In February, I wrote a blog post, "What Felt Impossible Became Possible," about George Dale a newspaper editor and publisher based in Muncie, Indiana in the 1920s who used his paper, his wit, and his inability to stand down from a fight to do battle against the Ku Klux Klan. I'd done a fair amount of spelunking through Dale's archives in the months that followed the election of Donald Trump in 2024 and I thought that his story of perseverance would resonate with folks.

It did.

A lot of people read it. Like, a lot a lot, which took me surprise on day one and was truly mind-blowing weeks later when it was still going strong. And it got me thinking: Maybe there's a bigger story here, the story of someone who refused to back down against fascism even when the odds were stacked massively against him and the only one that believed he could do it was himself. And maybe there's something resonant about how he won, with words and with truth and with a wit sharpened like a razor poised to cut through the entire power structure aligned against him.

And so a friend connected me with a book agent, who had already read the blog post—because at that point, like I said, a lot of people had—and he thought the same thing that I had: There was a bigger story here.

And so I'm absolutely beyond belief excited to tell you that that bigger story will get to be told in I HATE THOSE MASKED BASTARDS! Terror, Truth, and the Editor Who Took on the Klan, a new book by me coming sometime in the future (I still gotta write the thing) from the powerhouse radical indie press Haymarket Books. Really! There's even one of those Publisher's Marketplace things!

I'm thrilled and I'm terrified. While I've done books before, I've never done something like this: researching events from a hundred years ago and trying to weave them into a coherent story that not only talks about yesterday but is relevant to today. It feels like I'm embarking on some kind of uncharted endeavor, like I'm heading into the frozen arctic without a map.

Anyway.

Of course, it's not lost on me, and I hope it's not lost on you, that there's a new crop of masked bastards running around the very streets that we live on right now. And it feels, at least for me, like the odds of overcoming them are insurmountable. That's where I think the story of George Dale (and others like him) comes in, because in learning about history we learn that the struggles of a hundred years ago offer lessons for the struggles of today. It's part of why our current crop of fascists are so hellbent on erasing history. And why we can't let them.

You will be hearing about this a lot in the coming months, including how you can help make it happen. But for today, here's to history, to uncharted endeavors, and to beating back the masked bastards once again. Let's fucking go.