It's Fascism. New Rules. | Part 5 |by Esmée Streachailt
This image is not like the other series images :) | This is a free & public series.
Late Addition: This Really Is An Information War. Yes, there really is a tight little cabal. As male and rich as they are, they can be beaten. The Chat Groups that Changed America are coming for us all.
Heather Marsh's work, in this and the last post (whew!), includes strategies for beating them. Visit Binding Chaos on YouTube.
Starhawk, our beloved elder, has kept with the times. She's got tactics too. Disrupt. Redirect. Be an Information Guerrière!!
*.ﾟ+ヽ(○･▽･○)ﾉﾞ +.ﾟ*☆ ....OK....To....The....Post.... ⌒(＊＾∇゜)v
I did not want this series to go on, y'all. But, I need to tell you why you can trust this Heather Marsh I keep referring to. She's rad. For real. And she writes an easy to digest and apply version of social/critical theory in brilliant, short books. Her emphasis is on Doing Real Change.
Whether you live in the US of The Emergency or not, Marsh’s methods are world building RadMatFems can emphasize in our work. Like I said, we’re already doing it!!!
Also, the group Red, Wine & Blue has 700,000 members, women, working to stop these assholes in the US. They have their sites on the whole of Project 2025, but also have focused priorities for the near term. In addition to Indivisible, Move On, and others. For now, I think connecting with already big (if ‘merely’ liberal) movement is vital. In the US. We’re in deep shit here.
(In the video below: Trump to Bukele: "Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It's not big enough."
@atrupar on X)
Trump to Bukele: "Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It's not big enough." pic.twitter.com/o20thGNK9e
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 14, 2025
Working together means we don't have to reinvent an autonomous women's movement and then start building a world. It means we can be building while we re-establish autonomous women's movement while resisting/recovering in coalition with #3E and others to throw these oligo-patri-fascists into the shining sea. We simply do not have time to take these steps sequentially. We can do RadMatFem stimergically in these movements. It doesn’t matter where you live, sisters & readers. If the far right is not foreclosing your future, the climate crisis is. We will have to take these actions in tandem, in a non-linear, and emergent way.
What I'm excited about is: Marsh's way of doing mass movement comports with RadMatFem, and her theory of a healthy society does too. So, I'm going to give you some sense of her Stigmergy: How to Build a Mass Movement (David M gives a good summary in this video) and ask that you go get familiar with her work. The women of this newsletter and the women we're connected to can be activated in very meaningful ways without trying to Take On All Of History All At Once by ourselves.
I can tell from those who've shared their country location with us on sign-up: we are global in reach if still few in number. Mass movement means worldwide and tailored to each place. So, in this post, I'm going to show why we can take up Heather Marsh's insights and methods, and much of her lingo too.
Like RadMatFems do, stigmergy (stig-mer-gy) works in a non-hierarchical way, following gestures, signs left in the environment/discourse, and moving along them in tandem. I call this ‘hunting as a pack’ at Medusa Rising. We don't all do the same thing, but we do all work to intuit what the most effective actions will be in this moment.
Stigmergy also works by Verbs instead of Nouns. Movement means move, make. Building a non-profit creates a noun, a property. Sharing posts and information, best practices, and leaving signs for others to follow creates verbs, actions. Verbs are where the feminist energy is rather than the concretion and defensiveness of ‘patriarchal’ nouns (see this early post for more on that).
It's not a movement, it's a way to do movement.
RadFem Adjacent / We Are Already Doing It
Heather Marsh is the reason Anonymous became an anti-trafficking hacker collective and ran #OpDeathEaters. Marsh discusses this Stigmergy along with the many other Ops and movements she's been involved in. She’s basically a roving justice movement catalyst.
She knows the value of materially accurate language, arguing against third-wave-type pushback on her explicit naming of rape slavery, baby production slavery, and child abuse media. The saboteurs (her word, not mine) wanted the more diffuse ‘sex trafficking, bride trafficking, and child pornography.’
Keeping a movement in the verb-space makes sabotaging it (with language, with what-aboutism, with decoys) so much harder. Example? Women's Liberation. She writes:
Women's liberation is a perfect stigmergic goal. The liberation of women includes everything related to liberating women and nothing not related… Actions under the idea of women's liberation fought for women's emancipation through the right to divorce, the ability to survive outside of marriage slavery, birth control and payment for domestic labour.
Speaking of the third wave-inclusive feminism Marsh agrees with us that:
Without such a specific goal, late feminism has become an organization and an identity [!! ah-ha, hi rad fem!!]. It fundraises, organizes events and sells books and merchandise, but it has no goals that anyone has been able to agree on. It has been used as an umbrella for many other forms of activism, but it is easily confused and divided by all of them.
Comporting with RadMatFem's insistence that feminism is for and about and by women, she describes the reason Medusa Rising has carried on from her origins in the pages of THE RADICAL NOTION:
Imagine if feminism meant supporting specific clear and actionable goals, including the liberation of women. No one in the liberation movement would be arguing that Feminism means a woman's right to choose! Or call people Western Feminists for fighting against the Taliban or Iranian regime. Chants such as My feminism includes [anything], or, The most important challenge for feminism is getting rid of misandry, or any focus on unrelated causes would be gone. It is clear that the … liberation of women does not include women's right to choose oppression and slavery, and does not include any other cause either, however worthy or compatible. It does include every instance where any women are held in servitude … That goal was so clean and simple and easily understood it was well on its way to achieving its aim — which is why it had to be changed by its saboteurs.
Wild cheering from me!!! Marsh wants movements about ideas and goals, not about personalities and loyalties. When movement is about ideas and goals, “No one needs permission” and “Collaboration is fluid and temporary,” converging on “specific tasks as needed” and dispersing when that contribution is complete. (See the series on Sisterhood / Coalition). The originator of an idea/goal might work on it for years with ever shifting groups as needed. “What is essential is that they leave the idea completely open for anyone else to pick up and contribute with no further direction.”
Goodreads
Bookmark leads to Heather Marsh's Blog & it's cool have the new Anonymous poster matches our colors :)
Stigmergy leaves everyone autonomy over their own work and in the areas where they have strengths or want to learn, respecting sovereignty as a relation. It works like a murmuration, or jazz, everyone is free to contribute, suggest a new idea, and if that idea is taken up then it grows. “Radically innovative ideas almost never receive instant mainstream acceptance, so leaving control to group consensus cripples innovation.” Everyone should try their idea, and if as it proves attractive it will also become accepted. Take action, let those who follow follow.
This emergent, fluid way of working makes cooptation and sabotage much more difficult for either established power or groups that feel competition with your group/idea/goal.
Welcome New Women, Leave Signs, Show Actions
Wherever we are doing movement, let's be welcoming. Grown women and young women are discovering the clarity and power radical feminism and RadMatFem every day. Let's be answering questions, offering gentle guidance, and sharing resources galore. As socialist, radical, separatist, anarcha, and old school intersectional feminists; as respectful descendants of black, lesbian, abolitionist, and indigenous feminist lineages — we have room for a lot of women. When we’re doing stigmergy instead of purity we can build worlds together, we can celebrate and hold each other up with no sense that we're ‘costing’ ourselves any thing at all. That, that will create power.
People join listless and reactionary movements built around identities because they seek belonging and meaning. Let's make sure we're presenting that, making that, so that we don't lose anymore women to cooptation by left or right gender ideologists, or to pretend women's rights campaigners who support Trump and lament having to employ pregnant women.
The points I'm making here apply to US women rather urgently right now, but work in all our international contexts.
We have to point the way to the circle to dance. And we have to amplify each other like our lives depend it!
Marsh is smart about this. Practical. The constant slog in the information spaces is worth it, she says. These lights we leave on and tend to get seen:
Refuse to listen to fear, uncertainty, doubt, character assassination, and uncredible sources.
Do not cede platforms. Being shamed off of major corporate platforms is akin to not driving on a main road because you’re trying to overthrow the government. Take all the roads and flood them with your message.
Use the algorithms. Algorithms can be used to censor movements, but they can also be gamed to amplify them. Whatever the algorithm like to promote … can but used as a decoy to get other messages amplified.
In the face of bad ideas, harm, and disinformation, give no retreat and no quarter. As I say to the other gorgons here, we don't pick fights, but we’re in one, we go all in and win. And lastly:
Plant your flag to the far reaches of your goal. You will never attain anything more than you strive for. If your goals are truly ‘unrealistic’ for a time, they will at least make progress towards your goal look comparatively realistic.
As I've been saying in this series, we have to have a dream at least as big as the MAGA-NRx-Broligarch-Dark Enlightenment dream of a globe of AI managed surveillance serfdom of assigned labor ruled over by an elite class of Techno Monarchists.
And our dream is a world where women and girls live in a healthful, relaxed confidence in their physical integrity and intellectual ambitions. Our dream is a world where the rape slavers of the world, the violent men, they are imprisoned as easily as they are let off of charges now.
Building on the margins, building in order to NOT repeat the structures we live in now, that is the key to making new worlds.
For movements to last, and succeed, they usually have:
to replace those in power with themselves. You can attempt to influence voting, policy, public opinion or industry, but the most effective action is to shut them down and replace them with something better. Don't protest institutions, replace them … Replace them. Bankrupt them. Imprison them. If they are truly criminal and corrupt, those are the only reasonable goals. Why would you leave criminals in power and beg them to obey the law?
If we want a council of grandmothers, or council of women to replace the system we have, let's make one. Let's show the world what we would do with it.
We can bring these principles to any group we work with to stop the fascist destruction of the US or to build away from the patriarchal institutions that harm us. We can add to them what they can accept and take from them what we need to keep dreaming our big dream.
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In case you haven't read this yet, please do. It is a both true and elegant.
Naomi Klein
Join a riot of support for women canceled for wrong-think. Writers, painters, potters, dancers, weavers, women of all creative kinds!! London, Streaming, May 30 & 31.
Dedicate this post to a woman you admire,
nudge us for more like it.
( ^-^)ノ∠※。.:*:・'°☆ ( ^-^)ノ∠※。.:*:・'°☆ ( ^-^)ノ∠※。.:*:・'°☆
