Forward: I mentioned in my introduction that I am an informal organizer in formal spaces. It is an unenvious position, but I believe strategically it is important for certain things. Mainly to be the random insidious person going, “these are kind people, but this shit seems futile, right? Like we can do something better?” which has been effective in building out a community that I believe is capable of many things. This also means I typically write analysis for “movement” people on what is happening. There was a request to write on the Insurrection Act. I wrote it intending to be a formal memo to the non-profit movement types, immediately got annoyed, and went on a tangent. I figured it was no longer worth giving them because of my critiques and concerns on strategy. Rather than change it up, I am offering it here in its entirety. For timeline purposes, I wrote this on April 9th.
The Insurrection Act (IA) is coming on April 20th or sometime shortly thereafter
Trump has publicly stated that he may not even need the IA, but whether this is grandstanding or something his legal advisors have concluded is yet to be seen. When discussing the IA, there is a lot of phrasing around martial law and incredible dystopian visions, but these broad strokes make it a bit of a challenge to ask, how does this change the landscape in which we resist? The devil is in the details and with little to no information at this time, we can only assume what the devil may look like. This is one such attempt. I will break it down into three groupings: the lead up, the border and beyond, and next steps. To be abundantly clear: my breakdown of the Insurrection Act and its lead up is akin to a memo, but my recommendation on next steps is a lot more radical.
The Lead Up
Trump’s intended use of the Insurrection Act did not begin with his day one executive order on returning to office, rather it happened much earlier. It began in his first term, where he wanted to use it, but did not have the support of his SecDec or military leadership. This failure very explicitly shaped how he would attempt to approach it again in his second term with the help of the Center for Renewing America’s (CRA) Russel Vought, a Christian Nationalist who worked on Project 2025 and is now the current director of the Office of Management and Budget, along with Jeffrey Clark, a fellow at CRA who was Trump’s lead in attempting to overturn the election and was indicted as a result. Clark is particularly nefarious, when he was told that Trump refusing to leave office would cause riots, his response was “That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act”. Clark was identified as the lead Trump official on the Insurrection Act, who has managed to keep incredibly low on the radar (comparatively) to a point there is little public information that Clark has actually been appointed to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, an obscure, but important element to the American Empire’s function.
Vought literally stated in a public recording that CRA was working to build a “shadow” Office of Management and Budget, a “shadow” Office of Legal Counsel, so that they could upon immediately being elected remove and address legal barriers that would block Trump’s strategies. These people wrote the EOs and every other legal piece to come from the Trump admin, by their own standards this is an 180 Day Blitz which would place us at the end of June. If the IA passes at the end of April, it would hold the space of the last two months of that blitz, so we are either seeing an immediate ramp up at the end of April or the IA serves as the next-phase following the legal blitz, which would place it as really hitting the streets by June. My personal assumption is closer to April or beginning of May due to current ICE actions.
This lead up would be dishonest if I only discussed how we got here by providing an analysis of Trump and his fascists. The road the fascists are taking to power had its very bricks laid by Democrats and Republicans alike. Not only did they lay these bricks, but the American left has done little to remove these bricks and begin to weaponize them. It is not enough to discuss the successes of Empire in its pursuit of domination, we must own where we failed, especially if we failed on our own accord.
The bulk of the left, regardless of ideology, has been consumed uncritically by a conception of mass movement. That we need more people if we are to do anything. It makes sense, especially as our politic centers community, so why wouldn’t we need more? The problem is that the anti-war movement against the Iraq War should have proven to us that our over-centering of mass movement means little to nothing if we do nothing with it. They were the largest protests within American history and yet, what did they do for Iraq? We could’ve had zero protests and achieved the exact same outcome. Its energies and momentums were redirected into worthless avenues of change: anti-war political candidates, “non-violent direct action” which is really just a defanged version of what NVDA used to be, and a bitter resentment of the American left’s inability to do anything.
Are we really going to build another largest protest in history that again accomplishes nothing? The fundamental problem is that our reliance on mass movement as our driving force is similar to that of another problem I will discuss later in that: it is not about having a “mass” movement. It is about having enough people that we can feel confident about creating change and taking action. That is the problem though, it is a strategy guided by a feeling, a feeling ultimately resting on overcoming anxiety and fear. It is abstract, immaterial, and fleeting. Our strategy has never been dictated by “what if this is all that we have, what can we do with it? ” because that is a terrifying conception.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that’s what the now demands. We must fly into action, without confidence, without mass, with terror and fear in our hearts, but we must act anyways because we are on a timer. We’ve been on a timer. Really, we should’ve had a timer before, but the victims of imperialism never warranted it for the American left, the genocide in Palestine never made a sense of urgency beyond the usual sit ins, the ecological collapse seems to not be at the forefront of the pop left’s minds, and now that fascism is home to roost, this is the moment in which we either recognize there is an urgency in how we move or we lose. We lose lose. Our failures rolled out the carpets for this to happen and we are to blame as much as the actors who pushed us towards this because we simply refused to treat the moment with the urgency that was warranted. This is our karma for our ineptitude.
The Border and Beyond
The justification most publicly stated and within the executive order itself is that the Insurrection Act would be reviewed for use on the Southern Border. We know, frankly, that’s bullshit, but with the devil in the details, what will happen at the Border and how will that spill out? All of the fans of the Insurrection Act are currently in power and they are quieter than ever about it since the release of the executive order, it is impossible at this point to know what the April 20th report will contain.
About Face (AF) members wrote a situation report specifically on how the US military is all ready operating on the southern border. It also suggests what might be to come, but I’ll elaborate my thoughts here as concisely as I can in no particular order.
- Tom Homan, Obama’s former chief deporter and Trump’s border czar wanted to utilize the military in a way that wouldn’t require the Insurrection Act by having them take over the logistical elements to allow ICE to be more present on the streets doing enforcement. He saw it as a force multiplier when talking about this in November 2024. This is the current reality as of April 2025.
- In Nov of 2023, Stephen Miller told Charlie Kirk that he wanted to deputize National Guard as immigration enforcement officers within their respective states of neighboring states, with ICE leading operations and scaling up with National Guard. Both of these statements appear in a Center for Immigration Study report titled Don’t Fear the Insurrection Act, which is a fascist operation I won’t be sourcing
- We know the full administration has every intent to utilize the military as a force multiplier whether or not the IA is implemented. We know the administration wanted to use the IA on protestors during the George Floyd Rebellion. We know ICE is currently deporting US citizens to El Salvador, they are ignoring court orders to return people from El Salvador, and we know ICE is being weaponized against Palestinian organizers, union organizers, etc.
- We should have every assumption that if the IA is enacted, it will be under the pretense of “it isn’t enough to secure the southern border, we must secure every entrypoint into the US”.
- We should also have an assumption of military escalation. As mentioned in the above report, it is clear that the military is list-building “cartels” along the border, and nothing should be taken off the plate, everything should be assumed from actual on the ground assaults to drone strikes.
- Any solidarity with immigrants or Gaza will be utilized as justification alone for detainment, we see this all ready, but it will ramp up extremely and we can easily envision an entire solidarity encampment, like at Columbia University, simply disappeared. The Insurrection Act will be weaponized against anyone in these two camps (Palestine solidarity organizers and immigrants), but definitely not just these two, they are very much the temperature gauge for how much they can get away with.
Next Steps
To take a spin on Joseph Déjacque, in the beginning of this article, I had only wanted to analyze the Insurrection Act, and I’ve been led (by myself) to critique what we are currently doing and what we should do next. I’m going to be an asshole on a soap box here, but you are also choosing to read this, so either you can treat the first two pages as a primer, or you can get on board. If you feel a knee-jerk reaction to whatever I say, please just continue reading.
If the language deters you, then I find you already incapable of meaningfully resisting fascism, and I am uninterested in speaking to a wall, so begone. Either you will find out why you have the knee-jerk reaction or you’ll show yourself to be unmovable and therefore you’d be in the category of someone I’m not interested in organizing with in the first place.
If you believe in a legal solution, you are clinging to an illusion that is undermining you more than aiding you. There is no legal solution here, Malatesta, one of the original antifascists and anarchists, noted this in regards to the Italian fascists in “Why Fascism Won” in 1923. The socialist parties thought they could defeat fascism through the courts, through voting, and their failure to fight fascism would give way to the existence of fascism abroad in Germany. I would directly attribute that the legalitarian’s unwillingness to take the fight to the streets and over-emphasis on reform would provide such a meaningless resistance as to make the Holocaust inevitable.
We can and should take the blame when we refuse to fight and I mean fight. Marching is not fighting. These are parades at best, pathetic parades at worst. If your action tantamounts to a bad car accident, review said action. The best form of non-violent resistance, if I am to tolerate it, is the one that understands property destruction also falls under their purview. A pacifist should be actively, physically destroying the machines that enable fascism since they’re unwilling to fight the fascist themselves, otherwise they’re dead weight on the movement as an example of NVDA.
Again, we won’t win by sign holding in the streets, we won’t win by quirky sloganeering, and we won’t win by redeeming liberals, who were accomplices and enablers of this fascist boomerang up until they became its victims. I can already feel the knee jerk reaction to reading this and I don’t care. Actually, I do care, but more about the victims of the state than a feel good politic. We’re failing and we’re behind, but I have zero interest in giving up.
The Trump admin is interested in crisis making, but conspiracy theorists would have you believe crises are necessary to create legal justifications for repression, which is why they get so angry at “violent” protestors, by having an absolutely shit political analysis. The crisis making is not for legal justifications, it is simply to ensure a consolidation of their internal forces. The soldier questioning authority questions less when, in the act of repressing, those they see themselves as in a fraternal order with are harmed. The state doesn’t need to justify itself to you, again anarchists know this, the state is justifying itself to those who would carry out its orders. These are two different things.
Again, I can feel the knee jerk impulse. No, our strategy should not cater to that soldier either. Sure, there are folks who should agitate and best can, but the larger meta-strategy cannot be bothered to be concerned with strategy that would derail it for a more effective strategy. Often times I hear, “let’s not make perfect the enemy of action”, but really this is used to justify continuing the current shit strategies of resistance. I’m not asking for perfect, I am not asking to improve the current protest strategies, I am asking for a wholesale rejection, and I am asking for something else entirely.
So, what should be our next steps?
Ignore the conspiracy theorists, ignore the peace police, ignore the people who won’t risk going to a penal colony or die to resist Empire. If the Trump admin wants a crisis for internal justification, our job is not to pacify the crisis, but our job is to exacerbate it until it is out of his admin’s control. I said I am asking for a wholesale rejection, by that I mean, throw out the term de-escalation and plug in the word escalation.
If we aren’t moving fast, we aren’t moving at all.
Trump wants an economic crisis via tariffs? Great, let’s do his admin one better. We block the ports, we block the boats, we block the most high priority parts of logistics. If we shut down every port on the west coast for a sustained period of time, I’m talking weeks if not months, we would cripple the US economy that makes the fascists unable to act. If the unions won’t let us, ignore whatever radical laurels they had decades ago, their inaction over Palestine has proved how little worth they have, and they can either join us or we can simply work against them too.
“But wait, won’t that hurt us? “
There is no way in hell that fighting fascism we won’t be hurt. We fucked up, our ancestors fucked up, hurt is a guarantee now, but the question is, can we make them hurt more than we get hurt? As a chronically ill person who needs daily medications, if blocking the ports means I no longer have access to those medications, oh well. Yeah, it’ll suck, but my health is doomed anyways under fascism and capitalism, at least I’m hopefully taking these fucks with me or my community finds alternative means to provide for me. If you think there’s a safe way to fight back, just stand aside. We have everything to lose, but that has always been the reality and you just didn’t want to accept it.
“Won’t Trump use the military to re-secure the ports? “
That would be great if he tried to. It would mean pulling troops from operating under ICE, it would pull troops from the border, it would pull troops from abroad. This is our chance to undermine imperialism and border imperialism by causing a crisis that gets out of hand. We must be the crisis, we must control the tempo, and we can never let them catch up.
“Trump wants to use the Insurrection Act to effectively create a bigger police force.”
Great. We need to undermine the ability of the state to enforce itself. De-arresting, interrupting prison transports, shutting down airports. This is a surveillance-state, but let’s flood the surveillance feeds with drivel, with misinformation, with redirection, with the incomprehensible. We are mistaken if we treat this as a fight for territory, our goal should be to make as many pockets of physical space where the state simply cannot enforce itself, where cops fear to trend. ICE can’t deport a family if they’re afraid to go into the family’s neighborhood and, make no mistake, these people do feel fear. There’s just few who eagerly chose to make them afraid and if thousands more of us took on fear as an active project of liberation, they’d be a whole lot less effective.
“The cops are so violent-“
No. That stops now. We’ve created an imagined violence against protestors that is actually a fraction of what it was a century ago. Protestors a century ago were infinitely at more danger than we have been in decades. People like to bring up that rioters in Paris don’t have to be afraid of French police like we do American. To be frank, that is counter-insurgent propaganda. Plenty of people die abroad resisting their governments, Americans mainly find an excuse for cowardice, which is precisely why the first victims of the Trump admin are either non-Americans or Americans with dual citizenships, both because of the legal space they occupy, but the reality being that the majority of Americans are doing meaningless bullshit like a Hands Off protest.
Even among the American militants and radicals who do face high-risk shit and actual repression, the repression is over-stated. The Green Scare comes to mind and with all due respect to those comrades, just from experience in radical spaces, the total number of victims of the Green Scare is less than a fraction of a percent of the would-be militant population of Americans. We let horrific moments of repression unduly influence the rest of us, no matter how small they actually are in terms of numbers. It is bittersweet that I say this because the undue influence is directly related to our love for life and freedom, so yes, a few harmed is a big deal to us, but we need to contest with the reality we’ve let ourselves be scared into being overly cautious.
There is no way to fight fascism without a risk of bloodshed or deportation. None. There is no safe way about this. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you actually want to fight back, you have to come to terms with this. You will be going through a rapid set of growing pains in the next few months, you should’ve gone through them before, but since you want to be useful now, the pains are now.
For too-long we’ve coddled the very same people we expect to fight fascism and like a parent who prevented their child from experiencing the cruelty of the world and their place in it, we have set people up for failure. Despite having set people up for failure, we continue the same trends of interaction that we did in the first admin. That we shouldn’t shame people for how they protest, that we shouldn’t shame people for not knowing. I’ve seen the age demographics of those shit protests, the majority of them were adults in the first Trump admin too, and clearly these fucks did zero education considering Hands Off censored words like Gaza and were clearly a pro-Copmala crowd. These people are not our friends, by and large, maybe a few wayward souls or a few youths, but this is rooted in a mass movement politic that assumes, “if we do not have enough, we’re doomed to failure”. I am arguing that we will never have enough, that it is an abstraction that undermines organizing, and that our pursuit should be of willing people who clearly understand the threat, then centering strategy on that. Maybe more will learn and join us, maybe we actually all ready have enough, but if we don’t do something, if we are busy waiting to build mass, then we’re simply waiting for our turn in the camps.
So, in no particular order, even perhaps simultaneously:
1. Shut down the economy
2. Interfere with the ability of the state to enforce itself
3. Create alternative means of community support.
For 3, We cannot wait for this to commit to 1 and 2 or we risk the fight back never happening. This is often the biggest reason against inaction because we want all of our affairs in order. This is the actual “perfect” that is the enemy against action in many organizing spaces. If anything, 1 and 2 will exacerbate the necessity of 3, whereas 3 without 1 and 2 can fail simply on the complacency of community alone. Remove the ability to be complacent may force some hands, but action must happen even if all the supports are not in place. Everyone is so desperate for “dual-power” concepts or ways of providing material aid, but like mass action, this is actually a front for “I don’t want action until I’m in a position of comfort to do said action” which is illusory and stagnating. We have to reckon with engaging in the fight from a place of discomfort. We don’t have the numbers, the equipment, the anything, but if we wait for all of that to be ready to fight, then we won’t be ready at all, we’ll be late, and we’ll be lost.
People will use all kinds of disingenous analogies here, like building a boat in motion or something, but even prior to fascism, we ignored for a long time there is a timer on our work. The victims of American imperialism were never valued enough to be a timer, clearly as indicated by the largest protest in US history being against the Iraq war doing absolutely jack shit for Iraq, and so one may think that an ecological collapse or fascism would finally add a timer for how we organize, and it seemingly hadn’t. We do not have the luxury of time to build what we think is ideal to fight back, we never actually have, but the long-standing movement doctrine was this was a generations-long fight. Of course if you think this is a generations long fight you will have zero sense of fucking urgency to fight now. I’m here hoping you will realize the fight is now and our timer is out. We make do with what we have or we don’t make it out at all.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/declaring-a-national-emergency-at-the-southern-border-of-the-united-states/
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/04/jeffrey-clark-ethics-rules-00150631
https://archive.is/20240615160759/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/05/trump-revenge-second-term/#selection-1221.2-1221.43
https://www.sej.org/publications/watchdog/trump-pick-head-secretive-agency-adept-stifling-info-regs
https://www.propublica.org/article/video-donald-trump-russ-vought-center-renewing-america-maga