Book In Review
In the fourth session on Christopher Mathias’ To Catch a Fascist – Nick Paro, Tara Devlin, and Steven Acheson opened with a graphic and necessary reading from page 91 — the documented lynching of Mary Turner in 1918. Nick read the passage aloud with a content warning in place, and the crew used it as an anchor for the entire episode: the violence that built this country’s racial hierarchy was never fully confronted, and its consequences are still being vandalized out of public memory. Tara connected the dots between the removal of Turner’s memorial markers in 2020 and the broader erasure that the anti-DEI agenda now performs under a legal cover that feels more comfortable than a hood.
Steven brought the weight of a veteran’s perspective to the discussion of the KKK’s decline in membership. He pointed to the Rage Against the Machine lyric that crystallized the book’s argument for him — those who once burned crosses are now in the halls of power. Nick built on historian Linda Gordon’s argument from pages 98–99, reading directly from Mathias’s text: the Klan’s most durable victory was not rallies or robes but the Overton Window itself, shifting what passes for acceptable public discourse and encoding white nativist ideology into law. When the ideology is in the statute, the organization no longer needs the membership numbers.
The conversation moved from historical analysis to lived counter-organizing. Steven described blocking Westboro Baptist Church protesters outside a Madison Planned Parenthood by parking his truck on the median — not confrontation, but interference, wasting their time so they couldn’t do worse. Nick and Tara both named the visibility of everyday anti-fascists as a critical force: when your neighbors know who you are and they see that an anti-fascist looks like a normal person, you shift the social landscape. They drew a direct line between community presence, local food systems, CSA farming models, and the parallel infrastructure people need to reduce dependency on corporate supply chains that fascism is currently weaponizing.
The final stretch connected everything upstream. Tara named the Democracy Index downgrade of the U.S. press freedom score. Nick traced the attacks on Iran, fertilizer supply disruptions, and rollback of EV infrastructure as coordinated policy failures that disproportionately hammer the same rural farmers who voted for the administration executing them. The episode closed where it had to: the goal is not simply to stop one man or one party, but to destroy the conditions under which fascism can take root at all — so that the environment that produced a Trump or a Putin cannot re-emerge.
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Thank you Eric Lullove, PJ Schuster, Kevin Paquette, Olivia Janis, Bee's Free Verse/True Verse, and many others for tuning into my live video with Tara Devlin, Steven Acheson, and Nick Paro! Join me for my next live video in the app.
Banner & Backbone Authors’ Notes
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Anti Fascist Book Club Team
~ Nick Paro | Kristofer Goldsmith | Stephanie Wilson | Tara Devlin | Steven Acheson ~
