Keen On America

An anti-fascist spy handed American officials evidence of murderous intent from a Nazi planning server — and they declined to act.

About the Guest
Christopher Mathias is a journalist covering the far right, formerly a senior reporter at HuffPost, with work appearing in The Guardian, The Nation, MSNBC, Zeteo, and WNYC. His reporting has helped unmask white supremacist cops, soldiers, teachers, and politicians, and he was a Deadline Awards finalist for feature writing. He is originally from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and lives in New York. His new book, To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right (Atria Books), is out now.

About the Episode
Days after Jonathan Rauch’s influential Atlantic essay announced he’d moved from fascism skeptic to fascism believer, Christopher Mathias joins the show to discuss his new book — a deeply reported investigation into the decentralized network of anti-fascist activists who infiltrate, monitor, and expose neo-Nazis and white supremacists operating in positions of power across America.
The conversation quickly moves beyond whether Trump is a fascist to the harder questions his book raises: Who gets to decide who is exposed? What rights to privacy do members of extremist groups retain? Is unmasking community self-defense or vigilantism? And does the same logic that justifies exposing a neo-Nazi EMT extend to the tens of thousands of ICE agents now conducting raids on American streets?
Timeline
00:00 Introduction
 Jonathan Rauch’s Atlantic essay and the renewed fascism debate
01:10 Meet Christopher Mathias
 Introducing the book and the journalist behind it
01:45 The Greenville Moment
 When Mathias first used “fascist” in a headline after watching Trump whip a crowd into chanting “Send her back”
02:40 Defining the F-Word
 Fascism as a right-wing politics of domination; Langston Hughes recognizing it in the 1930s before the word arrived
04:15 The Hard Question
 If MAGA is a fascist movement, are the 70-plus million who voted for Trump fascists too?
05:55 The Worst of the Worst
 Why the book targets explicit neo-Nazis in positions of power, not ordinary Trump supporters
08:15 Who Decides?
 Privacy, accountability, and whether everyone at Charlottesville deserves exposure
10:45 Antifascist Amnesty
 Leave the movement and we leave you alone; return and we publish
12:30 The Equivalence Trap
 Why Mathias rejects the idea that this is just radicals exposing radicals
14:05 From Neo-Nazis to ICE
 How anti-fascist tactics are now used to identify masked federal agents
17:15 Where Does It End?
 Drawing lines between violent enforcement and bureaucratic participation
19:40 “Just Following Orders”
 Why some orders shouldn’t be followed, and the occupation of Minneapolis
21:30 The Battle Over Shame
 Competing databases, surveillance, and what America should be ashamed of
23:15 The Spy Who Warned Charlottesville
 An infiltrator uncovers plans for violence that officials ignore
26:00 Minneapolis as Model
 “We protect us” and a blueprint for grassroots resistance
28:45 The Underground War
 Intelligence, counterintelligence, and the personal cost of exposure
30:30 Closing
 Fascism as a snake eating its own tail and the urgent task of limiting the damage

Links & References

Mentioned in this episode:
Jonathan Rauch, “Yes, It’s Fascism” — The Atlantic (January 2026)
To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right by Christopher Mathias (Atria Books, February 2026)
Christopher Mathias reporting archive
Follow Christopher Mathias: BlueSky | X

About Keen On America
Keen On America is a daily podcast hosted by Andrew Keen, the Anglo-American writer and Silicon Valley insider named by GQ magazine as one of the world’s “100 Most Connected Men.” Every day, Andrew brings his sharp Transatlantic wit to the forces reshaping the United States — interviewing leading thinkers and writers about American history, politics, technology, culture, and business. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show’s founding on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
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Can meat save the planet? That’s the paradoxical promise of the longtime vegan activist Bruce Friedrich, founder of the Good Food Institute. In his new book, Meat, Friedrich argues that plant-based and cultivated meat can satisfy the craving of the most hardline carnivore while simultaneously fixing the apocalyptic environmental consequences of industrial farming. So new tech, particularly the latest technology that magically mimics meat, will enable the regeneration of the (real) natural world. For this vegan advocate of meat, this next agricultural revolution will not only transform humanity’s favorite food but also our planet’s environmental future.

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There’s something absurdly Strangelovian about the American quest for a perfect weapon. As Jeffrey Stern warns in The Warhead, his new history of The Paveway, the first “smart” bomb, weapons are always, like their human engineers, imperfect. “It’s always exploding somewhere,” Stern dryly notes, and those explosions in the Texas Instruments developed Paveway were not only unexpected, but often tragically imperfect. So for example, the Second Gulf War was the most precise air war in history and yet within a year, more civilians died than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. The conceit of “perfection”, Stern warns, might be as quintessentially American as the fatally flawed Walt Disney corporation or the Kennedy dynasty (both part of the Paveway story). Which is why this history of smart weapons makes such chilling reading in an AI age when Americans are once again being promised perfect military technology.

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Why did Nixon trigger a remarkable cultural American renaissance while Trump has generated an avalanche of social media bluster, but few great movies, songs or novels? For Silicon Valley critic Jon Taplin, the problem isn’t just technological. Yes, he argues in Rolling Stone, social media has sucked a lot of the cultural vitality out of America and created a self-interested new class of influencers. But Sixties veteran Taplin sees this cultural crisis in generational terms arguing that young American artists need a “cojones transplant”. Perhaps. Although one wonders if Taplin is part of an American gerontocracy which is hoarding not just power and wealth, but also virtue.

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Is AI going through an adolescent crisis, even it’s still just a toddler? There certainly seems to be a lot of adolescent angst amongst our new AI overlords like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. In his latest essay, appropriately entitled “The Adolescence of Technology”, Amodei lays out all the existential dangers of AI while simultaneously rejecting the doomsday pessimism of many tech sceptics. Amodei, That Was The Week’s Keith Teare quips, “reminds me of a teenager raised by religious parents to believe you should only have sex after marriage, but he wants to have sex now and feels guilty about it." Teare is right. Amodei - not unlike fellow adolescents Sam Altman and Elon Musk - certainly wants to have his cake and eat it too. So when will they all grow up? Some, like the perpetually infantile Musk, never will. But perhaps like Keith Teare’s conflicted teenager, maybe Dario Amodei will eventually grow out of his guilty adolescence and become a responsibly accountable adult.

Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe