Read widely. Read carefully.

“Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on the internet, and a lot of what is on television, is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate propaganda campaigns, some of which come from abroad. Take responsibility for what you communicate with others.”

— Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

Reading & Media 

Start here:

Three things, free, in the order we’d hand them to a neighbor who just asked how to help.

• Indivisible: A Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink — indivisible.org/resource/guide/

The current national guide. What the strategy is and why. Free.

• Guide for New Groups — indivisible.org/resource/guide-for-new-groups/

A 30–60–90 day plan. Useful even for a group that already exists, as a way to see what we’ve skipped.

• On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century — Timothy Snyder, 2017

Twenty short chapters, about a hundred small pages. The quotation at the top of our Resources page comes from Lesson 11. If you read one book on this list, read this one — you can finish it in an evening. 

Books

How democracies come apart

• How Democracies Die — Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, 2018. Two Harvard political scientists on the pattern: elected leaders, legal steps, no tanks in the street.

• Tyranny of the Minority — Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2023. The follow-up, on the specific American machinery that lets a minority govern.

• How Fascism Works — Jason Stanley, 2018. The rhetoric and how to recognize it.

• Twilight of Democracy — Anne Applebaum, 2020. Short and personal: why people she knew went along.

• Strongmen — Ruth Ben-Ghiat, 2020. A century of them, from Mussolini forward, and what they have in common.

• On Freedom — Timothy Snyder, 2024. Longer and more philosophical than On Tyranny. What freedom is for, not just what it is against.
  
  

The vote itself

• One Person, No Vote — Carol Anderson, 2018. How voter suppression works in practice, mechanism by mechanism.

• Give Us the Ballot — Ari Berman, 2015. The Voting Rights Act from 1965 to its gutting in 2013.

• Ratf**ked — David Daley, 2016. How gerrymandering was engineered. North Carolina is one of the central cases in the book, which is a strange thing to read about your own state.
  
  

How ordinary people have actually won

• Why Civil Resistance Works — Erica Chenoweth & Maria Stephan, 2011. The research behind the “3.5%” figure you may have heard: nonviolent campaigns succeeded roughly twice as often as violent ones.

• Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know — Erica Chenoweth, 2021. The same material in plain question-and-answer form. Start here if the 2011 book looks too academic.

• This Is an Uprising — Mark Engler & Paul Engler, 2016. How movements are built on purpose rather than by accident.

• Hope in the Dark — Rebecca Solnit. For the weeks when it feels pointless. Her argument is that we routinely fail to notice our own wins.

• From Dictatorship to Democracy — Gene Sharp. Ninety pages, free online, and translated into dozens of languages because movements around the world kept asking for it.
  
  

North Carolina

• The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics — Rob Christensen, UNC Press. Fifty years at the News & Observer behind it. Explains how one state produced both Jesse Helms and Terry Sanford, which is most of what you need to know about North Carolina.

 Watch

• Slay the Dragon (2020) — gerrymandering, told through the Michigan volunteers who took it on. Free on Tubi.

• All In: The Fight for Democracy (2020) — voting rights, with Stacey Abrams.

• 13th (2016) — Ava DuVernay on the Thirteenth Amendment, criminalization, and disenfranchisement.
  
  

Streaming moves around. If a title isn’t where we said, justwatch.com will tell you where it is, and the Polk County Public Libraries can often get it.

Listen and subscribe

• What’s the Plan? — the weekly Indivisible podcast, hosted by co-founders Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg. New episodes Wednesdays. The closest thing to hearing the national strategy straight from the source. indivisible.org/wtp

• Democracy Docket — Marc Elias’s voting-rights litigation tracker. When a lawsuit about ballots or districts is filed anywhere in the country, it shows up here first, in English rather than legalese. democracydocket.com

• Letters from an American — Heather Cox Richardson. A historian’s nightly summary of the day’s news with the historical context attached. Free by email.

Local and state news

Snyder’s advice was to subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing. This is the part of the list where that costs the least and matters the most.

• Tryon Daily Bulletin — tryondailybulletin.com. Our own paper, covering Polk and upper Spartanburg counties. County commission meetings, town boards, school board. Nobody else is in those rooms.

• Blue Ridge Public Radio — bpr.org. Western North Carolina public radio out of Asheville.

• Carolina Public Press — carolinapublicpress.org. Nonprofit, nonpartisan, investigative, and focused on our end of the state.

• The Assembly — theassemblync.com. Long-form statewide reporting.

• NC Newsline — ncnewsline.com. Daily statehouse coverage. Nonprofit, and openly progressive in its editorial outlook — worth knowing as you read it.

Check before you share

• News Literacy Project — newslit.org. Nonpartisan, free. Their RumorGuard tool takes the viral claim you just saw and shows you how to check it yourself.

• For anything about voting — go to the source, not to social media. NC State Board of Elections at ncsbe.gov, or the Polk County Board of Elections at (828) 894-8181. They are nonpartisan and they are the only ones whose answer is authoritative.

Where to get all of this

• Polk County Public Libraries — polklibrary.org. Locations in Columbus, Saluda, and Tryon. Nearly every book above can be requested, free, and if they don’t own it they can usually borrow it from another library.

• Lanier Library in Tryon — a membership library, and one of the oldest in the state.

Reading one of these and telling somebody else what was in it is, by itself, the work. That is what we mean by sharing resources is community.