Day: Sunday September 20th

About Americans Without Borders: The Radical Activists Who Fought for US Ideals Abroad While Facing Political Persecution at Home

Inspired by the story of a distant cousin, investigative journalist Julia Harte explores the rich and hidden history of American citizens who fought against imperialism and dictatorship abroad, only to be excoriated at home.

One night in 1940, a group of Stalinists opened fire on Leon Trotsky’s compound in Mexico City. In the end, the victim was not Trotsky, but his bodyguard: a young American named Sheldon Harte. For investigative journalist Julia Harte, the quest to uncover the truth about Sheldon—her father’s second cousin—was just the beginning of discovering a wider, hidden history of Americans who traveled abroad to join revolutionary liberation movements—and in return were labeled radicals by the U.S. government.

From Americans who fought in the 19th-century Greek revolution to modern-day solidarity volunteers in Palestine, Harte chronicles two centuries of Americans whose support for international causes at odds with U.S. geopolitical interests put them in their own government’s crosshairs. The surprising characters she profiles include African American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War who battled bigotry and McCarthyism upon returning home; a Jewish American woman who helped the Black Panthers establish an international wing in post-independence Algeria; a teenage activist who organized Filipinos against the repressive Marcos regime; the forgotten Native American contingent in Nicaragua’s Sandinista-Contra conflict; and many more. These figures held various ideologies and beliefs, yet each in their own way sought to fight oppression and saw their actions as grounded in American ideals of equality, self-government, and human rights. Meanwhile, U.S. officials responded to them with surveillance, blacklists, travel bans, and prosecution.

Through meticulous research and on-the-ground reporting, Harte brings her subjects to life in deeply personal detail, exploring not only their heroic sides but also the tensions between their actions and ideals. Interrogating how and why activists were branded as threats by an expanding security state, Harte asks what makes a ‘radical’. In lively narrative and rich detail, this eye-opening book reveals the long history of transnational radicalism as an irrepressibly American tradition.

A fearless and urgent chronicle of the tech-authoritarian movement from its early days in San Francisco politics to its current moment on the international stage, exploring the wild and dystopian ambition of the technocrats at its center, and offering a road map to resistance.

When Silicon Valley says it is ‘‘moving fast and breaking things,’’ the world interprets the chaos as a necessary cost of innovation. Gil Durán reveals something far more sinister: a decades-long campaign to replace elected governments with corporate rule.

Drawing on insider political experience and new investigations, Durán traces this ideology from its philosophical roots in The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. He introduces its modern apostles—Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, and Elon Musk—and shows how the promise of technological liberation has transformed into a global movement for digital feudalism, powered by cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and the algorithmic propaganda of social media.

The Nerd Reich explains the origins, strategies, and ambitions of Silicon Valley’s war on democracy for the first time. From San Francisco’s weaponized elections and secret billionaire projects to the White House, Durán exposes how the world’s richest men are building a new political order.

The Nerd Reich is more than a hidden history, it’s an urgent warning: democracy is being dismantled not by coups or tanks, but by code, capital, and the illusion of innovation. Durán insists there is still time to fight back—if we act now.

“This transfixing debut from journalist Durán investigates the antidemocratic ideologies espoused by tech billionaires linked to the second Trump administration…It’s an ominous look at an insular elite arrayed against American democracy.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A gutsy, razor-sharp demystification of a powerful organization.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The first-ever history of the Anti-Defamation League and its determined, century-long alliance with Western empire.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is a major US political organization, yet its politics have gone largely unexamined. While the ADL is often portrayed as a defender against antisemitism and racism, its history shows that it is better understood as a proponent of the racial state and US empire. From “correcting” the embarrassing racial difference of immigrant Jews to policing the leftist politics of Black, Arab, and Jewish groups, the ADL pursued a conservative version of civil rights paired with aggressive anti-communism. Even as it became an authority on white nationalism in the 1970s, the ADL joined with the emerging anti-left, anti-Arab, and pro-Western neoconservative movement.

This history presaged the ADL’s work, from the 1980s to the present, in developing the hate crimes framework as a pro-state policing project, which soon merged with the “War on Terror,” the “antisemitism scare,” and anti-Palestinian racism. The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State presents the ADL’s history through its conflicts with social justice movements, illuminating the ADL’s outsize role in shaping the ideas about race and rights that have underwritten US empire.