The Daisy Chain: A Neighbor's Guide to Mass Cooperation

what happens next is down to every neighbor of conscience-- each of us must find our red line, stand in our truth, and hold the line for democracy

The Daisy Chain is a story of how everyday people move together to reclaim democracy when institutions are weaponized against them.

The Daisy Chain isn’t my story: it is our story. It is both a plan, and a story of stories, about how people can (and always have) used what they had when times got tough and institutions became weaponized against the people.

The Daisy Chain is a map, of sorts, for a coordinated pro-democracy movement, rooted in nonviolent civil disobedience and neighborly love. The daisy is a visual metaphor for building communities of support and expanding our collective capacity for nonviolent civil resistance at the local level-- eventually moving in murmuration with our neighbors at the township, city, county, state, and federal levels.

The Daisy Chain isn’t just a map for surviving this moment but building what comes next: it helps neighbors keep each other safe outside of an abusive system, it develops processes to hold political abusers accountable, and it offers a collaborative vision for how to recreate (from the ashes) a government that works for everyday people, our ecosystem, and future generations to come.​​​​

This is how the Daisy Chain grows: one flower at a time:

1. We Focus on Each Other, Not the Chaos: We stop allowing this regime to sow confusion so that no one can plan a response. Instead, we start to organize a hyper-local community response to upend this fascist nonsense.

2. We Organize Ourselves by Postal Code: We create nimble, networked resistance communities in every postal code (41,704 total in the U.S.). Organizing at the postal code level is important because it empowers us to get offline, meet our actual neighbors, and create a peaceful, nationwide, organized resistance.

3. We Build Local Resistance Like a Daisy: Each postal code will organize as if it were a daisy with 7 overlapping petals. Each petal represents a different campaign, which is broadly focused on pooling resources, obstructing fascism, and building a beloved community, designed to last well beyond this regime.

4. We Get into Formation: Each of the 7 petals (campaigns) works to meet its mission while also collaborating with neighbors in other campaigns.

5. We Respect the Ecosystem: When choosing teams to join, we move where our energy takes us. No neighbor will be asked to take risks they don’t want to take. No neighbor will stifle nonviolent civil resistance led by neighbors in an adjacent campaign.

6. We Assemble as a Daisy Chain: Once a postal code has begun assembling its Daisy, it recruits and mentors people in neighboring postal codes to also assemble their daisies. Using emergent strategy (horizontal, organic movement building), the idea is to eventually create a Daisy Chain, linking up with our neighbors at the township, city, county, state, and national levels—amplifying our resistance and coordinating to make sure every neighbor has what they need in this moment.

The end goal is an entire ecosystem of 41,704 wildflowers— gorgeous, distinct, and connected to each other at the roots. In this national formation, we’ll work toward a general strike to remove this fascist regime, find and free our disappeared neighbors, hold abusers accountable, and assemble a constitutional convention to develop a government that works for people, not profit.

How to Assemble a Daisy

Imagine each postal code in the U.S. as a daisy, with 7 petals, which represent distinct but overlapping campaigns.

To create a daisy in your own neighborhood, you’ll gather the people, resources, and skills needed to build out each of the 7 campaigns, listed below. Keep in mind that not every postal code will have/need the same resources or look the same, and you don’t have to have every “petal” in operation to get going. The focus here isn’t uniformity so much as it’s coordinated interdependence.

There are 7 overlapping campaigns, which focus on providing our neighbors with resources political abusers are attempting to take away from us so that we’ll be easier to control:

• Food Campaign: feeds neighbors and creates a systematized way to grow, store, preserve and, most importantly, share food

• Shelter Campaign: finds creative ways to keep our neighbors off the street and housed with dignity

• Health Campaign: provides various forms of medical, dental, and mental healthcare to neighbors, making use of the community’s collective skills and resources; develops ceremonial containers to help neighbors alchemize strong emotions; checks on and cares for disabled people, people struggling with trauma, children, and elders

• Safety Campaign: employs tactics to frustrate the regime’s efforts to threaten, surveil, disappear, and cause bodily harm to neighbors who are targets of the regime; develops whimsical tactics to disorient abductors from targeting our most vulnerable neighbors; makes connections in their community to encourage security forces to defect from the regime

• We-Conomics Campaign: creates opportunities for sharing and exchanging goods and resources without the use of extractive capitalist structures; recruits people to participate in local actions, including strategic boycotts and rolling labor strikes

• Kinship Campaign: creates opportunities for connection that strengthens the social fabric of the community, linking individuals and groups; ​​​​​ creates events to celebrate our diverse shared humanity; presents a unified front of religious and spiritual freedom as an antidote to Christian nationalism

• Creatives Campaign: grounds the movement in connection, play, and possibility; creates freely shared spaces to experience and create community art that amplifies our collective right to self-governance; documents a collective vision statement for what emerges after the fall of this regime, including specific laws, policies and guiding documents–– which will be communally created, discussed, revised, and updated.

How to Get Started

• Find someone already doing something in your neighborhood and join them. Invite a friend to join you. Accept an invitation, if you’re invited. Show up.

• Look for people with similar civic values who may be working alongside churches, food pantries, domestic violence prevention networks, public libraries, unions, LGBTQIA+ groups, and indie bookstores.

• Head over to the General Strike US, which has a Discord channel for every single state. In each state, there’s a section to reach out and share how you’d like to get involved.

• Create a “pissed of potluck,” and invite people to a house party to brainstorm how y’all might play with the idea of the Daisy Chain in your own neighborhood— and learn what works through practicing it in your neighborhood.

Share This Offline + Across Platforms

Neighbors, we are working against a weaponized algorithm. If this post has meant something to you, absolutely, restack it here. But also consider sharing it on other forms of social media AND directly to your friends via text, email, Signal, Discord, and the like.

Print it out and make zines, tailored to your own communities. You have my enthusiastic consent!

While I am resolute about being disciplined in strategic nonviolence, I am not worried about attribution. I’m not here to make a name for myself but here to make an impact. My reward is seeing fascism collapse in on itself, and preventing white Christian nationalists from simultaneously enacting a genocide and a world war (which, I can attest as someone who has studied them for fifteen years, is absolutely their aim).

We can stop them, but people need a map to learn how to move together. Share this map everywhere— and make it your own.