Survival is Resistance

Every day, things get worse.

Trump and his unhinged secretary of defense are conditioning the military to beat and shoot protestors. They're in the process of deploying troops to Portland, Memphis, and Chicago. They'll keep using immigration as an excuse to start fights with big blue cities, so they can initiate federal crackdowns.

That's the whole point.

We've been tracking these developments for a while now, and the picture looks clear. This regime wants to crush every oasis of resistance and bring the entire country under its control. They want a police state, and they're close to having one. Some of us have already been living in a police state for a long time.

If they're not stomping down protests, they're dismantling our institutions. On top of everything else, they're once again clawing away money from healthcare and threatening another government shutdown to do it.

It's truly amazing that Republicans stripped billions from healthcare just a few months ago, and it wasn't enough. They're coming back for more.

It will never be enough.

This regime won't stop until it has destroyed every social safety net, from Medicaid to food stamps. They won't stop until they've wrecked the economy with their tariffs and tax cuts, and we have virtually no leadership to stop them.

Occasionally, you hear that the government is hiring back some of the workers it fired. They're pausing some of the tariffs. They're caving on certain issues. And while we'll certainly take any good news we can get, it's hard to calculate the longterm damage. Agencies like the National Weather Service remain at the breaking point, according to the latest news. Staffers are working double shifts just to keep forecasts open. Hospitals are at their breaking point. Everything is broken or breaking.

This feels like the new normal, a government always on the edge of a shutdown, federal agencies always on the chopping block...

Federal crackdowns always in progress...

We're already seeing some of the most outspoken opponents of this regime fold and call off or "reschedule" their protests when Trump authorizes lethal force. Honestly, I can't blame them. I can't afford to get shot in the eye with a rubber bullet, beaten, locked up without an N95 mask and forced to breathe dirty air for a weekend. None of us can. And that's the point. Soon, it's going to be as dangerous to protest here as it is in countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia. It's easy to look back in history and judge citizens for not rising up against fascist regimes of the past. We sit around in classrooms. We shout on our phones. We act like we would do things different. No, maybe we're not actively complicit in all the evil going on right now, but standing up to fascism at the moment requires real sacrifice. It requires more than most of us are willing to give.

Of course, fascism is not the central problem.

It's a response to a dying world.

Social industrial collapse on this level begets fascism. It's not happening on a national scale anymore. It's global. You could even call it inevitable.

So it doesn't really matter how many "no kings" protests you have. Those aren't going to stop fascism, because the real driver of fascism is a planet going up in flames. It's the resurgence of disease. It's billionaires and their reckless pursuit of AI, which is depleting our resources even faster, and which would proceed largely the same regardless of who was president. That's the bold, uncomfortable truth.

In order to stop fascism, you have to deal with the root cause, and that's not what the vast majority of the public are working on.

There's resistance, and there's survival.

As we descend deeper, survival already has plenty of resistance built in. I'm talking about resistance to disease. Resistance to climate disasters. Resistance to supply chain failures. Resistance to ignorance. Resistance to all the things trying to kill us.

Like always, these kinds of articles don't seek to depress anyone. Some of us just need the reality check. We need to hear words grounded in the real world, the one we're living in, and not the one we wish we were.

That's it for now.

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