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Key to Strategy #1: Know Your Enemy

Max Elbaum Organizing Upgrade
To “know” our enemy, we need to grasp its essential character, its strengths, and its vulnerabilities.That translates today into getting the clearest possible picture of the racist and authoritarian coalition that has “Make America Great Again”.

Friday Nite Videos | April 2, 2021

Portside
Why Matt Gaetz Is a Product of the Modern Republican Party | Mehdi Hasan. Louis Armstrong - Go Down Moses (Lyrics). Cranky Uncle's 5 Techniques of Science Denial. Lawsuits Put 45 in 'Serious Trouble.' Does My Neighborhood Determine My Future?

The Left Must Hit the Streets Again—Right Now

Osita Nwanevu The New Republic
The Biden presidency must be greeted with a historic amount of organizing and agitation. Otherwise, we’re done for. Politics should never be practiced with the expectation of ideal conditions.

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Right Hooks: Trump and the Anatomy of the Alt-Right

Michael Hirsch The Indypendent
The book traces the myriad links between the far right, from Fox News, Tea Party activists, militia supporters, new media trolls, White Nationalists, resurgent Klan members and self-proclaimed Nazis to Donald Trump, where each piggybacks on the rest in honing messages and growing their influence. While the author spends little time referencing left and progressive forces opposing the right's resurgence, his work is exhaustive in researching the phenomena.

Fascism Today

Ted Pearson Portside
The advent of Donald J. Trump to the Presidency of the United States has generated an avalanche of interest in fascism. It is the 2016 number one lookup on the Merriam-Webster site. Google reports that searches for fascism-related topics have surged since election day, 2016. Why all the sudden interest? It would not be empty speculation to recognize that people are alarmed by the Trump Presidency and are trying to see where it fits in the political spectrum.

To Stop Trump, Learn from Tea Party - Build at the Grassroots

Ezra Levin, Leah Greenberg And Angel Padilla New York Times
Today is the first day of the 115th United States Congress. In less than three weeks, this Congress will join with President-elect Donald J. Trump to claim a mandate they do not have for policies that most Americans do not support. Together, they will seek to enact a bigoted and anti-democratic agenda, threatening our values and endangering us all.But Americans have the power to resist this dangerous turn. We know because we've seen it before.

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Inside the Sacrifice Zone

Nathaniel Rich The New York Review of Books
We know the rancid politics of the Tea Party, but what is behind the thinking of white, rural and hard-scrabble far-right supporters whose economic self-interests are at odds with their hard-right political and social beliefs. Berkeley sociologist Hochschild spent five years doing field research in western Louisiana, describing what people say, how they live, reconciling their contradictions and what lessons can be learned by knowing these people in a deeper way.

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What’s the Matter with Cancer Alley?

Sean McCann Los Angeles Review of Books
Arlie Russell Hochschild has taken readers deep into the lives and minds of contemporary conservative voters and Donald Trump supporters. As reviewer Sean McCann shows, Hochschild's new study offers welcome insight into the forces that are driving our divisive politics.

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Koch World

Tom Gallagher Los Angeles Review of Books
Mayer charts the domestic far-right effort to remake the political system through foundations, think tanks, university institutes, paid political commentators and huge campaign contributions by heirs to energy giant Koch Industries. One strategist admitted, "We want to decrease regulations. Why? It's because we can make more profit, okay?" Yet selling that line is hard. So they pose that ameliorative legislation denies the "opportunity for earned success" to the poor.
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