Why read Today in Fascism?
Too much is happening and it’s happening too fast. If you’re confused, distressed, and so overwhelmed as to feel almost paralyzed . . .
Today in Fascism is here to tell you: you are not alone. AND YOU ARE NOT POWERLESS.
This newsletter makes sense — and sometimes fun — of the myriad ways Trump, MAGA, and the right are stripping our government of every benign, humane function and transforming the U.S. into a white supremacist police state.
But I won’t just give you the bad news. I’ll report on mutual aid, protests, and small acts of revolutionary love and courage.
My take is original, politically, historically, and culturally informed. It is opinionated but never doctrinaire. Curmudgeonly in intellect, utopian in spirit.
I won’t inundate you. One short TiF every weekday. That’s all.
Your participation is enthusiastically invited. Applaud, gripe, muse, express your solidarity, atone for your sins. I’ll post news of nonviolent collective actions, past and upcoming. Send pix.
Why subscribe?
Free subscribers receive Today in Fascism every weekday, plus access to the archives.
Paid subscribers make it possible for an impecunious writer to keep doing this every day. In return, they experience a warm, righteous feeling.
Founding subscribers (aka Benefactors) receive indulgences toward heavenly reward.
Stay tuned for perks.
About me
I attended my first protest march—Ban the Bomb—in my stroller and have not stopped demonstrating for racial and economic justice, sexual and reproductive freedom, peace and pleasure since. I am a socialist, but I’m allergic to ideology and dogma. As an intellectual and a journalist, I try to understand and represent as accurately as possible what’s really happening, not erase the things that contradict my preconceptions.
These days, perhaps like you, I can’t keep my mind off the Trump regime’’s destruction of U.S. democracy. Hence, this newsletter. My interests lie most deeply in the territory where the body meets the body politic and where emotions intersect with politics, the law, and the economy, in intimate life and social movements. Right now, in emergency mode, that stuff is in the background. But it’s always in my heart.
Aside from five books, I’ve written hundreds of pieces of reportage, commentary, and personal and political essays, most recently in the Guardian, N+1, Boston Review, and the Intercept.
When not at my desk, I like to swim, kayak, cross-country ski, play the piano (badly), cook and eat with friends, speak French, and try to please my cat.
My literary-political idols include Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, and Ellen Willis. My favorite piece of art is a small, 14th-century painting by an anonymous Italian artist of Saint Anthony looking at a rabbit, with crooked trees, a distant boat, and a neon orange sky behind him.
