All tagged Far Right

The French Far-Right Gains + Losses: Voting For “The Leopards Eating People’s Faces” Party / Alley Valkyrie

Social critic Alley Valkyrie returns to the podcast to provide analysis of the recent election in France. She discusses the French far-right's long-term efforts to remake their image and gather widespread support, in ways that are both surprising but contextually understandable, making tremendous gains in the first round of the parliamentary snap election called by President Emmanuel Macron.

True West: Myth & Mending In The American West / Betsy Gaines Quammen

Historian and author Betsy Gaines Quammen returns to the podcast to discuss her new book, True West: Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America, published by Torrey House Press. Building on her previous book, American Zion, Gaines Quammen follows the historical roots and trajectories of troubling political trends in the Western United States, decoupling the myths and material realities of the landscapes and the peoples and the more-than-human lives that occupy them.

“True West explores myths of the West and how, if left unexamined, they distort the realities of the present and exacerbate polarizations. These misperceptions about land, politics, liberty, and self-determination threaten the wellbeing of western communities overrun by newcomers seeking a dream—and the country, unless America recognizes the dangers of building a national identity on illusion. Gaines Quammen interrogates it all by listening, carefully, to people from varying political and cultural perspectives as she seeks to reconcile the deep anger and broad misunderstandings that linger amid myths that define and impede the West and America.”

No Pasarán!: Inroads To Power & Antifascist Community Making / Shane Burley

Author and journalist Shane Burley returns to the podcast to discuss the anthology No Pasaran: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis, published this fall through AK Press. Burley is the editor and a contributor to this collection.

In catching up since our last interview, I ask Shane to clarify where the far-right stands in a "post-Trump" context. What inroads have far-right, and explicitly fascist, ideologues made in political discourse and policy in the United States over the past two years? How coherent is the far-right agenda, and who are their targets? What are the paths to power? And most importantly, how can various subcultural spaces, as well as rural and urban communities, each build effective resistances to this threat? No Pasaran, with its broad collection of voices, provides some of the most comprehensive answers to these questions.