That’s pretty much how the talibangelicals operate. They disobey subpoenas and refuse to comply in various other ways, both petty and legal.

It’s effective at showing how powerless and spineless our authorities are, so fair enough to turn the tables.

Fight back.

Good luck with that attitude in 1930/40s Germany or similar states. Fascist states have always dealt with this kind of people.

I take one issue with this, just one.

“They can’t be everywhere”

See, that may have held up in the 1930s and 40s, but we live in the country with the most robust surveillance apparatus on the globe. And almost every one of us carries around a fun little brick full of privacy violations with us, everywhere we go, absorbing everything we do and say and buy, and packages it neatly into a form ad agencies and the government can use how they like. And one of those little bricks we call smartphones, why, not only do we carry them around willingly, they’re almost a necessity to get anything done in the modern era. We have surveillance that the Gestapo would’ve had wet dreams about. And, more, all of the largest tech corporations and their techbro CEOs – Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, etc. – are only too happy to kiss the ring and give them unfettered access. To say nothing of the countless other devices spying on you – Ring doorbells selling your data to police departments comes to mind. License plate scanners – even if your car doesn’t spy on you (which, if it was made in the last decade, it almost certainly does to some extent). Your desktop computer has been backdoored by Intel’s management engine or AMD’s PSP for well over a decade – if you don’t think they’ve built in backdoors for the government, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. They can strongarm any company in the world they want, especially ones owned and operated in the US, do you really think they haven’t quietly taken them aside and demanded hardware-level access to every computer made in the last 20 years? With how much the people at the NSA would have wet dreams about that? Yeah, no.

I’m not saying it’s necessarily hopeless. But there will be no Anne Franks hiding in the attic if it comes to that point. They can, in fact, be everywhere, and if the hammer falls it’s going to fall hard and fast, there will be no long continuous search for undesirables across the countryside.

If you want my advice? do as much sketchy-looking shit as possible while not actually doing anything illegal. Use a VPN. Look up Kali and Tails and download them to a Ventoy flash drive. Run I2P (even Tor – but preferably I2P) on your computer. Get Signal. Download the simple sabotage manual, expedient homemade firearms, etc. Do everything in your power to make them look as closely at a complete nothing as possible, and destroy their signal to noise ratio – and tell your friends to, as well. They can collect mountains of data on everyone, certainly, and we can’t really stop that now; but it still takes humans to sift through (AI cannot, yet, do that for them with any meaningful accuracy) – make them look for their needle in an ever-increasing haystack.

Depending on the context, acquiescing and then not following orders can be quite effective as well, especially if you’re in a position of direct contact.

E.g., your supervisor instructs you to do something like take down the company DEI site? Say no, get fired… Or say yes, and just don’t do it. You forgot, it’s a cached version, etc. Eventually you have to take it down and then a month later when the site updates it’s back. Someone must’ve left it in the update package.

Be creative, be active. Anyone who wants to gaslight the world is owed nothing but deception and disrespect.

A good example of this is the Rosenstraße Protest. Nazi Germany was unable to deal with popular pushback at height of Hitler’s totalitarian power at the literal center of repression.

Not only that: They rely on people pre-emptively obeying them before even being threatened. Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, all those guys, they know better. They’re also doing fine money-wise. They had every option to just tell Trump to get fucked, and mess up their company if he wanted to make that decision. They wouldn’t have been out on the street, whatever happened, and they would have had a chance to do something noble instead of just optimizing for the money function like a malfunctioning AI superintelligence.

One of the critical factors in fascists taking power is “obeying in advance.” Because, yes, they can’t be everywhere. Fuck that. I fully support this message.

Edit: Typo

They cannot be everywhere, but they’re certainly trying with ever-increasing surveillance and AI to go through all that data.

Removed by mod

I’ve heard of three other words that all start with a D

I suspect we’ll have another Rosa Parks moment for the history books sometime in the next four years or so.

I can’t even fight back in self-defense because I’m not white and typically the other person is.

The system is stacked against me and the only possible approach is secret vigilante justice.

AoC says strap up

Not a meme

“vote for Biden”

“No, make me”

Yeah, this, THIS will work perfectly