RSS

David Neiwert

David Neiwert is a freelance writer based in Seattle and the editor of the blog Orcinus. A National Press Club award winner for his reportage on the radical right, he is also the author of three books, most recently Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community.

Recent Articles

The Fence to Nowhere

The Minutemen promised their supporters a high-tech border barrier. Instead, they got a five-strand barbed-wire fence and a bunch of radical splinter groups.

David NeiwertSep 19, 2008

Jim Campbell was a contractor before he became an Arizona retiree, so he happens to know a little about getting construction projects completed. He also happens to be avidly involved in efforts to stem what he and thousands of others see as an unholy tide of illegal immigrants streaming over the U.S.?Mexico border. So when the Minutemen--those "citizen watchdogs" who have been setting up vigilante border patrols throughout the Southwest--announced plans to build a fence along a section of the Arizona-Mexico border, it seemed to Campbell like a good time to step up and make a difference.

A couple of years later and $100,000 lighter, Campbell's not so sure it was a good idea. In fact, he calls the people running the Minutemen's border-fence project "a bunch of felons."

Jonah Goldberg's Bizarro History

In his new book, Goldberg has decided to dream up fascists on the left rather than acknowledge that the real American fascists have been lurking in the right's closet for many years.

David NeiwertJan 08, 2008

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg (Doubleday, 496 pages)

* * *

The public understanding of World War II history and its precedents has suffered in recent years from the depredations of revisionist historians -- the David Irvings and David Bowmans of the field who have attempted to recast the meaning of, respectively, the Holocaust and the Japanese American internment. Their reach, however, has been somewhat limited to fringe audiences.