Author: Slingshot robot #1

Contact us by April 20 if you want to draw art for the 2026 Slingshot Organizer — you do not have to live in California to draw. 50 artists from all over contribute to each edition. 

Please send additions and corrections for the Radical Contact List by May 23. We’re especially looking for contacts in under-represented areas, states and countries (cities that are NOT college towns). We’re looking particularly for contacts in the South and Midwest — anywhere in Alabama, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wyoming, Africa & the Middle East.

If you want to work on editing and adding to the Radical History dates, reach out between now and April 20. We want to add protests or notable events from 2024 / 2025, older stuff we’re missing, especially marginalized issues and movements, and we need help proofreading to try to locate and correct errors. 

If you are in the Bay Area, join Slingshot for two art party weekends to put the Organizer together by hand May 24/25 (times TBA) and May 31/June 1 (24/7, baby!) at Long Haul 3124 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley. “It is like an art rave — but geeky and free.” Drop by for an hour or stay all day and all night. 

Selling the Organizer enables Slingshot to print and distribute this newspaper for free. If you know of a store in your area that could sell the 2026 Organizer, let us know. 

Sadly, we ran out of copies of the 2025 Organizer so we don’t have any extra copies to give out this year.

PRODUCT RECALL: The 2025 Organizer’s month-at-a-glance calendar for September is defective / off by 1 day. You can fix it with a pen. We’re very sorry about the error. Please tell your friends. 

By Average Joey

Capitalism is more than just an economic model: it is an all-encompassing socio-political system fueled by the exploitation of human labor and natural resources, and enforced by violence. The logic of capital is the prioritization of profit above all else, which dictates nearly every detail of our personal lives — our relationship to work, community, relationships, even our perception of ourselves. If we start to unveil this logic, we can see how insidious it is to our mental and emotional health. 

What is considered “rational” according to the logic of capitalism is often ethically indefensible. Ecological devastation, unspeakable human exploitation, and the violence of war are all permissible under this logic, so long as the profits rise in the upcoming fiscal quarter. A society that worships opulence while it normalizes millions of people sleeping in the streets is deeply sick. What does it do to a person to be entrapped in this framework?

Stuck in a cycle of meaningless labor, vapid consumption, hyper-individualized social alienation and with social bonds captured by profiteering algorithms, we are certain to interpret the world as hostile, competitive, unfulfilling, and isolating, which in turn affects our mental/emotional state for the worse. Diagnoses such as depression or anxiety, are biomedical labels for the natural, healthy and inevitable reaction of people to hostile social conditions. 

Modern capitalist society is abnormal, in the grand scheme of our species’ history. For 95% of humanity’s time on earth, we lived in classless communities of mutual obligation. Meeting the needs of fellow members of the tribe was a core necessity for one’s own survival. Under these forms of social organization, the ways in which our basic biological needs were met — that is, communally and in close relationship to the natural world — formed our social needs for group cohesion, trustworthy community, and connection to the environment. Meeting our physiological needs through a collective process of egalitarian social relationships is what shaped our psycho-emotional needs for social belonging within an interdependent community of mutual care. 

It is not that prehistoric people were more ethical or virtuous, but that this mutual aid was necessary for survival. The material conditions shaped social relationships, biological evolutionary expectations, and psycho-emotional needs. The same applies to today — in order to survive under material conditions of modern capitalism, people are forced into particular social relationships. However, this social arrangement can be said to be “unnatural” — meaning it is antagonistic to the evolutionary expectations of our species. Capitalism is not conducive to individual and social wellbeing; psycho-emotional distress is all but inevitable.

Propaganda that attempts to frame “human nature” as inherently greedy or selfish comes from a place of either bad faith or ignorance; this narrative is a misdirection, diverting attention away from structures of inequality and the powerful people who benefit from them. Human nature is not fixed. Rather, people act according to the incentive structure of their social environments. It is not some fundamental flaw that makes people behave selfishly or violently, but rather the dysfunctional social conditions which incentivize anti-social behavior — and sets up the personal experiences that result from those conditions. Indoctrinated by the ideologies of capitalism our entire lives, behaviors which maintain the status quo appear to us as fundamental to our nature, but they are historically contingent. 

Dialogue around “mental health” tends to individuate and pathologize the experiences people have under these antagonistic conditions, focusing on diagnosing and treating symptoms rather than considering the systemic causes of psycho-emotional distress. A mental health diagnosis can be flattening: “Why do I think/feel/behave this way? Because I have a ‘mental illness’” — end of story. This reductionism reinforces the falsehood that mental or emotional discomfort is the result of individual malfunction and can be fully resolved through medication or “lifestyle changes.” 

It is true that many people find great value — personal relief, social validation, and genuine healing — through biomedical diagnosis, medical treatment, and therapeutic management. The alleviation of debilitating distress provided by medication, the support of peer groups, and the tools one acquires through therapy cannot be disregarded outright. However, these are ultimately inadequate if they are understood as the exclusive path to resolution or healing, while the social and political causes of distress go unaddressed. There is nothing disempowering about diagnosis so long as that diagnosis leads to a deeper inquiry into all the factors that contribute to psycho-emotional health — including the social and structural ones. Without a wider analysis, a mental health diagnosis can lead a person struggling with their psycho-emotional health down a path of defeated passivity.

Capitalist social structures are certain to cause stress, loneliness, anxiety, and existential sadness. Our inability to conform to or abide by the demands of the logic of capital is not a flaw — not an indication of a personal malfunction — but a sign that we have not yet relinquished our humanity. You are not wrong to feel depressed or anxious. Given the reality, it would be weird not to be anxious and depressed. Our body/mind/soul’s rejection of these conditions and ideological confines serves as proof of capitalism’s fundamental antagonism to all it means to be human — biologically, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. Our spirits are crying out for something better. If such a large percentage of the population experience “illnesses” such as depression and anxiety, these arefundamentally social problems. Depoliticizing mental health takes capitalism for granted as inevitable, which it is not. Stepping over dying people on a daily commute or passively scrolling past images of genocidal violence should be psychologically disturbing. It does something to the human spirit, or psyche, or soul to live in a culture where such brutality appears to us as mundane. 

What is “healthy” or “crazy” depends on the ideologies of a given society or culture. Who is more violent and dangerous: the houseless person experiencing a manic episode in the town square, or the executives of the weapons manufacturers who build, disseminate, and profit from 2,000 pound bombs? Historically, and in the present day, it has been adherence to the status quo which has perpetuated the most egregious violence the world has ever known. In a capitalist world, it is the “normal” people who establish, perpetuate and maintain structures and logics that are inherently violent — that are antithetical to the health and wellbeing of human and non-human life the world over. Those who insist on something better are labeled “crazy.” If alienation is normal, let us embrace abnormality. If insisting on a radically different social reality is irrational, it is time to be irrational. If turning away from capitalist ideology in favor of a radically different world means being labeled as crazy, let us embrace a liberating madness. 

After watching for over a year as the leaders of the University of California (UC) failed to condemn genocide or reckon with the implications of the university’s investments, research, and donor complicity in the destruction and devastation of the Palestinian people, a systemwide collective of faculty, students, staff, and community members launched the UC People’s Tribunal for Palestine on November 11, 2024. UC leaders normalized the Israeli state and defended Zionism while restricting speech and employing militarized police power against those who spoke out against the genocide. 

Our first session focused on the inaction of UCSF, the sole UC campus dedicated to healthcare, to condemn the targeting of hospitals and healthcare workers, as well as Zionist donor pressure and influence. We are holding a second session in southern California on May 9-10. This session will focus on (1) UC investments in and research collusion with war industries, (2) racialized and militarized police repression of Palestinian solidarity, and (3) Zionist policing of forms of knowledge with the complicity of the university.

In addition to our live sessions, the UC People’s Tribunal serves as a repository for independent research about complicity of the UC in aiding and abetting Zionist aggression. 

We’ve begun to build a broad-based popular curriculum based on the archive.

Though 2024’s Palestine solidarity camps were crushed or disbanded, the tribunal continues their demands for divestment and anti-imperialist education. Campus-based struggle for divestment from apartheid South Africa lasted for years. We are in it for the long haul. For more info: ucpeoplestribunal.org

By Little Yew

Right now, a lot of Americans are hurting as the cost of being alive is falling out of reach. People on TV keep telling us to blame minorities and women for what’s going on. They tell us that if we disempower these groups, our economic woes will go away. This is a pernicious myth, designed to distract everyone from the real reasons life is so expensive right now: union-busting, privatization, and monopolies.

Union-busting hurts us all. In the 1950s, union membership in the U.S. was at an all-time high. This had a huge impact, boosting quality of life for many Americans. Then came the era of union-busting firms, in which bosses began hiring companies to spread lies and sow derision among workers. Thanks to union-busting tactics, workplace union contracts got derailed, and vital collations dissolved. This has led workers to constantly get a bum deal — or not even get a seat at the bargaining table. Union-busting is the one of the biggest reasons we’re in this current mess. To learn more about union-busting, check out A Collective Bargain by Jane McAlevey.

Privatization is another reason everything is so expensive. There’s this awful pattern that started in California in the late 1960s, and that spread to the whole country by the 1980s. This pattern is called “privatization,” and it’s the trend of eliminating public services and instead giving taxpayer money to for-profit companies to handle the services instead. These companies prioritize their investors above all else, and this leads to a degradation of services. It also means we often must pay for things twice. For example, our tax dollars might be used to hire a private contractor to build a road, and then they charge us a toll to use it. This awful logic is now everywhere in the U.S. — including in education, healthcare, and even military weapons. Privatization has led many of us to become straddled by debt or even go bankrupt over things that are free in other countries — such as attending university or access to healthcare. This entire system makes no sense, and it’s created hundreds of paywalls in our everyday lives through which we are constantly bleeding cash. To learn more about privatization, check out the 5-minute video “The Truth about Privatization” by Robert Reich.

Monopolies have gotten out of hand—and lay the foundations for price gauging. You might have heard that only 10 companies control almost the entire world’s food supply, only 6 companies control 90% of U.S. news media, and local rental markets have been flooded with Wall Street companies buying up all the housing stock. This is all part of a larger pattern in the formation of monopolies, in which fewer and fewer companies control the supply of something. This pattern lays the foundation for a myriad of awful things, including price gouging, thanks to lack of competition.

The bosses and Wall Street want you to blame minorities and women. Don’t fall for it. Disempowering those groups never fixes anything. The way to fix the economy and make life affordable again is to build up worker power, break up monopolies, and put a stop to privatization.

By anonymous

When I advise mutual aid groups and activists on their cybersecurity, their first question is often “What messaging app should we use?”

The answer is Signal. But, while encrypted messaging is important, just “using the right app” really isn’t enough. If a right wing activist can log into your accounts, or a police officer unlocks the phone of the person you’re messaging after a protest, it doesn’t really matter how well encrypted your messages were in transit. The messages of your entire group are now going to be in the hands of someone who can use them to harm all of you.

Our cyber security isn’t individual — it’s built with and through the actions of our community. As our cybersecurity risks increase in the coming years, we need to stop thinking of it as a personal concern, and start thinking of it as a community endeavor. We live in a cyber risk ecosystem, and if you haven’t taken the necessary steps to understand those risks or protect your devices, accounts, and communications, it makes your entire community more vulnerable to those risks as well. 

What are these risks? There are basically three broad categories we should consider: We all face a very heavy ‘background noise’ of financially motivated attacks from scammers and extortionists. For those of us politically involved on the left, we will also face similar attacks from right wing hacktivists. And finally, we should limit our exposure to government surveillance. 

There are many, many forms each of these attacks can take, but it’s important to understand the most common. For political hacktivists and financial extortionists, the methods will be similar. First, trying to log into your accounts with username/password pairs that were leaked from other hacked websites. Second, “phishing” emails and “smishing” texts that try to get you to download files or enter your password into a mimicry of an actual login page. Finally, exploiting technical vulnerabilities in your operating system or browser if it hasn’t been kept up-to-date.

Clandestine government agencies may engage in these attacks as well, but the vast majority of government surveillance is much more simple. Law enforcement will just ask relevant corporations to hand over all relevant information about you. Google, Meta, and many other corporations have specific web portals to actively facilitate these requests. And if you’re stopped at a protest or on the street, cops can and will forcibly unlock your phone using thumbprint or facial recognition if no password lock is enabled.

I believe that the likelihood and magnitude of all three of these risks (financial extortion, political hacktivism, and government surveillance) will increase a lot in the coming years for leftists, anarchists, activists, and noncomformists in the US. With Trump’s far-right politics and talk about fighting “the enemy within”, it doesn’t take a huge amount of historical analysis to see that there will likely be an increase in surveillance and prosecution based on political ideology. But I believe that financial extortion and political hacktivism against the left will drastically increase as well, once it becomes clear that the administration now lacks the will to prosecute such attacks.

The impact of these can be serious. Law enforcement investigations could lead to prosecution or incarceration. Not just for you, but for those you have messaged. We wouldn’t talk to cops about our friend’s activities, but many of us continue to communicate via unencrypted mediums (email, text) over corporate servers (gmail, meta), on insecure devices (no password or not up to date). If cops can find something incriminating in a conversation, imagine what they can find across all of your collected emails or texts with a person. 

In addition, as our government-run social safety nets are pillaged, it will become much more difficult to recover from financial fraud and extortion. While the background noise of financially motivate attacks can affect anyone, this will be particularly true for individuals and organizations that become politically targeted. It’s hard to be an effective activist if your elderly relative has just had their financial accounts drained, or your partner’s intimate pictures have been posted publicly online for ransome. Brown shirts have always been the first, cutting blade of fascist violence, and it’s hard to imagine far right groups desisting from these attacks once they feel a carte blanche to pursue those of us on the left without repercussions.

So, how will we face these threats? The anarchist answer is predictable — solidarity, mutual aid, community care. Masking in a pandemic. Providing food for your neighbors. Once again, in yet another domain, we need to help each other to our feet in the still-crumbling ruins, to build a safer world for ourselves, together.

Below, I’ve provided a basic checklist to help you secure your devices to keep yourself and your community safe. I encourage you to share this list (or even a single bullet point!) with someone else in your community as well.

There’s not space to fully explain all of these protections, and even this checklist should be mostly considered a healthy starting place! For more in depth information you can visit privacyguides.org or infosecforactivists.org.

Checklist:

For all of your Devices (phones, tablets, computers)

• Password (not face/thumb!) required to unlock lock screen
• Full Disk Encryption enabled (automatic for newer phones)
• All ‘sharing’ set to ‘off’ (airdrop, fileshare, screenshare, etc)
• Updated operating system (and auto-update turned on)
• Do all internet access through an updated web browser. 
• Install antivirus (usually not needed for phones/tablets)

For Important Accounts (Anything with bank details or used to impersonate you)

• Two-Factor Authentication enabled. (Preferably via app like 2FAS, not text)
• Password not used on any other of your accounts (Password managers like bitwarden help with this). 
• In particular, Email and Phone provider passwords MUST be unique — they can be used to unlock all other accounts
• Password not easily guessed (Random is best – use a password manager!)
• Audit privacy settings and disallow public visibility where possible

Communication

• Use Signal for sensitive topics and wherever else possible
• Assume text/email are unencrypted and not private
• Understand metadata and configuration risks for other apps like whatsapp, messenger, or telegram

• Use a trusted VPN on untrusted networks, or TOR to avoid surveillance
• set an admin password and wifi password for any routers you own
• Only use up-to-date browsers to access internet
• Avoid “smart home” devices where possible — lightbulbs, fridges, printers etc are easily hacked, consider any network with these devices “untrusted”.

Networks

By Ethan

Are you having some mixed feelings about mainstream social media platforms? Were you appalled when Meta announced its January 2025 “Actually, hate speech is cool with us!” policy change? Wanna learn about an alternate approach to connecting online? Come with me, on a journey into . . . The Fediverse!

Most mainstream social media platforms revolve around capturing user data to feed targeted ads and keep us locked in “walled gardens.” Network effects pull in all our friends, leaving us reluctant to switch. Meanwhile, proprietary algorithms mete out content in ways that enrich shareholders, leaving us with more ads, sensational junk, and less of what we actually want from our friends—resulting in what author Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification.”

What Is the Fediverse and Why It Matters

The Fediverse is a network of independently run servers, all using a shared protocol (ActivityPub) to seamlessly communicate with one another. Instead of handing control to a single corporation, each server is guided by its own community’s moderation rules—shaped by shared values, not profit motives. Unhappy with how your server is run? Move to another, and bring your followers.

Exploring Fediverse Platforms

Different services plug into this shared network:

• Mastodon offers a Twitter-like experience.
• Pixelfed is akin to Instagram.
• PeerTube, Loops, and Friendica cater to video, TikTok-style clips, and Facebook-like socializing, respectively.

All of these platforms can still follow and interact with each other because they “federate”—it’s one giant,interconnected world of smaller, values-driven communities.

No Algorithm, No Ads, and No Tracking

Unlike major social media, the Fediverse doesn’t rely on targeted ads or invasive tracking. Yohronological feed is populated with accounts and hashtags you’ve followed, instead of being filled by the whims of a profit-driven black-box algorithm. 

Volunteer Effort

Fediverse servers are reasonably affordable to run, and are maintained and moderated by volunteers who periodically ask for donations from their users.

How To Get Involved

Pick a Platform: Mastodon and Pixelfed are presently the most popular.

Pick a server: Browse a list of servers, and sign up on one. I recommend avoiding the most popular servers for each service, mastodon.social and pixelfed.social

Explore and Connect: Introduce yourself using #introduction, liberally follow accounts and hashtags, and see what’s trending in the Explore section. Since there’s no algorythm filling your feed, you’ll need to do a little work to follow interesting people and topics.

Learn More: fedi.tips has incredible guides for getting started, and the punks over at The Counterforce wrote a brilliant “Guide to Mastadon Fediverse”

After joining, drop me a line, and ask me anything! I’m @dusk@todon.eu

I’ll leave you with the words of the excellent article by 404 Media: You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism. Whatever social media you opt to use, remember to connect and organize with folk near you, IRL.

By Kermit

In the wake of the L.A. fires, a lot of folks were re-posting a quote about how climate change will manifest “as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer…until you’re the one filming it.” The same could be said about totalitarianism. Each day the footage and news reports of actions meant to destabilize, shock, and control people are getting closer and closer. The fascists have hung up their dog whistles and are putting on their boots. For many of us inside the US who have felt insulated from the capricious actions of the state in the past, it feels like something vital about our world has just shattered. For those of us in whom that realization came a long time ago, it still feels like a turning point, where the pretense of slow moving and deliberative institutional stability is evaporating and the naked use of institutional violence, stripped of any veneer of legitimacy, is accelerating and openly repressing any attempt to mitigate the trauma left in its wake.

We don’t know how bad it is going to get or how effective court challenges will ultimately be against this flurry of executive orders, but the trend lines are clear and it is easy, in this moment, to feel like any and all of our actions are futile. The stories that have encouraged us to hope for the best and believe in a future that is better than the present increasingly seem like wishful thinking if not absurd lies. Electoral politics have failed us, the courts cannot be trusted to defend us and we have been conditioned to believe that these are the only ways to make the world better; to save it, and us, from a terrible fate. As we move forward it will be necessary to let go of stories that do not serve us and find other ways to remain grounded and able to thrive.

However we do that, we have to start by accepting that we cannot save the world; there is no way to turn back the clock and the arc of the moral universe does not always or inevitably bend toward justice. Clinging to the belief that time, reason, institutional safeguards or thinking good thoughts will prevent or overcome the bad things happening leaves us immobilized and unable to recognize what we can do to resist them. Things will never go back to normal; we will not be delivered out of this world and into a better one — this is the world we have and we have to decide how we will live in it, connected to our values and nurturing a culture that is robust enough to survive the coming storm.

The opposite of hope…

Faced with terrifying headlines and an overwhelming sense of current and impending trauma, It is understandable that many folks are checking out, their sympathetic nervous systems overloaded, reacting with despair and numbing distractions. Some try as hard as they can to sound the alarm, burning brightly and demanding that we pay attention to everything all at once, not realizing that to pay attention to everything leaves no time or mental energy for meaningful action or the capacity to tend to the things in our lives that we are fighting for.

It’s true that this is an emergency and direct actions are needed to slow the fascists down but martyrdom is not the answer and overwhelming people with information meant to scare them into action often backfires in the long run. It sets people up to burn out, lose motivation and disengage in order to protect their psyches.

Others who do see the perils of martyrdom counsel us to remain calm and distrust mainstream voices that are suddenly horrified by things they were silent about when a center-left politician was doing them. They point out that this process did not begin in the last election and losing our shit will not serve us now. They are right and calming our nervous system is vital, but knowing this doesn’t change the fact that things are getting worse and stopping here can lead to a sense of smug resignation; a feeling that since things have always been terrible and are unlikely to stop being terrible, there is no point in doing anything.

The idea that we are not able to fix the whole problem can obscure the fact that there are smaller things we can do that have an impact. If we understand the future as a winner-take-all contest between utopia and catastrophe, then being faced with realities that cause us to lose faith in utopia means that everything is lost. It renders us incapable of noticing the small ways utopian moments and dynamics can exist in catastrophic times.

…is collectivity.

There is an irony in the idea that to avoid hopelessness, we must walk away from a certain kind of hope. In her book, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, Sarah Jaquette Ray talks about how the opposite of despair isn’t hope, but a feeling of collectivity, of being connected, with others, to something larger than ourselves. She describes not wanting to leave people feeling hopeful, but “like you have the capacity and power to do something, including the most important task, preserving yourself for a lifetime of thriving in a climate changed world.” We live in a culture and economic system that encourages us to focus only on our agency as individuals. Things like climate change and political instability are far too large for any one person to meaningfully effect (save the odd megalomaniacal billionaire), so we are forced to conclude that our agency doesn’t matter. When we recognize that we are all, unavoidably, also part of larger collective groups of people and nurture those connections, we are not only able to do things together that make us feel good, but realize the actual sphere of our influence and see opportunities to be part of larger efforts to make positive change.

Recognizing that we are each only a small part of something larger can take the pressure off and give us permission to care for ourselves. It also allows us to better identify the scale within which our agency is powerful; certainly inside our own heads, but also in the lives of the people we love and are loved by, perhaps among our neighbors and other people we encounter or connect with as we move through the world and even as part of larger collectivities; haphazard and intentional, cultural and occupational.

Strengthening our communities and building collective solidarity has to start with finding our people and talking to them about the things that matter; building relationships with others that allow us to have healthier relationships with ourselves. Exploitative work schedules, antisocial urban planning and ‘social’ technologies that isolate and discourage us make this task harder. Finding ways to overcome those barriers and live in defiance of a culture that would seek to alienate us can push us to take the emotional quality of our lives more seriously.

Making sure we are able to conserve our energy for a long and ongoing struggle is important. There are always ways to respond to the present moment that are not meaningless; that connect us to one another and the world around us and encourage us to find joy and purpose with each other. Paying attention to our need for play and pleasure increases our capacity to get through difficult times. Resistance can look like sharing burdens and joy, like people who know how to laugh with, soothe, affirm and challenge each other. It is important to stay focused on the places where we can have the most impact, but also to honor the necessity of finding playful moments of presence with each other and to be reminded of the wonder of being alive; of recognizing that we have more energy to face the world when we feel connected to the people around us.

Our lives are precious, our stories matter

When I lived in Berkeley, I had an old crimethinc poster on my door that said something like “Beauty must be defined as what we are, otherwise the concept itself becomes our enemy.” The stories we tell ourselves about the world matter; they shape our lives, fuse meaning onto our actions, nurture our relationships and help us understand our emotions. As we learn to nurture stronger bonds with those around us and build more resilient narratives together to replace the stories that have failed us, we can articulate our own values more clearly and counter the rhetorical and material escalation of the fascists more effectively. 

Fascist narratives try to convince us that choosing to value our own life and culture demands devaluing the lives and culture of others. This is bullshit. I know that the lives of other people are precious precisely because my life and the lives of the people I love are precious to me and in dehumanizing others, we dehumanize ourselves.

My own certainty about this did not develop in a vacuum, it was nurtured and grew over time, through many conversations and experiences with people in my life. Conversations like those and the relationships and communities around them are what teach us how to critically engage with the world, allowing us to take in new information and let it change us. There is so much over which we have virtually no agency or ability to control. We do have agency over the stories we tell ourselves about what is important and who we want to be. We can learn to tell stories that acknowledge the grief of this moment and the trauma of the past honestly, that allow us to move through that grief and into a space where we are more healed and better able to meet whatever life might throw at us. 

Figuring out how to live in the world as it is means finding ways to create meaning and build structures that serve us on the scale of our own lives. It means interfacing with technology in ways that promote community building and solidarity while evading state surveillance, respecting the common humanity we share with people all over the world and understanding the systems of power that seek to estrange us from one another. 

Once we let go of the idea that we will get to paradise or return to normal, we have more capacity to make choices that build meaning, connection and resilience. Working together, we can build and defend the best lives we are able to make for ourselves, not as atomized individuals or nuclear families, but as networks of support and mutual aid bound together with ties of solidarity and love.

By Lola

We went to chinatown to watch the lunar new year parade. The streets were packed and we had to park 10 blocks away, up on a steep hill in north beach. I remember walking towards the fireworks, slowing down every two minutes as i waited for you to tag a trashcan, full moon hanging low over criss-crossing streets. We found the rest of the group in huntington park, drinking and skating the stoop of grace cathedral. Something felt sad and lost. I told you i was going to go find the parade. This was 2024, the year of the dragon. We ended up back in oakland that night, at the ave, and although no one seems to remember that, or the parade itself, to me it was unforgettable. A foray into my year of wishing and wanting. We lit christmas tree fires in the street all through that winter, and fire was all i could see — all that I was betting on. I didn’t have a strategy. I just knew I was angry and in love. I just wanted to get closer to the heat. 

Around me, like hot wax, the world moves, drips, pools, morphs. Gray whales and monarch butterflies begin their migration journeys north. Palestinian resistance fighters push the IOF off of their land, and march homeward. Seasons twist, winter arrives, you give me a knife for my birthday. I keep it in my purse. An email on how to protect our students from ICE is circulated through the school that i work at. And as I walk in spirals from the first full moon of the year to the last, it seems like the dragon has spoken her message loud and clear: all movement hinges on its proximity to the open flame. I find myself tucking into corners where the wax is hottest, the most malleable. I initiate fights that i don’t have the skills to win, i love people who i’m pretty sure will not love me back. And it feels good, for a while. This chasing, wishing, praying.

*

My sister told me that the earth recognizes three different kinds of blood. The blood of life (blood from childbirth), the blood of transformation (period blood) and the blood of death. Because reproductive health is in crisis — our natural cycles are no longer honored and revered and birth has been co-opted by patriarchal western medicine — the only blood that the earth is receiving now is the blood of death. In many ways we have tricked the earth and ourselves into believing that we have arrived at the end; that we are all dying. There is always death in the news, and there is always the death that the news will never report. The president announces he will level Gaza out and turn it into a strip mall. Some people — especially liberals, eager to blame anything and anyone other than empire itself — are very scared now. For others, this is nothing new. More threats and intimidation. The violence will continue, as it has continued for a long time, and the resistance will continue alongside it. (Trump is never going to “own” Gaza; as Subhi put it, “The west is so lost in their tiny little world that they are incapable of realizing not everybody in the world values what white westerners value… Many Palestinian muslims would rather sacrifice their lives, their bodies in this world, than to be pushed out of their land — hand over their holy land to the enemy.”) 

On tuesdays, grand lake theatre shows old movies for $5, and we decided to go see the wizard of oz. I had this crazy creepy feeling the whole time we were in there, watching this film that by someone’s colonial, 20th century american standards, was supposed to be a simple allegory for good and evil. A clueless white girl shows up in someone else’s country, kills the witch who lives there and steals her magical shoes, consequently pissing off the witch’s sister; she then makes friends with a bunch of infantile older men who help her kill the witch’s sister and promptly head back home, taking the shoes with her. It occurred to me, as I watched this wild series of events go down, that a mainstream american film from the 1900s is not different at all from a movie that might have been produced in nazi germany. We have a long history of comparing the atrocities of the US government to other, infamously “evil” states. We draw on north korea, russia, germany, iraq… stating that contemporary displacement, genocide, and oppression caused by the US is “almost as bad” as the foreign dictatorships of the past. But we don’t need to travel so many miles away, so many years back to make sense of where we are today. We don’t need to analyze foreign military structures, propaganda films, or government policies to understand how oppression works. Because it’s all right here at our own doorstep. There is nothing more American than genocide. 

It can be a twisted existence. Knowing where we are, and how we got here. Maintaining that awareness everyday. How much blood is there, under the paved streets? Under the grass on their front lawns, under the high rises and bridges? Under the sand on the beach? Blood of death, blood of life, blood of transformation. The history of this place is a history of enslavement, exploitation. Displacement and starvation and control. But that’s just one way to look at it. Because of course, a good amount of the blood that has long-since soaked into the earth belonged to the cops and presidents. And depending on which way you wanna see it, the history of this place is also a history of resistance. 

*

The lunar new year, like the wiccan holiday Imbolc, celebrates the half-way point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. It is the turning point between winter and spring, a tentative light pin-pricking the darkness. In the weeks that border two different seasons, it always feels like the membrane between past and present is thinning, perforating. The last time i could feel the seasons shifting like this, perceptibly, breathlessly, it was sometime in october. The clouds high and dark and tinged with orange, the once-lost feelings swimming tentatively to the surface. I was teaching middle school at the time, seventh grade english. I remember the first rain of the year, during second period. A drizzle against the big west-facing windows of classroom 204. The brief moment between summer and fall, just like the one between winter and spring, always makes me feel hopeful, nostalgic. Like the first leaf that shrivels, turns red, falls from the branch to the street: there is both the sense of knowing and not knowing what will come next, the urge as well as the reluctance to remember that the branch will become bare, the rain will fall, the neighbors will frame their door in christmas lights. Most of the time these days, i’m all caught up in my emotions. Lost in my own ups and downs. It is easy to forget that all of the change — the 

up only to cool down, the anger and hardness that gives way to soft vulnerability, is all part of the natural swing of things. Remembered or forgotten, weaving between apocalypses and dandelion seedlings, the repetition and balance of our world is ceaseless.

Lyrics from the band Drugdealer have been stuck in my head since high school. Wild motion running through your life…helps you to ease your mind, be still sometimes. I don’t know exactly what they were attempting to say there, but i’ve always felt a lucid sense of direction in those intervals between structure, steadiness, and sterility. Momentum follows heat and renewal arrives alongside ash. The state of the world is terrifying, and it isn’t an interlude. Maybe it has always been this way, always will be this way. If the end times are here, maybe they have been here since the first ice age. Maybe they have been here since the day the ice began to melt back into the sea. That burning desire for revolution is ingrained within us — we mirror the planet we call home. Irrational, incendiary, flooded in moonlight. But as assata shakur said, revolution must be scientific, not just emotional. We can’t afford to get lost in the heat now, bugs smashing dully against the street lamps, sand crabs crawling straight into the driftwood fire, punches thrown clumsily on the sidewalk, swinging and missing and swinging and missing and swinging again — 

In a couple weeks, the lunar new year parade will wind through the streets of chinatown. I’ll probably be there to see it, leaning against a windowsill with my tall can, watching the fireworks that they’ve aimed at the moon, that same full moon. But a year older, now. 2025 is the year of the snake. Similar to the dragon, but smaller, stealthier. Still deadly, but with no fire in its lungs. I imagine this snake slithering quietly through the rubble of the past year, observing, assessing, plotting. In filipino mythology, serpents would sometimes follow warriors into battle, indicating that one’s ancestors were on their side. Whether we wanted this or not, the world has begun to burn. I don’t think thats going to end anytime soon — i don’t think things are going to start calming down. I’m pretty sure we’re headed for more chaos. More battles. It’s a beautiful instinct, to follow the heat. But i don’t want to follow it blindly. Whether or not we remember the balance of life, the pendulum will continue to swing. From light to dark, side to side, quiet to loud — from firing guns to writing poems — its time for us to collect ourselves, now. Organize. Militarize. Lock in. Your wishes and prayers have always been more than scraps of paper to be set aflame, sent off into the wind — they are the venom in your fangs. Remind yourself, and bare them. 

By Icarus Rising

As our country lurches forward towards fascism before our eyes, let’s go back to basics to help stay grounded. A key principle for the battles ahead is that everything that’s happening in the outside world is also happening inside of us. 

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a model of the mind that sees us not as a single, unified self but as a system of different “parts” — each with its own perspective, emotions, and strategies for survival. Some parts of us are protectors, working hard to keep us functioning in the world. Others are exiles, carrying deep wounds, fears, and suppressed memories. At the core of this system, beyond all the internal conflict and trauma, is something deeper: the Self.

The Self is not a part — it’s the center of who we are when we are connected, calm, and leading from clarity rather than reaction. When our parts trust the Self to lead, we feel grounded, creative, and courageous. We don’t exile or suppress parts of ourselves — we integrate them. Healing happens not by dominating or controlling the mind, but by listening, understanding, and bringing all of our inner world into balance.

But what happens when a society, like an individual, is built on exile and domination?

Fascism: The Politics of Exile and Control

Fascism is not just a political system — it’s a way of organizing power that mirrors the same patterns of exile and suppression that traumatized minds experience. In authoritarian states, dissent is crushed, contradictions are silenced, and those who do not conform are cast out. There is no room for complexity, uncertainty, or questioning — only obedience, control, and fear.

IFS teaches us that when a person has exiled parts, they develop extreme protectors to keep those parts hidden. The same thing happens in authoritarian societies:

• The government functions like an extreme protector, trying to keep order by any means necessary.

• Those who challenge the system are treated like exiles — pushed out, discredited, or destroyed.

• Fear becomes the organizing principle — for both the rulers and the ruled.

And just like in an individual psyche, the more a system relies on repression, the more fragile it becomes. The exiles don’t disappear. They grow stronger in the shadows. The system becomes more extreme, more paranoid, more desperate to maintain control.

But there is an alternative. Just as IFS teaches that healing comes from Self-leadership, societies can heal through collective leadership — through creating space for all voices, embracing complexity, and refusing to be ruled by fear.

That’s where courage comes in.

Courage: The Key to Facing What’s Happening

In IFS, courage is an aspect of the Self. Not as an abstract concept, but as an embodied state — a way of being that allows us to face fear, hold our ground, and act with clarity even in the face of overwhelming pressure.

Courage is not the absence of fear — it’s the ability to move forward despite fear. It’s what allows us to:

• Look at reality without turning away.

• Stand up to systems of oppression without losing ourselves in hatred or despair.

• Trust that another world is possible, even when everything around us is crumbling.

Fascism feeds on fear and isolation. It wants us to believe that we are alone, that resistance is futile, that we must obey to survive. But courage shatters isolation. It reminds us that we are not alone, that there are others who see what we see, and that together we are stronger than any system that seeks to control us.

Courage is not just about individual action — it’s about collective transformation.

Building Self-Led Communities: The Path to a New World

The old systems — authoritarian politics, extractive capitalism, and rigid top-down control — are collapsing under their own weight. The future is not going to be built by governments, corporations, or elites. It will be built by people—by communities that take responsibility for shaping the world they want to live in.

This is why self-led groups and healthy leadership are the future. Just as IFS teaches us to trust the Self to lead internally, we need to cultivate leadership that is accountable, responsive, and rooted in connection rather than coercion.

Authoritarianism thrives on control and domination — where leadership is about exerting power over others. The alternative is not the absence of leadership, but a different kind of leadership — one that is shared, participatory, and in service to the whole.

Imagine:

• Networks of mutual aid that meet real needs while building long-term infrastructure for survival.

• Groups where leadership is dynamic — where people step up to guide, teach, and organize based on trust, skill, and accountability, rather than status or control.

• Communities that create space for real decision-making, where leadership is about responsibility and contribution rather than authority.

This is the difference between hierarchical domination and healthy leadership:

• Fascist leaders hoard power. Healthy leaders distribute it.

• Fascist leaders suppress dissent. Healthy leaders make space for different perspectives.

• Fascist leaders operate from fear. Healthy leaders cultivate courage.

When leadership is about service rather than control, responsibility rather than dominance, and relationship rather than coercion, it strengthens communities rather than creating dependency.

Fascism teaches us that power means domination. But the truth is, real power comes from connection, trust, and the ability to move together toward a shared vision. The more we practice Self-leadership, collective courage, and accountable organizing, the less control the old systems have over us.

This is how we win — not by waiting for permission, but by building something new, together. Let’s start by talking about it.

Expanding the Vision: IFS Support Groups and Collective Healing

Imagine a future where Internal Family Systems practice extends beyond therapy rooms into grassroots communities. I envision self-led IFS support groups, both face-to-face and online, where people come together like in 12-step groups to share their inner journeys, support each other’s healing, and practice courageous self-leadership in a world that tries to divide us. These groups could offer regular meetings, peer support, and shared resources, creating networks of care and empowerment. In a time when isolation and fear are weaponized, spaces where we can bring our whole selves — wounded parts and all — into connection are revolutionary. Let’s build those spaces together. 

Info: undergroundtransmissions.substack.com

By RADD’s initators

Sometimes, when a new sense of crisis hits, people don’t know what to do. When our communities are under deepened attack, and our ideas and values are increasingly treated by those in power as a threat to their power (which they are!), it’s sometimes hard to see a light at the end of the tunnel. 

Still, the ways that we can come together and push back on harsh new realities are not really all that different from how they have been in the past. We just need to do them!

At this time, like always, we need to come together in person, to share space and ideas and resources, to learn together, to organize new initiatives and strengthen existing ones, and to produce a sense of belonging that us among the “radical left” tend not to feel as strongly in times of right wing resurgence and liberal complacency.

To that end, as longtime participants in food justice and food sovereignty movements here in the Bay Area, we have launched RADD: “Radical Agroecology Dinner & Discussions”.

This is a monthly gathering that combines reading group, community building, and political education on agroecology-related topics, while providing a platform for materially meaningful organizing. It takes place at a local urban farm that itself was founded through direct action and land occupation — living proof that “direct action gets the goods”. Helping make the case for us, the farm itself exists as a space that embodies the radical politics of taking control of food and land as the critical basis for any larger revolutionary transformation of society.

Each month’s gathering starts with sharing potluck food, casual socializing, meeting new friends, seeing old friends, and partaking of the convivial technology that never goes out of style: hanging out with fellow humans, without agendas or pressures. Then, one participant shares from a reading or video that they are inspired by and wish to discuss, as a spark to collective conversation and political (self)education. Although it is a “reading group“, there is no requirement to have read the assigned reading in order to attend. Although it is a potluck, there is no requirement to bring food. All are welcome as they are; partly because that is the way it should be, and also because we don’t need to add one more stress to our community’s plate or make them feel inadequate!

After discussing the month’s topic — whether it be land reform, seed sovereignty, direct action possibilities, forms of organizing, or practices of gardening for local conditions — we return to our process of community building, collectively deciding where we want to go next month.

We’ve only been running this gathering for two months, but already we’ve seen a large community of people who are longing for this kind of community space. Each time we have met, the number of participants has grown, and by next time we’ll likely outgrow our 100-person space! We wrote this small article simply to encourage people to do the same wherever you are — it doesn’t need to be about farming, but you know what you and your people are working on and what topics and focuses might help you grow your community’s political analysis, strategic vision, and social-emotional-practical ties, all of which will help us survive under fascist threats. Who knows? These practices and spaces might even help us build the much better future that we know in our hearts is possible, so that we can thrive, not just survive.

Don’t find us on social media, we won’t be there! We are organizing by word-of-mouth, and when the people want to gather, they will let you know that by showing up with enthusiasm. That’s what we’ve seen!