Minneapolis was where George Floyd was killed, and EVERYBODY believed his murderer would get away with it. But Minneapolis wouldn’t stand for it, and the murderer is serving a long jail sentence at this moment
It was really dumb to think Minneapolis would roll over for this shit. They’ve had PRACTICE
Thanks for putting that into context, it makes me feel quite fond of them. I should not have been so indifferent to this good city.
Always liked Minneapolis, and Minnesotans. Cool people, and tough enough to take that cold.
You don’t need religion to be a good person.
If you absolutely need a religion to be good, I would wager you are not a good person. Just too scared of a imaginary, fiery goat-person torturing you to do something bad.
Or whatever version of hell/whatever you might believe in.
I mean some branches of the church did resist the Nazis in WW2.
I’m not a believer in salvation in the afterlife, but whomever dishes it out in this life deserves some faith.
Churches are some of the only third spaces left unfortunately.
Fund your local libraries, organize book clubs, go to the independent record shop and put up fliers.
Do this before ICE comes to your town.
How to organize a rapid response from a very high level with further detailed resources. https://southerncoalition.org/resources/rapid-response-101/
Good general advice on organizing, also a good resource to find groups near you that are likely aligned. https://www.fiftyfifty.one/organizer-resources
Adding onto this:
We need to put in the groundwork to prepare for our most powerful means of non-violent offense: a proper, long-term, Nation Wide General Strike.
The country would be brought to its knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor, allowing us to simply ignore the democrats and their lack of spine, and instead demand real changes (abolishing ICE should be towards the top of the list).
That tactic was extremely effective in Chile in 2019, and had they not fallen for the trick of liberal reform, they would’ve had a successful revolution on their hands with virtually no bloodshed.
There are some concrete steps all of us can take toward enacting that hard-core general strike to make it more viable and bearable for us all. (the titles below expand if you click them).
Learn First Aid! ⛑️
As we’re seeing, deadly violence is being used against us and it will only continue. It extremely important to have the skills to be able to keep yourself and others alive if they get hurt.
Tacticool Girlfriend provides a great introduction to building a personal first aid kit, called an IFAK, which can deal with things like bullet wounds and other serious bleeding wounds. I also want to emphasize her recommendation of only buying medical gear from reputable sources (not Amazon!), such as North American Rescue to avoid fakes that could cost you your life.
But you’ll need to learn how to use that equipment, too. The best resource for that is to take a local Stop The Bleed class, which are pretty widely available in most places. They may cost a small fee, but can also sometimes be free. Alternatively, if you cannot access a local class, this video by PrepMedic will give you a solid understanding of how to use Tourniquets and Gauze for wound packing.
Injuries are less harmful if they are tended to early. Learning first aid can help conserve resources when healthcare becomes unaffordable. Having several medics in case of harm by police is an extremely powerful morale booster during a protest that may become a police riot. When you become comfortable with the basics of first aid, riot medicine is the next suggested step.
Establish or join local Mutual Aid networks ✊
If you haven’t already, get to know your neighbors. Mutual aid is a willingness to support and grow your community. This can include informal networks through friends, tenant/renter organizations, solidarity groups, and industrial unions.
These are groups using direct action to solve each other’s problems. Building strong communities makes it difficult for fascism to take root. The actions of the government are going to hit every community hard, and the ones who build trust in each other and work together are most likely to survive. We’ve been building a list of resources in !inperson@slrpnk.net to help you on your way. Also check out this handy guide to find existing groups in your area.
This isn’t only for your own community protection. Your ability to organize today will change the political landscape tomorrow. When revolution occurs, the social organizations that show the greatest resilience through the regime are the ones typically calling the shots when the dust settles. When it comes to elections, get out the vote drives are useless if most of the voters are fascists. At some point, you have to do grassroots political education if you don’t want fascist candidates winning elections. Mutual aid networks are excellent forums not only for teaching each other good political ideas, but demonstrating them in practice.
Join a Union and Prepare for an even longer General Strike! 💪
If you aren’t in a union (or even if you are, it’s worth dual-carding), consider joining the IWW to unionize your workplace (bonus: you’ll get higher wages, better benefits, and more time off if you succeed!) to strengthen a general strike if we manage to enact one, as most unions have a strike fund that can supplement your income during a general strike to make it more financially bearable (you should also save as much money as you can reasonably do, so it can also be used to keep yourself afloat during a strike). A General Strike is officially planned by the UAW for May 1st 2028, but it was planned before Trump was elected, and by then may be too late, so prepare now for one that may start sooner.
And for our international friends, you should join one as well, as fascism is gaining momentum globally. If your country isn’t listed below, just contact the IWW directly in the link above, and they’ll help you set up a new local branch.
Adopt Security Culture and Digital Camouflage 🛡️
Sometimes benign seeming efforts can turn into unexpected personal data collecting traps. Like an obscure website for exchanging contact info with other students turning into a global ad-tech surveillance network (Facebook), or innocent seeming online personality tests being use to harvest character profiles. Even Etsy, Reddit, Tinder, and Duolingo are feeding information to US Government Agencies like ICE.
Security culture is commonly used to describe the general awareness of such potential traps and how it can affect groups or entire communities. This goes beyond mere individual privacy efforts, as without joint efforts these often fail to work.
Especially in activist circles, security culture is paramount. For opsec reasons not everyone in the group might be aware of what clandestine efforts others are involved in, but with a general security culture many potential data leaks can be avoided.
Movements are made by the volume of their participants, and the easier and less dangerous it is to participate, the more people will get involved. As more people get involved, individual involvement becomes even less dangerous, creating a virtuous cycle.
We’ll start it off with some General Advice:
- Mentally wall off personal uniquely identifying info from your online presence, actively build a habit of opsec so that withholding information is your default mental state
- Be careful about who you meet online
- Use different, unrelated usernames, passwords & emails for every account. And try not to connect to those accounts with your real IP address (use Tor or a VPN)
- Be mindful that anything done online leaves a trail
- agents provocateurs may seek to find patsies willing to perform an ill-advised illegal activity in order to legitimize police repression. If someone is trying to pressure you, especially if you don’t have a long and proven history with them, be extremely wary.
For a full guide on what encrypted communications platforms to use, and how to stay off the radar, read the Digital Camouflage section within the Monthly Meta post here (you’ll need to scroll down. I’d add it here, but it won’t fit in this comment).
I’d also highly recommend Full Spectrum Resistance to anyone who wants further info on how to resist (audiobook version here).
In fact, it makes many people WORSE.
The world would be a better place without religion.
The world would be better without humans
Indeed.
I don’t agree: some people need the fear of divine retribution to keep them from gestures broadly to the Epstein files
We don’t need a god to give that fear. A functioning society would have a strong enough social contract, and actual punishments for those who go against it.
Instead, we got a smiteful and all powerful god who will tell you to listen to your priests or you’ll burn forever in hell. Well what happens when shitty people Abuse that power? Suddenly priests shift their dogma to revere the very type of person that we should be ostracizing and casting out of society.
The rest of society not letting shitheads get away with being shitheads is all that’s needed.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that most of those people were at least nominally Christian.
Besides, if you need to be threatened into acting like a good person, you’re NOT a good person.
Others need the earth based divine retribution because gestures broadly to the Epstein files
The divine in that sentence is still assuming a god
Could just be assuming Ru Paul with The Matrix levels of weaponry.
You got my vote.
Yeah, lot of good it did them.
Or we could just legalize chainsawing pedos in half.
You don’t, but it is something that lets you organize a community in a way that enables them to act, for good or for ill. No reason to cede that exclusively to those who want to create a worse world
Yeah, if you do mutual aid lefty stuff for any amount of time you will almost certainly end up volunteering alongside a religious person who’s there for religious reasons at some point, and anybody who tries to kick an ally out of an antifascist coalition over a religious dispute may as well be a collaborator. If they’re there because god told them to, they’re there and that’s what matters.
Everyone anti-fascist is an ally, we can argue about where to go next after the fascists are gone.
straight to hell
All the fun people went there anyway.
This is anarchist praxis even if most people don’t realize it!
They’re forced to utilize anarchist praxis because the government sure as shit isn’t doing anything to help them, federal or local.
That’s what’s so interesting. Most of these people are not ideologically anarchist, and probably would be opposed to it in a more general context. But they are using anarchist techniques because that is what is effective in the given moment.
It’s like socialism, people are opposed to what they’re told it is, not what it actually is.
I think about that all the time. Especially when people online are like “do something”. We are doing something. Lots of things. Lots of small decentralized things so they can’t be targeted as easy.
Yeah, a better version of this article would talk about how Minneapolis has actually always been a kinda radical town, from the general strike in the 30s, AIM being founded there in the 60s, and the whole co-op wars stupidity that happened in the 70s, all the way through the RNC and Occupy protests in the 2000s. Like, there have been self identified anarchists in that city for almost a hundred years at least, and that has got at least as much to do with what we’re seeing as “patriotic and Christian values” do.
As a Twin Cities resident we are surprisingly radically progressive. I think it’s important to know how much “work” people did post George Floyd to look at racial bias and systematic change in progressive socials. I know of multiple book clubs of retirees reading books on anti-racism and white privilege. It was eye opening experience here
