David Neiwert, “Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump” (Verso, 2017)

Investigative journalist and Northwest correspondent for the Southern Poverty Law Center, David Neiwert has been covering the radical right-wing for decades. In Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump (Verso, 2017), Neiwert takes his years of experience to chronicle the rise of what is now known as the “Alt Right,” and how it contributed to the election of Donald Trump to the White House. Neiwert shows how the militia movement of the 1990s, the anti-immigrant Minutemen of the 2000s and the Tea Party that surged in 2010 all led to the “Alt Right.” Neiwert also discusses the Alt Right’s relationship with domestic terrorism, from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing to the 2015 Charleston church massacre. The book also explores the far right’s attraction to conspiracy theories, going back to Henry Ford’s promotion of the “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Neiwert considers radical right is fundamentally authoritarian and anti-democratic, and considers the question often asked about fascism in America: Can it happen here?

Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006.

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