Miguel Petrosky

Every couple of years, interest spikes in the “religious left,” a nebulous, hard-to-pin-down coalition of religiously motivated actors involved with American liberal and progressive politics.

When one mentions deportations of immigrants for their political views and activism, or the antagonistic relationship between the government and higher education, it conjures up the current news cycle in the second Trump era. However, as the New York Times editor and writer Clay Risen shows in his recently published book, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, these aren’t new developments.

On January 8, 2023, supporters of Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, rioted in the capital’s government buildings to try to retake the country and to encourage the Brazilian military to perform a coup d’etat on Bolsonaro’s behalf. The moment bared a striking resemblance to the January 6, 2021 insurrection in the United States, and left observers with a surreal and somber sense of déjà vu.