Raise the People’s Defense Force: Strategy, Discipline, and the New Terrain of Resistance

For too long, resistance has been treated as an emotional reaction, not a coordinated effort. We’ve inherited a culture of spontaneous outbursts—marches, banner drops, confrontations—that masquerade as strategy. But there is no strategy without coordination, and no coordination without discipline. The enemy knows this. They’ve been preparing for decades, reading the old war texts and building movements structured like militias, not mutual aid networks.

We need to stop thinking like activists and start thinking like insurgents.

The authoritarian Right has armed itself not just with weapons but with theory, with battlefield psychology, with an instinct for power. They read Sun Tzu. They study Fourth Generation Warfare. Their pundits quote Machiavelli while ours post slogans. They’re not playing at rebellion—they’re training for it. And unless we recognize that, we are walking into the fire unarmed.

A People’s Defense Force does not mean a mirror image of the far-right’s militias—it means building an ecosystem of defense that is strategic, mobile, hard to detect, and impossible to destroy without severe cost. It means recognizing when to go quiet and when to strike. It means hitting targets that fracture alliances, forcing the opposition to choose between control and coherence. A smart resistance forces the enemy to fight itself.

We remember what started in 2020 and is happening again now as you read this—federal agents in unmarked vans snatching protesters off the street, ICE black-bagging organizers and spiriting them away without warning, with no badges, no accountability. That wasn’t the beginning. It was a test. They wanted to see what they could get away with. They still do.

We need to re-learn deception, misdirection, patience. Appear disorganized when coordinated. Appear weak when strong. Theatrics have their place—but without discipline and timing, they’re empty rituals. Every action must serve a long game: not merely expressing outrage, but reshaping the terrain beneath the enemy’s feet.

The People’s Defense Force should be a body within the larger movement—interconnected with mutual aid, embedded in local organizing, but distinct in function. It trains. It scouts. It plans. It studies weaknesses and tests methods of disruption. It does not exist to be seen—it exists to be effective. Its members are not martyrs or saviors. They are shields. Saboteurs. Strategists.

And if we build it right, they will never see us coming.

Not because we are hiding—but because we’ve finally learned how to move.