The "America Is Pretti Good" Edition

It’s very hard in the middle of a fight while you’re taking casualties – casualties who are good people, who deserved rich and full lives they aren’t going to get – to see that your side actually is advancing, that the chaos around you is horrifying, but going your way.

That’s what’s happening right now. We – or the brave citizens of the city – are winning the Siege of Minneapolis, even as it still goes on in its vicious cruelty.

Trump’s regime is struggling to put a satisfactory communications story together. Homeland Security is flailing; centrist Democrats are calling to defund ICE, an opinion shared with a plurality of Americans for the first time. Even Second Amendment stalwarts are outraged at the Administration’s blithe ignoring of their idea of gun rights. And always out there lurks Epstein, Epstein, Epstein.

Things are going to get worse. Kristi Noem released video of herself touring one of the several new warehouses DHS has rented to turn into concentration camps, and I can promise you those won’t be reserved for undocumented migrants alone; private companies don’t make those kind of infrastructure investments to shut down in a year or two. Trump said on a podcast with Dan Bongino on Feb. 2 that “Republicans should take over the elections,” then called for “nationalizing” them, while he sends the Director of National Intelligence to raid election facilities in Fulton County, Georgia. These are no bluffs, but they are very much admissions of weakness - even authoritarians don’t call for taking over elections when they think they can win them fair and square.

I wish I could say non-violent resistance could be bloodless, but sadly it never is. Renee Good and Alex Pretti are casualties of a struggle for freedom as much as James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were in the ‘60s, or for that matter any veteran of one of our wars. Pretti in particular stands out as a hero: he’d already been injured just days before his death in another confrontation while monitoring DHS operations, yet he came out again anyway. His last conscious action in life was to try to help someone else assaulted by DHS. Equal respect must be given to everyone around him who managed to keep their cool and continue recording a horrific murder even knowing they could have been shot next. The residents of Minneapolis deserve our respect and gratitude. They are to 2026 what Bostonians were to 1776.

Pretti’s murder requires a certain degree of analysis, given that he chose to bring a firearm to his act of non-violent resistance. Before I criticize him, let me emphasize I don’t blame him: he didn’t brandish it, and the Stormtroopers who assaulted him already had disarmed him before they murdered him. Pretti’s choice to carry a gun thus was irrelevant to his fate. His choice didn’t matter for his death, but it is relevant to what comes next because it will affect what choices others make about weapons.

I’ve stated repeatedly I don’t think one should bring a gun to a non-violent action. Strategically, the whole point of non-violence is to be prepared to take the pain the oppressor can inflict, and come back for more. It’s really just that simple. I even have issues with people who wear helmets and bring gas masks or shields: the power of non-violence lies in being willing to suffer for your cause, in confidence that your suffering eventually will turn your oppressor.

Tactically, you’re bringing a gun to a place where the regime always will have more armed gunmen than you – there’s no way Pretti’s gun would have saved him had he drawn it, given how many Stormtroopers surrounded him. Another problem with bringing a gun to a loosely-organized non-violent activity is that you’re implicating everyone around you in your choice – it’s fortunate this killing didn’t devolve into a broader massacre, which one has to think DHS is itching to perpetrate.

It’s a different thing if an event wants armed security – say, a bookstore hosting a drag queen story hour that wants some protection. But even then, do those volunteer guards have training and coordination and agreed-upon rules of engagement, or are they just well-intentioned people with guns? There is a huge difference, and it implicates the safety of your friends as well as your foes when you arrogate that choice to yourself.

Having said all that (which I still feel in my gut), the reaction to Pretti’s death made me reassess my beliefs. Tactics must be adapted to local circumstances, and in the case of the United States, we have a bizarre system we would not advise any other country to create where average citizens routinely are allowed to carry deadly weapons. We can deplore this fact, but it’s a deeply-engrained matter of our law. One thing any pro-democracy person in any repressive country would say is, exercise every right you have as loudly and proudly as you can. When one of those rights is “carrying a gun,” why not that one too?

I guess what I come back to is the same basic critique I have of people carrying weapons in public for any reason: you’re making things potentially more dangerous for everyone around you. In the normal day-to-day, it’s the risk you, a non-cop, non-professional, might get engaged in an escalating situation you aren’t prepared to handle. Even in the best case, you might intervene against a mass shooter, only to be shot by police who don’t know who is the “good guy with a gun.” In a protest, it’s the chance the event devolves into a general massacre if one person with bad trigger discipline trips.

It might be something different to have a group of people who all choose to be armed for a protest, as pro-2A types do routinely. To me, that involves a lot of confidence that the dumbest stranger in your group isn’t going to do something to trigger a firefight. I would have to have trust in military-level training and coordination of that group of people. And now you’re in militia territory, and you’ve probably attracted a FBI narc to your group, and why do all that when non-violence is working?

As Cassian Andor said, “you wanna’ fight, or you wanna’ win?” Our best lesson from this tragedy is that your smartphone is the modern minuteman’s musket. A bullet kills but one person; a video reaches millions, and from a warfighting perspective that matters more. Pretti’s gun was irrelevant to what happened to him; the phones that witnessed his killing made all the difference.

Everyone Has Their Own Rebellion, Part II

My words in my last edition were from a place of emotion. Hey, I’m human! That’s how we work! Our first responses to things are emotional: fight or flight. Those instinctive reactions can be adjusted somewhat by training and education, if we correctly anticipate what to prepare for. Later, if we survive that saber-toothed tiger at the water hole, we rationalize how we did that, which is essential for us to plan better how to approach the water hole the next time – and to persuade others in our tribe to share our approach to the water hole, so that all of our tribe get water and survive saber-toothed tigers. So having taken you through my instinctive emotional path to rebellion, let me take you through my post-facto logic.

Obviously, there will be no lawful or peaceful transfer of power in 2028. There may not even be a free and fair election in 2026. If January 6 didn’t make this obvious enough, the regime’s use of the FBI to seize election data from Fulton County, Georgia – overseen by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who by law is barred from working in domestic law enforcement – demonstrates they are preparing some form of mass election interference. This will be hard to do, thanks to Federalism, but it’s not too hard at all to imagine them causing sufficient confusion in certain elections that Speaker and Professional Toady Mike Johnson just refuses to seat winning Democratic candidates.

Also obviously, Trump will run again in ‘28 if he’s capable. His ego cannot abide being a lame duck, watching others he doubtless considers lesser figures – Vance, Rubio, Don Jr. – take the limelight from him. If Trump dies or is too enfeebled to run, some other Republican candidate, burdened with his policies but lacking his charisma, will have to attempt to hold on to power – the alternative for all of them will be prison. This only increases the probability they will use the power and violence of the state to hold their own positions.

There is no “democratic election” that on its own will restore small-d democratic governance in the face of a mafia regime that will resort to mass murder to hold onto power. Nothing short of a mass popular uprising – a “color revolution” - will divert us from the path of authoritarianism we are on.

That was very hard for me to say, as it means abandoning the system of constitutional government I committed my life to. But at the same time, it’s obviously true. Clinging to our old system in the face of what we’ve seen since Jan. 6 is like clinging to biblical creationism. We can try to maintain what we think that system’s values were, but the system itself isn’t recoverable.

Once one sees this obvious truth, a vital corollary also becomes clear: no one is going to take to the streets against a heavily-armed, tyrannical government in the name of restoring our pre-Trump constitutional order. Who is going to risk their lives to preserve lifetime Supreme Court appointments, or the Senate filibuster, or an Imperial presidency with all the powers we’ve seen so grossly abused concentrated in one unaccountable person?

“But MSU,” you say, “what about Andor? Isn’t the whole point of ‘everyone has their own rebellion’ that it only matters that we all hate the existing regime? Do we have to be agreed on what should come after?”

The best I can say is, it certainly is possible to remove a regime on shared dislike alone, but it’s very risky. The Arab Spring revolutions in Egypt, Libya, and Syria all reflect the consequences of movements who couldn’t look past their hatred for their regime to what a shared future could look like. Each of these countries overthrew their tyrants; all suffered terribly, and none achieved what they’d hoped for.

Star Wars actually shows my point: if Mon Mothma and the Rebellion’s other leaders have an idea of what post-Palpatine galactic governance should look like, they never show it. What we do see over the 30-some years played out in TV and film after Return of the Jedi is a Senate and Jedi Order that are no better than the predecessors Palpatine destroyed – and indeed, the First Order wipes them out pretty easily. Our own revolution didn’t have one single vision of its future governance, but it had sufficient agreement on the principles of republicanism, federalism, and a broader democracy than Britain’s. The Framers argued about the degrees of these questions, but not the fundamental points.

We also need at least the outline of a vision so that we can negotiate with those among our foes who will want to defect to us as the regime spirals further downwards. Obviously, they don’t want the pre-Trump order either - that’s why they chose Trump! They’ll also likely be terrified that our winning leadership will take on all the powers Trump has held, and use them against them. While we must ensure some degree of accountability for this regime’s crimes if we are to build anything new, we must also be clear where we think the limits are, and how we agree to protect them, in a new system that still represents all Americans, however imperfectly. We have to win, and then call a time out to agree on new rules of the game.

So at the very least, we have to acknowledge and accept we’re in a revolutionary time, and think about something beyond our existing system. We don’t have to agree on every aspect of that, but if we can’t start by embracing that project, we’re in trouble. There always will be the temptation to try to “restore” or “reform” what came before, but we tried that with Joe Biden, and look where we ended up. Even if we’re more comfortable saying “rebuild,” as with ICE and CBP, we have to acknowledge that the project is a tear-down in its magnitude.

Even if we don’t need to agree on what the post-Trump future looks like, we need to agree the status quo ante Trump was failing, and deserved to fail, and roughly grasp what those failures were. That’s counterintuitive for me to say, since that previous system was working pretty well for me, but if that was true of most of America, we wouldn’t be here now. I’m going to try to focus on that imagining over the next several editions, if the regime can stop committing atrocities long enough for me not to have to respond to them.