Photo by Kira on Unsplash

We win the way all People’s movements win.

The name of the dictator or even his specific actions don’t matter. What matters, what makes a difference is what we do. And that we don’t listen to his lies or participate in, or in any way support his cruelty.

It’s our duty to refuse to listen to the lies and to make every one of the cruel actions difficult to carry out — and very, very costly for the dictator and his lackeys.

Cruelty and Power: Rule By the Criminally Insane

It’s always difficult to know if our opponent is stupid or lying, but in the current case I think it’s safe to assume that he’s both.

Perhaps the motivations don’t matter—the job is to disempower evil, not understand it. Still, we might be more effective if we understand what’s behind it all.

We know that the tyrant is thin-skinned, as almost all tyrants are, and much stupider than the average tyrant. We know that he’s listening to people who are as evil but smarter than himself. But he’s not a good listener, so he’s an unreliable ally to the rogues around him.

This is a plus for us. They are divided and we are united.

Here’s the Challenge And Opportunity

It’s a tough situation, but one where We The People can clearly come out on top. This isn’t easy but it is absolutely a winnable situation for us.

It’s like learning surgery from a book and then performing surgery. We may feel a bit out of our league. It’s scary. We can accumulate the knowledge but most of us lack the experience. Nonviolent revolution requires a lot of on-the-job training.

That’s what the protests are about. They aren’t about challenging the authorities—at least not just yet. They are about learning to be together, to act together, to become a movement, to practice actions and learn things that will enable us to win.

We aren’t the first to have this challenge, and when we win, we won’t be the first People’s movement to defeat a dictator.

The people of Portugal defeated Salazar. The people of The Philippines defeated Marcos. The people of Romania defeated Ceaușescu. The people of Poland defeated Jaruzelski. The people of Serbia defeated Milosevic. The people of Ukraine defeated Yanukovych. The people of Brazil defeated Bolsonaro.

The people of the United States can and will defeat Trump. We can do this in part because the strategy for success was pioneered for us by Gandhi and King and all these lesser-known movements. But we have to study, to learn and to develop our own approaches from the same proven framework.

We need to get skilled at nonviolent noncooperation. We need to invent and carry out dilemma actions. We need to win over the armed enforcers who keep the tyrant in power, the people of ICE, of DHS, of the National Guard and various police forces, and the military. Those people are our spouses and relatives and loved ones and friends. We must talk to them and remind them to serve and protect US, to protect The People, and not some violent law-breaking thug.

And by talking to them, we WILL win over enough to cripple the dictator, to make him doubt that his support will hold. And it’s our job to make sure that his support DOES NOT hold.

We must begin withdrawing our support, starting in small subtle ways. We must stop doing work that he NEEDS US to do.

We must stop extracting, processing and burning fossil fuels—deprive him of energy and the revenue he gets from energy.

We must stop doing the administrative work necessary for any and all evil actions—from DOGE to ICE and even down to the stupid $100 million military parade the infamous draft-dodger and coward is planning for himself.

Where we can’t safely overtly stop work, we can slow down, or do bad work, make mistakes, show up late, or do whatever we can get away with that makes the evil work somehow never come to fruition.

This is what effective movement do.

Our Narrative, Not His

And we can change the narrative. All their PR and well-financed lies can be countered because WE—as the audience for those lies—are the critical element in all this.

We can tune out Fox News and all White House press conferences and announcements and ANY “news” that are really a bunch of lies designed to distract us and make us feel powerless.

Because, in fact, WE have the power. WE do all the work. Our opponents, like all tyrants have NO POWER WHATSOEVER unless we take their orders.

When we disobey—even just enough to rob them of efficacy—they lose. Every time. They are INCAPABLE OF DOING

ANYTHING because they are few in numbers and very low-skilled in abilities. And lazy. Their “leader” doesn’t work—he golfs. Or at least cheats at golf.

Remember that our opponent is a stupid, portly man who was born to wealth. He has serious psychological problems and he’s OLD. His mind, which was never very impressive, is failing.

He is a supremely unimpressive individual. He and his followers and supporters are the SS. The Sadistic and Stupid.

Our narrative is simple truth. We will repeat it incessantly, and remind ourselves of the real situation and the real crises and what we need to do to meet the challenges. The truth is that all people are largely the same. We are mortal creatures that live short limited lives. Life is amazing, astounding, and some of it is inevitably heartbreaking. But life is to be lived and enjoyed as free people. There is nothing stupider or more wasteful than spending our lives in cubicles and factories producing unearned wealth for greedy fools.

That stupidity is the basis for our “civilization.” And keep in mind, this preceds the current dictatorship. The only thing worse than the stupidity we had before is the abuse we are experiencing now. We don’t want abuse OR wasted lives.

We don’t need to produce endless mountains of useless crap for sale—because not only is that a waste of our lives, but it’s deadly to our biosphere. Our “productivity” is ruining the planet and dooming our children.

We need to make quick work of ending today’s tyranny (not only in the United States) and then pivot to fixing the polycrises that we can no longer afford to ignore.

We Can Meet All The Challenges

We can’t fix this stupid system, this fatally flawed system, by tweaking it around the edges. It would take too long and would probably fail.

We need to rethink things. We need to start with the question: what do we need to live as free human beings? What do we need to have meaningful lives?

As it turns out, we’ve been wasting our lives and energy and time on exactly the wrong things—things we don’t need.

Nearly all of us work largely useless and often destructive jobs. We are producing profit for nonworking elites, wasting our time, poisoning the Earth, and then dying having never really lived.

Now, we experience all that awfulness but have added to it random cruelty and violence.
The obvious move is to stop. And to do something else. What would that something else be?

Our Vision

Did you ever notice how uninspiring pretty much all of our leaders and opinion-makers are in their vision of what we should aspire to? And it’s always filled with a bunch of abstractions.

We are promised more and better paying jobs. A booming economy. More education and opportunities. Opportunities to do what? To waste our lives doing useless repetitive crap until we drop?

Our vision is this. We produce what we need to live. What biology requires of us. Food for nutrition—and enjoyment. Medicine for health. Camaraderie that a social species requires.

We need to express ourselves, to think, to spend time in Nature. We need to wonder, to make and tell stories. We need to stare at the night sky.

We need to care for our planet and for each other. THIS is the world we want, the world we can create. When we set aside all the stupidity we’ve been surrounded with, been gaslit with, our entire lives.

It’s time to do the work. Fortunately, on balance it’s a lot less work. We’ve been wasting upwards of 60%_80% of our waking hours and our energy as low paid servants to elites. We will have more than enough time and energy to do what’s needed now

And the motivation. A beautiful world is within reach. Together, let’s grab hold of it.