I think the solution is attack the systems themselves and when that isn’t sufficient there are only a few people at the top with power.
I am leaving or unsubscribing from as many monopoly powers as possible: Google, Amazon, meta, Twitter, Netflix, etc etc. Be vocal about it, take friends and family with you if you can. I’m choosing open source when possible over more polished closed source, like jellyfin and Linux (transitioning this weekend 🤞), and donate. These actions take a small fraction of their income from them and if enough people do it I believe it will cause them issues.
I’m trying to not just leave these things but build communities for when we leave. For me this looks like trying to get a blog off the ground for friends and family, developing friend circles that have these discussions frequently, and then contributing/volunteering within my direct neighborhood or community (working on this one as I’m new in Germany and that comes with it’s own time taxes).
Also, if you can afford to, buy local. Buy from someone you know. Buy from people with good supply lines. Be vocal about how this is critical and necessary. The more money that goes to our neighbors instead of the 1% somewhere else in the world, the better. That’s all the shift of power, and it starts with not shopping at whole foods or Walmart and buying bespoke or sometimes worse products for sometimes more money so that those good people can work on their process and products.
But these are small steps, and personally I don’t have any idea of the connective tissues between a person or group of people and the political systems most of us exist in. I guess in the past political parties were more grassroots driven, like get in a room with your neighbors and develop policies and debate. I’ve never lived in that reality. Getting back to that is probably incredibly important. I guess new age political parties and old school unions are the best path forward there.
But the inevitable path, if all else fails, is violence. That is the reality. That becomes a lot less personally risky the larger a community you have before starting it, but as we’ve seen one Super Mario brother is sufficient to make changes.
Luigi
Is this a reference to something?
you’re in the EU right? Don’t ever let them privatize your healthcare to the degree it is in the US.
A few options:
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Get out. If you’re one of the people fascists want dead, then surviving is in and of itself an act of resistance. Leave their domain. Go somewhere else. And live – Just live. Build a life they can’t touch.
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Organise and survive under their noses. It will not be easy, even if fascism has a short shelf life… It still does a lot of damage while it is active, and you and yours could end up as their target. Still, your best chance of surviving is by grouping up. Meet your neighbours, meet your local activists, get to know them, and start helping each other.
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Violence. But. It’s not enough to just go spree killer. The violent response demands organisation. You could join an armed resistance group. Or, if you leave the country, if it comes to war, you could enlist to fight against your old nation. Lots of people did both in the forties.
- Sabotage - purposefully obstruct these lunatics any way you can. Delay their food orders. Slash their tires. etc. Delete emails. Empty gas tanks. If they’re constantly fixing shit there’s less time for them to create problems
I feel like IT people have a lot of efficacy on this one.
See a big truck with a Trump sticker? Make their life hell. Slow them down in traffic. Intentionally make them annoyed and miserable.
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What can you do as an individual? not much. A community? Now we’re talking.
Find people to fight fascism with.
Just having a network of care, looking out for each other and replacing functions a fascist state doesn’t offer any more (think childcare/healthcare/food for those in need) can be a huge act of resistance. Organizing political protests as long as it’s still possible (even if it’s illegal). Strike, sabotage, physical violence … Eventually you will have the choice of imprisonment/death, assimilation or exile to me the last act of resistance will be never to choose assimilation. Continuing to live in exile can be as much of a martyrdom as dying for the cause.
It might involve the second amendment.
Nooo you can’t use violence
Self defense also counts as violence?
The things being said here are a good start, but you cant do anything without other people. And if you and your community dont like the reccomended actions here? Make up your own plan with them! We cant just wait until we have the perfect plan to stop fascism and fix alll the world’s issues. We need to start working together now.
Strong, inclusive communities are the antithesis of fascism. If everyone had a sense of belonging and camaraderie with their community it would be a much less fertile population for fascist ideas to spread.
Rally, apply pressure to local politics, interfere with the workings of the government and their loyalists…
Putting up political stickers, Grafitti, sharing leaflets and more action forms to drive up costs of operations for the Trump system.
For more specific actions you could take inspiration from Palaction, who take action against Britains complicity in the Gaza genocide. https://www.palestineaction.org/
Fight facism together! Duh!
If you ask a question and you say, “but don’t say the answer,” you’re just asking for an echo chamber.
The echo usually says vote which is right but… here we are
IMO we’re here because of the 10 million Democrats who voted for Biden in 2000 and refused to show up in 2024. Bonespurs only won by a little over 2 million. Harris should have kicked his ass, but oh now, she “supports genocide”. Last week the long, difficult Gaza ceasefire negotiation process finally paid off. Funny how nobody’s talking much about it.
Ridicule them.
Get organized with a socialist, revolutionary, anti-war, and/or anti-fascist organization near you that is visibly putting in the work and regularly mobilizing. Recruit more people to your cause and form coalitions with organizations that align with your values. I can personally endorse the PSL but certainly do the research for yourself to find a group that speaks to you personally & whose work you find to be the most fulfilling.
Compulsory voting.
If you don’t vote, you don’t get to take deductions on your federal taxes and you don’t get any owed tax refund. When you do vote, you also get an extra 3% discount on federal tax owed until your AGI is over $190k.
Love this idea. Just make voting as easy as paying taxes.
How does this fix a two party system that does not represent the people?
OK, so a bit over a third of the population doesn’t care enough to vote. Not for anyone - D, R, or any third party. Let’s assume they’re mostly uneducated. What happens to the polling results when you compel them to vote?
I think compelling voter turnout is the last thing you should be even considering. The first real problem is education - nobody understand anything about government - not what fascism is, not how the economy works, not what imperialism is, nothing of real substance. The second problem is this “lesser of two evils” bullshit that has even the slightly-more-educated half of the population voting for mass murderers, which you can’t resolve in first-past-the-post majority rule elections, at least not with the stupid mindset everyone has right now. Electoral college is a similar problem. And what about the problems with “representative” government both failing to represent and manipulating public will for the benefit of powerful lobbies? How about systemic reform that removes their power?
You thought about any of these things?
I don’t hate this idea.
We do it in Australia and it’s super based.
We usually do sausage sizzles at the polls 👍
Edit: we don’t do the weird tax shit, you just get fined if you don’t vote.
M3 grease guns proved effective last time we tried it.
Ok but I just want to clarify before we valiantly and romantically take the fight to fascists…
… Did you muster the courage to vote for Harris, return2ozma?
Sure did, donates too. And id do it again. Worth noting, I live in WI, my vote definitely mattered
Did you muster the courage to vote for Harris, return2ozma?
No. I said I wouldn’t vote for a genocider multiple times throughout the year too. I’m in California so my POTUS vote had zero effect. I voted for everything else and left POTUS blank. Trump won in a landslide. Even if single issue voters about Gaza 100% voted for Harris, she still would have lost.
Not true. People like you contributed to giving Trump the popular vote and a broader mandate, leaving aside down-ballot Congressional races.
By the way is this you in this picture?
In a way, you too are now complicit in exacerbating genocide.
Harris didn’t have to run on us having the most lethal military in the world, but she made that choice.
It’s on her and establishment democrats at large.
I don’t believe Democrats would have been any more humanitarian, they just take longer to do their killing. Just look at Gaza, that happened under a democrat. A gigantic demolition site sponsored by Biden.
haha!
Trump says, “Finish the job” to Bibi while transferring the embassy to Jerusalem and you think you’re going to get more results with Trump than Harris? Even if at best the same, as the Venn Diagram proves, it’s deeply illogical. You drank the online Russian vodka and now more Palestinian blood is on your hands.
(Forgetting the obvious fact that you’ve got Ukrainian blood on your hands now, too, since Ukrainians also wanted Harris over Trump)
The kids want to “fight fascists! >:(” but can’t bother educating themselves on the issues enough to realize they’ve fallen for the classic — textbook even — BoTh SiDeS fallacy that is peddled every election cycle.
So even though:
- The popular vote doesn’t matter
- Electoral College is all that matters
- Ozma lives in California that voted for Harris
- And that one vote doesn’t somehow flip the entire EC to Harris
It’s his fault Harris lost?
I noticed you kind of hop-skipped past the whole down-ballot races thing, didn’t ya?
You know. The California races that in the end decided who won the House? Sure hope their district had absolutely zero relevance whatsoever lol.
Forgetting the fact that they seemed vocal enough in trying to stop others from voting for Harris, too. But I’ll eat my words if they can link a comment of theirs where they advised battleground voters to support Harris.
If I recall, they live in Long Beach, I don’t know the house results for that area.
In my personal area, it was between two Republicans, one personally supported by Trump, one personally supported by Trump’s allies. Both were for Trump and his fuckery with the system. I r
And on the Assembly, it was two Republicans again, “Republican shithead” and “Unknown crazy Republican shithead”.
I hate living in redneck rural shithole…
lol when did I ever say you were a Republican? This is indicative of a broader education issue quite possibly.
If down votes were votes, maybe Harris would have won in the swing states, and not California where your vote literally didn’t impact anything, except local elections.
Don’t let them gaslight you into thinking that you somehow personally swayed every swing state to Trump’s fascism, while they stick their head in the sand of how Harris lost and why.
Last week a dude was swearing to me that Kamala lost because of the “I did that” Biden stickers
Jesus fuck
They will blame anything but the facts of a bad campaign.
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I have three pieces of advice:
First: The best, most practical and actionable advice I can think of is to start organizing your neighborhood. You don’t even have to openly be organizing resistance to do it, just get to know your neighbors, get your neighbors to know each other, get to know what’s going on in each other’s lives and offer help where and how you can. Bring over some snacks on the basis of being neighborly and just ask how they’re doing some time. Forming these social bonds are really, really important, and it’s the basis of building resilience in your community. We used to have stuff like this built in, but it’s been slowly eroded over lifetimes, largely but not exclusively by exclusionary zoning and car-centric infrastructure.
Look, if you’re just the person a couple doors down they don’t really know, people might go “oh, huh” when the brown shirts come. If you’re Dolores down the street who brings them brownies every month, there’s a much better chance that your neighbors knock back when the brown shirts come knocking. And if it’s not just one neighbor, but three or four of them that come out to beat some Nazi ass? Pretty good chance those fucks will get the message loud and clear.
I can feel some of you out there already replying “but my neighbors voted for the Nazis”. Yeah, they did. I’ve also worked with enough Republican voters to know that when they think of the evil other, they don’t possibly imagine that that could include their friends, family, and co-workers. That is, your neighbors, in all likelihood, don’t want the bad thing to happen to you. The point is this: community bonds can and will outweigh other considerations if you build them.
Second: Go to local government meetings as much as possible, bitch at them about your favorite pet issue, listen and watch other people who show up there. It’s an easy way to speed run making connections in your local activist community, and you might even end up actually influencing some local policies. I go to them, it’s free and easy, and the cops can’t stop you from yelling at the city council about the price of housing. The real value, though, has been getting invited to other local activist groups that I never realized existed because I met other members of those groups there.
Third: Prepare. If shit hits the fan, you need to be able to take care of yourself, help might not be coming. I think probably the best strategy is the same as for mass shooters: run, hide, fight.
Run- ditch your smartphone and other spyware devices. Tell nobody about your plans, especially not over any kind of electronic medium. Just go. Have a bug out bag ready to go. When you’re making your bag, remember that you’re going to have to carry it a long, long way. Try to be practical. Probably the most important items you can have are your ID, cash, more cash than you think in a few different places, a change of clothes (especially underwear and socks), a good multi-tool or fixed-blade knife (no need to go crazy, just get a decent full-tang no-frills knife from a flea market or something), hygiene products (moist towelettes and baby wipes are great), water, and snacks (try to focus on really energy dense stuff like peanut butter). Small tarps and mylar/wool blankets probably are good ideas too. Water should also be its own container, ideally a large canteen, or a backpack if you can swing it. I’d also recommend a handful of dice or playing cards to keep you sane.
Have a plan with anyone who’s going with you on where to meet up and how long to wait and don’t tell another soul about it. If they miss the deadline, just go ahead and follow the rest of the plan.
Also, part of this is upskilling. Learn how to repair tears in your clothing, how to talk to people, how to do first aid, stuff like that. You’ve got to be ready to rely on yourself to get yourself out of a jam. At the point of running, this is the worst scenario, and you need to treat it as such.
Hide- DITCH YOUR FUCKING ELECTRONICS. Never go on social media ever again ever, don’t log into Google, don’t check your email, don’t log into Lemmy, just quit this shit altogether. The NSA already has a full database of basically anything you’ve ever communicated over a phone or the internet, and law enforcement absolutely will use it via parallel construction. Don’t use debit cards or credit cards, pay in cash. You wouldn’t believe the shit they collect on you all the time. You can worry about contacting people once you’re safe.
Fight- There is still a second amendment. If it’s a choice between dying in a firefight with some fascists or going to the boxcars, I think that choice seems obvious. Speaking as a gun owner: If you get a gun, you MUST practice with it at least a few times. Get familiar with it and understand how to handle it, you really don’t want the first time you’ve ever shot your gun to be when you’re trying to fight the Nazis. Personally, I’d recommend a pump action 12 gauge shotgun; it’s practical for many, many use cases, the ammo is easy to come by and very common, it’s dead easy to service and maintain, and aiming at close quarters is as simple as point and click.
Physical maps. Radios.
Physical maps are fine, but take some practice to actually use well. I wouldn’t pack transmission radios like walkies- most that are affordable are unencrypted, and the encrypted ones are in all likelihood already broken by the alphabet gang. Plus, they need batteries and they’re just not that useful in practice, imo. An AM/FM receiver, though, I could get behind that.
“A Riot is the language of the unheard”
-Martin Luther King Jr.
“When peaceful revolution becomes impossible, violent revolution becomes inevitable”
-John F. Kennedy
As per lemmy.world rules, I’m obligated to say that I do not condone violence, just quoting some people, interpret it however you wish to. 😉
O.K.! 😉🤫🤭
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Sorry everyone, I meant to say violence is not the answer. If you check your history books you’ll see that Hitler was defeated by everyone keeping their heads down and voting him out of office at the next election.
I want to do some more radical stuff without getting arrested. What should i do? I live in sweden and the right has been creeping up here as well(not as bad as the us but still a shit situation). I already did the first steps like trying to wake up friends to the reality(family already “woke” so thats nice, less work) of the situation.
There are whole books written on the subject, look around. I’ve seen one by (precursor to) CIA and other by radical eco figters.
Make up a fake concern that they would be angry about. Get them to organize a protest, but at some right wing leaders house or something. Not illegal to mislead people.
