Unprecedented Nazi Republican Assault On Free And Fair Elections
Even prior to the 2020 elections the Nazi Republicans have been hard at work at assaulting free and fair elections But then it was obviously escalated with Cheeto’s Big Lie denying the 2020 results
Now after narrowly and questionably(vigilante challenges to registered voters prevented a Harris win) getting a 1.5m vote margin Cheeto lied his way out of prison during his campaign After the narrow margin the Nazi Republicans know that if they want to win the upcoming elections they know they will have to cheat to reverse a very negative US electorate
Using red state legislatures the Nazis have been persistently trying to prevent an avalanche of angry voters destroying the Congressional Nazi majority This has led to mid decade gerrymandering in Texas and probably Florida Significantly the DOJ is badgering blue states for voter data which is being resisted, needing the information to repeat the vigilante challenges mentioned above The DOJ has now been infiltrated with election deniers and many federal agencies protecting elections from foreign and domestic influences have been killed by Cheeto
2026 is turning out to be a vital election for democracy because of what the electorate is up against WE the People should keep our eye on the prize and do all WE can do to be vigilant about what the Nazis are trying to do our elections Talk to your congressional reps and senators and all your neighbors, friends, relatives, family to let them know these Nazis have to be stopped
Too true — the Repugnantcans have been busy little fucks working to undermine elections and then challenge results they don’t like. They are and have been actively working on this while the Trumphukian CABAL is ginning up excuses to cancel elections outright (Insurrection Act, etc.).
Talk about it with neighbors, friends, family even if they lean toward Nazis Also talk to your Congressional rep and senators Make this a talking point for 2026
Your point about fighting fascism through defensive tactics resonates. We keep treating symptoms while the underlying infection spreads through different channels. What if the real vulnerability isn't the fascists themselves, but the story vacuum they've expertly filled while progressives argue over tactics?
Thanks for the comment. I think you're pointing in the right direction as it relates to the vulnerability being a “story vacuum” that then gets filled by fascism. I've written about precisely this to articulate how it happens and how we might get out of it. If you're interested it's called The Freedom Illusion. It's book length and completely free right here on my Substack. One of the key points I make there is how the left keeps splitting itself in different silos without realizing that each of their issues are faces of the same problem, whether it's wealth inequality, racism or climate change. And that until we can build something that fills that vacuum as a whole with something that transcends any single silo that we'll never truly win for our silos. Each of the 5 parts serve their own purpose and the main parts of the argument are on parts 3 and 4 with the solution I see being on 5 (1 covers what we're experiencing today, 2 the history, 3 the ideological argument, 4 the cost, 5 the solution). Given that you're already looking in the right direction, I'd be interested in your thoughts if you do decide to read it.
Thank you—seriously. “This is the best article I’ve read on Substack on not just confronting but fighting fascism” means a lot.
And yep: if you search “fighting fascism” on my Substack, you’ll find the other pieces in this strategy series.
It’s been a difficult year. I get why people are exhausted and angry, the last thing anyone wants to hear is “we’re doing it wrong.” But if we don’t change strategy (fast), we’re going to lose, not because people don’t care, but because our pressure has been aimed at the wrong targets.
I want to expand on the “why now.”
Last fall I warned we were heading toward a flashpoint like what’s unfolding in Minneapolis. I’m not saying that to brag—I’m autistic, and pattern recognition is one of the ways my brain works. Minneapolis feels like a Rubicon: proof of what this regime is willing to do, and how quickly “unthinkable” becomes routine if it isn’t met with real constraints.
The next Rubicon is the true point of no return: the moment so many people in power have committed so many crimes that losing power becomes unthinkable, because accountability on the other side is existential. After that, they don’t negotiate — they escalate.
There are two remaining levers that can still stop this before we hit that point:
Congressional Democrats using the upcoming funding fights to put binding limits on ICE (and the broader apparatus), and
State/local officials using lawful authority—prosecutors, policy, National Guard posture—to deter and prosecute criminal overreach.
Neither of those happens unless we, the base, shift our protest energy to force it: relentless, public, targeted pressure on the people who actually have power to intervene.
Thank you again for the encouragement, and if you’re willing, the best way to help is spreading the strategy shift, not just the outrage.
Being down heah in South Crackerlina contacting my state officials won’t do squat. Not sure what the Charleston mayor would do.
I disagree about not protesting and demonstrating. I see it as absolutely necessary but not sufficient. We know that the Trumphukian CABAL wants to ratchet up oppression and call out the troops. But sitting on the sidelines (perhaps calling state and local
officials) is insufficient. What is needed is thousands in the streets protesting the abuses of ICE and Border Patrol. Ten thousand blocking NYC and Surrounding Federal Buildings in DC.
We do need governors and attorneys general to step up as in Philadelphia. We need state and local authorities to arrest ICE and BP agents conduct illegal search and seizure.
I am not a pacifist. I do not want violence. But we cannot allow these Fascist Nazis to continue their rampage.
I'm saying: Don't do it in a way that feeds ICE's propaganda (the whistles and everything else to help protect immigrants is completely separate and a great idea). Rather, do things that put pressure on Dems to use the power they have. It's ok if you're down in SC. Go on social media and help put pressure on Dems. Call their offices. Sure, your number will show you're not from their area, but that's ok, make it clear their failure is a national problem, not just a local one.
Same with celebrities/media. Celebrities especially hold one kind of incredible power. They can reach people who are tuned out of politics. We need to put pressure on them to speak out against what's going on and to activate their fans, many of whom are just going about their lives like it's business as usual. This is not normal times and people need to wake up.
As for the media, a big reason why they let Trump off easy is because our side goes too easy on them while MAGA excoriates them for saying anything bad against Trump. If nothing else, we need to make the cost of going easy at least as high as the cost of telling the truth, or they never will.
I agree we must put pressure on the Dems. especially our Senators who seem to just be playing along as if they can operate as usual. It's clear who the leaders are, they are speaking out. Im not sure I agree that we need to go low to win this. Who will we be then? the same low-lifespan as the liars and screamers? I don't want to be that, frankly. I believe the way is through Arts, and creativity to sustain a new story of what we want to happen, to live like. We need to call out the cruelty and not replicate it. They are trying to instigate riots and madness in the confusion. This is our opportunity, as a country, to truly become something better by building the strength of WE THE PEOPLE, instead of giving away our power for trinkets. There are better ways to live than abiding with corporations and billionaires. But we have to want it and to put in the creativity and effort.
Finally, the media is almost all owned by billionaires now. We will probably lose substack in the near future. We need to plan for these realities. We need to build coalitions across the normal divisions. We need to care ourselves and learn to work together. Hard in our scattered communities. And we need to truly understand nonviolence and the possibilities of that.
On going low: I too want to live in a world where people don't go low. But we will never get to that world if one side creates a positive-expected-value* position for the other side in going low by asymmetrically deciding never to do so even if the other side does. This has been fairly well proven from all kinds of scenarios as small as individual relationships and as large as nuclear warfare.
*Game theory: If you make it so the other side can win by doing something you never will do yourself, you are effectively guaranteeing that we will forever live in a world where the other side is in a permanent race to the bottom, the opposite of what you and I seem to want.
The paradox may suck, but it is an undeniable fact of life that the best way to make sure both sides don't go low is to be able to demonstrate that you're willing and prepared to do so.
On billionaires/power: There will always be some form of "power" because there will never be a time when we're all perfectly equal. Some people are good at leading, some people are good at following. Some people are good at accumulating resources, some people are not. Some people want to save for later, some people do not. And if you ever force everyone to be completely equal, you will see societal collapse as people completely lose a sense of purpose. But here's the ultimate point that I want to make clear: too many people on the left are power-averse. Power never ceases to exist, it only changes hands. If those who want human flourishing (peace/arts/creativity/cooperation/etc.) choose to pretend we live in a world where power doesn't exist, then power will accrue to those who want human exploitation. And guess what they'll do with that power?
So again, if you want human flourishing, we better start accruing power to those who would lead a society driven by human flouring rather than exploitation. That is the only way that ever gets achieved.
On the media: same as with power, but with a caveat: we need to be willing to defend our worldview in the media, even when people are mean. We are, as a society, our total combined knowledge. And that total combined knowledge is molded by communication, which happens in the media. Too many of us have recoiled from social media (where most communication is happening today), because "it hurts our mental health" or because people are mean. My mental health is a hell of lot worse today than it has ever been given the country is being taken over by fascists, which is happening, at least in part, because so many on our side have silenced themselves in vast swaths of the media, entirely ceding the public sphere to the other side to take with little to no contest.
TLDR:
- If you want to live in a world where people aren't constantly going low, you have to be willing to go low as a deterrent
- There's no such a thing as a world without power. If you want human flourishing to become what rules society, then you must accrue power to those who want human flourishing rather than those who want human exploitation.
- If you ever want a world guided by human flourishing, in addition to accruing power, we need to be able to defend that worldview in the public sphere, even if that means dealing with nasty people who hurt our mental health. The alternative is what we're living today.
We should be abolishing the entire federal government. Symbolic protests—marching in the streets, chanting slogans—change nothing. Liberty in America is effectively dead. Congress is indifferent and without a unified political movement committed to restoring unalienable rights, there are no peaceful mechanisms left to reverse the decline. Calls for violent revolution may arise, but such a path would almost certainly fail—not because the state is invincible, but because the public lacks the unity, clarity, and shared purpose required to sustain it.
The only real hope lies in the emergence of a true representative of liberty—someone who can cut through the noise of both parties, remind the people of their unalienable rights, and rekindle faith in America's founding principles. A person whose vision resonates deeply with all Americans and who understands that the sole purpose of government is to secure unalienable rights. Until such a person steps forward, there is little else we can do but remain vigilant, patient, and ready for the moment when they arise. And buy guns.
Sometimes, when there are imperialistic entities threatening the lives of both humans and our non-human kin, morality calls upon us to resist and defend the sacred in ways beyond nonviolent civil disobedience.
“BEYOND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
DO WE WISH TO BE CIVILLY OBEDIENT TO A SETTLER COLONIAL system established and maintained on genocidal and ecocidal violence?
The matter of civil obedience might appear to be questioned in the famed assertion that, "What is legal is not synonymous with what is right." But that statement assumes an agreeable morality of and in settler colonialism, its liberal synonymizing reinforces the State. It is a rallying cry of settler inclusion.
The relationships of power that comprise what is "civil," demand obedience. They demand tactics and a politics that confine them to be respectably included (what is called respectability politics in activist speak). Their escalations are a fervor not to undermine and abolish, but to be a part of the club.
If you ve been to any direct action training, the first terms defined are "nonviolent direct action" (NVDA) and "civil dis-obedience" (CD). These terms establish a framework that has been in use since it was created in the 1960s by Christian civil rights activists. They intentionally built an implicit consensus around nonviolence and contrasted their tactics to those of the Black Panthers, AIM, Weather Underground, Symbionese Liberation Army, and other militant formations that sought to abolish the US empire.
In the last fifty plus years, very little has changed in this organizing framework that continues to shape strategies and tactics used by activists throughout the world. At their core they are temporary interventions in social and political power relations that appeal through varying degrees of pressure for justice to be bestowed by the State. This model is not only the status quo in social and environmental justice organizing, it is also embraced by the State and capitalists as it reinforces and reproduces their underlying relationships of power.
The NVDA position speaks through activist managers in a moral binary of violent (bad)/nonviolent (good). It fails (by design) to understand that violence exists on a spectrum (structural, lateral, direct, etc.). This binary fiction of violence/non-violence, which is the preferred fantasy of liberals, normalizes the State's monopoly on violence in declarations of demonstrations and principles as nonviolent. It alienates radical possibilities and the militant legacies of anti-colonial struggle.
The question of nonviolence and violence has never defined Indigenous resistance, it has always been a more practical consideration of, what works?
Outside of the historical movement parentheses, the limitations, failures, and underlying power relationships of these rights aren't discussed and examined enough. This is due, in part, to the overall ways that direct action has been institutionalized by non-profit managers and self-imposed "allies." The criticisms aren't new, as anti-political analyses from the Earth Cells of Fire, and other militant strains of what can be called resistance have long pushed against the narrowly prescribed economy of action in the milieu of what is cynically dubbed “The Struggle” (patent pending).
Outside the parenthetical containers of sanctioned struggle are voices that distance and denounce actions as violent or extreme. After all, the context of their notions of disobedience is confined to the will. Their moralism constricts their lineage to nonviolent martyred icons that the State also embraces such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. It dissects the violence of abolitionists sitting the throats of those holding whips and keys to cages. It delicately separates the disfigured entrails of bloody liberation movements and moments that have underscored how power is imposed and disposed of in this world. It declares a monopoly of social transformation that is steeped in its utopic colonial imaginary. The liberal philosophies and ideologies of struggle have colonized and commodified social transformation.
Gord Hill bites at this tendency in his powerful antagonism, Smash Pacifism: A Critical Analysis of Gandhi and King, where he acutely observes that:
Pacifism must be challenged and discredited as an acceptable doctrine for resistance movements. To promote nonviolence is to disarm the people psychologically and to dampen their fighting spirit. This is even more so when the population is already largely pacified, as is the case in North America. Pacified not through state repression, but through apathy and hopelessness, and when these are broken, by the preaching of a pacifist doctrine that claims to be morally, politically, and tactically superior to all other forms of struggle.
Peter Gelderloos' book, How Nonviolence Protects the State offers an extraordinary study. Gelderloos asserts
“Only a people trained to accept being ruled by a violent power structure can really question someone's right and need to forcefully defend herself against oppression."
Indigenous warriors and warrior culture are perversely fetishized by the white historic gaze, yet the intensity and brutality of these complex resistances are sanitized for colonial consumption. But ours is the contradiction of the "noble" and the "savage." And while I'll dig into Indigenous inclusion and "civility" in later chapters (particularly "Voting is Not Harm Reduction," and the whole last section), I want to emphasize that for the duration of the "Indian Wars" and most all history of colonial invasion, Indigenous spiritual and physical resistance was regarded as illicit terrorism against civilization. Most (we had our scouts and collaborators for sure) of our ancestors weren't concerned with legitimacy of their tactics and their moral implications.
Broadly speaking, spirit and the sacred were their frameworks for action and they responded how they could with whatever worked, outside the enclosures, or reservations of dissent sanctioned by their enemies.
The fascinating instability of ongoing Indigenous dissent and disobedience is in its contentions of legitimacy and criminality and disobedience is in its contentions of legitimacy and criminality.
The "criminalization of dissent" becomes an invitation to embrace the anti-settler criminality of our ancestors in order to overwhelm colonial society's abilities to function. There is no need for activism in a world where collective- and self-defense is a way of life. There is no need to stay enclosed on reservations of resistance. Settler civility should always be undermined and contended.”
— Klee Benally
From his book titled “No Spiritual Surrender : Indigenous Anarchy In Defense Of The Sacred”
Great points Keep up the fight for the ballot box
Unprecedented Nazi Republican Assault On Free And Fair Elections
Even prior to the 2020 elections the Nazi Republicans have been hard at work at assaulting free and fair elections But then it was obviously escalated with Cheeto’s Big Lie denying the 2020 results
Now after narrowly and questionably(vigilante challenges to registered voters prevented a Harris win) getting a 1.5m vote margin Cheeto lied his way out of prison during his campaign After the narrow margin the Nazi Republicans know that if they want to win the upcoming elections they know they will have to cheat to reverse a very negative US electorate
Using red state legislatures the Nazis have been persistently trying to prevent an avalanche of angry voters destroying the Congressional Nazi majority This has led to mid decade gerrymandering in Texas and probably Florida Significantly the DOJ is badgering blue states for voter data which is being resisted, needing the information to repeat the vigilante challenges mentioned above The DOJ has now been infiltrated with election deniers and many federal agencies protecting elections from foreign and domestic influences have been killed by Cheeto
2026 is turning out to be a vital election for democracy because of what the electorate is up against WE the People should keep our eye on the prize and do all WE can do to be vigilant about what the Nazis are trying to do our elections Talk to your congressional reps and senators and all your neighbors, friends, relatives, family to let them know these Nazis have to be stopped
Too true — the Repugnantcans have been busy little fucks working to undermine elections and then challenge results they don’t like. They are and have been actively working on this while the Trumphukian CABAL is ginning up excuses to cancel elections outright (Insurrection Act, etc.).
To make it worse the CABAL owns the courts.
What can we do to have free and fair elections?
Talk about it with neighbors, friends, family even if they lean toward Nazis Also talk to your Congressional rep and senators Make this a talking point for 2026
This is an awesome and inspiring read
Your point about fighting fascism through defensive tactics resonates. We keep treating symptoms while the underlying infection spreads through different channels. What if the real vulnerability isn't the fascists themselves, but the story vacuum they've expertly filled while progressives argue over tactics?
Thanks for the comment. I think you're pointing in the right direction as it relates to the vulnerability being a “story vacuum” that then gets filled by fascism. I've written about precisely this to articulate how it happens and how we might get out of it. If you're interested it's called The Freedom Illusion. It's book length and completely free right here on my Substack. One of the key points I make there is how the left keeps splitting itself in different silos without realizing that each of their issues are faces of the same problem, whether it's wealth inequality, racism or climate change. And that until we can build something that fills that vacuum as a whole with something that transcends any single silo that we'll never truly win for our silos. Each of the 5 parts serve their own purpose and the main parts of the argument are on parts 3 and 4 with the solution I see being on 5 (1 covers what we're experiencing today, 2 the history, 3 the ideological argument, 4 the cost, 5 the solution). Given that you're already looking in the right direction, I'd be interested in your thoughts if you do decide to read it.
https://americanmanifesto.news/p/the-freedom-illusion-part-1
This is the best article I have read on Substack on not just confronting but fighting fascism.
Thank you—seriously. “This is the best article I’ve read on Substack on not just confronting but fighting fascism” means a lot.
And yep: if you search “fighting fascism” on my Substack, you’ll find the other pieces in this strategy series.
It’s been a difficult year. I get why people are exhausted and angry, the last thing anyone wants to hear is “we’re doing it wrong.” But if we don’t change strategy (fast), we’re going to lose, not because people don’t care, but because our pressure has been aimed at the wrong targets.
I want to expand on the “why now.”
Last fall I warned we were heading toward a flashpoint like what’s unfolding in Minneapolis. I’m not saying that to brag—I’m autistic, and pattern recognition is one of the ways my brain works. Minneapolis feels like a Rubicon: proof of what this regime is willing to do, and how quickly “unthinkable” becomes routine if it isn’t met with real constraints.
The next Rubicon is the true point of no return: the moment so many people in power have committed so many crimes that losing power becomes unthinkable, because accountability on the other side is existential. After that, they don’t negotiate — they escalate.
There are two remaining levers that can still stop this before we hit that point:
Congressional Democrats using the upcoming funding fights to put binding limits on ICE (and the broader apparatus), and
State/local officials using lawful authority—prosecutors, policy, National Guard posture—to deter and prosecute criminal overreach.
Neither of those happens unless we, the base, shift our protest energy to force it: relentless, public, targeted pressure on the people who actually have power to intervene.
Thank you again for the encouragement, and if you’re willing, the best way to help is spreading the strategy shift, not just the outrage.
Being down heah in South Crackerlina contacting my state officials won’t do squat. Not sure what the Charleston mayor would do.
I disagree about not protesting and demonstrating. I see it as absolutely necessary but not sufficient. We know that the Trumphukian CABAL wants to ratchet up oppression and call out the troops. But sitting on the sidelines (perhaps calling state and local
officials) is insufficient. What is needed is thousands in the streets protesting the abuses of ICE and Border Patrol. Ten thousand blocking NYC and Surrounding Federal Buildings in DC.
We do need governors and attorneys general to step up as in Philadelphia. We need state and local authorities to arrest ICE and BP agents conduct illegal search and seizure.
I am not a pacifist. I do not want violence. But we cannot allow these Fascist Nazis to continue their rampage.
Thanks for the reply.
Just to be clear on the point of the article:
I'm not saying Don't protest/demonstrate.
I'm saying: Don't do it in a way that feeds ICE's propaganda (the whistles and everything else to help protect immigrants is completely separate and a great idea). Rather, do things that put pressure on Dems to use the power they have. It's ok if you're down in SC. Go on social media and help put pressure on Dems. Call their offices. Sure, your number will show you're not from their area, but that's ok, make it clear their failure is a national problem, not just a local one.
Same with celebrities/media. Celebrities especially hold one kind of incredible power. They can reach people who are tuned out of politics. We need to put pressure on them to speak out against what's going on and to activate their fans, many of whom are just going about their lives like it's business as usual. This is not normal times and people need to wake up.
As for the media, a big reason why they let Trump off easy is because our side goes too easy on them while MAGA excoriates them for saying anything bad against Trump. If nothing else, we need to make the cost of going easy at least as high as the cost of telling the truth, or they never will.
Agree.
Wow, Michael Fanone is suggesting we use our 2A rights. Who would have ever thought the state militias were right?
We absolutely need to put more pressure on the companies that fund our oppressors.
Great post, excellent action items. It's time to hold the feet of our state governments to the fire. Protect us!
I agree we must put pressure on the Dems. especially our Senators who seem to just be playing along as if they can operate as usual. It's clear who the leaders are, they are speaking out. Im not sure I agree that we need to go low to win this. Who will we be then? the same low-lifespan as the liars and screamers? I don't want to be that, frankly. I believe the way is through Arts, and creativity to sustain a new story of what we want to happen, to live like. We need to call out the cruelty and not replicate it. They are trying to instigate riots and madness in the confusion. This is our opportunity, as a country, to truly become something better by building the strength of WE THE PEOPLE, instead of giving away our power for trinkets. There are better ways to live than abiding with corporations and billionaires. But we have to want it and to put in the creativity and effort.
Finally, the media is almost all owned by billionaires now. We will probably lose substack in the near future. We need to plan for these realities. We need to build coalitions across the normal divisions. We need to care ourselves and learn to work together. Hard in our scattered communities. And we need to truly understand nonviolence and the possibilities of that.
Thanks for the reply.
On going low: I too want to live in a world where people don't go low. But we will never get to that world if one side creates a positive-expected-value* position for the other side in going low by asymmetrically deciding never to do so even if the other side does. This has been fairly well proven from all kinds of scenarios as small as individual relationships and as large as nuclear warfare.
*Game theory: If you make it so the other side can win by doing something you never will do yourself, you are effectively guaranteeing that we will forever live in a world where the other side is in a permanent race to the bottom, the opposite of what you and I seem to want.
The paradox may suck, but it is an undeniable fact of life that the best way to make sure both sides don't go low is to be able to demonstrate that you're willing and prepared to do so.
On billionaires/power: There will always be some form of "power" because there will never be a time when we're all perfectly equal. Some people are good at leading, some people are good at following. Some people are good at accumulating resources, some people are not. Some people want to save for later, some people do not. And if you ever force everyone to be completely equal, you will see societal collapse as people completely lose a sense of purpose. But here's the ultimate point that I want to make clear: too many people on the left are power-averse. Power never ceases to exist, it only changes hands. If those who want human flourishing (peace/arts/creativity/cooperation/etc.) choose to pretend we live in a world where power doesn't exist, then power will accrue to those who want human exploitation. And guess what they'll do with that power?
So again, if you want human flourishing, we better start accruing power to those who would lead a society driven by human flouring rather than exploitation. That is the only way that ever gets achieved.
On the media: same as with power, but with a caveat: we need to be willing to defend our worldview in the media, even when people are mean. We are, as a society, our total combined knowledge. And that total combined knowledge is molded by communication, which happens in the media. Too many of us have recoiled from social media (where most communication is happening today), because "it hurts our mental health" or because people are mean. My mental health is a hell of lot worse today than it has ever been given the country is being taken over by fascists, which is happening, at least in part, because so many on our side have silenced themselves in vast swaths of the media, entirely ceding the public sphere to the other side to take with little to no contest.
TLDR:
- If you want to live in a world where people aren't constantly going low, you have to be willing to go low as a deterrent
- There's no such a thing as a world without power. If you want human flourishing to become what rules society, then you must accrue power to those who want human flourishing rather than those who want human exploitation.
- If you ever want a world guided by human flourishing, in addition to accruing power, we need to be able to defend that worldview in the public sphere, even if that means dealing with nasty people who hurt our mental health. The alternative is what we're living today.
https://substack.com/@rebecca310932/note/c-205126790?r=7awn9c&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Aren't we always?
What do you mean?
It was related to the headline, "....we're doing this wrong."
We should be abolishing the entire federal government. Symbolic protests—marching in the streets, chanting slogans—change nothing. Liberty in America is effectively dead. Congress is indifferent and without a unified political movement committed to restoring unalienable rights, there are no peaceful mechanisms left to reverse the decline. Calls for violent revolution may arise, but such a path would almost certainly fail—not because the state is invincible, but because the public lacks the unity, clarity, and shared purpose required to sustain it.
The only real hope lies in the emergence of a true representative of liberty—someone who can cut through the noise of both parties, remind the people of their unalienable rights, and rekindle faith in America's founding principles. A person whose vision resonates deeply with all Americans and who understands that the sole purpose of government is to secure unalienable rights. Until such a person steps forward, there is little else we can do but remain vigilant, patient, and ready for the moment when they arise. And buy guns.
Sometimes, when there are imperialistic entities threatening the lives of both humans and our non-human kin, morality calls upon us to resist and defend the sacred in ways beyond nonviolent civil disobedience.
“BEYOND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
DO WE WISH TO BE CIVILLY OBEDIENT TO A SETTLER COLONIAL system established and maintained on genocidal and ecocidal violence?
The matter of civil obedience might appear to be questioned in the famed assertion that, "What is legal is not synonymous with what is right." But that statement assumes an agreeable morality of and in settler colonialism, its liberal synonymizing reinforces the State. It is a rallying cry of settler inclusion.
The relationships of power that comprise what is "civil," demand obedience. They demand tactics and a politics that confine them to be respectably included (what is called respectability politics in activist speak). Their escalations are a fervor not to undermine and abolish, but to be a part of the club.
If you ve been to any direct action training, the first terms defined are "nonviolent direct action" (NVDA) and "civil dis-obedience" (CD). These terms establish a framework that has been in use since it was created in the 1960s by Christian civil rights activists. They intentionally built an implicit consensus around nonviolence and contrasted their tactics to those of the Black Panthers, AIM, Weather Underground, Symbionese Liberation Army, and other militant formations that sought to abolish the US empire.
In the last fifty plus years, very little has changed in this organizing framework that continues to shape strategies and tactics used by activists throughout the world. At their core they are temporary interventions in social and political power relations that appeal through varying degrees of pressure for justice to be bestowed by the State. This model is not only the status quo in social and environmental justice organizing, it is also embraced by the State and capitalists as it reinforces and reproduces their underlying relationships of power.
The NVDA position speaks through activist managers in a moral binary of violent (bad)/nonviolent (good). It fails (by design) to understand that violence exists on a spectrum (structural, lateral, direct, etc.). This binary fiction of violence/non-violence, which is the preferred fantasy of liberals, normalizes the State's monopoly on violence in declarations of demonstrations and principles as nonviolent. It alienates radical possibilities and the militant legacies of anti-colonial struggle.
The question of nonviolence and violence has never defined Indigenous resistance, it has always been a more practical consideration of, what works?
Outside of the historical movement parentheses, the limitations, failures, and underlying power relationships of these rights aren't discussed and examined enough. This is due, in part, to the overall ways that direct action has been institutionalized by non-profit managers and self-imposed "allies." The criticisms aren't new, as anti-political analyses from the Earth Cells of Fire, and other militant strains of what can be called resistance have long pushed against the narrowly prescribed economy of action in the milieu of what is cynically dubbed “The Struggle” (patent pending).
Outside the parenthetical containers of sanctioned struggle are voices that distance and denounce actions as violent or extreme. After all, the context of their notions of disobedience is confined to the will. Their moralism constricts their lineage to nonviolent martyred icons that the State also embraces such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. It dissects the violence of abolitionists sitting the throats of those holding whips and keys to cages. It delicately separates the disfigured entrails of bloody liberation movements and moments that have underscored how power is imposed and disposed of in this world. It declares a monopoly of social transformation that is steeped in its utopic colonial imaginary. The liberal philosophies and ideologies of struggle have colonized and commodified social transformation.
Gord Hill bites at this tendency in his powerful antagonism, Smash Pacifism: A Critical Analysis of Gandhi and King, where he acutely observes that:
Pacifism must be challenged and discredited as an acceptable doctrine for resistance movements. To promote nonviolence is to disarm the people psychologically and to dampen their fighting spirit. This is even more so when the population is already largely pacified, as is the case in North America. Pacified not through state repression, but through apathy and hopelessness, and when these are broken, by the preaching of a pacifist doctrine that claims to be morally, politically, and tactically superior to all other forms of struggle.
Peter Gelderloos' book, How Nonviolence Protects the State offers an extraordinary study. Gelderloos asserts
“Only a people trained to accept being ruled by a violent power structure can really question someone's right and need to forcefully defend herself against oppression."
Indigenous warriors and warrior culture are perversely fetishized by the white historic gaze, yet the intensity and brutality of these complex resistances are sanitized for colonial consumption. But ours is the contradiction of the "noble" and the "savage." And while I'll dig into Indigenous inclusion and "civility" in later chapters (particularly "Voting is Not Harm Reduction," and the whole last section), I want to emphasize that for the duration of the "Indian Wars" and most all history of colonial invasion, Indigenous spiritual and physical resistance was regarded as illicit terrorism against civilization. Most (we had our scouts and collaborators for sure) of our ancestors weren't concerned with legitimacy of their tactics and their moral implications.
Broadly speaking, spirit and the sacred were their frameworks for action and they responded how they could with whatever worked, outside the enclosures, or reservations of dissent sanctioned by their enemies.
The fascinating instability of ongoing Indigenous dissent and disobedience is in its contentions of legitimacy and criminality and disobedience is in its contentions of legitimacy and criminality.
The "criminalization of dissent" becomes an invitation to embrace the anti-settler criminality of our ancestors in order to overwhelm colonial society's abilities to function. There is no need for activism in a world where collective- and self-defense is a way of life. There is no need to stay enclosed on reservations of resistance. Settler civility should always be undermined and contended.”
— Klee Benally
From his book titled “No Spiritual Surrender : Indigenous Anarchy In Defense Of The Sacred”
Read it, tell me what I have wrong.
So, what claims did I make that are not supported by reality?