This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our listeners who support us at patreon.com and by haymarket books which has loads of great left-wing titles

perfect for dig listeners like you.

One that you might like is Azati, freedom, fascism, fiction, by Arandotti Roy.

In this series of electrifying essays, Arndati Roy challenges us to reflect on the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism.

The essays include meditations on language, public as

well as private, and on the role of fiction and alternative imaginations in these disturbing times.

The pandemic, she says, is a portal between one world and another.

For all the illness and devastation it has left in its wake, it is an invitation to the human race, an opportunity to imagine another world.

Azadi, freedom, fascism Fascism Fiction by Arandotti Roy.

Out now from Jacobin magazine. My name is Daniel Denver and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island.

No doubt, Q Annan seems pretty weird and it is indeed pretty damn terrifying. But also I must admit sort of entertaining.

I read every one of Will Summer's newsletters not only because understanding Q is key to understanding the present day right,

but also because their wild conspiracies make me chuckle. A morbidly fascinating cabinet of

curiosities that perfectly exudes the bizarre and bad

vibes of this dystopic moment. But Q Annan is not as abnormal as we might like to think.

Step back and consider that the past 40 years of American politics have revolved around hysterical media-fed mass

bipartisan panics over predatory threats against American children, particularly

sexual threats, sadonists, pedophile daycare owners, drugs, metal and rap music, immigrants, criminals, and, of course, missing

and abducted children from Aeton Pates and Adam Walsh to Polly Class and Jacob Wetterling. Those cases were real and horrible.

But transmuted into mass media and politics, they fed a bipartisan panic that took off at the tail end of the 1970s and that was fast rendered into the unquestionable common sense that children were being abducted, gruesomely assaulted, and killed by strangers in just enormous numbers.

This panic took flight under Reagan, intensified under Clinton's war on crime, and by the time of the George

W Bush administration had been folded into the politics of the more closely. Unfortunately, as we work to help our children feel safer by fighting terror,

...