REGISTER: Bette’s Speakeasy — Democracy Unchained with Dr. Nancy MacLean

Please register for our first Sunday Speakeasy of 2025 with Dr. Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains and Beyond the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan

***Paid members will find the registration link to our first Sunday Speakeasy of 2025 below the paywall. Please take out a membership and support independent investigative journalism in this time of grave deception.***

“Will the Right succeed? The answer depends on the American people.”—Nancy MacLean on RadPod Ep120

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Bette’s First 2025 Sunday Speakeasy — Democracy Unchained with Dr. Nancy MacLean

Bette members: please join our Sunday Speakeasy at 4 pm Pacific featuring Nancy MacLean, a US historian with a keen eye on our dilemma and what we need to be preparing to do to take our democracy back.

“One of the things that has always helped progressive forces to advance in the United States, going back to the days of the fight against slavery, is the anti-democratic elite will always overstep and misuse its power. And those are the moments that people have to be ready for to use to the fullest in order to expose them, take away their power, and build alternative power centers. So that's something we should all be prepared for going forward — they will overstep.”—Dr. Nancy MacLean, Democracy In Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America and Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan

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• Dr. Nancy MacLean is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, and the author of the New York Times bestseller, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Current Affairs and the Lillian Smith Book Award for outstanding writing about the U.S. South. This year, her first book Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan, came out in a 30^th anniversary edition that explains how today’s radical MAGA right draws from the Klan well, but is more dangerous.

More about Democracy in Chains — updated with new preface, from Amazon summary:

• 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. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.

• If you are not yet a member of Bette Dangerous, you can watch RadPod’s first interview with Nancy here and her latest interview with us below:

And you can read a print version of the interview above right here:

ICYMI: ‘And then they came out on the streets en masse…’

I feel very privileged that we get to spend time with the most important historians in this moment.

Keep scrolling to the end of this post for the registration link for Sunday.

In solidarity, reality, truth, and unity,

Heidi xo

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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.

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Begin each day with a grateful heart.

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REGISTRATION LINKS FOR TODAY’S FIRST 2025 HAPPY HOUR HERE, AS WELL AS OUR 1.12 SPEAKEASY WITH DR. NANCY MACLEAN