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How to fight fascists: A tactical brief for the times we’re in [1]
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Date: 2025-04-18
Authoritarianism doesn’t usually creep in quietly. It tends to come with violence. But sometimes, it just arrives through packed courts, gutted agencies, police crackdowns, and disinformation campaigns. It criminalizes dissent, scapegoats the vulnerable, and centralizes power under the banner of patriotism or tradition. It builds alliances with the wealthy, captures the media, and reshapes laws to serve the few.
When it succeeds, it’s not because people didn’t see it coming, but because they couldn’t organize fast enough to stop it.
We are watching this happen in the U.S. now, in real time. To grasp the scale, we have to zoom out. What we’re living through isn’t just a domestic slide into repression—it’s part of a broader global shift. Imagine the view from Moscow: Vladimir Putin, a strategic and ruthless authoritarian, watching U.S. institutions fracture, alliances weaken, and public trust collapse. For him that is victory without invasion. Add in a global network of billionaires, corporations, and nationalist actors willing to prop up autocratic systems to protect their assets or advance their ideologies, and you get a powerful alignment of forces committed to democracy’s failure.
To meet that threat, we need more than symbolic opposition. We need a serious strategy. Here’s what history—and frontline organizers around the world—teach us about how to win.
1. Undermine the Pillars of Authoritarian Power
No regime holds itself up alone. Authoritarians rely on specific power centers—courts, police, military, media, corporate interests, labor and logistics, even religious institutions—to enable repression and suppress dissent. These are the “pillars” on which their power rests, that must be identified and eroded.
What this looks like in practice:
Legal and political confrontation : Build coalitions to block judicial takeovers, expose corruption, and pressure electeds into choosing sides. Electoral wins are necessary—but not sufficient without pressure campaigns that raise the cost of complicity. We’ve done this before. For example, when Donald Trump issued the first Muslim travel ban in 2017, legal resistance and public protest erupted simultaneously. The ACLU and a coalition of state attorneys general immediately filed lawsuits, while tens of thousands flooded airports in spontaneous demonstrations. Judges around the country blocked the ban’s most extreme provisions, and repeated legal battles forced the administration to revise it multiple times. Though a limited version eventually took effect, the legal and political backlash delayed implementation, protected families from separation, and sparked a wave of civic engagement that energized immigration advocacy for years.
Economic resistance: Target financial backers through sanctions, boycotts, shareholder organizing, and divestment campaigns. When the regime’s enablers lose money, alliances fracture. During the global fight against apartheid, students and activists across the U.S. and Europe launched sustained divestment campaigns that targeted banks and corporations investing in South Africa. Universities, churches, and city governments withdrew billions from companies complicit in the regime’s human rights abuses. The economic pressure created growing fractures within South Africa’s elite class and contributed to the regime’s eventual collapse. It remains one of the most successful examples of global economic resistance against a racist, authoritarian government.
Security force engagement: Organize inside the military, police, and civil services. Support dissenters. Provide exit ramps and legal protection for those who refuse unlawful orders. Authoritarians fall faster when the repressive apparatus breaks rank. In 1974, a group of mid-ranking military officers in Portugal, disillusioned by years of dictatorship and brutal colonial wars, launched a peaceful military coup known as the Carnation Revolution. Supported by mass civilian mobilization and a refusal by other security forces to escalate, the revolution succeeded without significant violence. The authoritarian regime collapsed in a matter of days. The key to the revolution’s success was the internal fracture within the armed forces, proving how quickly authoritarian rule can crumble when the repressive apparatus breaks ranks.
Targeted non-cooperation: Encourage mass refusal—from government workers to tech engineers to contractors—to participate in the fascist project, to refuse to participate in surveillance, detention flights, censorship and repression. Bureaucratic sabotage has long been a tool of quiet resistance. In 2018, thousands of Google employees learned that the company was quietly developing artificial intelligence for the Pentagon to improve drone targeting through a program called Project Maven. In response, workers organized internal protests, drafted open letters, and forced leadership to confront the ethical implications. Amid growing pressure and widespread media attention, Google ultimately canceled its participation and pledged not to pursue future contracts for weapons-related AI. It was a landmark moment in tech worker resistance—and a powerful demonstration of how targeted non-cooperation can halt authoritarian-aligned projects from within.
This isn’t about symbolic defiance. It’s about strategic disruption—making it impossible for authoritarian systems to function as designed.
2. Build Widespread, Coordinated Visibility That Hurts Their Narrative
Authoritarians rely not just on power, but on perception: the illusion of consensus, inevitability, and strength. They flood the public square with propaganda, manipulate crises to their advantage, and use visible brutality to intimidate.
Our task is to rupture that image, poke fun at them, stigmatize and satirize them.
Bold visibility campaigns: Mass mobilizations, yes—but also decentralized visual resistance: projections, art, public noise, workplace walkouts, local disruptions. Show that resistance is widespread and impossible to contain. In the lead-up to the 2019 Hong Kong protests, activists projected massive slogans onto government buildings, hung neon banners off overpasses, and covered city walls with Lennon Walls filled with post-it notes and artwork. These decentralized visibility tactics turned the entire city into a living message of dissent—making resistance impossible to ignore even when protests weren’t happening. Meanwhile, small workplace walkouts, masked flash mobs, and laser-pointer “raves” showed that opposition was both joyful and widespread, beyond the reach of easy suppression. This kind of visual defiance sent a clear signal: the movement was everywhere.
Disruptive storytelling: Focus less on abstract moral outrage and more on concrete impact. Highlight how authoritarian policy harms people’s jobs, health, safety, and families. Make the consequences personal and impossible to ignore. When Tennessee passed sweeping anti-trans laws in 2023, local activists didn’t just issue statements—they told the stories of parents whose kids lost access to gender-affirming care, teachers who were fired for supporting students, and teenagers forced to leave the state to feel safe. These stories were shared in public hearings, digital campaigns, and community gatherings, shifting the narrative from abstract “debates” to gut-wrenching lived experience. By making the harm visible, tangible, and deeply human, organizers reframed the conversation—and brought new allies into the fight.
Ridicule as a weapon: From Eastern Europe to South America, resistance movements have used satire and surrealism to expose the absurdity of power. Humor disrupts fear, lowers the barrier to participation, and punctures myths of invincibility. Remember Trump kissing Elon’s feet? In Serbia during the Milošević regime, a youth movement called Otpor! (Resistance!) used absurd humor and satire to destabilize authoritarian power. One famous tactic involved placing a barrel with Milošević’s face on it in the middle of the street and giving passersby a bat—crowds gathered to take swings. Police who showed up to arrest the barrel looked ridiculous, and the footage went viral. Humor became a political weapon: it broke the fear, drew in people who were tired of solemn appeals, and made the regime look weak and ridiculous. In modern terms, think Trump memes, TikToks roasting fascists, or public pranks that expose hypocrisy with laughter.
Don’t just “raise awareness”—coordinate action: Visibility without direction exhausts people. Potent public disruption is tied to real demands, pressure campaigns, or material goals. In 2020, when McDonald’s workers walked out to demand PPE and hazard pay during COVID, the action wasn’t just a symbolic protest—it was part of a tightly coordinated campaign tied to legal complaints, media coverage, and public health demands. Organizers made sure the visibility led somewhere. That same year, youth-led climate actions shifted away from vague messaging to targeted fossil fuel divestment goals, pressuring universities and banks. The most effective campaigns didn’t stop at raising awareness—they gave people something clear to do, and made institutions feel the heat until they moved.
This isn’t about being seen for its own sake. It’s about narrative control. When people see mass resistance, their willingness to resist grows. When elites see it, they start calculating the cost of staying loyal to the regime.
3. Mutual Aid is Infrastructure, Not Charity
Every resistance movement faces the same challenge: how to sustain itself when the news cycle moves on, when the repression hits hard, and when people start to burn out. The answer is not just political—it’s material.
Mutual aid is what keeps people alive and movements functioning.
Support the most affected: From frontline protesters to undocumented workers, those targeted by repression need legal, emotional, medical, and logistical backing to stay in the fight. Make it safe for security forces to defect rather than turn their weapons on us.
Tend to the broken social fabric: Authoritarianism thrives where the state has failed. Local mutual aid networks can do what institutions no longer do—feed, house, and protect. That builds loyalty and trust across lines that typically divide us.
Invest in in-person, low-tech organizing: Secure networks, offline meetings, community hubs—these are more resilient to digital surveillance and harder to fragment than online coalitions.
Create on-ramps for everyone: Not everyone can take to the streets. Resistance also happens through childcare networks, ride shares, court support, food delivery, prison visitation, banned book clubs and quiet conversations over dinner tables. All of it matters.
Sustainable movements don’t ask people to sacrifice endlessly. They build systems that make participation viable and connecting for the long haul.
This is the Work
What we’re facing isn’t new. The tactics of authoritarianism are well-documented. So are the strategies that have brought them down.
What’s different now is the speed, the scale, and the stakes. This isn’t a political disagreement—it’s a contest for what kind of world we want to live in.
We don’t need to wait for permission. We don’t need to wait for a perfect strategy. We need to start where we are: weakening the systems that enable repression, showing up in ways that shift the public imagination, and building networks of care that no regime can crush.
No single action will stop what’s coming. But taken together, and taken seriously, our actions will change the outcome.
This is the work—not just of resistance, but of reimagining. Because when (not if) we succeed in defeating the fascists, we’ll be faced with a profound challenge: What comes next?
Do we return to the systems that got us here? Or do we dare to imagine something entirely new—a government, a society, a democracy worthy of the people who fought to reclaim it?
We’ll be writing more about that soon. For now, the task is clear: disrupt, protect, build. [The future depends on it.]
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