Chaos Comes Calling

“Chaos Comes Calling is a tightly written and well-reported account of the rise of extremism in small-town America... Chaos Comes Calling provides a road map to bring back reason and levelheadedness to our communities—and hopefully in time, our country as well.”

“A sobering story but also one that offers hope.”

“Sasha Abramsky, a peripatetic British journalist who has written widely on life in America, particularly on U.S. prisons, has turned in the more straightforwardly journalistic Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America. Abramsky alternates between small communities in Northern California and Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, where, beginning in the strange and dislocating early days of the pandemic, the local far right began a series of putsches to take over mayor’s offices, city councils, election boards, and school districts.”

“Well-reported...Chaos Comes Calling provides insight into how the right became a home to anti-authority moods that were once the left's province.”

“An enthralling account...an eye-opening close-up view of American politics.”

“An excellent, fearless work of political reportage in  the face of America's violent discontents.”

“An unflinching, sobering, and essential read, filled with first-person narratives and reflections that offer an urgent warning about the fragility of democratic institutions in the face of rising extremism in the United States and around the world.”

“An important and disturbing book...A fine-grained account of political and social turmoil.”

“There are real people in this intimately reported book, real consequences—and also real hope. The great achievement of Chaos Comes Calling is what it reveals about how communities become captive to the little fascisms of would-be tyrants, and how some, at least, free themselves. This story about small places has big implications.”

“Abramsky takes us out of the Washington, DC, media echosphere and its myopic coverage of national horseraces and puts us on the ground in real communities where Trump, Bannon, and their cacophony of lies and falsehoods have already curdled the local governments, perverting the laboratories of democracy into wellsprings of authoritarianism. The fight against these people starts at home."

“In this chilling report from the American West, Abramsky shows how the extreme right has mobilized to upend local democratic institutions and warns of a fascist threat that’s alarmingly close and widespread. A disturbing, necessary book.”

“Abramsky listens to people we might dismiss as villains, hearing the fear, whether justified or ginned up, behind their increasingly extremist worldview. Chaos Comes Calling helps us reckon with the trauma that reverberates.”