Mr. Book just finished Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy, by Jon Michaels and David Noll.

The authors defined vigilante democracy as the Republican’s “breathless rhetoric their authoritarian ambitions, their brazen recruitment strategies, the radical initiatives they’ve launched, and the canny ways these operatives have managed to secure legal cover for their campaigns of political domination and terror.”

An important part of that strategy is the vigilante part—getting private citizens, their supporters to do the dirty work. That’s done by dissenter vigilantism (enabling the views of the minority to prevail over the majority), courthouse vigilantism (filing the lawsuits for the radical right-wing federal judges to issue their rulings), street vigilantism (deterring and disrupting legitimate political rallies and protests) and electoral vigilantism (assault on elections by threatening voter, abdicates, voter registrants and election officials).

The authors successfully show that we have always had a history of private vigilantism, in support of political agendas, dating back to the founding of the country. Some examples are slavery, the efforts to defeat Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the long history of the suppression of the right to vote.

The book does an excellent job of showing how this strategy has been playing out and how each aspect of the strategy is helping them try to achieve their goal of the destruction of our political system and the installation of one-party totalitarian rule.

I give this book an A. Goodreads and NetGalley require grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, an A equates to 5 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).

This review has been posted at NetGalley, Goodreads and my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews

Mr. Book originally finished reading this on June 28, 2024. Due to the publisher’s request, I am not posting this review until a week before its October 8 release date.