Investigative journalist Matt Kennard joins us to discuss Irregular Army, his investigation into how white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other extremists found their way into the US military during the War on Terror. From Iraq and Afghanistan to Donald Trump, MAGA and Pete Hegseth, Kennard argues that the consequences of those years are now playing out at the highest levels of American politics. We explore the rise of the far right, Islamophobia, US military power and foreign policy, and ask whether the War on Terror helped create the political forces reshaping America today.
This article was originally published by The Thinking Muslim; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.
Muhammad Jalal - Host of The Thinking Muslim Podcast
Muhammad Jalal is an educator specialising in politics, he founded and hosts The Thinking Muslim podcast. He regularly delivers lectures and courses on politics and how to navigate political ideologies within an Islamic framework. He writes regularly for a number of journals including Muslim Matters and Traversing Tradition as well as his own substack http://jalalayn.substack.com
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
The Wind Cries Freedom, the new book from Z co-founder Michael Albert, is a sweeping oral history of a future American revolution.
Through thirty interconnected chapters, it draws out the strategies, failures, turning points, and hard-won wisdom of a movement that called itself the Revolutionary Participatory Society. These are not the polished memoirs of politicians: they are the unfiltered accounts of people who organized in neighborhoods, hospitals, universities, stadiums, courthouses, and places of worship, and kept a shared vision alive through cynicism and exhaustion.
The result is speculative political fiction that reads like history: messy, human, and quietly hopeful in the way that only real experience and long thought can produce.
Get your copy and peruse more features on the book’s website below.
“Read it, argue with it, but don’t look away. The future it recalls is one we must still fight to deserve.”
Yanis Varoufakis
“The most unusual and intriguing combination of prophecy, manifesto, and movement building manual that I have ever encountered.”
Bill Fletcher Junior
“This work fills a huge gap in our social movement literature.”
Cynthia Peters
You've just read your article on Z this month.
DOES Z'S SURVIVAL MATTER?
You keep coming back for a reason: serious political analysis, movement reporting, and debate beyond the priorities of corporate media. Today, Z is in a precarious financial position. If Z is part of how you understand the world, help keep it going. The readers who give monthly are the reason this work survives between fundraisers.
Z is in a precarious financial position. If it’s part of how you understand the world, help keep it going.
Your reading count is stored only in your browser and is never sent to us.
Sound is muted by default. Tap 🔊 for the full experience
CRITICAL ACTION
Critical Action is a longtime friend of Z and a music and storytelling project grounded in liberation, solidarity, and resistance to authoritarian power. Through music, narrative, and multimedia, the project engages the same political realities and movement traditions that guide and motivate Z’s work.
If this project resonates with you, you can learn more about it and find ways to support the work using the link below.
Z is in the most precarious financial position in its history.
Z is a place to think beyond the limits of the present.
For decades, Z has brought together political analysis, movement reporting, debate, and visions of a different future from writers and activists around the world. That work is more than journalism. It is movement infrastructure: movements need places to develop ideas, test arguments, learn from experience, and imagine what comes next.
In the first two days of this fundraiser, 19 donors and 8 new monthly sustainers stepped up. Help us reach 1,000 donors who keep Z independent, for everyone.
For decades, Z has published the analysis, debate, and visions movements need, free of paywalls, ads, and billionaire owners. If that work should continue, Z needs your support now.