JANUARY 6TH: 24 HOURS AT THE CAPITOL: An Oral History of the January 6th Insurrection; THE CONSPIRACISTS: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging

24 HOURS AT THE CAPITOL: An Oral History of the January 6th Insurrection
NORA NEUS
Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The 24 Hours in Charlottesville author offers a minute-by-minute account of the January 6 riots through the never-before-heard stories of those who were there Neus’s progressive lens goes beyond mainstream reporting to reveal important truths about racial justice and the US white nationalist movement

Drawing on the collaboration and support of Tim Heaphy, chief investigator of the U.S. Congress’s January 6 Select Committee; on exclusive access to the United States Capitol Historical Society’s oral history project on the insurrection; and on her personal contacts on the Hill, Nora Neus reconstructs what it was actually like in and around the Capitol during those 24 hours. Her narrators include high-profile politicians and maintenance workers, Capitol Hill residents and White House photographers, police officers who defended the building and insurrectionists who have since disavowed their actions.

Police officers recall the insurrectionists screaming at them and calling them traitors. Staffers remember “walking over pools of blood” as they ran for their lives. A young Asian-American staffer recalls locking herself in a room just feet from the rioters, mentally preparing to be raped. A mostly Black janitorial staff began cleaning the blood of insurrectionists off the marble floor on the Capitol before the building was even officially secured.

January 6 was a well-planned attack coordinated largely right out in the open, the threat of which lawmakers and government officials underestimated in part because it was coming from white people. Neus will examine the underlying racial implications of not only the attack itself, but also in the planning and coordination of the response.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A deeply, deeply disturbing book about a searing and fateful moment in US history. No one wants to think about it this way but I'll say it openly: J6 was the Fort Sumter of the white supremacist rebellion. It's approaching a new inflection point with midterms threatening to expose the lies that undergirded felonious yam's 2024 election. We can expect more violence, and with a better prepared kakistocracy in place.

You're a citizen. If you're not, you still have a stake in what happens in the country that holds the planet's future habitability in it silos and missiles. Inform youself so you will know what to pressure your government officials to oppose, prevent if possible, and agitate for serious effort to neutralize.

It was, and is, possible for angry white men to plan and execute a coup attempt and get away with it because unexamined privilege, unacknowledged dominance, is finally being challenged. At this moment, the allies at the top are fumbling issues important to the aptly-named "base" so there is a window of opportunity we can not afford to bungle our handling of.

I encourage you, since you were not there on the grounds of the United States Capitol building on the sixth of January in 2021, to read these first-hand accounts from those who were. Calling this event a riot is inaccurate, diminishing both the intent of the perpetrators and the severity of the impact of their actions. Read about the planning...took place in the open, remember...the execution of this failed Putsch, the actions of the traitors. The awful things done, the horrifying behavior.

Now realize the sitting president, in his last Constitutionally sanctioned term, has issued many pardons for these men.

Do not assume the midterm elections will proceed as usual. Sound the alarm in your community for poll-watchers to be defended...and defended against. Do not sit it out because you're tired, because you don't think "They" would dare to do that.

Did you imagine "They" would dare stage a coup attempt? Because "They" did.

Openly. Without consequences.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE CONSPIRACISTS: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging
NOELLE COOK
Broadleaf Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: How do ordinary women become extremists?

Leafing through photos from the January 6 insurrection, extremist researcher Noelle Cook was struck by how many women looked like her: middle-aged white women in puffy coats. Women were not on the fringes of the extreme right, she realized. They were radicalizing each other, and the pandemic was changing them. So who were the women of J6? And why did some of them believe in shape-shifting reptilians and the health benefits of colloidal silver?

This is the world scholars call conspirituality, in which New Age religion, online wellness culture, and extremism blend and become laced with antisemitic and racist theories. With acute attention to the emotional lives of women and research on conspiracism, Cook introduces us to Tammy, who believed storming the Capitol would help take down a global cabal of pedophiles. We also meet Yvonne, convinced she is a starseed destined to lead others into the fifth dimension. We visit a trade show where vendors hawk everything from quantum healing devices to government cover-ups, and trace the movement's roots to a nineteenth-century mystical philosophy.

With arresting detail, The Conspiracists draws us into the lives of conspiratorial women to explore how and why women are becoming radicalized. Women are crafting entire worlds, Cook argues, and we ignore these worlds at our own peril. As misinformation spreads and extremism intensifies, The Conspiracists does not seek to excuse women's conspiracism but rather to understand it. Otherwise, we have no hope of countering its force.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I am quite openly an atheist. In a world where how you pray and to whom can get you murdered, that is not the safe option.

One of the most powerful repulsive forces in my eyes against all religions, everywhere and of every stripe, is that this book's subjects are not unique to any one tradition...apart from the socially acceptable psychotic break that is labeled religion.

That statement will offend many. I've had a psychotic break recently, a reaction known to occur to people who take Levaquin (albeit very, very few of them, lucky me) as I did for pneumonia, so I speak from my own experience: If inanimate/invisible things are speaking to you, are counseling you about Reality, are imbued with consciousness or intelligence or both, you are experiencing a psychotic break...not a divine visitation or revelatory vision.

I'd treat the women profiled in these pages with the care and concern I received during my own psychotic break, gently attempting to lead them back to consensus reality. It's not always effective but it's worth trying. In profiling these women, Author Cook is not demeaning them, not saying (as I have) they are experiencing a mental-health crisis, not presenting value judgments outright...again, like I have done. She traces the women's sense of being abandoned, unconsidered, as they travel further and further into what most of us see as conspiracy-theory aberrations. It is a truth we as a society do not want to face head-on that huge swaths of our population are in the grips of this factually supported idea of themselves as abandoned, hard done by. In the face of that existential crisis what else is there to do but reach for some explanation, some reason? They already know there is no justification or excuse for their situation. There must be a "why," because there always is.

It's facing up to the vile, selfish cause of the nightmarish cruelty enacted on them that makes conspiracy theories so appealing and so successful. As these ordinary women's descent (as I see it) into aberrant thinking and acceptance of "alternative facts" demonstrates, the need to have a "why" is the most powerful inducement of conspiracies and delusions...of all sorts, in all times.

The absence of trust in what I see as trustworthy authority structures, eg science, has been carefully cultivated for more than a generation. (You can look up the research on your own.) It's led many people into a more general mistrust of what was once mainstream information economies that we relied on to build our consensus about the polity we live in. That vacuum, as the women profiled demonstrate in their adherence to beliefs not demonstrably truthful, is filled by the Othered communities they've chosen to fill the void. In those Othered communities there is stability, there is fellowship, there is belonging and validation the unempathetic outsiders do not offer.

I certainly don't offer empathy and understanding to people who believe they're messiahs, or that there are lizard people secretly controlling the world. Scorn and contumely by the dumpsterload, yes; understanding and empathy, not a smidgin. Hence my need to engage with this book: being Right is being part of the problem that's led to these fractures developing during the time of immense societal stress we're experiencing. In a quest not to unknowingly respond to others' delusional thinking, as I see it, with behaviors that will only worsen the problem I've identified, I seek my usual trusted source of advice: Experts who share my vision of the world more than they don't.

January 6th looms. It is a midterm election year, and there is widespread opposition to the current regime. A foreign war has been launched.

The omens do not portend a smooth course ahead. Conspiracists, you aunties, cousins, and grandmas, are likely going to support a radical alteration of the country's governance...despite the signs pointing to that course leading to repression and violence and immiseration. Beliefs that "They" are the ones who will suffer and be punished for "Their" misdeeds, that this horror will lead into a glorious Golden Age of Truth and Rewards for those who believed, are going to be dashed...are being dashed by the entire Epstein files debacle. Marjorie Taylor Greene, with whom I share nothing except the Constitutionally-guaranteed right to trial by a jury of my peers, has admitted she was wrong to hold her conspiracist beliefs.

It's a process we cannot hasten and widen in scope without understanding its roots. That was the point of Author Cook writing this book. Stand ready to escort the conspiracists back into consensus reality by learning how and why they left it.

THE VOTE COLLECTORS: The True Story of the Scamsters, Politicians, and Preachers behind the Nation's Greatest Electoral Fraud, SECOND edition out soon

THE VOTE COLLECTORS: The True Story of the Scamsters, Politicians, and Preachers behind the Nation's Greatest Electoral Fraud
MICHAEL GRAFF & NICK OCHSNER
University of North Carolina Press/Ferris and Ferris Books
$23.00 trade paper, second edition preorders for March 2024 above|first edition $8.53 on Kindle, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: In November 2018, Baptist preacher Mark Harris beat the odds, narrowly fending off a blue wave in the sprawling Ninth District of North Carolina. But word soon got around that something fishy was going on in rural Bladen County. At the center of the mess was a local political operative named McCrae Dowless. Dowless had learned the ins and outs of the absentee ballot system from Democrats before switching over to the Republican Party. Bladen County’s vote-collecting cottage industry made national headlines, led to multiple election fraud indictments, toppled North Carolina GOP leadership, and left hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians without congressional representation for nearly a year.

In The Vote Collectors, Michael Graff and Nick Ochsner tell the story of the political shenanigans in Bladen County, exposing the shocking vulnerability of local elections and explaining why our present systems are powerless to monitor and prevent fraud. In their hands, this tale of rural corruption becomes a fascinating narrative of the long clash of racism and electioneering—and a larger story about the challenges to democracy in the rural South.

In their preface to this second edition, Graff and Ochsner bring the story up to date, as accusations of voter fraud continue to pervade our national discourse. The Vote Collectors shows the reality of election stealing in one southern county, where democracy was undermined the old-fashioned way: one absentee ballot at a time.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: While I did not love the book’s structure, I *did* resonate to its message and purpose: documenting and publicizing the voter fraud committed in the 2018 election by the North Carolina GOP in search of a national majority in the US Congress to further their regressive agenda. I have reaffirmed my belief that guilty people accuse others of their own crimes as a result of reading this book.

You should read it, too, as we approach the 2024 elections. If you imagine that catching these perpetrators of voter fraud is enough to scare the others out there into compliance with the law, think again...these are True Believers in A Cause, men—mostly—on a mission. Vigilance of the citizenry is the only resource we have left to combat this criminal undertaking. The authors are at pains to detail the toothlessness of oversight allowed by the state’s law on North Carolina’s local elections. It is not terribly different in the rest of the country.

The center of the 2018 plot was a man the authors seem to have a lot more sympathy and affection for than is warranted in my observation of their own descriptions of him: McCrae Dowless. A convicted insurance fraudster who transitioned to political fraud with apparent ease, Dowless was a Democratic operative who switched sides and ramped up the lawbreaking after he learned the ropes. His early death has failed to elicit from me more than a "what a relief at least one is gone" response.

Not a book to be dipped in and out of, because the level of detail can grow hazy in one's mind after too much time away. Also not a light little romp through one event in a bygone election. This stuff is going on now, and it will not stop until the silent, bored, apathetic parts of the electorate get off their "ignorance is bliss, if we don't think about it, it will go away" poses.

Voter suppression is real, and a real problem. It is time to Vay attention to it. Start here.

THE PLOT TO SEIZE THE WHITE HOUSE: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R., unnerving real history

THE PLOT TO SEIZE THE WHITE HOUSE: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.
JULES ARCHER
Arcade Publishing
$10.97 ebook editions, available now

$1.99 on Kindle! (non-affiliate Amazon link)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Many people might not know that in 1933, a group of wealthy industrialists working closely with groups like the K.K.K. and the American Liberty League planned to overthrow the U.S. government and run F.D.R. out of office in a fascist coup. Readers will learn of their plan to turn unhappy war veterans into American brown shirts,” depose F.D.R., and stop the New Deal. They asked Medal of Honor recipient and Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler to work with them and become the first American Caesar.” Fortunately, Butler was a true patriot. Instead of working for the fascist coup, he revealed the plot to journalists and to Congress.

Archer writes a compelling account of a ploy that would have turned FDR into fascist puppet, threatened American democracy and changed the course of history. This book not only reveals the truth behind this shocking episode in history, but also tells the story of the man whose courage and bravery prevented it from happening.

Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history—books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The wonder of History as a study is how much of what sounds new and apocalyptically nightmarish to you is, in fact, the latest of many iterations of the same bull. Humans seek patterns, and novelty; "this is unprecedented! and it's just like this thing that happened way back when!" sums it up.

Author Jules Archer (1915 – 2008) was a prolific popular writer on history for all ages. He grew up in New York City during times of great changes and the fomenting of radical opposition to the status quo. He saw, firsthand, the causes of the New Deal's legislation. He spent a lot of time in later life using the free college education that New Yorkers of sufficient academic achievements were at that time entitled to explaining the country, and history itself, to others.

This book was published first in 1973, in the soft, rotten middle of the Watergate hearings. The timing, and the subject, were chosen carefully. Remembering your history, younger-than-50s, you'll recall we as a country were in the throes of indicting and removing an actual criminal from the presidency, as well as losing a war in Asia. That war left the country with a lot of badly damaged men and no jobs for them when they returned to civilian life.

Any of this ringing some bells?

So Jules Archer, explainer extraordinaire (seriously, go look at his bibliography!), reached into his own past for an analogous passage of disastrously concatenated events and found World War I, the Bonus Army, and the very little spoken-of Businessmans' Coup of 1933. "We have been here before," said Archer, "and the country survived."

The hero of this piece is a man of whom I guarantee you have not heard. General Smedley Darlington Butler is one of those figures that appear all too seldom, the Man of Conscience whose principles are strong and whose moral compass, whether or not it's calibrated as is one's own, is clearly aligned with honor on every axis. The plotters of this heinous act of subversion as Archer details it chose exactly and precisely the wrong man to execute their plot. (Goddesses please accept our thanks that they didn't approach Douglas MacArthur!) He blew so many whistles and did so with such enormous credibility and evidence that the entire plot had to be abandoned.

Not to say the idea went away. We've seen that in our own time. This Peter Arno cartoon could've been drawn in 2010 and been about Obama, or 2020 and been about Biden:

After reading this book, your illusions about this unique moment in history being absolutely the awfulest, most scum-ridden, darkest passage in the US will perforce vanish. But you'll also, I hope, read it and think, "this isn't the first time?! Holy maloley, we'd better pay attention!" Because I'm entirely sure that was the aim of Jules Archer's project in writing many explanatory books about history over many decades.

HITLER'S AMERICAN FRIENDS: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States, traitorous fascist sympathizers aren't new

HITLER'S AMERICAN FRIENDS: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States
BRADLEY W. HART
Thomas Dunne Books
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A book examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II.

Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided.

Bradley W. Hart's Hitler's American Friends exposes the homegrown antagonists who sought to protect and promote Hitler, leave Europeans (and especially European Jews) to fend for themselves, and elevate the Nazi regime.

Some of these friends were Americans of German heritage who joined the Bund, whose leadership dreamed of installing a stateside Führer. Some were as bizarre and hair-raising as the Silver Shirt Legion, run by an eccentric who claimed that Hitler fulfilled a religious prophesy. Some were Midwestern Catholics like Father Charles Coughlin, an early right-wing radio star who broadcast anti-Semitic tirades. They were even members of Congress who used their franking privilege—sending mail at cost to American taxpayers—to distribute German propaganda. And celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh ended up speaking for them all at the America First Committee.

We try to tell ourselves it couldn't happen here, but Americans are not immune to the lure of fascism. Hitler's American Friends is a powerful look at how the forces of evil manipulate ordinary people, how we stepped back from the ledge, and the disturbing ease with which we could return to it.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It's always been a failing of the left-wing political folk to see the Apocalypse in each and every thunderation from the Christo-Fascist Right as the ongoing battle for the USA's soul continues. There are now, there were in the 1950s, there were in the 1930s and 1940s, traitorous scum whose personal vision of a Perfect World contains only people like them, who are willing to do anything legal or not to enforce their will on the eternal majority who don't want that. In an article in The Nation, the author of the think piece I've linked to comments most saliently on the Red Scare years' school-textbook battles, book burnings, and other such performative outrage with this pithy remark:

Most Americans don’t think that proponents of critical race theory are secretly spreading “Marxism” in the schools, either, or that woke corporations are somehow supporting the same evil project. The people who make such claims are a small minority, just as they were in the 1950s.

The fact is that our country's been under some form of internal attack from fascist and/or authoritarian right-wing rabble since Day One. So has every other political structure. Let's not forget the fate of Periclean Athens. It's the eternal project of greedy, selfish control freaks to get everything they can into their own hands and to control what they can't possess.

Author Hart made a well-researched and -written alarm call against calm, resigned acceptance of the culture coup attempted during the 45th president's term in this book. He uses the well-documented and clearly overcome existence, activities, and failures of Nazi sympathizers in the US. It is an effective technique; it uses as its organizing principle a simple structure: Each chapter is dedicated to a single organization active in promoting German/Nazi interests in the US, and gives some crucial details about how and why this choice was made. It also characterizes and puts into timely context the people who made up the institution in question. This avoids a common trap in histories of zeitgeists or social movements, the dreaded alphabet soup of initialism and too-similar or too-often-repeated names. That admittedly more synthetic approach can weave a tapestry of details. It more often than that causes severe MEGO disease.

The most disturbing take-away of this entire loudly rung tocsin is that these forces of anti-democratic rage failed because they lacked a credible, powerful leader. Today's versions, it is very frightening to realize, do not suffer from that lack. It isn't that Author Hart is unaware of this, it's that he seemed to feel he shouldn't make as much of the echoes I heard in each chapter of current events as I would've preferred. There is something to be said for taking off the gloves and hitting the enemy within hard. It's something "they" do a lot of (see my review of The Obama Hate Machine) and with a lot less factual basis than Author Hart presents.

Why this book only gets four stars from me is the quite startling number of uncorrected typos that made it from the DRC I read into the library copy I checked out. Scandalous! And, in the end, there were moments that I found myself not quite satisfied with the case the author made for some person or organization's motivation for opposing the US entry into WWII. Mixed motives are more common than pure ones on every gradation of the ideological spectrum, as (for example) morally based pacifism is present among right-wingers, too.

Perhaps the most telling thing that I noticed go underremarked was the utter ineffectuality of Hoover's FBI in going after right-wing terrorism. Red Scare propaganda against our nominal allies the Soviets was rife. How telling that is...British intelligence informed the US government better about domestic threats than Hoover's FBI.

I was still angered and unsettled and unnerved by this read. I am recommending it to all and sundry who think the Right's victory in the 2022 midterm elections is somehow inevitable. We who do not wish to have our country scourged by the hypocrites and religious nuts of this book's modern counterparts should heed Author Hart's dictum: "{U}nfortunately, the merchants of hate always seem to have someone to listen to them." Let's plug the holes in our national awareness. It can only help the side dedicated to the rights and duties of citizens against the Right's attacks on them.

THE TEAPOT DOME SCANDAL: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country remains relevant

THE TEAPOT DOME SCANDAL: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country
LATON McCARTNEY
Random House (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

***NOTE 7/11/18*** I'm amazed I wrote this review in 2012. Coulda been written today.

The Publisher Says: Big Oil bought the election of 1920 for Sen. Warren G. Harding of Ohio, because he was amenable to giving away huge amounts of money to the oil companies, including using American power in Mexico to undo the Mexican nationalization of the oil companies' assets there. Part of the payoff to the oil interests was assigning leases worth about $100 million (in 1920 dollars...well north of a billion now) in the US Navy's strategic petroleum reserve in several locations.

Including Teapot Dome, Wyoming.

It all unraveled, the leases were voided, and thanks to a crusading Montana populist Sen. Tom Walsh, several really rich and really corrupt men spent some token time in jail.

Despite his proven knowledge of the transactions, Harding's vice-president was re-elected in 1924 (Harding died in 1923, some suspect at Mrs. Harding's hand, so he would never have to testify before the Walsh Committee).

Oh for the good old days.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THEIR COLLECTIONS, LEVERAGE THEIR REACH! DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT NEEDS THEM.

My Review: This book was published in 2008, an election year. I do not think this was an accident. The GOP, a sink of depravity and greed since the Taft Administration, did not need any help losing that election...the fact that the sitting vice-president didn't run as the candidate tells you all you need to know there, the GOP knew what was coming and wanted someone else to take the blame for it...but this book, about a conspiracy of evil, greedy GOP pols, their money-men, and the full intent to defraud We-the-People for private wealth, was still well-timed.

Lest any stupid damnfool conservative start mooing about bias, I rush to report that the author does not say the words I've said. The author reports the facts as history has them. The Committee reports, the papers of all parties concerned, all extant documentary evidence, was used in a careful reconstruction of the actual events that led to the Teapot Dome Scandal, as we've come to call it.

The fact that the documentary evidence makes the conservatives look like evil, greedy rotters is just a bonus. Embrace the demon within, GOP/Tea Party supporters! Align yourselves with those who think nothing of splashing out millions to buy the votes and influence the course of the river of money that flows from any government into their own pockets, with the minimum of trickle-down into the Public Good.

Do it openly, and in full knowledge of what kind of rotten sleazebags you're supporting...they've never been any different. Read this book and see why.

2022 ADDENDUM Lest my ire seem more partisan than it is, I rush to assure all readers that Senator Joe Manchin ("D"—Corporate America) has demonstrated the continuing susceptibility of our representative government to overt, money-based rigging in favor of those whose greed exceeds their common sense.