous, often corrupt politicians in statehouses across the country who pose the greatest dangers to American democracy.
Because these statehouses no longer operate as functioning democracies, these unknown politicians have all the incentive to keep doing greater damage, and can not be held accountable however extreme they get. This has driven steep declines in states like Ohio and others across the country. And collectively, it’s placed American democracy in its greatest peril since the dawn of the Jim Crow era.
Look for an interview I did with David about Jim Crow 2.0 this weekend in Byline Supplement.
More here:
Putin’s Kleptocracy - Who Owns Russia, by Karen Dawisha
As I wrote in my recent report about the reporters who came before us, the work of Russia scholar Karen Dawisha is so important for its prescience. While the world was still believing the lies, Dawisha knew that Russia was not a democracy in the process of failing, but an autocracy in the process of succeeding. Her painstaking research, which led her to translate Russian reports that had been expunged from the internet, concluded that Russia was eliminating independent media and targeting its own citizens with totalitarian propaganda - an import that came to our shores and is dividing America as I type.
Publisher’s Description: The raging question in the world today is who is the real Vladimir Putin and what are his intentions. Karen Dawisha’s brilliant Putin’s Kleptocracy provides an answer, describing how Putin got to power, the cabal he brought with him, the billions they have looted, and his plan to restore the Greater Russia.
Russian scholar Dawisha describes and exposes the origins of Putin’s kleptocratic regime. She presents extensive evidence about the Putin circle’s use of public positions for personal gain even before Putin became president in 2000. She documents the establishment of Bank Rossiya, now sanctioned by the US; the rise of the Ozero cooperative, founded by Putin and others who are now subject to visa bans and asset freezes; the links between Putin, Petromed, and “Putin’s Palace” near Sochi; and the role of security officials from Putin’s KGB days in Leningrad and Dresden, many of whom have maintained their contacts with Russian organized crime.
Putin’s Kleptocracy is the result of years of research into the KGB and the various Russian crime syndicates. Dawisha’s sources include Stasi archives; Russian insiders; investigative journalists in the US, Britain, Germany, Finland, France, and Italy; and Western officials who served in Moscow. Russian journalists wrote part of this story when the Russian media was still free. “Many of them died for this story, and their work has largely been scrubbed from the Internet, and even from Russian libraries,” Dawisha says. “But some of that work remains.”
Sadly, we lost Dawisha, as we lost the great Wayne Barrett, to a mystery lung disease, but her work laid the groundwork for others to pick up the baton and run with the truth in defense of democracy.
It’s Komprocated - Volume One (9/2016 - 4/2019), by me (50% off with discount code - LIVETHROUGHTHIS)
From the moment I pressed send on my first anti-Trump blog in 2016, I knew there would be no going back to the comfort of my old life. Since that moment, I have been fighting on behalf of truth with the experience of a veteran investigative reporter during an era where bothsidesism has given birth to a dangerous unreality.
The self-published ebook compilation of my political writings from 2016 to early 2019 reveals the evolution of my work from a mom blogger, who had retired from a career in news, to a return to my roots as a high-profile, investigative reporter. The title, “It’s Komprocated,” is one of my portmanteaus, a blending of “kompromat”and “complicated.” I am glad I kept the files of my work, as some of the websites no longer exist. The weight of being gawkered was too heavy a burden for some editors to bear.
Final thoughts - along with On Tyranny, I always have historic non-fiction on my bed. I am currently plowing my way through Robert Massie’s Peter the Great. I finished Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra two years ago, and I still quote from it regularly. No Rasputin, no Lenin, simple as that.
We are in a dangerous post-literate era, and those of us who read, who understand history, have a duty to warn others and help guide them toward the light.
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Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded publication. Thank you to all subscribers, and thank you to those who generously donate coffee tips. A special thank you to paid monthly, annual, and founding members. Looking forward to the next Bette Dangerous ‘Speakeasy’ for paid members on January 29, where we will feature another surprise guest. Heidi’s latest book, the erotic novella, Fox Undercover, was just published in her Ko-Fi shop!
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(Below, ‘On Tyranny’ — break glass in case of emergency)
