All You Fascists Are Bound To Lose

Corporations vs Democracy | Some Tips For February 28 Boycotts

Resist Rebel Revolt is a reader-supported publication by Melissa Nadia Viviana; Author, Women's Rights Activist, & Philosopher. To receive new essays about the absurdity of our current political reality, and the activism we can do to combat it, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Woody Guthrie: This Machine Kills Fascists (1943)

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The Fascism Definition by Encyclopaedia Britannica says:

An authoritarian or totalitarian form of government with:

• Extreme militaristic nationalism;

• Contempt for electoral democracy or liberalism;

• A belief in a natural social hierarchy & the rule of elites;

• & The desire to subordinate the individual’s interest for the good of the regime

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Robert Paxton writes in his 2004 book, The Anatomy of Fascism, that fascism is:

A form of political behavior marked by:

• Obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood,

• With compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity,

• In which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants,

• Working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites,

• Abandons democratic liberties,

• Pursues with redemptive violence,

• And without ethical or legal restraints,

• The goals of internal cleansing & external expansion.

Yikes. That sounds terrifyingly accurate.

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In Paul Mason’s book, How To Stop Fascism, he reminds us that

“The number one thing we need to learn from history is that fascism takes off when large numbers of people experience a kind of mass religious conversion to far right ideologies. This conversion happens quickly. From 2% of the voters in an election to 17% practically over night.”

He goes on to say

That in the 1930s, a French anarchist toured early Nazi Germany during the beginning seeds of their religious fascism fever.

The Frenchman said that the only thing that might have stopped this takeover was a living, breathing, alternative to the problems that fascism promised to solve.

An alternative that is more promising, more attractive, more visionary than the racist, misogynistic utopia that the fascists are proposing.

And that this alternative proposal or vision needs to be built by a coalition of the center left and the extreme left.

Paul Mason said that when the center left and extreme left are at war with each other, the fascists win (as happened in Germany during the rise of Hitler). The only thing that can stop them is a coalition with a strong enough vision for the future.

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So this is it. This is our time to become radical and to build a coalition of radicals.

But not radical in action––radical in VISION.

The fascists are trying to burn everything down. The only way we can stop them is to rise up with a more inspiring vision of the future for America.

So if you have a radical people-power movement that was too fringe in 2010 - now is your time to bring it out. Universal income? Environmental sustainability? Take it out. Start talking about bolder and bolder solutions.

Why? Because the truth is, we have to get to work creating a new vision for America that combats a seductive, nearly-religious conversion that provides simplistic, comforting solutions for our current problems.

As Paul Mason says: fascism provides solutions that answer to “a collapse of a belief system, the collapse of an identity that a society holds. The mass disorientation of new systems and new paradigms emerging.”

But it does so by relying on simplistic solutions that your average white, male can reliably fall back on. For example, white supremacy and gender superiority. Which aren’t visionary ideologies. In fact, they’re lazy, but reliable and comforting ideologies––that simply promise to restore stability within a paradigm that is bringing mass disorientation.

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So in order to build a vision that can answer to this mass disorientation, the center left and the far left need to build a radical coalition around a new vision for the future.

And that means that we have to ditch the paradigms we inherited from 50 years of Republican Capitalist propaganda.

We have to fight back against the subtle conditioning that technology has given us through two decades of cellphones, apps, & social media.

We have to create a radical vision that fights to represent us, against the world order that the tech autocrats are trying to turn us into.

And the bigger and grander our vision, the better.

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One thing to remember:

Good people who use the oppressor’s talking points have no weapons against the oppressor.

We have to begin to have conversations that they don’t want us to have. And we have to begin to question our reliance on technology in ways that disrupts our technological conditioning.

All of this is possible. It just takes paradigm-shifting acts.

Today, on the scheduled economic blackout, I want to share a few of my thoughts to get us started. And I also want to invite you to join my Discord: a Resist Rebel Revolt Fascism community.

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First I want to talk about getting organized:

One way that social media fucks with our brains is that it gives us 10,000 pieces of content one single time.

Which creates information overwhelm.

In reality, we need far fewer messages, repeated multiple times so that we can digest, absorb, and integrate the meaning and value that these messages have.

Just like when you’re learning a new language, you have to hear those words repeated many times, in order for the content to implant into your memory. Learning a language by hearing 10,000 new words, only once, will never work.

This is how social media scrolling becomes a vapid tool.

By constantly scrolling and absorbing 1,000 pieces of new information, we write over the old information quickly and lose our ability to remember and act on even the useful things we learn.

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This was driving me crazy for a few weeks. So I began to organize myself in order to combat this. Here are three things I began to do differently:

1 - I repost some of my favorite posts every morning on Bluesky.

Yes, I repeat myself constantly. Probably 4 new posts for every 6 reposts.

But the reason I do this is that I prefer good information to be shared repeatedly, week after week, so that we’re reminded of what’s important and we can actually integrate it into our memory and use these mantras to sustain our actions.

MORE AND MORE information DAY AFTER DAY only overwhelms us.

While good information given to us repeatedly, helps solidify its meaning so that we can remember to apply it.

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2 - For this reason, I’ve created spreadsheets for my bookmarks

I created a spreadsheet in order to intentionally pull out articles and resources to revisit. There in the spreadsheet, I have notes about why they’re important.

These include websites for various non-profits, PDFs & resources tracking executive orders, legacy media articles, Substack essays, and even video speeches that inspired me.

Our goal is not just to be aware of information, it’s to act on it.

To use these new ideas to inform our behaviors in the future. And thus, we need to be able to remember these new ideas and revisit them frequently.

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3 - I created a Discord for Hive Mind Activism

I had already created a Discord for my local Women’s Rights Group. I’d been the admin of a FB group for 3 years, but I wanted to move them off of Meta platforms, so I created a Discord.

After a month of using Discord, what I realized is that any time I came across a Youtube, Bluesky post, Meta post, or a Substack article that was informative, inspiring, or helpful - I had the impulse to share it in Discord, because Discord was working like a storage space for all of the great content that I saw.

Discord is organized via Threads, and each Thread has a different topic and a different emotional need being fulfilled.

For example: “good news & wins” is one Thread. While “bad news about DOGE” is another.

This enables me to create “emotional threads” that fulfill the purpose to either:

Selectively inspire people & cheer them up.

Or to inform people about the influx of heavy and bad news.

By separating their emotional content, people know what to expect from each Thread.

On a day that they need to be cheered up, they can visit the happy Threads and get inspiration. While limiting the amount of bad news that they receive, because they know exactly where that content is stored in the server.

We do not have this luxury while scrolling through our Social Media timelines. And thus, we have no regulation of our emotions.

Discord allows us to “Choose Our Own Adventure” - because, instead of scrolling on a random timeline that we have no control of, we can open up a specific Thread that is inspiring when we need it. Or a Thread that has entirely bad news when we’re emotionally prepared for it.

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There are also passive & active Threads.

For example:

A Thread with memes is passive, you simply laugh

(And this is important! We all need a good chuckle once a day).

While a Thread with a call-to-action––to call your representative on a new piece of legislation––is active

(and those are important, too. But an entire group with only active actions also burns us out. It’s helpful to let people relax as well).

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There are also Threads for each and every protest, so that each time I come across new information about a previous protest, I can go back to the specific Thread and add new information there.

There are also Threads for stories and venting, just in case someone is going through a hard time and wants to open up and talk about it.

Over time, each Thread becomes a sort of bookmark or folder to store banners, news, information, website links, etc within them.

A snapshot of my Savannah Discord

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I hope you see where I’m going with this:

Discord Threads enables people to sort and organize the many pieces of activism that are required for a sustainable resistance against fascism.

For example:

• Being inspired & sustaining hope

• Celebrating wins

• Maintaining the ability to be informed about bad news (in limited doses)

• Getting call-to-actions, for example, calling your representative about a piece of legislation

• Getting updated about specific protests

• Diving deep into Project 2025 or Neoreactionary Bros

• Sharing resources for trans & immigrants

• Getting news about how each of the billionaires: Zuck, Musk, Bezos are royally fucking us over

• Having a directory for independent journalists that can be trusted

• Having a boycott list of media companies that are capitulating to Trump

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Woody Guthrie gets it: all you fascists are bound to lose, but only if we, ourselves, can get organized.

So I decided to create a larger Discord for a larger group of people than my local Women’s Rights group. If you’re interested in joining, it’s called Resist Rebel Revolt Fascism.

While I’m still setting up the various Threads, I do hope to begin to organize us into a Hive Mind of informed resistors.

Please join, if you’d like to share gems that you’ve found across the internet with the group.

At the top, there will be Announcements, Rules, a Site Map, & Discord Tips that will give you a little rundown of what to expect from the server. And I’ll be adding new Threads throughout the week.

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To finish this essay, I wanted to share content from a specific Thread that I created in my local Discord group. This Thread is called Resist Fascism and this is where I store all types of tips from across the internet.

Resources like the Simple Sabotage Field Manual: a CIA de-classified field manual that “describes ways to train normal people to be purposefully annoying telephone operators, dysfunctional train conductors, befuddling middle managers, blundering factory workers, unruly movie theater patrons, and so on. In other words, teaching people to do their jobs badly” in order to disrupt fascism.

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And in this Thread, I began to share more and more disconnected pieces that were spread all over the internet, and came from many different sources, but began to create a cohesive discussion about resistance.

Especially about changing our consumer habits. So today - during a scheduled economic blackout - I thought it would be helpful to share these tips with you.

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A week ago, I wrote:

If the fascists are tech overlords, then our resistance must be fueled by abstaining from consumerism & technology.

We must collectively stop empowering them with our eyes, our minds, & our dollars.

I quoted a Substack article that I found a month ago, that lays out a foundation for starving an outdated system, in order to build a new one.

The 3.5% Strategy: How to Starve the Old System & Build a Well-being Economy

There, Michael Muyot writes:

The fastest way to collapse an unsustainable system is to make it irrelevant.

He says that “history shows that only 3.5% of the population needs to actively participate in an alternate model in order for entire structures to shift.”

And that the best thing we can do is to “Starve An Extractive System Like a Fire.”

He writes:

When we stop feeding them—when we redirect spending, labor, and attention—they suffocate.

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Michael Muyot also writes that “extractive systems force money out of communities and concentrate wealth in the hand of the few” while a “well-being economy keeps wealth circulating locally, increasing prosperity & resilience.”

He says that “when a dollar is spent at a local farm, co-op, or independent business, up to 70% of its value remains in the community” while “that same dollar, spent at a corporate chain, often vanishes instantly, extracted into distant shareholders’ accounts.”

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Think about that during these next few months of boycott.

Shopping locally isn’t only about convenience or buying higher/lower prices.

It’s about sustaining local economies and putting money into the hands of a local community - rather than an extractive system, or a distant corporate overlord.

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Indian political activist, Arundhati Roy, wrote

“The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they’re selling––their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this: we may be many and they may be few, but they need us more than we need them.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

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In response to my post, another user, called Valley Girl East, wrote:

Republicans vote against their own interests.

Democrats shop against their own interests.

We funded the billionaires taking over our government.

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The website Goods Unite Us––which allows people to search for how brands are donating to political campaigns––says:

The average consumer funds politicians and PACS about 3x more through their purchasing decisions, as compared to their direct political contributions.

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But pulling back from supporting this corrupted system, in which we fuel the rise of right-wing politicians isn’t an all-or-nothing solution.

Remember when I said:

When we use the oppressor’s talking points, we have no weapons against the oppressor.

Just remember that your oppressor WANTS you to believe that boycotts are all or nothing.

They want you to believe that if you stop buying toilet paper from Amazon and you begin to get your toilet paper from a local drug store, that this won’t move the needle…

because they benefit from you giving up before you begin.

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But this fight is NOT all or nothing.

A Bluesky user named: Keriyawn Pepper says:

Boycotting is not about perfection. It’s death by billions of paper cuts to the billionaires.

Find what you can change. Change that. Sustain it as long as you safely can.

You’ll often find, as you adapt, that you can change even more.

For example: with me, Target & Instagram were easy to ditch. While Amazon was harder. So I cut a little bit at a time.

I responded:

We all make thousands of decisions in a month. If everybody changes a few of these decisions in order to boycott some corporations, then this will make a dent.

We don’t need to cut everything out. We just need to work together to collectively move the needle so that they feel the burn. (Remember the 3.5% needed to starve a system).

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Another user named, Better World Builder, added to this conversation:

This is chopping a tree. We don’t need to cut it all the way through. We just need to make the right cuts in the right places.

Slow, repeated chipping away, until the hole is big enough.

Even a 30% dip would be enough to scramble them.

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Gibby Wants Justice, writes:

We, the people, are not powerless. They want you to think that we are. But we have great collective power.

Each and every day, do at least one thing to claim and exercise your power.

When you do, you’ll feel you’re in control again. That your actions matter.

Maybe it’s: make a call, serve your community, or boycott.

But do one thing to use your power every day!

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And a user named, Ko, says:

It reminds me of an old Chinese saying: “The ruler is the boat and the people are the water.

It is the water that bears the boat up, and the water that capsizes it.” (Xunzi).

Republicans & Corporations better be careful with the water that carries them.

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Back in December, I wrote a post on Bluesky that said:

Billionaires give me acid reflux. So I’m making little changes.

That day, all I did was:

Change my main browser to Duck Duck Go, instead of Google Chrome. (DDG has privacy features built into it, including blocking ads, disabling cookies & trackers, and gives you email privacy options)

I promised that I would use Bluesky, rather than Threads or X. (Bluesky has a de-centralized algorithm, not controlled by a billionaire).

I chose to follow writers on Substack, rather than Medium. (Medium is owned by Musk).

And I vowed to text people happy birthday, rather than maintain friendships via Facebook.

These were small actions that I took. But 2 months later, I’m still there.

And since then,

I’ve moved my Facebook community to Discord.

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In the comments of my posts, we collected a whole host of other ethical alternatives to the distorted internet monopoly.

For example:

Cara instead of Instagram (Cara does not use your art to train AI).

Signal instead of WhatsApp (Signal is secure and encrypted)

Thrift Stores & consignment stores instead of Amazon (for clothes & household goods)

For books: Bookshop.org instead of Amazon (Bookshop.org donates to local bookstores, in order to keep independent bookstores afloat)

Proton Mail instead of Gmail (Proton Mail is more secure, but not free)

Storygraph instead of Goodreads (Goodreads is Amazon owned, Storygraph is black-owned)

Libby or Overdrove instead of Audible (Libby is a library app that gives you free access to e-books and audio books through your public library)

And I’m sure I’m forgetting many more suggestions.

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As Arundhati Roy says:

“The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse … their notion of inevitability.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

So I hope you’ll join me in making small shifts where and when you can.

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Perfectionism isn’t the end goal here.

A small, but sustainable paradigm shift is the transformation that can move the needle enough to collapse a predatory system.

As I wrote a few days ago:

Technology could have always been a source for good.

Just because corrupt billionaires hijacked our own power and are now using it against us, doesn’t mean we can’t take it back.

It just means we have to choose to abstain from abusive technologies and have ethical consumerism.

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For more essays, please subscribe to my newsletter.

And I hope you’ll join me on Discord, as I work to create a community there, with a Hive Mind of sustainable activism going forward.

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