This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I share some of what I’ve been reading and watching.
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My book, When the Clock Broke, is out in paperback in the US and UK, with copies turning up as far afield as Kuala Lumpur and Christchurch.
I also co-host the film podcast Unclear and Present Danger with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. Our Patreon features bonus episodes and a weekly politics discussion.
In case you missed it, I visited my friends at the Know Your Enemy podcast to talk about some recent pieces.
Reminder: Next Monday, October 26th, from 7-9:30 PM, I’ll be participating in a panel discussion of A.J.A. Woods’s The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West at the Verso office in Manhattan. Tickets are free, but you must RSVP due to limited space.
In my appreciation last week of the life and work of the late Anwar Shaikh, I forgot to include videos of his lectures based on his book Capitalism: Competition, Conflict and Crises. This is a grad-level course on economics, so it can be overly technical for people—like me—with lay knowledge, but the second-to-last lecture—”Postwar Accumulation, Forces Leading to the Current Crisis”—which puts his theory to historical work, is accessible and of general interest.
My publisher is reissuing Leonard Zeskind’s Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream. Released in 2009, its subject seemed, in the wake of Obama’s election, to be purely of the past. As his Times obituary put it last year:
….many reviewers in 2009 were skeptical, treating his work as a backward look at a fringe movement led by racist crackpots whose day was over. The United States had just elected its first Black president, and extremist movements such as Christian Identity, which preached that white Christians were entitled to dominate government and society, seemed antiquated.
The Los Angeles Times waved away those hate groups as questing after “an impossible future.” NPR noted that “while a handful of bigots” were still grumbling about the South’s defeat in the Civil War and spreading conspiracies about Jews, “some 70 million others have, in a testament to the overwhelming tolerance of contemporary American society, gone ahead and elected Barack Obama president.”
Zeskind was a member of the antifascist left whose research on the far right earned him a MacArthur grant. It’s to his book’s great credit that it was removed from the US Naval Library by Hegseth’s Department of Defense during their purge of materials on racism. It’s been indispensable for my own work, and I was proud to blurb the reissue.—
“Leonard Zeskin’s Blood and Politics is a neglected classic that has become only more important in recent years to understand the perilous situation in the United States. It is the essential subterranean history of modern America.”
