Look, cards on the table, shit IS scary. We’ve got an intelligence apparatus that has every message every one of us has ever sent electronically, and probably microphone data from every Internet connected device we’ve ever been in earshot of, so organizing something a little more potent has to happen nearly spontaneously. You’re dreaming if you think our operatives (or cops for that matter) are above just throwing a bag over your head, breaking your legs and throwing you down a mineshaft. Those intelligence agencies, for most of a century, have been spearheaded by the kind of people that sponsored violent right wing reactionary movements around the world to depose peaceful communist/leftist regimes you’ve maybe never heard of. They’d gladly take this over someone even as far left as Sanders.

Half the country still thinks that everything happening is perfectly cool and normal and totally how a republic works. A lot of the people in power still aren’t convinced that Trump won’t wake up one day and just be normal; they come to each new day of horrors completely shocked and surprised that he continued to be what he said he would, and to suggest that we should maybe do something about that is scandalous to them. Those two things together mean that the meaningful support is not great. Being a lone gunman is unlikely to change much, given that MAGA is a movement, and others around Trump- the people who hand him the EOs, and the billionaires who sponsor them- will remain. Being an armed resistance is effectively a death sentence, and nobody’s quite ready to sign up for that, at least until it’s absolutely clear that the alternative to fighting is just as bad. If I go rogue and catch a bullet, nobody’s going to take care of my family, they’re going to be homeless until RFK sends them off to a camp. Plus, as others have mentioned, it’s pretty goddamn difficult to organize mass protests in DC when everyone who feels like you do is living dollar store hot dog to dollar store hot dog and DC is further from you than Moscow is from London.

For as long as I’ve been alive, the consistent message to the American people has been that help is not coming. The cops will gladly form a task force to come shoot your grandma in her living room, but routinely have argued that they have no duty to protect you. When the BLM protests were happening, a bunch of my coworkers cheered and giggled at videos of cops doing drive by pepper spraying of people who were just walking, and derided that dude (I think it was in Seattle?) who returned fire when the cops shot at him first. When the great recession happened, our government spent a trillion dollars bailing out banks instead of people. If you need assistance, you’re ruthlessly scrutinized and continuously presumed to be a criminal or a parasite, only to be given not nearly enough at the end of it. Not only that, but we’ve even been attacking the helpers. We’ve spent decades eroding the ability to join a union, eroding the efficacy of unions, fighting and propagandizing against them at every turn (it doesn’t help that I’ve had my fair share of experience with worthless unions where the rep wouldn’t even return your calls. I know more people who’ve had experience with weak ass unions than people who’ve had experience with unions that are prepared to bury your boss under a sports stadium). We’re shutting down churches that house the homeless, arresting people who try to feed them, and our authorities have the goddamn audacity to frame that and bulldozing encampments as acts of “compassion” because to not make the homeless miserable is to enable them. Every one fundamentally understands that help is not coming, we must help ourselves, and this is a really, really, really big job for an individual.

So, yeah, I’d say I’m pretty goddamn scared and I feel rational to be so.

The only thing that makes real sense, imo, is to start laying the groundwork for cold balkanization. It will break the federal government’s power, finally allow needed social, legal, and economic changes, and hopefully can be achieved without much bloodshed.