Plus some new reads to take with us into the new year. November/December 2021 The past two months at PRA have been a busy, celebratory, and focused period for PRA staff, board, and community. This past Tuesday, we virtually celebrated 40 years with more than 80 friends and family of PRA over cocktails, interactive games, and shared memories. In November, we hosted an incredible roundtable discussion with some of the brilliant and fearless activists and thinkers leading the movement to emancipate sex work from state violence and repression. At the beginning of December, we convened a panel of leading analysts and practitioners preparing for the next year in this historic fight for trans justice. As we close the year, we have been publishing incisive new pieces including an incredible look at the political legacy and uncertain future of Liberty University under the Faustian leadership of the Falwells by PRA frequent contributor Carolyn Gallaher. We opened three new full-time staff positions and welcomed two new staff members as we grow our team in preparation for the fight ahead. And in these last weeks of the year, we have turned our focus to preparing a comprehensive briefing of the state of the Right today as we take a look back at developments in right-wing movements in the year since the January 6 insurrection. Stay tuned for more information about this exclusive briefing and how to attend. With fists up and hearts raised, The PRA Team P.S. Save the date for a PRA Briefing on the state of the Right since January 6th: January 6, 2022 - Time TBA PRA's Year in Books A Gift Guide and/or Reading List to Close Out 2021 While the past few years have brought myriad distressing new developments from the Right and Far Right, it’s also been the occasion of a boom in serious and nuanced scholarship and reporting on these movements. At the end of a year marked by unprecedented conspiracism; nationwide attacks on public schools, public health, and honest accounts of U.S. history; calls for burning books and banning reproductive freedom; and, not least, a violent and coordinated attack on the democratic process itself, we thought we’d highlight some of the journalists, activists and academics whose books are helping inform our resistance. From fighting White Evangelical Racism to searching for A Wider Type of Freedom, here’s what PRA’s been reading in 2021: view the full list of twelve books here. White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism By Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective The book, coauthored by an international group of scholars and activists known as the Zetkin Collective, marks the first systemic inquiry into the Far Right’s interventions in the climate crisis. Using case studies from 13 countries in Europe, as well as in the U.S. and Brazil, Malm and the collective explore the links between climate denial, racism, and far-right intersections with the environment and fossil fuels. Continue reading PRA’s review here. A Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Radical Justice Liberate Everyone By Daniel Martinez HoSang Daniel Martinez HoSang looks at movements across the last three centuries—from fights against forced sterilizations, for domestic workers’ rights, and the environmental justice movement today—that illustrate the need to dismantle failed systems in order to rebuild an equitable society. HoSang talked to PRA this June about the limitations of liberal ideas of freedom, and what a wider conception of liberation means. Continue reading PRA’s interview with Martinez HoSang here. Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump By Spencer Ackerman Ackerman’s account takes us on a tour of three administrations, Republican and Democratic, and into the belly of the security state beast. The cumulative effect is a picture of the business-as-usual uses of surveillance, repression, and violence against Arab and Muslim Americans day after day and year after year, regardless of who sits in the White House. This, he notes, is in stark contrast with the ways in which White nationalist violence, consistently the most deadly, has been neglected or ignored by federal law enforcement. Continue reading PRA’s review here. A Field Guide to White Supremacy Co-edited by Kathleen Belew and Ramón A. Gutiérrez In her latest book, an anthology co-edited with Gutiérrez, Belew broadens the scope to look at the interlocking ways that White supremacy and oppression are manifested, including issues of patriarchy, attacks on Indigenous sovereignty, attacks on trans and non-binary people, and antisemitism. The anthology includes almost two dozen essays, some reprinted classics but mostly new, illuminating issues such as the complex way the anti-immigrant movement has fueled right-wing politics, or the long history of organized White nationalism that undergirds the modern Alt Right. Continue reading PRA’s interview with Belew here. View the Full List Here In Case You Missed It Anti-Sex Work Feminism and the Lived Reality of Criminalization and State Violence: A PRA Roundtable Discussion “Our anti-sex work bias is male supremacy, is the patriarchy infecting us and saying that it's dangerous when...someone is selling something that normally cis-men can get for free. And that the very act of selling is a transgression of norms that the patriarchy thinks are important.” - Heron Greenesmith, PRA This Year and Next in Anti-LGBT Advocacy: A PRA Briefing "Our members are also fighting what we're calling a hyper local level. And that is school boards, that's library councils. And we're seeing them more and more trying to limit curriculum. It's completely tied up, braided with the anti-critical race theory, anti-masking, etc." - Fran Hutchins, Equality Federation New from PRA Between a Secular Rock and a Fundamentalist Hard Place: The Aftermath of Scandal at Liberty University by Carolyn Gallaher Jerry Falwell Sr co-founded Liberty University as a place of fundamentalist education. When Falwell Jr. took over, the scandals that followed him left Liberty University reckoning with misdeeds under the Falwells' tenures. Dispelling Illusions and Overlooking Continuities: A Review of Spencer Ackerman’s Reign of Terror by Steven Gardiner Gardiner reviews Spencer Ackerman's Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, looking at what Ackerman got right, and where he could have gone further in his analysis. Sentimentalizing Resentment: How Taylor Caldwell Set the Mood for the Far Right by Carol Mason Taylor Caldwell's novels, published in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, breathed life into anti-Communist conspiracy theories and motivated right-wing women to take political action with lasting impact today. A Field Guide to White Supremacy: Author Q&A with Kathleen Belew by Shane Burley Burley and Belew discuss the broader picture of White supremacy, the definitional work missing in reporting, and community-based solutions to far-right violence. White Skin, Black Fuel: Author Q&A with Andreas Malm by Zavi Kang Engles Kang Engles discusses with Malm the close, historical and contemporary ties between the Far Right, White supremacy, and the fossil fuel industry. New From Religion Dispatches Authoritarian SCOTUS Didn't 'Just Happen': As Roe Hangs by a Thread the Press Struggles with Context and Framing by Chrissy Stroop As we look ahead to the pending Supreme Court decision on Roe, Stroop presents compelling evidence that major media outlets are doing more harm than good in the way they uncritically adopt right-wing framing of both the rightward turn of SCOTUS and the anti-abortion movement poised on the precipice of a significant and disastrous win. Unintended Consequences: Overturning Roe v. Wade May Endanger This Cherished Evangelical Practice by R.L. Stollar As evangelicals funnel organizing and resources into making abortion effectively illegal in the United States, they threaten a legal precedence that underpins another core priority of the movement: the right to homeschool one's children. Is Zionism No Longer Able to Offer Solutions to the Present Reality? by Shaul Magid "[T]he present iteration of liberal Zionism as a humanistic project of Jewish self-determination based on liberal democratic values is in a defensive mode in light of the realities in the state of Israel...and in its own self-fashioning...that cannot be defined as “liberal” by any stretch of the imagination." For more analysis and resources, browse our most recent articles and 40-year archive on our website. Get involved with PRA! Work with Us HR & Operations Coordinator Research Program Coordinator Development Director Research Analyst Subscribe to The Public Eye Our quarterly print magazine is one of the longest running of its kind! 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