Many people in the United States are understandably frightened right now, feeling targeted, and looking for safer places to go.

Yes, you know more about your specific risk-profile than we do, how prominent or targeted you are; it well may make sense to move cities, states, or countries.

However: not everyone who might be targeted by the current U.S. regime wants to or can flee it for some other place. That place would not necessarily be safe or stay safe for long in any case, given how this regime acts.

Do you have community where you’re going, or would you be a refugee? Think on this.

Ultimately, and for most people, at best only the illusion of safety can be got by leaving here for there.

But the most important consideration may just be this: if you’re right in all of your fears about this regime in its authoritarian ambitions and fascist character, then this is the most vulnerable they will be for a long while.

Why would you not stay now and fight them now when they are so weak? Why would you, already embedded in the belly of this dark machine, not find your place in it, sabotage and smash some piece of it in your power to do?

Someone has to do it, and don’t you already have the perfect cover? You are here, and they have to expend energy to get you out of themselves. Make them do it.

Again, there are particulars that only yourself can know. An international student who can transfer to another university that will not toss you in a cage for insufficient public patriotism? By all means, look elsewhere. If you have specific threats for your safety, the same, especially immigrants.

But if you’re a natural-born citizen who just didn’t foresee yourself having to live thru the dystopias of your fictions, feeling the stomp of the boot in the same way many Americans have had to their entire lives and people living under regimes we’ve supported for decades have had to experience…?

You are here, you have community, and there is plenty to do.

You do not have to die on every hill, but we do all die, and there is a hill waiting for you somewhere here already, something worth defending, and work in that place worth being done.

So let us get to that work. Let us stay at it.

Would that it were different! But it’s this way, not the other way, and here we are.

Do what you can to take advantage of that as much as you can for as long as you can.

A better world is still possible, even here. We swear it.

A person:
What if I don’t want to fight these idiots, but be part of a better society abroad? And how can we fight here (non-violently) that we can’t from abroad? I could still donate to campaigns, mock them, and vote from abroad. And moving away does punish them by not supporting the economy they depend on.

My question is, how can we fight here non-violently that we can’t from abroad? (If you’re talking about violence, that’s not something I want to participate in, nor do I support it, nor do I think it would work.)

You said, “I can still donate to electoral campaigns, mock electoral campaigns, and vote in electoral campaigns.”

What about the previous statements made you think that resisting and pushing back again fascism was about voting or harvesting votes in elections? Is your life just “elections” and “violence”?

Take your coffee outside and wave at people. Talk to your neighbors, your co-workers, your family and friends. Get phone numbers. Use them and stay in touch in person.

Show up for each other. Half your burdens and double your joys together. The entire human experience of life is exactly this.

“What can that do about fascism?”

Well, if calling cops is a danger to your neighbors, have people to call other than cops.

When someone comes to grab your neighbors, get lots of you to show up for them. Document and disrupt it, even at cost to you. This is one example, and hard work — but it’s vital.

Talk to your co-workers about your shared gripes with your job. Turn that from just complaining into useful action. Educate yourselves on the laws and organize to be able to take best advantage of them. Agitate on the things that are important to you. Unionize. Get active in your union.

For family and friends who presumably already care about you, talk about what’s important to you and why. In a world of increasing scarcity (sought and caused by billionaires), hoard less and share more.

Along with neighbors and fellow workers, engage in mutual aid, interconnectedness.

Vote or don’t vote, but politics is not a campaign or season. It’s not “someone else” but “us” and “our whole lives”.

In truth, you don’t fight fascism at the ballot box occasionally but by always undermining the fictions and hierarchies it requires to take hold.

And then you have your projects, the one-to-three things (and no more than that) that you commit yourself to being reliable to others about. Whatever your interest is, whatever motivates you most strongly, if you can show up daily, weekly, monthly for that thing and provide it to others, you can grow it.

It can be meals for a regular meeting on how to best disrupt homeless sweeps in your city; or the carpool to get people from one side of the city to the suburbs with no public transit; or child care for parents who go protest ICE detention and might get arrested. It could be prisoner writing. But you do it, and people can know you do it.

“What else can I do as an ordinary person besides voting?”

Everything!

You have to do it, and for most people, the best place to do it is where we already are with people we already know and connections we already have. So we try to grow that, deepen and strengthen it.

“The fascists are coming for Seattle! The Trump regime is going to send the military to occupy it We have to get out of here before they throw us in the camps.”

And yet, there are more antifascists in Seattle (and their Psych 210* class) than you think, and more who will not realize they are conscripted until the worst happens.

Wow, the University of Washington's Psych 201 class does *not* playgo fuckin HuskiesNazi UW students fuck off

— Queer Satanic (@queersatanic.bsky.social) 2025-10-02T03:07:09.676Z

We have to do work now, and do it even amid the worst, so that people awakening later to what’s happening and newly motivated to do something can have existing causes, programs, and experienced people — who’ve been doing the work for years — that they can join in an augment when their time comes.

A person:

Thanks, this does help. So not exactly fighting but: be kind, be in solidarity, help each other survive. All of which I’ve been doing forever in what small ways I can. It’s hard to even see the value of that while I watch so many good people and systems being savagely attacked and destroyed.

Right, and it is important to be kind. But you also have to be building relationships worth sacrificing and suffering for.

When the bastards ask you, “Or else what?”, you need to be able to give them a credible threat of answer beyond “I will tattle on you” or “I will declare you broke some law.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean, “Grab your AR-15 and start fighting off tyranny with the powers of the Second Amendment.”

But it does mean you have to hurt them in some way, and they will not like being hurt very much, so you’re likely going to suffer for impeding or beating them.

Very few people will suffer for ideal, only, no matter how pure or right.

But we will do that for each other, if we care about each other and rely on each other.

“I will knowingly get myself hurt to help someone else not be hurt” can be very powerful, including against fascism.

But to do that, you have to take heart that a better world is possible.

So start taking heart.