We Are the Heirs of Grit
Americans Have Always Found a Way to Fight Back
Here are the 13 original rules that can teach America how to fight back — and win.
The Rules
"Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have."
"Never go outside the experience of your people."
"Whenever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy."
"Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."
"Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage."
"A good tactic is one your people enjoy."
"A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag."
"Keep the pressure on."
"The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself."
"The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition."
"If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative."
"The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative."
"Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."
I sat at my desk, listening to the country groan under the boot of a rising dictator. I turned the pages of history. I scrolled the faces of my neighbors. I watched the future trembling on the horizon. And I realized: the playbook for survival — for victory — was already written. It was sitting on my bookshelf. A book hotly contested and used for good and evil. So, I have turned the thirteen rules on their heads.
In 1971, a man named Saul Alinsky published “Rules for Radicals.” It wasn’t a book for the rich or powerful. It was a guide for ordinary people — teachers, waitresses, students, nurses — to fight back against cruelty and corruption with strategy, ingenuity, and joy. It worked. Over and over, across decades and generations, it worked. And now? It’s our turn. Because Project 2025 is a blueprint for fascism. And this — these rules — are the counterattack. These are the battle-tested tools of people who refused to bow, who outwitted empires, who changed history with nothing but their voices, their feet, their sheer refusal to give up.
These rules are not theories. They are maps drawn in blood and hope. Read them. Share them. Live them. Because it’s not just the big things that topple tyrants. It’s the everyday acts — the letters, the songs, the marches, the refusals. Small things, multiplied, move mountains.
So, let’s begin with the first truth we will carry into the storm: the real meaning of power.
Rule #1: “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.”
This story is the first seed you must plant in your heart. Because it’s not just about marches and speeches — it’s about vision and strategy.
It was 1963. Birmingham, Alabama. The air was thick — thick with heat, thick with hate, thick with the desperate, bloody grip of segregation. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference looked around and saw the truth: they did not have armies. They did not have guns. They did not have millions marching behind them — yet.
They had small, flickering groups of teachers, waiters, barbers, teenage girls who could not vote yet but could be arrested. Tiny sparks. But King knew something that would change everything: Power is perception.
And so they built the vision.
They carefully staged protests and sit-ins at strategic locations. They called the cameras ahead of time. They trained volunteers to fill the angles — so every photograph looked like the world itself was rising behind them. They made sure every story sent to the evening news would show bravery, not rage. They filled the jails on purpose — until even the smallest courthouse looked under siege.
It wasn’t numbers that changed America.
It was what America saw.
It was the illusion of an unstoppable flood — until it became an unstoppable flood.
Politicians scrambled.
Business owners begged for peace.
Presidents picked up phones and drafted new laws.
All because a few hundred brave souls became a million in the imagination of a nation.
In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, King wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
He understood: you don’t need the whole world standing behind you to move mountains — you just need the whole world to believe you might.
This Is What We Do:
And in 2025, we must do the same.
Not someday. Now.
Flood the internet with protest images that look massive, training our activists to frame every photo to seem like a sea of humanity.
Amplify every small rally as if it were the beginning of a tidal wave — because it is.
Saturate local media with press releases and local heroes’ stories, flooding the public conversation with acts of bravery and conscience.
Coordinate online storms — hundreds posting at once — so that resistance feels inescapable and inevitable.
Choreograph marches designed for maximum visual impact: matching shirts, towering banners, synchronized movement across bridges, town centers, campuses.
Claim every blank space: posters in windows, stickers on cars, chalk on sidewalks — making the very landscape itself shout back against tyranny.
We don’t have to start with millions.
We have to look like millions — until the millions come.
And they will.
Because courage is contagious.
And courage, once seen, cannot be unseen.
Rule #2: “Never go outside the expertise of your people.”
Come closer. You need to hear this not as a bedtime story — but as a blueprint you carry in your back pocket.
It was the late 1980s. AIDS was a death sentence. Hospitals turned away the dying. Churches refused to bury them. Politicians shrugged. Whole communities were dying in silence, while the so-called leaders of the free world did nothing.
And so — out of fury, out of grief, out of a defiant will to live — the people rose. They formed ACT UP — the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power — and they did not wait for permission. They were not politicians. They were not generals. They were artists, nurses, students, lovers, drag queens, carpenters, bartenders — ordinary people who became warriors because there was no other choice.
They turned every scrap of expertise into a weapon.
Nurses trained each other in at-home care when hospitals abandoned patients.
Artists plastered cities with shocking posters that shattered the silence.
Patients became experts on experimental treatments and demanded access.
Families turned funerals into acts of public protest, carrying the ashes of their dead to the steps of power.
Larry Kramer, a founding member of ACT UP, said it plain and fierce: “The world has to know the horror that we are living through.”
And they made the world see.
And they made the world change.
This Is What We Do:
And in 2025, we must do the same.
Not someday. Now.
We must organize pop-up clinics, offer first-aid support at marches, and teach “How to Treat Tear Gas Exposure” workshops at community centers.
We must create banned book clubs in homes, church basements, and libraries — reading aloud the truths they want forgotten.
We must build protest murals and underground art shows, covering cities with the faces and names they try to erase.
We must build secure networks for information sharing — encrypted chats, peer-to-peer messaging, offline libraries.
We must flood social media with short, piercing videos that tear the mask off Project 2025.
We must feed each other, house each other, protect each other — without waiting for permission from the forces trying to silence us.
We do not need the permission of this administration to fight for our lives.
We will do it ourselves.
Because survival is not submission.
Because community is revolution.
Because the knowledge already burning in our hands is enough — if we dare to use it.
Rule #3: “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.”
Let me tell you a story about confusion — about how the powerless outwitted the powerful by daring to fight in ways their enemies never expected.
It was December 1st, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama. Rosa Parks sat down in the “whites only” section of a bus and quietly refused to move. Her arrest, though courageous, was not the end of it. It was the beginning of a plan so daring and so simple that it would confound the city’s leadership for an entire year.
The segregationists expected riots.
They were prepared for violence.
They knew how to crush an uprising with police batons, tear gas, and jail cells.
They were not prepared for what came next:
an invisible, economic war fought with aching feet, determination, and ingenuity.
The Black citizens of Montgomery organized a boycott.
Not just for a day or two — but for 381 relentless days.
They walked miles to work.
They organized secret carpools.
Churches became hubs for transportation.
Shoe repair shops boomed, fixing the worn soles of marchers.
The bus company bled money.
Businesses suffered.
And slowly, inevitably, segregation cracked under the pressure of a people who refused to fight the way they were expected to.
The city officials didn’t know where to strike.
They couldn’t outlaw walking.
They couldn’t arrest every pair of battered shoes.
They lost — not through confrontation, but through confusion.
Through relentless, creative endurance.
This Is What We Do:
And in 2025, we must do the same.
Not someday. Now.
We must organize economic boycotts against corporations and banks funding Project 2025, and redirect our dollars with precision and pride.
We must build alternative communication networks: encrypted neighborhood listservs, private screenings of banned materials, hand-to-hand USB drives — creating an underground river of truth.
We must stage unexpected forms of protest: silent sit-ins, die-ins at malls, candlelight vigils outside government buildings — ways they cannot easily predict or crush.
We must create pop-up libraries and underground schools, teaching the banned histories, the forbidden sciences, the truths they want buried.
We must overwhelm their bureaucracies with minor legal actions, endless requests, and meticulous public record demands — clogging their gears with their own rules.
We must outflank their expectations with radical dignity — offering kindness, offering food, offering visible humanity when they prepare only for war.
They expect fists.
They expect screams.
They are prepared for one kind of battlefield — and one only.
We will give them another.
We will step sideways into the fields they forgot to guard.
We will move faster, smarter, wilder.
And confusion — brilliant, strategic confusion — will be one of our fiercest weapons.
Rule #4: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.”
There’s a special kind of power in using the enemy’s own words to trap them — to mirror back their hypocrisy until it cracks wide open for the world to see.
It was the 1950s and 60s.
Jim Crow ruled the South with an iron fist — separate water fountains, separate schools, separate everything — and always the chant: “separate but equal.”
But Black civil rights activists understood something razor-sharp: if the law said “separate but equal,” then it damn well had to be equal.
They demanded it — over and over — in the courts, in the streets, in front of television cameras.
They showed America its own rotten reflection.
If schools were supposed to be equal, why were Black children studying in falling-down buildings without books?
If public spaces were supposed to be equal, why were Black citizens relegated to crumbling back entrances and leaking bathrooms?
Every lawsuit, every protest, every photograph wasn’t just resistance — it was a legal and moral dare.
Live up to your words.
Or show yourselves for what you are.
And it worked.
Judges twisted themselves into knots trying to justify the unjustifiable.
Public opinion shifted.
And the towering walls of segregation began to crack under the unbearable weight of their own hypocrisy.
As Dr. King said, “We will wear you down by our capacity to suffer.”
And in doing so, they exposed the lie at the heart of the system.
This Is What We Do:
And in 2025, we must do the same.
Not someday. Now.
We must demand that “family values” laws protect all families — queer families, interracial families, immigrant families — until the hypocrisy bleeds through the words.
We must insist that “free speech” be truly free, and flood every forum with banned histories, banned voices, banned truths.
We must use public complaint systems, legal filings, open record requests — thousands upon thousands — to expose every cruelty, every censorship, every abuse.
We must show up at every school board, city council, and courtroom, reading their oaths of office aloud, demanding they confront the sacred words they are betraying.
We must film, record, and publicize every breach of democracy, turning every camera and every pen into a witness that cannot be silenced.
We must call out every selective enforcement, every unequal application of law, until the contradictions collapse under their own rot.
They want to frame us as lawless.
But the most devastating thing we can be is lawful — relentless — unbreakable thorns in their side.
We will not break the rules.
We will drag them, screaming, into the full light of the promises they never intended to keep.
And when the world sees — fully, nakedly —
the truth will do what truth always does:
it will burn down the lie.
Rule #5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”
Let me tell you another story. This one is about laughter — not the soft, easy laughter of jokes shared around a kitchen table, but the sharp, devastating laughter that cracks thrones and sends dictators stumbling from their gilded chairs.
It was the late 1980s in Czechoslovakia, behind the Iron Curtain.
The regime controlled the newspapers.
The regime controlled the streets.
The regime thought it controlled the people.
But then came the students.
They took to the squares with blank signs —
nothing written at all —
marching in silence, daring the secret police to act.
And the police did.
They arrested students for holding up empty sheets of paper.
The absurdity could not be hidden.
Photographs of the arrests spread beyond the iron borders.
The world laughed — and in that laughter, the regime’s myth of power cracked.
It wasn’t the bullets that began the downfall.
It was the mockery.
It was the shame.
Here in America, ridicule has long been the weapon that tyrants fear most.
When Richard Nixon was clowned and roasted on late-night shows, it wasn’t just entertainment — it was erosion.
When George W. Bush was lampooned for his clumsy speaking and empty bravado, it weakened the war machine more than a thousand protests could.
And then there is Donald Trump.
Trump, who built his entire empire on the illusion of strength and dominance,
has spent his life howling in rage at late-night comedians, cartoonists, and internet memes that cut deeper than any political scandal ever did.
He survived impeachment.
He survived bankruptcies.
But what he has never, ever been able to survive is being laughed at.
Because laughter strips away fear.
Laughter makes a tyrant human.
Laughter turns a strongman into a punchline.
And punchlines can kill empires.
As Lenny Bruce said, “The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can’t fake it.”
And we will not fake it.
We will wield it.
This Is What We Do:
And in 2025, we must do the same.
Not someday. Now.
We must create protest signs so clever, so piercing, that they are photographed, shared, and remembered far longer than any speech.
We must flood the streets, the walls, the internet with art, satire, parody, memes, videos — every form of mockery that unmasks the ridiculousness of tyrants and their cronies.
We must organize satirical campaigns: fake awards for “Most Cowardly Politician,” public “funerals” for banned books, “graduation ceremonies” for corrupt judges.
We must weaponize late-night open mics, comedy slams, underground shows, where resistance is not just spoken but laughed into existence.
We must give cruel laws ridiculous names — Project 2025 must become known not as serious policy, but as a dystopian joke, a punchline nobody can say without smirking.
We must strip tyrants of the one thing they cannot survive without: our fear.
They want to be feared.
We will make them ridiculous.
They want to be kings.
We will make them clowns.
Because ridicule, properly aimed, is not cruelty —
it is liberation.
It is the sound of a people refusing to be ruled by fools.
We will laugh.
We will sing.
We will point and say, “Look! Look at how small they really are!”
And the world will laugh with us.
And the walls of power will tremble.
Rule #6: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”
Let me tell you a story about joy — not the soft kind that comes easily,
but the fierce, defiant joy that blooms in the teeth of fear.
It was the summer of 1961, deep in Mississippi.
Freedom Riders — Black and white young people — boarded segregated buses, determined to shatter Jim Crow’s grip with their bodies and their wills.
They were arrested.
Beaten.
Thrown into the steel jaws of Parchman Farm, a prison designed to crush hope.
But inside those cold concrete walls, something happened that the guards could not understand — and could not stop.
The Freedom Riders sang.
They sang gospel hymns and freedom songs through the night.
They sang while mattresses were taken away.
They sang while guards screamed for silence.
They sang until the very walls shook with the sound of stubborn, unkillable life.
The prison could chain their hands.
It could starve their bodies.
It could never silence their joy.
That same defiant joy lit the streets outside the Stonewall Inn in 1969.
When the police raided — again — expecting terror and shame, the patrons fought back with fists, with heels, with broken bottles, with fierce kisses in the street.
And when the smoke cleared, they danced.
They turned pain into parades, and shame into pride.
Tyrants depend on fear.
Joy is what they cannot kill.
As Audre Lorde wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
Joy is not escape.
Joy is survival.
Joy is strategy.
This Is What We Do:
And in 2025, we must do the same.
Not someday. Now.
We must host protest picnics in parks and town squares, filling the air with music, banners, shared food, and laughter that cannot be legislated away.
We must organize “Resistance Singalongs,” gathering voices together in public spaces to belt out banned songs, old protest hymns, and new anthems of defiance.
We must hold mass read-ins of banned books in libraries, coffee shops, schools — anywhere the censors try to close the door on truth.
We must flood the streets with joy-fueled flash mobs: dancers, choirs, artists painting sidewalks with defiant beauty.
We must weave “Freedom Gardens” into every neighborhood — turning abandoned lots and backyards into blooming fields of resistance.
We must cover fences and lampposts with bright ribbons, posters, lights, and messages of stubborn, radiant hope.
They want us silent.
We will sing.
They want us afraid.
We will dance.
Because joy, fiercely wielded, is more revolutionary than fear.
Because every act of celebration is an act of resistance.
Because when we refuse to surrender our music, our stories, our stubborn hope —
we make ourselves ungovernable.
Tyrants can outlaw marches.
They can tear down banners.
But they cannot kill a people who keep singing.
This is Part 1 of a two-part walk through the 13 Rules for the 2025 People’s Resistance. The first six rules have been shared here — with all the grit, the history, and the fierce hope they carry.
Before we continue, I want to ask you something. Will you tell me what you think?Tell me what in these stories and ideas feels strong — what you believe could work today, in our towns, our neighborhoods, our lives. Tell me, too, if there are parts that feel impractical, unreachable, like echoes from another time that don’t quite fit the world we’re standing in now. And tell me — only if you wish — what you feel you can do.
What calls to you. What feels possible. What piece of this storm you might be willing to carry. And if there are parts you know you cannot do, that’s just as important to know. No need to explain why.No judgment. No guilt.We all have different roads, different battles, different weights we are carrying.
All I ask is for your honesty, your thoughts, your presence. Because this fight — this living, breathing resistance —is not just about words on a page.
It is about all of us finding our place inside it. I am listening. I am learning alongside you.
And I am so deeply grateful you are here.
“The road to resistance is not walked all at once — it is built one rule, one act, one soul at a time.
Part Two is coming tomorrow. Keep your fire lit.”
— Always forward, Gloria
Thank you for the restacks.
“We were made for these times.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Gloria, you have given me more than hope. Thank you for the inspiration! Love wins.