Rethinking Resistance

Now is the Time to Launch a Real,

Revolutionary Resistance!

When Donald Trump was elected president a little more than eight years ago, the buzzword was "resistance." Pink pussyhats were in fashion and the Women's March attracted some 4 million people in Washington, DC and 600 other cities. When Trump announced a ban on Muslims entering the US shortly after his inauguration, #Resist appeared in over 2.5 million tweets.

So what did the liberal resistance go on to accomplish? Not much!

It failed to stop Trump from passing the biggest corporate tax cuts on record, eliminating scores of environmental protections, and imposing harsh new immigration restrictions. So-called resistance leaders in Congress, the Democratic Party, the mainstream media, and elsewhere talked big but went along, and discouraged any attempts at popular organizing against the new neo-fascism.

The Democrats appear to have learned nothing from Trump 1.0 and are still waiting for Trump to save them by shooting himself in the foot. In the meantime, they bend over backwards to not be disruptive, even if it means letting Trump and Elon Musk concentrate more and more power in their hands. The Orange Menace and his tech-bro klepto-crony are counting on them to keep doing so.

What they don't seem to realize is that this time, the MAGA movement hasn't just hijacked the state. It IS the state. Which means it’s time to rethink resistance: what we resist, how we do so, what our objective is.

Resistance can't mean going back to the status quo of October 2024; that's what got us here in the first place. It means finding new ways to organize, relying on each other through mutual aid. It means resisting the dictates of the MAGA state: with our bodies, our words, our refusal to accept and obey. It means seizing and shaping the dominant narrative in the media. It means rethinking such supposedly well-understood ideals as freedom and democracy: ideals that have now been thoroughly co-opted by MAGA.

This is the biggest challenge of our lives. As anarchists, we have been preparing for it all our lives. Now is the time to launch a real, revolutionary resistance.

Movement Media Training Series

Mainline, the independent magazine based in Atlanta, Georgia, is hosting recurring movement media training sessions for community organizers and aspiring journalists/media workers. The series is being offered on a sliding scale subscription basis and will cover topics like how to build an effective media strategy, media writing 101, how to write press releases, how to pitch stories, and much more. For more information and to register, go to Mainline's website.

Mainline intentionally engages audiences through education and messages that continuously disrupt the status quo and corporatized media. They cover news, activism, culture, and music in the Atlanta area through articles, podcasts, and a newsletter, which is available on Substack and Patreon.

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