Anniversary depicts a rightwing takeover of the US inspired by a book of essays. But it\u2019s fuzzy on the bits in between<\/p>\n
As we all know from history and the current news cycle, autocracy is bad. But it can also be boring. For every explosive confrontation in Minneapolis, there is a quieter, less tangible threat in the form of Kash Patel\u2019s FBI seizing voting records<\/a> from Fulton county, Georgia \u2013 a state Donald Trump lost by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020 \u2013 or the steady implementation of 900-page manifesto<\/a> by the influential rightwing thinktank the Heritage Foundation, neither of which lend themselves to blockbuster treatment. And so we have a problem: how to animate the quiet part of what\u2019s happening in the US to reflect a dangerous but tedious reality \u2013 namely, that this thing ends not with a bang, but a combination of voter manipulation and federal electoral interference that undermines faith in the democratic process.<\/p>\n I bring this up after a week of watching popular movies that resonate in Trump\u2019s US, most of which go heavy on the firefights and light on the details of how we arrive at them. The latest, Anniversary, which launched this week on Netflix \u2013 a streamer increasingly uninterested in the subtleties of any situation, let alone this one \u2013 depicts a US in which an evil rightwing genius in the shape of a beautiful young woman talks the country into ditching democracy via the medium of (I love this detail; the sheer optimism of it) a stirring book of essays.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Anniversary depicts a rightwing takeover of the US inspired by a book of essays. But it\u2019s fuzzy on the bits in between As we all know from history and the current news cycle, autocracy is bad. But it can also be boring. For every explosive confrontation in Minneapolis, there is a quieter, less tangible threat … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65361\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}