Natasha Lennard's core move is a Wittgensteinian inversion: the danger isn't uncertainty, it's the unchallenged certainties — militarized borders, enforced gender binaries, capital-driven crisis frameworks — that structure our fear and foreclose action. The phrase "in these uncertain times" functions as a sedative, flattening everything from pandemic to fascism into a single ambient dread that excuses inaction. Lennard, a journalist and former Occupy Wall Street organizer, builds from Ludwig Wittgenstein's 1969 book On Certainty, which examines how foundational beliefs operate not as proven propositions but as unquestioned ground rules. She applies this to contemporary politics: the "certainty" that border security is non-negotiable, that trans people's existence requires debate, that AI apocalypse is inevitable. These aren't natural facts — they're political settlements that movements can and have ruptured. The book's strongest argument is historical. Lennard traces how paradigm shifts happen not in single revolutionary sparks but through accumulated organizing. The 2020 George Floyd uprisings, easily dismissed as a "flash in the pan" given the repression that followed, built the neighborhood support networks and ICE-watching infrastructure that proved operational in Minneapolis in 2025. The DSA's electoral successes and Zohran Mamdani's campaign ruptured Democratic Party certainties about candidate electability through door-knocking and tenant organizing, not through media narratives. She's honest about what the book doesn't offer. There's no formula for overthrowing capitalism or defeating fascist regimes. The book ends with Lennard watching the 2024 election results with her friend Sarah Leonard, who says, "We're not starting from scratch." That's the argument in miniature: not that victory is certain, but that the infrastructure of resistance — boycotts, mutual aid, mass strikes, neighbor protection — already exists and compounds. The weakest stretch is the Wittgenstein scaffolding itself. Wittgenstein's linguistic philosophy is genuinely useful for understanding how foundational beliefs operate below the level of argumentation, but the connection sometimes feels more gestural than structural. Lennard acknowledges he "was no activist," and the book is strongest when it leaves the seminar room for the street — the Reconstruction parallels via W.E.B. Du Bois, the concrete genealogies of movement networks. On higher education, Lennard refuses nostalgia. She doesn't want to restore the pre-Trump university — already "decimated and adjunct-ified and unaffordable" — but insists that free higher education as a public good isn't utopian. The UK had free tuition until the late 1990s. The Trump regime's destruction of records and histories echoes post-civil war Reconstruction, and the defense requires militant unions, not institutional sentimentality. This is a book for people already in or adjacent to left organizing who need a philosophical framework for why the work matters when outcomes aren't guaranteed. Wittgenstein's advice to return to "the rough ground" of everyday meaning-making becomes Lennard's case for the quotidian practices of resistance — not as gestures, but as the actual mechanism by which political certainties get unmade.
