I would’ve easily given this book five stars except that the author lost his way towards the end. He should’ve wrapped it up with what happened with the Vietnamese fishers. Instead, he added a new topic of toxic environmental waste that would’ve been better told as a separate book.

Up until that point, it was pretty riveting and even the epilogue was great to read. But that boy in between that took place many years after the lawsuit against the KKK had no correlation to the clear xenophobia against the Vietnamese. The fact that the factory centered on your second portion was from Taiwan felt completely unrelated given it had nothing to do with xenophobia. 

Highly recommend the book anyway. It was almost five stars!, and I really appreciated learning the history of the Southern Poverty Law Center (and was so glad I never donated a penny to it myself). 

We all like to think of the Klan as a historical dinosaur that only exists in history books, but Kirk Wallace Johnson is here to tell you that the Klan is alive, well, and very active in Texas. I'm still sitting here, thinking about the fact that Pasadena, a suburb of Houston, was a sundown town until the 1980s. That the Boy Scouts that were trained by the Klan are now men in their 50s walking among us. That the majority of the vile, racist, xenophobic people written about in this book are alive and still living among us. That the whole idea that the Klan infiltrated law enforcement and the armed forces is not something new that exploded on January 6, 2021. White supremacists have always been among us and they have never gone away.