Will Potter’s new book, Little Red Barns: Hiding the Truth, from Farm to Fable (City Lights, July), earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly for its investigation into how “the financial forces behind factory farming have grown powerful enough to silence industry whistleblowers, investigative journalists, and even federal inspectors.” The investigative journalist spent a decade documenting what he describes as a “secret world of disinformation, corporate corruption and social control.” It all amounts to what Potter calls a new authoritarian playbook, one that connects the censorship of agricultural activists to the rising threat of fascism and, by extension, “a threat to our very survival as a species.”
How do you describe this book succinctly without scaring people off at dinner parties?
It’s a book about how attempts to control our food supply and information are directly connected to the rise of fascism right now. Everyone eats and everyone wants to know some basics about where our food comes from. We’ve all seen many disturbing videos of factory farming. So this is a story about how the industry tries to prevent us from asking those questions and getting real answers from journalists. This isn’t an activist project or an animal rights project. It’s about threats to our fundamental rights to access to information.
You describe what you uncovered as “the new playbook” for the political far right. What do you mean?
The FBI officially labeled animal and environmental activists their number one domestic terrorism threat. These groups have never used physical violence. They’ve engaged in sabotage, but then the movement shifted to investigations—and even that is being labeled as terrorism. There is no other contemporary social movement post-9/11 that’s been hit with the full weight of the surveillance and repressive state like these movements. The FBI singled them out as their top priority while they were deliberately ignoring the rise of the far right.
So, you see this as a microcosm of a larger problem?
No, I believe it is precursor of a larger problem. If we want to understand what’s happening with the ICE raids, with these new private detention centers that are opening [like the one that has been dubbed Alligator Alcatraz], things like Cop City—the police training facility in Georgia—we really have to go back a little bit and to see how some of what I’m reporting on was truly pioneering.
Why don’t people make the immediate connection between factory farming and authoritarianism?
It goes back to a fundamental lack of awareness connected to the press not treating these issues as seriously as they should be. They treat it as a personal or lifestyle issue versus a serious political issue connected to our democracy. Talking about animals and the environment have always been the bastard child of progressives and the left. They’re not really seen as part of the traditional set of values we think of as social justice. These movements are centering the natural world and animals, and that pushes them out of the frame.
You’ve described this as more than just a political threat. How do you see this as a threat to our actual lives?
Our ecological crisis and the rise of fascism are intersecting directly and they’re going to fuel each other and speed each other up. As we use up water for things like AI and also just water scarcity in general, states are trying to close borders, keep out immigrants, restrict access. At the same time we see the rise of these authoritarian movements that are hostile to any idea of confronting the facts of these issues. I think we’re entering this kind of militarized situation if we’re not careful. It feels like we’re all becoming extinct. These are truly existential threats we’re facing.
This investigation took a decade of your life. There must have been personal consequences?
This book was very much a reckoning for me. I’d always taken on this identity as an investigative and crisis journalist. When things get bad, we rush towards the trouble and we witness it, we take all this in. There is a hefty dose of disregarding the self and disregarding what it does to you. It came to a point in this book I couldn’t ignore that any longer. There were many times I seriously considered moving away from the craft of journalism and moving away from this book. The book was very much about confronting PTSD and depression and reckoning with what does it mean as a human being to try to keep doing this work while also trying to create hope.
You worked with lawyers during the publication process. What were their concerns?
I was shocked. I met with these hotshot lawyers and we had some real “come to Jesus” conversations. That’s the reason I didn’t publish photos in the book. We removed accounts of personal experiences with activists involving illegal activities. The threat of prosecution or other scrutiny is real. This sounds naive, but it hit home in a different way of hearing these outside lawyers say “no, you actually should be concerned about your welfare.” We think about press freedom as something you worry about in foreign states, and that has now shifted. Now it’s very much an issue in the States.
How do you view the role of the book publishing industry in addressing these issues?
I think the industry has to step up. If we’re not going to do it, I don’t know who else will. In this onslaught of debilitating dark news that we’re all receiving, the importance of the publishing industry cannot be overstated. We can scroll and doom scroll and just get constantly put in this trance state of seeing the bad stuff over and over. Something about sitting with the book allows us a bit of distance. We aren’t directly confronted with the actual visual. We have to recreate the visual in our heads. Something about the process allows more space, and that’s something we desperately need to cultivate.
What’s your experience been like working with City Lights?
There really couldn’t have been a better home for this project right now than City Lights. Going back to their history, one of the landmark cases in history was the government trying to censor [Allen] Ginsberg over Howl for obscenity. That’s baked into how we were thinking about this project. My publisher, Elaine [Katzenberger], provided a degree of emotional support and really engaged with the complexity of the arguments I’m trying to put forward. It helped trim back the narrative and got to the heart of these questions about bearing witness and press freedom.
Do you have advice for younger journalists who want to pursue this kind of work?
This goes back to punk rock. I’m grateful for growing up in the punk scene. It was this ethos of do-it-yourself. The way to make it happen is rather than going to where the resources are, you go to where the passion and community are. I always try to tell my journalism students “you have to write the book that has to get out of you, that you can’t live with it just boiling alive inside of you.” That’s what this project was for me. I’m trying to focus on finding my people. What we chase is a connection with people that are part of a world that are really sustaining us.
