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David Neiwert: The Age of Insurrection (Hardcover, Melville House) 5 stars

From a smattering of ominous right-wing compounds in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s, to …

Be afraid, be very afraid

5 stars

This book is a continuation of the arduous and thankless work that David Neiwert has been doing for decades: tracking, documenting, and analyzing far-right movements in the United States, under their many iterations. This "longue duree" allows him to see the continuities and ruptures in these movements. However, the present volume makes clear that something has changed, as noted in the title: the far right is now in full insurrectionist mode, from talk to collective action, with an amplified eliminationist rhetoric and obsession with civil war. Neiwert examines this through the early days of the Trump presidency, through the COVID pandemic where the far right latched onto a willing anti-vax movement, through the January 6 insurrection that never really ended, but returned to the local level. But contrary to his previous volume, Neiwert does not offer solutions, except outorganizing this rising fascist movement.