Will They Invoke the Insurrection Act on 20 April 2025?
I didn’t want to write about this. I still don’t.
I’m sure you’ve seen the information, the DETAILED information, going around about invocation of the Insurrection Act. Enough people have sent me various versions, and requested my thoughts, and so here we are.
I won’t reprint any of the plans - Cliff Notes Version: we should all make sure that everyone knows the fascist regime is going to invoke the Insurrection Act of 18071. The versions present all sorts of scary situations, including soldiers in the streets in our neighborhoods, complemented by yutzs and yahoos with guns to back them up. Arrests, shutdowns, closed borders, no press, all sorts of horrors. And the overall resistance plan is to make sure everyone knows about it, and takes various actions in the next couple weeks because the logic is that if enough people know about it, and it’s public enough, they won’t be able to pull it off.
The plan for invocation is in Project 2025, so it’s nothing new, although the date is wrinkle, since Project 2025 wanted the process to start on Day 1 of the new fascist regime. It’s the major reason I wrote so many posts last fall and winter on how to protect yourself and your devices2.
As you can assume, I have a different take.
First, I think they’ll have a lot of logistic trouble with the implementation of martial law. As an aside, they have so much trouble with logistics that they’re planning a military parade (with tanks) from the Pentagon into DC to celebrate another year of the Giant Cheeto.
Here’s their problem: to get from the Pentagon into DC, you have to cross the Potomac River. On a bridge. Most convenient is the Arlington Memorial Bridge, which has a weight limit of 10 tons. A Bradley weighs about 27 tons, and an Abrams weighs about 70 tons. Both weights are somewhat variable due to how the tank is configured, but in any case MORE THAN 10 TONS!
These boys don’t know how to plan. Sorry, I digress.
Back to the topic at hand.
I think they’ll come up with an incremental plan in the border states first, where they’ll get a lot of support from the governors3. And then they’ll look for ways to go after blue cities. If you speak with people who have lived under martial law (and I know a few) there are whispers, and then stories, and one day you wake up and there’s a soldier at the end of your block. And he’s armed.
I truly believe they will try their damnedest to harm all of us regular Americans. And what I care about is less what they’ll try, and more about what WE need to do.
What WE need to do is form cells. Just like the resistance in WW2. Small cells organized into larger networks to undo the damage, protect the most vulnerable, spread counter-propaganda, and do things decent people never talk about in public.
As you know, I’m a big fan of elections, and doing everything possible to get good people elected. In addition, I’m a huge believer in taking to the streets. As an aside, the counts for the 5 April Hands Off! rallies vary from 5 to 6 MILLION participants domestically, and more in other countries in solidarity, dwarfing the Women’s March of 2017, which was closer to 3 million. These things need to continue, but we need to be ready if suddenly there is no legitimate government, and only horror.
Some of you will read this and say “I’m in! What do I do?” and some will read this and say “I’m never leaving my house again.” For the first group, I am willing to host a conference call to talk about building cells, and later calls regarding operations. The initial call would be over Signal, and be limited to 25 people, albeit if there was interest, there could be multiple calls set up. If you are interested, contact me via Signal4.
As an aside, I keep talking about the necessity going forward of using fax machines, and people keep laughing at me. If you have a VPN (and you should) it can be configured with your fax machine and VoIP. Let’s say I need to send you an important message that must remain secret. I write it on a piece of paper, and use my VPN-enabled VoIP fax machine to send it to your VPN-enabled VoIP fax machine. We both burn our copy of the message after memorizing the information. Even if the message itself can be decoded by nefarious actors, they have no idea from where it originated, nor to where it was sent5. If the message is cryptic or in code, it’s useless to the bad actors. In a world of cameras and surveillance, this will be the safest way to exchange critical information if the worst comes to pass.
So those are my thoughts. What THEY do is in certain ways different from what WE do. They have a slash and burn mentality because they want us to respond to every shiny object. They want to keep us off kilter. They want us bouncing between Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security and then onto deportations and the SAVE Act6, over to the RIFs, back to other legislation, all the time worried as our finances go down the drain.
WE need to stay focused. We must anticipate that they will do worse than we can imagine and therefore quietly (VERY quietly) organize for the unthinkable. The people who call their reps needs to keep calling. The protesters need to keep taking to the streets. And hopefully, small, thoughtful groups will form, just in case. And remember, successful resistors can be anyone. The young lady with the baby carriage (you’ve probably heard about this from the Vietnam era). Elderly people who seem unsure on their feet and thus completely non-threatening and invisible. Smart people who, in the worst of situations, can carve out and run “liberated zones”. Brave people who do the unthinkable7. Historically, these are “regular people” who just wanted to live their lives in peace and quiet, but rose to the challenge.
For everyone who thinks “But I’m afraid, I could get hurt” - that’s completely true. Being part of a cell will be risky. But the alternative is far worse.
Not for the first time - my all time favourite quote:
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. Margaret Mead.
If you have never read the actual law, this article from Wikipedia explains what you need to know. PLEASE READ IT. It provides not just facts, but framework, and you cannot stand up against something if you don’t really know what it is.
One post here. Another here. Also, Cape phone service is now available for the general population, and you can port your number.
Read the Insurrection Act information — they need governors to call out the National Guard, the Feds can’t do it.
If you don’t have Signal, you download it onto your phone. Info here. You then use the little blue Signal icon to text and make phone calls.
Helpful tip: Some fax machines automatically save numbers that were called, or from which faxes were received. If you pull the plug while the fax machine is on, it will delete the memory.
Vote scheduled for Thursday - call your House member to remind them to vote NO.
My personal heroine from WW2 is the fictional character Shosanna Dreyfus from the movie Inglorious Basterds.
From the Brennan Foundation:
The Insurrection Act does not authorize martial law. The term “martial law” has no established definition, but it is generally understood as a power that allows the military to take over the role of civilian government in an emergency. By contrast, the Insurrection Act generally permits the military to assist civilian authorities (whether state or federal), not take their place. Under current law, the president has no authority to declare martial law.
I so appreciate you, and your ability to boil things down for us. Thank you.