Tucson Trains on Civil Resistance for the Coming Federal Law Enforcement Overreach

Authoritarian consolidation is happening more quickly in the U.S. than in countries like Hungary and Turkey, and Project 2025 was written in consultation with Orban, the dictator of Hungary.

A Freedom Trainer from Washington, D.C., was in Tucson on Saturday, September 6, with 72 people participating in their Authoritarian Playbook and Noncooperation Workshop. The next day, 25 folks representing the gamut of Tucson’s progressive groups got together for a strategy session with the Freedom Trainer.

Studies show that, without nonviolent civil resistance, only 7.5% of attempts to go back to democracy in the face of an authoritarian takeover are successful. With nonviolent civil resistance, our chances of success go up to 51%.

Things have moved so fast that our trainer fears authoritarian consolidation in the U.S. has already been accomplished. Only two days after she gave this same training to activists in Chicago, Trump announced: “We’re going in” to Chicago. Fortunately, the trainees had learned many ways to resist.

Our heartfelt thanks to Jim Driscoll from Democracy Unites Us and Good Trouble Action Group for organizing these two events!

Next, we learned that the U.S. is already experiencing the six characteristics of an authoritarian takeover:

• Federal law enforcement overreach
• Domestic deployment of the military
• Lawbreaking licensed by the autocrat
• Regulatory retaliation
• Direct investigations against critics
• Refusal to leave by the autocrat

Is our situation dire? Yes.

But research shows that, over the last 100 years, every nonviolent campaign against an oppressive regime was successful if it mobilized 3.5% of the population to take part in a ‘peak mobilization event’ with continued and sustained engagement. (See https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/chen15682.) 3.5% at one protest event indicates broader public support for the issue. Change is possible with far less than 100% participation.

Our job now is to build capacity to respond with massive nonviolent resistance to a “red line” or trigger event. We will have to move from protests and persuasion (which are already widespread in Tucson) to civil resistance. Our two goals will be (1) to limit harm, and (2) to build an alternative government structure and a better society.

Training materials showed that civil resistance can succeed if it:

• Sustains mass, diverse participation
• Expands our repertoire of tactics
• Maintains discipline despite escalating repression
• Elicits loyalty shifts among key pillars of the regime.

The key pillars include government (elected officials, civil service, military, police), business, media, education, and other sectors.

Does Trump even think about little Tucson? Yes, indeedy. Tucson had the first and biggest Tesla take-down in the country, and – even more irritating to MAGA – We just said NO to a data center project! I might add: we have a Hispanic mayor, and our city is 50% Hispanic.

Trump has promised the tech bros ten “freedom cities.” Will he make Tucson one of them and hand us over to plutocratic reactionaries like Peter Thiel? (Arghh!)

Countering the authoritarian takeover

We discussed eight of the many categories or types of noncooperation, focusing on:

• Economic boycotts – take months of planning
• Worker strikes – organized by labor unions. The U.S. has never had a nationwide general strike, so we’re not ready for that yet, and maybe won’t be ready in time.
• Tax resistance – the refusal to pay taxes by means that are legal norms, as a means of non-violent resistance.
• Jury nullification – Yes, it’s legal to vote your conscience and refuse to convict someone based on the evidence. No, it’s not legal to discuss jury nullification with someone who is already on a jury. We need to serve on juries! One can contact the Tucson City and Pima County courts and ask to be put on a jury. You don’t have to wait to be called up.
• Social noncooperation
• Counter recruitment
• Alternative structures (for example, forming mutual aid societies and a shadow government – an underground political, economic and cultural infrastructure.
• Internal action within government (malicious compliance)

We brainstormed several possible triggers for mass actions, and we role-played our response to one of them: federales are about to arrest our mayor and city council members.

But this was not a direct-action training. We will need training focused on planning and implementing large nonviolent direct actions, so we will be ready when Tucson is tested. As our trainer said: We must not surrender in advance.

If you would like to participate in a nonviolent direct-action training, feel free to contact me at mailto:tori_woodard@yahoo.com

(For more info, see freedomtrainers.net and beautifultrouble.org.)