flatreader

No Kings Sat Oct 18, 2025

Emotions are high. I know a lot of people want to go full throttle and push back. I am one of those people, however this is NOT the time for violence.

Violence has very rarely worked to invoke change. The times in which violence did work was a different time in our democracy. We did not have an out of control authoritarian government in those instances.

What has notably worked is pacifism. This is a war of optics. Proving this fascist regimes claim of those of us on the left being violent does not serve our purpose but helps theirs.

Plz do a quick Google search on the Civil Rights movement in 1963 - 65.

Also see Vietnam War protests 1965 - 69.

These were also wars of optics. People seeing peaceful people being brutalized has changed the course of this nation over and over.

It's not fun. There will be suffering. We must video all of it. DON'T FIGHT BACK! Give them zero vid clips or sound bites that validates their rhetoric against us.

Examples:

Birmingham campaign (1963): The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), led by Martin Luther King Jr., organized a major campaign against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. Images of police using fire hoses and dogs on young demonstrators shocked the nation and helped pressure the government to act.

Sit-ins: Starting in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960, students and activists staged sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, refusing to leave until served. This tactic, which spread across the South, was a key part of the student-led activism that formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Selma to Montgomery marches (1965): Protests for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, were met with violence, famously on "Bloody Sunday". The marches highlighted the need for a federal law protecting voting rights and contributed to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

To sum it up:

Sit-ins

Marches and mass demonstrations

Speeches

Strikes

Civil disobedience (good trouble - not violence)

Don't get me wrong there were other means of protest. Violence (riots) did become more pronounced toward the end. However they had that luxury to fall back on. Right now we do NOT. We all know that this regime is poking the paverbial bear to get a violent reaction. To get to their holy grail of martial law...

Let's get out there tomorrow and show the country and the world how absurd this regime is by saying we are violent and everything is on fire.

We can do this!!!