Show In Review
In today’s 3rd Anti Fascist Book Club discussion into To Catch a Fascist, we opened not in the book but in Minneapolis — where Kristofer Goldsmith and Nick Paro had spent the previous week at the AbolishICE Live music event near the Alex Pretti memorial, organized in partnership with the Dropkick Murphys, local bands, Valor Media Network, The Save America Movement, and anchored by a brass ensemble called Brass Solidarity. What came through in that opening was about the direct lessons learned: Minneapolis is doing anti-fascism in real time, using mutual aid, community kitchens, rent funds, and sustained memorial culture to hold the line against an ICE occupation that has directly damaged the local economy. Kris framed it plainly — every American with the means to do so should plan a trip, support those businesses, and bring lessons home, because ICE is a fraction of its projected size and this is what expansion will look like everywhere.
When the group turned to the book itself, Kris grounded the conversation in the stakes of his own infiltration work. He explained that when he first entered Patriot Front, he assumed the word “Nazi” was being used loosely. It wasn’t — these were people debating national socialist philosophers, using words like “propaganda” and “self-radicalization” without irony, and pursuing genocide as an explicit goal, not an abstraction. Chapter seven’s thesis — that American white supremacy oscillates between masked periods and periods when masks aren’t needed — drove the episode’s central question: are we entering an era when ICE agents, like the Patriot Front members before them, feel socially and legally invulnerable enough to operate in the open? Kris argued that federal pardons cover federal law, which means state and local governments are the only remaining mechanism for accountability — and most of them are not stepping up — yet.
Tara Devlin named the structural problem enabling all of this: the paradox of tolerance. A society that extends liberal protections to movements whose explicit goal is genocide isn’t being principled — it’s being cowardly. She connected the normalization of fascist aesthetics and rhetoric to the failure of corporate media to draw clear lines, while pointing out that trans people are now being targeted in precisely the sequence the early Nazi regime used: first strip legal identity, then restrict movement, then remove the ability to vote. The Kansas driver’s license law came up as a concrete, present-day example of that sequence in action. Tara and Kris both pressed that the debate should never have been about what Trump said after Charlottesville — it should have been about the country refusing to tolerate Nazis at all.
Steven Acheson joined late in the discussion, bringing a rural Wisconsin ground-level view that sharpened the local organizing argument. An Army veteran, former organic farmer, and current local school board candidate, Steven talked about what it actually looks like to build community trust in a town of 800 where you weren’t born — coaching youth sports, being intentional about the language used with kids, finding common ground before introducing harder conversations. He pushed back on the idea that Wisconsin is a red state, describing it instead as a blue state gerrymandered into losing. His enthusiasm for gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong — the only explicit democratic socialist in the race — closed the episode on a concrete electoral note: education funding, fair maps, and candidates who know their communities from the inside are where the work connects local resistance to statewide change.
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Thank you Soso's World, Dannys, Laura Tompkins, Ms.Yuse, Donna Dupont, and many others for tuning into my live video with Tara Devlin, Steven Acheson, Kristofer Goldsmith, and Nick Paro! Join me for my next live video in the app.
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