Building Resistance

Building networks to create and sustain resistance. 

Views from the South,

https://ourmoralmoment.substack.com/p/america-has-seen-authoritarianism?

Excellent advice.   A conference at Vanderbilt, , and the Poor Peoples Campaign.  

Duane Campbell

Still No Kings: Millions to Protest Trump On Saturday

Still No Kings: Millions to Protest Trump On Saturday: A coalition of civil rights groups expects the turnout on Oct. 18 will be even bigger than the first nationwide protest held in June, which by some counts was the largest in U.S. history.

Including Sacramento planning 

Resources for Resistance

 Resources 2025 

 10 Ways to Stop a Dictator. Waging Nonviolence.

https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/11/10-things-to-do-if-trump-wins/

 

Indivisible Resource Guide

Indivisible: A Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink

PDF, Grayscale PDF, Google Docs, Audio version [Length: 28 pages]

https://indivisible.org/resource/guide

               What’s Up With This Document

● Who this is for: 

    Anyone who lives in America and is upset, scared, and determined.    

    You want to do your part to protect your family, your neighbors, and democracy from Trump 2.0. 

 

Will the U.S. Survive The Present Crisis  ?  Maybe.  Timothy Snyder.

https://snyder.substack.com/p/look-on-my-works-ye-mighty?

Substack. Heather Cox Richardson

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/

Ssubstack; Robert Reich.  Why Trump is Doomed.

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/sunday-thought-263?

Economics of Oligarchy. Heather Cox Richardson.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-3-2025?

 

 

 

  

Soldiers Organizing to Defend Democracy

Choosing Democracy: Soldiers Organizing to Defend Democracy:   Soldiers Organize for Democracy. On the Fourth of July, members of the military are calling on Congress to protect service members who dis...

Resources for military resistance

Resources for National Guard & Military

• Encrypted support form from About Face (for Guard/Active Duty resisting deployment): bit.ly/MilOptions
• Legal help: National Institute of Military Justice
• GI Rights Hotline - highly trained counselors that can confidentially talk through options and risks with military members - https://girightshotline.org/ 1-877-447-4487
• Know Your Rights (Military): bit.ly/militaryKYR

Resources for Demonstrators:

• Protestors Guide to Talking to National Guard: Instagram post

Soldiers Organize for Democracy.

 
Defeat Fascism/Fight for Democracy 
List of  resources and opportunities: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cRIJsSJwtF72ckJ8QLQu5cDCGnoeh5OIIjwqRkDKdBg/edit?usp=sharing

 

Los Angeles: The Resistance Grows

 What is our moral responsibility as citizens of the United States when the President of the United States moves to deploy thousands of American soldiers against us? 

Trump signed a memo late yesterday ordering 2,000 members of the National Guard to be deployed in Los Angeles County after federal immigration agents in riot gear squared off with hundreds of protesters for a second consecutive day.

Trump’s action is extreme although technically legal. Title 10 of the United States Code allows a president to federalize the National Guard units of states to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.” In a presidential memo, Trump said, “To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

Why is he doing it, and why now? 

Because Trump can’t stand to be humiliated — as he has been in the last two weeks. By senate Republicans refusal to quickly enact his so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. By Xi Jinping’s refusal to back down on trade (and restrict shipments of China’s rare earths, which American industry depends on). By Putin’s refusal to end the war in Ukraine. By the federal courts pushing back against his immigration policy. And, now, by insults and smears from the richest person in the world, who has a larger social media following than does Trump. 

So what does Trump do when he’s humiliated? He deflects public attention. Like any bully, he tries to find another way to display his power — especially over people whom he doesn’t consider “his” people. 

He has despised California since the 2016 election when the state overwhelmingly voted against him. 

And what better Ground Zero for him to try out his police state than Los Angeles — a city teaming with immigrants, with Hollywood celebrities who demonize him, and wealthy moguls who despise him? 

He is calling out the National Guard to provoke violence. As California governor Gavin Newsom said, “that move is purposefully inflammatory and will only escalate tensions.” 

Exactly. Trump wants to escalate tensions. He wants a replay of the violence that occurred in the wake of the George Floyd murder — riots, mayhem, and destruction that allow him to escalate his police state further — imposing curfews, closing down parts of Los Angeles, perhaps seeking to subdue the entire state. And beyond. 

Please do not give him this. Don’t fall into his trap.

We cannot be silent in the face of Trump’s dictatorial move. But we must not succumb to violence. 

What is needed is peaceful civil disobedience. Americans locking arms to protect those who need protection. Americans sitting in the way of armored cars. Americans singing and chanting in the face of the Americans whom Trump is drafting into his handmade civil war. 

Americans who do not attempt to strike back, but who do what many of us did during the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements — peacefully but unambiguously reject tyranny. 

A humiliated Trump is the most dangerous Trump. But he will overreach. He already has. And this overreach will ultimately be his undoing. 

As long as we keep our heads.

May we look back on this hellish time and feel proud of what we did. 

Be strong. Be safe. Hug your loved ones. 

Robert Reich

Bernie Sanders, AOC, Coming to Folsom, California Tues. April 15

 Bernie’s coming to Folsom  on Tuesday, April 15, and you’re invited! He’ll be speaking alongside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about how our movement can come together to take on the Oligarchy and demand a government that works for all of us, not just the wealthy few.

This is going to be a great event, and we’d love to see you there. So, can you make it? Here’s everything you need to know:

TPlease be advised that there is a venue change: we will now be at the Folsom Lake College Athletic Track in Folsom, CA.

Here's everything you need to know:

Fighting Oligarchy: Where We Go From Here with Bernie Sanders in Folsom
With Special Guest Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Tuesday, April 15
3:30pm PDT Doors Open
6:00pm PDT Speaking Program Starts
Folsom Lake College Athletic Track

10 College Pkwy, Folsom, CA 95630 

📅 Here are some ways you can take action. Sat, Apr 19 @ 1pm April 19 Protest Rally and March 1-3pm › Sun, Apr 13 @ 2pm · INDIVISIBLE Sacramento A Pint of Politics and Doing Something Second Sundays › Tue, Apr 15 @ 7pm · INDIVISIBLE Sacramento INDIVISIBLE Sacramento Monthly Meeting: APRIL 2025 › Sat, Apr 5 @ 9am · INDIVISIBLE Sacramento Hands Off: Protest & Picnic at the Capitol › Fri, Apr 4 @ 4pm · INDIVISIBLE Sacramento Freeway Overpass BANNER TEAMS! › Sat, Apr 5 @ 11am · El Dorado Progressives - Indivisible El Dorado Sacramento 50501 / INDIVISIBLE Hands Off April 5 Capitol Picnic Protest › All times Pacific

 

 

Organizations Currently Involved in Resistance

 

Organizations currently engaged in resistance.  A list of a few.

 

If you’d like more specific guidance on what you might do, check out these organizations: MoveOn: https://front.moveon.org/ Indivisible: https://indivisible.org/ https://350sacramento.org  : Environmentalistshttps://californiaalliance.org https://californiaalliance.org  : Seniors  https://www.aclu.org  American Civil Liberties Union.  Northern California.  Sacramento Immigration Coalition.  https://sacimmigationcoalition.com/ LULAC. League of United Latin American Citizens.  https://lulac.org/know_your_rights/ Third Act https://thirdact.org/

 

The Resistance Starts Now !

 

The Resistance Starts Now

I still have faith in America, but we must mobilize to protect those at risk if Trump achieves his worst impulses.

ROBERT REICH

NOV 06, 2024

•  

Friends,

I won’t try to hide it. I’m heartbroken. Heartbroken and scared, to tell you the truth. I’m sure many of you are, too. 

Donald Trump has decisively won the presidency, the Senate, and possibly the House of Representatives and the popular vote, too.

I still have faith in America. But right now, that’s little comfort to the people who are most at risk.

Millions of people must now live in fear of being swept up by Trump’s cruel mass deportation plan – documented immigrants, as he has threatened before, as well as undocumented, and millions of American citizens with undocumented parents or spouses.

Women and girls must now fear that they’ll be forced to give birth or be denied life-saving care during an ectopic pregnancy or miscarriage.

America has become less safe for trans people – including trans kids – who were already at risk of violence and discrimination.

Anyone who has already faced prejudice and marginalization is now in greater danger than before.

Also in danger are people who have stood up to Trump, who has promised to seek revenge against his political opponents.

Countless people are now endangered on a scale and intensity almost unheard of in modern America.

Our first responsibility is to protect all those who are in harm’s way.

We will do that by resisting Trump’s attempts to suppress women’s freedoms. We will fight for the rights of women and girls to determine when and whether they have children. No one will force a woman to give birth.

We will block Trump’s cruel efforts at mass deportation. We will fight to give sanctuary to productive, law-abiding members of our communities, including young people who arrived here as babies or children.

We will not allow mass arrests and mass detention of anyone in America. We will not permit families to be separated. We will not allow the military to be used to intimidate and subjugate anyone in this country.

We will protect trans people and everyone else who is scapegoated because of how they look or what they believe. No one should have to be ashamed of who they are.

We will stop Trump’s efforts to retaliate against his perceived enemies. A free nation protects political dissent. A democracy needs people willing to stand up to tyranny.

How will we conduct this resistance?

By organizing our communities. By fighting through the courts. By arguing our cause through the media.

We will ask other Americans to join us – left and right, progressive and conservative, white people and people of color. It will be the largest and most powerful resistance since the American revolution.

But it will be peaceful. We will not succumb to violence, which would only give Trump and his regime an excuse to use organized violence against us.

We will keep alive the flames of freedom and the common good, and we will preserve our democracy. We will fight for the same things Americans have fought for since the founding of our nation – rights enshrined in the constitution and Bill of Rights.

The preamble to the Constitution of the United States opens with the phrase “We the people”, conveying a sense of shared interest and a desire “to promote the general welfare”, as the preamble goes on to say.

We the people will fight for the general welfare.

We the people will resist tyranny. We will preserve the common good. We will protect our democracy.

This will not be easy, but if the American experiment in self-government is to continue, it is essential.

I know you’re scared and stressed. So am I.

If you are grieving or frightened, you are not alone. Tens of millions of Americans feel the way you do.

All I can say to reassure you is that time and again, Americans have opted for the common good. Time and again, we have come to each other’s aid. We have resisted cruelty.

We supported one another during the Great Depression. We were victorious over Hitler’s fascism and Soviet communism. We survived Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts, Richard Nixon’s crimes, Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war, the horrors of 9/11, and George W Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We will resist Donald Trump’s tyranny.

Although peaceful and non-violent, the resistance will nonetheless be committed and determined.

It will encompass every community in America. It will endure as long as necessary.

We will never give up on America.

The resistance starts now.

 

 

Preparing for the Next Coup

Preparing for the next coup

 

Waging Nonviolence is once again teaming up with Choose Democracy to provide resources on how to stem the rising authoritarian tide. This is the second in a series of interviews with experienced organizers and movement thinkers on ways to defend and expand democracy.

Last month, the New York Times published a broad overview of rising political violence in the United States, noting that, “By almost all measures, the evidence of the trend is striking.” According to one poll, more than 80 percent of local officials said they had been threatened or harassed…..

 

In cases like that, how did people prepare themselves to handle a potentially violent response?

Anticipating what the other side is probably going to do is actually helpful because the fear of the unknown is often paralyzing — and people succumb to confusion, and then demobilization. I so admire the scholar Brian Martin and others who have done research into what makes repression backfire. They point to the five steps perpetrators use to try to inhibit outrage:

First, they cover it up, deny it ever happened and try to prevent knowledge of it from spreading.

Second, they devalue the victim and try to reduce their social standing in the eyes of onlookers.

Third, they reinterpret the abuse that happened by claiming it was necessary — that the police, who may have done something totally unlawful, were actually just trying to keep order or do their jobs. Or they were just a few bad apples.

Fourth, if they have to, they’ll say they’re going to launch an internal investigation. They like internal investigations that are closed doors, because they give the appearance of justice and take time. People demobilize frequently when they see an institutional process is underway.

Finally, they offer threats and rewards: threats against people talking out and rewards for people who stay silent.

That’s the playbook. It’s used by authoritarians. It’s used by governments and businesses. It’s used at a micro personal level. It’s used at a macro level.

How can organizers respond to these moves?

The backfire framework tells us what we need to do to counter all that. There’s five R’s:

1. Reveal what happened. Counter attempts to cover up.

2. Redeem: value the victim, humanize the victim, don’t let them be othered and cast aside.

3. Reframe and say “Actually, what’s going on is systemic, deeply abusive, corrosive and actually the tip of the iceberg. It’s indicative of a much deeper problem.

4. Redirect: If there is an institutional process, you may participate in it, you may not, but you don’t depend on it. You continue to mobilize. You continue to use that institutional process as a mobilizing opportunity.

5. Resist threats and bribes, and possibly turn them into new forms of backfire.

 

Read more: 

https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/06/political-violence-surging-2024-election-authoritarian-playbook-hardy-merriman/

 

 

On Tyranny:Twenty Lessons. Timothy Snyder

  

 

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.   Timothy Snyder.2017

 Advice from the book. 

First: Do not obey in advance.

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy. Perhaps rulers did not initially know that citizens were willing to compromise this value or that principle. Perhaps a new regime did not at first have the direct means of influencing citizens one way or another. After the German elections of 1932, which brought Nazis into government, or the Czechoslovak elections of 1946, where communists were victorious, the next crucial step was anticipatory obedience. Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed.

In early 1938, Adolf Hitler, by then securely in power in Germany, was threatening to annex neighboring Austria. After the Austrian chancellor conceded, it was the Austrians’ anticipatory obedience that decided the fate of Austrian Jews. Local Austrian Nazis captured Jews and forced...

 

 

 

 

1.     Do not obey in advance.

2.     Defend institutions

3.     Beware the one-party state

4.     Take responsibility for the face of the world.

5.     Remember professional ethics

6.     Be wary of paramilitaries

7.     Be reflective if you must be armed

8.     Stand out

9.     Be Kind to our language

10.  Believe in Truth

11.  Investigate

12.  Make eye contact and small talk

13.  Practice corporeal politics

14.  Establish a private life

15.  Contribute to good causes

16.  Learn from peers in other countries

17.  Listen for dangerous words

18.  Be calm when the unthinkable arrives

19.  Be a patriot 

20.  Be as courageous as you can

Resistance- California Fights Back

State of Resistance – California Fights Back Fred Glass December 5, 2019 The Stansbury Forum At the same moment that Trump was riding his horse Xenophobe through a narrow passageway in the Electoral College to the presidency, California elected only Democrats..., extended progressive tax revenues and ...locked out anti-immigrant policy... 2015: San Francisco, CA.: H&R Block demanding the government give back billions. Unhoused person resting at a bus stop., Copyright 2015: Robert Gumpert State of Resistance: What California’s Dizzying Descent and Remarkable Resurgence Mean for America’s Future, by Manuel Pastor (New Press, 2018, 278 pages) California Fights Back:  The Golden State in the Age of Trump, by Peter Schrag (Heyday Press, 2018, 112 pages) “California is America fast-forward,” says Manuel Pastor in State of Resistance:  What California’s Dizzying Descent and Remarkable Resurgence Means for America’s Future.  I hope he’s right, and the author gives us reason to think so.  So does former Sacramento Bee editor Peter Schrag in California Fights Back:  The Golden State in the Age of Trump. Schrag foresees an attainable national future in the state’s self-assigned role as lead organizer of the opposition to Trump:  “Given California’s size, demographic diversity, economic heft, and its (mostly) blue political hue, it’s not surprising that the state is both the leader of the resistance […] and, at the same time, a bright model of an alternative.” Although each book largely presents latter-day California history with accuracy and insight, State of Resistanceprovides a deeper dive into the state’s complex social relationships, while California Fights Backfeatures a thinner but useful empirical recitation of how the state’s political actors have fought the Trump regime’s offense against immigrants, facts and common decency. ( n.b. California fights back is more useful.  But, both are pre Trump) In both books we learn how, by the late twentieth century, the once lustrous Golden State had lost its sheen.  When Governor Pete Wilson found himself behind in the polls in 1994, after his first term in office, the hitherto moderate Republican came up with an explanation for the state’s economic doldrums:  illegal immigrants.  He fashioned a ballot measure, Proposition 187, to deny undocumented immigrants and their children most state sponsored services, including public education, and sailed to reelection on these mean-spirited winds.  (Prop 187 was soon found unconstitutional.) A decade later, Arnold Schwarzenegger couldn’t plausibly finger immigrants as the source of his failure to deliver on bombastic campaign promises to “blow up the boxes” of government bureaucracy, since he had arrived on these shores from elsewhere himself—although, with Wilson, Iago-like, whispering in his ear, he briefly tried.  Instead, the wealthy governor made scapegoats of public employees and their unions, and called a special election to deal what he imagined would be deathblows to these mortal enemies of the people.  His ballot measures proposed to dismantle pensions, strip away job protections, and wrest for himself dictatorial control over the state budget. But the electorate didn’t see things his way.  Instead, teachers, nurses and firefighters, powered by grassroots organizing and a much smarter media strategy than Schwarzenegger’s, molded themselves into a secular Holy Trinity, and their union-funded campaign solidly defeated the once and future movie actor’s nasty ballot measures.  Their cause was helped along by the Governator’s contemptuous demeanor, transparent lies about his opponents, and abrupt policy zigazgs.  Both authors see this as a turning point, or at least the moment that revealed California’s tectonic shift from celebrity media politics, conservative gutter ideologies and austerity policies a couple decades ago, to the present day when the state stands as a bulwark of ethnic tolerance and serious, if insufficient efforts to address the threats of economic inequality and climate change.  Pastor in particular digs below the surface of electoral politics and personalities to diagnose the structural problems that led to the state’s decline and analyze its path to improvement in ways that might help others. Thus two-time governor Jerry Brown often received plaudits, especially outside California, for the state’s phoenix-like rise from the Great Recession, during which time right-wing pundits enjoyed calling liberal California a “failed state.”  (They still do, not having noticed, or choosing to ignore, the changed circumstances.)  At the moment he was elected in 2010, public education was losing ten thousand K-12 teaching positions a year; services to seniors and the poor were slashed to the bone; and four of the top ten counties in the country hit hardest by the sub-prime housing crisis were to be found in the Central Valley.