The Minuteman

Audio Notes: Listened at 1.2x speed. The narrator has a very nice, interesting voice. He adds slight accents for different direct character quotations, nothing over the top. Would definitely listen to something narrated by Jonathan Davis again!

I'd never heard of Nat Arno. Or of the Newark Nazis. Or had any idea that there was a large Nazi movement in the United States before World War 2. Not sure if my memory is just lacking, or my history education, or possibly (probably) both.

The Minuteman is a quick dive into the world of the Jewish mob in New Jersey in the 1930s, the unrest that brewed there and in other cities with both large German and Jewish populations, and a look at the life of Nat Arno, a Jewish boxer turned gangster, and his often violent fight against the rising Nazi movement in his home state. While his methods can't exactly be condoned - even if he tried to avoid outright killing anyone, he was unapologetically violent in breaking up Nazi meetings and demonstrations - his dogged defense of his own people and culture and early recognition of what the Nazi groups were heading towards certainly played a large part in events of those years leading up to America's involvement in the war.

The author compares the Minutemen to modern day Antifa, not an exact correspondence but some of the methods and attitudes are implied to be the same. There are a ton of reviews on Audible that are absolutely OUTRAGED at this comparison. It seems like neither group is one that an entirely logical, law-abiding citizen would want to emulate, and both were/are organizations that take aim at groups that spew hate and bigotry about one group of people or another. I don't have much more knowledge of Antifa than I do of the Minutemen, so I'll leave it at that. Just the level of pearl-clutching outrage in the reviews because of the comparison seems a bit overblown.