letters from a weirdo

street flowers — by flightlessblrbs

Do not take the bait. Shooting wars do not exist now. They will drone your asses. They’re highjacking your amygdala to get you to do stupid s**t that plays right into their hands.

Organize locally. Grow food. Raise rabbits. Pile up in owned or mortgaged housing. If you can, stop charging your tenants rent. Take on roommates, and figure out how to live with each other. Give each other free medical and dental care. Hide regime targets and help them go dark. Multi-layered housing swaps to disorient kidnappers should begin now. Take your kids out of school; they will be indoctrinated.

Starve the regime of your fear and your tacit cooperation. Stay offline as often as you can. Limit yourself to 20-60 minutes a day. I cannot emphasize this enough: social media is a massive psyop and surveillance scheme.

Creators and writers: Move from social media to old school mailing lists, particularly if you’re emailing from a free, encrypted email account (like Proton or Tuta). If you’re using the online to create a revenue stream, include a Buy Me a Coffee link. You don’t need venture capitalists to make money, if you need to make money from your content. Besides, free newsletters are going away on this app anyhow.

Stop doing advertising for the regime by talking onilne about what the dictators are doing, get offline, and start planning practical ways to help each other. There is no peaceful revolution without daily, coordinated efforts to help your neighbors. This is about freedom from a system quite literally designed to enslave you (same as it ever was).

Engage in pro-democracy public art in your neighborhood. Host free concerts. Learn to care about your neighbors, their needs, capacities, resources, hopes, worries. Fascism is only enabled through you closing yourselves off and hiding inside, hoping the monster doesn’t get to you. The monster will get you, if you take this approach. See Niemöller.

This approach I’m suggesting isn’t naive. Mass noncooperation, plus community cooperation and interdependence starves regimes of power. It’s been done before in both fascist and imperialist contexts successfully; the reason you don’t know about it is because you live in a war-profiteering culture and peacefulness is antithetical to the fascist elite business model.

Daily, neighborhood-level coordinated noncooperation, in the form of para-institutional community support systems, starves regimes of the compliance they need to survive. They don’t want you to focus on the fact that they need you to pull this off. That is why they’re trying to scare the s**t out of you: so you don’t see your power to make this regime crumble.

Never agree to the abusers’ terms of engagement. You have waaaay more options than to cower inside or fight in the street.

Fascism can only go on as long as people passively, tacitly consent. They try to scare you into thinking “there is only now” and that there is no future. It’s psychological warfare: make a people think a tyrant’s win is inevitable and they will collapse into despair.

Until we can pull off a general strike (which will take time because they require local resources and a coordinated national murmuration), work ineffectively, work slowly, make so many mistakes, be very confused, ask to have things explained on loop, share info you’re not supposed to share.

If you work for the government in any capacity and are asked to take on illegal orders or indoctrinate others, refuse. Leak illegal orders. Leak fascist requests. No job is worth you propping up fascism— no job is worth your soul.

Engage in local campaigns to get local LEOs to defect— white moms, kids, and grannies, this is your time to shine. This is your work.

Clergy and healers of all faiths and spiritual practices, now is the time to host interfaith, all-inclusive services— ideally outside. Demonstrate a joyful public alliance of neighborly love. If you are a church within the legacy of nonviolent civil disobedience, encourage your elders to pass this wisdom into your community— to anyone who’ll listen. Host local ceremonies to alchemize neighbors’ grief, anger, fear, and hopelessness.

But whatever you do: do NOT take the bait for violence. You will literally be playing into these people’s hands. I highly recommend staying out of the streets at the moment that a tyrant is clearly indicating a desire for bloodshed and mayhem, because even if you don’t give it to them, they will create it.

If you’re in a blue dot, the goal is to induce defections from security forces. Remind the military that we are their neighbors. Leave flowers in the empty streets and signs in the windows that say neighbors do not turn on each other. This will create a moral contrast so stark that the soldiers won’t be able to ignore it; they are already feeling used. Remember, the regime needs these soldiers’ obedience to pull off their coup. If soldiers and cops start to ignore orders, this whole thing collapses.

The time for symbolic protests in the streets are over. We know we have the numbers; that’s what street protests have always been for. (See Gene Sharp.) We know the dictator and the dictator waiting in the wings are very unpopular, across identity and party lines. Use your numbers to coordinate at the zip code level. Stop looking at the mountain, take the first step, and be useful to your actual neighbors in your zip codes (and neighboring zip codes).

“One lesson that we had to learn pretty quickly is that if there is somebody in the group… who’s shouting, you know, “Off the cops” or “let’s break some windows” or whatever, you’re very likely to see him in court testifying for the police, because that’s their job, you know, to try to turn activism into something that’ll alienate the public… and give them grounds for repression.” — Noam Chomsky

If you want more ideas to get started in your zip code and move in formation with your neighbors, check out this post to get started. A plan is coming. Neighbors across the country, regular people, are working on a plan to help us move in formation with each other to shut down this treasonous violation of our collective sovereignty.

Thanks for reading my work! If you like this weirdo’s content, follow me as I shift my content to a free Patreon, in order to get outside this nonsense, anxiety-inducing algorithm. Weirdo’s Patreon will go live October 13th. There you’ll find Weirdo’s blogs (including vintage weirdo archives from Substack), flightlessblrbs’s pro-democracy art, a new podcast called “My Weirdo Friends,” and a series of hosted community discussions to focus on the tactical art of neighborliness during times such as these.

howdy partner — by flightlessblrbs

A neighbor who subscribes to my Subtack messaged to share that a post of mine was shared in someone’s Substack private chat, where people were asked (something to the effect of) “what do we think about this brand of liberal?”

In case, you’re curious, I have been deemed “okay” by people in the chat, who more or less agreed with the points I made in the article.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted to see people vibing with my point of view, but I’d also like to confess: I’m not a liberal. In fact, I rebuke any political term you wanna place on me because, the fact of the matter is no political term has ever represented my felt sense of this place we call the USA.

I just know I don’t like everyday people being treated like s**t, while rich guys steal from us and terrorize, abduct, and kill our neighbors. This isn’t just an authoritarian situation— we’re in the beginning stages of a goddamn genocide, and I would love for us to care more about our people than our politics.

But more to the point, we can stop this. To do that, we’re gonna have to get off our screens and into our neighborhoods and actually start helping our community members.

If you want to learn how to stop this fascist monolith by limiting your focus to mobilizing in your own zip code and then learning to move in murmuration with each other, I recommend you check out this post where I talk about the Daisy Chain:

So to return to the question… who the hell am I?

I am your weirdo friend. I’m also your neighbor.

Who the hell are you? You’re my neighbor. You might even be my weirdo friend.

Either way, if you’re reading this, I have a good feeling we’re gonna work together to shut this nonsense down.

No one deserves this kind of cruelty or brutality.

We are powerful and, once we become coordinated in our peaceful resistance, we’re gonna be unstoppable.

Thanks for reading my work! If you like this weirdo’s content, follow me as I shift my content to a free Patreon, in order to get outside this nonsense, anxiety-inducing algorithm. Weirdo’s Patreon will go live October 13th. There you’ll find Weirdo’s blogs (including vintage weirdo archives from Substack), flightlessblrbs’s pro-democracy art, a new podcast called “My Weirdo Friends,” and a series of hosted community discussions to focus on the tactical art of neighborliness during times such as these.

power to the peaceful — by flightlessblrbs

this monstrosity devouring our communities has a name, neighbor: it is wendigo.

wendigo is not a myth. never has been.

it’s story, ancestral wisdom, and its wisdom revisits us now, because our ancestors never left and they have been trying to get us to listen.

neighbor, it is time to listen.

the wendigo story isn’t about a mythic monster— it’s ancestral remembrance of a human phenomenon. but more than that, the story of the wendigo also offers a blueprint for collective liberation.

this is not my story. it is ours. listen.

Thanks for reading my work! If you like this weirdo’s content, follow me as I shift my content to a free Patreon, in order to get outside this nonsense, anxiety-inducing algorithm. Weirdo’s Patreon will go live October 13th. There you’ll find Weirdo’s blogs (including vintage weirdo archives from Substack), flightlessblrbs’s pro-democracy art, a new podcast called “My Weirdo Friends,” and a series of hosted community discussions to focus on the tactical art of neighborliness during times such as these.

Neighbor, I need you to do four things in this order:

* Breathe and know that we are going to get though this.

* Listen to the podcast, below, by Kristofer Goldsmith, and be alive to the fact the regime wants to lure you into the streets for a protest, turn infantry against you, create violent chaos and then claim there is “disorder” only he can solve. It’s a trap and it’s weak. Don’t fall for it.

* Listen to this podcast. It’s uncharacteristically short for this weirdo, but it’s effective. What do you do to show you object and snap soldiers out of their fog? If you know the infantry are rolling up in your blue city, cover the streets with bouquets of wildflowers and walk away. Why? Political jujitsu.

* What do you do instead? Organize mutual aid at the local level. A bigger plan is on the way. We got this. Don’t give up. We have all the cards that matter.

* Share this with everyone you know. Not just online but everywhere. Tell everyone being occupied: flowers in the streets, not bodies, not blood. Flowers. Refuse to give them the optics. This is called the basics of backfire.

This is a personal reflection on institutional complicity during times of fascism. I’m about to get pushed out of my job, not because I’m not a talented educator but because this regime has re-framed my research as “controversial” and thus unspeakable and unwelcome. All of this is taking place under the guise of (wait for it) “viewpoint diversity.”

There are a handful of points I make in this free-ranging episode: (1) there is no self-preservation when it comes to kissing the ring, because fascists mean to take it all, (2) stop “looking up to” politicians, business leaders, and people in positions of power in institutions of higher learning— they’re not the leaders you’re looking for: you are.

We need to stop saying, “Well if ____ caved, then what can the rest of us do?” Because here’s the answer: the rest of you can do a whole lot.

And a lot of people this culture has told you to accept as leaders have always caved to power. Why? They were never leaders but palatable middle-managers placed into positions of power, precisely because they would protect unjust power structures. Do not be shaken when they fail to meet the moment, because they were always going to fail to meet the moment.

Regular people are more powerful and more leader-full than any institution.

Leadership requires an alignment between words and action and a willingness to stand in solidarity with the vulnerable, especially when it costs you something.

There’s a high price to pay for integrity, and the price and the pain are always worth it.

Regular people are going to lead this movement and, eventually, people sitting on the sidelines (including some of the same leaders who abandoned people) will come around claiming they always supported the pro-democracy movement.

Regular people can also remember liars.

Regular people can hold liars accountable.

No powerful person who abandons you to fascist harm is a leader.

They never were. If this time teaches you anything, let it be this: you were always the leaders you’ve been waiting on. Always.

Neighbors, I know this feels terrifying, but you are not powerless. They have you scared so that you can’t see how simple it really is to stop them.

We don’t have to deal with this s**t.

What’s more, because they’re currently eviscerating the the law as you read this, guess what? We also get to call b******t and start planning for a plain-spoken constitution that works for regular people, in all of our beautiful human and ecological diversity.

Once more with feeling, we don’t have to deal with this s**t. Listen to this podcast to help clear the fog. Then pass it on, because these internet streets are not kind to community organizers. Show resistance by directly texting the podcast to your friends, and tell them why it impacted you, which will increase their odds of listening. So much of what we call revolution begins via invitation.

The United States is a traumatized people. We have been trained to do two things:

(1) hate each other

(2) assume only special people get to govern for us, because it’s all so very complicated.

B******t.

These people have been harvesting our tax dollars to the point of cannibalism and ecological collapse. This isn’t just stupid— this is fascist elite white men acting out their unhealed trauma on other people and calling it power.

It’s meanness. It’s fundamentally broken. And, if we want it to stop, we can end it now.

I’m not being a motivational speaker here. I’ve read quite a bit on how fascists fall and how political power works and, in times of collapse like this, the yahtzees aren’t the only ones who can break the rules: we can too.

All this time, we have been trying to incrementally push forward toward a life that works for regular people, so as not to scare off our rich overloards who fund our corrupt politicians. But to fight fascism and win requires being bold and audacious and pursuing what we collectively want for each other instead of shrinking.

Do not let these people con you into thinking we aren’t special enough to work together to stop them and build a life that works for regular people— and not powerful men who have convinced themselves they are kings and gods. They are not, and we do not have to let them hurt us.

Listen in to clear the fog and breathe some full breaths, because we’ve got this. All we have to do is our one tiny part, knowing our neighbors are working alongside us.

Related, if you’re new here, I encourage you to to check out my previous podcast, below, where I describe how you can work together in your neighborhood, at the zip code level, to not only shut this thing down but to actually build a life we want.

Niehgbor, I know you’re tired. You’d have to be: this entire-ass system has been designed to keep us traumatized and fighting each other. We can, and will, heal this s**t— and we have the political power and collective capacity to do it.

It's not as difficult as you think.

We just need to work together at the local level and do our one, coordinated, small-but-impactful part. Every single skill, resource, talent is necessary in this moment. Don’t let them con you out of your power by telling you that it’s not worth doing anything, because you can’t do everything. You weren’t meant to— we’re meant to work as neighborhoods.

Watch this space.

Neighbor, today’s episode is both a cross-post and supportive commentary on THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali’s recent blog, “Israel is Committing a Genocide, and U.S. Elected Officials Must Finally Admit It.” I wanted to do more than share Waj’s words with a restack, which is why I read his essay aloud on in this episode followed by some of your weirdo friend’s commentary.

If I haven’t made it clear time and again, let me repeat it: Our Palestinian neighbors deserve to be free of Israeli occupation. Our Palestinian neighbors deserve to thrive. They are, like all of our neighbors, inherently worthy expressions of the divine— and all people of conscience are called upon to stand in solidarity with our Palestinian neighbors and all of our neighbors, everywhere, who are being hunted down by imperialists who try to mask their brutality by abusing scripture to justify it.

No more wars in the name of supremacy culture. No more wars in the name of fearing thy neighbor’s culture. No more wars in the name of conquest. No more wars in the name of religion that has metastasized into brutality.

If Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene can denounce genocide, so can you. Demand your elected officials not use our tax dollars to systematically murder our Palestinian neighbors. Demand the end to Israel’s aid blockade. Demand an end to Israeli occupation of Palestine.

these are my neighbors, these are my friends— by flightlessblrbs

neighbor, i wish i could find the magic words to move people to action, but i don’t.

all i have is my story.

most days, i keep it to myself and focus on how to help people (who are far less in the crosshairs than i) shake loose their fear and come together, so that people like me might simply live.

what has always terrified me about this moment was not my fascist neighbors; they have always been here. what terrifies me are my neighbors who are both in denial of where this is headed and in denial of their agency— which, if they’d simply use it, would save people’s lives. right now, a very small amount of a******s are taking over the country. just imagine what would happen if even an equal and oppostie force got off their screens, out of their freeze response, and into their communities with a plan to help their neighbors? you would save lives.

the magical thinking that midterms will save us and that people can simply go on with their routines while their neighbors are disappeared into concentration camps is deadly. it may not kill you, but it has already gotten many of your neighbors disappeared and killed and, unless people begin to take responsibility for waking their neighbors up from their slumber, through bold nonviolent action, it will most certainly result in more of your neighbors being killed… and i, your weirdo friend, will be among them. project 2025 has written what they mean to do to educators like me.

my husband’s art that you email me telling me how much you love? i love it, too. he’s coming into his own as activist artist, with more grit and vulnerability and lived struggle than i have ever seen in a shepard fairey. but that art won’t be here either, because he will also be taken. he will also be disappeared.

this isn’t fearmongering. this is speaking the truth in a time of profound denial.

the reason i speak of neighborliness with such passion is because my life is literally in your hands. we no longer live in the era of anne frank: you are being desensitized to mass casulty events and genocidal actions on a daily basis.

i wish to god there were a single story i could tell to awaken people to their agency and inspire them to use every single ounce of their privilege to shut this down. the reason i come on here everyday and write to you, the reason i have spent all my time researching and developing and quality-assurance testing an action plan to end this is because: i can see what this is, i know no politicla savior is going to swoop us in.

this is down to us. this is down to you. and my life is in your hands.

won’t you be my neighbor?

through the cracks — by flightlessblrbs

Neighbor, you are not powerless to stop this. You have been intentionally groomed to think you are powerless so that filthy rich white men could hoard power over you. You live in a country that tells you we are free and brave— but what I’m seeing are neighbors of culture constantly being terrorized and non-targeted neighbors acting helpless about how to stop it. Asking: “When is somebody going to DO something?” is a spell of perpetual innocence and socially engineered learned helplessness. It ends now.

You’re the one who is supposed to do something, and you’re meant to do that something alongside your neighbors. Consider this is your formal invitation to take your collective power back and join The Daisy Chain Revolution. Listen in.

If you like this plan, don’t just share it online: share a link of this episode with your neighbors, your friends, your parishioners, your meditation group, your knitting circle, your soccer team, your book club, your bible study members, your family members, your coworkers, and your childhood friends. Text them a link. Email it to them.

Say something like: “Hey, here’s the plan. Let’s do this.”

If you want to help this peaceful movement of collective liberation spread, help me move around the algorithms engineered to suppress pro-democracy online organizing. We gotta go low tech to beat our high-tech overlords.

can you tell me how to get to sesame street? — by flightlessblrbs