#comdef

Queer lefties, get armed if you can and get medic training if you can't.

Practice and train and prepare.

Defend yourself, your loved ones, and your community.

Links:

Organize with friends you trust intimately

Develop a security culture

Formulate a plan + objectives

“Just like in abusive relationships, the answer isn’t to wait for the abuser to change—it’s to build a life outside their control.

This is where community care and self-reliance come in. Because if we keep relying on unstable infrastructure, we’ll stay locked in this loop. The next crisis will come, the next relief will be temporary, and the cycle will continue. But we have the power to disrupt this.

The government’s infrastructure is unreliable by design. Our communities, however, can be as stable as we make them. We can build networks that don’t crumble every time a policy shifts.

Here’s how we break free:

1. Stop relying on the government for stability. Their role in the cycle of abuse is clear—they aren’t here to save us, and that’s not where we should place our trust. Place it in each other instead.

2. Create mutual aid networks. We don’t need permission or government programs to take care of each other. We need local solutions where neighbors show up for neighbors—food, housing, childcare, and healthcare through community support.

3. Get creative about building self-sufficient ecosystems. Think about co-ops, shared childcare, bartering systems, urban farming, and skill exchanges. There’s more freedom in community collaboration than in waiting for the government’s next decision.

4. Build resilient information networks. Platforms like TikTok, grassroots messaging channels, and community boards allow us to communicate outside the mainstream panic-driven news cycle. When we control the flow of information, we control our responses.

5. Foster radical imagination. Stop imagining that relief comes from policies “restored” by the same people who threatened to take it away. Imagine a world where we don’t need them in the first place.”

“Mutual aid projects will be important. People will need hormones, birth control, abortion pills, money for traveling for medical care or escaping a hostile environment, assistance averting various forms of state violence. But these are fundamentally defensive strategies that must be connected with offensive forms of struggle to succeed. We cannot separate care and struggle, nor should we let the desire for individual safety interfere with the forms of collective action that represent our only hope of following through on the slogan “We keep us safe.”

Donald Trump did not win the 2024 elections because people took to the streets—he lost the 2020 elections as a consequence of disruptive protests, and he won the 2024 election in part because those died off. Everyone must understand this.

Here are some concrete steps that we can take as individuals and movements.”

TL;DR:

- Quit X/Twitter; Diminish Reliance on Instagram; Join Mastodon and Bluesky

- Establish Local Organizing Venues

- Build Rapid Response Networks

- Establish Mutual Aid Projects

- Establish Community Defense Projects

- Prepare to Resist Raids and Deportations

- Organize Pressure Campaigns

- Organize against the Police

- Debunk Liberal Narratives

- Sow the Seeds of Defiance

- Study the First Trump Era

- Reach Out

- Reach In