Hammer Fall
“The people never give up their liberties
but under some delusion.”
A Movement cannot move in a straight line because it is a creature of energy, emotion, and momentum. 50501 is a decentralized institution for both security and rapid iteration, and it is only one part of a much larger Movement that is growing like an organism and uncertain of its true power. Like the nation we represent, we are split along lines of ethnicity, gender identity, political bias, religion, and geography. We have a million theories of the world, and while none of them is fully compatible with another, it is both the strength and weakness of the big tent we are trying to build. This nation is vast and to mobilize all its people to the robust defense required will take enormous investments of resources, time, money, and talent. The power of the people is greater than any branch of government but it is a blunt and temperamental instrument. It cannot be fully mustered or deployed in a day. Movements are like a force of nature or the weather; a disturbance in the political atmosphere that we must be wise enough to navigate.
Despite these difficulties, the American public’s collective psyche has been primed by endless outrages; we are fully aware of the potential energy building up in the system like lightning in a bottle. Directing it effectively requires mobilizing, recruiting, and training large numbers of people while continuing to provide protest pressure to the movement to keep up momentum. We are not complaining but we do understand the assignment. We believe the stakes could not be higher and that this Movement will be the most consequential thing that any of us do with all of our lives. But that means we must dispense with romantic fantasies about what activism is, analyze our opponents with clarity and honesty, and only spend our limited resources for a net gain. We must be fierce, we must be ruthless, and we must be strategic.
We spend a good chunk of our effort on preparation with an eye towards capitalizing on opportunities created by the mistakes of our opposition or the cleverness of our allies. These are called ‘Trigger’ events. It’s an event that successfully captures the imagination of the public and focuses the undirected energy of a thousand different interest groups and millions of human beings on a single thing. Harnessing this flow of human potential has become our life's work. We do not direct currents of this massive ocean of human emotion—we sail along with it, harnessing the wind of emotive force to drive our next action.
Organizing the people’s emotion in response to an event is important—each extension creates new connections between people, galvanizing more of the public’s attention, money, and time to the task ahead. This power must be exercised if it is to maintain its vitality and strength—the energy can drain out of a Movement as quickly as it was gathered if left unactivated for too long. This is the purpose of large coalition events like Hands Off or No Kings. These are large actions coordinated by many independent organizations who come together and try to do something big. These national rallies are not the goal of the Movement, but they are meant as a bold display of raw political power that is impossible to ignore. A movement correctly built has all the subtlety of an explosion. By rallying the people in large numbers we gain legitimacy in the eyes of lukewarm supporters, infuse our base with new energy and enthusiasm, and push the forces of fascism into narrative retreat. It allows us to push a message—to tell people that they are not alone in their anxieties. It gives people hope and community—it makes them stronger. If we execute well enough, it encourages greater acts of sacrifice and commitment to a great and righteous cause.
With each beat of the drum we extend a new capacity for determined, strategic and disciplined resistance. This is hard work, full of heartbreak, false starts and downright errors—but it must continue. Each event is like flexing a newly formed muscle, stressed by action and then relaxed for recovery. This recovery period is also important—because it is the time where we build relationships, recruit new volunteers, train, and experiment with tactics.
As we build machinery of resistance the regime attempts to do the same. The Administration is now attempting to extend its authority to federalize the entire National Guard, so that he can use it to suppress dissent—using the tension around anti-ICE abduction protests to justify their deployment. This is a sign that our resistance is working and that he is fearful of our collective opposition and our growing reach and influence.
Opposition is beginning to stiffen across the country. His agenda has been stymied by the courts time and time again. Resistance in the government is slowing implementation of his orders to crawl through malicious compliance. The Army Parade in DC was pretty depressing and it wouldn’t be surprising if a few Pentagon event planners were having a bit of fun at his expense. Trump has to rely on mercenaries to staff ICE because he can’t find enough collaborators in the government who are willing to do illegal things on his behalf. Cities and towns across America are scaring off his poorly trained goons through pure mass.
Photo via Heather M. Collins from Idaho on 6/14/2025
In an autocratic society the leader will often try to appease his population. The longevity and health of the regime is premised on its capacity to buy off the required supporters to remain in power, and oppress the rest with the security state. The Administration's attempts at appeasement are clumsy and create new enemies through their blatant corruption. He is using oppressive tactics wildly, randomly, and ineffectively. Each outrage generates more opposition. Evidence of the administration's weakness is accumulating and the Movement’s strength is growing.
The Administration is going to have scaling problems. The deployment of National Guard troops is a tricky and complicated enterprise and they did not do even the basic amount of work required for them to be effective. The National Guard has insufficient food, fuel, and quarters to undertake the task to which they have been assigned. There is doubtlessly a very pissed off group of officers and NCOs trying to execute on these stupid and poorly thought out orders. As he is revealed as an incompetent commander, forces will grow more hesitant to execute on those orders.
He does not have a sufficient number of loyalists in place to competently lead the forces he commands to the objectives that he desires. Even if he did have enough loyalists in his service who would abandon the oaths they swore, the power of the U.S. military and the National Guard is simply not enough to secure a country as large and diverse as ours and create a true dictatorship. This administration is doomed to fail. Our task is to accelerate that process and to reduce the damage that the administration can and will cause as it fails. Every protest, every petition, every act of civil disobedience increases the cost to the regime and galvanizes and motivates our allies.
The consequences of this mismanagement will be dire, and they only get worse the longer this administration is allowed to persist; we are likely to see some dark and violent times ahead. He is vindictive, cruel, and reactionary. He is incompetent, ignorant, and prone to wild conspiratorial thinking. We know what this man is, how he thinks, how he reacts, and what the limits on his ability are. Though he struggles futilely to warp vice into virtue, every lie incurs a debt to the truth and he is running out suckers to pay for his mistakes. He is surrounded by equally incompetent and maladjusted sycophants so he is also not getting real information about the world, nor would he listen if he actually was.
Though he does not have the skill or the intellect to take over the country and establish some weird dystopian imperial dynasty, he does have the cunning and the spite to destroy the entire system and leave the nation shattered. We are the final line of defense in an era of institutional collapse. We cannot let that happen because this entire experiment in self governance will be lost for a generation or more if it does. We must do what our leaders in both parties failed to do. The futures of our children, our friends, our families, our wealth, those that have it or want it—all of it will be at risk. Disaster is inevitable, but the shape of things to come has not been decided. We the people do have agency—if we have the courage and the fortitude to exercise it.
The hammer is falling, and it is up to the people to bear the blow where and when it falls the hardest. That time may be approaching sooner than we would like, but if we endure the coming trials with dignity and strength, the hammer can and will break upon us and this era of Trump and Trumpism will end here—under a reclaimed and redeemed flag of red, white, and blue.
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