There’s been a lot of chatter lately regarding the midterms. Someone tells me they’re scared. Then they tell me what they think is coming. Then they ask me what they’re supposed to do about it. For the longest time, I didn’t know how to answer them because, like them, this is my first time dealing with a Nazi regime in real life too. But I know history and I’ve read plenty of material on what worked and what didn’t, what mistakes were made and the lessons learned. And I think I finally have an answer.
I don’t think fear itself is the problem. Unprepared fear is the actual thing that suffocates us before we can act. Fear with nowhere to go cripples us into either paralysis or recklessness, and neither wins anything.
This isn’t a call to arms and I’m not interested in romanticizing violence. I’m not going to pretend it’s the inevitable endpoint of resistance, because it isn’t. The data backs that up. Erica Chenoweth is a political scientist who did research on civil resistance and nonviolent movements. She coined what’s known as the “3.5% rule,” and concluded after studying hundreds of resistance campaigns going back as far as 1900, that nonviolent campaigns succeeded twice as often as violent ones. She also found that no campaign that had at least 3.5% of the population’s participation failed to achieve their goals. Not because nonviolence is nicer, but because it just works better.
Violent movements fracture. They lose the public. Everybody fiends for violence until they’re the ones that get their asses beat. And once that happens, the public tends to stop showing up for self-preservation and for the safety of their families. Violent movements also hand the state exactly the justification it’s been waiting for. It shifts the terrain to the one place the state is guaranteed to win: a contest of force. Instead of “protesters vs. an unjust policy,” the story becomes “law and order vs. dangerous radicals.” We DO NOT want the military turned against us. I promise you. Our at-home defense weapons are child’s play to the training, surveillance and weapons systems our military has. We don’t want that smoke.
Disciplined, broad-based, nonviolent movements are harder to demonize and harder to crush. And when they succeed, those wins tend to last.
Build the thing before you need the thing. Every movement that survived a long fight had structure in place before the fight started. This is not the moment to be figuring out who your people are. Figure that shit out now.
Know your local legal resources. Find your state ACLU chapter. Find the immigrant rights legal aid groups in your area. Find Lawyers for Good Government. Do this before you need a lawyer, not after.
Get into a mutual aid network, or start one. Bail funds, strike funds, the mutual aid pods a lot of us built in 2020 and let fizzle out — a lot of that structure still exists. Revive it. All it needs is people again.
This next one is huge. Plug into election protection work. The Election Protection coalition runs poll monitoring and rapid legal response, and you can be a part of that. No degree required. If we want to ensure election integrity — be there for the process. You’ll be surprised how many great people you will meet. Lasting friendships will form. It’s a real path back to bringing our villages back together.
Find your local organizing hubs — unions, tenant unions, faith communities that aren’t racist bigots or Christian Nationalists, your local grassroots or DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) chapter, Indivisible groups, etc. Movements with existing structure move faster than movements starting from a blank page in a moment of panic.
And go get actual nonviolent action training. Not because you’re planning on getting thrown in the clink tomorrow, but because trained people hold discipline under pressure and untrained crowds don’t. The difference between the two is often the difference between a movement that holds and one that collapses by day 3.
Chenoweth’s research found that nonviolent movements that got at least 3.5% of the population actively, sustainedly participating has NEVER failed. Three and a half percent of the U.S. for 2026 is roughly 12 million people. We can do this.
Our largest single day protest was in March 2026 for No Kings Day. Eight million people showed up in a single day! The largest sustained movement was the Black Lives Matter Movement following George Floyd’s murder by a police officer in Minneapolis. This prompted 15-26 million people participating over an extended period of time making it the largest protest movement in American history.
We don’t need everyone, but everyone needs to want to. This is our home. These are out neighbors, friends and family. The hate and rage and distrust that our white supremacist government has sown in our hearts is a lie. They keep us pointing fingers at one another so we don’t look at them. This play is as old as time and we fall for it over and over again. We cannot continue with their hateful agenda. A government that cares for it’s people — ALL it’s people — succeeds. A country that keeps us divided always falls. We are falling and we are running out of time to get organized.
We need to reprioritize and have a committed core of people that keep showing up, over and over, in a way that’s low-cost enough that ordinary people with jobs and kids and rent can actually sustain it. And it needs to be white people showing up in numbers we haven’t seen before.
Black and brown people have carried the weight of movement after movement in this country while white leadership took the credit. Susan B. Anthony was real, and so was her role — but the suffrage movement she led was a white movement that sidelined, tokenized, and erased the Black women organizing alongside it. Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, Sojourner Truth. Names our white washed schools never taught, doing work that made room for rights we now take for granted. The same rights this government is stripping away from us one at a time. It’s no secret that the 2020 protests were the largest protest movement in American history. That happened because Black organizers built it, led it, and sustained it, and it happened despite white America’s long habit of showing up late, if at all.
White people: get to work. The country needs you to care. Our children’s futures need you to care. Because the United States government does not care about your white kids either. The blanket of white protection was always just an illusion, a lie to keep us all divided so they could control us all. Fuck that.
This one doesn’t get talked about enough, and it’s often the actual pressure point — more than any march. This means targeted boycotts and labor actions where union infrastructure still exists. Civil servants and lawyers declining to process orders they know are unlawful. Authoritarian consolidation need bureaucratic compliance to function. If we take away the compliance, we take away the machine.
Also, using federalism on purpose. States and cities still control elections administration, policing, enormous swaths of money and regulation. This is slower and less cathartic than a protest, but it has razor sharp teeth. This requires state AG’s coordinating lawsuits, sanctuary and non-cooperation policies. And state legislatures simply refusing to implement something unlawful. If your state legislature isn’t doing their job, fucking FIRE THEM. Vote them out in November. Research your district, find out who your grassroots or DSA candidate is and vote for them. Campaign on their behalf to your friend and family members. Power to the people!
Protect the information ecosystem. Every authoritarian project depends on controlling the narrative. Support local and independent journalism. Document what you see. Hold your own side accountable for accuracy too, because a movement that lies loses it’s credibility fast and rarely ever gets it back.
And lastly, build coalitions wider that what’s comfortable. The movements that won pulled in people who weren’t natural allies. Business groups. Veterans. People who disagree with you on plenty else but won’t accept this particular thing. Ideological purity feels good, but wins nothing. Big, uncomfortable coalitions win. Train for discipline before you need it. Rehearsed responses hold up under provocation. Improvised ones don’t. Separate the system from the people enforcing it. That cop, that soldier, that low-level bureaucrat — the messaging that leaves room for them to refuse an order or walk away is more effective than the messaging that treats every uniform as the enemy. You want defections, but you won’t get them from people you’ve already told there’s no way back for them.
None of this requires waiting. All of this is the same infrastructure that makes ordinary organizing effective right now, today, regardless of what happens in November. Building it isn’t alarmist or paranoid. It’s just what taking this shit seriously looks like.
Fail to plan, plan to fail. I don’t want us flat-footed. I want us ready, disciplined and impossible to crush. We can do this America. We must do this.
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Thank you for being here. Seriously. You make this worth doing.
~Eevie
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