Read & Resist – 4/16/2025

Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance – “We aren’t powerless. The place to start fighting back is with knowledge..If people are uninformed about what he’s doing, they won’t object. So our job is to be well informed, to understand what’s going on…Have conversations with friends—and with total strangers—about what’s going on. But don’t be complacent. That’s the dictator’s trap, and we are not going to fall into it.”

It’s Not Fascism Yet, But…– “Bannon and Trump aren’t just willing to let the economy tank—they need it to tank to consolidate their vision of permanent authoritarian rule. This is part of the fascist playbook, and we must counter it by exposing their strategy, mobilizing workers, and building alternative economic and political structures that make it harder for them to seize total control…We are the majority. It’s time we learned how to act like it.”

People Get Ready – “He points toward a crucial truth: the only power that Trump, Musk, etc. have is the power to give orders–they don’t do much of anything else themselves. The other three hundred million of us have the power to not obey them and to support and encourage others who don’t. Enforcement of those orders is mostly by threat, and we have seen people undaunted by those threats, at home and abroad (and some of those threats can prove to be empty, and some threats that can target a few people can’t do much about hundreds of thousands or millions who won’t comply; there’s safety in numbers).”

Mutual Aid in the Age of Fascism – “If we are to have any hope of surviving the coming dark age, we need mutual aid—not just to keep people housed and fed, but to keep them connected…What will family mutual aid look like? Communal, intergenerational housing, shared kitchens, child care shifts, leaving free time for creativity and leisure: let new forms of intimacy and interdependence supplant the patriarchal nuclear family religious fundamentalists and their elected officials have been laboring to reinvigorate for decades.”