this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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In Person Activism
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"Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them." -Tim Snyder
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Okay leftists, do something then.
Yeah, we have been. Antifa networks existed to track and dox Nazis way before 2016. Leftists fought Nazi skins in the streets in the 80's and basically saved the country from this happening once already.
In Seattle we organized a public records activism group that found SPD illegally using surveillance software, and identified a cop posting a bunch of Nazi shit on Twitter (who we got fired), and de-anonymized all SPD accountability records allowing us to identify a list of statistically deviant cops. Oh yeah, and some other leftist took that and built SPD.watch. We also organized free hand-to-had defense trainings. Oh, we also organized a community pantry that later expanded to feed houseless folks...then we organized a disaster preparedness committee where we bought a bunch of N95 masks and gave some presentations on smoke risk.
Oh... That was before the pandemic, so we actually had a few hundred masks to give to medic folks and houseless folks when the pandemic hit. You're welcome for keeping our medical staff safe. We were also the ones who organized that huge protest right after the Charlottesville attack.
We didn't have to organize a bail fund because anarchists did that years before. We also did have to organize independent media because anarchists had also organized that before.
That was almost all from 2016-2020 with like... 15 to 20 people.
All this is to say, we've been fucking busy. How about you?
Edit: the ask is literally just, "go prepare yourself and your neighborhood for crackdowns so you can keep protesting and escalate if needed" and "think about what winning could actually look like." Like... Do you know when people get arrested? We used to track that, bail folks out, and get them support when we could. If someone gets arrested, that can be a big burden. People can lose their jobs. Families can struggle. Are you going to raise money for legal defense? You gonna make sure those folks can pay rent? Are you at all prepared for shit to get wild, or are you just going to let the anarchists take care of everything? Do you have literally any plan beyond "I'm gonna show up with a sign sometimes then I'm gonna vote?"
Sincerely, great work there! Let's all become leftists that do something.
Organizing is honestly just a lot of trying things until they work. I was surrounded by a lot of folks who were skilled and motivated, but also it was just like... Calling business and seeing which ones had free rooms we could reserve, reserving rooms at the library, talking to other anarchist spaces to find out when there were openings (if they even exist in your area). It's a lot of learning how to run meetings and learning when it's OK to let things fail... And a lot of working out conflicts between people who are organizing together.
It's both easier and harder than you would expect. I think our first meeting only a couple of people showed up. It was months of mostly nothing before there was a regular crew, then a lot of just figuring how we even organize before we were able to do anything. Patience, more than anything, made that part possible. But once more people started working together, it ended up feeling a lot easier and we were able to do a lot.
Maybe I'll write something up some time, but really it's a lot of "try and fail, and keep trying" and "listen to feedback without getting mad."
You called them looters and rioters in 2020, they were the last vestiges of the civil rights movement.
You raise a good point