This compelling book traces the history of the assault on democracy and the rise of a police state that reached its zenith in the George W. Bush administration. From the war on communism, to the war on labor, to the war terrorism, our government has used surveillance, preventive detention, torture, and a climate of fear to consolidate its power and neutralize dissent. Under the guise of nurturing democracy at home and abroad, the U.S. government has actually undermined it.

Jeanne Theoharis is professor of political science at CUNY’s Brooklyn College, one who takes the responsibility of her profession towards her students, and to the society she lives in, very seriously. When she discovered that one of her former students, Syed Farad Hashmi, was being treated unjustly by the U.S. judicial system, she spoke out, and she continues to do so.

Sam Green’s Oscar nominated film The Weather Underground is an in depth look at the radical group which grew out of the Students for a Democratic Society and turned into a domestic terrorist organization opposed to racism, the war in Viet Nam and the oppression of people in the United States and around the world.

Anger at the United States government policies at home and abroad propelled this group forward. They were young, white middle class, intelligent, articulate and driven by what they saw was wrong with United States policies at home and abroad. To that end the group took to bombing government buildings, alerting the occupants in order to minimize casualties. Three members were killed while building a bomb, but no other live were lost, though millions of dollar worth of damage occurred, and a sense of fear was instilled in the American public. The group bombed the Capitol building and the Pentagon, broke Timothy Leary out of prison, and evaded one of the largest FBI manhunts in history.