Let’s Learn and Live Lessons in Collective Survival Together

Part of the Series

Movement Memos

“We are really good at finding what’s wrong with each other,” says author and podcaster Margaret Killjoy. “We really need to challenge ourselves to be ready to let people be better.” In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Killjoy talks with host Kelly Hayes about preparedness, collective survival, and the organizing lessons we need in these times.

Music by Son Monarcas, Curved Mirror, Pulsed & David Celeste

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about solidarity, organizing, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about preparedness, community defense, protest, and how we can move through these disastrous times. We’ll be hearing from Margaret Killjoy, whose newsletter, Birds Before the Storm, is a favorite of mine. Margaret is a transfeminine author, podcaster, and musician based in the mountains of Appalachia. She is the host of the radical history podcast “Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff” and co-host of the preparedness podcast “Live Like the World is Dying.” She is the author of The Sapling Cage, Escape From Incel Island!, The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, and many other books. She is also the principal songwriter for the feminist black metal band Feminazgûl.

In the weeks following the 2024 presidential election, a refrain from Margaret’s newsletter echoed across social media: “Deescalate all conflict that isn’t with the enemy.” At a time when many people were at each other’s throats about how Donald Trump got reelected, and about how various forces on the left have failed each other, not everyone was ready to hear those words, but for many of us, Margaret’s message was essential. Today, we’re going to talk about deescalation, when it’s called for, and what this moment demands of us.

If you appreciate this podcast, and you would like to support “Movement Memos,” you can subscribe to Truthout’s newsletter or make a donation at truthout.org. You can also support the show by subscribing to “Movement Memos” on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or by leaving a positive review on those platforms. Sharing episodes on social media is also a huge help. As a union shop with the best family and sick leave policies in the industry, we could not do this work without the support of readers and listeners like you, so thanks for believing in us and for all that you do. And with that, I hope you enjoy the show.

[musical interlude]

KH: Margaret Killjoy, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Margaret Killjoy: Thanks for having me.

KH: How are you doing today?

MK: Today, I am good, but obviously it is a very up-and-down time to be a person in the United States.

KH: Yes, and I know the question, ‘How are you doing” can be a weird and awkward one in these times. Sometimes, people just look at me like, “Are you serious?” and I totally get where they’re coming from. But you know, I think too many people don’t get asked that question, in any given week, by someone who really welcomes an honest answer. And I think we all need to have those moments where, if we want to, we can talk about what’s good or rant about what’s terrible, and it’s all completely welcome, so I keep asking.

MK: No, it is, it’s a good question for us to ask earnestly of each other right now in particular. I don’t know what your social circles are like, but a lot of what happens on my phone is people checking in and being like, “No, really? How are you today?” Not because I’m in particular… that makes me sound like anyway, whatever. Yeah.

KH: Well, I am glad that you’re doing well today and so glad you’re here. Can you take a moment to introduce yourself and tell the audience a bit about the work you do?

MK: Yeah. My name is Margaret Killjoy. I am an author and a podcaster and a musician, and I am really lucky that I get to do a couple different things for a living. I write fiction is one of my main things, but I also, I podcast professionally and that’s kind of nice, as you might be aware. I read history books for a living, for a podcast called “Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,” just looking for all the people in history when they’re confronted with terrible things, learn how to do good things. I also write. I write science fiction and fantasy and just try and write about the kinds of worlds that I like to escape into.

KH: Well, we could all use some fantasy worlds to escape into right now, and as I mentioned before we hit record, I’ve really appreciated the insights you’ve shared in your newsletter over the past year, and especially since the election.

MK: Thank you. The newsletter has been really interesting. It’s taken off recently and I started it off thinking, “Oh, I’m going to write a lot about a lot of topics,” and I write a lot about the strategic value of hope and how to avoid despair, but that wasn’t the main thing I was doing. Then slowly as the political landscape started to transform, it became more and more important. I write a weekly pep talk to myself that goes to whoever wants it. It’s more or less what happens right now.

KH: Well, I really appreciate your exploration of hope and I think those insights are really needed right now. Something else that you talk about, in the newsletter and in your podcast, is preparedness. We are living in unpredictable times, and I think the pandemic gave many of us a jolt, in terms of realizing just how unprepared we were for disastrous events. Now, with Trump sowing even greater destabilization, on a landscape where catastrophes are a steady occurrence, we all need to think about preparedness. In your writing and podcasting, you talk about preparedness as a community-oriented practice, which I really appreciate. Can you talk about how your approach to preparedness differs from the hyperindividualistic prepper culture some of our listeners may be familiar with, and how individual preparedness can aid community preparedness?

MK: Yeah, this is one of my favorite questions because it’s the kind of thing that started off as this almost hypothetical position, because I became interested in preparedness a while ago, and I spent most of my young adult life traveling to be sort of… I didn’t have a fixed home and I lived in a van and I traveled around to do a lot of activism and just sort of see the world. So on some level, preparedness was just always part of life when you don’t really have much in the way of resources, so you always need to make sure you have a little bit of food on you and things like that. Then I started, as it felt like the political system and the economic system of the United States started to feel more precarious, I started finding myself doing things like putting buckets of beans and rice and whatever collective punk house I was living in, whereas no one else in the house really understood why I was doing it.

There’s been this divide, the prepper community has only very recently kind of opened up demographically away from center-right and far right, usually middle-aged white men who just want to collect guns and fill a bunker full of beans and rice and things like that — with the goal of shooting anyone who comes to take it in times of crisis, which is nonsensical and so immediately and obviously nonsensical as a survival strategy that most people therefore end up dismissing preparedness, or preppers at all. If you talk to people who grew up in societies that weren’t quite as stable as the United States was through the past several decades, they know that a level of preparedness is just part of life. Overall, I started seeing more and more I would say anarchist or leftist attempts to deal with disaster because most preparedness isn’t really actually for the zombies or the end of the world or whatever.

It’s for disasters, it’s for natural disasters, it’s for interruptions in the supply chains and things like that. Most of the response was this beautiful mutual aid-focused community disaster response. I also find that really fascinating, but yet the podcast that I do, one of my other podcasts, I have a podcast called “Live Like the World is Dying” and I pitch it as individual and community preparedness. It’s about both because I’m tired of seeing them as a dichotomy. There’s obviously more we can do together than as individuals, but that still doesn’t mean there isn’t a point in having those beans and rice sitting in your basement or wherever. The most immediate way I can illustrate this relates to Hurricane Helene that hit Western North Carolina where I had been living for a very long time. I had recently moved away from, and I’m living elsewhere in Appalachia and I have a basement full of prepper stuff.

I have solar generators and I have food and I have water jugs and all of these things. And on some level I was like, “I wonder why I do this?” My current disaster plan is to go drive elsewhere where more people are if a crisis comes to me,” and just because where I’m at. But then, when a bunch of my friends were suddenly without power and without water and without a certain way to get food, I was like, “Well, I have a van and I have a basement full of prepper stuff.” And so I connected up with a mutual aid group and drove into the disaster area and distributed the supplies that I brought down and then used my van to drive around and help people get stuff. I’m not saying this to be like, “And then I saved the day.” I didn’t, but I did get water and food to some of my specific friends who needed it.

Then, I talked to people and I did a couple podcast episodes based on this. And one of my friends who lived there, the point of this story is that he worked at this bar and immediately after the disaster he was like, “Well, we lost power, so we better go cook all of the food that’s in the freezer.” The bar had a kitchen. He just goes and does it. He was able to do it because of his own individual preparedness. Because people would come up and be like, “Hey, do you need anything? Do you need water?” Then they would kind of look at him and he’d be like, “No, wait, you already have all this stuff, don’t you?” “He is like an old punk and a prepper, and he is like, “Yeah, no, yeah, I’m all right.” Because of the fact that he didn’t have to make sure his household was taken care of, because it already was, he was then immediately able to go into the taking-care-of-other-people position.

And a lot of the immediate response to Hurricane Helene came from people who had a high degree of self-sufficiency — and maybe not… none of us really should aim to have total self-sufficiency, but you might have access to something like there was someone with a well and a pickup truck who was like, well, I have a big water tank you can put on the back of a pickup truck, and just was like, “Well, I’m going to fill up this with water and drive down and figure out who needs water.” Then he had all the tools to set up 50-gallon drums to make sure that he could fill up water wherever he went.

It wasn’t that he was a prepper, he was just a guy who had a farm, so he was able to do that. I just immediately, I’m just like, “No, the point of being individually prepared,” I know is a long tangent about this, “but the point of being individually prepared is it positions you so well to help take care of other people, by the whole put on your own mask before you help the person next to you or whatever.”

KH: I really appreciate that insight, because I think, too often, people think about community needs and individual needs as though they exist in opposition to each other. Like, I am either taking a bubble bath and completely focused on my own comfort, or I am martyring myself for the people. We really do need to understand that, yes, the community comes first, and also, I am part of the community, so caring for me is part of caring for the community, and part of caring for whatever movement I’m a part of.

I’m also thinking about the differences between what it means to do this kind of preparedness work when you have a farm, or you have a basement, and when you don’t. I think about this a lot as someone who lives in a one bedroom apartment in Chicago, whose closets are over-stuffed with coats and whatnot. What are your thoughts around preparedness for those of us who don’t have a lot of space?

MK: Yeah, I think that people get lost looking at the super preppers, even from a lefty perspective. People shouldn’t try to imitate the way that I live. At a certain point, it almost just becomes a hobby for me. The thing is that most of the time you are preparing for three hours to three days to maybe three weeks of interruption in services. The things that you prepare for the first three days, the first 10 extra cans of food you put in your pantry are infinitely more valuable to you than the 590th to the 600th can. Someone in an urban area, I think mostly it’s just a matter of you look at what the threats that are facing the area you’re in. One of the main things, especially for people in urban areas, but also people in rural areas is like a “go-bag.” This is no larger than a backpack, a small day bag you put in your front closet or under your bed or whatever. I know space can be very limited. I’ve helped friends brainstorm through this and sometimes it means carving out space for a couple five-gallon buckets in their closet that they previously had things already there and they chose to get rid of those things.

I understand how tight space can be, but that first little bit is what matters. I would say what I hope is that most people have three days worth of food, three days worth of water and three days worth of backup power for their cell phones, which is just a couple power bricks that are the size of cell phones. I think those will be so much more important than the big stuff. Although, the big stuff’s fun too.

KH: I used to have a go-bag and I have to admit, I have cannibalized it over the years when I’ve needed stuff.

MK: Oh yeah.

KH: I really need to rebuild my go-bag. So, as a refresher for me, and for our listeners, what belongs in a go-bag?

MK: It’s so easy to cannibalize your go-bags. One of my tricks is that I put in protein bars that I don’t like because I’m both addicted to sugar and I eat a lot of protein as a vegan, so I’m always looking for the like, “Ah, I need a protein,” and I don’t feel like cooking. I run and go eat the protein bars out of my go-bag way too quickly. I have to put the ones that I think are terrible. I feel you on cannibalizing it. What I’ve done is I’ve kind of tried to build up a habit about once a month, I’ll kind of pull everything out and look at it and be like, “Oh, I really need to remember to put socks back in here. I totally took some out the other day when I didn’t feel like doing laundry.”

In a go-bag, it’s important to think of a go-bag, not as the way that right-wing prepper culture has made people think about go-bags, it’s like you need a hatchet, and a saw and probably some skinned deer already in there or something for some reason. Most people don’t need a go-bag to go live in the woods. That is not what most people, even me, I live in the woods, that’s not what my go-bag is. Instead, a go-bag is: What would I need if I was driving somewhere and an ice storm came and I had to pull off [to] the side of the road and sleep in my car rather than drive through the ice storm? In that case, you probably want a hat, you probably want some socks. You probably want enough calories that you’re not going to be hangry sleeping. A couple bars of food or whatever. You’re going to want medications. You’re going to want that you already take or whatever, you’re going to want over-the-counter medications.

I basically… I see it as a hygiene kit, a first aid kit and a survival kit are the things that go in a go-bag, plus enough sort of stuff to make your life okay. You might need it if there’s a fire and you need to evacuate and it has copies of your important documents, digital copies or physical copies, they’re important documents so that if you have five minutes to run out of your house, this is what you grab. Mine has an extra dog leash in it and everyone’s going to have the things that they might need for this very quick turnaround leaving. Most of the time, it’s just convenient because you go drive somewhere and you’re like: “Hey, I’m going to stay at my friend’s house tonight. Good thing I have a toothbrush, good thing I have some deodorant. Good thing I have earplugs because my friend snores.” It’s lots of little light cheap things is what I think mostly belongs in a go-bag.

KH: I think the simplicity of that approach is really helpful. I think people have a tendency to think in extremes around go-bags. Either people worry too much about having all of the right things assembled, or they blow off the whole prospect of having a go-bag as some individualist panic project – which is why I think your analysis about preparedness making us more able to help each other is so important. And in keeping with that theme, I’m wondering, how can we make preparedness a community practice?

MK: It’s really going to depend on where you are physically and what the community around you is. The first people I ever met who took this sort of leftist practice and put it together lived in New York City. The first preppers I ever met lived in a very small (I guess you’d call it) brownstone in Queens. Then they were actually in the end very well-positioned for when Hurricane Sandy hit and you had this whole movement Occupy Sandy, which was one the kind of foundational mutual aid disaster relief people coming together to do things. The way that they had prepared ahead of that is they didn’t organize Occupy Sandy. They didn’t know that that was going to be a thing that they would need to do. They kind of just talked to some of their neighbors and were like, “Hey, if the power ever goes out,” that happens sometimes in New York City, “What’s our plan? What should we do?”

I think that just on some basic level, just starting to talk to people and it’s very hard. We live in a very isolated society and most people compared to 100 years ago, I might be overgeneralizing here, but I would say overall, fewer people genuinely know their neighbors. There’s fewer block parties, there’s fewer coming over to borrow a cup of sugar. If you can, start breaking some of those social barriers. I always say that the first thing to do is to get to know your neighbors, besides the three days of food, three days water or three days power or whatever, and a go-bag, is to know your neighbors. People are always like, “Well, I’m trans and my neighbors all hate me or they might hate me, or I’m a person of color and there’s the racists around here,” or there’s all these very valid concerns.

It’s not even necessarily about know your neighbors, become friends with them, but isn’t it nicer to know ahead of time which of your neighbors you should kind of avoid? Also, during times of crisis, social barriers drift away. The way I usually used to explain this is that if you’re ever waiting for a city bus, there might be, depending on the culture you’re from, there’s going to be a sort of boundary where you don’t talk to anyone else in this public space and then the bus is three minutes late. As soon as the bus is three minutes late, you all can compare notes about different bus schedules, and what do you think might’ve happened to the bus. Crisis brings people together. On some level, if you’re doing terribly at building community, you can kind of just be like, well, when the bad things happen, we’re going to get together and build community.

Any work that you do ahead of time, I think, does a really good thing for this. I think that any form of social organizing can play into this. I was talking with some folks recently about what they might want to do to prepare for the current, oh, fascist coup that seems to be possibly happening in the United States right now. It was a bunch of pretty rural folks and I was like, “Well, you all should probably get together every couple of weeks or once a month, just literally talk about what’s going on, what your problems are, how you might try and solve them, how you might try and solve them together, how you all can help each other out.”

They talked about it for a while and they’re like, “We’re going to do a seed swap. We are a bunch of gardeners and farmers and we have access to a lot of stuff and food sovereignty is important to us,” but it’s not just to swap seeds. Your knitting circle, your book club, your get-together with your friends and watch movies. Just make sure that there’s a little component of it to be like, “How are you doing?” The way that you started this whole conversation? Literally, how are you doing? I think it’s easier than people think. I’m an outgoing introvert, so in some ways it’s easier for me, but I’m not like, I don’t choose to spend all my time around people.

KH: An outgoing introvert. I resemble that remark.

MK: A “social sprinter” I sometimes call it.

KH: That really resonates with me. I’m also thinking about what you said about Hurricane Sandy, and about the people I know who were part of that effort from around the country. And something that I think is really important there is that you had a bunch of activists who had these email listservs from the Occupy Wall Street movement, and at that point, some of those listservs had gone quiet, as the movement had waned, but when disaster struck, and folks organizing for collective survival in New York needed back up, these lines of communication were revived for a new purpose. Because people who have existing lines of communication, and existing relationships, are more able to pivot in a crisis. And I think this is true of so many forms of connection and organization. As you were saying, your knitting group, your book group, all of the ties that bind us together can become lifelines in a crisis.

I’m also thinking about a piece you wrote for your newsletter called, “The Year of Preparedness: Storing Food” where you wrote, “My favorite method of stockpiling food is to get together with your community and make and seal your own food buckets in bulk.” I really appreciated your breakdown of how to make this act of preparedness into a community activity – getting a bunch of mylar bags, filling them with dried food and oxygen absorbers, and then sealing the bags and layering them in buckets. Holding one of these events, and getting folks outfitted with some buckets of beans, rice, oats, salt and sugar is on my wishlist of events I would really like to organize.

MK: That was so much fun. I hope I get to do that more.

KH: I really love and appreciate the pragmatism of that kind of group activity, and how we can sort of co-learn and co-live these lessons in collective survival.

And speaking of practical concerns and collective survival, as a non-binary person who has a lot of friends who are freaking out right now, what do you think preparedness means for trans people in these times?

MK: Well, so I try very hard not to be doom and gloom and the sky is falling, even though I’ve been sort of joking that my job recently is to run around like Chicken Little screaming, “The sky is falling, don’t worry, we’ve got this,” but things are bad and they’re probably going to get worse before they get better. I think that one of the most important things, the first step to getting anything to be better ever is you have to soberly look at the problem. You have to actually face it head on. I use the Litany Against Fear from the Dune books that I haven’t read a lot. Part of the Litany Against Fear, it’s just a little sort of prayer to not be afraid is, “I will face my fear. I will let it pass through me and then I will turn my mind’s eye to see where it has gone and when it has gone, only I will remain,” something like that.

Facing the fear is essential. I think looking at the fact that health services are being cut dramatically at the moment, it’s for youth. Everyone that I’ve talked to expects this to expand to adults, and there’s already, we’re starting to see a lot of that gender-affirming care become denied in a comparable way that anyone who’s capable of getting pregnant is looking at all of their basic health, their right to have health care stripped away, even if they can afford health care. It’s just like a great number of things are becoming illegal very quickly. Also, in some ways what’s happening to the trans community is worth looking at for what’s happening to everyone because the gutting of the CDC, the gutting of science communication, all of these things, some of that is going to affect trans people and a few other marginalized groups first, but it is absolutely already affecting everyone and it’s going to continue to do so.

So, in terms of what we can do, well, frankly, I think that every person who can should have their passport and should keep it up to date and be aware. I don’t think people should leave. Some people might want to leave, and that’s totally up to them. I’m not trying to tell people to leave or not to leave. Also, it’s also not as easy as just being like, “Oh, why don’t you just leave if you don’t like America,” right? There’s incredibly hard most of the time getting a visa in another country involves either lucking out with some heritage or having just a fuck ton of money. Canada doesn’t want people. People are already getting arrested at the border trying to walk into Canada right now.

Because it really is for cis people who are listening, it really is becoming an existential problem for trans people, depending on what level of financial independence you have, what level of medical intervention your trans can… I don’t know the right words here that you need as a trans person. Different people have different levels of medical care that they rely on. Just being aware of what your plan B is, I think is super important. I don’t think for most people, I don’t think leaving should be plan A for most people.

I think that figuring out how you can keep access to care, there’s a lot of work that’s being done around DIY HRT and there’s a lot of information that people can look up that I am not sure about any of the legality of, so I’ll just leave it at that, but people are capable of getting and/or producing hormones. There’s an incredible body of work that has been produced by people who are experimenting with DIY HRT.

Then one of the most complicated questions I think facing trans people is on some level we are all safer the more out trans people there are, because people have a harder time hating a group of people that they know people in. At the same time, this might not be the best moment for people to be out in every situation. People are going to have to make their own decisions around what is and isn’t safe.

Then I guess I’ll say in terms of preparedness, one thing that I try to push, and a lot of the people I know who are in a similar position as me try to push is that when you are scared and feel threatened and are angry, it is the literal worst time to go out and get involved in firearms. I think that firearms can be a part of individual and community preparedness and defense.

Certainly, when we look at what fought fascism in the past, it is, well, it’s complicated because I’ll say that, and yeah, it took firearms to defeat the German Nazis, but it actually took Irish Catholics and Jews throwing potatoes with razor blades in them to stop the English fascists. If people want to read about the Battle of Cable Street, what stopped England from falling to fascism was popular revolt and not firearms specifically, but in general, I would say that a lot of people are looking for easy answers and firearms tend to be talismans, and people tend to view them as easy answers, and they are not. They are one of the most complicated ethical decisions that you could ever make in your life.

KH: I really appreciate all of that. And as we think about what it means to show up for each other, at the community level, as people are facing these threats, I also want to share some words from my friend Dean Spade, who I recently talked to about this. Dean said:

We can still do what we’ve always done — take care of each other, break rules, and help people get what they need to survive. All of us can help people get a place to sleep, get away from abusive parents and partners, find a meal or warm clothes. All of us can write to trans people who are locked up and form a support system from the outside. Many of us can share medicines, or break rules at our jobs — as nurses, teachers, social workers, doctors — to help people get essentials. This is a time for sustained care for one another, careful rule-breaking, and disobedience in the face of illegitimate authority.

KH: Do you have other thoughts on community defense and what preparedness to protect and defend each other looks like?

MK: Yeah, I think that the core of deciding what level of engagement to have with oppressive forces is threat analysis, is thinking through very carefully and as strategically as possible, what is ethically and strategically justified at any given time? I think that individual self-defense and community defense are incredibly vital. I think that to talk about how individual and community stuff ties into each other, again, when people try to attack queer people and then the queer people beat the shit out of the people who are attacking them, that tends to make the people who attack them less likely to attack the next group of people. It doesn’t make them stop being hateful. It doesn’t necessarily solve individual problems. Well, it does solve the individual problem if you didn’t get beat up or killed that day, although, it has all kinds of other problems. Like I’ve had a friend who was stabbed in a homophobic attack and stabbed the attackers back, and then he’s the one who went to prison because of really complicated stuff around the ins and outs of Georgia’s self-defense laws and a bunch of bigoted jurors and judges.

It’s complicated on some level, but I think that basically just saying we’re not easy targets because I think that fascism by and large is a coward’s ideology. It is an ideology that runs to daddy for quick and easy and safe answers. Overall, from talking to a lot of different anti-fascists, especially veterans from the kind of eighties, nineties era, and also, talked to a lot of European anti-fascists around this, which have much more of a culture of street fighting against fascists, overall, fascists want to be fascist when they’re winning. When they don’t feel like they’re winning, they hide. They hide behind white hoods, but honestly, when they’re really losing, they lose the white hoods too. They hide them deep in their closet or they burn them because a fascist does not want a fair fight. Sometimes all we have to do is put up a fair fight.

We don’t have to win all the time, we just have to make it hard for them. We have to make it so that we’re not soft targets. I don’t mean this just about physical violence, although, I do mean it about physical violence. I think that when they come after us, having other people, whether it’s other queer people or whether it’s other allies or whatever, but it’s like the word ally gets a bad rap, and I understand why. I think of allies as literally allies in a war. We all have skin in the game. Fascism is a death culture that is coming for us all. When they come for one of us, all of us acting up, watching — and queer people are not the only people who are at the front lines of all of this right now. Obviously I would say that certainly by numbers, undocumented people and also documented people, just immigrants or even just non-white cultures, a number of literal Indigenous people to this nation have been picked up by ICE, not just recently, but in general, but especially recently, it’s astounding.

Us making all of it hard for them, it takes all of us doing all of it. I think community defense is an important part of it. You know, to say, “You’re not going to have another Pulse nightclub shooting.” It’s scary, but I think it’s important. I just always feel weird talking about it in public because there are so many complicated issues involved in the use of firearms, but just because things are complicated doesn’t mean that we should hide from them.

KH: I think there are a lot of scary topics that we have to confront in very real, really practical terms right now. And I am grateful for people who’ve had a long game approach to those concerns. I am grateful for people who have developed skills over time, in disciplined ways, because as you say, there are some things we shouldn’t do because we’re panicking or upset.

I am also thinking about the social structures of protection that people have developed over time, which are broadening in this moment. Here in Chicago, where I live, we have celebrated the complaints of Tom Homan – Trump’s “border czar” – who has whined that Chicagoans are so “well-educated” when it comes to thwarting ICE raids. He called our Know Your Rights trainings “how to escape arrest trainings.” These are grassroots efforts that are effectively preparing a whole lot of people for crisis situations, and complicating this government’s efforts to rip families apart and deport people. That work has been ongoing for years, but it’s obviously expanded and ramped up in recent months, and these community efforts are getting results.

In our schools, our teachers are forming Sanctuary Teams so that educators have assigned roles in a crisis situation. In addition to knowing what to say to ICE when they’re trying to enter the building, and knowing not to let them in, they are preparing people for contingencies, like what do we do if ICE somehow gained access to the building?

MK: That’s so good.

KH: And I want to make sure that people know that there is a toolkit for educators that the Chicago Teachers Union has created that is adaptable, so you can rewrite it in ways that reflect the needs and intentions of your team and your community – and we’ll be sure to include that link in the show notes of this episode. I hope people will avail themselves of this resource, and the community defense resource that Siembra NC has created to fight deportations. Because we have the power to get together, as groups of people who have shared concerns, and figure out how to create as much safety as possible.

When it comes to defensive postures, I am someone who’s never going to own a gun. As a depressive person, that wouldn’t make sense for me. But what I can do, and what I feel good about doing, is making plans with people. This is a time to team up with our neighbors, our colleagues, our book club buddies – whoever shares our values or the spaces we occupy, and figure out what roles we can play.

Hook up with whatever groups are doing ICE watch in your community, and if no one’s doing that work where you live, use the Defend and Recruit playbook to start a community defense project. And if you need some more guidance about what that looks like, we will be talking about that resource in our next episode.

And you know, I am really appreciating the opportunity to think out loud about some of this stuff, because I think one of the reasons we get stuck in doom and panic mode is that we get transfixed, staring at everything that’s going wrong. We keep absorbing the horror of it all because we don’t know what else to do. And sometimes, when we’re taking it all in, and we’re doom scrolling or whatever, the act of bearing witness makes us feel like we’re doing something, when in reality, we’re actually experiencing an impact instead of having one.

MK: Oh, this is interesting.

KH: If we can interrupt the fear and panic spiral and say, “Yes, this is scary, but what can I do? How can I support trans people, or my migrant neighbors, or these teachers who are defending our students?” And the last thing I want to add here is that our teachers in Chicago are taking an expansive approach to sanctuary. They are looking at how they can build protections for trans youth, queer youth, and Black youth into their contract, and this is how they plan to organize together, to defend our communities expansively. So, I want to challenge all of us right now to not only share in that expansive vision, around creating as much safety as we can, but to think about where we can plug in, so we can build that together. When we get upset about something, I want us to ask ourselves, how can I be constructive, with regard to this? And if the answer is that I don’t really know what I can do about this right now or I don’t have the capacity, to ground ourselves in what we can do.

MK: This is such a good point. You know, a lot of people that I talk to, especially the past couple of weeks, even people who are usually kind of plugged in with what’s going on… one, there’s literally too much happening right now for anyone to be plugged in completely. But I’ve seen more people, the sort of shock and awe that they’re doing against us has been more effective than usual. I see more people taking a step back and being like, “Look, I’m just not reading the news this week.” And it’s frustrating because in my mind, this is maybe one of the most pivotal periods in human history is happening right now. If there is a time to face the horrors, it is right now. But I think that your point about facing the horrors is not enough… you should probably only face the horrors in the context of learning what you’re going to do about those horrors.

We have to act with agency. These teachers are going to come up with these plans and they’re going to enact them and they’re going to succeed sometimes and they’re going to fail sometimes. But on some level, that’s all we can do is actually try. We have to look at these things that are happening and try to put our talents into use to make sure that we live lives in coordination with our ethics.

KH: I really agree with what you’re saying about the shock and awe being more effective this time around, and I’m reminded of what my friend Mariame Kaba recommends to people, which is to really pay close attention to the one or two issues you are going to be most active around – because none of us has the capacity to be active around everything. Or if you’re like me, and you really need a kind of overview of what’s going on, then subscribe to newsletters and take advantage of digests that different publications create to summarize what’s happening, rather than feeling like you have to absorb every blow in real-time. This is the exact reason that I create a must-read list of articles for my newsletter every week, to help people get bullet points about what they need to know, without having to endure the full hailstorm of every news cycle.

But since we’re talking about engagement, and how we should be paying attention so that we can take action, I am wondering what advice you have for people who want to do some good right now. Some of us have been around for a minute, and are trying to gear up for this moment, and a lot of people are new to activism and organizing, and entering on a pretty scary terrain. So what kind of advice would you offer those people right now?

MK: I would say ironically, some of my advice around this is actually going to be to seasoned organizers and activists. I would say overall, one of the left, especially the sort of less grifty left, overall, one of our biggest weaknesses is onboarding new people. We have a culture that tends to be a little bit nervous of newcomers because of how much for the past 50-plus years, well at least 100 years, how intensely the government has attempted to infiltrate and dismantle social movements. We have this culture of paranoia, and I understand why, but I would say it is more dangerous right now to not help new earnest people get in than to risk bad actors getting in. I think that is a risk that we need to take.

So, I would say on some level, my advice to experienced organizers is to get better at helping new people get in. Whatever group or organization you’re working with — get better at figuring out how to onboard people. If you have a public-facing meeting and there’s new people coming, have someone whose role is to sit next to the new people and explain to them what’s going on and help them find… I’ve been saying for a while, we don’t need gatekeepers, we need ushers. We need people to help find how they are useful.

On some level, it shouldn’t have to be completely up to the new people. That said, realistically, it often is, and if you’re listening to this and you’re trying to get involved, I would say that, as you kind of pointed out, figuring out what you care about and then figuring out who’s trying to do something about that thing that you care about, and then figure out if you can help them with the skills that you uniquely have. And if there aren’t people already trying to do that in your area, you’re going to get together with two to 17 of your friends or 17,000 of your friends, whatever, and start talking about, “How do we want this to go?” I would also say for new people, be alert for people who are in the movement in bad faith.

And I would say that there’s two main categories of these. There’s people who are attempting to not really address the issue, but just bring you into some structure of power, whether that’s authoritarian leftism or it’s the Democratic Party… I’m not trying to be like, “Everyone who’s a part of this is doing this,” but overall this militant force of recuperation, of coming in and trying to take activism and put it towards… take direct action and make it symbolic, that is a thing to be careful of. On the other end of things, there are people, if you are someone who is getting involved for the first time and you are thinking, “This is a real big deal and I’m going to be real militant,” there are people usually hired by the government who exist to try to get people who care to take more direct and dangerous and risky action than they are prepared for.

This has happened time and time again on the left. Don’t let anyone convince you to do something that’ll get you arrested unless it’s a decision that you have made totally independently or with your actual close friends and collaborators. That’s true of people who want you to lock yourself to things and do civil disobedience. It’s true of people who are like, “Hey, kid, do you want to throw a Molotov cocktail?” The answer to that is no. If anyone tries to give you something that explodes, just say no. Yeah, that’s my advice.

KH: I really appreciate what you’re saying about bad faith, and people who will try to make people feel like they’re not radical enough unless they want to do something particularly dangerous. I think those of us who have been around for a while have seen how that plays out, how people are set up and demonized. I’ve done defense committee work, I’ve done court support work, and I’ve seen the damage done. And in this environment, under this administration, I expect those infiltration efforts to be as ugly and ambitious as anything we have ever seen, so yes, please don’t get talked into doing anything drastic, and don’t trust strangers who talk a big game like that, because why the hell would they tell you, a stranger, about their big plans?

I also agree that we need to be very thoughtful about arrests right now. I have organized a lot of protests over the years, including protests that involved symbolic arrests, and that’s not something I would do or organize right now. I think the power of a symbolic arrest is in the story you’re telling, and I don’t think that right now is the time to burn arrests on symbolism. I think of arrests like any other resource – I can only get arrested so many times before I have very serious problems. Right now, I am going to conserve that resource, with the expectation that I may need it, in order to help stop material harms from happening, or to enact my values in material ways. That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t protest, but I have protested, and even broken the law, plenty of times, without intentionally getting arrested. I think if we are engaging in direct action, right now, we should all be planning on evading arrest and keeping ourselves out of the hands of the state so that we have more freedom of movement to do the radical work that is going to have to be done in these times.

I think something I’ve noticed a lot in, especially from orgs that have been around for a long time, is that tactics don’t necessarily evolve quickly as conditions change. You might find people proposing that we do the same stuff that we might’ve done two years ago, or 10 years ago in response to a bad policy move. I think that we need to be very aware that our conditions are changing and that it’s not just about doing what’s edgy and also familiar, but what really makes sense for the moment we’re in.

MK: I like the way they put that, the edgy but familiar. Because people want to feel like they have done something sometimes more than they want to have succeeded at doing something, and that’s natural. I think it is actually important that people look at the bad thing and think, “I’d better do something about this.” I actually think we all do need to look at what’s happening right now, and all of us need to say, “We need to do something about this.”

It’s just really hard to know right now what exactly needs to be done. And most of the people who are offering easy answers are looking to use you, whether it’s to make their nonprofit look good in a PR arrest photo, or whether it’s to have you go to jail instead of them, or whether it’s all kinds of stuff. I don’t know. That said, sometimes when you don’t know what to do, well, you just have to pick something and start doing it. Whatever the thing is that you’re trying to deal with, just start trying to fix it and figure out what’s working and not working as you go, I guess.

KH: I completely agree, and I love what you were saying about people who want you to go to jail instead of them. There’s been so much, “where are the protests” BS on social media. It’s like, well, for one thing, there are a lot of protests happening.

MK: Yeah, totally.

KH: There’s a lot of stuff going on. Just because the national press isn’t highlighting it, or you’re not paying attention, doesn’t mean it’s not happening. But it always strikes me, as someone who would typically be organizing a protest, that it makes complete sense to these people that they themselves are not organizing a protest, but are doing something else with their time that they find valuable and important, but it doesn’t make any sense to them that someone like me, or someone who has historically been willing to take to the streets, might be focused elsewhere right now. And yet, it makes complete sense to me that I am doing what I am doing, because the work has always involved more than street protests, and there’s a lot of unseen, unsexy work that needs to happen right now. And I am not even talking about underground work, though of course people are doing that, too, but most of the work that makes movements possible, that will make collective survival possible, in fucked up situations, is unseen work. So, to the new folks, and the folks who’ve been around a while, please never let these armchair pundits, who are not protesting, who have never built anything, tell you what matters. They don’t know what to do about anything and they’re not going to do anything. They are blathering, and that’s not expertise. To move through these times, you’ve really gotta tune out the noise. Know whose opinion matters to you. Who are you in community with? Who do you trust? Who has relevant experience? Who is directly impacted by your action or inaction? If you let every random voice get under your skin, self-doubt will overwhelm you, and that’s not warranted.

MK: Yeah, no, absolutely. One of my best friends always talks about the “more stuff” theory of activism, which is that the best critique of a thing that isn’t working is doing a thing that works. If people are trying something and it’s not working and you don’t like the thing they’re trying, go do something different. The example I use all the time is that, I don’t talk shit on the people who glue themselves to art for the climate, even though I genuinely don’t get it because I’m not doing something better. Just so I am glad that people are trying the things that occur to them to do, and yeah.

KH: I am 100% with you on that. The whole gluing one’s self to art thing doesn’t resonate with me, and it’s not what I would do, but these folks are doing something about the most essential issue of our time. They are fighting to save the natural world, and I think everyone who disapproves should really devote themselves to figuring out the better, smarter way to save the world, or maybe shut the fuck up.

On the subject of not completely agreeing with people, and not losing our shit over it, you wrote a piece, not long after the election, that was really meaningful to a lot of us. It was called, “The Sky is Falling, We’ve Got This.” There was a refrain in that piece that many of us have shared avidly on social media. The quote was, “Deescalate all conflict that isn’t with the enemy.”

Some people get mad at me when I repeat those words because a lot of people are angry with each other right now. There are a lot of fractures on the left and among people of conscience. Can you speak to the importance of de-escalating some of our internal conflicts right now and focusing on collective survival?

MK: Yeah. Again, this is one of the most repeated and contentious things I’ve ever said in my life. For full credit, there’s a podcaster named Young Sole who, S-O-L-E, that I think it was him. Oh, now I can’t remember… years ago said, “My New Year’s resolution is to deescalate all conflict that isn’t with fascists.” I was like, “Oh, that makes sense,” and then my spin on it is “that isn’t with the enemy,” because I think that some types of conflict might not fall specifically on the fascist versus anti-fascist side or whatever. I think about it as, it doesn’t say, ignore all problems that aren’t with the enemy, right? It’s de-escalate conflict.

When I find myself getting mad at someone, I want to think to myself, “Is this person my enemy?” Some people are like, just, frankly, they are. Now, the way that my ethical structure works, no one is permanently my enemy. Anyone can stop. I don’t literally want us to kill all the billionaires. I want all the billionaires to stop being billionaires, whether that’s by the nicest version which is they give all their money away. The less nice version is we steal it. I don’t care. I also, frankly, if they get killed, whatever.

The best way to not get eaten as the rich is to stop being rich. Anyone could stop being my enemy, but there are people who absolutely just are my enemy. That usually for me means people who are organizing for a fascist world, but sometimes it means the person … Actually, I mean, the person screaming homophobic shit at me on the street or something like that. Sometimes those people are my enemy. Sometimes the people doing it are Nazis. They’re doing it because they hate people. Sometimes the person screaming homophobic stuff at me on the street, more often than any other case, it is a person having a mental health crisis who is unhoused. That person is not my enemy. My goal is to deescalate that conflict.

Now, does that deny my right to self-defense? Absolutely not, but by and large, I feel like I have pretty good success with it, in this specific kind of case that has come up several times in my life, is just kind of talking politely to the man who was saying horrible, bigoted things at me because he’s having the worst day of his life every single day, and he is not doing it ’cause he hates me. He is doing it because he… oh, now I’m just thinking about a specific guy. I think he wanted the cops called, I don’t know. That man is not my enemy. I want to de-escalate conflict. I think overall, most of our conflict we want to de-escalate, and it’s hard.

I mean, in some ways I’m almost the worst person to have branded this is because I have a very serious problem with authoritarian communism. I am not quiet about that fact. I think Stalin is comparable to Hitler and the fact that they were allies makes sense to me, and I am frustrated that I am part of a left that somehow thinks that that is a contentious thing. That doesn’t mean that Marxists are my enemy.

So, in some ways, I’m actually a terrible person to be talking about this, because fundamentally I’m going to define enemy differently than a lot of other people. I think that authoritarian opportunists, not the individual rank and file, but the heads of those organizations, those people are my enemy. Other people aren’t going to define it that way. They probably have better strategy than I do. But yeah, I don’t know. Overall, we are really good at finding what’s wrong with each other. There’s people talk about like, “Oh, we have to practice discourse so we can sharpen our knives,” and I’m like, “On each other? That’s your goal is that we get really good at stabbing each other so that we could ostensibly stab fascists? This is a terrible plan.” We’re so good at, and I see why. So much is wrong in the world that we got really good at coming up with why things are bad.

Give me a movie and I can tell you why it’s problematic, but that doesn’t make the world better. Knowing what’s problematic does make the world better, but being mad at everyone who ever did anything imperfectly absolutely makes the world a thousand times worse. Learning to offer each other grace and engage in good faith and deescalate our conflict as best as we can, and sometimes we don’t, and sometimes the best way to deescalate conflict is to never organize together again. There are people who are like, I’m ideologically on the same page as who I’m like, “I will never work with that person again,” and that’s okay.

KH: I think it’s so important, what you’re saying about how de-escalation is not dismissal or acceptance. One of the people who got angry with me for sharing that quote, honestly, just has anger issues, but I think some of the folks who got uneasy about it just aren’t differentiating between de-escalation and pretending everything’s okay. When I got trained in deescalation, it was for the sake of de-escalating angry drivers who were stopped in traffic because we had shut down the street. Deescalating did not mean those people got their way. I was there to turn down the temperature so they didn’t attack our people or try to drive through the crowd. I was there to help regulate the situation so it didn’t spin out of control. The conflict was still there. We were still doing what we needed to do. That’s not coddling someone. It’s refusing to allow every conflict to become the most extreme version of itself, because that’s not strategic.

And as I have said many times, I think a lot of this desire to fight with people who aren’t the enemy comes from a place of powerlessness. We are ill-equipped to stop or hurt the people who are harming us the most, and the people who make us feel afraid, but people who share some of the same goals or values as us — we can hurt them. We might even be able to break their hearts, and so people will do that, just to feel something. Just to get a tiny bit of satisfaction. Most of us have done this at some point, and we’re all worse off every time.

And something I hope that people are taking away from this conversation, and from everything you’ve said about preparedness, is that, in a crisis, our need for each other will not be dictated by how much we like each other. We have to be able to work in concert with people who aren’t of our own choosing, and that means not taking every difference that exists between us to its most dramatic conclusion. We don’t always have to spike the ball.

MK: I think all the time about community as almost a meaningless phrase on the left where you’re like, “Oh, my community.” I’m like, “Well, what does that mean?” It can mean all kinds of different things, and sometimes it just literally means the people around you. It doesn’t mean only the people you like. I think about who I would take in if, I don’t know, if the hollow I lived in burned and for some reason my house was standing and other people’s weren’t, I’m going to take in that guy with a Trump flag. I’m not going to take in the guy with a Trump flag who spends all of his time screaming how he’s going to kill trans people. But I’m going to take in the other guy who I don’t agree with about everything, and about some very important things, but I’m like, community is sometimes it’s the people that you have to do the things with and sometimes it means survive a wildfire or whatever.

And then the easiest way to figure out who you think is the enemy is on some level, you’re like, “Well, if there was a shooting war, would they be shooting me?”

I hope there’s never a shooting war, but if there is, would that person be trying to kill me? If the answer is yes, then that person’s your enemy. If the answer is no, then that person’s not. Maybe that’s oversimplified, but….

KH: It’s certainly a helpful metric.

As we wrap up today, is there anything else you would like to share with or ask of the audience today?

MK: Yeah, I guess, just really challenging people to all this talk about enemies and shooting wars and all of this stuff, I think we really need to challenge ourselves to be ready to let people be better. I think about… I’m in a black metal scene, ostensibly. I’m in a black metal band, so it comes up and there’s a lot of worry about the very large fascist infiltration within that scene. Well, in some ways actually, the anti-fascists are the infiltration within that scene. There’s all this worry about like, “Oh, this one band played with this other band that one day did the thing that where they once played with another band that was Nazi, so to hell with all of them forever,” or you’ll find people who will be like, “Hey, I messed up. I shouldn’t have done that. My politics have changed.”

Even someone will be playing a show and someone will reach out and be like, “Hey, you probably shouldn’t play that show. It’s with a bunch of Nazis.” Then the band will be like, “Oh, okay, I’m not going to play the show,” but then people will be like, “Oh, that band almost played with Nazis. They’re bad forever.” If we’re going to make people pick sides, we have to let them pick our side. That includes people who don’t look like you, who look like people that you don’t like. If some random person leaves the Trump camp and wants to stop the coup that’s happening in the US right now, we need to let them help. We need to let the enemy quit being the enemy. Otherwise, all we’ve done is try and create some weird scene of purity. That’s the thing I’m thinking about way too much right now. That’s my final thought. Yeah.

KH: I really appreciate that. I think we all have a lot to reckon with right now about what our actual goals are. As Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò reminds us, we need to move toward people who are encouraging us to do something, rather than people who are recruiting us to be something. I am not trying to be part of some pious church of social justice. I am not concerned with anyone’s purity. My people have already lived through an apocalypse. I am here today because they had a culture of reciprocity that aimed to keep as many of us alive as possible, for as long as possible. Collective survival means that even if you don’t like someone, you don’t let them starve. Our commitment to reciprocity gave our people a future. And that’s what I am fighting for, too. The possibility of a future, and one worth inhabiting.

And I really appreciate the way that your work calls us to fight for that future as well, Margaret, and I am really grateful that you could join me today.

MK: Yeah, thank you so much. I’m going to be thinking about a lot of the stuff you said for a while, so thank you.

[musical interlude]

KH: Well, that was one hell of a conversation. I hope you will all check out Margaret’s newsletter, Birds Before the Storm, and her podcast, “Live Like The World is Dying.” We covered some tricky subjects today, and I don’t expect all of us to settle into perfect agreement. Margaret and I don’t agree on some topics, but we found a lot of common ground here, and I hope you can take something useful away from our exchange. More than anything, I hope this episode inspires you to do something you feel good about. Whether it’s putting together a go-bag, hosting a food prep event, or learning more about community defense planning, I hope you take action this week in a way that makes you feel engaged and empowered. Remember, the news isn’t something that just happens to us. We have the power to connect and to build, and as Margaet reminds us, to try to fix things. So, let’s get to work together.

I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

Show Notes

• Be sure to check out Margaret’s newsletter, Birds Before the Storm, and her podcasts “Live Like the World is Dying” and “Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.”
• You can find the Chicago Teachers Union’s Sanctuary School toolkit here.
• You can find Siembra NC’s Defend and Recruit workbook on community defense here.