Out Now: 'Strange People on the Hill'

Strange People on the Hill is out today, and I highly recommend adding it to your reading list. You can order it directly from the publisher, buy it at your local independent bookstore, or request it through your local library.

I didn't tell Mike that I planned to write a post about his book and what it meant to me. I'll keep this short, and I hope this won’t embarrass him too much.

I first connected with Mike in 2017, when we were both employed as journalists covering the Radical Right. It was a different time then. After a deadly white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville horrified the country that year, newsrooms were finally starting to treat right-wing extremism as a legitimate “beat" worthy of dedicated reporters and resources for aggressive investigative stories. Many of us working on the beat were in regular contact during that time, commiserating over the sadistic characters we confronted each day and supporting each other through difficult moments.

A decade later, that beat hardly exists anymore. Only a few reporters from the era that Mike and I made our names in are still employed in newsrooms, and those who still have full-time jobs have seen their roles folded into larger assignment desks, often overseen by editors who are reluctant to fight the good fight. Some of us went to work for major “anti-hate” nonprofits, but even those institutions would retreat into a defensive posture during the second Trump Administration. The organizations best-positioned to confront American fascism instead cowered at the sight of its fangs.

In his new book, Mike writes about what happened in a quiet West Virginia community after a prolific white nationalist hate group called VDARE moved into a castle overlooking the town’s main drag. But unlike most books published about the far-right, the extremists are not the central focus. Instead, we find VDARE lurking in the background while a town tears itself apart — a microcosm of our country's struggle to reconcile with the hate haunting our daily lives.

Strange People on the Hill is about something much bigger than VDARE. It is an exploration of the heartbreak and devastation that comes to those fighting for love in a nation that has emboldened hate. It’s about reckoning with the failures that got us to this point and realizing that major institutions have left us to fend for ourselves. And it’s a testament to the righteousness of continuing to fight, even on days when the battle feels lost.

This is the moral struggle of our time, and Mike’s book traverses it with a striking amount of vulnerability and intimacy. The fight against fascism contains joyous moments, especially when you score a win, but it also inflicts tremendous pain on those who join its frontlines.

It moved me in ways I didn’t expect it to, and that makes Strange People on the Hill one of the best “extremism” books I’ve had the pleasure of reading.

-Jared Holt