As the fascist machine moves into more cities, as more detention centers get built to torture our kidnapped neighbors before they are shipped off overseas, if not outright killed, one refrain remains spoken from the lips of the resistance:
“We must remain non-violent.”
Why?
We have heard all the explanations before:
“It’ll make us just as bad as them!”
“It’s exactly what they want!”
“That’s illegal!”
What weight do these oft-repeated phrases hold? What is the logical conclusion of them? And are we even allowed to dissect the rhetoric that we use to talk about our response to harm perpetrated by the government?
Who is Non-Violence For?
Non-violence is a tactic based on spectacle. It is incredibly useful for demonstrating the unjust nature of an aggressive entity acting upon a passive entity. Most everyone would agree that shooting an unarmed person is incredibly fucked up and wrong, an unnecessary escalation. Most everyone would agree that the state calling peaceful protesters terrorists is rhetorically dangerous. Most everyone would agree that someone breaking into someone else’s homes to steal them from their families is straight up evil. Viewing these things, seeing them happen, is what drives people to consider the entities carrying out these acts as wrong and unjust. In the court of public opinion, that is incredibly effective and the genuine efficacy of this tactic in this specific regard should not be minimized.
The abuses that people have suffered at the hands of ICE have made even the ones who voted for this, even the people who signed up to enforce it, to reconsider their complicity and deem the government’s actions as having “gone too far.” The internet has been instrumental in spreading the videos of ICE’s violence in their deportations, and the footage of guns held by agents pointed at Renee and Alex’s heads. Their extrajudicial murders served as rallying points for people who recognized this violence for what it was, and activated people who may have been on the sidelines up until that point.
The problem is when we decide that non-violence is the only tactic that we can use. When non-violence becomes the goal, when the spectacle becomes the point, we lose sight of what we are trying to do, instead focusing on how it looks.
What comes after we show people that what is happening is unjust? We think you would agree that once enough people think that what is happening is a problem, then something must be done to fix it. What happens when the people who are supposed to fix it are the ones responsible for creating the problem? When the law has failed, when the system has failed, how else can the problem be fixed?
Simply, we must take matters into our own hands. If the government won’t stop killing us and kidnapping us, then we must stop them ourselves, by any means necessary.
For the non-violent activist, this is untenable. If we stop being passive victims, then rhetorically we cede ground to the state to justify their abuse! They finally have an excuse to shoot us in the street, to raid our homes, to shut down our protests!
Except, that is happening anyway. Being non-violent did not save the lives of Keith Porter Jr., Renee Good, and Alex Pretti. Being non-violent did nothing to stop ICE from tear-gassing children in Portland. Being non-violent does nothing to stop the administration from painting all of us as terrorists, as insurrectionists, as thugs. Being non-violent did nothing to stop ICE from “losing” 3,000 people in their detention system.1 They are already doing what you are afraid of.
Can you look your neighbor in the eye, and say whole-heartedly, that you will not physically stop ICE from taking them because you need to maintain the moral high ground?
What is the point? To adhere to non-violence as an end in-and-of itself, to portray ourselves as the passive populous oppressed by an evil government? What audience are we performing this for? To keep our actions reigned in to maintain the narrative of being passive victims is to ensure that is all we will ever be, passive in the face of injustice. Our pleas to the administration to stop the abuse will continue to go unheeded. After all, it is the administration itself that is perpetuating this abuse. Local governments have no legal authority to stop them, to believe so is to fundamentally misunderstand how the legal hierarchy of our government works. We cannot confuse a legal framework with an ethical one. When the law actively obstructs what we are trying to do, then it must be bypassed. Who gives a fuck when following the law means that we die?
The Law as Morality
There is an idea that seems to pervade throughout the more popular of the resistance movements. The positioning of ICE’s efforts as illegal and therefore unjust, and our attempts to stop them as legal and therefore just.
This is incredibly dangerous rhetoric.
This position reinforces the idea that what is legal is inherently right, that the only reason we should be stopping ICE from deporting people is that they are going about it the wrong way. We instead think that we need to stop ICE because ripping people from their homes, their communities, and their families is ethically unjust, regardless of how polite we can make the process. The entire function of deportation is oppressive and disgusting, and the biases that inform who gets deported and how are baked into the whole fucking program. This is not something that we can reform. This is not something that we should want to reform, to only have a few deportations, to maintain violence at the border just as long as we’re being nice about it. This is something that we will abolish, because the entire concept of deportation, and truthfully the concept of border security, is predicated upon and is maintained through violence or the threat of it.
The problem, also, is that not everything ICE is doing is illegal.
The wanton racism is legal. The Supreme Court ruled that ICE agents can simply apprehend people based on the color of their skin, the accents they have, and the jobs they work, and how well they conform to gender.2,3 That is legal. At time of writing, a Federal Appeals Court has determined it is legal for ICE to retaliate against peaceful protesters. It is legal for ICE to detain, arrest, and pepper spray you for simply standing in the street and voicing your opposition to the government.4 That is legal. That is the reality we live in.
If any kind of dissent is going to be deemed illegitimate by the same government that refuses to enforce its own laws, then it should be obvious to anyone with pattern recognition where this is headed. We need a framework for ethics that exists outside of what is deemed moral by the state.
When it becomes legal to kill transgender people, does the legality of that action make it right? The state of Florida has passed a law authorizing the state to use the death penalty against sexual criminals. The administration is currently attempting to make being transgender in public a sex crime.5 That would give them legal authority to kill anyone who the state decides is transgender. Does that make the law ethical, and the breaking of that law by protecting our transgender family, friends, and neighbors unethical? Just as it was illegal in berlin to hide your neighbors from being taken by the nazis, it is illegal to hide your neighbors now to prevent them from being taken by ICE. Does that mean that committing a criminal act such as keeping people alive make us bad people? Does that make our decisions illegitimate, make our cause unworthy, just because we are breaking the law?
Why are we letting the fascists determine what is right, or just, or a legitimate way to resist their rule? We cannot let them control the narrative of our ethics, because that is what leads to genocide. We are not being hyperbolic when we say this. You too, can read a history book and know what is going to happen if we do not use every available avenue that we have to end this oppression. Even the methods that make you uncomfortable to think about, because obviously being peaceful and lawful hasn’t helped. If the law worked the way that we seem to think that it does, then somewhere in the four years since the Jan 6, 2021 coup attempt, Trump would have been put behind bars.
Why didn’t that happen?
Walls of text in a law book are not magical spells that bind individuals to its rule, the law requires a body wielding a gun to make the decision to enforce it on an unwilling participant. And quite simply, the law is not on our side. There is a reason why the cops are lined up at our peaceful protests preparing to fight us instead of the illegal actions of ICE. You can’t fight the system with itself. Laws are only as applicable as they are enforceable, and who is going to enforce the law against the President of the United States? The Supreme Court, who has given the administration such wins as letting their gestapo be as racist as they please? The Department of Justice, which attempted to portray Renee Good and Alex Pretti as terrorists to legitimize their murders? The Military, headed by a man that ordered multiple war crimes in the Caribbean and Iran? The United Nations or NATO, who couldn’t even be fucked to stop the genocide in Palestine?
We cannot be so naive. There is no point in continuing to place our faith in and define ourselves by a system that so obviously wants us dead, or disappeared, or silent.
In the years since George Floyd, in the years since Michael Brown, in the years since Rodney King, it should be obvious by now that simply quoting the law at the people who are meant to enforce it will do nothing to deter their violence against us. We need a different framework.
What are the goals that we want to achieve? How best can we do that? What is keeping us from succeeding in those endeavors? What are the tools that we have been using, and what are the tools we have yet to utilize?
The Ethics and Effects of Non-Violence and Violence Alike
The argument that the administration wants violence in opposition to it is as ill-conceived as it is oft-repeated. Really? The government wants their agents to be confronted with mortal peril for kidnapping people? For real, they want the detention facilities stormed and every person inside released before the buildings are burned to the ground? Truly, they want us to actually fight back against their oppression by any means necessary, to take up arms against their brownshirts, to steal food and rob their banks and set government buildings ablaze? This is what they want?
This is not a serious argument. The idea that a government wants legal precedent for the things that it is already doing illegally is absurd. We will not entertain it further.
We aren’t characters in a storybook, we are living beings experiencing physical harm from a government trying to kill us.
No action exists in a vacuum. Choosing to abstain from an action is an action itself, with an outcome dictated by that decision. No matter how badly you may feel about it, the outcome of hiding in your house trying not to hear their cries results in your neighbors being kidnapped unopposed. Likewise, the outcome of waiting until the midterms or the 2028 elections to attempt to elect a candidate to replace the fascists, and the time that it takes after that to push through legislation in an attempt to close the concentration camps (which didn’t even happen under Biden!6) means that in the meantime, there are still thousands of people held in those cages, thousands of people taken from their homes, and hundreds killed in the process.7
Within the context of non-violent resistance, that is particularly the point. Non-violent protests and movements, at least the effective ones, are almost never actually non-violent. They instead count on the violence of the system to persist so as to demonstrate how terrible the system is to people who aren’t affected by that violence. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. noted in 1965, the violence he expected to encounter in his marches would lead to “Americans of conscience in the name of decency demand federal intervention and legislation.”8
Except the federal government, the highest authority in the country, is intervening on behalf of racism. It is legislating cruelty, and taking away our means of affecting change through non-violent means. The purpose of non-violence is to coerce dialogue about an injustice that is happening with someone who can actually do something about the injustice.
And when our movements are dedicated to the idea that we must only point to evil happening in our communities in order to ask the people who are doing it to stop, and those people are actively saying “We are going to be more evil about this,” we need to take them at their word, and formulate a strategy to stop them without their say-so. Otherwise, the alternative is that they keep doing evil while all we allow ourselves to do is simply tell them that it is evil. The cruelty is the point.And it is our ethical obligation to stop cruelty, not simply demand that someone else stops it for us.
There are already casualties from our decisions. We cannot pretend that there aren’t and that our non-violence exists within an ethical bubble.
Once we actively consider the outcomes of each decision we make, the ethics of each choice become more nuanced. It is no longer a simple positioning of “Our Innocent Non-Violence vs Their Abusive Violence” but instead turns the conversation back to what we are trying to accomplish. If we are trying to stop the government from kidnapping and killing people, and the steps that we have taken to that end are not effective, then the next steps are to try things that we haven’t yet considered. Putting our bodies between ICE agents and police and the people they are trying to take. Sabotaging the machines that they use to kidnap people, rendering them physically unable to carry out their goals. Firing back when they fire on us. Render actual consequences for their actions, because obviously the law is not going to do that, or it would have already.
We do understand that simply firing a gun at a riot cop in the middle of a large protest will result in nothing but a massacre of innocent people. Firebombing a random building is not the move. We do not advocate to commit violence for violence’s sake. We do, however, acknowledge its usefulness in pursuit of a specific goal, and we advocate for the organized and narrow implementation of it.
Let us examine the contradictions of who gets to claim that violence has happened, and what violence has happened to. How strange that it is often said that violence erupts at a protest after someone throws a tear gas canister back at police, despite that tear gas having to come from the cops in the first place. How peculiar that conversations about violence seem to lend the taking of human lives and the burning of a cop car with equal weight. The idea that the breaking of office and bank windows is as detestable as the breaking up of families is absurd and cruel. This argument leaves no sense of scale, leaves no sense of nuance, and reduces the value of human lives to that of objects.
Fuck an office, fuck a car, smash and burn it if it keeps our families together and alive.
If there’s one thing these fuckers believe in, it’s money. We can make it too expensive for them to do anything, or too costly for private enterprise to want to contract with them. Breaking into and burning down field offices when the workers are out for the day, stealing records, destroying logistic paperwork and expensive equipment is effective and does no harm to human beings. If we know that a detention center is going to be built on a plot of land, we can destroy the construction machines while the workers are out for the weekend. Rendering their fleets of kidnapping vehicles inoperable by smashing them to bits while they stay parked in a lot. Stopping transports in their tracks and releasing every single person held in their vehicles. Tackling ICE agents to prevent them from tackling someone else.
And, if it comes to it, armed defense. Community Defense Networks posted up in our neighborhoods utilizing firearms as deterrents, letting them know that we will actively defend our communities. Comrades ready to fire upon agents if any more decide they can just kill us without consequence. That is what is second amendment is for.
Armed organized affinity groups making sure that we can properly respond and offer protection if any fascists decide they can pull a mass shooting at the next protest. Just because an organization says that a march is going to be non-violent, does not mean that it will be.9 We need to prepare ourselves for that.
No one has to die from our actions, even our violent ones. Especially our violent ones. But if we continue to stand on the sidelines and not embrace a diversity of tactics, or at the very least refuse to condemn the people who are trying to stop the machine any way they can, then more people will be killed. That is a guarantee from the administration, not from us.
And truly, that is the point of this text. We will not attempt to convince you to pick up a weapon just because we said so. Everyone’s risk assessment is different, and if your risk assessment is different than ours, we simply ask that you recognize the same for us. It is the job of cops and feds to condemn citizens for playing outside of the rules, to paint physical actions taken against them as terrorist and socially abhorrent. This is a tactic to draw a line between “good” protesters and “bad” protesters, with that line somehow always being set right at the cusp of effective action, and always in the moment, the line never recognized in history.
We do think that a good majority of people who repeat the phrase “The First Pride Was A Riot” or slap that sticker on their water bottles would be swift to condemn anyone who would riot now about the loss of transgender rights, the attack on gay marriages happening across the country, and the lack of access to abortion care. It is that hypocrisy that we wish to critique in our analysis of non-violence, that simultaneous uplifting and co-option of revolutionary language and imagery, while at the same time working to suppress any real revolutionary capacity, and actively condemning the people who would open that door of possibility for us. We need us all; the letter-writers, the garden planters, the medics, the caretakers, the sign-wavers, the dancers, the poets, the artists. And, we need the troublemakers, the risk-takers, the anarchists, the commies, the brick-throwers, the joyful revolutionaries. The overlap of all these kinds of people is more than you may think. We need all of us. None can be left to the wolves or turned over to the fash as a favor or marked for retribution or shunned from action. Because all of us need to live to see what comes after, and we all need to work together to build a world worth living in.
There is going to be an After.
The fascists haven’t destroyed the future just yet, and if you decide to help to make a new one they never will. There will come a day when Trump’s regime is as far away a memory as Hitler’s, and what do you think you will remember? What will matter to you?
Well, what are the things you remember about resistance to the Nazis? Do you fondly think of how lawful and peaceful the marches were? How they worked within the system to bring the holocaust to an end? Or do you recall the bravery of the people willing to take matters into their own hands, the saboteurs that firebombed SS offices, that ambushed logistical points, the people that liberated the concentration camps with rifles in their hands?
If you are able to correctly identify this administration as a fascist one, then we must look to history to correctly discern what it took to defeat a fascist government. Either we must take up the arms ourselves, or we wait for two armies with opposing politics to invade and destroy the government for us, imposing their own rule afterward. We prefer the option where we are not found under the heel of new oppressors. We choose the one where we are in charge of our own futures.
Yes, the application of force to achieve our ends does mark a certain point of no return. The thing is, the fascists have already pushed us past that point.
The world that existed before January 20th, 2025 is dead. USAID is dismantled. Billions of dollars have been poured into funneling people into concentration camps. Clean energy projects have been canceled, national health institutions have been obliterated. The SAVE act will prohibit millions of Americans from voting. The administration has brought us into yet another illegal war with no end in sight. The president wields his own private military in the form of ICE. The way that the government of the United States of America functions right now is wildly different from the way that it has functioned for the last century. It is not the same as you were taught in school. Fuck, it is not the same that it was five years ago.
We are already within a brand new political structure. We cannot vote our way out of this. The previous avenues for affecting change in our society have been destroyed. We functionally cannot go back to the way things were.
And even if we could, why would you?
Do we really want to go back to police officers killing unarmed black people in the street? Did they not also count as citizens being murdered by the state? Do we think that stopped with the ICE surges, or do we think that they’ve increased in frequency?
Do we really want to go back to the political structure that gave Trump power in the first place? Gave it to him twice? Are we really convinced that gambling for our rights every four years is the best way to govern ourselves?
Do we really want to continue an economic system that gives men like Jeffery Epstein and his friends the resources to affect abuse on that scale? Do we really want to maintain an economic system that encourages AI to use up all our water and poison our communities?10Do we really want to maintain the system that makes people starve to death outside a supermarket, or freeze to death outside of an empty home? Do we really want to continue the same system that denies healthcare to people when the patient needs it and the doctor wants to perform it, but some fucking CEO doesn’t want to pay for it with the money the patient already gave them? The same system that accumulates so much wealth and resources only to use them to fund genocide?
Do we really want to keep the hierarchy of gender? The same structure that ensures a dead woman is used as an incubator for a fetus?11 The same structure that says that all women owe men their bodies, their lives, to do with as they please? Are we sure we want to maintain a structure that convinces children that they are so unloved for who they are that they feel they have no choice but to kill themselves?12 The same hierarchy that informs homophobia and transphobia, places people into coercive boxes from which they feel they have no escape?
In hindsight, it seems like what was normal was incredibly harmful. Instead of spending the futile effort to claw our way back to what was already an ineffective system, let us instead divert our resources, our time, and our efforts looking forward to building a new world.
It is not enough to define ourselves simply by what we are against, for once the myopic evil is defeated we would return to complacency. That isn’t conjecture, just look at everything that has happened since Trump first left office in 2021, and how ineffective the liberal establishment has been at actually preventing fascism.13,14
No, we prefer to define ourselves by what we are actually fighting for. A world in which no human being is treated as disposable. Healthcare for all. Homes and food guaranteed to each and every person. A way of living devoid of any structural power over anyone else. We have the resources. We have the means. It just so happens that certain systems and structures stand in the way of that goal. We are not against capitalism simply because we hate mondays, we are against it because it is explicitly a system that does not provide freedom to everyone living under it, only a select few. We are against the state because it can only exist as an entity that uses force upon its citizens as means of control. We are against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, and classism because those concepts stand in the way of liberation for all. And we mean ALL!
Our aim is not to be the ones in power so that we can wield the violence of the state against our enemies, our aim is to do away with power all together, so that no one may ever oppress another ever again. We will not take over the jails to make sure the “right” people languish within its walls, we will burn them to the fucking ground.
If we are going to be building a new world from scratch anyway when the fascists let out their last gasp, we have no need to compromise with a system that would no longer exist. We are wholly and completely in charge of our future. Even now. Do not lend the oppressor your hand to help snuff out possibility. Instead, extend it to your neighbor in the dirt to help lift them up.
So Then What?
We will not offer a critique where we also cannot offer a solution. The purpose of this text is not to radicalize you and then make you angry and hopeless with no direction to take that energy. That is how mass shootings happen, and despite what the government might tell you about anarchists, getting more innocent people killed is the last thing we want. We are in fact mobilizing to stop that.
We can build the new world in the shell of the old. Right now, there are a great number of projects that require attention. If you still adhere completely to the idea of non-violence above all else, there’s still so much you can do to help the people around you in ways that matter. You don’t have to do everything all at once, and in fact, we recommend that you don’t. Pick something that interests you and have a go at it. Everyone doing the thing that they are good at means that with enough people, everything will get done. If you don’t know where to start, here are a few suggestions:
Building The New World (Active Care)
As the fascists eat themselves and take the rest of us with them in their self-destruction, we need to build dual power to continue living as the usual options for survival become inaccessible to us. The anarchist principle of Mutual Aid is what will ensure this survival. Strong communities keep each other safe, both from starvation and external harm. These are some projects that are rooted within that framework. If you are unfamiliar with the concept, or are confused as to how Mutual Aid differs from charity, this text is a good place to start.
https://crimethinc.com/zines/mutual-aid-the-commons-and-the-revolutionary-abolition-of-capitalism
Making and Distributing Food to Your Neighbors
People need to be fed. And if the current capitalist structure cannot do that, and is in fact making it harder to do that, then we will take it upon ourselves to do so. Food Not Bombs is a mutual aid network that has been around for decades, and has fed millions of people around the world. Find a local chapter, or make your own. If feeding a city seems like too much, feed your neighborhood. Set up block parties where folks can come together for a meal, and meet and enjoy each other’s company. Find out who needs help with grocery deliveries in your neighborhood. Your Latinx neighbors may be in more need as the threat of ICE abductions keep them sequestered in their homes. A large number of Mutual Aid projects have popped up in recent years to try to meet these needs. They need all the help they can get.
Food Not Bombs:
https://foodnotbombs.net/info/locations/
https://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/seven-steps.php
Mutual Aid Networks:
https://www.mutualaidhub.org/
Community Fridges and Pantries:
https://pollitify.substack.com/p/starting-a-community-fridgepantry
The People’s Transportation
As the price of transportation keeps rising, and with cities in the US being as car centric as they are, people may find themselves stranded and unable to get to work, or doctors or DMV appointments, or to a voter registration office. The bus may not take them there, or it may take too long to arrive, or it may stop running by the time they’re off work. Someone’s car may be in the shop, or unregistered or uninsured, and they cannot risk driving anyway. Or, as we’ve seen in Kansas and soon to be other states, transgender people’s drivers licenses are getting immediately revoked.
Rideshare apps can be expensive, or someone might not have a smartphone. You can create local networks of dispatched transportation, a number that someone can call if they need to get from point A to point B. Start in your friendship circles, or post signs in your neighborhood. Help take people on their grocery runs, in fact plan to do your grocery shopping at the same time so you only have to take the one car between two families. Start carpooling. Offer rides where and when you can. Make sure people get home safe, or to and from work, or to and from the hospital. We can get each other everywhere in the world as long as we choose to. Anyone who’s hitchhiked or given a ride to a stranger can prove that.
Building a Safe-House Network
If you are in a position to keep people safe from danger in your home, and are willing to do so, make that known. This can mean anything from making sure a queer kid who has a shit home life has a place to go and spend the night, or housing a trans person for a time on their way to another state. This can mean letting your neighbors who would be targets of ICE know where the spare key is if they need to not be at home during a raid, and that you would answer the door and refuse to let federal agents search your home as the law allows you to do. This can mean being a rendezvous point for activists on their way to or from a protest where they can change clothes and catch their breath. If we are able to and can provide shelter and safety, there are many ways for us to do so.
Making and Distributing Medicine
We don’t have to tell you that the medical system in America is fucked. We’ve been talking about Universal Healthcare for decades, even as other countries have successfully implemented it. We can keep waiting for the slog of bureaucracy to save us, or we can start doing it ourselves. As medical access keeps getting more and more restricted, especially for trans people, there are numerous projects that are currently saving lives, and can save a whole lot more. From HRT to Abortion to Cavity Fillings to Micro Pharm labs, the links below provide a good starting point for caring for each other.
https://crimethinc.com/2022/12/15/producing-transdermal-estrogen-a-do-it-yourself-guide
https://www.sproutdistro.com/catalog/zines/diy/how-to-do-it-anyway/
https://fourthievesvinegar.org/
Reappropriating Abandoned Buildings, Housing Collectives, and Tenant’s Unions
It’s vacant, take it! As more people find themselves without a home, either from being scared to work for fear of ICE showing up, or people losing their jobs from a shrinking economy, or a great majority of us being just one accident away from the streets, the housing crisis is going to get much, much worse. The squatting movement has depreciated over the years, but with things going the way they are, it is important to return to these tactics in order to keep a roof over our heads. If you’re housed and got extra space, take a houseless neighbor in. If you know of an abandoned building in your area, learn to pick a few locks so that it can keep people warm and dry again. This is part of how we keep each other alive.
https://www.sproutdistro.com/catalog/zines/direct-action/its-vacant-take-it/
https://www.sproutdistro.com/catalog/zines/direct-action/atu-tactics-v1/
Reading, Talking About, and Distributing Literature!
You like book clubs! We also like them, so much so that the government has trouble infiltrating our shit because of how much we read! Our actions are informed by our politics, and it is through the framework of anarchism that we organize. What informs your politics? What are the philosophies that you operate under? Do you talk about that with your friends or do you just assume that everyone you know is on the same page? If we’re going to be building a new world, the ideas that determine how we interact with each other are just as important as knowing how to grow food. The creation of a new society is nuanced and complicated, and we intend to meet the challenge. To be able to engage with the world now, and the world that comes after, we think these are good places to start:
sproutdistro.com
theanarchistlibrary.org
Crimethinc.com
ember.noblogs.org
Contributing to the Mesh Network!
Meshtastic is an open-source decentralized communication platform that uses Long Range Radio, or LoRa, to send texts across long distances. It uses a localized network of nodes that are all talking to each other to send encrypted messages from one person to another, like a student passing a note to their friend with multiple people in between, passing the note to the next person in the chain. The more people that participate, the more robust the network becomes, as more nodes also mean more redundancy in getting the messages where they need to go, and greater range. Mesh networks have been incredibly useful in establishing communication in affected areas when cell service or the internet goes down, such as in the case of natural disasters. It also means that we are in control of our own communication infrastructure, free from control of corporations and the prying eyes of government! If you’re tech-minded, this is an effective and actionable project for you! If you like to tinker, you can build your own device for around $30, or you can get a pre-built device starting at a little under $60. [Note: we are aware of Meshcore and its benefits in contrast to Meshtastic, and will be updating this section once we have done enough research on the protocol to feel that we are able to effectively speak on it]
https://meshtastic.org/
https://heltec.org/product-category/lora/meshtastic/
https://muzi.works/products/elecrow-thinknode-m5
Dismantling The Old (Accurate Destruction)
Contributing to the Mesh Network!
All those AI traffic cameras can be taken down and the solar panels repurposed into holding Meshtastic nodes. They’re basically giving us the materials for free, and you can help physically dismantle the police state in the process! (Well, not exactly free. We already paid for ‘em, it’s our tax dollars after all!)
https://www.sproutdistro.com/catalog/zines/direct-action/birds-feather-flock/
Sabotage and Obstruction!
If you happen to know where ICE is staging for a raid, some slashed tires could render a fleet immobilized. A shattered windshield can make it too dangerous for them to drive. Diagonally cut metal rods bent and welded together make fantastic standing spikes to drop in the roads leading in and out of their detention facilities. The time they spend picking them off the asphalt or replacing their tires is time spent not kidnapping people. You don’t need to build IEDs, there are many ways to stop a person or a van from entering a location. Pour some sugar in the gas tank, put super glue in the locks of their offices so they can’t get in. Build barricades and block off intersections so they can’t leave or enter certain areas. Form a rapid response network localized in your neighborhood to keep watch for ICE activity and dispatch to respond to it. Jam their radios and their drones, keep those fuckers awake at night, keep them tired, demoralized. Make their lives a living hell wherever they are, for as long as they keep human beings locked up in hellish conditions.
These tactics can also be applied to more targets than just ICE, like say, cops attempting to evict a neighbor in the middle of winter, or a data center that is being built in your area. This is an incomplete list, but we feel that these actions are good places to start. You’re a smart cookie, get creative!
Beautify Your Neighborhood and City!
Generally, we think it’s pretty unfair that the people who control this country have vast amounts of money to pour into propaganda efforts to convince us to hate each other and ourselves. We also think that simply not asking permission to put up our own posters and billboards can help level the playing field!
That blank wall could use some color, why not write or paint something that gives people hope, or pushes them to action, or gets them to think? Bus stop ads make great blank canvases, and any flat surface can be wheatpasted with posters providing information, agitation, or consolation. Make an evening of it with your friends, hit the town and make it as pretty as you can! Sticker everything! Cover up fascist propaganda with something silly and absurd! You can literally do this whenever, wherever. Crimethinc has some pretty good posters to get you started, and you can always design and make your own!
https://crimethinc.com/posters
https://www.sproutdistro.com/catalog/zines/direct-action/banner-drops-stencils-wheatpaste/
General Strike!!
The United Auto Workers union (UAW) has called for a General Strike beginning on May 1st, 2028. This is an actionable goal with a set start date, not some one-off protest called for on instagram a week in advance. We have years to prepare for this, years to organize our workplaces and get our co-workers on board, years to build community networks to get food and water distribution networks ready for when business has stopped. Years to build community clinics for medical treatment when the nurse and doctors unions walk out. Years to build tenant unions, organizing our homes and buildings and neighborhoods to be able to stand up to our landlords and say no, we are doing a rent strike as well. This is feasible, but those years will come quicker than you think. Pick a project, and start working on it in preparation for this goal now. NO SCHOOL, NO WORK, NO RENT, NO FASCISM!
https://may1.uaw.org/
www.iww.org
Preparing for The Worst, Fighting for The Best (We Can See The Future and So Can You)
We are not LARPing about nuclear annihilation, expecting a sun flare EMP to take out electronics, or fantasizing about a civil war. As climate change ramps up, and with the dismantling of the Clean Air Act accelerating that process, climate catastrophes are going to increase in frequency and scale of their destruction. Wildfires will burn longer and farther, hurricanes will reach new areas they aren’t expected like the destruction that Helene wrought on the Carolinas. Floods like the one that hit Texas, droughts like the southwest has faced the winter of 2025-26, leading to a summer of fires and water scarcity. A tornado alley that fires up earlier and shifts its borders to now include Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia. This isn’t a far off future. It is happening now. People have had to come together and take care of each other during these crises, and the skills posited in the Building of The New World are what they turn to. We need to be building those skills now so that we are not caught off guard when the next catastrophe hits, whether that be storm, sea, fire, flood, or government. And when enough of us are on the same page where we are prepared to ensure our neighbors are fed, housed, and safe during the next crises then we can finally shrug off the weight of capitalism and meet each other with kindness.
We will see you in a world free from police trying to ensure that we starve, freeze, grow ill, or die in a concrete box. We will see you in a future where food is shared, not kept from starving mouths. A future where the surplus of homes that already exist are filled with families, not made empty while people die on the street. A future where people are cared for, simply because that is what humans want to do when we see someone hurt or in distress. A world free of prisons, a world free of suffering for the sake of someone else’s conceptual power. A world where we can all meet each other as true equals.
That is the future that we are fighting for. What is the future that you are fighting for, and how do you plan to get there?
[3] https://transitics.substack.com/p/trump-administration-opens-the-door
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/21/ice-arrest-pepper-spray-protesters-minnesota
[5] https://www.them.us/story/trans-rights-ioda-porn-ban-bill-mike-lee-project-2025
[7] https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/how-many-people-ice-killed-tmrjsrgnq
[8] https://daily.jstor.org/martin-luther-king-jr-paradox-nonviolence/
[9] https://www.workers.org/2022/02/62081/
[11] https://abcnews.com/Health/pregnant-brain-dead-woman-georgia-life-support-experts/story?id=122963319
[13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6xlMhuxBb4
[14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAbab8aP4_A
Rest in peace to Saul Enrique Banegas‐ Guzman, ,Felix Bauckholt, Rubin Ray Martinez, Elena Catarina Morales-Chan, Enrique Juan Tizol Macario, Ryan Louis Mosqueda, Jaime Alanis, Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdez, Silverio Villegas González, Yahir David Martinez, Axel Everado Iquic-Sequen, Manuel Mateo Lopez, Jose Castro-Rivera, Bartolo Baltazar Baltazar, Epifanio Molina Bravo, Hector Lopez Lopez, Isaias Sanchez Barboza, Keith Porter, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Dr. Linda Davis, Nurul Amin Shah Alam, Genry Ruiz Guillen, Serawit Gezahegn Dejene, Maksym Chernyak, Brayan Rayo-Garzon, Nhon Ngoc Nguyen, Marie Ange Blaise, Abelardo Avelleneda-Delgado, Jesus Molina-Veya, Johnny Noviello, Isidro Perez, Tien Xuzn Phan, Chaofeng Ge, Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas, Oscar Rascon Duarte, Santos, Reyes-Banegas, Trinn A. Hatch, Ismael Ayala Uribe , Norlan Guzman-Fuentes, Miguel Angel Garcia-Hernandez, Huabing Xie, Leo Cruz-Silva, Hasan Ali Moh’D Saleh, Gabriel Garcia-Aviles, Kai Yin Wong, Francisco Gaspar Andrés, Pete Sumalo Montejo, Shiraz Fatehali Sachwani, Jean Wilson Brutus, Delvin Francisco Rodriguez, Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir, Nenko Stanev Gantchev, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz, Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, Parady La, Heber Sanchaz Domínguez, Victor Manuel Diaz, Lorth Sim, Jairo Garcia-Hernandez, Alberto Gutierrez-Reyes, Emmanuel Damas, as well as everyone who had names that we could not verify.
These are the names of the people who have died at the hands of ICE since only January of 2025. There are over a hundred more people killed prior to that, and there will be hundreds after if we do not abolish ICE by way of law or force. All of these deaths were preventable.
Let us prevent them.