I started protesting when I was twelve years old. My older brother was in college and he took me to march against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I believed what everyone told me: that if enough people showed up, if we made enough noise, the people in power would have to listen.
The war dragged on for twenty years.
Then came the next wave. Occupy Wall Street put inequality on the national agenda. We took over parks. We made the news. We owned the conversation. And then the bankers got golden parachutes.
Black Lives Matter brought millions into the streets after George Floyd’s murder. The largest protest movement in American history. While important victories were won, the police state of 2025 is inarguably more advanced and powerful than ever in our nation’s history.
We all watched Trump attempt an insurrection, avoid prosecution for four years, and become president again.
A million Iraqis dead. Wars around the world continuing in the name of protecting corporate profits. Epstein’s buddies get to run the government and control the organizations that are supposed to hold them accountable.
So here we are. Jeff Bezos looks at our protests like a thirsty shopkeep hoping to sell more products to both the protesters and the police.
I’ve spent my life being mentored by activists. I’ve met people at Veterans for Peace who have been protesting every war since Korea. They’re still showing up. I’m deeply grateful for their dedication, but dedication has never been the problem.
The model is the problem.
This isn’t an anti-activism piece. But we must acknowledge that our law enforcement has literally been training with Mossad (Israeli Intelligence.) They know the plays and have been studying them for years.
Look up “kettling.” That’s when police form lines around a protest, box everyone in with no way out, then gradually compress the space so they can tear gas, beat, and arrest protesters who have nowhere to run.
They’ve built plenty of prisons and they want the whole nation to be one. It doesn’t insult people who have done the work to say the fascists have been studying us. The ultra-wealthy worldwide are comfortably united, not along national boundaries, but along exploitative ones. And let me tell you, they have our number. They aren’t scared by people in the street. It doesn’t do what it used to do. Erica Chenoweth, whose research shaped a generation of activist strategy, has said it directly: authoritarians are getting more effective at controlling people. We too must evolve.
We have been trained to be supplicants. We petition power. We appeal to power. We protest, which is essentially asking power to notice our displeasure and choose to respond. The entire framework assumes we are outside the room where decisions happen, and the best we can do is knock loudly and hope someone opens the door.
To put it plainly, things have exclusively gotten worse for a long time. It’s a sunk cost and we must evolve if we want to turn the tides.
Meanwhile, intelligence agencies approach their targets very differently. They don’t beg. They don’t write letters asking hostile actors to reconsider their choices. They study what works. They gather information. They identify vulnerabilities. They apply pressure through coordinated operations. They get inside their target’s head and take up residence there.
We need to learn what operatives know.
I was trained in investigations and intelligence. I’ve studied how OSINT, HUMINT, and SIGINT work. What I’ve learned is that we’re fighting pepper spray with prose.
An operative understands exactly how power works in their specific context. They have the skills to independently gather intelligence and act effectively. An operative can make their target organization, or individual, feel the consequences of their choices every single day.
I want to be completely clear. I don’t advocate for violence. Not because I have a moral problem with violence. I don’t advocate for violence because the evidence unequivocally shows it is ineffective against authoritarian movements. If it worked I’d encourage it. It doesn’t. So I don’t. What works is making power too costly to exercise. What works is making them think about you when they’re trying to fall asleep.
The shift is not about caring more. We already care. We understand the stakes. The shift is from expressing political opinions to conducting political operations. They use these tactics to destabilize democratic nations; we must use them to reinstall one.
I wrote a field guide for making this transformation. It treats political action with the operational rigor of intelligence tradecraft. Not academic theory. Not therapeutic self-care advice. Not vague exhortations to show up and hope. Step-by-step instructions for gathering intelligence on politicians and their networks, getting access to their world, applying sustained pressure they cannot escape, and knowing when it’s working.
And you don’t have to start from scratch. You can find the free booklet by clicking anywhere on this sentence.
We also have The Existentialist Republic Discord, where we are building a shared library with members contributing what they’ve learned. The research you need might already be there. And when you find something new, you add it for the next person.
The guide teaches you to think like an operative. So what does that look like in practice? Ted Cruz may not have a conscience. But he has a career he wants to protect. He has donors he needs to keep comfortable. He has a schedule he wants to control. He has a sense of himself as someone in command of his environment.
We can take that from him.
That is a threat, just not an illegal one. You are not free from the repercussions of your actions. The public can make accountability inevitable.
We can have a free and just nation to live in, should we be willing to create one.
We can become the thing corrupt politicians think about when they’re trying to fall asleep.
Again, not through anything illegal. Through information, coordination, and relentless pressure. Through making it clear that their actions have consequences. We show up with such consistency and precision that they know they are seen.
The guide is called Being Dangerous: How to Go from Activist to Operative.
No more safe spaces for fascists.
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Christopher, thank you for this. It’s a bracing, honest post, and I mean that as praise. You’re naming something many people feel but don’t yet have language for, the grief of having shown up faithfully for decades only to realize that sincerity alone doesn’t move hardened power.
What you’re really naming here isn’t the failure of protest, but the exhaustion of a model that no longer imposes cost on power.
I appreciate that you refuse the easy dodge. You don’t dismiss protest as foolish, and you don’t sneer at the people who’ve been carrying this work for a lifetime. You name the truth more carefully than that. Dedication and care were never the problem. Asymmetry was. Power studied us while we kept repeating ourselves.
That’s not an insult to activists. It’s a recognition of how uneven the terrain became while we were busy proving our sincerity.
I want to underline something important in what you’re saying, because it’s where this conversation can either mature or drift into misunderstanding. The shift you’re calling for isn’t about intimidation or menace. It’s about legitimacy. It’s about withdrawing the quiet permission that allows corrupt power to operate comfortably, unremarked, and unbothered.
Authoritarian systems don’t just survive because they’re brutal. They survive because they’re normalized. Because their actions don’t feel costly. Because consequences arrive late, diffuse, or not at all. What you’re pointing toward is not fear as a tactic but friction as a condition. Making abuse of power less convenient. Less invisible. Less restful.
That’s the real battlefield.
Where I’d gently widen the frame is this: protest didn’t fail because it was naïve. Protest failed because it became untethered from leverage. Protest without follow-through becomes ritual. Signal without consequence becomes spectacle. But protest paired with sustained, lawful pressure, documentation, exposure, institutional resistance, and memory becomes something else entirely. It becomes denial of consent.
And that line matters. Not because we’re squeamish, but because legitimacy is still terrain we can contest. The danger, of course, is mistaking effectiveness for righteousness, which is how resistance curdles into imitation. The goal isn’t to mirror the psychology of domination. It’s to make domination harder to exercise without consequence. Publicly. Ethically. Persistently.
I also want to say this plainly: your insistence on nonviolence isn’t moral posturing. It’s strategic clarity. Violence hands authoritarians exactly what they want. What they can’t tolerate is being seen clearly, tracked patiently, and challenged relentlessly inside the systems they depend on for cover, credibility, and continuity.
Information. Coordination. Memory. Presence that doesn’t go away.
That work isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t trend well. It doesn’t offer the emotional release people are often craving. But it does something far more destabilizing to illegitimate power. It makes it feel watched. It makes it feel constrained. It makes it feel expensive.
So yes, the model has to evolve. Not toward rage, and not toward despair, but toward seriousness. Toward civic adulthood. Toward the long discipline of refusing to let corruption rest comfortably in the dark.
Caring loudly was never enough. Caring wisely might be.
I’m grateful you wrote this. It advances the conversation without pretending the moment is easier than it is. And it invites people not just to care more, but to act with intention.
Your history is so inspiring and makes me have even more confidence in you. I have also been an activist for many decades. I downloaded the book and I am thrilled to have another one of yours. This piece you wrote is real, terrifying and still empowering. That’s what I look for.