Dear resister,
The key to gaining support is not retweets, nor op-eds, not sucking up to the media with peaceful protests that achieve nothing apart from spending our entire national surplus of frustration on futility — the key is continual pressure.
You will have failures until you don’t, and that moment will be equal parts surreal and terrifying, because you have no control of how any protest ends nor where it goes from there until you start the next one, and that is true of your successes more-so than your failures. Success attracts factions that seek to profit off it, whether monetarily or through power dynamics, and you’ll have to contend with that.
Build your ally base out of factions you know you can trust. Avoid allies of convenience outside of protests themselves, and maintain strong relationships with factions that cannot protest as easily as you can; the unions, the people working three jobs, the people on overtime graveyard shifts who can’t risk their credit rating falling any more than it has. These are your base, these are your allies when you succeed, and they are how you channel popular pressure into legitimate change.
Because you are a protestor you are illegitimate by your very nature, but you are the hammer of the legitimate. Protest until you succeed, counter-protest when — not if — your once-allies ride your successes for their own benefit. And above all, do not surrender for the sake of civility, legitimacy, nor platitudes of peace; your fallen comrades were given none of the leeway these ideas imply, and you should not grant your enemies this leeway, either.
Protesting is not an easy path, nor is it a bloodless one. The myth of the peaceful social media protest was created to give you false hope in pointless action. Remain steadfast in your opposition, maintain organizers who can harden with your failures and maintain stability with your successes, and for the sake of your human losses, don’t let up.
Whether the protest fizzles out, is crushed, or achieves its goal, you are in a pantheon of a minority of humanity who risked everything for the sake of positive change, and that is the only romance and meaning you will ever need in a protest.
Good luck, comrade.
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