So they really went and did it. This time last year the Trump campaign was only just beginning to lose it’s comedic factor. Now Trump is just days away from taking office, and many are at a loss on how to navigate this new reality. Without promising any solutions, we would like to outline a combative strategy against the incoming regime and all manifestations of oppression and authority.

In the days following the election, even cities where riots did not erupt from anti-Trump demonstrations witnessed an antagonism unprecedented in recent history. In every metropolis throughout the country social peace was shattered, even where it was strongest. Even as the immediate momentum slows, calls to disrupt the inauguration ceremony on January 20th have picked up steam. Interfering with this spectacle holds potential, but the prospect of decentralizing conflict on the 20th and beyond is what really piques our interest. The model we elaborate here provides us with a loose strategy for spreading ungovernability, reducing the capacity of the Trump regime, and by extension local authorities of all parties, from operating.

This strategy is what we, and others like us around the world, call autonomous self-organization. Let’s take a moment to unpack what we mean by this. First of all, when we speak of autonomous action we refer to action taken outside of or separate from official groups and organizations. While useful at times, formalized relations such as these can not only hinder our ability to act but also leave us vulnerable to repression when actions can be tied to offices, spokespeople, or membership lists. For these reasons, affinity groups are often proposed as an alternative to organizations. Affinity groups refer to those friendships that most of us already have—those handfuls of comrades with which we have built, or are building, a deep trust. With our affinity groups or even alone we have the freedom to take initiative, acting on our own accord and on our own timelines without waiting for instructions or invitations.

In refusing to become followers in struggle we are also refusing to gather followers for ourselves. For this reason reproducibility is prioritized when acting. Spray paint is 97¢ if you can’t steal it, every home has a hammer, and concealing your identity is simple if you think ahead (see our September issue for some tips). The easier an act is to reproduce the more likely it is to generalize, and as attacks spread and more people join in it becomes more difficult for authorities to profile possible suspects, creating space for more to participate and for bolder actions to be taken. While isolated acts are manageable, generalized unrest can and does make it harder for law enforcement to operate, harder for them to harass, arrest, evict or deport us.

It is important to note that the framework of autonomous self-organization is not exclusive to small or clandestine actions. It can also inform how we approach mass actions such as demonstrations. Rather than the traditional march where we follow the bullhorn from point A to B, we can come together as a cluster of individuals and affinity groups who cooperate to carry out larger, public actions. The tradition of protest marshals solidifies a hierarchy between organizers and participants, stifling self-organization even when marshals aren’t directly facilitating the work of the police. Instead, different individuals and groups can come prepared to achieve their own goals, whether this means bringing a banner along with flyers to hand out, acting as a self-defense squad against right-wing threats, or having the tools necessary to carry out a targeted attack when the time is right. In this sense, every public call should be viewed as a call for self-organization, a call to step up with our own contributions, with the hope that they can come together to strike a chord.

It might be difficult to imagine anything meaningful produced in our current context from a handful of isolated acts of resistance, yet the world abounds with examples: gentrifying businesses closing in San Francisco after repeated vandalism, immigration enforcement raids aborted in London after spontaneous blockades, eviction lawyers in Berlin dropping cases after their cars are burned. These are small victories within western urban centers, but we have just as much to learn from the self-organized communities of southern Mexico, the squatted forest of the ZAD, or the maroons of the eighteenth-century South.

Over the past year, the Twin Cities has seen a number of acts that loosely fit within this framework. Some are claimed through anonymous communiques submitted to counter-information websites such as Conflict MN or It’s Going Down. Others simply rely on the eyes of witnesses and passerby, leaving us guessing as to their intentions or allegiances.

In the spirit of self-organization, we at Nightfall have no interest in becoming the single voice of anti-authoritarian views and critique in the Twin Cities. The actions we cover and the events we promote are not representative of any single group but instead resonate with us regardless of their stated affiliations or lack thereof. We look forward to others with whom this newspaper resonates putting their voices and clarifications out into the world in whatever format appeals to them. This newspaper only requires a printer and a few dedicated friends.

So far we have described a framework of attack—something we find to be a crucial component of liberatory struggle. However it is just that: a component. Equally important is to support each other and build communities to sustain ourselves. The balance between these two has been described elsewhere as spreading anarchy and living communism. Any attempt to sever one component from the other will surely lead to defeat. As a friend once said, the commune is that which sustains the attack and the attack is that which enlarges the commune. We briefly explore this in a separate article [in issue 4.]

Everyone agrees, the situation is bleak. The Democratic Party is scrambling for relevancy, desperate to redirect different struggles and campaigns into membership drives. Every leftist group sees an opportunity for a new organization to take the Democrats’ place; that this organization is always their own is surely just a coincidence. These false solutions only offer the certainty of defeat, of death. We see in autonomous self-organization the potential for something more than bare survival, something like life. Our lives belong to no vanguard, organizer, or leader—only to ourselves.

We recently hit a point of no return for climate change. Atmospheric carbon levels reached over 400 parts per million, well above the 280 ppm of preindustrial times, the 300 ppm agreed upon by many low-lying countries as the limit above which anything further would constitute genocide, and even the 350 ppm touted as the acceptable limit by North American NGOs. It’s likely that this level won’t return to a more environmental-friendly level ever again, at least not within the lifespan of the human species. Rather than being demobilized, however, this news only reinforces in our minds the urgent necessity of change, but we are still barely scratching the surface while we are rapidly destroying the planet. In the last couple years more and more environmental NGOs stepped up and launched campaigns to save the environment and reverse climate change, yet these campaigns mainly focus on changing personal habits and endorsing politicians. Let’s take a closer look at two organizations and their attempts to save our planet.

First let’s take Friends of the Earth Action, a sister organization of Friends of the Earth, one of the biggest national environmental organizations. Friends of the Earth’s biggest campaign right now is a campaign called “Save the Bees”. While saving the bees is definitely a cause worth fighting for, considering the issues we are facing right now it is pretty trivial, especially since FoEA doesn’t link the shrinking bee population to climate change. And even though Friends of the Earth Action is still hiring organizers to help save the bees, taking a look at their website the last article about anything related to their save the bee campaign is dated in 2014, which was also when the last action relating to this campaign happened. Still, Friends of the Earth Action is sending out canvassers every day to go door to door and ask people for donations.

The way this is done is very typical of NGO’s. Canvassers are not allowed to talk about specific goals and strategies of the campaign or even get into a discussion with people, but instead are instructed to keep it light and simple, focusing only on getting the biggest donation. Friends of the Earth Action’s strategy is for canvassers to hand people a tablet with a static screen displaying a picture of a bee and their slogan. The tablet doesn’t offer any information about the campaign, the cause, or what can be done to save the bees. FoEA doesn’t want to talk about strategies and action plans because they don’t have any. Their main goal is to get people to donate and become a member of their organization. This is a well known strategy, as the more members an organization has, the more funding it can get, and the more influence and power it has.

The second organization I’d like to talk about is 350.org. This in an environmental organization that is best known for organizing the People’s Climate Marches that took place all over the country in 2015. The first red flag is that like many other environmental NGOs, 350.org accepts significant donations from foundations such as Tides, which is primarily funded by oil profiteers. It might seem odd that the companies who are most involved in destroying our planet are donating to an environmental organization that is claiming to fight climate change and environmental destruction, but it actually makes a lot of sense from a capitalist perspective; buying the organizations, who might be able to hurt them to keep them quiet and their actions ineffective. Unlike Friends of the Earth Action, whose main focus is raising donations which seem to disappear into a void 350.org focuses on what they call direct action. During the People’s Climate Marches 350.org got a lot of people involved, partnering with many organizations, companies and politicians who all publicly promised to make an effort to stop and reverse climate change. But in the end that’s all that happened: a lot of empty promises. 350.org managed to mobilize tens of thousands of people to take the streets for a day to demand climate justice, but offered no way for participants to follow up on that demand. The marches garnered attention in the media, but that was all. Instead of building our capacity to fight against environmental destruction, 350.org continues to stage media-centric events and focus on people changing their personal habits. Despite their rhetoric, 350.org finds itself among the long list of environmental organizations who claim to advance radical change but instead only offer individual solutions such as taking shorter showers to save water, biking or walking instead of driving, using energy saving light bulbs to save electricity and all the other tips we have heard so many times.

While there’s nothing wrong with these tips, they don’t even begin to address the monstrous scale of the catastrophe. To be able to save the environment and slow down climate change, we need a radical action strategy in place of the idea that we can keep capitalism and our current lifestyle alive.

If people took the scientific reports about global warming seriously, the engines of every fire department would sound their sirens and race to the nearest factory to extinguish its furnaces. Every high school student would run to the thermostat, turn it off, and tear it from the classroom wall, then hit the parking lot to slash tires. Every responsible suburban parent would don safety gloves and walk around the block pulling the electrical meters out of the utility boxes behind houses and condominiums. Every gas station attendant would press the emergency button to shut off the pumps, cut the hoses, and glue the locks on the doors; every coal and petroleum corporation would immediately set about burying their unused product where it came from—using only the muscles of their own arms, of course.

– CrimethInc., “The Climate is Changing”

At this point only the most stubborn would attempt to deny the connection between the highway and structural violence. The office worker who glides comfortably from their workplace in downtown Minneapolis to their house in the suburbs and the person on the street whom the office worker only ever sees from the skyway both exist in their present forms because the police stand at the ready in case the person on the street decides to take action to get what the office worker has got, and the architecture of the city itself works in tandem with the police in ensuring this separation of decidedly closed loops of circulation, with highways and skyways reserved for some and sidewalks and bus routes for the rest. There are even some parking decks in the skyway system that exit directly onto the highway. But we want to talk about a relationship that is less obvious but no less real, the relationship between the greenway and police murder, between the greenway and displacement, between the greenway and the continuing climate catastrophe.

At first glance nothing could seem more absurd. The greenway is progressive. The greenway is eco-friendly. The greenway is for regular people. You know, people like us. What goes unexamined in statements like these is just who is included in this us and who is excluded. Witness for example the furor that erupted when muggings occurred on the Midtown Greenway on three consecutive days in 2015. Three muggings in three days would barely register if they took place a block south on Lake Street, but the muggings on the greenway enraged certain citizens, who fumed online in thinly coded language about the barbarity of anyone who would rob a biker, betraying a total lack of awareness of the role the greenway plays in shuttling the modern leisure class safely through destitute parts of the city to destinations like the co-op in Seward, the restaurants at the Midtown Global Market, or any of the numerous condos that line the greenway in Uptown. What does it matter to someone living in one of the neighborhoods that the greenway bypasses that the person they are robbing is passionate about progressive causes? The only thing that matters is that they have shit worth taking and are an easier target than someone in a car. Following the muggings Soren Jensen of the Midtown Greenway Coalition, an organization whose primary function seems to be to cloak the interests of business and development in the language of community, advised bikers in an interview with the Star Tribune to call the cops if they see groups of people loitering on the greenway. This despite the fact that anyone who uses the greenway regularly knows that people often congregate there not to rob anyone but because they have nowhere better to go, because it provides more shelter and less of a chance of being harassed by police than other public spaces in the area. In light of this Jensen’s exhortations for those passing through the greenway to ally themselves with the structural violence directed against those attempting to dwell there makes plain that the greenway is not there for everyone to use as they wish like the commons of some mythic past or future, but rather exists for a specific reason, to smooth the flow of certain people between various sites of work and play, if things that one must pay to do can ever really be called play. In this way the greenway can be viewed as a single piece in a giant mosaic of infrastructural projects and consumer trends that have been gaining steam for a while now.

At this point in time the market has realized that the old way of doing things, the way of suburbs and strip malls, is no longer sustainable. Not because of the violence needed to secure the existence of such places or the environmental havoc they wreak but because they are really fucking depressing. Too many people sense on some level the emptiness and destruction on which such a world is built and lose their desire to work and to play alike. The forces of the market cannot sit idly by and let this happen, and so a new capitalism must be forged, a sustainable capitalism. The modern capitalist subject who bikes to work, eats organic, puts a few solar panels on top of their house, posts an outraged Facebook status every once in a while can go to sleep feeling that they have done their part, or at least that they are not as guilty as those in the suburbs. But all the greenways, light-rails and co-ops in the world can’t conceal the fact that the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere recently eclipsed 400 ppm. Can’t conceal the communities across the Global South that have smoothly transitioned from being devastated by the drilling of oil to being devastated by the mining of the minerals needed to make solar panels and iPhones. Can’t conceal the fact that people’s rage is being expertly exploited by corporations like Berkshire Hathaway, which funnels millions through its various foundations into fights against pipelines yet just happens to own BNSF Railway, the railroad that currently transports 75% of the oil fracked in the Dakotas (approximately 600,000 barrels a day, much more than the 470,000 barrels that the Dakota Access Pipeline will transport if it is completed). In fact about 50 BNSF trains filled with this highly-volatile oil pass through Minneapolis each week on their way to refineries and ports, many of which Berkshire Hathaway also owns. Unsurprisingly, Berkshire Hathaway does not fund organizations that challenge the oil economy as a whole and not just the pipelines, and the spokespeople of the organizations it funds often work to discredit those who do as ‘unrealistic.’ And of course we shouldn’t forget that a major argument used by the state in favor of destroying much of Minnehaha Park and numerous important environmental and religious sites in order to reroute Highway 55 as discussed elsewhere in this issue was that the reroute of the highway was a necessary first step towards building the light-rail system, although one would think that if the goal was for people to use the light-rail building a highway parallel it would be the exact opposite of what one should do. This argument proved to be effective in driving a wedge between mainstream progressives and those who were putting their lives on the line not to reform industrialization but to stop it. Similar rhetoric is currently being used to argue for the removal of the K-Mart at Lake St and Nicollet Ave, as this is said to be necessary to build a streetcar line that will run down Nicollet connecting the restaurants and boutiques a few blocks north of Lake with those a few blocks south. The fact that this will destroy one of the last stores in the area that those with low-incomes can afford as well as a large parking lot where people can gather is simply seen by our progressive city council and neighborhood associations as an added perk (not that we are any friends of K-Mart, of course). What all these examples make plain is that the only thing sustainable capitalism ever sustains is capitalism itself.

So what then? We’re not arguing that use of the greenway should or could be replaced with some other more moral mode of circulation. Some of us use the greenway everyday, just as some of us eat organic when we can afford to, but we do these things because we prefer them to the similarly flawed alternatives, not because they will change anything fundamental about our society. Clearly they instead function hand-in-hand with the current order, as evidenced by the condos sprouting along the greenway like hideous brick-and-glass mushrooms and the gentrification taking place in Central around the newly opened Seward Co-Op Friendship Store. While we are forced to circulate as subjects of this brutal system, forced to work and to buy groceries and to pay rent and all the rest, we might make use of these amenities at times, but we should be careful not to mistake them for solutions to the mess we find ourselves in. Solutions will never come in the form of consumer choices. We only begin to work on real solutions when we stop identifying as consumers and citizens and begin thinking of ourselves as insurgents against this regime of consumption and death, and begin to link up with others who think similarly.

A NightFall Editor:  First off, can you tell us a little bit about the Dakota Access Pipeline?

Anonymous Participant: The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), is owned by a Houston, Texas based corporation called Energy Transfer Partners, L.P. which created the subsidiary Dakota Access LLC that is building the pipeline. The DAPL, also known as the Bakken Pipeline, is proposed to transport 450,000 barrels of crude oil per day (which is fracked and highly volatile) from the Bakken fields of North Dakota to Patoka, Illinois. The current route of the DAPL will cross over the Ogallala Aquifer (one of the largest aquifers in the world) and under the Missouri River twice (the longest river in the United States). Dakota Access has systematically failed to consult with tribes and conduct a full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).

In early August, Canadian pipeline giant Enbridge announced that, along with Marathon Petroleum, it will make a significant investment in the Bakken Pipeline System, including the controversial Dakota Access pipeline. As part of their statement, Enbridge also noted that, “Upon successful closing of the transaction, Enbridge and Marathon Petroleum plan to terminate their transportation services and joint venture agreements for the Sandpiper Pipeline Project [a crude oil pipeline proposed for northern Minnesota.]”

We know that this influx of resources from Enbridge will only speed up the construction process.

NF: When and how was the Sacred Stone Camp established?

AP: The camp is at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers. This is important location for the Mandan origin story as the place where they came into the world after the great flood. Where the two waters meet, created Iŋyaŋ Wakháŋagapi Othí, spherical Sacred Stones (thus the colonizers’ term ‘Cannon Ball River’), but after the Army Corp of Engineers dredged and flooded the rivers in the 1950s, the flow has changed and Sacred Stones are no longer produced. The camp is surrounded by historic burial grounds, village grounds and Sundance sites that would be directly impacted by this pipeline. The water of the Missouri River is essential to life on the Standing Rock Reservation as well as all of the nations downstream.

On April 1st, 2016, a group of over 200 supporters, led by forty riders on horse, under the Lakota name, “Chante tin’sa kinanzi Po”, which translates as “People, Stand with a Strong Heart!” left Fort Yates for a thirty mile trek to the camp located just north of Cannonball, North Dakota. They setup up tipis and a sacred fire. This camp has swelled in the past two months and has had multiple satellite camps across the river on private as well as unceded land on both sides of the river.

NF:  What is daily life like in the camp?

AP: Cooking, cleaning, gathering and chopping firewood and hanging out, especially around the campfire sharing food largely defined camp life. There are always families of all generations populating the camp. You can hear the people playing the drum, giving the camp its own heartbeat. Stories and memories are shared like water. Laughter and life are not uncommon.

The reality of the situation is that the people have been resisting the U.S. Empire and continuing genocide for so long that the drones and military surveillance flying above the camp the whole day becomes almost forgettable; like living next to a waterfall, the sound becomes a part of the landscape. We do counter-surveillance, logging the enemies movements. We can see all the pipeline construction equipment on the east side of the river.

Everyday there are prayers of resistance offered to the water, earth and ancestors. Without the water of life the camp and we would die.

NF:  How have folks at the camp mobilized to stop the pipeline thus far?  Has it been solely a publicity campaign/symbolic protest thus far or have folks directly interfered with construction of the pipeline?  Are there discussions about tactics at the camp?  Did these change after the Army Corps of Engineers approved the pipeline crossing the river and/or after the arsons affecting DAPL construction sites in Iowa?  As I see it, the camp and the arsons are complementary rather than conflicting tactics for stopping the pipeline; is this generally how people feel at the camp or is there a range of opinions on the matter?

AP: Like with any struggle, the people are not homogeneous in thought and tactic. Much of the camp’s rhetoric is of the “Non-violent Direct Action” type. Lock your arm to this piece of deconstruction equipment and take a picture with a banner for Facebook. But the Warrior Culture that is so rich in Lakota memory seems to counter a lot of the liberal, non-violent, NGO types. Comrades saw what happened in Iowa, heard about the $1,000,000 in damage and got inspired. I wouldn’t say that it was publicly celebrated because the camp’s tactic of “Non-violence” is the image they want to perpetuate. Like I said, it is a tactic… not everyone thinks that is what we need to dogmatically stick to. It is one thing to use Non-Violence as a rhetorical device in corporate media to spread your inspirational actions but it is another thing to preach it as your dogma in your private circles and use it to stop material damage to the infrastructure of ecocide. I see the former being invoked much greater than the latter.

NF:  How has the camp’s location on private land affected its character?  I would imagine the fact that it’s on private land gives it some protection against police but also means that if folks at the camp did engage in any illegal activities the land owner would be in a vulnerable position with regards to legal repression.  Is that a concern?  Does the person who owns the land have more say than others about tactics or daily matters at the camp?  What does the decision making process look like?

AP: The question of “private land” is especially difficult to address when we factor in Reservations (or what the U.S. Empire originally called and created them for, Prison of War Camps). The reservations are actually Federal Land. This means that local county and state police cannot enter it. A huge reason why Dakota Access (the company) is not building the pipeline thru the rez but literally a couple hundred meters north of it.

When the reservations were created, imperial logic of “borderization” was imposed; meaning, the communal and nomadic lands used for Life were divided by borders: fencing for animal domestication, invisible lines drawn on maps to denote “property” i.e. who owns what, etc. This fundamentally changed people’s relation to land. And this set up the infrastructure/hierarchies for surveillance and policing.

The camp exists in a way that resists this imperial imposition. We share food and water without hesitation. We have no leader. We all have knowledge to share and learn from each other. We recognize that the borders we build between ourselves are not “natural” anymore than the flooding in the 1950s by the Army Corps of Engineers is. They do not spread our Wildfire, so we continue to keep the eternal flame lit.

Instead of framing things in colonial terms of “legal/illegal”, it makes more sense at the camp to think in terms of effectiveness; effectiveness of stopping this genocidal project so the people can reclaim their Way of Life.

NF:  How can folks in the Twin Cities support the camp and keep up with what’s going on?

AP: Unicorn Riot has been doing amazing media coverage the entire duration of the camp and you can can thoroughly updated by reading and watching their media at their website search for tag: DAPL

Visit the camps offical website.

From there you can donate to the legal defense, see what supplies are needed, and more.

Lastly, come to the camp! Everybody is welcome.

[Pamphlet version]

The events of the July 9th highway shutdown were inspiring, to say the least. Those who struck back against the police state inflicted significant financial damages on the city of St. Paul and the businesses that rely on I-94, as well as injuring 21 cops. Headlines the next day juxtaposed this number with the 102 arrests made that night to imply that the violence directed against the police did not go unpunished. However, the vast majority of those arrests were either negotiated surrenders by pacifists among the highway blockaders or misdemeanor citations issued hours after the shutdown was over. As it stands now only one person is facing felony charges stemming from the shutdown. The fact that there were many more who fought back that night and got away with it shows that it is possible to put the police on the defensive without resorting to suicidal lone wolf attacks such as the recent ones in Dallas and Baton Rouge. However, one person facing felony charges is still one too many, and that number could easily have been higher had the police been only marginally more prepared. Many people engaged in a variety of risky activities without taking basic precautions to conceal their identity. While the police were temporarily driven out of the streets surrounding the highway there were still cameras present, as well as pacifist enforcers eager to impose their own tactics upon those with differing ideas of how best to oppose the police. Nekima Levy-Pounds, the influential leader of NAACP-Minneapolis, stated in a speech at the Governor’s Mansion following the shutdown that “I ain’t no snitch, but if I see you smashing things I’m running to the 5-0.” With this in mind we offer the following reflections and fashion tips for today’s security-minded rebel.

HOW

The first order of business is to cover your face. A bandana will work, but a t-shirt is better. Simply put it around your head as if you were putting it on, tie the sleeves together behind your head and pull it up to just below your eyes, covering as much as possible. Combine with a hoodie and/or stocking cap to completely cover your face. Another important point is that the more similarly-dressed people there are, the harder it tends to be for police to get charges to stick to any one of them. For this reason black is the preferred color for masks and protest-wear in general, as it is one of the most common clothing colors and it makes us look fabulous. Beyond the mask it is best to stick with plain clothes that can’t be easily tied to your everyday style, such as a simple hoodie and jeans combo. If something could be used to identify you, cover it up or leave it at home. That means tattoos, hair, shoes, bags and other distinctive accessories. Glasses are not ideal but you definitely do not want to have contacts in if the cops bring out pepper spray or tear gas, so wear them if you need them and ditch them if you can manage.

In addition to having your all-black ensemble ready to go, you will generally want to wear something inconspicuous when entering and exiting areas of conflict. Avoid changing in sight of cops, cameras and people you don’t know or trust. A change of clothes is also crucial in case the cops start shooting marker rounds, little pellets that hurt like hell and leave a colored stain wherever they hit. If you are tagged by one of these, ditch the marked clothes as soon as possible, as police use marker rounds in situations where they have lost control, tagging individuals to send snatch squads after once control has been reimposed. In fact, much of the state’s case against the person facing felony charges from the night of the 9th appears to rest on the fact that when they were picked up they were allegedly sporting a tag from a round fired earlier in the night. It might suck to ditch your favorite pair of jeans, but a new pair will be cheaper than a court case.

WHY

There are many reasons you might choose to maintain anonymity at protests and other moments of rupture, the most obvious being that many effective methods of resisting the brutalities of this world, from white supremacy to patriarchy to the destruction of the earth, fall outside the boundaries of acceptable protest as defined by cops, politicians and respectable citizens. Actions such as defending oneself from the police, attacking the assets of white supremacist collaborators such as the private prison-funding Wells Fargo and expropriating the physical manifestations of the life stolen from us at work (aka looting) all carry with them the possibility of repression and are therefore best done as anonymously as possible. However, there are many other reasons you might choose to mask up. Even if, for whatever reason, you do not personally engage in confrontational actions masking up can respect and protect the autonomy of those who do. As we said before, the more masked people there are the safer are those who are most likely to be targeted by the police. Or maybe you don’t come to the protest expecting to engage in any risky behavior but are overtaken by the course of events, as happens in unpredictable situations. If you see a cop trying to drag one of your friends away and have the opportunity to snatch them back, you will be happy you masked up. And beyond your feelings on whether or not outright confrontation with the cops is tactically sound in our current moment, the long history of state repression in this country demonstrates pretty conclusively that the state will mobilize all of its power to crush any movement, peaceful or not, that poses a real threat to its hegemony. You can be sure that the police were filming the night of the 9th, in addition to monitoring the feeds of those livestreaming; those who did not have their faces covered are now that much more likely to have attention paid to them in the future.

A word or two should also be said about white supremacists. Much has been made of the fact that the white supremacists who shot five protestors outside the 4th Precinct in Minneapolis last year were wearing masks. Respectability-obsessed activists have manipulated people’s legitimate concerns about another white supremacist attack to pressure anyone wearing a mask, regardless of their political position or their perceived race, into removing it, thus consolidating their control over spaces of potential rupture. What has been completely overlooked in the discussion of this incident is the fact that in addition to wearing masks the white supremacists were filming everyone at the camp. These creeps have shown a pattern of harassment against known anti-racists both online and in real life, as evidenced by the death threats received by the individual who originally sounded the alarm that white supremacists were using 4chan to plan an assault on the occupation. They used their camera as a weapon much like the gun they would shoot soon after. Clearly this is a conversation that should be happening before we are on the streets confronting the police and the racists, but in our opinion the existence of white supremacists is another reason to wear a mask, not a reason to expose yourself. Perhaps in this sense these white supremacists were being more realistic than our side; they recognized that this is a conflict between two irreconcilable forms of life and took steps to protect themselves accordingly. It’s time we do the same.

With the conventions over and election season moving right along, we’ve seen a renewed urgency around the imperative to make sure that anyone except Donald Trump is elected. Trump’s presidency is presented to us as a doomsday scenario that must be avoided at all costs, even if that cost is voting for someone like Hillary Clinton. Yet the fact is that Clinton’s policies are Trump’s with a softer touch. There is no alternative in electoral politics – whether Hillary Clinton or Jill Stein.

There are two differences between Trump and other politicians which make his campaign remarkable. The first is that he is blunt about his oppressive positions: making blatantly racist calls for deportations while Hillary attempts to sell her immigration policies as “humanitarian,” despite the fact that they will still lead to a similarly massive amount of attacks on migrants, just as Obama’s policies have. Let’s not forget that Obama has deported 2.5 million people, more than any president before him. Trump is simply the most flagrant of the candidates; in reality they all share an interest in the perseverance of the status quo.

The second difference is that Trump’s campaign has mobilized disparate organizations on the far-right and given them space to recruit and build. Militia groups have been prominent at Trump rallies and the white nationalist Traditionalist Workers Party was spotted at his campaign events early on. At the Republican National Convention in Cleveland countless different far-right groups were present. We’ve already seen how this campaign has encouraged the far-right in terms of public organizing; the KKK have attempted two high-profile rallies this year in Anaheim and Stone Mountain, while the Traditionalist Worker’s Party organized what was supposed to be a pro-Trump demonstration in Sacramento. All of these and more were fiercely confronted by anti-fascists, although some ended with serious injuries.

If we’re being honest, there’s nothing we can do to stop the election of a president who will continue to oppress us. We should focus on what we can do: prepare for the potential of escalating conflict with far-right movements. How would white supremacist groups react to Trump’s victory in November? To his loss? What if the loss is narrow, or a landslide? Victory celebrations could become roving mobs attacking people perceived to be of marginalized identities. As far fetched as this may seem, it’s already a reality in Europe where the far-right has capitalized on the refugee crisis to expand it’s power, in addition to the historical precedent of lynch mobs in the United States. Maybe the reality of a Trump presidency that can’t deliver on his promises will lead to a depression of right-wing organizing as happens on the left every time a Democrat wins. Maybe a landslide loss will bring many who previously held faith in the electoral system into the fold of militant fascist groups.

The point is that these are the material scenarios to explore and more importantly, prepare for. Preparation can include anti-fascist propaganda, self defense training (hand to hand, bladed, and armed), building and strengthening ties with friends and accomplices, keeping tabs on right-wing activity and confronting it when the opportunity arises. Nothing could be worse than facing a trained enemy after wasting months registering voters to defeat Trump. There are no solutions in the democratic system, it’s time to leave politics behind and confront domination where it exists: it’s material manifestations in our daily lives.

This will not begin nor end on election day. These confrontations are ongoing, flaring up during large battles at white nationalist demonstrations and Trump rallies. To stomp out fascism, we must be persistent in denying the far-right a platform, denying them a voice, denying them the ability to feel safe whenever they leave their house. The convergences against white supremacist demonstrations, the attacks on Donald Trump supporters at his events, the waves of anti-racist vandalism, these and more all coalesce as hostile conditions for our enemies. What we’ve seen so far is inspiring, from Sacramento to Chicago to here at home, but we need to get ready to step things up a notch.