CONFRONTING POLITICAL INTIMIDATION AND PUBLIC BULLYING

Reid provides a guidebook for surviving and handling life in authoritarian times.

The author, a University of California, San Diego, professor emeritus and the host of the politics and culture podcast UnSafe Thoughts, states that “the rapid deterioration of our political life” since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration in 2025 is what prompted him to update his 2017 primer on the challenges of living under, and resisting, increasingly authoritarian rule. He primarily seeks to find words for what American society is currently experiencing and possibly chart a way through it all. He provides readers with historical overviews of civil unrest in various periods and fleshes out accounts of government overreach and police offenses that occurred as a result: “The persistence of police killings in the age of smart phone cameras testifies to officers’ sense of impunity,” he writes, “and to the growing public spectacle of wanton violence that exploits its very visibility as a form of political and social intimidation of entire communities.” This timely updated edition went to press the same month that two Minneapolis civilians were killed by ICE agents, in separate incidents; the agency’s violent tactics have lately been employed in that city, among others. The topic of intimidation of communities naturally moves the narrative to the author’s main subject: Trump’s presidencies and the long series of irresponsible, immoral, or illegal actions that his administrations have taken in the last decade of American life—during which Trump took a Republican Party that had previously been characterized as “an exclusive country club” and transformed it into the spectacle of Trumpism.

To push back against this phenomenon, Reid adapts some of the customary guidelines for dealing with political intimidation to fit new realities, encouraging readers to stage massive rallies, pool funds for bail and legal expenses, protest outside ICE agents’ hotels, mock Trump administration officials in public, and engage in other strategies, with an emphasis on nonviolence; he adds the traditional caveat to avoid “responding violently to armed provocation by the authorities and their civilian allies.” Reid’s 13 strategies for resisting political intimidation, elaborated in detail over the course of this book, are thoughtful and well articulated, and they include such advice as educating members of the public about the issues at hand and examining the potential vulnerabilities of the resistance. Regarding government authorities, he reminds his readers that it’s “important to remember there is no psychological, social, or ethical boundary that they won’t violate.” He ends the work with a series of generous and very helpful endnotes. Reid’s persistent optimism throughout this book will come as a comfort to many news-weary readers, who may be discouraged by the fact that government agents have continued to use extreme violence against protestors—including those who’ve exercised strategies that are very similar to those in this book. Resistance, he writes, “is about separating ourselves from our fear and undoing fear as the ground of our collective existence.” Many readers, looking for hopeful guidance, will be cheered by how the author so clearly lays out such ideas.

An often compelling blend of practical advice about resisting political crackdowns.