Big news, folks: We have a pub date — The Legend of Skokie drops in April 2027. Get excited. More details, including a cover reveal for premium subscribers, at the bottom of this edition.

Also, a shift in the production schedule means there is still a very limited time to get in on an exclusive offer. Support my work and the writing of this book, and I will thank you by name in the acknowledgements. This expires for real next Wednesday, 9/23.

Friend of The Racket Jamelle Bouie has an update on the state of the American right:

You may recognize the formulation, ____ has a Nazi problem. Tom Nichols has used it, Medhi Hasan has used it, I (famously? notoriously?) used it to describe this newsletter’s former platform in 2023. You might think that means it’s overused to the point of meaninglessness, but unfortunately it’s the opposite: People keep seeing Nazis all over the internet and politics because they are, in fact, everywhere, and gaining influence.

For instance, one of the staffers Jamelle writes about, Nate Hochman, was in the news (and this newsletter) three years ago, when, as a rising conservative media star, he made an ad for Ron DeSantis’ abortive presidential campaign that, as I revealed at the time, was a nearly shot-for-shot remake of a niche neo-Nazi meme.¹ Hochman got fired from the campaign in the uproar. He is now a deputy director of the State Department’s policy planning office and the chief speechwriter for Marco Rubio, who, in case you’ve forgotten, is Secretary of State.

The Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, current Rep. Mike Collins, has at least four antisemites and white-supremacist extermists in his orbit, including a neo-Nazi influencer as a son-in-law. Florida Republicans are set to elect a guy who marched in Charlottesville with the neo-Nazi/neo-Confederate League of the South and once posted “public lynchings worked” to the statehouse in November. He has been endorsed by DeSantis, both of Florida’s Republican senators, and the next GOP nominee for governor, Byron Donalds. Just today, as it happens, the White House has given an anti-immigrant news outfit called “Border Hawk”—whose About page begins “the Great Replacement is real”—the “new media” slot for the in-town White House press pool.

The problem extends to Europe. You likely heard that the Alternative für Deutschland party, or AfD, recently overwhelmingly won—and came within three seats of single-handedly forming a majority—of seats in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt. (The party’s initials are an unsubtle riff on the old Nazi SA slogan “Alles für Deutschland,” or “all for Germany.” An AfD leader in the state of Thuringia was fined €13,000 in 2024 for using the full old slogan in a campaign speech.) This marks the first time that a far-right Völkisch nationalist party has won the most seats in an election in Germany since 1933. Nigel Farage, already a member of parliament, has signaled openness to working with the farther-right and adamantly ethnonationalist party Restore Britain. A rogue general leading a hard-right “futurist” party is climbing the polls in Italy. In Austria, a pro-Russia, anti-immigrant party founded by former Nazis won the most seats in a 2024 election, though it was consigned to the opposition. Etc.

This is all Very Bad, a product of disappearing memories of the realities of interwar fascism and World War II, unchecked corruption and money in politics, and (as Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein argue in their new book, End Times Fascism) a response to compounding crises of climate change, mass migration, technological upheaval, and the fallout from decades of neoliberalism and war. (All aided by the bastardization and mytholoization of liberal principles and some misunderstood historical events, as will be explored in my aforementioned upcoming book!)

But there is a sliver of good news in all of this. And that is that our Nazis, at least—the American ones—are part of a party that has proven incompetent. A thing the European fascists of old understood was that, while some people are just sadists, most people won’t swallow the violence and cruelty that is inherent to fascist regimes unless they feel that there is something in it for them—that the bloodletting and state violence is making their lives better in some way. But the man at the head of the 2010s and 2020s American fascist turn has proven, predictably perhaps, too personally enamored and cartoonishly corrupt to be interested in helping anyone, including what Carl Schmitt would have called those on his side of the Friend-Enemy Distinction and Americans call “the base.”

If gas and food prices weren’t soaring, if labor-force participation wasn’t falling, if A.I. wasn’t freaking everyone out and America’s foreign policy and war machines weren’t proving themselves empty shells in Trump’s war of choice, then maybe enough people would have been in lock-step behind his paramilitary anti-immigrant surges and cheering on his open attempts to subvert the midterms for it to work this time. But they aren’t. So, from the looks of things in mid-September 2026 at least, it won’t.

That doesn’t mean we should rest easy. The Democrats might, if the work is kept up, take the House and Senate in November—and, who knows, even be allowed to take their seats! Maybe, dare to dream, someone with a D after their name will even sweep back into the White House in two years as well. But if they can’t deliver results—if they can’t adopt a politics that is both empathetic and willing to take some risks, to actually ameliorate some of these crises and achieve real results in the lives of a majority of people in this country, then they will be rejected just as handily. And there is a rising generation of fascists, with some big money behind it, eager to step into the chaos—who might prove more effective, and dangerous, in the future.