Book In Review
Episode six of the Anti-Fascist Book Club’s reading of Christopher Mathias’ To Catch a Fascist centers on the chapter titled “The Fire Rises,” beginning around page 200, where Mathias traces the accelerationist movement’s path from internet subculture to political mainstream. Nick opens with the book’s account of how figures like Nick Fuentes — once fringe provocateurs whose rhetoric should have disqualified them from public discourse — were welcomed into Trump’s orbit during his first administration. The panel treats this not as history but as diagnosis, connecting Mathias‘ reporting directly to the week’s news: Pam Bondi’s firing as Attorney General, the Epstein Transparency Act violations, and the Supreme Court hearing a case against birthright citizenship.
What makes this episode sharp is the way Nick and Tara refuse to let the book’s analysis sit at arm’s length. Tara draws from Part Two of the book — the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, the doxing campaigns that exposed rally attendees as Republican staffers and military members, and the pattern of those same individuals later being arrested for domestic violence and CSAM. She places these facts against Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” framing, and the contrast does the work Mathias intends: the far right’s sickness isn’t aberrant, it’s structural. Nick extends the argument by connecting the chapter’s cultural analysis to the accelerationist pipeline — how abandoning the cultural space allowed movements like Trad Wives, looks-maxing, and Soft Girl aesthetics to flourish, and how conservative parents who screamed about radicalization were blaming trans people when the actual threat was accelerationist capture of their children.
The episode’s most sustained argument is about gendered power within the fascist apparatus. Nick traces a pattern: every woman removed from Trump’s administration is replaced by a man — Kristi Noem by Markwayne Mullen, Pam Bondi by an as-yet-unnamed male successor. The replacements aren’t just shuffles; they’re escalations. Mullen is described as even more performative than Noem, trading on a false masculinity that American culture is conditioned to accept. Nick connects this to “The Fire Rises” by arguing that accelerationists prefer male figureheads who can perform authority without scrutiny — the “trust me, bro” of fascist governance. The panel insists that while Bondi bears full responsibility for her choices, the systemic patriarchy that positions women as disposable shields for male accelerationists is itself a feature of the movement Matthias documents.
The conversation also addresses the cultural pipeline from rhetoric to policy, tracing how the “they’re eating the dogs” trope — which became viral TikTok content and a meme song — provided the cultural impetus for the Supreme Court to hear a birthright citizenship case. Nick argues this is the accelerationist playbook in action: normalize dehumanizing language through entertainment, then use the normalized hostility as political cover for stripping constitutional rights. Tara reinforces this by noting the double standard in how law enforcement treats right-wing versus left-wing protests, from Charlottesville to Zuccotti Park to January 6th. The episode closes with a live exchange with chat commenters about free speech and hate speech — a microcosm of the very cultural battle the book describes.
This second-to-last episode on To Catch a Fascist arrives at what feels like the book’s operational thesis: awareness without accountability changes nothing. Nick’s call for Bondi’s prosecution under the Epstein Transparency Act, Tara’s insistence that consequences must extend beyond individual scapegoats, and the book club’s standing invitation to start local chapters all point in the same direction — that community-building is not a supplement to anti-fascist action, it is the action itself.
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Thank you Beth Cruz, Pamela Williamson, Bart Emry, Stan Kelly, Irene Williams, and many others for tuning into my live video with Tara Devlin and Nick Paro! Join me for my next live video in the app.
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