Podcast

Blood in the Face: White Nationalism from the Birth of a Nation to the Age of Trump

Join Rick Perlstein, Jean Casella, and David Neiwert as they discuss the updated edition of Blood in the Face by James Ridgeway.

In 1990, Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, and the Rise of a New White Culture was the first book to uncover the contours, beliefs, leaders, and wider influence of the American racist far-right movement. It told their story from the inside out, complete with interviews, recruiting pamphlets, cartoons, rants, sermons, threats, police reports, and more. The accompanying analysis by veteran investigative reporter James Ridgeway detailed the movement 's volatile history and its expansion beginning in the 1980s, insisting that the groups making up this "fringe" culture were too powerful--and too much a part of American culture--to be ignored or dismissed.

When the book's prescience about the dangers of the racist far-right became manifest in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, a second edition of Blood in the Face was released with a new introduction charting the rise of the Militia Movement to which Timothy McVeigh and his co-conspirators were connected. Since then, both the book and the documentary film that accompanied its release (also titled Blood in the Face), have earned cult followings.

In the past 25 years, Ridgeway's final warning–that the "fringe was becoming part of the fabric" of American politics and culture, have come to chilling fruition in the rise of the Tea Party, the racist backlash against the presidency of Barack Obama, the resurgence of anti-immigrant Nativism, the growth of racist far-right media, and the election of Donald Trump with the thunderous support of white nationalists.

Join Rick Perlstein, Jean Casella, and David Neiwert as they discuss Blood in the Face: White Nationalism from the Birth of a Nation to the Age of Trump and its continued relevance.

Speakers:

Chicagoan Rick Perlstein is the author of a four-book series on the rise of conservatism in America. The first, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, won the Los Angeles Times Book Award in 2001. The second, third, and fourth made the New York Times bestseller list, with the second, Nixonland, appearing on the “best of” lists of over a dozen publications in 2008. A contributor to publications including the Nation, Washington Post, New Yorker, New Republic, he is the former president of the board of InThese Times magazine and a frequent talking head on cable news and history documentaries.

Jean Casella collaborated with James Ridgeway for more than 30 years, editing both the original 1991 edition and the revised 2025 edition of Blood in the Face. In 2009, she and Ridgeway co-founded Solitary Watch, a watchdog project that exposes solitary confinement and other abusive conditions in U.S. prisons and jails. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, and Mother Jones, among others. For her work on prisons, she received a Soros Justice Media Fellowship and an Alicia Patterson Fellowship.

David Neiwert is an investigative journalist and author based in the Pacific Northwest. Though now retired from daily newsroom operations, he worked as a reporter and editor for daily newspapers in Idaho, Montana, and Washington from the 1970s to the 1990s, when he made the leap to digital journalism in the early iterations of MSNBC's Redmond newsroom, where he won a National Press Club award for distinguished online journalism.

Get the book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1651-blood-in-the-face

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_PjcK3j8sI

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

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