Neighbor, I’m not just a weirdo. I’m a weirdo who loves to read, and I’m a weirdo who has spent the last twenty years mobilizing communities to create change and studying the elements that make pro-democracy organizing successful. Right now, I am spending every bit of my time pouring over insights about how our neighbors across the world have toppled tyrants and reclaimed the right to self govern. This blog and its corresponding podcast summarize the broad strokes1 of what needs to be done.
If you want our movement to win, we need to outlast, outsmart, and outmaneuver the fascists.
The task before us— the practical stuff you and I can do to move the dial— isn’t very difficult but will require us to be very disciplined. There are four concrete things each of us must do at the local level if we want to win this.
If you’re interested, I invite you to read on. Also, the podcast that corresponds to this blog isn’t bad either. It may be rough, but it’s descriptive, and I think it adds another layer2 to accompany what I’ve written below:
Commit to a broad rallying message. This isn’t about Republicans and Democrats, this is about preserving the People’s right to self-govern and fair representation. Signage and public-facing community art needs to focus on pro-democracy messaging. Democracy isn’t just a beautiful experiment on coexisting and collaborating with each other to get our collective needs met, it is also a steadfast commitment to a belief that We the People have the right to self-govern and live with dignity. That’s what fascist elites are trying to take away from us. They won’t win.
Commit to peaceful protests that leave no footprint. Neighbor, I can understand wanting to smash things and throw punches. A war is being waged on us. To be clear, however, what I’m seeing at protests, by and large, like 99.8% of the time, is just regular people protesting and marching and then getting shot at and teargassed and trampled by law enforcement officers (LEOs). That’s forked up. It’s not okay. I think because of the aggressive response to peaceful protestors by LEOs, and the way this administration is intentionally trying to provoke outrage with their wanton cruelty, 0.02% of protestors are starting to throw tear gas canisters back, or they’ll throw a water bottle at an ICE vehicle, or they’ll burn a self-driving taxi car. So let me clarify right out of the gate: I understand the need to express rage, which is why I am asking elders, healers, and community leaders to public varied opportunities that allow people to channel that anger through contained destruction, fierce creativity, and collective movement. Host a community rage room or axe throwing gathering— set up community punching bags and host free self-defense classes. Create first-amendment zones to create resistance art. We need to create spaces for that 0.2% energy to be channeled, and we need to honor it. But we also need to understand that this regime is looking for any footage to doctor with AI in order to justify violent crackdowns. Fascist elites lie to remain in power, and we cannot give them any ammo. We need to be smarter than them. Anticipate their moves. So I am inviting you to enrage the fascists by refusing to give them the footage they need and, instead, expressing creative civil disobedience3 in our public protests. The other reason this is important is because tyrants know that if a part of the movement fractures and becomes violent, the success of the movement drops from 70% likely success to only 30% likelihood of success. This is why fascists always provoke; they are seeking any element that can be misconstrued to justify a violent response. We must move in ways that make their provocations not only useless but also irrelevant. This isn’t about our collective and historical rage not being valid; how you feel is not only valid, it is holy— it is pure spirit reminding you to protect what you love. You need to feel and express that, but we also need to be strategic. This is why I am calling for communities to create ceremonial spaces to express rage and while also committing to practicing a disciplined front at mass protests. I recommend creating pop-up training several times a week to train people of all ages, especially young people, in tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience— not as a matter of tone-policing or respectability politics but an intentional ceremony of passing on generational wisdom to the next. All of our communities have elders practiced in these methods. It is time to humbly invite these elders to lead us in workshops to that we know what to do when an bad-faith interloper attempts to escalate.
Recruit law enforcement to stand down. My white neighbors, particularly white clergy and white women who have children, need to begin campaigning your local law enforcement officers to get them to commit to non-escalation. Explain that we want what they want: a right to self-govern— a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is especially important that these law enforcement officers (and mayors’ offices) hear from small children and their families. Because these little kids, when they cannot join us on the street, are protesting on video games— they know their future is on the line here. They see that their future is being stolen from them. Give them an outlet to make a difference. Mobilize kids’ letter writing campaigns. Deliver cookies with handwritten letters to asking officers to stand down and not obey orders to hurt their neighbors who simply want the right to self-govern, and asking them to refuse to let unidentified adults in masks hurt and kidnap their friends. White women, it is time for you to use your tears— which is a kind of political capital only you have. (Some of us aren’t allowed to be sad and, when we are, we are told our tears and our sadness and outrage are threatening. You will be listened to, especially if you go in groups.) Clergy, I am asking you to meet with police captains and all law enforcement officers as people of faith— explain to them the moral moment and what Spirit asks from each of us at this time. If you are ignored, hold services outside police precincts. Bring children to sing peace-loving songs outside the precinct. Why am I saying this? It’s strategy. Barring an oddball scenario where all the fascists behind Trump say, “Actually, we are done being fascists. You can take back your country and self-govern. Our bad,” every single anti-fascist movement that has succeeded (in returning to democracy, not just regime change) has required security forces to stand down. So “security forces” means, practically speaking, who the tyrant orders to beat you down. By and large, the people they’re getting to do that are our local law enforcement. So we need to start converting law enforcement officers to defect from the fascist regime— evident in their commitment to stand down if a tyrant asks them to violently shut down protests. This is a huge project, but it is ESSENTIAL that you do it, because if the fascists try to pull something like stealing the midterm elections, removing Democratic governors, or pulling a Constitutional Convention4 that wipes all the amendments from the constitution, then we’re going to need to shut down the country— and to do that, we need local law enforcement to stand down. To clarify, we are not asking law enforcement to change political affiliations or anything else, only that they refuse to protect power when power is trying to rob us all of our liberties and our right to self-govern.
Recruit your neighbors to join the movement and make a joyful sound. It’s time for door to door canvassing to recruit members to the pro-democracy movement. It’s time for community potlucks and pro-democracy picnics. It’s time for community meetings in high school gyms and public libraries. It’s not enough to show up at protests. We need to make sure our vulnerable community members have resources. We need to make sure our vulnerable community members don’t get disappeared. We need to find ways to care for one another as the fascist elites abandon us while absconding with our money. We need to build not just a coalition, but spaces of encouragement and neighborliness. Now is the time for pro-democracy BBQs, dance parties for democracy at a local park, free concerts for the people, and voter registration campaigns. Now is the time to identify unbought and unbossed leaders you want to nominate to run at every level of office, so that we can replace our town, city, state, and federal government representatives with people who work for us. Make sure everyone is getting fed and has access to the meds and resources they need, even if it means we have to share in unconventional ways. Make sure you’re hiding the people this regime is trying to disappear. It won’t always be like this, but we have to outlast the regime, and part of that means refusing to be divided from here on out. As neighbors, we must commit to not letting these rich weasels try to win elections by getting us to hate our neighbors. No more. Now, in this time of brutality, we fight back by building beloved community from the ground up.
What happens next is up to you. No one is coming to save you but you. The good news is that we have a lot going in our favor, even if the legal skullduggery and the theater of cruel lawlessness tries to convince us otherwise.
This game is ours to lose. We can win this, but we need you in this. We need you to find your better angels, roll up your sleeves, and commit to weekly (if not daily) local action to build our united states against fascism.
Now you can’t say you don’t know what to do. Now you have an idea. I am one person who practices community organizing, who has trained thousands of volunteers, taught thousands of students, and has spent an embarrassing amount of my free-time reading books to further educate myself about successful civic movements. This isn’t Weirdo Knows Best— it’s this weirdo has an general idea. Now run with it.
Much of what I’m pulling from here is from Peter Ackerman’s The Checklist to End Tyranny. It’s free to read online. If you want someone to discuss it with, I highly recommend starting a local book club. I could offer one online but, honestly, our central challenge right now is getting offline and actually building community.
I am not a perfect person, and you might’ve said it better than I did. Maybe you’d be more artful or inspiring. I love that. Please go say it. You have my enthusiastic consent to take anything you see useful here and remix it into something that resonates for you and your community. I want this idea to spread. I see my labor as just being one organizer who also happens to be a bookworm, and I’m researching this because I have that capacity, and I hope you’ll accept this as laboring toward democracy— not political perfection. I want you to have a voice and for you to tell your story and your perspective to your community. What I am focused on is what we can practically do, and instead of being preachy, I’m trying to show my math and why I think the solutions I put forward here will work. I also invite readers to DM me questions. If there’s a how-to question you’re curious about, I am delighted to help you think about the actual practice of community organizing a way out of this mess— not just the theory.
The corresponding podcasts offers concrete examples of how to creatively engage in protests that refuse to give the fascists what they want. I will continue to explore this topic with you in future blogs. The gist is to respond with creativity and joy— not because this is a good time but because fascists rely on a limited set of community responses and, when we take that from them, their entire house of cards falls apart.
Don’t think they won’t do this. Listen to what these fascist jamokes are saying and trust that many of these white Christian nationalists want to return to a time of slavery, domestic servitude, and no votes for anyone but white male landowners.
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