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
February 24th marked the fourth anniversary of Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine. Right now, it is bombing the country’s energy system, cutting off heat and electricity for millions in the depths of a bitterly cold winter. At the same time, the Trump administration is trying to bully Ukraine into a land for peace settlement that rewards Putin’s aggression and, with the willing collaboration of Ukraine’s oligarchs, puts the country up for sale to Western multinationals. Join this webinar to hear about Ukraine’s struggle.
Speakers:
Artem Chapeye is the author of Ordinary People Don’t Carry Guns (Washington Post 2025 best non-fiction) and The Ukraine. He is a writer, translator, activist, and, after the 2022 invasion, an enlisted member of the Armed Forces of Ukraine .
Tanya Vyhovsky is a Ukrainian American, Vermont State Senator, member of Vermont’s Progressive Party, and also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Denys Bondar is a native of Ukraine and an associate professor of physics at Tulane University as well as a member of the Ukraine Solidarity Network and Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction.
Join editors and contributors of We Are Each Other's Liberation, a major anthology that illuminates historical and contemporary solidarities between Black and Asian feminists.
A collaborative project between Black Women Radicals and the Asian American Feminist Collective, We Are Each Other's Liberation envisions a cross-racial and internationalist politics that explicitly addresses solidarity between Black and Asian feminists. Bringing together organizers, artists, journalists, poets, novelists, and more, this collection introduces readers to new ways of understanding and reflecting on race and feminism.
Drawing out lessons from the revolutionary work of movement forebearers—including the Combahee River Collective, Claudia Jones, Grace Lee Boggs, Yuri Kochiyama, and Third World Women’s Alliance as well as struggles today—We Are Each Other’s Liberation offers an urgent call for the just future we might build together.
Get a copy of We Are Each Other's Liberation from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2519-we-are-each-other-s-liberation
Speakers:
Rachel Kuo is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and cofounder of the Asian American Feminist Collective, which engages intersectional feminist politics grounded within Asian diasporic communities.
Jaimee A. Swift is the creator and executive director of Black Women Radicals, dedicated to uplifting and centering Black women and gender-expansive people’s radical activism in Africa and in the African diaspora.
TD Tso is a feminist writer, editor, cultural organizer, and cofounder of the Asian American Feminist Collective.
Pratibha Parmar’s films have shaped the politics of feminist, queer, and diasporic visual cultures for over four decades. From experimental shorts to activist documentaries and feature-length works, Parmar’s cinematic language operates as an act of visual justice. Her practice engages the image as a site of struggle—challenging the power relations that determine who is seen, how they are represented, and what forms of visual expression are made possible. Her films are a site of narrative transformation, where memory, activism, and artistic expression converge to resist erasure and imagine new futures. Pratibha is a published author and editor of of several anthologies. The Institute of Contemporary Arts (London) and Sming Sming Books published, Our Eyes as Commonly Tender: Visual Justice in the Filmmaking of Pratibha Parmar in 2025.
Margo Okazawa-Rey is an activist-educator working on issues of militarism for over 30 years. She has long-standing activist commitments in South Korea and Palestine, with Du Re Bang and Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling, respectively. She is a founding member of the International Women’s Network against Militarism and Women for Genuine Security, its US group. She also hosts feminist radio program Women’s Magazine, broadcast on KPFA Berkeley California station of the Pacifica Radio network, and is known as DJ MOR Love and Joy, transnational feminist virtual dance party DJ.
Dr. Beverley Bryan is a lifelong educator and political activist, who is co-author of the classic book Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (1985) which detailed the experiences of Black women and their fight for equality from post-war up to 1980s Britain. Dr. Bryan was a founding member of the Brixton Black Women’s Group and the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD); a Saturday school organiser, a mainstream primary school teacher who pioneered Black history teaching in her classroom in the 1970s and a member of the British Black Panther Movement. A lifelong educator, Dr. Bryan is a retired Professor of Language Education from the University of the West Indies, Jamaica.
In 2026, we’re celebrating 25 years of publishing “Books for Changing the World.” In those 25 years, we’ve helped build critical space and infrastructure for radical ideas and movements on the left to grow. That work of institution-building and popular political education has never been more necessary or more urgent. We need your help to continue to do this work.