Neighbors, this is a civil war on our democracy. Whether you’re a stated target of the regime or a horrified bystander, this regime is waging a war on you all the same. The battlefield is both online and in your central nervous systems; this is digital and psychological warfare wrapped into one.
It’s not just that the regime is surveilling you and censoring you, they’re also using creepy-thiel code to digitally fingerprint you, psychologically profile you, and then filter the information you do and don’t see in order to highjack your central nervous system to make you more predictable, suggestible, docile, and impulsive in unhelpful ways. Maybe we should thank our public high school English teachers for teaching us George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Yes, techno-fascism is creepy and scary AF, but there are actually things you can do to fight back and reclaim the sovereignty of your body-mind and your neighborhood. Fascism only works with our consent; they are trying to break you into compliance, and I endeavor to help you to fight back. Every night, like a weirdly helpful liberation zine no one asked for.
My podcast, Letters From a Weirdo is on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and Overcast1. Subscribe to the podcast, because I may bounce from this platform and host my corresponding blog elsewhere, because there appear to be anti-democratic shenanigans taking place on Substack. Gross. But predictable: this platform is owned by a Trump supporter.
Anyhow, If you’re feeling lost in all the badness, I get it. These are scary times. Let me be a flashlight under the blanket, whispering liberation stories and coordinates on how to get there— alongside your neighbors. We don’t give up the ship, and we don’t leave a single neighbor behind.
I record these defiant letters of hope, courage, and agency— every night. It is my sincerest wish that you find your way back to your own light, find your neighbors, work together, and go do a Care Bear stare in your community.
If you want to learn how to do something effective (instead of just react to the harm), if you want to make sure our protests shape into a movement, if you want to create movement resilience by building community, and if you want your communities to assemble into an unstoppable force of liberation: watch this space.
Who the hell am I to give advice? I’m your weirdo friend.
Neighbor, this is a weird timeline, and sometimes the people you’ve been trained to reject as outcasts are the very people who point the way to freedom. This regime is intentionally scapegoating people on the margins—the weirdos, the social outcasts, and immigrants, because we know how to labor toward liberation.
I’m not here to be CNN or a member of the DNC. I’m one of many lovers and dreamers and thinkers and weavers, who are helping their neighbors move into their agency and into formation.
The thing I might be doing a bit differently is that I am pointing you toward a liberation that is grounded, connected, cooperative, and resilient. I don’t want y’all burnt out. We need to be in it for the long-haul, and that requires community care.
Babes, this is gonna be a long-haul. On average, it takes 3.5 years to oust a tyrant—if we’re focused, maybe we beat those odds, but not if we’re not in formation. It’s true that the regime has more or less captured the institutional structures of federal government (executive, legislative, judicial), and it appears these moral cowards are gunning for blue states and blue dots and hoping to rig (or delay) elections— because fascism can’t thrive in an ecosystem of political views: theirs are too shitty to survive peer review.
But what this regime cannot capture is US, and we are the most important part of democracy. We always have been.
Instead of panicking, we need to be planning locally and rebuilding the kinship techno-feudalism and white supremacy have stolen from us. The only way our protest can form into a movement is if we adapt by building local, networked, analog communities. These people want to keep us focused on their chaos and depravity to make us hide and wear us out.
Mass marches alone will not help us: movements that succeed in toppling tyrants use a variety of tactics and strategies. We build resilient resistance campaigns, methods, and tactics at the local level. Once we’ve got that base, we fan out and lock arms with nearby communities— creating ley lines of liberation across the country.
🔥 Ironically enough, our best chance at toppling these fascist jerks is to stop fighting them on their terms, go analog AF, relearn what it is to be a neighbor, and build a resilient hyper-local community base— zip code by zip, block by block, street to street, and peer to peer. 🔥
I’m in the mood to help you, doods. Consider me your emotional support weirdo for pro-democracy organizing.
Stay weird, neighbor. It’s the best part of you. ❤️
I prefer Overcast, because it seems to be the least complicit in all this technofascist nonsense, and they value your privacy. It’s a free app to listen to podcasts. You can learn about Overcast here.
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