American Zealots

Inside Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism

By: Arie Perliger

Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon

Length: 6 hrs and 58 mins

Publisher's Summary

In an unsettling time in American history, the outbreak of right-wing violence is among the most disturbing developments. In recent years, attacks originating from the far right of American politics have targeted religious and ethnic minorities, with a series of antigovernment militants, religious extremists, and lone-wolf mass shooters inspired by right-wing ideologies. The need to understand the nature and danger of far-right violence is greater than ever. 

In American Zealots, Arie Perliger provides a wide-ranging and rigorously researched overview of right-wing domestic terrorism. He analyzes its historical roots, characteristics, tactics, rhetoric, and organization, assessing the current and future trajectory of the use of violence by the far right. Perliger draws on a comprehensive dataset of more than 5,000 attacks and their perpetrators between 1990 and 2018 in order to explore key trends in American right-wing terrorism. He describes the entire ideological spectrum of the American far right, including today's white supremacists, antigovernment groups, and antiabortion fundamentalists, as well as the histories of the KKK, skinheads, and neo-Nazis. Based on these findings, Perliger suggests counterterrorism policies that can respond effectively to the far-right threat.

©2020 Columbia University Press (P)2020 Tantor

Examination of extremism

Academic examination of militant ideologies and effects on US political reality. Uses relevant examples of right wing terrorism

Fascist manifesto

I have listened to this book and would find it comical if it didn't sound so much like a fascist manifesto. The author begins his intellectually dishonest writing with contradictory assertions that the left is for freedom and democracy but the right is authoritarian and is a danger to democracy, then calls out neo-nazi's socialist as a far-right group. He claims the KKK has long been associated with the right. Socialism is a left wing ideology, not a right wing ideology, so socialist groups, by the authors own assumptions, is left wing. The KKK was and is associated with Democrats, a left wing party. The lefts ideology decrease people's rights are decreed by the government, where as the right decrees people's liberties are natural and that government does not dictate ones rights, but is there to protect the infringement of them. This too is counter to the author's claims of the right being authoritarian as authoritarianism is the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom. The author negates any credibility within his first two chapters and spirals down hill from there with misrepresentations, mischaracterization, false assumptions/assertions, historical anachronism, and a lack of any credible citation of facts. Some of the ones he does provide, The Army of God and Milita men pamphlets, actually talk about saving and protecting lives from death without due process of law, and protecting individual natural rights from an authoritarian government. Again, his cited sources actually run counter to his left-right assertion he makes in the beginning. To think this author is actually a professor at any American University lends credence to the belief that left wing propaganda and propagandists have embedded themselves in our educational system. This tactic of indoctrinating our youth at schools has been a left wing ploy for decades since our youth are often fearful of contradicting their educators for fear of negative reprisal of a falling grade. It is an authoritarian tactic used to prevent free speech. This book is garbage!