Why the US military cannot suppress the protests of millions of people ...

Washington DC Summer of 2020: Calling in the National Guard does not
always work out the way the government plans.

Sending troops into the streets -- regardless of the issue -- is always trying to solve a political problem with a military solution, which is why you tend to see it done most often by authoritarian governments.

But there is a specific calculus for that: authoritarians try to move in fast, crush dissent quickly, ruthlessly, and publicly to strike terror in the hearts of those who might consider joining the protests because ...

Even authoritarians know the 3.5% rule, as noted by the Harvard Kennedy School:

Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.

"In 1986, millions of Filipinos took to the streets of Manila in peaceful protest and prayer in the People Power movement. The Marcos regime folded on the fourth day.

In 2003, the people of Georgia ousted Eduard Shevardnadze through the bloodless Rose Revolution, in which protestors stormed the parliament building holding the flowers in their hands."

In a country of 340 million people like the US, this means that we need 12 million people in the streets, protesting non-violently, and sustained for multiple continuous days -- in effect an ongoing general strike to topple the government (we can discuss the mechanics of that later).

It turns out that while this will be a big challenge for the various organizations like Indivisible or the 50501 Movement, achieving that over the next few months is far from impossible, and there is surprisingly little the government can do to stop it with force.

We are not here because of Donald Trump; Donald Trump is here because we created the conditions for him to emerge

We are too conditioned to see history in terms of changes rather than continuity.

The political narratives of the day represent the rubble that the historian or political scientist has to clear away in order to reconstruct what really happened. Those reconstructions are often so painful that, instead of being examined by the public and policymakers, they are often completely rejected in favor of a reinforced narrative of "good vs evil" in zero-sum game politics.

Here are two end points for you, from an historian's point of the terminus a quo (beginning point) and terminus a quem (ending point, or, in our case, today):

The real beginning point is between 1948 - 1951, but that would make zero sense to you without a detour through 1968, because that's where most people's major historical misconception about American politics begins.

The 1960s are, of course, famous for the counter-culture, Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, urban riots, and LBJ's extension of the New Deal welfare state. We look back on that as an era of protest, rock music, long hair, and weed. It was, in fact, a year of worldwide social protest and calls for revolution.

It gave birth -- in the eyes of many social commentators -- to the transition from Cold War America to what is often called the "liberal consensus" about human rights (evolved from FDR's "Four freedoms"), the role of the State, and the necessity for even greater democracy. (If you are interested in learning more about the exact nature of the revised social contract that formed this liberal consensus, you cannot do better than the first chapter of Matthew J. Costello's Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America.)

But here's the ugly little secret: the liberal consensus and the social revolution in America was a mile wide and an inch deep. The reality is that the majority of American citizens -- especially white American citizens -- were always significantly more conservative than our popular political narratives suggest.

Most of what you think you know about the presidential election 1968 is wrong.

This can be fully documented, but I am going to give you one overwhelming example to prove my point: the Presidential election of 1968, which pitted Republican former VP Richard Nixon against Democratic VP Hubert Humphrey and the insurgent independent campaign of Alabama Governor George Wallace.

On the freedom of information

Millions of us purchase ebooks through Amazon Kindle.

Most do not realize that the terms of service for Amazon Kindle permit Jeff Bezos to: 

(a) not only track your purchases but your reading (it's partly how I, as an author, gets paid, but it obviously has other uses);

(b) Amazon can literally yank any book out of your library at any moment without warning; what you purchase with Kindle is not the content but access to the content only;

(c) Amazon can literally edit/change the contents of any book at any time you sync your library and you CANNOT go back to the old version. I use this, as an author, to correct typos and small errors in my own books, but I have a friend who literally rewrote a character arc in one of his own books -- in a way I hated -- and I could never get back to the old one).

Plus, under the Patriot Act, Amazon complies with any and all government requests for information.

Except for my escapist reading of a few authors, I have stopped acquiring books on Kindle, but Facebook would not let me tell you about my alternative.

It's this: Anna's Archive. Anna's literally is 

the largest truly open library in human history. ⭐️ We mirror Sci-Hub and LibGen. We scrape and open-source Z-Lib, DuXiu, and more. 📈 42,295,586 books, 36,486,718 papers — preserved forever. All our code and data are completely open source.

You do not have to purchase a membership to try it out, just select Slow Download #1 as your download option. The only thing slow is that it will give you a wait time of up to 5-6 minutes to start your download. If you like it, then I would recommend a membership.

Most books are available in  multiple file types -- epub, pdf, mobi, etc. -- but if one isn't there are any number of cheap, simple eBook converter apps out there.

I used to use libgen, but it is constantly under attack, and on any given day it can take you 10-15 minutes to figure out what mirror sites are working. Anna's, so far, has been stable, although I am sure it will come under attack at some point. And then we will adapt again.

Please share any comments on this post HERE and not on Facebook, which already bounced this once.

Reading is always a good investment: especially when it's free and not profting Amazon

Not until I retired after 35+ years in my field did I realize what a. great boon it had been to be an academic who literally got paid to read books.

Now, as I think about what we are facing as a nation, I think about the books that I hope people might get the chance to read and ponder ... in a world that increasingly has no time for that kind of non-productive behavior.

Almost equally importantly, I think of books that you can either get for free, or for dirt cheap, without having to send money to Jeff Bezos and Amazon.

WHERE TO GET THESE BOOKS (with a couple minor exceptions)

Every one of these books (unless otherwise noted individually) is available both at Anna's Archive and Abe Books.

Anna's Archive is a free digital library that describes itself thus:

The largest truly open library in human history. ⭐️ We mirror Sci-Hub and LibGen. We scrape and open-source Z-Lib, DuXiu, and more. 📈 42,295,586 books, 13,266,182 papers — preserved forever. All our code and data are completely open source. 

It's true -- this is the worthy successor to LibGen and far superior to the Internet Archive (though you can still find odd things there that you can find nowhere else). If you don't buy a membership you have to use the "slow downloads" sources, but honestly I download more books than you ever will (trust me) and I work around the slow downloads on background browsing.

Sometimes you will get a bad file -- shit happens. But mostly (especially in pdf and epub) you're golden.

There is of course the question of whether you had deep feelings of depriving authors of royalties by grabbing what are essentially bootleg copies of their work. As an author with fourteen books up on Anna's Archive, I personally am just happy that people continue to look for, download, and hopefully read my stuff. Trust me -- particularly in a hard copy, you're not depriving the author of much. But if that is an issue ...

... use Abe Books instead. A-B-E (advanced book exchange) is a marketplace for hundreds if not thousands of booksellers worldwide. You can find almost anything, and usually at a phenomenally good price (or at least a fair price). You are ordering through Abe Books to the individual bookseller, but the cool part is that if there is a problem, it's Abe Books that returns your money, and they go get satisfaction from the sellers. Since the sellers don't want that to happen, they are very accommodating.

I have probably ordered more than 200 books this way over the years, and had a significant problem with only one, which was ironed out in 48 hours to my complete satisfaction. If there is a refund to be made, you get it directly from Abe Books rather than having to wait on the individual seller.

THE BOOK CATEGORIES (for today):

I want to suggest books in three different categories today: (a) non-fiction regarding resistance to authoritarianism in America (to include considerations of violent resistance); (b) non-fiction regarding a variety of threats to American democracy in past days (that are not quite what you may think; and (c) relevant fiction about America and fascism

Resistance to fascism/authoritarianism

PRISONERS OF LANGUAGE: Racism, my third-grade teacher, the big pool of life ... and reading

Especially within a school setting, we are all potentially prisoners of language.

The first day of school at Wilson Elementary School in Fishersville, Virginia, in September 1964: it was a different world, although we didn’t yet know it. 

I was beginning third grade. 

Wilson Elementary was a red-brick, single-story, one-hall school (an extension would be built between my sixth and seventh grade years, turning the rectangular building into an L-shaped structure). It housed about 500 kids in Grades 1-7 (no kindergarten in rural Virginia in the early 1960s, and few junior high schools). It was an artifact of such a completely different time and American culture than we inhabit today that it is almost impossible to portray it in any meaningful fashion.

I have often told my college students that it was one of the only elementary schools they would ever hear about that could have had a student parking lot. In 1960s Virginia there was no social promotion yet, so it was not unusual for some of the sixth or seventh-graders to be sixteen, or even seventeen, years old. 

On the other end of the scale, our principal took all the boys in each new first grade class to the restroom to explain how to flush the toilets and carefully distinguished between urinals (which many had never seen) and water fountains. “One is to pee in, and the other is to drink out of,” Mr. McChesney said. “Remember that all the drinking fountains will be in the halls, not in here.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP'S TRANSGENDER EXECUTIVE ORDERS ARE MEANINGLESS: Resist and do not comply

The lynchpin to the Republican anti-transgender crusade is President Trump's January 25, 2025 Executive Order entitled "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government."

This EO puts forth three critical "arguments" (better characterized as "assertions") that form the foundation for the enforcement of the order and all other EOs regarding transgender American (not competing in athletics, etc.)

It is important to understand that most of this Executive Order is either window dressing (an opinion section at the beginning about, grunt, grunt, scratch, scratch, "transgender bad") or are specific directives to the State Department regarding transgender and nonbinary documents. The first opinion section is legally meaningless in all senses except propaganda. The directives section only has force of law if (a) it falls within the scope of the President's power to administer the government AND the legal assertions underpinning the directives are sound (or at least make some kind of approach toward being rational).

In this case the President would probably win the argument that he has the requisite authority over the State Department issuance of passports, since former President Biden permitted the change in gender markers on such documents by Executive Order in 2022.

On the other hand, the legal representations in the body of the Executive Order are utter and complete garbage, Just ask conservative Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, since he wrote the majority opinion in Bostock v Clayton County in June 2022.

Here are the three key contentions in President Trump's "Defending Women" EO:

PUBLIC EDUCATION IN REPUBLICAN CROSSHAIRS: This is one battle we can definitely win

But to win we need to be paying attention ...

It is critical not to let important attacks on American institutions slip by simply because they don't involve a racist, illegal South African immigrant and his merry band of youthful incels.

Consider the threat to public education, which is essentially two-fold: (1) financial and (2) thought control.

But what you have to understand, critically, is that the legacy media, both because it needs "pants on fire" pieces to sell advertising, and because it's scared too death of the Republicans, is not going to be covering this story.

For that you have to into the increasingly important "alternative media" on the left. That's where I have drawn most but not all of the information for this post.

THE FINANCIAL THREAT