Neighbor, I keep promising myself I won’t write novels for the podcast description, and I’m going to try to keep this short to encourage you to listen. Here’s my best shortest summary:
This situation is traumatizing. It’s important you understand what being traumatized means so that you can understand what needs to happen. Trauma isn’t just about being wounded— it’s about being wounded in isolation, without the healing balm of an actual community. This is why every Veterans Against Fascism group keeps telling you to commit to weekly and daily communal acts of resistance.
The other thing you need to understand is that trauma comes with our individual responses to danger. Those responses are: fawn, freeze, flight, and fight. In the podcast, I help you identify your relative risk, not in terms of your personal comfort, but based on whether or not you are in a social group the regime has explicitly identified as a target.
I also explain why, on a collective level, people who are not being targeted by the regime need to move into fight mode. But this fight is a particular kind of fight mode that is strategic, communal, coordinated, principled, and nonviolent. This podcast will help you understand what a healthy, successful, collective fight mode might look like for your community.
I am not sharing this to tell you weirdo knows best. I’m writing this to the part of yourself that keeps saying: “I don’t know what to do. I feel so powerless in this moment.”
Neighbor, you are not. You are actually the most powerful group in this battle to save our democracy—from people who have very explicitly told you they don’t want a democracy anymore. Fighting back in a principled, strategic, and nonviolent way is— as history has proven over and over again— the best way to bring down a tyrant and preserve your democracy.
Neighbor, there are more of us than there are of them, and there really is a reason why people chant: “The people united will never be defeated.” It’s to remind you of a truth our ancestors have passed down, generation to generation. It’s ancestral wisdom.
The key part of that chant is “unity.”
This moment calls on you to be in local community.
This moment calls on you to love the stranger and the outcast, to see your neighbors as compatriots, and to coordinate locally to develop a “fight back” strategy.
Every community is a potential battlefield. You have seen the fascists invade other neighborhoods, and he will continue, because fascists never stop unless they’re stopped. By us.
The first thing is to recognize you’re being attacked in the first place. The second thing is to challenge yourselves to collectively develop a strategy to fight back against fascism where you’re at right now. To win this, you are going to need to relearn what it means to be in community.
This podcast gives you an actual plan for civil disobedience as a community. Moving forward, I will do my best in this space to share with you ways to fight back in a way that is strategic and nonviolent.
It’s about working smart, not working hard.
It’s about working together, not being a hero.
Every battle that has ever been won has been fought collectively.
We got this.
Special note: I have been trying to keep these podcasts to twenty minutes, but I ended up at thirty minutes this time. You have my enthusiastic encouragement to just speed up my voice.
