Every Monday leading up to the election, McNally Jackson Seaport is hosting journalists and writers to help break down the events of the week, as it relates to their area of expertise for our Engaged Electorate series. These clarifying conversations aim to cut through the waves of information on our newsfeeds, and bring discussion forums to our in-person communities.

This week, we welcome legal scholar David Noll and journalist and author Melissa Gira Grant. Drawing on their years of experience researching and reporting on justice and the law, they will discuss the latest news around MAGA Republican strategy to roll back civil, political, and privacy rights and subvert American democracy. They will also discuss Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy, a new title from David Noll and co-author Jon Michaels which, in addition to exploring these subjects, prescribes a plan for beating the Christian nationalists at their own game.

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About Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy:

For readers of How Democracies Die, two legal scholars expose the MAGA Republican strategy to roll back civil, political, and privacy rights and subvert American democracy—and prescribe a plan for beating the Christian nationalists at their own game.

Time and again, when confronted with serious challenges to their power and privilege, white Christian nationalists seek solace—and satisfaction—in state-supported forms of vigilantism. This was true at the dawn of the American republic, when Northern abolitionists threatened the Southern slavocracy. It was also true in the aftermath of the Civil War, when emancipated Black Americans and their Northern allies sought to fulfill the promises of Reconstruction. And though this pattern was seemingly broken after the Civil Rights revolution of the 1950s and ’60s—and abandoned once and for all—legal vigilantism has made a surprising, roaring comeback in the months and years following the failed coup of January 6, 2021.

Committed to never again losing power, let alone experiencing the humiliation that followed on the heels of the ham-fisted insurrection, overlapping networks of right-wing lawyers, politicians, plutocrats, and preachers have resurrected state-supported vigilantism.

Vigilante Nation tells this story of the American Right marginalizing, subordinating, and disenfranchising the increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan members of the American polity. This book exposes the vigilantes’ plans, explains their methods—everything from book bans to anti-abortion bounties to attacks on government proceedings, including elections—and underscores the stakes. Now that supporters of democratic equality are numerous and dexterous enough to finally secure the broad promises of the civil rights revolution, the race is on for Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and the architects of Project 2025 to subvert our democracy before a countermovement can rise up to thwart their insidious plans.

“Vigilante Nation is a chilling exposé of the methods and tactics that far-right extremists—and their political and judicial enablers—are using to undermine democracy, in the tradition of Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side. A gripping, bracing read.”—Sewell Chan, executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and former editor in chief of The Texas Tribune

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David Noll is the associate dean for faculty research and development and a professor of law at Rutgers University. An academic fellow of the National Institute for Civil Justice, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, the New York Law Journal, and many others. He clerked for Judges Pierre N. Leval and Raymond J. Lohier Jr. on the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Judge Richard J. Holwell on the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Melissa Gira Grant is a journalist, author, and filmmaker. She is is a staff writer at the New Republic; the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (Verso), which was named a Village Voice favorite book of the year; and the co-director of They Won’t Call It Murder, selected for the 2021 DOC NYC Short List. Her forthcoming book, A Woman Is Against the Law: Sex, Race, and the Limits of Justice in America (Little, Brown and Company), uses narrative journalism and original archival research to offer a feminist indictment of the criminal legal system, drawing on 150 years of women’s attempts to appeal to the law in search of safety, accountability, power, and freedom.

 

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