Resistance isn't futile, it's essential

Last week, I went to a town hall meeting held by longtime Democrat Congressman Mike Thompson. I was there along with 400 other supremely pissed off people, looking for creative ideas on how to respond to the unraveling of our democracy. 

We didn't hear any. Like so many Democratic politicians, Thompson seems completely incapable of grasping the reality that is so clear to anyone who breathes oxygen but lives outside the beltway. 

We came looking for a fight. Instead, we got platitudes and tepid encouragement. He urged us to call friends trapped in red districts to petition their MAGA congresshumans, and suggested maybe we can flip enough swing seats to retake control of the House in 2026. As if there's going to be anything left to save in two years.

As usual, the Democrats are bringing a rulebook to a gun fight. 

The good news? That there were 400+ people motivated enough to attend this meeting and others like it. The other semi good news: The realization that we can no longer wait for the Dems in DC to do anything worthwhile. It's all on us. 

And We the People are responding.

Viva la resistance

You've probably seen this response already. Earlier this week, muckraking journalist Marisa Kabas posted this on her Bluesky feed:

Finally, a deep fake we can all get behind. What makes the 11-second video disturbing yet believable is how much Faux Trump is really into AI Musk's toe jam. [1] 

Mockery may be our best weapon against these mooks. Remember how badly they lost their shit when Tim Walz called them 'weird'? 

Earlier this week, a group of recently axed National Park employees displayed an enormous US flag upside down —-a distress signal, as any sailor and/or corrupt Supreme Court justice can tell you — at El Capitan in Yosemite. 

A similarly inverted flag was unfurled outside the US State Department in DC.

One of the most surprising resistance groups is Alt National Park Service, which formed during the first months of Trump I in 2017 and now boasts more than 3 million members on Facebook. [2] They have been keeping track of crimes committed by the ruling junta as well as acts of courage and defiance in response.

Check out what ANPS posted on Bluesky in response to Musk's Ketamine-fueled directive demanding federal employees to list five things they got done last week.  

Here's something they posted on their Facebook group page while I was writing this:

Rather than violate their oath or comply with Musk’s illegal requests, 21 civil service employees resigned today from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (formerly the United States Digital Service), stating they would not use their technical expertise to dismantle critical public services. 

“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” the 21 staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter.

Many of the resigning staffers had previously held senior roles at major tech companies such as Google and Amazon before joining the government out of a deep commitment to public service.

There's also the seven career prosecutors who resigned rather than drop federal corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams. Quitting your job in protest is a true act of courage. Bravo to all of them. 

See you in court

Christina Pagel, a professor at University College London, has been tracking the 75+ responses to Trump's blatantly illegal policies, mostly legal actions taken by advocacy groups and states attorneys general, and put them into a series of Venn diagrams you'd need an electron microscope in order to read.

Just Security has a running guide to all the resistance litigation here. [3] As The Atlantic's Quinta Jurecic writes, some of these suits are having an effect:

Courts have prevented Trump from dismissing a government watchdog without explanation and granted restraining orders barring the administration from slashing funds for crucial scientific research. They have prevented Musk’s team from meddling with Treasury Department systems and insisted that the government halt its transfer of an incarcerated transgender woman to a men’s prison. Four separate judges have issued orders requiring the government to stand down on its effort to dismantle birthright citizenship. 

The point is, there's been a lot of pushback — much more than you've heard about if you only consume mainstream media — and it's starting to have an impact. Trump's (and Musk's) approval ratings are already starting to drop, barely a month into his coup term. All presidents experience a bump after inauguration and then a decline, but I can't remember it ever happening this quickly.

After getting an earful from pissed-off constituents at town halls, a handful of Congressional Republicans briefly located their testicles.   

(Wake me up when one of them is brave enough to say this stuff on Fox or NewsMax.) 

You know who else is resisting? This guy.

What can YOU do?

The first thing everyone can do is vote with their wallets.

This Friday, February 28, Al Sharpton, the NAACP, and others have called for a 24-hour 'blackout' of mega corporations that gutted their Diversity, Inclusion & Equality programs shortly after Mango Man took office. They include: 

• Amazon

• Meta (Facebook, Instagram)

• Google

• McDonald's

• Target

• Walmart

Don't visit their stores, don't use their services, try to lay off the BBQ Bacon Quarter Pounders for a day. It's not hard.

Personally, I've cut Bezos and his associated entities — Amazon, Prime Video, Audible, Goodreads, Whole Foods, the Washington Post — completely out of my economic diet. Aside from the fact I have to wait two weeks instead of two days for my online orders to arrive, it hasn't been that bad. (As Gloria Gaynor once sang, I Will Survive.) 

Meta is dead to me. I'm working on de-Googling — more on that in a future post. Will this devastate the bottom lines of these insanely profitable corporations? Not any time soon. But it's a start.

More important, take your dollars to businesses that haven't pulled down their trousers, bent over, and said "Please sir, may I have another?" They include: Apple, Ben & Jerry's, Costco, and Delta Airlines. 

Who doesn't want to eat more more Ben & Jerry's? 

What else can you do? Here's a document containing a long list of actions people can take that don't involve voting or protesting.

Or, as writer Judith Levine suggests in The Guardian, we could all stop paying our federal taxes. If billionaires can do it, why not the rest of us?

But if tax evasion is a secretive act, tax resistance is civil disobedience, a public, political act. The reason to withhold your taxes is not to cheat the government of much-needed funds. It is not even to cheat the crooks now running the country, satisfying as that may be. It is to expose the criminality of what is being done – and not done – with the money the state has a legal and moral obligation to collect and then to distribute, to serve all the people. 

The thing about public displays of resistance, even seemingly inconsequential ones like Donnie suckling Elon's bunions or the distress flag on El Capitan, is that they demonstrate defiance — and wannabe autocrats hate defiance. 

They're counting on people to meekly comply in advance, like the soulless bed-wetting executives at Amazon, Google, Meta, and so on. Authortarianism works by intimidation. Government bullies come down really hard on a handful of people and hope the rest fall in line. But when "the rest" is millions who refuse to comply, their authority shrivels.

How are you planning to resist? Share your ideas in the comments or email me at my NEW address: [email protected]. 

[1] I'll wager the HUD deep fakers took some inspiration from the AppleTV show "Silo," in which a contraband video of the world outside the Silo is displayed on everyone's screens until the evil IT department shuts it down. 

[2] Hat tip to reader KD for alerting me to Alt National Park Service.

[3] Will Trump et al simply defy the courts and continue taking a sledgehammer to our Constitution? Maybe. But perhaps that will inspire a few more Republicans to locate their cojones.