Today I am excited to talk with Sonali Kolhatkar and Viet Thanh Nguyen about a new book edited by Sonali entitled Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism. The book is comprised of interviews Sonali conducted with activists, organizers, intellectuals and artists from a rich diversity of locations—from Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and other major cities, to small towns in Georgia, Maine, the Carolinas, and elsewhere. We talk about the broad ideological formations that support State Terror and Fascism, as well as the ways people have wielded soft power with tactics and strategies such as mutual aid, Know Your Rights, power mapping, networking, and rapid response. Viet specifically talks about the power of counter-narratives that tap into radical imaginings and utopian thinking. We speak of the ways people from all walks of life have risen to the task of keeping each other safe. Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host, and executive producer of Rising Up With Sonali which airs as a radio program on KPFK Pacifica Radio and dozens of other community radio stations around the U.S. and as a TV show on Free Speech TV, and a podcast on Spotify and iTunes. She is the author of Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism (Seven Stories, 2026), Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World is Possible (Seven Stories, 2025), and Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights, 2023). Her first book, co-authored with James Ingalls, is Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2006, Seven Stories). Sonali is Senior Correspondent and Writing Fellow of the Independent Media Institute‘s Economy for All project a monthly columnist at Truthout and also at OtherWords, Senior Correspondent for The Zero Hour, the founding Co-Director of the Afghan Women’s Mission, a US-based non-profit solidarity organization that funds the work of RAWA, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Justice Action Center. Her first novel, Queen of Aarohi, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2027. She also has won awards for her paintings and displayed her works at numerous exhibits and galleries. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He was a professor at the University of Southern California for many years, but stepped down from his professorship to become a Writer in Residence at USC. Most recently he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and le Prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book in France), for The Sympathizer. He is the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives and the Library of America volume for Maxine Hong Kingston. He co-authored Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book, with his then six-year-old son, Ellison, and his most recent novel is The Committed, the sequel to The Sympathizer. HBO turned The Sympathizer into a TV series in 2024, directed by Park Chan-wook. Nguyen’s last two books were Simone, a children’s book illustrated by Minnie Phan, and To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, from Harvard University Press in 2025.
