"a level-headed, straight-talking fulmination" RESISTING THE RIGHT review
Posted by The Village Voice on February 15, 2025
In his 2024 book, Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Gathering Storm, Robert Edwards reminds us, “Autocrats want you to be discouraged … they prefer a public that believes it has no power.” A former Army intelligence officer turned filmmaker/producer (Land of the Blind, One More Time), Edwards has written a level-headed, straight-talking fulmination of a book. The first chapter, “How to Tell Your House is on Fucking Fire,” is as sharp a takedown of the MAGA-verse as you’ll find anywhere. But if you’re tired of that sort of thing, go to Chapter 9, in which Edwards explores methods for annoying, mocking, thwarting, and ultimately defeating Trump Redux, stressing the need to take advantage of what an autocrat fears the most: the people themselves. “A despotic regime,” he writes, “can only remain in power if the citizenry is unwilling to mobilize sufficiently against it (without underestimating how difficult that mobilization might be).”