Guerrilla Readers May 2025 Reminder

New and returning friends: Just a reminder that we’re taking a month’s break. We’ve earned it after that hefty four-week democracy unit: Democracy Awakening (Richardson), Jesus and John Wayne (Du Mez), Prequel (Maddow), and Caste (Wilkerson). If you’d like to look back, all my posts (free) and our conversations (for paid subscribers) are under the Guerrilla Reads tab on Substack.

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.

Documents unearthed from wooden crates in the basement of Argentina's top court included Nazi notebooks, photographs and postcards. ULAN/Pool/Latin America News Agency via Reuters

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!