Minneapolis was where George Floyd was killed, and EVERYBODY believed his murderer would get away with it. But Minneapolis wouldn’t stand for it, and the murderer is serving a long jail sentence at this moment
It was really dumb to think Minneapolis would roll over for this shit. They’ve had PRACTICE
Thanks for putting that into context, it makes me feel quite fond of them. I should not have been so indifferent to this good city.
Always liked Minneapolis, and Minnesotans. Cool people, and tough enough to take that cold.
You don’t need religion to be a good person.
If you absolutely need a religion to be good, I would wager you are not a good person. Just too scared of a imaginary, fiery goat-person torturing you to do something bad.
Or whatever version of hell/whatever you might believe in.
I mean some branches of the church did resist the Nazis in WW2.
I’m not a believer in salvation in the afterlife, but whomever dishes it out in this life deserves some faith.
Churches are some of the only third spaces left unfortunately.
Fund your local libraries, organize book clubs, go to the independent record shop and put up fliers.
Do this before ICE comes to your town.
Adding onto this:
We need to put in the groundwork to prepare for our most powerful means of non-violent offense: a proper, long-term, Nation Wide General Strike.
The country would be brought to its knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor, allowing us to simply ignore the democrats and their lack of spine, and instead demand real changes (abolishing ICE should be towards the top of the list).
That tactic was extremely effective in Chile in 2019, and had they not fallen for the trick of liberal reform, they would’ve had a successful revolution on their hands with virtually no bloodshed.
There are some concrete steps all of us can take toward enacting that hard-core general strike to make it more viable and bearable for us all. (the titles below expand if you click them).
Learn First Aid! ⛑️
As we’re seeing, deadly violence is being used against us and it will only continue. It extremely important to have the skills to be able to keep yourself and others alive if they get hurt.
Tacticool Girlfriend provides a great introduction to building a personal first aid kit, called an IFAK, which can deal with things like bullet wounds and other serious bleeding wounds. I also want to emphasize her recommendation of only buying medical gear from reputable sources (not Amazon!), such as North American Rescue to avoid fakes that could cost you your life.
But you’ll need to learn how to use that equipment, too. The best resource for that is to take a local Stop The Bleed class, which are pretty widely available in most places. They may cost a small fee, but can also sometimes be free. Alternatively, if you cannot access a local class, this video by PrepMedic will give you a solid understanding of how to use Tourniquets and Gauze for wound packing.
Injuries are less harmful if they are tended to early. Learning first aid can help conserve resources when healthcare becomes unaffordable. Having several medics in case of harm by police is an extremely powerful morale booster during a protest that may become a police riot. When you become comfortable with the basics of first aid, riot medicine is the next suggested step.
Establish or join local Mutual Aid networks ✊
If you haven’t already, get to know your neighbors. Mutual aid is a willingness to support and grow your community. This can include informal networks through friends, tenant/renter organizations, solidarity groups, and industrial unions.
These are groups using direct action to solve each other’s problems. Building strong communities makes it difficult for fascism to take root. The actions of the government are going to hit every community hard, and the ones who build trust in each other and work together are most likely to survive. We’ve been building a list of resources in !inperson@slrpnk.net to help you on your way. Also check out this handy guide to find existing groups in your area.
This isn’t only for your own community protection. Your ability to organize today will change the political landscape tomorrow. When revolution occurs, the social organizations that show the greatest resilience through the regime are the ones typically calling the shots when the dust settles. When it comes to elections, get out the vote drives are useless if most of the voters are fascists. At some point, you have to do grassroots political education if you don’t want fascist candidates winning elections. Mutual aid networks are excellent forums not only for teaching each other good political ideas, but demonstrating them in practice.
Join a Union and Prepare for an even longer General Strike! 💪
If you aren’t in a union (or even if you are, it’s worth dual-carding), consider joining the IWW to unionize your workplace (bonus: you’ll get higher wages, better benefits, and more time off if you succeed!) to strengthen a general strike if we manage to enact one, as most unions have a strike fund that can supplement your income during a general strike to make it more financially bearable (you should also save as much money as you can reasonably do, so it can also be used to keep yourself afloat during a strike).
And for our international friends, you should join one as well, as fascism is gaining momentum globally. If your country isn’t listed below, just contact the IWW directly in the link above, and they’ll help you set up a new local branch.
Adopt Security Culture and Digital Camouflage 🛡️
Sometimes benign seeming efforts can turn into unexpected personal data collecting traps. Like an obscure website for exchanging contact info with other students turning into a global ad-tech surveillance network (Facebook), or innocent seeming online personality tests being use to harvest character profiles. Even Etsy, Reddit, Tinder, and Duolingo are feeding information to US Government Agencies like ICE.
Security culture is commonly used to describe the general awareness of such potential traps and how it can affect groups or entire communities. This goes beyond mere individual privacy efforts, as without joint efforts these often fail to work.
Especially in activist circles, security culture is paramount. For opsec reasons not everyone in the group might be aware of what clandestine efforts others are involved in, but with a general security culture many potential data leaks can be avoided.
Movements are made by the volume of their participants, and the easier and less dangerous it is to participate, the more people will get involved. As more people get involved, individual involvement becomes even less dangerous, creating a virtuous cycle.
We’ll start it off with some General Advice:
- Mentally wall off personal uniquely identifying info from your online presence, actively build a habit of opsec so that withholding information is your default mental state
- Be careful about who you meet online
- Use different, unrelated usernames, passwords & emails for every account. And try not to connect to those accounts with your real IP address (use Tor or a VPN)
- Be mindful that anything done online leaves a trail
- agents provocateurs may seek to find patsies willing to perform an ill-advised illegal activity in order to legitimize police repression. If someone is trying to pressure you, especially if you don’t have a long and proven history with them, be extremely wary.
For a full guide on what encrypted communications platforms to use, and how to stay off the radar, read the Digital Camouflage section within the Monthly Meta post here (you’ll need to scroll down. I’d add it here, but it won’t fit in this comment).
I’d also highly recommend Full Spectrum Resistance to anyone who wants further info on how to resist.
In fact, it makes many people WORSE.
The world would be a better place without religion.
Indeed.
The world would be better without humans
I don’t agree: some people need the fear of divine retribution to keep them from gestures broadly to the Epstein files
The rest of society not letting shitheads get away with being shitheads is all that’s needed.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that most of those people were at least nominally Christian.
Besides, if you need to be threatened into acting like a good person, you’re NOT a good person.
Others need the earth based divine retribution because gestures broadly to the Epstein files
The divine in that sentence is still assuming a god
Could just be assuming Ru Paul with The Matrix levels of weaponry.
You got my vote.
Yeah, lot of good it did them.
Or we could just legalize chainsawing pedos in half.
You don’t, but it is something that lets you organize a community in a way that enables them to act, for good or for ill. No reason to cede that exclusively to those who want to create a worse world
Yeah, if you do mutual aid lefty stuff for any amount of time you will almost certainly end up volunteering alongside a religious person who’s there for religious reasons at some point, and anybody who tries to kick an ally out of an antifascist coalition over a religious dispute may as well be a collaborator. If they’re there because god told them to, they’re there and that’s what matters.
Everyone anti-fascist is an ally, we can argue about where to go next after the fascists are gone.
straight to hell
All the fun people went there anyway.
This is anarchist praxis even if most people don’t realize it!
They’re forced to utilize anarchist praxis because the government sure as shit isn’t doing anything to help them, federal or local.
That’s what’s so interesting. Most of these people are not ideologically anarchist, and probably would be opposed to it in a more general context. But they are using anarchist techniques because that is what is effective in the given moment.
It’s like socialism, people are opposed to what they’re told it is, not what it actually is.
I think about that all the time. Especially when people online are like “do something”. We are doing something. Lots of things. Lots of small decentralized things so they can’t be targeted as easy.
Yeah, a better version of this article would talk about how Minneapolis has actually always been a kinda radical town, from the general strike in the 30s, AIM being founded there in the 60s, and the whole co-op wars stupidity that happened in the 70s, all the way through the RNC and Occupy protests in the 2000s. Like, there have been self identified anarchists in that city for almost a hundred years at least, and that has got at least as much to do with what we’re seeing as “patriotic and Christian values” do.
As a Twin Cities resident we are surprisingly radically progressive. I think it’s important to know how much “work” people did post George Floyd to look at racial bias and systematic change in progressive socials. I know of multiple book clubs of retirees reading books on anti-racism and white privilege. It was eye opening experience here
Minnesota has emerged as a heroic example of state and local and neighborhood-level resistance in the name of core patriotic and Christian values.
Christian values.
I thought Christian values were causing all of this in the first place? A cabal of white Christian nationaist pedophiles have coopted the government and are attempting to kick off the apocalypse by baiting Israel into being destroyed.
When you write it all out there, you really do feel insane.
Strictly speaking, Christian values directly oppose treating immigrants poorly. Or as second class citizens. Explicitly stated in the old and new testament. You know, Biblical law that we ‘should’ all be following.
On the other hand, “It’s easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven.” And “Love of money is the root of all evil.” Doesn’t seem to be cited by Prosperity Christians.
Growing up, I was always told to remember John 3:16. As I get older, I become more and more partial to John 2:15.
sauce
John 3:16 - For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life
John 2:15 - And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables;
Basically: when young, God and Jesus loves you. As I get older, I’m not above whipping and flipping tables at people who continue to use the religion as an excuse to hurt and subjugate others.
Sounds like the last ~2026 years to me.
There’s “Christian values” then there’s “Christ’s values”. Never the twain shall meet.
There are about 235 million people in the US who identify as Christian. They are far from a monolith. There is considerable variability of values between all of those different denominations and congregations.
Oh honey, I hardly doubt it’s that many people. God is fake. A man made creation and nothing more.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/
341,784,857 (official population estimate from 2025) * 62% (proportion of people who identify as Christian per Pew survey from 2023-2024) = 211,906,611.
So… You’re right, but they were in the ball park, but also about spot on if you include the 7% “Other religions” (who presumably mostly also believe in a god).
How many of those Christians go to church and aren’t just agnostic or religious for social status?
5%? Where is “Pew” to save this one?
The majority at least? Where I live, people say we have a church on every corner. Because we almost literally do. I drive past 5 just on my way to work every day. They wouldn’t be there if people didn’t attend. In my experience, even most of the non-affiliated will say they believe in a “higher power” or somesuch. In the Pew survey, only 6% out of the 29% non-affiliated identified as agnostic, and only 5% as atheist. Living in the south, having grown up in the bible belt, I can say with very high confidence that more than 5% of Christians actually believe in god. I’m sure some do maintain a facade for social reasons (I did myself for a few years, though would have been honest on an anonymous survey), but certainly not 95%+.
I’m sure it varies by location (obviously, the bible belt was thusly nicknames for a reason), but the idea that less than 5% of Christians anywhere actually believe in god just stretches credulity.
Where is “Pew” to save this one?
Right here: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religious-attendance-and-congregational-involvement/
“Who could imagine…that they would freak out in Minnesota…” - Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention
