Book In Review
The final episode of the Anti-Fascist Book Club’s discussion on “To Catch a Fascist” by Christopher Mathias zeroes in on the closing chapters, where Mathias traces how the right has systematized the branding of antifascism itself as a domestic terror threat. Part Three examines the mechanism: right-wing influencers led a well-funded, well-organized effort to make “antifa” legible as a terrorist organization, a campaign that has now moved beyond rhetoric into state apparatus. Nick Paro, Kristofer Goldsmith, and Tara Devlin wrestled with the book’s most urgent implications — that fascism thrives on isolation and identity capture, while authentic democracy depends on the opposite.
The discussion opens with a gut-punch story from the book: a young Patriot Front member who left the organization describes his terror at the loneliness that followed. His entire identity, his sense of belonging, his access to people who would house him and call him brother — all of it was tethered to the group. This becomes the connective tissue for the entire discussion. Tara seizes on it immediately: this is why separating people from MAGA, from white supremacist movements, is so brutally hard. It’s not just propaganda doing the work. It’s community. It’s identity. It’s the bonds that humans are wired to need. The group recognizes what the book makes clear: the antidote is building our own communities so compelling, so real, that they become the default rather than the exception.
Nick and Kristofer expand this into the context of American decline. Kristofer points to a structural catastrophe: the postwar suburbs destroyed what he calls “third places” — the bars, bowling alleys, pool halls where people of all types gathered without apology. American culture stopped engineering spaces for community, and extremist organizations filled the void. Young men in particular — isolated, searching for agency, lacking any forcing function that would connect them to others — are funneled into Patriot Front, Three Percenters, and the ecosystem around them. These organizations sell what the military sold Kristofer at eighteen: mission, purpose, community. The book documents this recruitment pipeline. The team makes clear that preventing it requires not de-radicalization programs but preventative community building. This is why the Anti-Fascist Book Club exists at all.
The panel also locates the book in a second, more immediate crisis: the state weaponization of the antifa label. Nick methodically walks through what Mathias documents. The Trump administration designated antifa as a domestic terror organization without legal authority — a move that “doesn’t actually mean anything” in law but everything in practice. Pam Bondi’s DOJ issued orders to prosecute it. More chillingly, the Trump administration pressured allied governments to officially designate domestic antifascist organizations overseas as international terrorist organizations, building a legal network that can be drawn back to Americans working in international spaces. For researchers, journalists, and transnational antifascists, this is a direct threat to civil liberties. The game is to create the apparatus — the international designations, the surveillance infrastructure — that can then be deployed domestically. The panel’s response is not panic but clarity: the actual threat comes from the right. Always has.
The third pillar of this episode is a withering critique of the left’s failure to match the right’s media strategy. Tara articulates what she’s been saying for years: the right won control of the national imagination by flooding every corner of culture — YouTube, podcasts, mainstream television — with their message. Small creators like Diamond and Silk got elevated to Fox News. The right understood that reaching people everywhere, all the time, was the strategy. The left does not do this. Progressives have the ideas, the facts, the moral clarity. But they do not have the funding, the organizational will, or the tribal loyalty to outreach at scale. This is not accident. It is choice. And that choice is killing democracy.
Nick brings the book back to the constitutional question at stake. He quotes Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from “Letters from Birmingham Jail” — “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” — and uses it as the spine for a larger argument about national identity. Americans have allowed themselves to become fractured into state-based identities, a fragmentation the right exploits relentlessly. But King was arguing for something else: the interconnectedness of all communities, the notion that Americans are never “outside agitators” but always neighbors. The Anti-Fascist Book Club provides one model: forcing functions for people to gather, to build relationships, to remember that they are not alone. The book’s final message, which the panel inhabits fully, is that antifascism is not an intellectual exercise. It is the work of building community stronger than the fascists can.
What Comes Next
Surviving Autocracy by Masha Gessen — Indiebound
Books Mentioned
To Catch a Fascist by Christopher Mathias — Hachette Book Group
Letters from Birmingham Jail by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — King Institute
Where to find resources
How to Access the material
We encourage you to read along with us, with get a copy of your own — we recommend these resources:
Go to your local library and checkout a copy, if available
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Actions You Can Take
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Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76
Thank you Cris Northern, Noble Blend, Cathy Stein, Ms.Yuse, SammyD, and many others for tuning into my live video with Tara Devlin, Kristofer Goldsmith, and Nick Paro! Join me for my next live video in the app.
Banner & Backbone Authors’ Notes
The America we strive for — it is one where we willingly remember the teachings of our past, humbly learn from our failings, proudly celebrate our successes, and boldly lead the way into a future for all people.
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Anti Fascist Book Club Team
~ Nick Paro | Kristofer Goldsmith | Stephanie Wilson | Tara Devlin ~
