How To Fight A Military Occupation

Friction. Obstruction. Demoralization.

AMAugust will happen on Thursday, August 21, at 8:30 PM ET! This one’s open to everyone. I’ll send links and stuff next week. if you have a question, you can email me or ask anonymously here.

On Monday morning, Trump federalized the DC police. He did so in the name of protecting our capital city from the violent teenage crime wave he made up and cleansing the city of homeless people who are, apparently, corrupting Our Children by overdosing on fentanyl in front of them. What fate awaits these homeless people remains unclear, but Trump’s recent “Ending Crime And Disorder on America’s Streets” executive order suggests the answer might be uglier than the usual cruelty of sweeps. Law enforcement can now involuntarily institutionalize “individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves.” Who makes the mental health diagnosis? Unclear. What institutions will these people be sent to? “Appropriate facilities.” For how long? “Appropriate periods of time.” Careful readers will note that this executive order covers any mentally ill person who poses a risk to the public which, considering Trump's definitions of mental illness and public risk, could mean damn near anyone.

Nothing like Trump’s occupation of DC has ever happened in this country before. Even when Trump sent the National Guard into LA two months ago, their orders were to quell protests and support ICE. These instructions, bad as they were, at least confined the danger of state violence to small areas of the city: people not at protests or an ICE kidnapping were largely safe from harm. That's not the case in DC. There is no set building declared off-limits, no protest line to join or avoid as you see fit. The FBI, DEA and National Guard are conducting armed patrols throughout the city, which Trump says will continue into the foreseeable future. The DC charter allows the federal government to take control of the city’s police force for 30 days; Trump is already moving to obtain “long-term extensions” to that mandate. And if Congress doesn’t approve these extensions? “If it’s a national emergency, we can do it without Congress.”

Trump says these patrols would target “known gangs, drug dealers and criminal networks”: language he often uses to describe undocumented immigrants with regular jobs and no criminal record whatsoever. But Trump is casting a wider net this time. “Some of these people -- a lot of them are homegrown criminals, and these are bad people,” he said. Again: Trump often uses this language to describe people who have not committed any kind of crime beyond their lack of legal status. He also has a long history of threatening to prosecute those who stand against him, including political enemies, intelligence officials, ethical journalists, and peaceful protesters. Everyone is a potential target. No one in our capital is safe from state violence.

It is no exaggeration to say that Washington DC is under military occupation. We do not yet know whether this occupation will be merely bad or unthinkably brutal; we will find out in the coming days and weeks. We do not know if Trump will declare his national emergency and follow through on his threat to occupy cities like New York City, Chicago, and LA. We'll find that out in the coming months.

For a very long time, American democracy teetered on the edge of the cliff of authoritarianism: neither falling nor able to regain its balance. When Trump won reelection last year, we fell. Now, at last, we are about to hit the ground. America is no longer descending into fascism. We are seconds away from impact.

It’s hard to stay sane right now. There’s not a great blueprint for remaining calm while watching your country die and wondering if you're going to be, say, involuntarily institutionalized for being mentally ill. Or forcibly detransitioned. Or stripped of citizenship. Or, even if you aren’t personally targeted, living the rest of your life in a country that isn't free and watching all the institutions that were supposed to protect us fail or acquiesce, one by one.

We cannot fall into the trap of helplessness and despair. We are not powerless, things are not hopeless: we can fight back against this authoritarian takeover. And, fortunately for the future of this Substack, we can talk about fighting back without violating a single term of service or prompting an FBI visit (probably), because the best ways to fight back right now have nothing to do with violence.

Let's be very, very real right now: any tactic that involves going toe to toe with Trump’s militarized forces right now will lead to a fight we’re going to lose. The DC police are predictably stoked about Trump's authoritarianism. Most National Guard volunteers don’t want to be involved and will probably sandbag, but they won't actively turn against Trump. And Kash Patel has spent months purging the FBI of anyone who might stand up. Hegseth has been doing the same thing within the Department of Defense; we’ll see what the military does, if and when Trump calls on them.

Trump has a complete monopoly on force right now, but here's the good news: force isn't actually a very good way to control someone’s behavior. It works well short-term, but takes a lot of energy to maintain. You have to keep your gun pointed at the people you're subjugating to keep them in line, and God help you if you let your focus slip for even a second.

If you want someone's behavior to stay changed even after you walk away, you need to get into their head. Persuasion. Manipulation. Demoralization. These are our weapons. These are the things we can use.

Demoralization

Humans climbed the evolutionary ladder by hunting in tight-knit groups. Those social instincts are alive and well in all of us today, which is one reason that rejection hurts as much as it does. It’s also why ostracism feels like a death sentence on an instinctual, brain-stem level. So let's ostracize Trump’s shock troops. Let’s make them regret every decision that led them to this point.

Imagine you're an ICE agent or an FBI spook. Imagine patrolling the streets of a city you don't live in. You're far away from home and family, and the job itself is stressful.

Now imagine that everywhere you go, people flip you off and call you a fascist. Imagine not being able to eat in a restaurant without someone yelling at you and telling you to get out of their city. Imagine people honking outside your hotel every night so that even in your sleep, you know that everyone in this city hates your guts.

Or maybe you’re a National Guard member. You joined for the extra money or because you wanted to go to college or maybe you just liked the idea of helping people. Now you’ve been ordered to occupy a city and oppress the people inside it. And maybe, interspersed with the general hatred, you hear a different message. You don't have to do this. Stop destroying America. Join us.

These actions might not sound like much, and as isolated incidents, none of them are. We've all dealt with assholes, we've all been yelled at by strangers, we've all been told we’re living our lives wrong. It sucks, it might even ruin your day, and then you get over it. But what about constant vitriol day after day, week after week? You start to go insane. Morale slips. It's harder and harder to recruit.

Death by a thousand cuts. Wear them down a little more each day.

Friction

When I was in the military, my company lost two brand-new up-armored HMMWVs. This is a very weird and very bad thing to lose. A lost military vehicle is a national security risk; the kind of thing you’re supposed to report right away.

My company did not report the missing HMMWVs right away. Instead, they put all of us into small teams, gave us the serial numbers of the two missing vehicles, and ordered us to look at the serial number of every single HMMWV on base. This was at Fort Bragg, by the way: the largest military base in the country with tens of thousands of vehicles just like the ones we’d lost. We were to be very, very quiet about this. They could not order us to lie outright, but they made it clear we were supposed to.

Our team was not quiet at all. We made absolutely no effort to obscure what we were doing. It took a couple hours for someone who outranked me to ask what the hell we were doing, and I told him immediately. He didn’t believe me at first — he thought we were being hazed or pranked — but when he realized I was serious he made a few phone calls and suddenly we were all ordered back to company HQ and the covert search was over. I got yelled at, but that’s as far as they could go. What were they going to do, give me an Article 15 for not lying to a First Sergeant?

Morale in my unit was dogshit, and this kind of resistance happened all the time. Everything took way longer than it should have. If they didn't explicitly order us to do something, it didn't happen. No initiative. No problem-solving. Every day, you ask yourself: what would the most incompetent fool in the universe do in my situation? And then you do that. Failure to follow orders will get you into a world of trouble in the military. Following orders badly, on purpose? Prove it.

Let's imagine you're that ICE agent again. You go into a restaurant and your order takes forever. Then it's wrong. Every single time. You go to a store and the cashier just can't figure out how to ring up any of your merchandise, you have to get the manager. You ask someone to move their car and they do a thousand-point k-turn. And of course this whole time people are telling you to get fucked and/or that you're doing something wrong and need to stop.

If you find yourself in a position where, as part of the job you work to pay your rent and feed your family, you are asked to help ICE or the FBI or any of these militarized thugs telling people what to do, you have the option of doing the worst job you've ever done in your life. It's not a big thing by itself, but it adds up to time wasted and morale sapped.

Obstruction

There are also ways you can actively slow these bastards down, if you feel so inclined.

We're getting into territory where you are risking arrest, even if you are doing nothing illegal, because laws don’t matter like they used to. It's up to you to decide whether that's a risk you're willing to take. If you're at a high baseline risk already — trans, not white, visibly queer, etc — actions in this section will carry more danger. If you're white and cis and straight-presenting and especially if you're a man, this is your time to shine. Don't check your privilege — use it.

We're seeing obstructionary tactics all over the country with ICE already. People are following agents and loudly warning residents of ICE raids. They’re hounding these ICE agents (without touching them) while they abduct people, and they’re getting these abductions on film. People are getting pictures and videos of ICE agents wherever they go so that Internet sleuths and researchers can figure out who they are. No this is not doxxing; these motherfuckers work for us, or at least they're supposed to, and we have a right to know their names.

Do you have a phone with a camera? Congratulations: you have everything you need to be a photojournalist. If you see these assholes arresting someone or acting belligerant, get them on video. Recording helps keep people safe; as brutal as cops are when people are watching, they're a thousand times worse when they think no one's around to see. It also helps the world see exactly what's happening. People need to understand what occupation looks like, and you can help show them. Nervous to have your name attached to footage like that? You know someone with a platform; email me and I'll publish it with credit to an anonymous videographer.

If you're in a car and you see their unmarked vans, you can follow them and figure out where they're staying, where they're bringing prisoners: all sorts of things. You can post it online or email your local activist group. If you know where ICE is staying, you can call the hotel and tell them to kick the bastards out. You can get all your friends to call and get people on the Internet to call. If you know where they're transferring or off-loading prisoners you can make sure to be there so you can yell at them and film them and make yourself a nuisance.

A lot of the things I've just mentioned are risky, but none of them are illegal. I am not going to advocate for doing illegal things on the Internet, and neither should you. I will definitely advocate against doing anything that, if filmed and played on cable news, would convince regular people that Trump is right to send armed patrols into your city. “Optics” was a dirty word back in 2020, but this is 2025 and I think a lot more people understand that optics are a fantastic weapon we can use to our advantage. Let's deprive the administration of that weapon as much as we can.

Putting It All Together

At this point, you may be thinking: that's cute and all, but if Trump uses these “emergencies” to do away with free and fair elections (or, you know, redistricts this country into red plurality), none of these tactics will get him out of office so that real patriots — people who believe in a country where no one is above the law — can reclaim America.

You'd be absolutely right. I am not describing a full-fledged opposition movement. I am describing the beginning of one.

Small acts of defiance matter for their own sake, as described above, but they also get people used to the concept of defying an armed occupation. Every act of resistance makes people feel less helpless and less afraid. It keeps them from succumbing to fear or becoming fully accustomed to a militarized society.

Small, visible actions on a large scale also remind us that we are not alone. News outlets are already trying to underplay the DC occupation and make it seem normal. That type of propaganda is going to get worse as speaking out grows more dangerous; real news is going to become harder and harder to come by. It's important to remain visible in our outrage, to give others courage to stand up, and — eventually — to build communities of people who aren't going to take this lying down. This is how you build a movement capable of taking on MAGA even as the Democratic party fails and our institutions bend the knee. It’s going to take time, but every small success brings us closer to building something better atop the ashes of authoritarianism.

And we will see success with these tactics. We know they work because they’re already working. Chad Loder, a journalist on the gound in LA, wrote a thread about how things are going for ICE that everyone should read. Here are some excerpts (emphasis mine):

ICE and DHS cannot move around Los Angeles undetected. Their every move is transparent, from the hotels where they sleep to their morning briefings to their 3-vehicle convoys entering neighborhoods. An entire megacity of 13 million people has awoken against them. They're slow and clumsy.

ICE has had to adapt their tactics to avoid getting trapped and surrounded the way they did in Paramount and Bell. ICE uses small vehicle teams: 3-4 unmarked rental vehicles with 2 agents each. They do quick raids, grabbing one or two people at a time. Each team has capacity for only 8 prisoners.

Once an ICE vehicle team fills their prisoner capacity, they have to cease kidnapping and drive to the nearest prisoner transfer staging area. Prisoner transfer stages 3-5 Ford Transit vans for 2 hours, under freeway overpasses, in secluded parking lots. Their spots get blown, they have to move.

DHS and ICE's popularity are at an all-time low. ICE's suppliers are being actively boycotted. Universities are divesting from DHS's grant and recruiting programs. Their agents are being de-anonymized.

ICE is fighting (and losing) a classic low-grade insurgency in LA.

The administration has to appear strong. The people do not.

Every single activity listed in Loder’s post is legal (though some of them might get you arrested anyway). None of them are violent. And yet, look how much sand they managed to throw into the gears with almost no resources. Regular people, each doing their part, are significantly impeding ICE. If it worked in LA, it can work in DC. It can work in New York. It can work wherever you are.

Army Field Manual 3-24 (“Insurgencies and Countering Insurgencies”) defines an insurgency as “a struggle for control and influence, generally from a position of relative weakness, outside existing state institutions.” America has fought several insurgencies over the past few decades and it always goes the same way: a decisive victory, a protracted and grinding conflict and, eventually, a humiliating loss.

Trump is likely to have a decisive victory in DC, and in any other city he decides to send his troops. That’s OK. It might feel like the end of the fight, but it’s not. It’s the beginning.