Book In Review
This session opens part three of Surviving Autocracy — “Who Is Us” — covering the three short chapters 17 through 19: “A White Male Supremacist Presidency,” “Throw Off the Mask of Hypocrisy,” and “The Anti-Politics of Fear.” Nick Paro is joined by Tara Devlin and a guest who fits the material exactly: Kris Goldsmith, the veteran who infiltrated neo-Nazi groups and runs the reading list at veteransfightingfascism.org. Kris frames the Anti-Fascist Book Club not as a salon but as an organizing center — meet weekly, in person if you can, because relationships and community are the essential element of fighting fascism. The throughline across all three chapters is the same: the mask is off, and the panel argues that naming what’s underneath is the work.
Chapter 17 is where the panel lands hardest. Kris pulls Gessen’s capture of Marco Rubio’s 2017 tweet imploring Trump to call Charlottesville a terror attack by white supremacists, then sets it against the present: that same Rubio now runs the State Department implementing white-supremacist policy — barring people of color while fast-tracking white South Africans as refugees. “Marco Rubio has become a white supremacist,” Kris says, and treats it as the chapter’s whole point. The panel reads Charlottesville’s “fine people on both sides” as the tell everyone should have caught, noting that Republicans condemned it in tweets and then never spoke of it again. Tara names the mechanism Hal Sparks calls a normalization bias — the corporate press straining to crown Trump “presidential” at every fleeting moment of calm, sanding the abnormal into the routine.
Chapter 18 gives the episode its title and its sharpest exchange. Nick reads from pages 171-172 — Trump promised to change the American story, a balm for supporters who felt slighted by inclusion and political correctness, and the promise distilled to four words: you no longer have to pretend. He inverts it on the spot, arguing the honest version is that none of us should have to pretend to like an oppressive system. Tara refuses the comfortable framing that Nazis “moved into” GOP spaces — they came out of hiding, she says, the standing remnants of the KKK and the Confederacy that helped inspire the Nazis in the first place. Kris grounds the hypocrisy in history with Ona Judge, the woman George Washington enslaved and then hunted with federal marshals, rotating his enslaved people out of free Pennsylvania to reset the clock to their freedom. The panel’s verdict is blunt: confront that past plainly or never get past it, because “political correctness” was only ever a slur invented to politicize basic decency.
Chapter 19’s anti-politics of fear pulls the threads together. Gessen’s claim — that real politics means compromise and trade-offs, and that this regime has swapped it for scapegoating and fear that keeps the base unified — gets tested against the day’s news. Nick reads page 178, where Trump “reversed history and shrunk the circle of us,” and traces the word sovereignty from his 2017 UN speech into its isolationist, once-antisemitic lineage; Kris argues Trump confuses sovereignty with a zero-sum individualism in which cooperating with allies counts as losing, citing the withdrawal of a third of U.S. air power from Europe as Putin’s wishlist made real. The panel reads the 2026 World Cup as the fear chapter in real time — players handed “ICE training,” a top Somali referee denied entry, the Iranian team arriving in pins reading “186 for the girls.” Against all of it Nick offers the repair: stop treating Musk’s trillion-dollar SpaceX windfall as inevitable, nationalize what taxpayers already subsidized, and recognize that the large language models built on human work are aggregated intelligence we should draw dividends from — a universal basic income hiding in plain sight.
What this episode adds to the series arc is the pivot from cataloguing official cruelty to organizing against it. The hosts argue the antidote to manufactured us-versus-them is the thing the regime works hardest to break — community — and they make the case in the smallest, most repeatable terms: start your own local book club, talk to your neighbors, rebuild a shared reality one room at a time. Next week the club closes the book with chapters 20 through 22 and the epilogue, and in two weeks it picks up Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist on the premise the panel keeps returning to — that neutrality is not enough, and that silence is how we got here. As Nick signs off: e pluribus unum, out of many, one.
Books Mentioned
Surviving Autocracy by Masha Gessen — Penguin Random House
How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi — Penguin Random House
Thank you David A Henry, Christiane mccafferty, LPC, Cris Northern, KC, and many others for tuning into my live video with Tara Devlin and Kristofer Goldsmith! Join me for my next live video in the app.
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