Silverio Villegas González, Keith Porter Jr, Renee Good and Alex Pretti (and countless others who’s names we may never know) will not be the last people we will have to mourn, but we can take steps to prevent as many future deaths as we can, while enacting our last means of non-violent offense against the regime.
(the titles below expand if you click them).
Learn First Aid! ⛑️
As we’re seeing, deadly violence is being used against us and it will only continue. It extremely important to have the skills to be able to keep yourself and others alive if they get hurt.
Tacticool Girlfriend provides a great introduction to building a personal first aid kit, called an IFAK, which can deal with things like bullet wounds and other serious bleeding wounds. I also want to emphasize her recommendation of only buying medical gear from reputable sources (not Amazon!), such as North American Rescue to avoid fakes that could cost you your life.
But you’ll need to learn how to use that equipment, too. The best resource for that is to take a local Stop The Bleed class, which are pretty widely available in most places. They may cost a small fee, but can also sometimes be free. Alternatively, if you cannot access a local class, this video by PrepMedic will give you a solid understanding of how to use Tourniquets and Gauze for wound packing.
Injuries are less harmful if they are tended to early. Learning first aid can help conserve resources when healthcare becomes unaffordable. Having several medics in case of harm by police is an extremely powerful morale booster during a protest that may become a police riot. When you become comfortable with the basics of first aid, riot medicine is the next suggested step.
Establish or join local Mutual Aid networks ✊
If you haven’t already, get to know your neighbors. Mutual aid is a willingness to support and grow your community. This can include informal networks through friends, tenant/renter organizations, solidarity groups, and industrial unions.
These are groups using direct action to solve each other’s problems. Building strong communities makes it difficult for fascism to take root. The actions of the government are going to hit every community hard, and the ones who build trust in each other and work together are most likely to survive. We’ve been building a list of resources in [email protected] to help you on your way. Also check out this handy guide to find existing groups in your area.
This isn’t only for your own community protection. Your ability to organize today will change the political landscape tomorrow. When revolution occurs, the social organizations that show the greatest resilience through the regime are the ones typically calling the shots when the dust settles. When it comes to elections, get out the vote drives are useless if most of the voters are fascists. At some point, you have to do grassroots political education if you don’t want fascist candidates winning elections. Mutual aid networks are excellent forums not only for teaching each other good political ideas, but demonstrating them in practice.
Join a Union and Prepare for an even longer General Strike! 💪
The most effective non-violent action we can take is preparing and organizing for a General Strike.
The country would be brought to its knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor. That tactic was extremely effective in Chile in 2019, and had they not fallen for the trick of liberal reform, they would’ve had a successful revolution on their hands with virtually no bloodshed.
If you aren’t in a union (or even if you are, it’s worth dual-carding), consider joining the IWW to unionize your workplace (bonus: you’ll get higher wages, better benefits, and more time off if you succeed!) to strengthen a general strike if we manage to enact one, as most unions have a strike fund that can supplement your income during a general strike to make it more financially bearable (you should also save as much money as you can reasonably do, so it can also be used to keep yourself afloat during a strike).
And for our international friends, you should join one as well, as fascism is gaining momentum globally. If your country isn’t listed below, just contact the IWW directly in the link above, and they’ll help you set up a new local branch.
Adopt Security Culture and Digital Camouflage 🛡️
Sometimes benign seeming efforts can turn into unexpected personal data collecting traps. Like an obscure website for exchanging contact info with other students turning into a global ad-tech surveillance network (Facebook), or innocent seeming online personality tests being use to harvest character profiles. Even Etsy, Reddit, Tinder, and Duolingo are feeding information to US Government Agencies like ICE.
Security culture is commonly used to describe the general awareness of such potential traps and how it can affect groups or entire communities. This goes beyond mere individual privacy efforts, as without joint efforts these often fail to work.
Especially in activist circles, security culture is paramount. For opsec reasons not everyone in the group might be aware of what clandestine efforts others are involved in, but with a general security culture many potential data leaks can be avoided.
Movements are made by the volume of their participants, and the easier and less dangerous it is to participate, the more people will get involved. As more people get involved, individual involvement becomes even less dangerous, creating a virtuous cycle.
We’ll start it off with some General Advice:
- Mentally wall off personal uniquely identifying info from your online presence, actively build a habit of opsec so that withholding information is your default mental state
- Be careful about who you meet online
- Use different, unrelated usernames, passwords & emails for every account. And try not to connect to those accounts with your real IP address (use Tor or a VPN)
- Be mindful that anything done online leaves a trail
- agents provocateurs may seek to find patsies willing to perform an ill-advised illegal activity in order to legitimize police repression. If someone is trying to pressure you, especially if you don’t have a long and proven history with them, be extremely wary.
For a full guide on what encrypted communications platforms to use, and how to stay off the radar, read the Digital Camouflage section within the Monthly Meta post here (you’ll need to scroll down. I’d add it here, but it won’t fit in this comment).
I’d also highly recommend anyone reading Full Spectrum Resistance if you want further info on how to resist.
Silverio Villegas González
I mean, you can make a mistake as a triggerhappy ICE agent but 10 bullits in 5 seconds? Those guys are fully deranged (just as their leader). Sad times, America, sad times.
They were clearly told they have absolute immunity and they act like it. The cause-and-effect is pretty clear.
Who the fuck downvoted this
Feel free to tag the downvoters as “fascist scum”
Huh one of them I replied to just the other day talking about cop uniforms which they knew an awful lot about. Strange.
Someone who doesn’t know you can find out who votes what on Lemmy?
I didn’t but I sometimes I downvote things(comments/posts) by mistakes with gestures and not even notice it, so I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that it was necessary intensional
Never happened to me, not once. What devices and what GUI are you using? I’m on both mobile boost and desktop web.
Never had such issues, therefore I’m tagging all downvoters as potential “fascist scum”.
Happens to me all the time on voyager, usually I notice it tho
What can people from other countries do to help? I see this endless stream of depressing US news, but can’t see anything I can do as a (poor) Brit besides agreeing that it’s bad on social media.
Fight Farage.
Understand that this is not happening in a vacuum and that attempts to convert your democracy into authoritarianism are coming for you too; in the UK it’s the Reform party, and they’re using the same old tired canard of demon immigrants to gain power. Keeping authoritarianism and fascism out of your own country, wherever it may be, helps us all.
By yourself you can’t change the world (yet), but you CAN immunize yourself and prepare yourself, so that when your turn comes (may it never, but here we are) you can readily act in your own community.
First, educate yourself: get your news from multiple sources, preferably from multiple continents, so that no one voice or group of voices can manipulate your worldview. Be an armchair expert on British history basics so that you know the bullshit when you see it online. Familiarize yourself with your own constitutional rights and how they are codified, so that you know when they are in danger.
Especially, be aware that corporate-owned, centralized social media is artificially manipulated, and instead of thinking you can’t be drawn in, be aware of the power of even seeing a headline that is worded a certain way to shape how you mentally frame a subject, for example. It’s subtle but it’s real. So tread carefully, or limit your time altogether.
Understand also that over time, social media teaches us how to self-censor and encourages us to value the opinions of others as highly as our own, giving oversized power to group pushback, when in fact it’s all just an artificial space where nothing is real and our natural instincts get very blunted over time, making us ever more intellectually malleable by tiny increments. By way of strong contrast, there is an absolute amount of power inherent in speaking your own truth, uncensored, full of the passion you feel about your subject: stick to online spaces that foster this, and limit your time to whatever lets you feel healthy and whole and still participate.
Secondly, get to know your own community in person, as much as you can. Is there already some kind of protest or direct action going on near you, like an effort to clean up a local waterway or stop an unwanted corporate building project? That’s a great place to get to know people. Even just doing little things like this you learn that just showing up has so much power. Just showing up. You don’t have to save the world. You can just be one person among many, and getting to know your local neighbors and community is the way to do it.
And that’s it. That’s how you start. Educating yourself (and protecting your mind), and getting to know your own community. That is all that Minneapolis has done, but look at how well they are resisting intense provocation and bringing world censure to the wrong that is happening to their town. That’s community working together, just doing what they can do.
You’re doing both of these things, educating yourself and getting to know your neighbors, because change does not come from “speaking truth to power” or strongly worded letters; it comes from simply knowing your neighbors, and amassing with them in large groups when the time comes. If more is ever necessary, then from that place of mutual agreement the best path for that time and that place is formed, but even that all starts with knowing your neighbors and knowing a basic level of truth about whatever you’re facing. It is far, far easier to do this if you’ve already done it before, and it helps when you already know from personal relationships that what you hate for your neighborhood, your neighbors hate too.
Your power comes from being one of many. You have something you can say or do that, in combination with many others, absolutely can make it incredibly difficult for evil to win.
That’s what you’re seeing in Minnesota, and why you’re drawn to help. Ignore the people who would tell you that none of what I just wrote matters, and look instead at Minneapolis: what you’re seeing is exactly this. They learned from the George Floyd protests, got to know their neighbors, and are relying on personal networks to do everything they are doing. The media isn’t talking much about it but ICE has been having to go farther and farther into the rural areas because neighborhood networks, made of people just like you, are making it insanely difficult to get to anyone anymore, and meanwhile relentlessly documenting all their excesses. That’s what’s winning this war: just regular people, like you, like me, doing whatever little tiny thing we each can do.
Also, thank you for your kind and supportive words. Here in the US we are relentlessly firehosed with propaganda from every direction, and to stand against this horrible thing can feel very isolating and alone. When we protest, it is consistently either undercounted or ignored altogether by mainstream media. So hearing you say that you are standing with us in spirit is very heartening, and I know that you’ve protested our insane president before, in many ways and at multiple times: it really means a lot.
Apologies for the wall of text, and thank you again for caring enough to ask the question. Hope it helps.
That’s a lot, and I read all of it! Thank you so much!
To respond to just one point, being able to speak your mind on social media without getting censored, what is a place like that that exists, do you think? I switched to Lemmy a few years ago because Reddit was horrible for this, but Lemmy just seems to have its own mods and recommended beliefs (eg Marxist Leninism, anti AI, espousing violence against anyone labeled a ‘Nazi’, etc). And any place that’s apparently truly uncensored is slandered as just being where Nazis hang out, and nobody seems to really take it seriously. I would recommend only client side censorship on social media, but that doesn’t seem to exist.
And as for Reform UK, I am well aware of them. The best I can hope is that they split the right sign vote so Labour gets in - that’s what happened last election.
For myself, Lemmy (for now) is as good as it gets because no matter where you go you’ll always get people who disagree with you, but at least here it’s usually not structured, and not done to serve some third-party narrative (though we did see some of that this weekend). I take the trouble to adjust my comments to be suitable for the community I’m in, but beyond that mostly I either leave toxic threads or if it’s bad, stay offline.
It’s a fact that in online spaces, you will encounter censorship of some sort, but in the Fediverse at least you can absolutely minimize that and still express yourself freely, I think. YMMV, of course. But please note that when I speak for myself, as I have been with you, self-awareness does not equal self-censorship, and obeying the rules as posted is the trade I make for being in a tolerable online space. When it doesn’t work out that way, I leave and find somewhere else, and I recommend the same strategy to you.
any place that’s apparently truly uncensored is slandered as just being where Nazis hang out
Lol, too true. Remember Voat? It really was a Nazi space, among other things. But that’s the paradox of tolerance at work: any decent place is going to have some modicum of moderation (or, as some consider it, censorship), or you end up with Voat, where it really was just a cesspit.
So to me it’s not a matter of avoiding all moderation, it’s a matter of picking the instance that matches your own needs and preferences, and then – above all else – taking the time and trouble to curate your own feed, blocking communities and users that don’t suit. To me, to take your example, I don’t mind learning about other worldviews, so the Marxist/communist/anarchist doesn’t bother me at all, but if they did I’d block them.
It does take work and some maintenance, but it’s very doable, I think.
Mastodon is a Twitter alternative.
I meant more like a forum kind of thing; I’m already technically on Mastodon but that style doesn’t really engage me. Also, is it not censored just like Lemmy?
I think less so since it’s just a bunch of individual accounts.
https://ask.metafilter.com/ is from back in the day. Don’t how active it is nowadays.
We need more community defense classes now more than ever. For Alex Pretti. For Renee Nicole Good.
Medical professionals are typically very ethical people who believe that the right for medical care applies to the worst criminals the same as to a president, and they would uphold that belief even if said criminals executed their own FOR helping their fellow humans. (*)
But that is a belief which is hard to understand for a fascist. Who would they trust with their wounded once things escalate into a civil war? Seems unlikely that someone would risk pushing a pillow over a patient’s face, but what if wounds have a higher rate of infection, surgeries fail etc.? Not intentionally, of course, but who could manage to keep operating at perfect precision while staring at the ICE uniform all while having traumatic flashbacks from videos of their coworker being executed?
(*) Also my belief, to be clear; punishment must be lawful following due process. Even Hitler should have been patched up had he survived his suicide attempt, morphine and everything.
May you rest in peace Alex.
As a fellow nurse and protest participant, my heart fucking bleeds for you, Alex.
A moment of silence is nice. Moments of noise are necessary.
I really appreciate the guides!
I think it would be worth posting each one as a separate post, maybe on [email protected]? It’s a large community, just make sure to use an appropriate title to meet their requirements.
It would focus the discussion on each topic and maybe get some location specific recommendations. Also you could link back to this post for anyone that misses the other guides
That’s a really excellent idea, thank you for the suggestion! I’ll work on doing that over the next few days :D
Alex Pretti and Renee Good will not be last people we will have to mourn
They weren’t even the first? Damn does everyone just ignore the non-white victims or what.
Silverio Villegas González, An unnamed 31-year-old Mexican man, and Keith Porter all shot by ICE. Not to mention the many deaths in the camps.
I read some comments before about how racist America is that they started mobilisation with Reneé, and not mention this before because they weren’t white. So yeah, kinda. Still shitty but it kinda sours the movement when they only name the whites.
plus the rapes going on, during an ice arrest. remember that post was uploaded when a ice pig followed a woman into the portapotty that he arrested while the other guy in the car sit as a lookout. almost no posts on social media was even questioning it. it was on reddit 1 or 2 days, but it vanished.
Damn does everyone just ignore the non-white victims or what.
I wouldn’t be surprised if them not being white led to significantly less coverage, which may explain why I was not aware of them until your comment now (I almost exclusively get my news from lemmy, so if I miss a post about something here, I tend to be unaware of it). I recall seeing a headline that a couple people were killed by ICE I think a day after Renee was killed as well, but I do not know their names either.
Alex Pretti and Renee Good are as far as I know the two most high profile deaths due to their violent executions being on film and widely spread (being white and middle class probably helped that a bit), enough to where it would be posted frequently enough to lemmy that I became aware of the killings.
Thanks for mentioning the names of those others killed by ICE, both for myself and for anyone else who may have missed the news of their deaths. I’ll add them to my post.
Yeah I mean it’s hard to image race doesn’t have an impact but I’m not sure it was the biggest one here. Most of the other victims died off camera and there was no way to contest the regime narrative. If there was another case that was filmed this clearly please correct me but I have not seen any.
Same reason George Floyd was a much bigger deal than other victims of the police. It was just so intimate and obvious that he was murdered that it was impossible to turn away or doubt what happened to him.
This kind of comment is really off-putting when we are all allies here, regardless of race, gender, sexual identity.
It’s like trying to further divide. Seems counterproductive.
I kinda agree, but you got to understand their frustration when the only names being named are the white people that died.
Acknowledging it isn’t counter productive, they are not saying to stop the reporting on Reneé and Alex, they are saying that maybe also report the other ones. There is no divide.
You say that you are all allies, but that’s not what we see, because the response to nonwhite murders is not the same. You can keep what you are doing while also acknowledging that you should do better. It’s fine.
apparently mexicans aren’t people :/
spoiler
/s
Had to be a cishet white man for enough people to care.
Imagine fighting in the gender instead of the class wars. Absolute 🤡.
We live in a clown population. Mock for mock innit. Hope you’re doing work on the ground and this isn’t your activism 🫶
and a white women, eventhough she was lgbtq+
With incontrovertible video evidence
😭😭😭
Your spoiler tags aren't working
You’ve got to add a space between the three colons and the word ‘spoiler’
Hm, it seemed to work fine on my end in the standard browser lemmy-UI, are you viewing from a mobile app?
Cheers for the heads up though, edited the post to add the spaces.
Jerboa.
Now the spoilers work; but their titles are hidden. Gotta remove the second space after ‘spoiler’
Three colons, one space, the word ‘spoiler’, one more space, then your title.
Only the first spoiler had that extra space after the spoiler, so I’m surprised the other 3 are blank. Is it working now?
Perhaps it’s because I have an emoji in the title, or that they are bolded in markdown? They’ve always looked and worked correctly for me even with the incorrect formatting on browser and the voyager app, so I think that may be a bug in Jerboa.
Hmm, still looks the same…
Test Title 👍
Is this working?
/edit its the text formatting messing it up. No bold/italics
Ah, good to know! Thanks for testing that. I removed the bold from them. If you have a github account, you may want to open a bug report for Jerboa that it can’t render bold or italics in spoiler tags.
Also wanted to say the same
That they are/were not working for you either? Are you viewing it from a lemmy mobile app or a web browser?
It’s working now!
This is a great post. I think it would reach a much wider audience if it were posted in a different, more relevant comm and had a title that indicated its nature better.
The main point of the post is the picture of Pretti’s colleagues, I just figured I’d add the guides to the post body for any who are interested in effective ways to resist as a bonus.
you guys really want to turn every single com into a USA politics one don’t you?
remember, fox news exists because Rupert Murdoch was allowed to be a heinous piece of shit in Australia.
wat?
