June 3 · Organizing
Becoming Dangerous: How to Go from Activist to Operative
They have evolved; so must we.
I started protesting when I was twelve years old. My older brother was in college and he took me to march against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I believed what everyone told me: that if enough people showed up, if we made enough noise, the people in power would have to listen.
That war would drag on for twenty years.
Occupy Wall Street rose while it still raged. It put inequality on the national agenda. We took over parks. We made the news. We owned the conversation. And then the bankers got golden parachutes.
Black Lives Matter brought millions into the streets after George Floyd’s murder. The largest protest movement in American history. While we won important victories, the police state of 2025 is inarguably more advanced and powerful than ever in our nation’s history.
We all watched Trump attempt an insurrection, avoid prosecution for four years, and become president again.
A million Iraqis dead. Wars around the world continuing in the name of protecting corporate profits. Epstein’s buddies get to run the government and control the organizations meant to hold them accountable.
So here we are. Jeff Bezos looks at our protests like a thirsty shopkeep hoping to sell more products to both the protesters and the police.
Activists have mentored me my whole life. I’ve met people at Veterans for Peace who have been protesting every war since Korea. They’re still showing up. I’m deeply grateful for their dedication, but dedication has never been the problem.
The model is the problem.
This isn’t an anti-activism piece. But we must acknowledge where we are.
For some perspective, look up “kettling.” That’s when police form lines around a protest, box everyone in with no way out, then gradually compress the space so they can tear gas, beat, and arrest protesters who have nowhere to run.
They’ve built plenty of prisons and they want the whole nation to be one. It doesn’t insult people who have done the work to say the fascists have been studying us. The ultra-wealthy worldwide are comfortably united, not along national boundaries, but along exploitative ones. And let me tell you, they have our number. They aren’t scared by people in the street. It doesn’t do what it used to do. Erica Chenoweth, whose research shaped a generation of activist strategy, has found that the success rate of mass nonviolent movements has fallen from roughly half to about a third, and she traces the drop to authoritarian regimes learning from one another, sharing tactics, and training their police and soldiers to hold the line before a protest can grow. We too must evolve.
They trained us to be supplicants. We petition power. We appeal to power. We protest, which is essentially asking power to notice our displeasure and choose to respond. The entire framework assumes we are outside the room where decisions happen, and the best we can do is knock loudly and hope someone opens the door.
To put it plainly, things have mostly gotten worse for a long time. It’s a sunk cost and we must evolve if we want to turn the tides.
Meanwhile, intelligence agencies approach their targets very differently. They don’t beg. They don’t write letters asking hostile actors to reconsider their choices. They study what works. They gather information. They identify vulnerabilities. They apply pressure through coordinated operations. They get inside their target’s head and take up residence there.
We need to learn what operatives know.
Creating this booklet involved studying investigations and intelligence. We can’t keep fighting pepper spray with prose.
An operative understands exactly how power works in their specific context. They have the skills to independently gather intelligence and act effectively. An operative can make their target organization, or individual, feel the consequences of their choices every single day.
I want to be completely clear. I don’t advocate for violence. Not because I have a moral problem with violence. I don’t advocate for violence because the evidence unequivocally shows it is ineffective against authoritarian movements. If it worked I’d encourage it. It doesn’t. So I don’t. What works is making power too costly to exercise. What works is making them think about you when they’re trying to fall asleep.
The shift is not about caring more. We already care. We understand the stakes. The shift is from expressing political opinions to conducting political operations. They use these tactics to destabilize democratic nations; we must use them to reinstall one.
The Existentialist Republic built a field guide for making this transformation. It treats political action with the operational rigor of intelligence tradecraft. Not academic theory. Not therapeutic self-care advice. Not vague exhortations to show up and hope. Step-by-step instructions for gathering intelligence on power networks, understanding their world, applying sustained pressure, and knowing when it’s working.
The guide teaches you to think like an operative. So what does that look like in practice? Ted Cruz may not have a conscience. But he has a career he wants to protect. He has donors he needs to keep comfortable. He has a schedule he wants to control. He has a sense of himself as someone in command of his environment.
The public can make accountability inevitable.
We can have a free and just nation to live in, should we be willing to create one.
We can become the thing corrupt politicians think about when they’re trying to fall asleep.
Again, not through anything illegal. Through information, coordination, and relentless pressure. Through making it clear that their actions have consequences. We show up with such consistency and precision that they know they are seen.
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