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Five Steps To Resist The Coming Tyranny
Adopt These Urgent Immediate Actions to Safeguard Yourself, Your Family & America
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Photo: The French TV Show “Un Village Francais” showed how the average French citizen endured a compliant tyrranical government overwatched by the Nazis.
As you know, I have been a practitioner of intelligence collection and secret activities for over thirty years. But I have also been an ardent student of the World War Two French resistance in Nazi-occupied France. The American people can learn lessons from how French society stood firm in the face of tyranny.
Why France Resisted Tyranny
On May 10, 1940, the armies of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded France, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and Belgium. Three countries were subjugated within days. France finally capitulated after a month’s combat. A new French government was quickly formed to collaborate with the Nazis under a former decorated WWI General, Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, and Pierre Laval, the day-to-day administrator. They administered France from their chosen capitol, the centrally located resort and spa city of Vichy. The Vichy French worked hand in hand with Germany to occupy virtually every city and created hated paramilitary militia groups to assist the Gestapo in rooting out all opposition and sending Jews to concentration camps.
France suffered a bruising military defeat, but the people were not all subjugated. The nation broke down into three general categories of political opinion:
1) Collaborators - Those who obeyed and cooperated with the Germans. They were generally pro-fascists who admired their strength and proximity to Hitler’s power.
2) Apathetics - People who were tired of war and lived their lives within the occupation but took no action to hinder the Vichy government or antagonize the Nazi army. They could not be relied upon to be sympathetic to anything that did not immediately improve their lives financially.
3) Resisters - Many loyal French citizens saw the surrender, occupation, and collaboration with the Germans as vile and treasonous. Almost without prompting, these citizens of France chose to resist by all means necessary. At first, they chose passive resistance and clandestine propaganda campaigns until they were organized to fight back. Then, with the assistance of Britain, America, and the exiled Free French government, they formed a secret, armed underground army called the Maquis.
Facing The Coming American Dictatorship
The Impending rise of an American dictatorship under the Trump regime has familiar themes in the nazi occupation of France. The Vichy government was full of incompetent yes men and women who sold the soul of France and eventually sent tens of thousands, especially Jews and partisans, to their deaths. A tyrannical rule was the way Hitler gained the compliance of the French upper class and enforced ruthless draconian laws that led most French people to reject their governance and move from passive pushback to active resistance.
Make no mistake, we, the American people, are entering into a four-year tyranny never before seen in our history. We just do not know how bad it will get, but remember, a minority of the electorate (just 31%!) voted in a wanton authoritarian to run actively on a campaign to wreak revenge on his enemies. Now that he has that power, we must assume he intends to use all levers, including the military, to do evil.
But we cannot wait for an outright tyranny to affect our lives before a resistance loyal to the Constitution forms. No, we cannot. It is the job of the citizens who will live under this tyranny to prepare to carry out acts of resistance, no matter how small, and illustrate the lawlessness of this dictator’s incoming regime.
Here are Five steps to help you.
Step 1 - Adopt a Resistance Posture (RP)
Your Resistance Posture (RP) is an active decision you will make about what the face of your compliance or opposition to the Trump regime will look like. It is also about how far you will go to make your displeasure known. Most people should adopt a secret resistance posture. This means to carry out opposition in a way that is not known to your coworkers or the greater public. This may appear cowardly, but you cannot react to conditions you do not know about.
The most important aspect of setting your RP is collecting information, sharing accurate intelligence, and raising self-awareness about what is happening to you locally and nationally. During the initial phase of the regime’s establishment, the highest quality information must be collected and prepared for potential hardship to one’s family, community, and livelihood.
The regime will want you to be bereft of precise information and wallowing in disinformation, lies and conspiracy theories. Do not be fooled by this. They will most likely force news media to comply or even remove alarming stories that could directly impact your life.
Before you set your RP, it would be best if you also assumed the government is now going to be turned into a weapon against you. Make sure your RP is as bland as possible unless you choose, like me, to be publicly and openly defiant. Before you do that, note that these agencies may soon become enemies or surveillance arms of the Trump regime.
TAXES: Make sure your taxes are paid, and your relationship with the IRS has no basis for attacking you.
TRAVEL: This week, coming from Canada, the Customs & Border Patrol adopted a much heavier and more aggressive interrogation of everyone crossing from Montreal, particularly me. Without orders, the CBP officers have already assumed Trump’s attitude toward borders. They even gave my dogs a hassle.
LAW ENFORCEMENT: While State and federal law enforcement may be more challenging to turn, one must assume that local police & sheriffs have a highly political mind. If they feel the President of the United States may protect them, they may not see abusing their office as unlawful. Be mindful of how you drive and interact with law enforcement officers. It’s terrible to say this, but if you’re a liberal in America and have a high-profile RP, you should expect to be treated like a black man.
Step 2 - Stop Debating Maga & Use Simpler Speech
The reason Democrats lost in 2024 was that the Republicans manipulated the population into believing that their plain speech gave them strength. Like the New Yorker cartoon of the sheep looking at the billboard of the wolf as a politician, and liking his catchphrase “I will eat you ” because he is “telling it like it is.”
The simple framework for simple minds to consume complex ideas is called Meta-narrative framing.
We must tear a page from the MAGA playbook sheet and throw it back in the faces. MAGA has always loved the fact that progressives, Democrats, and others seek to engage in a civilized, rational discussion in which logic, truthful arguments, and reality will win the debate. Watch their pundits on CNN or Fox; they will listen carefully and launch into a firehose of simple-to-consume lies. They’re not debating you; they’re using your goodwill as a weapon to show you are weak and “wordy.”
On the contrary, the extremist right shouts out short, easily digestible slogans Walmart shoppers can understand while liberals present thousands of hours of discussion about their meaningful policy. They. Do. Not. Care! This is where they set the framework around the voters who either did not show up or who now hate liberals.
You are to stop arguing with MAGA this very minute. No more debate. No more discussions. You have to put the metanarrative around your opponent before he does it to you.
“Make America Great Again.” is the Trump Mega-metanarrative. Those with him don’t care about any policy, discussions, policy positions, or really any details about how he will achieve that goal. They like the emotion of it. As one commentator put it in the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump was held to a kindergartener standard while Kamala Harris was held to a presidential standard. As resisters, we will now reject that bullshit. Our use of metanarratives will hold Trump to the highest standards and force-feed his followers our image in a way they understand. The simplest one is a fact: “Mad King Trump is a Dictator” or “Trump is a Tyrant.” All of his acts will validate our framing while saving millions of unsaid words.
Step 3 – Establish A Safe & Secure Communications
Journalist Carol Cadwalladr wrote an excellent article for the Guardian called “How to Survive the Broligarchy.” In it, she detailed just how much trouble your text messages and internet history could get one into should the administration or any of their minions come after you. She wrote:
“11. Think of your personal data as nude selfies. A veteran technology journalist told me this in 2017 and it’s never left me. My experience of “discovery” – handing over 40,000 emails, messages, documents to the legal team of the Brexit donor I’d investigated – left me paralysed and terrified. Think what a hostile legal team would make of your message history. This can and will happen.”
This is a good time to recommend that you get off corporate Social Media and scrub your history. If you have been on Twitter, then be prepared by mid-January 2025 to transition to Blue Sky, which is not owned by a single corporate ruler who owns literally everything you’ve written. Copy your tweets using widely available apps, and then delete your entire Twitter history. Make sure the direct messages are gone also because they became the property of Elon Musk the moment he bought it. Facebook is simply an intelligence collection platform for whoever pays them the highest. US intelligence has found that service members with top-secret security clearance. It could be tracked into their most secret spaces through advertisements that were scrolling on their cell phones. In the time of a regime that used social media to engineer an election, it might be time for you to remove yourself from all but a small sliver of the cyber sphere.
Reestablish Face-to-face interaction with friends. Once a day or a few times per week, I meet with my friends at a café in my village. There, we discuss the news of the day, but we do it face-to-face rather than via text message, DM, or video chat. That way, the communications that occur there belong to us and are not documented. It also goes back to restoring your humanity. Try it with your family and immediate friends, especially as the situation grows more dire.
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Photo: In July 2020 Trump sent federal officers to Seattle. Several conducted illegal seizures of American citizens off the streets in unmarked vehicles and held them without charge. Expect this Gestapo-like behavior to become a norm.
Step 4 - Do Not Engage In Violent Protests Or Armed Action
If you are a firearms owner, like myself, then you should already be responsible enough to keep them locked and safe in your house. Unless there is a direct threat to your home, yourself, or your family, weapons should be kept out of the equation. Note that right-wing “hero” Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of killing two people and shooting one other because a “liberal progressive” person bought a firearm to the protest, and Rittenhouse used the presence of that weapon to justify self-defense. Armed, malicious, or even mentally unstable actors can legally come within feet of your residence and not be in violation of the law. Also, active resistance in the form of violent protests, brandishing of arms, or personal violence is precisely what the Trump regime wants. They will wish for a massive, violent protest so that they can beat down the liberals and establish extra-legal emergency powers.
Let's not give it to them. The regime will use an attack on one person to strip tens of millions of their rights. Do. Not. Be. That. Guy.
However, if you are confronted in your home with a viable threat of violence, consult your local laws well in advance before you exercise self-defense.
Step 5 - Secure Your Home, Family & Friends
We have to take the things the Trump regime says at face value. That means being prepared for the economic hardship that could come in the face of tariffs and price hikes. The month before the election might be a good time to stock up on things that could be affected. Make sure you know where your family members are located and that they are trackable by Find My iPhone or other means. If you have a high RP or public profile it may also be good to have the number of a lawyer on the favorites section of your phone. In the age of unprecedented abuse, you need to be prepared for whatever may come.
Just remember this one truism: Politically, no one is coming to your rescue in a dictatorship. You are your own Calvary.
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