🚫👑 No Kings In America - Huge Nationwide Protest Being Planned For June 14th

[DocWatts]

37 minutes ago, Hardkill said:

@Emerald @DocWatts Alright, well you both have made valid points. Let’s hope enough people in America still care about their rights, despite the intense cynicism surrounding our country’s system.

Thank you. I've appreciated your thoughtful political posts over the years and, I hope you'll consider throwing your hat into the pro-democracy struggle if you haven't already. We could certainly use someone with your nuanced, pragmatic outlook.

Finding my local Indivisible chapter and attending an in-person meeting was easily the best decision I've made since the election. Authoritarian regimes want us to feel isolated, afraid, and disempowered. Our cynicism and despair is their ammunition. Spending less time on the internet and more time engaged in in-person civic participation with people in my community has made me feel much less anxiously cynical than I would otherwise be.

We haven't had to fight for our democracy in America in a long-time. But we're not in this alone. Millions of people are standing up this cruel, idiotic regime. 

Edited May 11 by DocWatts

[LordFall]

Good! We should start a list of action steps to take beyond that. As one of the questions on the first page this thread, you definitely don’t protect yourself against authoritarianism through violence. That only gives them the excuse to turn to full on totalitarianism. 

[DocWatts]

2 hours ago, LordFall said:

Good! We should start a list of action steps to take beyond that. As one of the questions on the first page this thread, you definitely don’t protect yourself against authoritarianism through violence. That only gives them the excuse to turn to full on totalitarianism. 

As far as action steps, the first thing I would advise everyone to do is to find a local, in-person pro-democracy group to organize with. 

Indivisible is the one I joined - it's a nationwide broad-tent pro-democracy movement that has local chapters in every state and most major metropolitan areas (https://indivisible.org/).

My local group has in person meetings every month where we share intel about what's happening in our state and the country, and coordinate actions like protests. The two founders of Indivisible have a nationwide 'What's The Plan Call' that anyone can join.

(In addition to Indivisible, there's also no shortage of other pro-democracy groups to join that organize around specific issues, such as immigration, climate change, workers rights, etc).

In addition to finding your local group, you can grab the 5calls app and make weekly calls to your Senators and Representatives about specific issues. The only way that our politicians are going to do what we want is if there's a sustained public pressure campaign telling them to vote NO on Trump's policies and cabinet appointments. Don't assume that just because your local Rep is a Democrat that they'll do the right thing without public pressure. And don't assume that just because your Rep is a Republican that they can't be pressured on specific issues, especially if they're in a competitive seat.

We also need be willing to have difficult conversations with friends and family members who've tuned out of politics since the election. While the trying to reach the MAGA Cult is likely a lost cause, there are plenty of people who aren't hostile to the pro-democracy movement, but aren't aware of the danger we're in because they haven't been paying attention. They might not know that ICE is kidnapping people off the streets like the fucking gestapo, and that Americans are being illegally renditioned to a foreign concentration camp. They might not be aware of that Trump is in the process of collapsing our supply chains, and that he's doing this intentionally to consolidate power. Don't assume people know things that are blindingly obvious to you.

In sum - we need to be spending less time on the internet and more time in-person building the pro-democracy movement within our own communities.

Authoritarian regimes want us to feel isolated, afraid, and powerless. Unless we have the platform of a Leo or a Destiny, there's not much we can do to fight this as individuals. We fight this by building a resilient network of communities that can come together to pursue a shared strategy.
 

 

Edited May 13 by DocWatts