Have Fun Dismantling Fascism

It's been done. Here's how.

This article is adapted from my new booklet, “Grab Them by the E.A.R.R.: How to Make Politicians Do What You Want.” The full booklet is available as a free PDF download here: https://buymeacoffee.com/theer/e/487906

If you can contribute, please do. We are printing physical copies of relevant booklets and will be putting them directly into the hands of every state Attorney General, every Governor, and every state legislator in America. We are mailing them, handing them out at fundraisers and town halls, and distributing them to activists on the ground. We exclusively hire humans and use union labor wherever it’s available. Contribute here: https://buymeacoffee.com/theer

State legislators say that six to eight contacts on one side of an issue feels like a landslide of public opinion. Show up at their district office with four other people and staff starts sweating about reelection.

Six phone calls. Five people in a lobby. That is how thin the margin is between being ignored and being taken seriously.

We have been lied to about our own power because people with power benefit from us not using what we have.

I spent nearly a decade learning how power actually works. Air Force veteran, law enforcement, national security, politics. Training in behavioral intervention, open-source intelligence, and the mechanics of influence that stay buried in agency manuals most people never see. I learned how institutions move, and I learned what makes the people who run them nervous.

Then I watched good people waste years on activism that accomplishes nothing. Marches that feel good as regressive policies were passed. Petitions that get filed in the trash. Phone calls made once, then never again. Organizations that spend 95 percent of their energy on bylaws and board meetings and 5 percent on actual pressure. People who show up for one protest, see no immediate result, and conclude the whole thing is rigged.

The system is rigged. But we can still win.

It moves every single day for lobbyists. It moves for organized money. It moves for anyone who shows up consistently, knows exactly who to pressure, stays on message, and never stops. The people who run things are not geniuses. They are not invincible. Politicians are busy and frequently lazy. They are terrified of losing their jobs, and they will move if you make standing still more painful than moving.

I wrote a booklet to make that happen. It is called “Grab Them by the E.A.R.R.” Educate yourself on the targets and who funds them. Activate by showing up and applying pressure. Recruit others so it multiplies. Repeat until we have toppled tyrants and their grand old parties.

Here is what makes it different from everything else you have read about civic engagement.

It is leaderless. Not because leaders get targeted, though they do. Because requiring leaders is a bottleneck. It limits who can participate and when. This model has no bottleneck. You figure out what you can sustain and you do it. Others do the same. No permission needed. No gatekeepers. No waiting for someone to tell you it is time to start.

It balances independence with collaboration. You can act alone, right now, on your own initiative. You can also coordinate when it helps, collaborate when it makes sense, invite people to participate, and accept invitations. But you never need permission or orders to be an effective activist. You never wait for approval. The choice to act is always yours.

It flips the ratio. Traditional activism tells you to form an organization, file for 501c3 status, elect a board, draft bylaws, get permits. Most organizations spend 95 percent of their effort on this bureaucracy and 5 percent on actual pressure. This model inverts that. 95 percent action. The rest takes care of itself.

It is designed for the long haul. The goal is sustained pressure at an intensity you can maintain for years. Start with five minutes a day. One phone call. One email. That is enough to build the habit. Once the habit exists, you expand. You are not sprinting toward a single event. You are training in a practice that becomes part of who you are.

It is self-multiplying. Each person brings in others. Not through campaigns or advertisements, but through relationships. You invite a friend into something you are already doing. They invite someone else. The network grows through people who actually know each other, which makes it resilient in ways top-down organizations never are.

And the math is on our side. A hundred persistent people can shape policy for a town. A thousand for a city. Ten thousand for a state. We don’t need a majority. We need a committed minority that never stops.

It works. Political scientist Erica Chenoweth studied 323 campaigns across a century and found nonviolent movements succeed more than twice as often as violent ones. The civil rights movement took fourteen years. Marriage equality took eleven. They won because they outlasted everyone who told them there was no chance. And 83 percent of the movements Chenoweth studied that succeeded never hit the famous 3.5 percent threshold. They still won.

The booklet gives you everything. How to find your targets and who funds them in fifteen minutes. How to hit them on every platform simultaneously so they cannot escape. How to structure demands with deadlines that pin them down. How to escalate when nothing moves. How to contact their donors and create friction that travels back fast. How to work local media so their name shows up in print attached to your issue. How to file public records requests that make officials realize they are being investigated. How to recruit so the pressure compounds instead of burning out.

Download it. Read it. Use it. Share it.

The system counts on us giving up. Most people do. They try once, see no immediate result, and conclude it does not work. They were never a threat.

The threat is the person who keeps showing up after the first setback, and the tenth, and the fiftieth. The person who understands that fighting is winning. Every hour they spend dealing with you is an hour they are not spending on something worse. Every sleepless night you cause is a victory. Every resource they burn responding to pressure is a resource they cannot use against us. And sometimes they actually face consequences. The threat is the person who treats this like a fun practice instead of an occasional burden.

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Grab Them by the E.A.R.R.” is available as a free download here: https://buymeacoffee.com/theer/e/487906

If you can contribute, here is what your money funds:

We are printing physical copies and distributing them to every state Attorney General, every Governor, and every state legislator in America. We are mailing copies directly. We will also be organizing distribution at fundraisers, town halls, and public events so these booklets end up in the hands of both politicians and the constituents pressuring them. This is all in service of building a grassroots network so activists across the country have physical copies to hand out. We are also working on an entire distributed activist toolkit based off of these principles.

This takes printing, postage, logistics, and labor. We exclusively hire humans and use union labor wherever it is available.

Contribute here: https://buymeacoffee.com/theer

If you cannot contribute financially, download the booklet, use it, and share it. That is what the whole system is built for.

We can do this.