This afternoon over a hundred Missourians gathered in the cold and snow on the Johnson County Courthouse lawn in downtown Warrensburg, Missouri. It was another one of many community organized demonstrations against the excesses of Donald Trump (r), his administration, and his paramilitary.

“I am here for free!”

“Defend Democracy”

“First they came for the immigrants”

“…Resistance, Courage & Compassion”

“Illegal, Cruel, Evil, Unamerican”

“Love not Hate…”

“Liberty and Justice for all”

“I take my whiskey neat because…Fuck ICE”

“Love melts ICE”

“Immigrant Rights are Human Rights…”

“Fuck Ice” “This is some NAZI bullshit”

“No King”

“…Save the USA”

“1984”

“Protest is patriotic”

“1984”

End Ice”

“Are we great yet?”

Stand up now, while you still can.

“…All we really have in the end is massive resistance. That is where we are heading–acquiescence or resistance. You and I will all need to make our choices about whether we will stand up against oppression in ways that a lot of our ancestors did not stand up…” – Erik Loomis

“RESIST” (2024)
Posterboard. Permanent marker. 22 x 28.

If you’ve ever wondered what you would have done had you lived in Germany in the 1930s, you’re doing it now.

#resist

Prepare.

A thread:

NCSteve ‪@ncsteve.bsky.social‬

17/ Let me try to sum it up in a way that may mean more to the olds than the youngs: you can’t prepare for this, or let your loved ones prepare for this like it’s 1968 and you’re going to protest and the DNC in Chicago.

You have to prepare for this like it’s 1963 and you’re going to Mississippi.
4:05 PM · Jan 10, 2026

Leading up to that:

1/ How many Americans even know what the real “storm troopers,” the Sturmabteilung, as opposed to the other jackbooted scum, were anymore?

Because that’s who these fucks are: party troops, radicalized thugs and opportunistic bullies. Not “law enforcement.” Their very purpose is to act unlawfully.

2/ And that’s where American brains start shorting out because the only context most have for what they’re seeing is “cops.” Bad cops, or rogue cops, or badly trained cops. Cops disgracing their uniforms, but cops, officers of the law, who must surely account to higher authority and the law, right?

3/ Our pattern recognition is of course further dulled by our decades of encouraging real cops, particularly county sheriffs, to swagger around in battle dress as a regular duty uniform. Americans can’t even distinguish cops dressed for patrol from cops dressed for a fight anymore.

4/ And that too, is part of the contextualization failure. Many have long seen the militarization of police equipment as both a cause and a symptom of the degeneration of police culture at every level into an occupation troop mindset that, by its own operation, generates bad cop behavior.

5/ That created a ready pigeonhole in our heads and the urge to drop this into it may be particularly acute among both strong supporters and strong opponents of police in the abstract. Because whether your reaction is “OMG, Bad Cops!” or “uh-huh, SSDD,” you’re being walked into a categorical error.

6/ Don’t walk into it. Don’t let either confusion or our ever-burning need to confirm our prior assumptions confuse you. These guys are not cops. They were not hired to enforce the law. They were hired to break the law. Not “laws,” but rather “the law,” the whole, imperfect structure of rule of law.

7/ They are being used as a tool to sweep away everything about our legal system except the parts that are broken and make what’s broken normal. Brazen lawlessness is the point. Smirking impunity is the point. Trampling the Bill of Rights into the mud under hobnailed boots is their actual job.

8/ And above all, they are being used as the bulldozer that clears away the difference between them and real police so that, if a time comes when it is politically expedient to purge them, what’s left behind are merely discrete secret policemen and “real” law enforcement grown exponentially worse.

9/ But the difference here and now is practical and literally deadly serious. Our police encounter threat matrix (and theirs) is built on assumptions that include court review, civil rights lawsuits, civilian oversight boards, protests that move mayors and councilmen. But that only applies to cops.

10/ Understand that their job isn’t law enforcement, it is terrorism. Sadism is policy. There is no stated limit on their behavior and it’s clear that any limits set will only be determined retrospectively. Whether there is any act too heinous to be covered up and excused remains to be seen.

11/ I’m not counselling fear and submission here. Hell no. But I’ve dragged you through all this in the hope that maybe you won’t think I’m being melodramatic when I say you have to prepare for protests and for other civic action like you’ll be dealing with cops accountable to local officials.

12/ do all the prep you would for a normal protest-first aid for tear gas, pepper spray and blunt force trauma, first phone number for your one phone perma-sharpied on your wrist, pet food for a night or weekend away from home. FFS, turn off biometric phone log-in and turn on a six-digit logon code.

13/ All that stuff. You know where to look it up. But for these thugs, I think you need to do more. You need to plan for the real possibility you may be murdered, shot or held incommunicado. Make sure pets will be rescued and have a plan for who takes care of our kids and how they get to them.

14/ Make sure you’ve got a backup contact to get you lawyered up if you’re disappeared, if you can, make sure your next rent or mortgage payment is queued or will otherwise get paid. Tell those who need to be told that you love them, appending whatever reassurances seem necessary and appropriate.

15/ If you can afford it, get a burner phone. If you can afford it, get a good faraday cage bag to keep your phone in both going and coming.

Once I might have included an Amazon link, but fuck that guy.

Make sure you someone has a power of attorney and healthcare power of attorney.

16/ I can’t tell you how to avoid giving them an excuse to harm or arrest you. Cops need excuses. Anti-cops don’t. Inflicting harm is their job and their excuses will be manufactured by their superiors. But don’t goad them into singling you out for abuse and if they do anyway, get it on camera.

“They’ll try to bury us.”
(2024)
Posterboard. Permanent marker. 22 x 28.
4th in a series of 2024 protest signs.

Previously:

The resistance (December 18, 2016)

Practical Dissent: Protest Signs (November 17, 2024)

Practical Dissent: testing, testing… (November 24, 2024)