I Wrote a Book. Here's Why I'm Giving It Away.
Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Removing Fascism in America is a tactical manual for people who want to fight authoritarian consolidation and don’t know where to start, or who have been showing up and suspect the punches could land harder. Every tactic rests on documented evidence of what has worked to break authoritarian power, and the book gives anyone who reads it the tools to act the same week.
The core of the system is the Five Levers of Power: bureaucratic friction, economic pressure, reputation destruction, information warfare, and mass mobilization. Every successful opposition movement has pulled some arrangement of these levers, and the book breaks each one down to deployment.
One chapter covers donor accountability, tracing the money behind a political decision back to the people who wrote the checks. A reader who finishes on a Monday can pull state legislator donor filings by Tuesday, identify the largest corporate contributors by Wednesday, and launch a coordinated social media campaign by the weekend. The book cuts deep into strategic targeting, state-level opposition through Soft Secession, distributed activist networks, and long-term sustainability, because movements die when the people burn out.
The book pulls information from COINTELPRO, ACT UP, the Montgomery bus boycott, and Hungary’s failed opposition to Viktor Orbán. Hungary did everything by the institutional playbook, filing lawsuits, holding rallies, and fielding candidates, then lost it all in three years for never matching the speed of consolidation. ACT UP watched that failure kill people during the AIDS crisis and refused to repeat it, mounting one of the most tactically brilliant activist operations in American history by combining direct action with media warfare and relentless pressure on specific decision-makers until inaction cost more than action. The Montgomery bus boycott waged a 381-day economic war bleeding revenue from a transit system and every business depending on it until the financial math broke, and each of these movements deployed the same tools in different configurations with mechanics anyone can replicate.
Open this on a Tuesday. Place a targeted call by Thursday, file a public records request by Friday, and spend the weekend assembling a direct action operation with friends who have never touched organized resistance, because the tactics land in anyone’s grip.
Order a physical copy by clicking anywhere on this sentence. Press it into a friend’s hands or leave it on a table where a stranger will open the cover, because books get lent and left behind and picked up and every copy in circulation is compounding pressure.
I'm ordering your book, Chris, because I want to support the good and important work you are doing to help us navigate this difficult episode in our democracy. I will be sending out copies and forwarding your Substack to as many people as I can, with your permission, of course, because you are a voice that needs to be heard. Keep up the good work. You matter.
Outstanding work, Chris. Now we all need to promote the heck out of this.
Save democracy. Save the world.
This is it.