Patterns by Naomi Klein

Low water levels have brought the wreck of a German artillery barge from the Second World War to light on the Danube. (Credit: APA-Images/Alamy Live News) As relentless heat and drought lowered its water levels this summer, the Danube began to give up its secrets. Like monsters rising through the muck of time, sunken wreckage from the Second World War has slowly materialized. In Serbia, the drying river revealed at least 20 Nazi ships, some still laden with unexploded ordnance.

I did my Live with Congressman Ro Khanna, who represents the heart of Silicon Valley, which is a rite of passage, apparently, for anyone on Substack. We started with something Rep. Khanna had posted that morning about the connections between the cuts to USAID and the Nepal floods. Here’s my friend and longtime collaborator, Bill McKibben talking about it last week. You can see my full conversation with Bill & Ayana here. But back to Rep.

My good friends Bill and Ayana, both of whom I’ve worked with in different ways for years, have teamed up to host the next season of Ayana’s podcast, What If We Get It Right? They will be highlighting climate issues in the upcoming midterms. To kick off the season, they asked me to join them for their first live. (It’s always terrifying when I’m the tech expert in the room…) Needless to say, it was such a fun time, even though we weren’t talking about the most fun topics.

Schoolchildren protest against climate change in the centre of Nelson, New Zealand (Tim Cuff/15 March 2019) The launch of END TIMES FASCISM – And the Fight for the Living World is exactly two weeks away! Over the coming weeks, Astra Taylor and I will share a lot of new material from and about our new book: op-eds, book excerpts, a mini-documentary, videos from the tour, recorded readings, audiobook clips, and interviews galore.

I did my first Live with Astra about our book End Times Fascism - And the Fight for the Living World, which is coming out on September 15th. I’m so happy with how it went and with the response we received from over a thousand people who attended the live.

I’m thrilled to announce the North American, UK and Ireland tour dates for END TIMES FASCISM - and the Fight for the Living World. Astra and I will be visiting fifteen cities in four countries in a little over a month. It’s going to be exciting, hectic and of course, tiring. But because I’ll be doing it with my friend and co-author Astra Taylor, it’s going to feel like a road trip.

Had such a great time joining Anat and Michael on Substack live yesterday. We dove right into the midterms of it all–with Angie Nixon’s win, the nail-biter of a Pennsylvania special election, and the California race. Then we went much deeper: what it actually means when money is in charge, and not just who wins elections. Anat made an important point that the U.S. left has sometimes over-indexed on electoral politics while missing where the real power resides.

As the institutions devoted to literacy seem to collapse around us, there is growing pressure on authors to engage in continuous “buy my book” posting, especially during the key pre-order period. I am not exempt from those rules (as these months of shilling have made clear…). However, I also have the privilege of reading a lot of books by other people before they come out, and there is no rule saying I can’t flog those too.

I hosted my first ever live with David Adler, Co-General Coordinator of Progressive International. David was the perfect guest to zoom out and map the rightward political realignment across Latin America from Columbia to Chile, Honduras to Peru. We unpacked both the historical and current role of U.S. interventions behind this shift as the Trump administration escalates its “war on the left” both at home and abroad. It’s best summarized by David who quotes Brazilian president, Lula da Silva.

Several readers of this newsletter have asked us to cover the attacks on democracy in Latin America. With that in mind, this week, I am thrilled to share Patterns’ first guest post, written by two scholars from whom I have learned a huge amount over the years, Verónica Gago and William Callison. Verónica is a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Argentina and has been a feminist organizer for years.