Think Mean, Take Power, Destroy Power

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I know most radfems and libfems don’t want to think as mean as we need to. Some do. We should listen and act.We should be encouraging our Dems to ahead, demand they’re preparing for every dirty trick.

Think Mean | Esmée Streachailt

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The Fash have one competency: They think mean. It's a form of flow for them, it’s part of their temperament. They time their moves to have the most devastating effect. They have already declared a Cold War on the People and the Republic, and a hot war on our immigrant nieghbors.

Male Supremacists Have Activated in Over 60 Countries

So here’s what we have to do:

Into The BadlandsSasha S. Graham

• SCOTUS puts the Voting Rights Act in a coma, and the next day (The. Next. Day.) the Old South hauled its zombie body out of the grave to redistrict Black voters out of relevance. Louisiana stopped a vote in-process.
• SCOVA waited, somehow everyone waited, until a whole ballot measure had been voted and counted on redistricting. The next day (The. Next. Day. Basically, more like in a week’s time) ruled on a GOP challenge to the new map. Surprise! The noodliness of the state constitution negates the ballot. Outstanding.
• The Bearded Hater, VP Vance announced rescinding $1.4BILLION in Medicaid funding from California. Again, mean, timing, competent. This comes One Day Before CA Governor Newsome would announce the 2027 budget, already hard hammered out in the state legislature. So millions of elderly, disabled, and just plain poor people will have no kind of health care at all, no payments to the care home, no maternal care… And most of these are their own voters.

Si vis pacem, para bellum

They will let us waste time, energy, and money. They are letting us try so that we can lose over and over. They are strategically depleting our momentum and hope. Trump has a 70% Disapproval Rating, so they have no choice but to wear us down and make most of our votes irrelevant or nearly impossible to cast at all (SAVE Act still hovering out there). The message: Yes, we will deliberately endanger the lives of our own party’s supporters Just To Fuck Over ONE Potentional 2028 Democratic Candidate for POTUS. Not to hoover up money to give to billionaires. No. Just to pants the competition at the starting line. The insecurity. The pettiness. The venality. The indifference. The bold-faced eugenics of it all. Mean. Smug. Evil.

At the National Level

• Who is writing the EOs we need a new order's president to sign on Day One?
• Who is writing the plan and the legislation that puts our federal government back into working order, a better working order?
• Who is preparing the legal challenges to the gerrymandering that will hit the courts as soon as the new POTUS gets a SCOTUS that behave like the impartial rational actors they are supposed to be?
• Who is writing the state legislation that will need passing?
• WHO IS THINKING AS BIG AND MEAN AS THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION? Because this is the bar now – both the lowest and the highest.

You feel me? Mayor Mamdani isn't just super-duper charismatic, he came in with a serious, executable, PLAN. And yes, meanwhile, all the other horrors of ICE kidnapping and detention continue apace. All the other institutional and social damage rolls on from DOGE’s digital sledgehammer.

ICE. The jagged edge of the cruelty, is still hiding an unknown number of young women who are being isolated from the rest of the people held in Dilley concentration camp in Texas. New reporting shows that these girls are or just turned 18, and some are being moved to other locations, and no one knows what’s happening to them. This is only a bit less terrifying than what we’ve been hearing about the Blue Butterfly Zones.

I Want You To Think Mean

Yes, many of us have an emotionally insightful and miraculously uplifting few weeks with Elayne Kalila’s gorgeous, healing essays in response to the Motherless reporting. I personally am forever grateful for her wisdom. And we are tired. The rubble pile is weighing on everyone, some more heavily than others.

But. We are facing down a power that wants to reduce us all to their servant class. This is how fascists approach their people every time, no matter how much ego puffing they do to their own base. Meanwhile, farmers in the US are going bankrupt as the highest rates (46% increase over 2025) since the original Populist movement grew out of Kansas under similar pressures in the 1880s.

So. Let us all find our succor and encouragement where we can. And start to think mean. We have to win. We have to not only eek out a slim margin in the election.

• We have to overwhelm their redistricting machinations with massive numbers in a midterm (no pressure). All purple-ish districts need slathering in GOTV volunteers.
• We have to prepare women and minorities for the SAVE Act which is still alive and panting out there in the distance. If it passes over the summer it could disenfranchise up to 69 MILLION women. That’s enough to secure the fash in power for a generation, which is forever.
• We have to prepare to win AND Get Out The Vote.
  ** Convert your vision into policy proposals and get ready to bother your legislators until they listen to you.
• We have to be preparing to lose and shift to networks of radical feminist support for women in the US. Some areas:
  ** Reinforce abortion networks
  ** Start a Janes-style system in your areas
  ** Organize collective childcare cooperatives, skill shares, tool libraries, double down on supplying food banks
  ** Locate and share info about low-cost health clinics
  ** Generally get more punk and low-key anarachist

So far that’s all too much and enough to have to dig down and find our very deepest fuck-you level of commitment to our liberties.

It’s Only Treason If You Lose (the tshirts are very cool)

The post you are reading/hearing right now is an act of domestic terrorism under the current guidelines of Executive Order Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence signed in 2025.

This is already a cold war against the people and our constitutional order. All wars are won by thinking like your opposition only more cleverly and more effectively.

Because these pathetic little assholes know how to think mean. They only understand the most brute, crude, dominating, extractive, little bully-boy uses of power. But they are also clever little shitbirds. Look around your city, state, community of kind, and think: If I wanted to fuck us over for the next two or three generations, what would I do? What weakness would I exploit? What super-wonky technical process lever would I pull and when? What locations in my community, city, state, local economy, local institutions, are vulnerable to physical or legal disempowerment or destruction? Every city in the world is totally food insecure after three days. What happens if these monsters do to, say, Kansas City, Kansas what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz? It’s not impossible. It’s mean and batshit crazy, but not impossible.

I mean Think Mean. Diabolical.

And then think about the easiest actions they can take and the most effective timing to take them. Position yourselves head on those. Because isolating KCK is very maximum effort and these pretenders are looking for low-hanging fruit. Instead, they’ll keep pulling Medicaid funding, move on to Medicare, etc. What’s working for us is they are also stupid. They thought Iran would be easy.

So Locally, for example

• Get Out The Vote #GOTV Everywhere Massively
• Your local Black, Latino, and every other Caucus in your Democratic party, reach out, see what’s needed.
• Bolster your local food banks, when folks lose Rx coverage, they will have to source food differently.
• Health clinics (drug rehabs, Planned Parenthood) might be moved to provide pro bono care. Talk to them.
• Double-down on your Minneapolis-style neighboring.
• If you do have to mobilize, have child-care cooperatives at the ready.
• Make plans even if you're not sure. As the tacticians say, “No plan survives contact” with reality, but not having a plan means you already lost. A plan gets you ahead.

I don’t know where you are, but you do. Look around with the eyes of someone who wants to disempower you forever. These community actions all need doing and we all need the oxytocin to keep us optimistic and energized. But think mean. Reacting is too late. Get ahead of these Poseur Machiavellis because they are terrified which means they are maximally dangerous. They have nowhere to go from here. It’s stay in power or go to prison and they know it. So think mean. Look forward to it. We have to take Power – use it to create accountability, rebuild our republic in a better form, and in the doing slowly devolve power to more people in more places – to destroy Power.

Think Mean, Stay Rad, Be Good to Each Other. Esmée