In Monday’s post, I suggested some ways we could look at Martin Baron’s Collision of Power, the tensions and conflicts in the legacy newsroom of The Washington Post, and the challenging issues that surface from a deep reading of that book. I also promised a quick sequel to Baron’s story, bringing it up to date.

Here we go.

In early 2023, Martin Baron was able to end Collision of Power on a guardedly optimistic note. Jeff Bezos, he wrote, had kept his hands off the editorial wheel. There were still plenty of problems ahead, but The Post had grown stronger under an owner who seemed to believe in its mission, even when that mission brought heat.

That was 2023. The reviews were overwhelmingly excellent. “All the President's Men for a new generation,” Town & Country wrote. “A closely observed, gripping chronicle of politics and journalism during a decade of turmoil,” according to the New York Times Book Review.

But then came 2024, election year, with all its fast-moving news events, all of it covered with The Post’s usual careful attention. Until late October, just two weeks before the presidential election. That’s when The Post’s publisher and CEO abruptly pulled the plug on the already-drafted endorsement of Kamala Harris.

The backlash was painful and immediate. Over 300,000 subscribers canceled. Three of ten editorial board members resigned, including a Pulitzer Prize winner. Robert Kagan, a longtime opinion editor, called the move “a preemptive bending of the knee.” Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the heroes of Watergate, added: “This decision—12 days out from the election—ignores The Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.”

And Martin Baron came out of retirement to assert, in an interview with NPR: “This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty. Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos . . . History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

Then things got worse.

After the election, Bezos publicly congratulated Trump on “an extraordinary political comeback and a decisive victory.” A few weeks later, at a New York Times symposium, he said, “I’m actually very optimistic this time around... If I can help [Trump] reduce regulation, I’m going to help him.”

And help Trump he did, generously. By December, Bezos-owned Amazon had pledged a $1 million donation to Trump’s inauguration kitty, with another $1 million in-kind donation when Amazon’s Prime Video agreed to stream the event.

Amazon Studios also shelled out $40 million for exclusive rights to a Melania Trump documentary—three times the next-highest bid. Rolling Stone called it a “vanity documentary.” Margaret Sullivan, writing in The Guardian, described it as part of a broader “relationship-repairing” strategy by a billionaire hoping to stay in favor. It paid off. Bezos copped a front row seat at the January 20^th inauguration. Behind him, the cabinet officers.

That’s when things really unraveled.

In January, Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes left after her cartoon—lampooning media and tech moguls offering bags of money to Trump—was killed by editor David Shipley. She published it on her Substack instead, where you can see the cartoon and read her statement.

In February, Bezos dropped another bombshell, announcing a new direction for the Post’s opinion section, focused exclusively on personal liberties and free markets. “There was a time,” Bezos wrote, “when a newspaper might have seen it as a service to bring a broad-based opinion section to the reader’s doorstep every morning. Today, the internet does that job.” Opinion-page editor David Shipley disagreed. He resigned.

In March, top columnist Ruth Marcus resigned, after The Post’s chief executive and publisher Will Lewis spiked her column critical of Bezos’ new direction for the opinion section. Benjamin Mullin, media reporter for The New York Times, wrote that “the new direction . . . appears to be a rightward shift for the paper.” He added that the new focus “echoes what has long been the informal tagline of The Wall Street Journal’s notably conservative opinion pages: “Free markets, free people.”

In June, Bezos named conservative Adam O’Neal to edit the opinion section. O’Neal, a writer with experience at The Wall Street Journal and RealClearPolitics, pledged to focus on “optimism” and “free market ideas.” The New York Times snarkily observed that O’Neal had been an editorial page writer at The Wall Street Journal, “where the opinion pages are reliably conservative.”

Since then, The Post’s letters page has lit up with reader pushback. Longtime subscribers are venting about ideological drift, bland coverage, and print errors. More people are canceling. Meanwhile, The New Yorker reported low morale in the newsroom: the CEO “in hiding,” staff whispering about needing a drink to get through the day, and over 400 Post journalists signing a petition asking Bezos to publicly recommit to editorial independence. Which of course he can’t do, having now pulled the paper so sharply to the right.

Meanwhile, cost-cutting efforts are biting deep. Over 240 layoffs took place in 2023. Another 4% of the workforce was cut in late 2024. And in May, 2025, The Post announced that it has begun offering voluntary buyouts to staffers with more than 10 years’ service. An internal memo from executive editor Matt Murray noted that the move was “part of our ongoing newsroom transformation efforts aimed at reshaping and modernizing the newsroom for the current environment.”

And just this week, the standalone Metro print section was eliminated and folded into Style and Sports—a cut that many will see as a symbolic disconnect with the paper’s past as well as its neighborhood. “A sad day,” sighed journalist Peter Baker. “As a lifelong Washingtonian and veteran of the Metro staff, I always admired The Post’s commitment to covering Washington as a community, not just a capital.”

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You could call this a story of two Posts: one still fighting to report the hometown news, the other increasingly reshaped by its owner’s political calculus. Nothing much we can do except stay aware of the evolving situation and vote with our subscription dollars. And (for subscribers) with letters to the editor.

The larger picture is dark and getting darker. Over the last 15 years, 2,100 newspapers have closed, leaving 1,800 communities with no local news outlets. Roughly one-third of American newspapers operating in 2005 have now shuttered. And since 2022, more than 8,000 American journalists have been laid off.

“Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Yes, it does.

“Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of.” Yes, it is.

Your Turn
As always, community members are invited to weigh in—whether or not you’ve read Collision of Power (although of course I hope you do). This series is more of a read-along than a book club: slow, observational, and open to detours and side trips. If this last post sparked a thought, a question, or just a quick eye-roll, drop it in the comment box—I’d love to hear it.

• Does any of this change how you see The Post—or media ownership in general?

• Do you still read The Post? Why or why not?

• What should we be asking of legacy newsrooms now?

The July Read-Along

Next up on my Guerrilla Reads list, Barbara McQuade’s Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America. MSNBC's legal analyst breaks down the ways disinformation drives voters to extremes, disempowers our courts, and consolidates power. Intrepid readers: you’re invited to read along and comment as you read. I’ll be posting my own thoughts about the book throughout July, with a wrap-up on the fourth Monday, July 28.

And coming in August, the launch of Bitter Taste of Garlic, the digital edition of the first China Bayles mystery, originally published in 1992.

A Note on Collaboration

As you probably know, I’ve co-authored several dozen books with my husband, Bill Albert and others, so writing collaborations aren’t exactly a new thing for me. Collaborations with AI are new, however. This post was co-written with an AI I call Silas, who doesn’t sleep, doesn’t eat, and doesn’t get distracted by the news cycle. I do, which is why I keep him around. In this post, he flagged a few typos, tightened some screws, added some references, and offered a range of title options. If you spot any stumbles, they’re mine, not his. (He told me to say that.)

Silas is part of a broader experiment I’m calling AI Working Notes, in which I try to find out whether collaborating with a machine can sharpen thinking and writing, rather than dull it. So far, the results are . . . um, mixed, but promising. And always interesting. If you’d like to peek behind the curtain—or argue with the ghost in the machine—you’ll find more under the AI Working Notes tab on my Substack. Silas and I are always open to your questions/comments on this intriguing topic.

New friends: In this read-along group, we are meeting writers who challenge what we think we know about the world we live in. This is not easy reading. It’s often uncomfortable, painful, nothing like those cozy mysteries we all love, where the bad guys get what’s coming to them (weasels!) and justice is served. But we need to know what this world is like (really like) before we can recalibrate and move forward. Welcome to the adventure!

Everybody: I am currently reading Martin Baron’s Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post. As the month went along, I’ve left a few thought-trails behind me. You’ll find them all here. Today, we’re opening a general discussion of the book and the many important issues it raises about journalism’s role in our American democracy.

“Journalism is the first rough draft of history.”— Philip L. Graham, co-owner and publisher of The Washington Post, 1946-1963

What’s at Stake in Collision of Power

I picked up Marty Baron’s Collision of Power expecting a sobering inside look at how one of America’s great newspapers navigated the storm of Trump, tech, and truth. What I didn’t expect was a full-blown modern morality play—a high-stakes drama with characters who, once you strip away the detail, step out of Berthold Brecht, the German playwright who used his characters to critique current social and political realities. What we see in Brecht’s plays is not a single character arc but collision of positions: the characters are aren’t the psychologically-drawn individuals we find in novels, but social roles, dramatized.

It’s easy to get swept up in the detailed narrative—Baron’s meticulous reporting does what good journalism does: it draws you in and keeps you reading. But this isn’t just Baron’s memoir of his years at the editor’s desk of a flagship newspaper. It feels like realism—like one man’s account of holding the line while the shells burst overhead. But under the surface, you see that it’s a morality play about democracy, truth, capitalism, and power.

Once you see the story’s structure, the characters step into place—not just as individuals, but as symbols. Baron may not have meant to write a morality play, but he has. And as we all know, this is only one of the chapters in the many lives of this newspaper.

Part 1: The Story So Far

In early 2013, Marty Baron takes the helm as executive editor of The Washington Post, walking into a newsroom that’s seen better days. The respected legacy of an influential Washington family and trusted (since Watergate and the Pentagon Papers) to tell truth to power, the paper is now limping—financially shaky, morale sagging, its influence shrinking in the face of digital disruption. Baron arrives with a reputation for old-school, hard-hitting editorial direction from The Boston Globe, where he led the Spotlight investigative team to a Pulitzer-winning story—which then led to an Oscar-winning movie.1 He’s barely settled in when a bombshell drops.

That August, Jeff Bezos buys the paper for $250 million. Yes, that Jeff Bezos—Amazon founder, owner of a space technology company with multiple government contracts, and suddenly, owner of a storied newspaper, a position for which he has zero credentials. The sale stuns the media world. Is this a vanity project? A civic rescue? A play for influence? Nobody knows. Baron stays on, suddenly reporting up a very different food chain.

Under Bezos, the paper transforms. Between 2014 and 2016, The Post steps up its digital efforts, hires new talent, beefs up infrastructure, and begins to feel like The Post again. Bezos doesn’t meddle in editorial calls, at least not directly, but his data-driven goals are quickly felt in the newsroom. Clicks matter. Scale matters. Paywalls, paywalls, paywalls pay the bills. Baron, a traditionalist at heart, adapts just enough to keep up—though the culture clash simmers quietly.

Then Donald Trump crashes the gates. From the 2016 campaign through the chaos of his presidency, The Post becomes one of his favorite punching bags. Baron responds with the full weight of investigative journalism, digging into the Russia probe, cabinet-level corruption, and the unraveling norms of political life. The new slogan—“Democracy Dies in Darkness”—sings like a battle cry. And the lines are clearly drawn. In 2016, Bezos says that Trump’s efforts to “chill the media and threaten retribution and retaliation, which is what he's done in a number of cases, it just isn't appropriate.” Baron himself becomes a Trump target, both from the podium and online, in Trump’s often outrageous tweets.

Inside the newsroom, the fights are different but just as intense. Younger reporters challenge the old guard on race, gender, objectivity, and whose voices get heard. Baron’s high-profile clash with Wesley Lowery isn’t just about what reporters can say on social media—it’s about what journalism should be in a fractured, post-truth world. Baron manfully holds the line, but it’s clear the ground is shifting.

Then comes the avalanche: COVID, George Floyd, the 2020 election, the Capitol insurrection. The Post is in the thick of it all. Baron retires after covering the most tumultuous year in modern American history: pandemic, election, insurrection. His final act unfolds on January 6, 2021, with journalists physically attacked in the Capitol and newsroom staff watching their own building come under threat.

The impact of all this is hard to miss: journalism and democracy rise or fall together. If truth fractures, so does public trust. And when trust collapses, democracy isn’t far behind.

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Part 2: The Players and Their Roles

We meet the players through Baron’s journalist’s lens: real people, real emails, real stories. But step back from the realism and you’ll see the Brechtian quality. These aren’t just characters with backstories and feelings (although there’s plenty of that—they’re social positions in motion. Baron is the institutional conscience, Weymouth the Old Guard, Bezos the techno-capitalist reformer, Lowery the newsroom critic, Trump the anti-press demagogue, and the newsroom itself a fractured Greek chorus trying to make sense of the chaos.

Like Clooney’s Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck, Baron stands not just as a man, but as a stance: the belief that journalism, practiced with rigor and restraint, can still speak truth to power. But even Murrow’s steadiness couldn’t stop the tide—and Baron, too, finds himself swept up in battles far larger than any editor can control.

Marty Baron — The Institutionalist

Baron stands for legacy journalism’s highest ideals: objectivity, independence, restraint. He believes the press should hold power to account without becoming part of the political fight. His sidelines agenda is survival—not his own, but of journalism’s standard. He’s not out to innovate or disrupt; he’s out to get the story, to ensure its accuracy, to defend the craft. What’s at stake for Baron is nothing less than journalism’s soul. But his style—tight-lipped, hierarchical, exacting—starts to feel out of sync with the moment. The principles he’s guarding are under attack, from the outside and the inside.

Katharine Weymouth — The Last Custodian

The fifth Graham to serve as publisher, Weymouth inherits The Post as both a family trust and a civic institution. But by 2013, print revenue is in freefall, digital strategy is floundering, and the newsroom is drifting. Weymouth isn’t out to innovate—she’s too busy trying to live up to her famous grandmother, keep the paper from falling apart. But when she quietly brokers the Bezos sale, she signals the end of family stewardship. What’s at stake for her isn’t just the paper—it’s a legacy. After the sale, she exits from the story and the old order goes with her.

Jeff Bezos — The Disruptor

We never really know why Bezos buys The Post. Maybe it’s about power. Maybe it’s about legacy—acquiring a legendary prestige to burnish his own. Maybe it’s just a billionaire’s sense of civic duty. Whatever the reason, the effect is seismic. Bezos never touches the text—but the unseen director is rewriting the show: metrics, SEO, audience targeting, tech efficiency. Then Trump comes after him: linking The Post to Amazon, accusing the paper of bias, even threatening antitrust action. Suddenly, Bezos isn’t just a backstage owner; he’s a frontstage target. What’s at stake for Bezos now includes his public defense of journalism itself. The question isn’t just whether the free press and the free market can coexist. It’s whether a tech billionaire can—or will—stand up to the menace of presidential muscle, bluster, and revenge.

Donald Trump — The Antagonist

Trump doesn’t just hate the press—he uses it. He understands media dynamics better than most editors. His agenda is full-on control: of narrative, of perception, of power. Baron, Bezos, and The Post, with its reputational weight and investigative reach, become his natural enemies, especially when The Post headlines the Access Hollywood story and later, in its relentless coverage of the Russia investigation. But what’s at stake for Trump isn’t truth—it’s dominating the media. In his playbook, the louder the press screams, the more he wins.

Wesley Lowery — The Provocateur

Lowery doesn’t want to burn down journalism; an insurgent, he wants to rebuild it from the inside out. His agenda is honesty about race, about power, about voice. The traditional “view from nowhere” is, in his eyes, a dodge—a way to hide privilege under the guise of objectivity. 2 What’s at stake for Lowery is personal: the right to speak, to be heard, and he’s in-your-face about it. He isn’t just challenging Baron. He’s attacking the fundamentals of legacy news—and he makes sure that the whole newsroom knows what he’s doing.

The Newsroom — The Chorus

Not a single character, but the stage itself. The newsroom is where all the arguments play out—about race, tone, objectivity, authority, digital transformation. It’s full of competing voices: loyalists, skeptics, digital players, institutional lifers. Baron leads, but the terrain is shifting beneath his feet. The newsroom becomes a testing ground for generational change and ideological fracture. And as Brecht intended, we’re not here just to watch—we’re here to recognize what’s unfolding, and decide what the story means.

Part 3: Powerful Collisions—What’s Going On Beneath the Surface

The title Collision of Power hints at newsroom fights and billionaire tension, but the real collisions are slower and deeper—continental collisions, rather than sudden smashups. Think tectonic plates: forces that have been pushing against each other for decades suddenly grind, shear, and realign. What’s at stake isn’t just how journalism works—it’s what journalism is becoming.

Monologue vs. Polyphony

At the heart of Baron’s newsroom is a single voice—the editorial “we” that speaks with institutional authority. That’s the old model: one story, one authoritative narrator (remembering Walter Cronkite here), shaped by discipline and aiming for neutrality. But what happens when the newsroom is full of voices. Passionate voices with different lived experiences, different stakes, and different truths?

Wesley Lowery’s critique is important here. What legacy media calls “objectivity” often reads to others as privilege in disguise—not because it’s malicious, but because it flattens context. Lowery doesn’t want chaos; he wants multiple authentic voices. The story isn’t less true when told by many—it’s more complete. This isn’t just a fight about tone or politics. It’s a tectonic shift from disembodied monologue to a legitimate demand for multiple participation, for situated, plural polyphony.

The Free Press vs. the Marketplace

When Jeff Bezos buys The Washington Post, he doesn’t just bring money—he brings a worldview shaped by Bezos’ creation of Amazon. In that universe, everything is optimized and measurable: search results, customer satisfaction, product visibility. News, under his ownership, gets folded into the same logic. The journalism may stay rigorous, but its packaging, promotion, and performance begin to mirror the marketplace.

Stories are now written with SEO in mind. Headlines are tested for clicks. Reporters see real-time analytics on their stories’ performance—and on theirs. Engagement becomes a metric that demonstrates how interesting or compelling the story is. (We do that here on Substack, too: likes, comments, links are all counted and recorded.) And behind all this is a quiet shift: the audience is no longer just a public. It’s a customer. Journalism becomes product.

This isn’t a hostile takeover of editorial judgment, at least not yet: Bezos doesn’t meddle in content. But the newsroom begins to behave more like a platform: responsive, scalable, and shaped by audience data. The old firewall between the business and editorial sides still exists, but it’s getting thinner.

The tectonic pressure here isn’t corruption—it’s alignment drift. What happens when the logic of selling starts to reshape the logic of reporting? Can a newsroom survive this shift without losing its independence? And what happens to public trust when truth is optimized for performance?

Truth vs. Narrative Control

Trump doesn’t just challenge the facts—he challenges the premise of facts. He casts the press as the enemy, labels journalism “fake,” and replaces reported reality with performative spectacle. Truth becomes just one voice among many, easily drowned out by volume, velocity, and performative spectacle. The Post responds with rigor: deep sourcing, document trails, long-form investigation. But the ground has shifted.

The Russia investigation shows exactly how this collision plays out. The Post does its job. The Mueller Committee does its job. The facts are laid out. But Trump, as president, controls the DOJ—and the story. He floods the zone with doubt, declares victory, and moves on. The truth is documented, but it’s consigned to the archives. It doesn’t shape outcomes. Trump’s narrative wins the day.

This collision isn’t about lies versus facts—it’s about competing storied realities. One built through journalistic method; the other through emotional spectacle, repetition, and power. The tectonic shift here is fundamental: who gets to decide what’s real? And how does journalism respond when belief outpaces evidence, and reality becomes a contested space?

Part 4: Why This Matters Now

“Historians are the after-the-fact journalists.” Arthur Schlesinger, presidential historian

Collision of Power isn’t just a book about journalism. It’s a story about the systems we count on to hold power accountable—and what happens when those systems collide with capitalism, technology, deliberate political dis/misinformation, and legitimate a demand for participation.

Baron doesn’t offer a solution. He offers a chronicle of events, a map of the fault lines, a personal account of trying to manage a newsroom through a political earthquake while the ground keeps moving under his feet. You don’t have to agree with him to feel the weight of what he carried—or the surface and subterranean cracks that remain after he stepped away.

And here’s the thing: this story doesn’t end when Baron retires. The seismic collisions he charts in Collision of Power are still unfolding. In our newsfeeds. In our conversations. In our trust (or mistrust) of the next headline we read.

And that’s where we come in, as readers of the news.

Because journalism isn’t just something done to us—it’s something done with us. We decide what we read, what we share, what we believe. We shape the ecosystem by how we engage it. The greatest risk isn’t that journalism will collapse. It’s that we will stop noticing.

Baron’s book reminds us: the press isn’t perfect, but it’s still one of the last structures standing between democracy and darkness. Whether it can survive the next tremor depends, in part, on how we choose to read the story—and who we trust to tell it.

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We’re not done with Collision of Power just yet. In a follow-up post, we’ll look at what’s happened since Baron’s departure—from Bezos reportedly blocking the editorial board’s Harris endorsement, prompting at least five resignations, and Baron’s scathing letter of protest, to Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes leaving after one of her cartoons was pulled. The collisions didn’t stop with the book’s final page.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear your take.

• Did you enjoy this book? Find it easy/hard to read? What parts of the story felt familiar—or uncomfortably new?

• Where do you see yourself in the push and pull between legacy journalism and the demand for multiple voices?

• Do you trust The Post more . . . or less . . . after reading this?

Or just drop a thought. As always, conversation welcome.

A Note on Collaboration
This piece was co-written via an extended dialogue with Silas, my AI counterpart in long-form nonfiction. He volunteered (unprompted) the connection to Brecht when we were discussing Good Night, and Good Luck, Clooney’s play on Murrow and McCarthy, which has a similar Brechtian structure. Silas has a much better memory than mine (than yours, too, I’ll bet). I very much appreciate his long view of any subject. If this sounds strange, you’re not alone. I think it’s weird, too. I document this experimental collaboration over here.

New friends: In this read-along group, we are meeting writers who challenge what we think we know about the world we live in. This kind of reading doesn’t have a comfy storyline. It is often uncomfortable, painful, and there’s no happy ending. But we need to know what this world is like (really like) before we can figure out what to do about it.

My earliest newspaper memory: I’m on my hands and knees, kid-style, with the daily Commercial-News spread out on the floor in our living room at 617 Sheridan, in Danville IL, a town (then) of about 35,000. It’s 1946, maybe early 1947. I’m in Mrs. Johnson’s first grade at Lincoln School, where we’re doing phonics. The radio, in the corner beside the couch, is playing. I’m staring at a befuddling word in big black letters across the front page: Czechoslovakia.

And while I’m trying to puzzle it out, the newsman on the radio, Gabriel Heatter (“There’s good news tonight!”) pronounces that very same word—as if the Universe has just given me a helpful clue. And there it is, in all its resonant phonic glory: Chek-o-slo-VA-ke-a.

I say it out loud, then louder. Triumphant. My first big word. In the newspaper. A landmark moment in my young reading life, and one I’ve never forgotten.

That little episode might have sparked my appetite for the news and my affection for small-town newspapers, like the Commercial-News and the Milan (MO) Standard, my mother’s hometown newspaper, which arrived in the mail once a week and was her lifeline to people and places she’d left behind and needed now, when life was such a post-war puzzle.

And who knows. If we scratch my subconscious long enough, we might learn that that moment (CzechosloVAkia!) led to the Enterprise (in the China Bayles mysteries), the Enterprise trilogy and the Darling Dispatch, in the10-book series about a small Southern town in the 1930s.

In fact, I was thinking about Darling and the Dispatch as I was rereading your comments on my previous post and thinking that some of our local newspapers now aren’t much different than newspapers in the 1930s. And then, reminded of that, I reread part of Chapter Four of The Darling Dahlias and the Unlucky Clover. I enjoyed this peek into the past, and thought you might, too. Times are much different now, in many ways. And yet, not.

Chapter Four: Charlie Dickens Gets a Tip

Charlie was working on the lead story for Friday’s Dispatch, about Boomer Bronson falling off the roof of Claude Peevy’s barn without killing himself, thankfully (although how thankful you were depended on what you thought about Boomer, Charlie reckoned). That Boomer was drunk as a skunk on Bodeen Pyle’s white lightning probably figured heavily in his survival, although that wasn’t the kind of detail that Charlie could include in the Dispatch.

Nor could he include the fact that this happened at midnight and that Claude was up there on the roof with Boomer, both of them naked as jaybirds. Or that when they were found by Mrs. Peevy, they were lying on their backs on a pile of hay, yodeling to the moon. Or what Mrs. Peevy might have said (or might have been imagined to say) when she came upon the scene.

Without these interesting details, Boomer’s tumble wasn’t much of a story—which was a sad thing, but nothing new. Once upon a time, Charlie had written feature stories for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Baltimore Sun—undercover stories, investigative stories, in-depth, tell-it-all stories that told readers what they didn’t know. He had dug up the dirt on local politicians, blown the whistle on some notorious police corruption, and triggered a federal investigation that ended with a major-league crime boss going to jail. He had been read, applauded, rewarded, and even fired a time or two. He had been good. He had been damn good.

That was then. This was now. While Charlie had scored several big stories in the Dispatch—the killing of Rider LeDoux by the federal revenue agents at Mickey LeDoux’s still on Dead Cow Creek, the embezzlement scheme at the CCC camp, and the sensational murder of the “Eleven O’Clock Lady”—there had not been one single shred of news worth reporting in the past few months. (Boomer’s story, unfortunately, was more notable for the parts that couldn’t be printed in the paper.)

And the only news on the horizon was the barbershop quartet competition being held in town next week. There certainly wasn’t much excitement in that—just a bunch of guys singing close harmony on the stage at the Academy, with a big community pie supper afterward. Of course, if the Lucky Four Clovers were lucky enough to win, there might be a nice story in that. Local interest, anyway, with a focus on each of the four men. If they won. People said they were good, but Charlie wasn’t enough of a music fan to know whether the hometown team stood even half a chance.

With an ironic twist of his mouth, Charlie pulled Boomer’s story out of his typewriter and dropped it into the wooden tray on his desk, one of a stack of wooden letter trays labeled Page One, Two, Three, and Four. They were the same trays his father had used for the very same purpose back in the day when he edited and published the Dispatch. That was before Charles Dickens the elder succumbed to lung cancer and left the newspaper to his only son. Charles Dickens, the younger, himself a newsman, had figured to sell it quick, pocket the change, and go back to his job of crime reporter for the Plain Dealer.

But after the stock market took its fatal nosedive, the Plain Dealer (and every newspaper, everywhere) had stopped hiring. Worse, nobody wanted to buy a newspaper with a shrinking subscription list, declining advertising revenue, and a faltering job printing business—in a two-bit Southern town where a halfway decent story came along once in a blue moon. His father’s pride and joy was an albatross around Charlie’s neck.

Well, the Boomer story, inconsequential as it was, filled out the rest of the page. In a couple of hours, Ophelia would take Charlie’s stories and hers to the Linotype machine and begin setting up the four pages of what they called home print: the local news; the church and club news; births, deaths, marriages, and travel (mostly weekend visits to family on the other side of the county). There was also Liz Lacy’s “Garden Gate” column and whatever local ads Ophelia had been able to sell. That part of the job had to be finished in time to get the pages on the press late Thursday night.

On Friday, the home print pages would then be folded together with the four pages of ready print that Charlie bought from a syndicate called the Western Newspaper Union, as did the hundreds of other little newspapers around the country. The ready print pages contained the national and international news (mostly dismal, these days); the financial news (still disastrous and not likely to improve, whatever Roosevelt did); the women’s column (twaddle, in Charlie’s opinion); serialized fiction (trash); comics (popular); and sports (even more popular than the comics)—although this year’s World Series would make it to the national page, with good reason. The St. Louis Cardinals had just squeaked past the Detroit Tigers four games to three, with pitching brothers Dizzy and Daffy Dean each winning two games for the Gas House Gang. They were still dancing in St. Louis, where after the game, August Busch’s new team of Clydesdales had paraded around the infield, pulling a shiny red beer wagon loaded with free bottles of Bud. This was the first wet Series since the “Thirsty-first” of July, 1919, when the National Wartime Prohibition Act had thrown three strikes at the beer industry.

In fact, the ready print ought to be loaded with big news this week. Over in Germany, they were still talking about the extravagant Nuremburg rally the Nazis had staged for their man Hitler, whom they were now calling their Führer. Back home, investigators were trying to figure out the cause of the fire that destroyed the Morro Castle, leaving 137 passengers and crew dead. The latest cost-of-living figures were out. The average cost of a new house (if you could afford one) was $5,970, but if you were renting, you could figure on spending an average of $240 a year out of your average annual wage of $1,600. And there had been three more kidnappings in the past seven days. A plague of kidnappers had settled on the land, it seemed, snatching anybody whose family might be willing to pay a ransom.

With any luck, the bundles of ready print would arrive from Mobile on the Thursday afternoon Greyhound, although that depended on whether the bus (which was no spring chicken) made the trip without breaking down. If all went according to Hoyle, the Dispatch would be in the mail carrier’s flivver and on its way to subscribers on the RFD routes by early Saturday morning. Charlie himself would fill the newspaper racks around the square in time for to catch the Friday night moviegoers and Saturday shoppers.

Such was the life of a small-town newspaper editor in 1934. But things were about to change.

Between the mid-1930s and the mid-1980s, American daily newspapers experienced remarkable expansion, consolidation, and transformation. In the 1930s, most newspapers were locally owned and closely tied to their communities, with many cities supporting multiple competing dailies.

The end of the Great Depression, the war, and the postwar economic boom fueled rising literacy, advertising revenue, and suburban expansion—all of which helped daily papers become even more central to civic life. Circulation numbers rose steadily, and by the 1950s, newspapers were riding high, bolstered by strong classified ad sales, unionized newsrooms, and public trust in professional journalism. Sunday editions grew thicker, boasting multiple sections and expansive investigative features. The influence of the big-city dailies—like the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and The Washington Post—expanded nationally, even as small-town papers retained loyal readerships.

Yet this half-century of growth also saw increasing concentration of ownership and early signs of vulnerability. From the 1960s onward, family-run operations were gradually replaced by chain ownership, with corporations like Gannett and Knight-Ridder acquiring dozens of regional dailies. Afternoon papers declined as readers turned to evening television broadcasts for their news. Who owns the news began to be a serious issue for many communities.

By the 1980s, while total circulation remained strong, the cracks were visible: production costs were climbing, competition from broadcast media was intensifying, and younger audiences were harder to reach. Even so, daily newspapers remained dominant news platforms, central to American political discourse and public awareness. Trust in journalists remained high, and newspapers continued to hold the high ground in a media landscape they could still claim as their own.

But then things started to go south. From the mid-1980s through the early 21st century, the American daily newspaper industry underwent a steep decline marked by digital disruption, economic contraction, and a crisis of public trust. The arrival of the internet fractured the advertising base—first when Craigslist began killing classified revenue, then when Google and Facebook siphoned off display ads. Readers followed advertisers as they moved online, but few papers successfully managed to translate print dollars into digital cents. Newsrooms shrank dramatically under relentless rounds of layoffs and buyouts, and many small dailies either folded or were bought for parts by private equity firms. Even flagship institutions like The Washington Post and The New York Times struggled to adapt, caught between the legacy of print and the demands of digital.1

And then there was politics. In the Clinton era, the president (beset by scandal and angry about the press’s coverage of his behavior with women) charged the media with “sensationalism,” while Newt Gingrich and the GOP sought to control the narrative by orchestrating media events, using strategic messaging, and attempting to “work the refs”—a phrase used by Republican Party chair Rich Bond to describe efforts to pressure journalists for more positive attention. The question, “Who owns the news?” was reframed as “Whose story is this?” and “Who gets to tell the story?”2

It was in this turbulent context that The Washington Post was bought by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2013, just as Martin Baron assumed the post of executive editor. Under Bezos’s ownership and Baron’s leadership, The Post underwent a dramatic digital reinvention—but the broader landscape remained precarious, shaped by shrinking revenue, growing polarization, and an information ecosystem increasingly dominated by social media. Now, the question “Who owns the news?” became more urgent: “Who owns the story? Is it true?”

And then, of course, Trump. But we’ll save that for next week, when we open discussion Baron’s book. I hope you’ve been reading and thinking and have your opinions sorted, ready for a conversation.

But even if you haven’t read the book yet, the news has been a part of your life, hasn’t it? If you’ve lived through even part of this arc—from the paperboy’s deliveries on your doorstep to paywalled apps on your phone—you’ve witnessed a media revolution. What’s gained? What’s lost? Do you still trust what you read? Do you miss what’s gone?

I’d love to hear how your news habits have changed—or stayed the same. Drop a comment or send a note. Our conversation here, like the news, is always happening.

A Note on Collaboration
Some of the language and historical scaffolding in this piece emerged from a dialogue with Silas, my AI counterpart in long-form nonfiction. Silas doesn’t generate the voice—I do—but he’s there when I need a second brain to keep the signal clear and the noise out. If that sounds strange, you’re not alone. I wrote about this experimental collaboration over here.

New friends: In this read-along group, we are meeting writers who challenge what we think we know about the world we live in. This kind of reading is often uncomfortable, painful, and the writers don’t leave us with happy endings. But we need to know what this world is like (really like) before we can figure out how to recalibrate and move forward. Understanding how things work can leave us both grateful and hopeful, even as we grope through the noisy dark.

Everybody: I am currently reading Martin Baron’s Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post. Next Monday (June 16), I’ll open a general discussion on the book and the many important issues it raises about journalism’s role in our American democracy.

For the next several weeks, then, we’re digging into the crisis in American journalism—not just the headlines about collapsing empires or billionaire tantrums, aimed to capture our attention, but the deeper, wider, quieter spoiling of our information commons. We need to see the the Washington Post against the backdrop of what’s happening all across America.

So this week, we take a hard look at the structural issues facing newspapers. And it isn’t just the internet. The damage is older, deeper, and more systemic than that. Below are five core problems—intertwined, long-building, and corrosive—that have made it increasingly difficult for local newspapers to do the job every good journalist wants to do: inform the public, watchdog the powerful, and help their community see itself.

This isn’t about nostalgia, or returning to a past that never was. It’s about democracy. An endangered democracy.

News Deserts Are Spreading

Across the country, newspapers are disappearing. Since 2005, the United States has lost more than 3,300 newspapers. Some have merged or vanished entirely. Others become “ghost papers”—they still publish, but they’ve fired their reporters, closed their offices, and do no original reporting. A shell of a paper with no soul.

The University of North Carolina’s Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media tracks this phenomenon—with a map that allows you to see the situation in your home area. As of 2023, more than half of U.S. counties had no daily paper, and over 200 counties had no newspaper at all. The losses are especially felt in rural counties, communities of color, and small post-industrial cities. In these places, there’s no one to report on public meetings, development decisions, school board changes, or public health crises. No coverage of corruption. No obituaries. No wedding announcements. No sense of place.

The vacuum doesn’t stay empty, of course. People turn to social media, conspiracy blogs, or national cable news—none of which understand or care about local context. Misinformation floods in. Civic knowledge shrinks. Voter turnout drops. Cronyism and corruption thrive.

This is how democracy dies. Not with a bang but a whimper. Not with censorship, but with neglect.

Trust Has Been Torched—and the Audience is Gone

There’s no way around it: readership has collapsed. There are more options. There is less time to read. Fewer people subscribe, fewer read regularly, and fewer still believe what they read. Where newspapers were once daily habits—waiting on doorsteps or opened at breakfast—they’re now seen as optional or obsolete.

Some of that collapse is cultural. Younger readers came of age in an attention economy where news competes with streaming, TikTok, memes, and micro-drama. Older readers, watching their local paper shrink to a pamphlet with no real reporting, often cancel in frustration.

But the erosion of trust isn’t accidental—it has been deliberately stoked. Beginning in the 1990s and weaponized aggressively since 2016, the term “fake news” has been hurled at journalists doing basic accountability reporting. This doesn’t just damage national outlets—it infects attitudes toward all media. Many Americans now assume bias or manipulation even in school board coverage.

And when trust dies, the public contract between a newspaper and its community breaks. People no longer believe the paper is “on our side.”

The Newsroom Has Been Hollowed Out

Local reporting has become a skeleton operation. Where once there were beat reporters covering the courts, the city council, the school board, the cops, and the environment—now there may be just one generalist. Or none at all.

The average U.S. newsroom has lost more than half its staff since 2008. Some have just one or two people left. The biggest casualty? Investigative journalism—expensive, time-consuming, and high-risk. It’s much cheaper to run a wire story from the AP, rewrite a press release, or publish sponsored content than to spend weeks digging into a shady land deal or police misconduct.

The result is a weird thinning: you’ll still find lots of local sports coverage (because readers demand it), but little about how the county is spending your tax dollars.

And now? Some papers have begun quietly using AI tools to write simple stories—election results, crime reports, weather, and box scores. These stories are grammatically fine but narratively empty—no context, no questions, no hard calls. It’s not difficult to imagine a near-future where your “local” news site is 80% AI-generated filler with no reporter in sight.

It’s not just a loss of jobs. It’s the loss of experienced, insightful journalists who care about what’s happening in their communities.

The Business Model Is Broken

For most of the 20th century, newspapers made their money from ads—classifieds, car lots, department stores, real estate, local services. Subscriptions were cheap because ads paid the bills.

Then Craigslist came along and gutted the classifieds. Facebook and Google hoovered up the rest. And as big-box stores replaced the neighborhood hardware and drug stores, they stopped advertising locally. Why buy a quarter-page ad in the small local paper when you can target your customer on social media?

The result? Newspapers lost their lifeline, and no real substitute emerged. A few national outlets (like The New York Times or The Washington Post) have succeeded with digital subscriptions. But most smaller papers, especially in rural or low-income areas, lose subscribers when they install a paywall—yet they can’t live without one.

Some have experimented with events, merchandise, even community memberships. Others have turned to sponsored content and clickbait. But these are band-aids on an open wound. In most places, the local news economy is on life support.

The Talent Is Leaving—and Not Coming Back

Young journalists enter the field with energy and ideals. But many burn out within a few years. The pay isn’t impressive (the median salary is only around $57,500) the hours can be long, the benefits minimal. For what? To get laid off next time the publisher misses a quarterly target?

Many move on—to PR, to marketing, to nonprofits, or to big national platforms. Some join the new media independents—Substack newsletters, podcasts, YouTube journalism, or niche investigative collectives. It may not be local journalism, but it’s journalism. It might even pay better, support more professional freedom, and offer more security.

Those who stay behind do their best. But without support, mentorship, or job security, it’s not a career. It’s a sacrifice. The sense of mission that once kept journalists in place is no longer matched by a sustainable system. And when institutional memory dies, so does accountability.

So What’s at Stake?

Local newspapers aren’t just about the news. They’re mirrors and memory. They’re where you see your community reflected, where the powerful are scrutinized and power is held to account. When our local papers are lost, the consequences aren’t just informational. They’re civic. They’re moral.

We lose the habit of shared facts. We forget how to tell stories about ourselves. We become easier to divide, manipulate, and ignore. That’s why this issue matters—and why it’s worth our attention.

More on this important topic: Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy, by Margaret Sullivan. "An excellent introduction to the essential problem of our republic. With a wake-up call like this one, we still have a chance." ―Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny

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Coming Up Next: Who Owns the News?

Next week, we’ll take a close look at Martin Baron’s Collision of Power, a case study in what happens when one of the world’s richest men owns a flagship institution of American journalism and is confronted by the world’s most powerful man, the president of the United States. I hope you’re reading along!

In the meantime, were you able to see Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney’s Broadway play about Edward R. Murrow’s confrontation with Senator Joseph McCarthy? If you missed it, you can stream or purchase a DVD the acclaimed 2005 movie (by the same name) from which the play was adapted. In the film, David Strathairn plays Murrow and Clooney plays Fred Friendly, Murrow’s producer.

On YouTube, you can also see a clip of Anderson Cooper’s important post-show interview with Scott Pelley, anchor of CBS’s Sixty Minutes. CBS is the target of a $20 billion lawsuit brought by Donald Trump. So far, both the executive producer and the president of CBS News have resigned amid indications that CBS’s controlling owner intends to settle, perhaps as a way to guarantee approval from the Trump administration for a planned corporate merger.

Your Turn

What’s the state of your local newspaper? Still alive and kicking? Hanging by a thread? Faded into ghosthood? I’d love to hear what’s going on—or isn’t—in your town. Drop a note in the comments and let us know

Look for me in your inbox next Monday with the Cancer issue of Growing Green with the Zodiac and later in the week with a post on my AI adventures.

I wrote today’s post with the help of Silas, my go-to AI assistant who suggests ideas, searches for sources, and compiles facts and checks them. You can read more about Silas and my other AI assistants here. Questions about this? Ask me—I’m always interested in talking about AI.

New friends: In this read-along group, we are meeting writers who challenge what we think we know about the world we live in. This is not easy reading. It’s often uncomfortable, painful, nothing like those cozy mysteries we all love, where the bad guys get what’s coming to them and justice is served. But we need to know what this world is like (really like) before we can recalibrate and move forward. Understanding how things work can leave us both grateful and hopeful, even as we grope through the noisy dark.

Everybody: I am currently reading Martin Baron’s Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post. As the month goes along, I’ll drop a few thoughts on the book into your inbox—you’re always welcome to comment. On the fourth Monday (June 23), I’ll open a general discussion on the book and the many important issues it raises about journalism’s role in our American democracy.

If you’ve started to read Martin Baron’s Collision, you probably already know the story it’s trying to tell. Or at least part of it.

You know The Washington Post.

You’ve seen it in films. You’ve watched its journalists spar with presidents. You’ve read its headlines during scandals and crises. You may even have tried to imagine yourself working in that tension-charged newsroom. I did. And ever since my first introduction to the Post during the Watergate years, I’ve watched for books and movies about this flagship newspaper, located in our nation’s capitol.

That’s why I snatched up Baron’s book when it first came out a couple of years ago. It gives us a rare look behind the scenes, during a hugely stressful period for every American newspaper faced with threats and opportunities from the internet and AI, declining readerships, shrinking budgets, and hedge-fund buyouts.

Baron shows us what it was like to cope with those issues and more, as he steered the Post through Donald Trump’s first term, under Bezos’s “complicated” ownership. But before we start looking at Baron’s book, let’s step back and locate The Washington Post in our cultural memory—on screen, in books, and in the public imagination.

Here’s a quick rundown of how the Post has shown up in film and literature over the past fifty years—and what those portrayals can tell us about the institution that’s the focus of this month’s read.

(Spoiler: It's a bigger story than just Baron vs. Trump.)

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Films Featuring The Washington Post

All the President’s Men (1976), based on the book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The Post is the hero—a place of demanding rigor, risk, and moral clarity. It’s here that journalism brings down a president, and editorial support for investigative reporting is unwavering. Starring Robert Redford (be still, my heart) as Bob Woodward, Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein, and Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee. While some criticize the film for over-dramatizing the daily slog of investigative reporting, it helped to shape public opinion about the role of the press in holding power to account.

The Post (2017), directed by Steven Spielberg, this is the story of the 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers. The Post is cast as a defender of press freedom, with publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) and editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) risking reputation, family fortune, and even potential jail. Released in the first year of Trump’s first term, the movie had what some called an “uncanny topicality.” Spielberg himself felt “urgent” about making the movie “because of the current climate of this [Trump] administration, bombarding the press and labeling the truth as fake if it suited them.”

Becoming Katharine Graham (2025 documentary, Amazon Prime). A vivid nonfiction portrait of Graham’s evolution from reluctant heiress to one of the most powerful figures in American journalism. Unlike earlier portrayals, this film centers Graham’s voice and legacy, highlighting her leadership through the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. It also addresses her internal growth, gendered challenges, and visionary role at the Post. (I haven’t seen it yet, but it’s drawn praise from critics, including the L.A. Times)

Books Featuring The Washington Post

All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein (1974). The newsroom is portrayed as principled, persistent, and fearless. This is the story that first mythologized the Post’s role in exposing presidential misdeed.

The Final Days by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein (1976). The sequel to All the President’s Men, this book chronicles the unraveling of Richard Nixon’s presidency from an investigative vantage point. While the primary focus is on the White House, the Post remains a looming presence—its investigative legacy pressing in from offstage. The book reinforces the idea that sustained, institutionally supported journalism can exert long-term pressure on political power, even after the headlines fade.

Personal History by Katharine Graham (1997). A Pulitzer-winning memoir by the Post’s publisher. Traces her journey into leadership and the decisions that defined the paper’s role in defending press freedom. Graham’s introspective, personal, often vulnerable account adds a deeply human dimension to the Post’s institutional image.

Becoming Katharine Graham: The Woman Who Led The Washington Post and Transformed Journalism by Robin Gerber (2023). A thoroughly researched biography that complements the 2025 documentary. It focuses not only on Graham’s personal and professional life, but also on the cultural and historical significance of her leadership. Vital for understanding the Post’s transformation and its broader influence on women in media.

Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom by Carl Bernstein (2022). This coming-of-age memoir traces Bernstein’s early years in Washington journalism, before Watergate. While The Washington Post appears only at the end of the narrative—as the next step in his career—the book captures the culture of mid-century newsrooms and the formative experiences that shaped a future Post legend. It adds depth to the mythos of the investigative reporter by showing where the skills, instincts, and values first took root.

Newsroom Confidential by Margaret Sullivan (2022). From her desk as media columnist at the Post, Sullivan critiques the institution’s cautious stance during the Trump years. She raises tough questions about objectivity, transparency, and newsroom culture. Adds a reformist voice to the Post’s self-portrait. The opening is slow, but it gains momentum—stay with it.

Collision of Power by Martin Baron (2023) Our featured book. Baron’s inside view of the Post under Bezos, facing off against Trump, and trying to hold together a fractured information ecosystem under the pressures of technological innovation. Baron portrays the newsroom as a place where ideals collide with practical reality, especially around issues of generational change, journalistic identity, and political pressure.

Legacy: The Post as Icon

Taken together, the books and films about The Washington Post portray it as more than a newspaper. It is a national symbol of investigative rigor, institutional backbone, and First Amendment heroism. Its story has shaped public expectations of what journalism can do when it serves the public interest. For many readers and viewers, this legacy remains the default image of the Post—a legacy that Collision of Power both supports and undercuts, as Martin Baron grapples with the digital, political, and cultural forces reshaping journalism in the long shadow of Watergate.

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What Version of the Post Lives in You?
This isn’t just a story about Trump, or Bezos, or a single editor’s decisions. Collision of Power is also part of a much longer conversation about journalism, democracy, and how we come to trust, question, or even doubt the institutions that shape our public life.

As we read, I invite you to keep a question in mind: Which version of The Washington Post feels most familiar to you—and which one surprises you?

Feel free to drop your thoughts in the comments as you read the book, or just sit with the question as you turn the pages. We’ll come back to it soon.

Oh, and a quick reminder: please don’t miss George Clooney’s play, Good Night, and Good Luck, Sat June 7, 7 pm ET, “based on veteran journalist Edward R. Murrow’s work and tension with Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare of the 1950s.” The play explores the vital role of strong journalism in the preservation of democracy. I’m looking forward to it!

Note. I co-wrote this post with my AI assistant, Silas. He gathered source material, helped organize it, and assisted with tone and clarity. Think of Silas as a co-editor who never needs a coffee break but always remembers what year All the President’s Men came out. You can read more about how this partnership works in the AI Working Notes section.

I’m taking advantage of the lull to point out several things in the recent news—and to offer a few thoughts on our upcoming book.

Notes for Guerrilla Readers

“There is no corruption.”
In a recent Substack post, guerrilla writer Kristin Du Mez zeroes in on an issue that’s been on everyone’s mind for the past few days: Trump’s acceptance of that luxury 747 from Qatar. She draws from a post by Stephanie Jo Warren, who explains that White Christian Nationalists don’t see gifts like this as bribes or backroom deals. They see them as tribute—proof that their leader is divinely appointed. To them, this is evidence, Warren writes, “that America is ‘returning to God,’ evidence that, despite appearing corrupt from an outside perspective, it is all part of a greater design—God’s design. And that should terrify us all.”

Yes, it should.

Propaganda, then and now.
Remember Rachel Maddow’s description in Prequel of how WW2 Nazi propaganda made its way into American homes? German sympathizers in the U.S. would hand the material to a member of Congress, who entered it into the Congressional Record, then sent it out—postage paid—across the country.

That same strategy was tried in Argentina during the war. This week, NPR reported a startling discovery: A cache of Nazi propaganda from 1941, sent from the German Embassy in Tokyo and recently found in the basement of Argentina’s Supreme Court. Maddow’s account gave me the context to understand this Argentina story, and to see just how coordinated—and familiar—this kind of ideological infiltration can be.

And as Maddow reminds us:

“Librarians and archivists and teachers are the Fort Knox of memory, history, and truth. We must defend them with everything we’ve got.”

That line lands hard in the wake of Carla Hayden’s firing—the first Black woman to head the Library of Congress—dismissed under one of Trump’s DEI-dismantling orders and replaced by a white man, Todd Blanche. It’s not just a loss of skilled leadership. It’s a symbolic overwrite: white for Black, man for woman—as custodian of our national memory.

Isobel Wilkerson, too, sees the pattern.
In Caste, she writes:

“A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups . . . ”

This is the frame we need for reading the new wave of federal actions targeting transgender service members, workers, and children. What else are we seeing but the reinstatement of caste lines—signed and sealed by presidential order?

And So does Heather Cox Richardson.

In her May 15th letter, Richardson wrote that most modern authoritarian leaders are elected. “They maintain their power by using the power of the government—arrests, tax audits, defamation suits, politically targeted investigations, and so on—to punish and silence their opponents. They either buy or bully the media and civil society until opposing voices cave to their power.”

With that in mind, here are my thoughts on our June book, Collison of Power, by Martin Baron.

Bullies, Billionaires, and the Battle for the News

I hesitated before adding Collision to our Guerrilla Reads lineup. It’s not a page-turner for most readers. Some of it is technical—about newsroom metrics, workflow systems, audience dashboards, even the architecture of online publishing. And much of it is inside baseball: who said what to whom at the Post, and when, and why it mattered.

But I kept coming back to it, because Collision does something no other recent account quite manages. It captures—in real time—what it’s like to lead a national newsroom under siege by an authoritarian president, while simultaneously transforming that newsroom for the digital age. It’s difficult reading, guerrilla reading in several senses of the phrase. But the book matters, and I want to work with it.

In Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post, executive editor Martin Baron offers a sharp insider chronicle of American journalism’s clash with political power during Donald Trump’s first term. The story unfolds inside a legacy newsroom fighting on multiple fronts: against a president who makes the press a daily punching bag, against a media economy in digital freefall, and against internal tensions around the paper’s future. Owned by Jeff Bezos, guided by Baron, and targeted by Trump, the Washington Post finds itself caught in the gravitational pull of three powerful forces—money, politics, and truth.

Trump doesn’t single out just one enemy. The New York Times is a frequent target. So is CNN and MSNBC. But the Washington Post is the home-town favorite—it’s on Trump’s doorstep, and that makes it a punching bag of choice. Baron documents how Trump deploys the full rhetorical arsenal of authoritarian power: discrediting the press as “fake news,” branding journalists as “the enemy of the people” and expelling some from the White House press room and Air Force One. The newsroom doesn’t flinch. Under Baron’s leadership, the Post pursues story after important story—on Russian interference, on Mueller, on the administration’s internal dysfunction—with clarity, rigor, and visible moral backbone.

Bezos (apparently mindful of potential conflicts) stays in the background but looms large. His ownership gives the Post financial breathing room and tech-forward tools to modernize operations. He doesn’t interfere with editorial decisions during Trump’s first term—but Baron makes clear the underlying tension between journalism as a civic institution and ownership as a brand-building strategy. Bezos wants the Post to be profitable, global, sleek. Baron wants it to tell the truth and hold power to account. During this period, they manage to coexist. But the peace is uneasy.

That tension comes into sharper focus after Baron steps down. Collision of Power doesn’t cover Trump’s second run for office, but it resonates there. Bezos, once hands-off, now appears to recalibrate. Reports suggest he pulls the Post’s 2024 endorsement of Kamala Harris, a move that raised eyebrows across the political spectrum. Baron’s own caustic commentary on that decision makes clear that the resistance chronicled in the book has since softened—either bought, bullied, or both. Trump remains bully-in-chief, and the tools of authoritarian pressure haven’t changed. What has changed, perhaps, is the posture of the institutions on the receiving end.

That’s why Collision of Power reads as more than a retrospective. It’s a record of a newsroom holding the line during a high-stakes, high-pressure phase of democratic erosion. But it’s also a reminder that no line stays held unless the people behind it keep standing. Baron shows us what resistance looked like from inside the Post. What happens next isn’t in his book—but it’s very much part of its story. And we haven’t reached the end yet.

That’s it from me this week. Thanks, as always, for reading—and for your support, for which I’m more grateful than I can say. I’ll be back next Monday with the Gemini issue of Growing Green with the Zodiac, both the post and the workbook. And yes, I’m working on that China Bayles serialization project I’ve been telling you about. And did you see my AI post last Friday? GROK, Bias, and . . . Well, DOGE

In the meantime, I welcome your thoughts and comments on this post and . . . well, on anything that’s on your mind. Looking forward to hearing from you!

New friends: In this group, we are reading guerrilla writers who challenge what we think we know about the world we live in—books that help us understand how we got where we are today. Difficult reading, to be sure, often uncomfortable, painful, even deeply troubling. But we have to know what this world is like (really like) before we can recalibrate and move forward. And understanding can leave us both grateful and hopeful, even as we grope through the terrifying dark.

Everybody: You’ll find my earlier thoughts and some earlier discussion here (“Introducing Caste”) and also here (“Some thoughts on Caste, Democracy Awakening, and Jesus & John Wayne.”) You can find current updates on the Notes tab (on my navigation bar) and in your Home Feed. These are observations on connections between the books we read and current events reported in the media, as well as other things I want to share with you—and can’t wait until the next post.

Guerrilla authors making news

The Guardian recently posted an excellent investigative piece on the potential effects of Trump’s appointment of White Christian Nationalists to key positions in his administration, and the likely impact on the First Amendment’s separation of church and state. Kristin Du Mez, author of Jesus & John Wayne, is interviewed for the post. About the appointments, Du Mez says: “It’s a pretty narrow slice of rightwing, predominantly . . . white conservative Protestantism.” Katherine Stewart, author of Money, Lies, and God, predicts: “We will see public funds flowing directly to religious institutions, and the insertion of the Bible and sectarian messaging in public schools, town meetings and other places that serve religiously diverse populations.” See my recent “Guerrilla Extra” review of Stewart’s book here. And watch the news for daily examples of White Christian Nationalists inserting their beliefs into all levels of our government.

Heather Cox Richardson is currently hosting a video chat (with helpful transcript), answering topical and timely questions submitted by her readers. You can find that here.

Prequel’s paperback edition just been published and Rachel Maddow has announced a schedule of events to discuss the book. Some events are already sold out, so if you want to see Maddow in person, better book early. She’s a dynamic speaker, and her book talks are always informed by the latest headlines.

In Caste, Isobel Wilkerson points out how important it is for caste to be “invisible.” To that end, the Trump administration is erasing all traces of DEI from our public records. Just one example of how people are fighting back: “Students at Pentagon Schools Sue Hegseth Over Book Bans on Race and Gender.” The banned books included Maya Angelou’s celebrated autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and many titles relating to race and LGBTQ+ rights. (But Mein Kampf is still on the shelf.)

Some questions for our discussion of Caste

Here are some of the questions we’ve been considering—and I know you have others. Please join the continuing discussion of this book. It’s open to you whenever you have something to add.

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Two Hidden Histories, One Urgent Message

At first glance, Caste and Prequel don’t seem to belong on the same shelf. One is a sweeping meditation on social hierarchy; the other is a sharp investigation of American fascists in the lead-up to World War II. But if you sit with them together for a while, they start to sound like a two-part warning—one from the inside of the house, the other from the front gate.

Both books are asking us to stop focusing on the headlines and start paying attention to the foundations—what’s underneath. Wilkerson wants us to notice the structure we live inside every day—the one that ranks people by race/caste and keeps inequality running quietly in the background. Maddow, on the other hand, asks us to look at the slow-building threat outside the window: political movements driven by power, fear, and a talent for blending in that may seem fringe—even hyper-fringe—until they aren’t. Until they’re no longer outside the window. They’re in our living rooms.

These two authors come from different angles, but they’re telling us something similar: What looks like crisis is often just the system doing what it was built to do.

What They Notice

Both authors care deeply about history—not just as something to remember in a quiet moment, but as something that has never really left the room. Wilkerson shows how America’s caste system isn’t something buried in the historical past. It’s the scaffolding that still shapes who gets seen, who gets silenced, who gets the job, who gets to feel safe.

Maddow reminds us that the U.S. had its own forgotten fascist movements in the 1930s and ’40s—well-funded, well-connected, and shockingly mainstream. And here we are again. Don’t believe me? Just look at the news.

There’s a powerful throughline here: If we don’t know the history, it’ll end up in o our laps.

Denial Is Part of the Design

One of the strongest links between Caste and Prequel is the role of denial—not just as a personal blind spot, but as a structural tool. In Caste, Wilkerson shows how the dominant caste maintains control by refusing to see its own privilege. It’s not just silence—it’s strategic not-seeing. Current examples: the erasure of DEI from government records. The most chilling, IMO: the removal of Maya Angelou's memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from the U.S. Naval Academy library, while copies of Mein Kampf remains on the shelves.

In Prequel, Maddow shows us newspaper stories and takes us inside congressional hearings where people knew exactly what was happening with pro-fascist groups—but chose to look the other way. In both, the danger wasn’t always the bad actors. Sometimes it was the good people who simply didn’t want to deal with it. Want a current example? Just look at Congress. You’ll find plenty.

When Normal Gets Dangerous

And maybe the most significant connection: Both books show how dangerous “normal” and “normalizing” can be. Wilkerson describes how caste survives because it feels familiar. It’s the walls around us, the ceilings overhead, the floor we walk on. And it doesn’t feel especially oppressive until and unless you’re the one who’s stepped on. For example, you’re a high-achieving Turkish Fulbright Scholar in an American university on an F-1 student visa—until you’re snatched off the street and deported.

Maddow’s story is full of moments where fascist sympathizers use patriotic language, media platforms, and polite social circles to avoid detection. They didn’t show up in jackboots. They wore suits-and-ties and clerical collars. They hosted radio shows and built roads and universities and published newspapers and were celebrity airplane pilots. They sounded “reasonable.”

That’s what makes “normal” all so dangerous. We don’t notice. We accept. It’s always been this way, and that’s okay. Until it isn’t.

Different Lenses, Shared Urgency

Of course, the books are different in tone and shape.

Wilkerson writes with the grace of a poet and the urgent self-examination of a moral philosopher. She looks deep into herself and invites readers to reflect, to reckon, to feel. Caste is the kind of book that lingers—it asks us to ask ourselves who we are and where we belong in this moral universe.

Prequel moves fast. It’s built like a thriller, but it’s all true. Maddow follows the money, the documents, the names. As she does on her television show, she lays out the dots and then connects them, one by one, with a journalist’s precision and a prosecutor’s patience. There’s not much self-examination here. There isn’t time for it.

But what they both make clear is this:
We don’t get to say, “We didn’t know.”
We know now.
And knowing comes with responsibility.

More questions. Of course.

Yes. Books like these always make us ask questions. Here are a few that bother me. If they bother you, too, I’d love to hear about it.

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If you want to understand how Christian Nationalism became such a powerful force in American politics—and why it is now at the heart of a second Trump presidency—Katherine Stewart’s Money, Lies, and God is essential reading. This is not a book about personal belief. It’s not about church pews or Sunday sermons or vacation Bible school. It’s about well-designed, carefully constructed political machinery: how and why it was built, who’s paying for it, and what it’s doing to American democracy.

One of Stewart’s central points is that Christian Nationalism isn’t a grassroots rebellion. It’s a top-down, long-haul project. Billionaires—some deeply religious, some not at all—have been funding it for years. Think of the DeVos family, the Wilks brothers, the Mercers, the Koch network. These funders aren’t just underwriting churches or Christian schools (although they’re doing that, too); they’re building a political machine: legal advocacy groups, media outlets, data-driven voter mobilization o…

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This week, I’ve been thinking about the books we’ve read so far in this group (each one brave in its own way) and wanted to share those thoughts with you. Maybe they’ll help you see Wilkerson’s work in an even wider context. (I haven’t included Prequel because it tells a very different kind of story.)

I’m also opening comments to this post for those who have already read the book and have it on their minds. If that’s you, jump in.

Three Books, One Crisis

The three books we are reading in this group—Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, Heather Cox Richardson’s Democracy Awakening, and Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne—aren’t telling the same story, but they’re definitely talking to each other. Together, they help us understand how American life got so tangled up in hierarchy, backlash, and belief—and what it might take to move forward.

Each book looks at a different layer of the same big mess:

• Caste shows us the invisible structure underneath the whole thing: how power and personal worth are assigned, often by race/caste, in ways we hardly notice—unless we’re among the marginalized.

• Democracy Awakening maps how our democratic system has been pushed to the edge by decades of strategic power plays using cultural divisions (race/caste) as political tools.

• Jesus and John Wayne zooms in on white evangelical masculinity and how it became deeply tied to politics, fear of the Other, and control of the marginalized.

What they all say, each in its own way: This didn’t happen overnight. What we’re living with may look like the “the way things just happen to happen.” But it’s really the result of long-standing systems doing what they were built to do.

They also all focus on backlash. Wilkerson writes about how dominant groups push back hard when they feel the grasp on power slipping. Richardson walks us through political movements—from the Goldwater-Nixon Southern Strategy to Trump’s MAGA—that were built on fear of loss of power and resentment of the Other. Du Mez shows how evangelical leaders doubled down on masculinity and control as a response to feminism, civil rights, immigration, and LGBTQ. Backlash isn’t random. It’s a strategy.

And each book lands in the same place: We’re at a turning point.

• Wilkerson asks: Can we be a true and lasting democracy if the structures that organize caste/race/gender stay in place?

• Richardson warns that democracy only works if individuals and groups step up to defend it.

• Du Mez asks (not very optimistically) whether and how white national evangelicalism can pull away from its power structures.

They all ask us to pay attention. And to decide.

What They Notice in Common

There are a few big ideas that these books circle around again and again:

History matters.
Who tells it, who gets left out, and how it’s used to justify power. All three authors show that forgetting (or rewriting) the past is a powerful way to keep things unequal.

Whiteness isn’t just about race—it’s about power over the Other.
Wilkerson puts whiteness at the top of the caste system. Richardson shows how it’s been used politically to divide people. Du Mez explores how it gets wrapped in religion, masculinity, and American identity.

Fear is a tool.
Not a feeling—an actual strategy. And mostly, it’s fear of the Other: fear of losing political power or status to the Other, and fear of the Other’s bringing change. These books show how fear is used to build loyalty, enforce silence, and keep people from questioning the system.

Religion can lift up—or lock down.
All three authors touch on the role of faith traditions. Sometimes religion fuels justice and community. But it’s also been used to reinforce caste, nationalism, patriarchy, and white power.

And finally: The stories we tell ourselves really matter.
From the myth of American innocence and specialness (Richardson) and the notion of strong-man saviors (Du Mez) to the story from under and outside, these books all ask: What happens when we finally start telling the whole truth about who we are?

Same Conversation, Different Angles

Even though these books are all dealing with power, identity, and what’s going wrong in America, they each come into the conversation from a different direction.

Wilkerson, in Caste, is more personal and reflective—this is her story, as a member of a “lower caste.” She invites us to slow down and spend some serious time thinking about the deeper structures that shape how we see each other—and ourselves. Her book is full of metaphors and big-picture thinking. It’s the kind of book that lingers on the questions, “What have you inherited? Where did that put you in the social hierarchy? How has it shaped who you are and what you do?”

Richardson, in Democracy Awakening, sounds the alarm. She has a historian’s eye on the past, a journalist’s sense of urgency about the present, and a teacher’s need to make things clear. Her book is like a timeline showing how we got from “We the People” to where we are now. She’s asking readers to pay attention—and to act.

Du Mez, in Jesus and John Wayne, digs into the culture, especially how white evangelical Christianity shaped a certain kind of American strong man. Her tone is sharp and direct. Her method is that of a cultural detective pulling together the clues. Her tone is a preacher’s call to repent and take a different way. She’s asking, “What have we been told to believe? Who does that serve? and What are you going to do about it?”

So while they all care deeply about justice, truth, and the future of the country, each is speaking from a different place. Wilkerson says: Look inside at who you are. Richardson says: Question the facts. Du Mez says: Ask harder questions about what you believe.

Put them together, and you get a full, powerful picture of where we’ve been—and what we need to rethink.

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Let’s Think About This

Here are a few things to think about as you read, keeping the other books in mind. Some of you have asked me to open the discussion earlier, so that readers can chime in if they’ve already finished the book. So I’ll do that with this post. Jump in whenever and as often as you have something to add to the conversation.

Where do you notice the structure?
Wilkerson talks about caste as as a hidden framework, like a building’s joists and rafters—always there, shaping our lives even when we don’t see it. Do you notice anything like that in your own world? In your workplace, school, neighborhood/community, church, social media?

What’s fear doing here?
All three books show how fear is used to keep people in line—politically, socially, even spiritually. Have you seen moments when fear was driving the conversation or shaping people’s choices? What was the fear protecting—or trying to stop?

What stories do we believe about ourselves?
Whether it’s the “land of opportunity,” “a Christian nation,” or “we’re all equal under the law,” America is powered by story. Which ones did you grow up with? Are there any you’ve questioned lately, or even let go of?

Where do you fit in the big picture?
None of these books is about finger-pointing. They’re about awareness, about being (yes!) a guerrilla, about doing something to shape the outcome. So where do you see yourself in this bigger story about power, change, and identity? What feels like your role right now? What’s yours to do?

Congratulations (and thanks) for reading all the way to the end! I appreciate every single one of you and thank you for being part of this group of brave readers. I’ll be back on Monday with my usual LifeScapes post. See you then!

To new friends: In this group, we are reading writers who challenge what we think we knew about about the world we live in—books that push us toward new understandings of the world we inherited and the communities we have shaped. These are not escapist, fun-to-read books, and the reading is unsettling, disturbing, even (often) frightening. But they give us a map through unforgiving terrain in daunting weather—sometimes the fog is so thick we can’t see the person walking beside us. And it’s good to know that somebody recently made the dangerous trip through this daunting territory and left us some field notes so we can grope our way through the dark to the other side of whatever-this-is. So we read on, hopefully.

This post is a brief reader’s guide to Caste. Earlier posts and discussions in this same series are here. Free subscribers are welcome to read along with the posts; paid subscribers have access to additional resources and are welcome to join the discussion that will open on April 21.

This week begins our usual reading period. This is a complex, multilayered book, so I’ve compiled a brief outline with a few questions that might help you move through it.

Part One: Toxins in the Permafrost

Chapters 1–3

• What does Wilkerson mean by “an old house”? How does this metaphor help us understand “structural injustice”?

• What buried "toxins" have you—your family, your schools, your workplaces, your community—inherited from the past?

Part Two: The Construction of Caste

Chapters 4-9

• In Prequel, we read about the connections between Nazi Germany and American laws. Wilkerson makes that connection even more hugely consequential than Maddow. How?

• Caste is easier to see when it isn’t ours. Both Martin Luther King and Wilkerson went to India. What did they learn? Have you been in a situation where caste (yours or others) was suddenly apparent to you?

Part Three: The Eight Pillars of Caste

Wilkerson’s eight pillars (somewhat rephrased) are:

1. “divine” law, “natural order,” origin stories;

2. heritage: caste is inherited, fixed (class isn’t);

3. endogamy, who can marry whom, have children;

4. who’s clean, who’s “dirty”;

5. who gets to work where, for how much;

6. “othering”: stigmatism, dehumanization;

7. controlling behavior by terror, cruelty;

8. inherent superiority/inferiority.

• Which pillars do you intuitively find most familiar? Why?

• Which pillars are unfamiliar? Why?

• Wilkerson writes: “If you can act your way out of it, then it is class, not caste.” Do you agree?

• Do you see any examples of any of these pillars in recent political events, here or in other countries?

Part Four: The Tentacles of Caste

Chapters 10-18

• Wilkerson uses personal and historical stories to show us how caste works. Which of these caught your attention? Surprised you? Made you squirm?

• How do military service, sports, and education reinforce or challenge caste? Have any of these impacted you?

Part Five: The Consequences of Caste

Chapters 19-24

In the U.S., Wilkerson writes, there is “an expectation that an upper-caste person must assert superiority of knowledge and intellect in all things, having been socialized to be first and to be central, a pressure to be right and the need to remind the lower-caste person, subtly or not, of their historic, cultural, spatial, and familial inferiority.” Have you experienced this? In what context?

Part Six: Backlash

Chapters 25-29

• What’s involved in backlash? Why? What instances of it are you seeing in our current situation?

• What’s the role of silence, denial, or complicity in preserving caste systems? What evidences of it do you see in current events?

Part Seven: Awakening

Chapters 30-31 + Epilogue

• What would it mean to live in a “world without caste”? How would that work? Is it possible? Why, why not?

• What does Wilkerson’s story, “the heart is the last frontier,” suggest about personal transformation? Do you have a similar story?

Below, a few more questions and resources for readers who want to dig deeper and who plan to join our discussion (beginning April 21). You’ll also find a list of additional titles on this topic and an announcement of our May selection!

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One reader added a comment this morning to our ongoing discussion of important pro-democracy books. Leenie H. has finished Prequel and is left wondering “who our heroes today will be, what sacrifices they will make for democracy.” That thought, she adds, is thrilling: “thinking that somewhere, right now someone is making hard choices and stepping out of line to take on the herculean work at hand. Just as there are always greed-drenched, power-lusting players, there are also those committed body, heart, and soul to the triumph of truth, equality, and justice.”

I don’t know about you, but I am so glad to have that reminder. In a time when all the news is bad news, when all we hear are stories about power grabs and government disruption, we need a hero or two—as many as we can get, actually.

And they’re out there, if we only pay attention! My candidate-of-the-morning (it will probably be different this afternoon) is Greenpeace, which just lost an important interim court battle (there will likely be an appeal). Greenpeace has been fighting our climate, social justice, and battles for decades now. I admire their persistence, their creative confrontations, their enduring commitment to the defense of democracy. They are my heroes. Who are yours?

To preserve the thread, I’ve closed comments on this post. Comments are open on Monday’s discussion post, here. Please share your thoughts.

Susan

New friends: In this group, we are reading guerrilla writers who challenge what we think we know about the world we live in—books that help us understand how we got where we are today. Difficult reading, to be sure, often uncomfortable, painful, even deeply troubling. But we have to understand before we can recalibrate and move forward. And understanding can leave us both grateful and hopeful, even as we grope through the terrifying dark.

Everybody: You’ll find my brief reader’s guide to Prequel here. Please look back at it for an overview of Maddow’s book: character groups, settings, and plots, subplots, and counterplots. (It’s about espionage, after all.)

In today’s post: I want to look at the three books we’ve read in this set: Democracy Awakening, Jesus and John Wayne, and Prequel. This may give us a different lens through which to look at the books and their authors and consider the ongoing relationships we have with each. As a writer myself, I try to see the books I read from the writer’s point of view—not as a finished thing, but a work-still-in-progress. And these three books and our access to virtual platforms give us the unusual, perhaps even unique opportunity to see and interact with the authors’ ideas as they develop in real time.

Free subscribers have access to these introductory posts; paid subscribers have access to additional resources and are welcome to join me and others in the discussion that begins today and continues as long as anybody has anything to say.

Let’s get started.

Three Writers, Three Voices

At first glance, Democracy Awakening, Jesus and John Wayne, and Prequel might seem like three different books with three different missions for three different audiences . Heather Cox Richardson (HCR) offers a sweeping historical narrative about democracy’s fragility, Kristin Kobes Du Mez (KKDM) investigates the cultural power of white Christian nationalism, and Rachel Maddow (RM) unearths a nearly forgotten tale of barely thwarted American fascism. Each author approaches her subject from a distinct angle—historical synthesis, cultural critique, and investigative journalism—yet all three are grappling with the same urgent question: How do authoritarian and anti-democratic forces take hold in the United States, and why do they persist? Taken together, their answers constitute a strikingly layered and revealing conversation about the forces shaping contemporary American political life. How so?

Democracy Awakening. Richardson writes like a historian who has spent decades helping students see patterns from the past that repeat themselves in the present. Her tone in Democracy Awakening is measured, explanatory, and almost reassuring in its clarity, even as she delivers unsettling truths. She lays out the facts and their implications, leaving us with both concern and a sense of agency. While democracy has always been flawed and fragile, she tells us, history offers solutions, if we pay attention.

Jesus and John Wayne. Du Mez, in contrast, writes with the precision of a cultural critic who is less interested in synthesis than in exposure. Her voice is piercing, at times even ironic, as she dismantles the mythology of American evangelical masculinity. She shows us what’s wrong with it, in damning moral terms. We’re not listening to an academic lecture but a deeply, earnestly-felt sermon. KKDM writes with the urgent conviction of a prophet revealing a scandalous, dangerous cultural system—one that desperately needs fixing.

And now to Prequel. Maddow has a journalist’s instinct for storytelling. In Prequel, she doesn’t just relate a forgotten moment in history. She plots her story as a political thriller with a strong espionage subplot. Her voice on the page sounds very much like her television voice: engaging, wry, and slyly, snarkily mischievous, as if she’s letting the reader in on a secret buried in just-declassified files. Where HRC paints the facts with a broad, sweeping brush and KKDM sharpens her critique like a double-bladed knife, RM delivers a suspenseful page-turner deeply etched with connections to the present, challenging the reader to see how the 1930s and 40s are a runup to the 2020s. Prequel is a reminder that the past isn’t something we study (as HCR does) or inveigh against (like KKDM). It’s something we have to live with—and relive, like it or not. Homegrown authoritarianism is not a distant threat, nor a new one, and forgetting or failing to understand our past makes us vulnerable to repeating it.

Three Writers, Three Career Arcs

These three writers are not just different in their approaches, but in their career trajectories—and that makes a difference in how they tell their stories

Richardson is already a respected academic historian with seven books to her credit, all focused on 19th-century political history. With Democracy Awakening and her massively popular Substack, Letters from an American, she assumes the broader role of a public intellectual, something like the Nation’s Historian, bringing in-depth historical perspective to current daily events.

In contrast, Jesus and John Wayne is Du Mez’s breakout book, propelling her from the quieter world of academic religious history and her personal faith community into a clamorous national conversation on evangelicalism and power, where she has become an active leader in a cultural reckoning. And like HCR, KKDM uses Substack as a way of connecting with an audience beyond her faith community.

Maddow is in a different place. Firmly established as an MSNBC news anchor and liberal political commentator, she has also produced four books. Drift (2012) examined the unchecked growth of the military-industrial complex. Blowout (2019) focused on the geopolitical influence of the oil and gas industry. Both expose corruption, the abuse of power, and the erosion of democratic accountability.

Maddow’s third book, Bag Man (2020, co-authored with Michael Yarvitz) began as a popular podcast revisiting the Spiro Agnew bribery scandal—and issuing a blunt political warning. Overshadowed by Nixon’s downfall, Agnew’s case is a textbook example of how a corrupt political figure manipulates public opinion, attacks the rule of law, and dodges accountability, all while he’s personally profiting. Bag Man makes it clear: This is the Trump playbook before Trump. Anybody thinking Tesla sales on the South Lawn?

Now comes the fourth book, Prequel (with Ultra, its precedent podcast). Here, Maddow takes a look at multiple historical figures, uncovering suppressed histories of American fascism and linking past and present in ways that feel urgent and revelatory. She is building a broader case than she built in Bagman: that American authoritarianism is not a one-off, an anomaly—it’s a recurring feature of our political environment, returning in new forms whenever accountability falters.

Together, these three writers—Richardson, Du Mez, Maddow—tell a fuller, richer story than any one of them could alone. The historian, the cultural critic, and the journalist each brings her own questions to the same problem, offering readers not just facts but frameworks for understanding why America finds itself at this crossroads. For those of us trying to find our way through this present chaotic moment, these three writers—different in tone, method, and scope—are essential companions.

Which brings up one more point. Each of these three women has created an important continuing connection with her readers. That is, these books are not static, finished, or self-contained. Each is part of an ongoing dialogue, shaped by its author’s deep engagement with current events, other thinkers, and her audience. While books have always influenced public discourse, this real-time, two-way communication feels especially contemporary to me. Let’s have a closer look.

Historian as Public Intellectual. Through Letters from an American, Richardson maintains a daily, real-time relationship with her audience, explaining history as it happens rather than simply analyzing the past. Seen in this light, Democracy Awakening isn’t just a book; it’s part of an evolving historical interpretation that HCR renews, refines and reshapes in response to the day’s events. At the same time, readers shape her thinking process by asking questions, expressing concerns, and steering her toward issues that matter to them. This interactive process means that her work is never really done—it’s a rolling, adaptive project, one that can’t be neatly contained between covers.

Cultural Critic in Conversation. Du Mez’s relationship with her audience is different. She is in an ongoing conversation with both supporters and critics of Jesus and John Wayne, which directly challenges powerful cultural narratives within American evangelicalism and has generated an enormous response within that world. Some of the figures she critiques have reacted, and her arguments have prompted significant debate and many proposals for change. This means that Jesus and John Wayne is not just a cultural analysis, but an intervention, a powerful agent in an ongoing cultural reckoning. The book is changing the way people within that world talk about power, militant masculinity, gender roles, and politics. What’s more, KKDM continues to engage through interviews, podcasts, and Connections (her Substack), evolving the argument, integrating new developments, and responding to counterpoints—all within the political context of the ongoing Trump administration. Her book’s conclusions continue to be tested in real time.

The Journalist’s “Live Footnotes.” Given her regular MSNBC gig (currently five nights a week for the first 100 days of Trump 2.0), Rachel Maddow has a unique opportunity as an author. Without being in-your-face about it, she keeps Prequel in circulation, revisiting its key arguments and tying elements of its plot to ongoing political developments. When she references figures like Ernest Lundeen and George Sylvester Viereck on her TV program (as she did last week), she’s reinforcing a critical point: the history she’s uncovered is not an artifact—it’s a living, breathing element of our political reality. Prequel is just that.

What’s Next for These Writers?

These authors aren’t done yet. Richardson’s work on democracy continues to evolve in a number of forums, Du Mez is deep into new women’s research, and Maddow is headed for the Big Screen: Both Bagman (Focus Features) and Prequel (Spielberg’s Ambien Entertainment) have been optioned for film and are currently under development.

These important conversations aren’t just ongoing—they’re widening, deepening, and moving into new formats.

This post is too long already, so let’s cut to the chase. Past the paywall: Discussion questions, a list of additional titles on anti-democratic authoritarianism and a look ahead at our April, May, June, and July Guerrilla book choices.

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To new friends: In this group, we are reading writers who challenge what we think we knew about about the world we live in—books that lead us to a deeper understanding of how we got where we are today and where we’re likely to be tomorrow and the day after that. This is difficult reading, to be sure, often uncomfortable, painful, even deeply troubling. But helpful in the long run, for it clues us into what’s going on, who the players are, what we need to be looking for as it all seems to come apart, why it all matters—and sometimes, what we might do about it. Understanding can help us recalibrate. It can leave us both grateful and hopeful, even as we grope through the dark.

This post is a brief reader’s guide to Prequel. Earlier posts and discussions in this same series are here. Free subscribers are welcome to read along with the posts; paid subscribers have access to additional resources and are welcome to join the discussion.

Full disclosure: I’ve been a dedicated viewer of Maddow’s TV show since 2010. I’ve read her books and listened to her podcasts. I am always impressed with the depth and breadth of her research and with her ability to bridge ideas from one historical period to another—and then use that bridge as a place from which we can view the present. This book is written with the same fierce passion that she brings to her on-screen and on-air work. IOW, if you’re looking for objective reportage, don’t reach for Prequel. Maddow cares about this story in a visceral way. She leaves a little bit of herself on every page.

A word about reading methods. I’ve read the book in pixels, together with Maddow’s synchronized narration—so I have both my marked-up text and the pleasure of her usual vividly dramatic style. Many of you will have listened to her narration but may not have the text. And since there are scores of characters, a dozen different settings, and a confusing number of intersecting plots, you may feel a little lost. So I have compiled the following brief reader’s guide to help you pull things together—a little cheat sheet, a map to help you make your way through a complex labyrinth of intersecting stories that played out over the two decades of the Great Depression and the Second World War and are coming back to life in our own time, some 90 years later.

Structure

It may help you to imagine this book as a series of four braided whodunnit plots, linked by and in the service of a single overarching political plot: the Nazi effort to neutralize the United States as a potential enemy and to prepare it for a possible takeover:

The Nazi game plan aimed to disunite the United States by tearing at the weakest political and cultural seams in American society: the divide between haves and have-nots, fear and hatred of immigrants, white supremacist race hate, and antisemitism.”― Prequel

Characters: Villains and heroes

The plot involves three different groups of villains, all working zealously in different settings to bring authoritarianism, fascism, and Nazism to the United States. These pro-Nazi players include:

• fanatical homegrown fascists like Huey Long, priest and radio celebrity Father Coughlin, antisemitic Henry Ford, America Firster Charles Lindberg, Lawrence Dennis and his follower Phillip Johnson, John Cassidy, wacky William Dudley Pelley and his Silver Shirts, and fuhrer-candidate George Van Horn Moseley;

• professional Nazi propagandists and espionage actors like George Viereck, George Deatherage, working out of the German Embassy in D.C. with direct financial and material support from Nazi Germany; and

• cooperative American legislators and government officials, some witting, some unwitting but complicit. Involved are 20-plus actively and criminally complicit senators and representatives, like Ernest Lundeen (who conveniently dies in the crash of Flight 19), Hamilton Fish, Burton Wheeler, and Gerald P. Nye, as well as passively complicit officials like Attorney General Francis Biddle, who derails efforts to bring the villains to justice.

Through the 1930s and 1940s, these three groups of villains are opposed by four groups of action heroes:

• passionate amateurs like Leon Lewis, a lawyer who organizes a spy ring in LA, and Henry Hoke, a direct-mail guy who uncovers Viereck’s congressional mailing scheme;

• dedicated journalists like Dillard Stokes (Washington), Arnold Eric Sevareid (Detroit), John C. Metcalfe (Chicago), and others who go undercover in often dangerous settings;

• government agencies like the Dies Committee (House Unamerican Activities Committee) and Hoover’s FBI, neither of which do a bang-up job. An exception, G-man Leon Turrou, fired by a jealous Hoover because he is too effective, both at finding spies and at selling stories to Hollywood; and

• professional prosecutors like O. John Rogge and William Power Maloney, who tried their damnedest to do their jobs but are thwarted by government officials who cave to political demands by complicit lawmakers.

Settings and subplots

The conflicts between these groups of characters play out in four important settings and four major subplots:

• The South and Upper Midwest. In Arkansas, where Nazi lawyer Heinrich Krieger studies Jim Crow race laws as a model for Nazi racial legislation. In Louisiana, where lawless authoritarian Huey Long runs the state like a ruthless mob boss while he puts on an aw-shucks style to court national populist support for a 1936 presidential run against FDR; and near Detroit, the broadcast home of Father Charles Coughlin’s virulently fascist radio program, heard by a third of the nation. Detroit is also the home base of Henry Ford, who spreads his toxic antisemitism through his nationally-distributed newspaper, the Dearborn Independent.

• California. In Los Angeles, the movie capital is a frontline of antifascist resistance, with Leon Lewis’ counter-fascist spy network infiltrating Nazi cells and exposing terrorist plans. Lewis’ network also successfully foils a raid on the National Guard Armory in San Francisco. And Hollywood begins telling spy stories with Leon Turrou’s 1938 Confessions of a Nazi Spy. The postwar Hollywood blacklist is an echo of these early fascist infiltration attempts.

• Washington D.C., the institutional heart of the story, where Congress functions as the official hub for the illegal distribution of pro-Nazi propaganda. This is where Viereck employs elected officials like Ernest Lundeen, Hamilton Fish, and dozens of others to push Nazi propaganda to millions of American taxpayers. It’s also the setting of the Great Sedition Trial of 1944, which collapses—but not before it exposes the villains in court and in the media.

• New York City. While it’s not a primary battleground, New York’s role in the transnational financial and media support of the fascist and pro-Nazi movement makes it critical. It’s also the national headquarters of the German American Bund, the most visible pro-Nazi organization in America, which in 1939 packs 20,000 people into Madison Square Garden. Speakers infamously call for “a white, Gentile-ruled United States.” New York is also the location of the main chapter of the America First Committee, where Charles Lindbergh—who openly admires Nazi military power and promotes antisemitic conspiracy theories—argues for isolationism. Plus, America’s largest city is of course the newspaper capital of the country, and newspapers are the internet of the day.

Four battlegrounds, One common failure

Across these four key settings—Arkansas/Louisiana, Los Angeles, Washington, and New York—the Nazi threat takes different forms: legal and ideological influence in the South, paramilitary activity in L.A., political subversion in D.C., and financial/media backing in New York. In every case, small-scale actors like journalists, private spies, and a handful of prosecutors try to push back—but without firm government backing, their efforts can only do so much. The institutional response is weak, often compromised, and ultimately ineffective in putting a stop to Nazi infiltration or (even!) holding the guilty to account once they have been stopped. If it had not been for Pearl Harbor forcing the U.S. into war, there is a very real possibility that these fascist movements could have gained more power and influence in American politics.

The warning: History may not repeat, but it rhymes

Maddow doesn’t argue in the book that America in the 2010s and 20s is facing a situation identical to the 1930s and 40s. But she does suggest that we face the same conditions—rising authoritarianism, the failure of democratic institutional guardrails, daily social media propaganda, political complicity in the legislatures. Prequel challenges the idea that American democracy is inherently stable and suggests that, just as in the years before World War II, the Constitution is only as strong as the people willing and able to defend it. History shows us that fascist sympathizers almost got away with their plots—until Pearl Harbor compelled a national response.

The questions Maddow implicitly asks is: What will be our Pearl Harbor moment? And will it come too late? As you read, please think about her questions. How would you answer them? What most concerns you now, given our developing international situation?

Past the paywall: More questions for readers who want to dig deeper and who plan to join our discussion (beginning Feb. 17). Also a link to a video of a far-ranging and deeply-informed conversation between Maddow and Ben Wittes of Lawfare, as well as a list of additional titles on this topic and an announcement of our April selection.

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A couple of comments in our discussion of Kristin Du Mez’s book gave me something new to think about and I wanted to share them with you. (This post goes to paid subscribers only.)

The first comment came from Substacker Jonna Higgins-Freese, in response to my question on Monday about the last line of the book. KKDM said that she wrote the last line, “What was once done might also be undone,” at the urging of her editor, who wanted her to “leave readers with just a bit of hope.” KKDM wondered whether that last sentence was too “feeble.”

Jonna didn’t think so. In her comment, she wrote:

I think the sentence "What was once done might also be undone," is a work of genius. . . [I]t recalls the sentiment and cadence of the General Confession used (at least) by Lutherans and Episcopalians: "Most merciful God/we confess that we have sinned against you/in thought, word, and deed,/by what we have done, and by what we have left undone” . . . But the sentence also reminds us of our agency and respo…

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Welcome back to our second Guerrilla read, and hello to new subscribers. We’re about to open our discussion of Kristen Kobes Du Mez’s history of White Christian Nationalism, Jesus and John Wayne. Putting this book together with our first read, Heather Cox Richardson’s Democracy Awakening, we can begin to get a glimpse of the broader historical forces that have pulled us into the current political chaos.

Okay folks, here we go, starting with a brief summary of Du Mez’s central arguments.

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To new friends: In Guerrilla Readers, we are reading writers who challenge what we think we know about about the world we live in—books that lead us to a deeper understanding of how we got where we are today and where we’re likely to be tomorrow and the day after that. This is difficult reading, to be sure, not fun or even mildly entertaining, often uncomfortable, even deeply troubling. But helpful in the long run, for it clues us into what’s going on, who the players are, what we need to be looking for as it all seems to come apart, why it all matters—and sometimes, what we can do about it. Understanding can help us recalibrate. It can leave us both grateful and hopeful, even as we grope through the dark.

Earlier posts and discussions in this series are here. Free subscribers are welcome to read along with these posts on the books; paid subscribers can share their thoughts and feelings with other readers in our discussions.

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What did it mean to be an evangelical? Did it mean upholding a set of doctrinal truths, or did it mean embracing a culture-wars application of those truths—a God-and-country religiosity that championed white rural and working-class values, one that spilled over into a denigration of outsiders and elites, and that was organized around a deep attachment to militarism and patriarchal masculinity?—Jesus and John Wayne. loc 4217

In the late 1940s-50s, my mother belonged to a fundamentalist Church of Christ. As a child, I went to services and potluck suppers with her and enjoyed years’-long friendships with members of the congregation. As a young woman, I taught Sunday school in a Southern Baptist church. I sold my first piece of writing to a church publication. Although my spiritual life took a different direction in my mid-adult years, I thought I understood the evangelical movement.

Which is why I was absolutely dumbfounded when evangelicals carried Trump into the White House in 2016. The congregation I knew in the ’50s would have been appalled by his porn-star affairs and his “grab ’em by the p****y” boast. They could never have supported a man like him. What happened?

That’s why I reached so eagerly for Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s 2020 book, Jesus and John Wayne. I wanted to know how the evangelicals I knew as a kid growing up had morphed into the kinds of people who could be duped into supporting Trump or—even more incredibly—how they did it with such apparent enthusiasm.

I got what I asked for. Jesus and John Wayne is a sharp, thoroughly researched historical analysis of how white American evangelicalism was taught to embrace a militant, patriarchal vision of Christianity—one that prioritized power, nationalism, and masculinity over theological doctrine. KKDM argues that this transformation wasn't a distortion of evangelicalism but an organic outgrowth of its long-standing cultural and political commitments. The book traces this development across the 20th and 21st centuries, culminating in the overwhelming evangelical support for Donald Trump, a figure whose personal morality conflict with traditional Christian moral standards but whose authoritarian, hyper-masculine persona resonates with the evangelical base.

Some things I’m thinking about as I read

Evangelicalism as a political, cultural, and commercial movement. Du Mez argues that it has become as much political as theological , now shaped by cultural anxieties about gender roles, race, and power. She highlights how evangelical leaders—from Billy Graham to James Dobson—used their platforms to push conservative social and political agendas, and how commercial Christian media have profited.

The cult of militant masculinity. Evangelicalism in the U.S. has been deeply shaped by a vision of masculinity that celebrates aggression, dominance, and "warrior" leadership, often tied to militarism and law-and-order politics. Figures like John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, and even Teddy Roosevelt served as cultural prototypes of the "Christian warrior," reinforcing this ideal.

The role of white evangelical women. Women played a crucial role in promoting and defending this brand of militant masculinity, particularly through family values rhetoric and the cult of male headship. Figures like Phyllis Schlafly, the Duggar family, and conservative Christian women’s ministries reinforced submission, modesty, and wifely duty, even as they wielded influence within evangelical circles.

Abortion, racial politics and evangelical power. White evangelicalism has consistently been linked to racial hierarchy, supporting segregationist policies and opposing civil rights movements. But the evangelical power base arises both from resistance to desegregation and racial parity and from pro-life abortion resistance as well.

The evangelicals’ embrace of Trump. Du Mez demonstrates how Trump’s appeal to evangelicals isn’t a bug but a feature of the movement’s long-standing celebration of strongman leadership. His defiance of “political correctness,” his promises to defend conservative Christian values (especially against feminism, DEI, LGBTQ+ rights, and secular liberalism), and his militant rhetoric have enshrined him as a champion of white evangelicals.

Some things to watch for

Both Richardson and Du Mez want to teach us what to watch for in the media we consume.

• The false narrative of a “golden yesterday.” Evangelical narratives about America’s past are often built on an idealized and inaccurate version of history.

• Women as patriarchy enforcers, enablers. Christian women authors, women’s ministries, and homeschooling moms may contribute to teaching and maintaining patriarchal gender roles.

• Militaristic and patriotic rhetoric. Du Mez pays attention to martial code words—the language of warfare, conquest, and battle metaphors—and visual imagery.

• Evangelical pop culture’s influence. The use of cultural heroes and commercial media (books, movies, music, theme parks) to reinforce gender norms and political ideologies. Who’s getting rich off of people’s religious commitments? Where is that money going?

• Is it theology or is it politics? Theology is being used as justification for political positions and (more alarmingly) being reshaped by political priorities.

A few questions for our later discussion

I’m posting these now so you can think about them as you read. I’ll keep our comment space closed for now and open it for discussion on Monday, February 17, when we’ve all had a chance to read the book.

• Have you had personal experiences of evangelical Christianity that either support or contradict Du Mez’ arguments? Where? When? What happened?

• As you read, notice where the writer is standing in relation to her subject—that is, what her viewpoint is on the world she’s writing about.

  • In her book, Richardson is writing about people and ideas on the national scene and in the past. She is a historian, standing on the sidelines, looking from the present into the past and from the outside in. While she’s intense and involved, she’s pretty objective.

  • Du Mez, on the other hand, is more of a reporter—somebody who’s close to the action, participates in evangelical work, and sees and takes notes on what’s going on inside. While she’s objective, she’s pretty involved. And intense.

• How do these different points of view affect the way these writers tell their stories? How do they affect your reading experience? Which do you find more effective: the outsider’s objective view or the insider’s involved view?

• If you read Richardson’s Letters from an American, or Du Mez’s Connections, you’ll notice that both use a reportorial viewpoint in these newsletters. What differences from their books do you see?

And here are the questions to consider about every book we read:

• What surprised you about this book?

• What pleased you?

• What do you most agree with? Disagree with? Why?

• What worries you about the book? What excites you?

• What parts did you skip? Why?

• What is your favorite quote?

• What question would you most like to ask Du Mez?

• What question would you most like to ask other readers?

If you want to dig deeper

Du Mez suggests that you might keep your eye on the performance of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. In her January 25th Substack, KKDM calls him a poster boy: “Almost chapter by chapter,” she says, “he embodies the themes of the book.” She goes on to ask, “Now that we’re all living in Pete Hegseth’s America, what can you do?” Her answer: “It’s a good idea to educate yourself on what we’re dealing with.”

And thanks to guerrilla writers like Du Mez, that’s exactly what we’re about here in Guerrilla Readers. Educating ourselves on what we’re dealing with. If you want to learn more, here’s a sampling of recent books on the subject:

• Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy – Katherine Stewart (Feb. 18, 2024)

  • A journalist investigates how evangelical leaders have weaponized religion for political and financial gain, exposing the deep ties between right-wing Christianity, dark money, and authoritarian power structures. (If you have time for only one more book, this is the one I recommend.)

• The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy – Philip S. Gorski & Samuel L. Perry (2022)

  • A historian and a sociologist examine how white Christian nationalism drives political extremism and violence in the U.S., connecting it to historical patterns of racial and religious supremacy.

• Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—And What Comes Next – Bradley Onishi (2023)

  • A former evangelical insider traces the history of white Christian nationalism, explaining how it evolved into an anti-democratic movement that fueled violent events like the January 6 insurrection.

• The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy - J. Russell Hawkins (2021)

  • A historian and scholar of race and religion shows how, although the triumph of the civil rights movement fundamentally transformed American society, it did little to change southern white evangelicals' commitment to segregation.

• Red State Christians: A Journey into White Christian Nationalism and the Wreckage It Leaves Behind – Angela Denker (Updated 2023 Edition)

  • A journalist and Lutheran pastor explores the lives of conservative Christians across America, providing a nuanced view of how faith, politics, and power have shaped evangelical communities.

Looking ahead

The comments are closed on these free introductory posts (but I’m available via DM or email if you have ideas to share). Our discussion of Jesus and John Wayne will open behind a paywall on Monday, February 17. The comments will remain open as long as anybody has anything to say. Thanks for reading, and hang on—it’s bumpy out there!

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Our comment/conversation space on Monday’s discussion is still open, in case you haven’t had a chance to get there yet. And here are three more questions for you to consider as we head into the weekend:

• In an interview, HCR has said that she wants to equip her students to filter the important takeaways from the endless barrage of information that confronts them every day. We’ve been inundated this week with a tsunami of real events, repeated lies, and performative acts by the new president. Do you feel that HCR’s book has given you any “filters” that have helped you to better understand what’s going on? If so, how what are they? How have they served you?

• Have you noted and thought about some item(s) in the flow of news that you might not have noticed before you read HCR’s book?

• Has reading this book changed the way you look at the past? Or the way you think about and imagine the future? Or the way you handle incoming information in the present? (This is a question I hope we’ll ask ourse…

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"Well, Doctor,” Elizabeth Willing Powel asked Benjamin Franklin on the last day of the Constitutional Convention on September 18, 1787. “What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"

“A republic, Madam,” Franklin replied, “if you can keep it.”

This Inauguration Day is not the day that many of us were waiting for, and not a day for celebration. But on this day we can still celebrate our democracy, however flawed and frail and incomplete it may be. We can honor those who have served it faithfully. And we can recommit ourselves to the work of fulfilling its promise.

It will not be a monarchy.

Welcome to the first session of Guerrilla Readers. This month, we are reading a steadying book in a turbulent maelstrom of chaos: the LA fires and the brutal cold, the noisy confirmation hearings; TikTok going dark, plus whatever shoes have dropped since I wrote this late on Inauguration eve. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, move over. I’m right there with you. And I’ve brought our book.

If you’re unsure of what Guerrilla Readers are about, that’s easy to fix. Just click over to this post for an overall map of our intentions. Or to this post for my introduction to our first book, by historian Heather Cox Richardson, who may also drop into your mailbox with her “letters from an American.” Here’s where we are today, she tells us in her daily letters, giving us a recap of an important event in D.C. or elsewhere. Here’s what happened, here’s where and how it started, here’s why. Then she brings us back to today again, but with a wider and deeper understanding of all the issues involved. That’s what she does in Democracy Awakening, our first Guerrilla Read of this year.

A few thoughts on reading Democracy Awakening—for the second time

I’ll begin on a personal note—a bit off-topic but I promise to tie it up. Madame Bovary was my first experience as a conscious rereader. I read that novel three times in college and once in graduate school. Each time, I knew where the story was going and remembered how I’d felt when I read it before. But in the intervals, I had read other books, gone through a painful divorce, had a tumultuous love affair, let my hair grow longer and my skirts shorter and moved from the Midwest to the West Coast. Every time I reread that book, I was a new reader. It was a new book, a different book. Maybe it works that way for you, too.

I’m telling you this because the first time I read Democracy Awakening in late 2023, it felt very much like a retrospective—a showing of an artist’s body of work or a book that explains a completed series of events. We were three-quarters through the Biden presidency by that time. The former president was facing multiple state and federal criminal indictments and a jury had convicted him of sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll. It had been a chaotic time, dangerous even, but I felt that we were on the other side of it. We were done, and HCR’s book was giving me a map of the terrain we had crossed. The title, Democracy Awakening, felt positive, a confident affirmation of safe passage, shared experiences, lessons learned.

The book didn’t feel that way this time. Now, reading it again in the aftermath of the November election and Trump’s resumption of power, the book feels ominously predictive. It’s not about what’s behind us but what’s ahead—and the outcome of the next four years is very much in doubt. I find myself thinking that the cover should be redesigned and the title followed by a big red question mark. Is our democracy really strong enough to stand up to an authoritarian president’s second term?

I’m not sure. The president who is being sworn in has already had four years to show us who he is and what he values, to hone his skills and learn the territory, plus four more to create his agenda, screen his appointees for loyalty, and plan what he has called “retribution.” There’s no mystery about the agenda for his term: the deconstruction, deregulation, and dismantling of the federal government. It’s all clearly spelled out in Project 2025.

So I’m wondering. How will the next four years answer Mrs. Powel’s question to Dr. Franklin, which is also the question HCR asks in her book: “Is it possible to create a nation in which every person, from all our many backgrounds, is truly equal before the law and entitled to a voice in our government?” By 2028, will we be living in a democratic republic or in . . . something else? As I see the book now, as a predictive book, I’m afraid that it will be something else. And that many of us will be profoundly disturbed by what it is.

Maybe you share my pessimism. Or maybe you’re seeing this from a different angle that gives you a more optimistic view. Let’s stop here and open the conversation so you can share your thoughts on this important book—on this important day. We’ve lived in this democracy for over 200 years. Can we keep it?

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So this is how it goes for now: we fall apart, we rise. We parse what we read and watch. We put arms around each other. We gather and say what is real. We listen and find paths forward. We take care of each other. We read.
—“Story Is a Map,” Christina Baldwin

Christina Baldwin wrote these lines as she woke to post-election reality, trying—as I was, as we all were—to grasp what had happened on November 5. Coping with it would be much harder and take far longer, and many of us aren’t there, even though it’s now 2025. With each day—each unsuitable, incredible Cabinet pick, each new threat to take over Panama or Greenland or disrupt peaceful families with deportation—we feel further from understanding. We are still asking ourselves, asking each other, What can we do? What can I do?

Not much, I have to say ruefully. I’m a woman in her mid-80s, living in a rural place, and I don’t drive unless I have to. But it was Christina’s words that reminded me that there is something I can do, that I need to do, and since we’re all here on Substack, I can do it with you. We can read more broadly—books we might not otherwise read—and deeply, with attention. We can listen and watch the “news” more carefully, so far as we can bear to do that. We can parse and discern what is real and what it means and how that reality—this new Trumpian reality—intrudes into our lives.

And we don’t have to do this alone. We can do it together, because—even though we live in 50 U.S. states and dozens of foreign countries—we’re all in the same place, here on Substack.

And we are all faced with the same difficult questions. How do we stay informed without becoming overwhelmed? What’s junk, and what are the important takeaways from the noisy barrage of stories aimed at us? Where is the line between truth and lie, between over-simplification and hype? Who can we trust on any of the dozen or so compelling issues that confront us?

So here we are. And herewith the first book for Guerrilla Readers, my 2025 reading project. I’m delighted, and excited, that you are here, too. We will be reading books that are full of inconvenient truths. We are reading together to remind ourselves that we are not alone. We are sharing our responses together to learn from each other.

Guerilla readers? A guerrilla usually exists outside mainstream society and has typically taken a position of active revolt or rebellion against the established ruling power. In social/cultural/artistic life, a guerrilla critic, writer, artist, or performer stands outside the mainstream, a paradigm-shattering dissenter who challenges and expands the boundaries of contemporary thought and practice.

Most of us are here because we are or want to be guerrilla readers. We are reading guerrilla writers, some of whom the current president-elect has called “the enemy of the people” who should “pay a big price” for being bold enough to raise their voices. Guerrilla writers write from the margins, as outsiders, looking in. Or as insiders, writing from painfully earned and deeply understood experience. Guerrilla readers read from a similar space.

I want to learn how to be a good guerrilla reader, to read from the margin, about the margin, for the margin. This feels more and more important as more and more libraries fall victim to the book banning craze that is sweeping the country, denying readers of all ages the right to choose what to read.

And when I thought about the books I want (and need) to put on my Guerrilla list for this year, Heather Cox Richardson’s work was at the top of my list. Like many of you, I first met her here on Substack in Letters from an American, where she describes herself as a “history professor interested in the contrast between image and reality in American politics.” The author of seven books, HCR teaches at Boston College. She has an apartment in Boston when she is teaching and lives the rest of the year in the small coastal town of Round Pond ME with her lobsterman husband.

Richardson began posting daily on Facebook in 2014, to promote her just-published book, To Make Men Free: a History of the Republican Party. Five years and 20,000 readers later, she moved to Substack. Letters from an American (also available as an Apple podcast) deals with the historical background of contemporary events, showing us how people and events of the past shape our current world and impact our American democracy. Her daily newsletter now has over 1.8 million readers.

Richardson’s Democracy Awakening—about the historical and contemporary forces that created Trump’s first presidency (January) and enabled his second (January—will be our January book. Here are the books for February and March.

• Kristin Kobe Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, about the blossoming of the White Christian Nationalist movement and its takeover of the GOP (February). Check out Du Mez’s Substack, Connections.

• Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, by Rachel Maddow, the little known story of how our rule of law was broken by fascist forces and political intimidation (March).

These aren’t easy books. They are linked by common concerns, related stories, and similar points of view, and the assessments they offer are pretty bleak. Except for Prequel, they are better read in print or pixel than in audio (IMO), and your reading will mean more to you if you keep a notebook (or computer file) handy, where you can make notes about points that are important to you and your personal story. Fair warning: this isn’t reading-for-entertainment. These books will often be difficult. Not everybody who begins the first one will finish the second or third, or stick around for the rest of the year.

But while you may not like what you read, I can promise that we’ll all be better informed and better prepared to understand and intelligently meet the many uncertainties that certainly lie in the next four years and the years beyond.

And for now, that’s probably the best we can do.

A few notes from my reading of Democracy Awakening

HCR has separated her book into three parts. The first two parts are told in roughly chronological order, from the New Deal to Trump 1.0 (and by extension, to 2.0). Part Three backs up to take a longer view.

• “Undermining Democracy” argues that the pluralistic “liberal consensus” established by the New Deal and following Civil Rights legislation was undermined by the Movement Conservative ideologies of Nixon, Reagan and Bush 1 and 2. These promoted deliberately “false histories” of the past to support anti-democratic misuses of the law in the present—redistricting, gerrymandering, voter suppression, the judicial narrowing of rights—which were designed to stifle dissenting voices and restrict the participation of marginal groups.

• In “The Authoritarian Experiment,” HCR shows how these practices led to the Trump 2016 victory and the authoritarian policies of his first presidency, culminating in his first and second impeachments. In his rewriting of history, Trump is turning the “liberal consensus” into an “illiberal democracy,” along the lines of the “Christian democracy” led by Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán. In this country, the movement is known as White Christian Nationalism.

• “Reclaiming America” broadens the picture, showing us the hazardous fragilities inherent in the American democratic government that was cobbled together some 250 years ago. While the Declaration of Independence promises equality for all, the Constitution excludes women and people of color. “Equality, then,” HCR writes (p. 164), “depended on inequality. So was the whole concept of American democracy a sham from the start?” Not exactly a sham, she concludes ruefully, but badly flawed, for the founders, men of their times who owned enslaved people, were unable to confront this fundamental contradiction. The inequities resulting from their failure have been resisted throughout American history, with marginalized people making determined efforts at reform, and holders of the status quo just as determinedly resisting. In this messy, up-and-down, back-and-forth process, there have been many promising successes and just as many painful failures. We are currently in a dark period, one of the darkest in our history. “How it comes out rests, as it always has,” HCR writes, “in our own hands.”
  

You can listen to her thoughts on her book here.

A few questions for our later discussion

I’m posting these now so you can think about them as you read (or reread). I’ll keep our comment space closed for now and open it for discussion on Monday, January 20, when we’ve all had a chance to read (or reread) the book. I’ll have a few additional questions for us then.

• What surprised you about this book?

• What pleased you?

• What do you most agree with? Disagree with? Why?

• What worries you about the book? What excites you?

• What parts did you skip? Why?

• What is your favorite quote?

• What question would you most like to ask HCR ?

• What question would you most like to ask other readers?

Additional Resources

If you have the time and the interest, here are several relevant related reads:

• Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt). America is moving toward a multiracial democracy, but the change has sparked an authoritarian backlash that threatens the stability of our political life. Why is democracy under assault here, and not in other wealthy, diversifying nations? And what can we do to preserve it?

• Fareed Zakaria focuses on the term “illiberal democracy” in this still-current 1997 essay: https://web.archive.org/web/20051015040527/http://fareedzakaria.com/articles/other/democracy.html

• For NYT subscribers, Jeff Shesol compares HCR’s and Rachel Maddow’s books: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/15/books/review/prequel-rachel-maddow-democracy-awakening-heather-cox-richardson.html

A Reminder

The comments are closed on these free introductory posts (but I’m available via DM or email if you have ideas to share). Our discussion will open with a post from me for paid subscribers on January 20.

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Also this month: I’ll be back next Monday with the January issue of All About Thyme, on January 13 with LifeScapes, and sometime in the third week of January with the Aquarius edition of Growing Green with the Zodiac. Thank you for reading!