The anti-Trump resistance must use peaceful unconventional warfare using smarts instead of guns. By Hal M. Brown

 

This is how Wikipedia describes the resistance movement during World War II, 

During World War II, resistance movements operated in German-occupied Europe by a variety of means, ranging from non-cooperation to propaganda, hiding crashed pilots and even to outright warfare and the recapturing of towns. In many countries, resistance movements were sometimes also referred to as The Underground.

The Underground used guns and bombs. They killed Nazi soldiers and they sabotaged bridges. They spied for the Allies. Their heroic contribution to victory has been described in books and depicted in movies.

This is how Wikipedia defines unconventional warfare:

Unconventional warfare (UW) is broadly defined as "military and quasi-military operations other than conventional warfare"^[1] and may use covert forces or actions such as subversion, diversion, sabotage, espionage, biowarfare, sanctions, propaganda or guerrilla warfare. This is typically done to avoid escalation into conventional warfare as well as international conventions.

This is from an article about how the Viet Cong employed various tactics in geurrilla warfare.

The tactics of the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War exemplify innovative approaches to guerrilla warfare. Their methods not only challenged conventional military strategies but also highlighted the significance of adaptability in overcoming technologically superior forces.

Through a combination of psychological warfare, intelligence operations, and an intricate network of tunnels, the Viet Cong achieved notable successes against their adversaries. Understanding these tactics provides valuable insights into the broader military history of Asia.

Trump would like nothing better than to have an excuse to declare a national emergency so he could use the military against protesters. One way to assure he’d do this would be to have even one person even bring a firearm to a protest, let alone use it. Those who organize protests must make absolutely certain that they emphasize that the protest must be peaceful and that any lawbreaking like vandalizing buildings is unacceptable. Even then, they risk having a Trump supporter pretending to be anti-Trump do something illegal or violent.

When Trump incited his Jan. 6th insurrection he used the word peacefully only once. Here it is in the context of the long speech during which he did his best to rile up his audience. (you can read the transcript here).

Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.

Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.

I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.

When any of us use terms like guerrilla warfare, or even terms like resistance, we have to preface them by peaceful. Trump wants to depict his enemies as potentially violent. He was given the gift that kept giving right up to the ballot box when someone shot at him, and later someone was caught trying to shoot him. He’s depicted immigrants as dangerous. Thom Homan got the message and at least on one occasion had his ICE agents use flash bang grenades when approaching a residence to make arrests. Of course this was televised. The message being sent was that whoever they were arresting were dangerous.

Many unconventional tactics used successfully in actual warfare can be adapted to be used nonviolently to, if not thwart, at least slow down and impede Trump’s assault on democracy. 

In Europe and South Vietnam most of the population cooperated with the resistance because they supported them. They let them hide from the Nazis and the South Vietnamese and American soldiers. We are not so lucky here to have a majority. Half of the citizens support Trump and MAGA. But crucially the other half doesn’t. But then we literally don’t have to hide from Nazis in crawl spaces in our houses.

Consider the following tactics used by the Underground and undogs as they challenged superior forces.

Propaganda .

Thas to be used far more effectively than it has been so far. The legacy media is aptly named. It reminds me of the well known website Legacy.com which has probably millions of obituaries on it. It has to be used to report the unvarnished truth about how Trump is destroying Democracy and document both the pain he is inflicting on people and his failures to keep his promises. They must report on his lunatic proposals for ehat they are, the proposals doomed to failure coming from a lunatic. In order to reach the MAGA world high profile members the resistance have to appear on Fox News and any other right-wing media that will have them. These venues are chasing ratings and I expect they would welcome people like Jamie Raskin and Hakeem Jeffries, two of the resistances’s best spokespersons, on their shows. We have to be honest when we look at people like Adam Schiff who is fine on MSNBC where he conveys intelligence, but not the rip your throat out machismo that gets the attention of the MAGAs. 

The resistance is playing catch-up in the use of social media and alternative media. Websites like the liberal HUFFPOST have had their comment section innundated by MAGA trolls. Liberals can go on MAGA websites and do the same thing. They can try this on X until their account is suspened. They can even sign up to Truth Social using, as I recommend, a burner phone and a new email address unattached to their regular email, and post there until they get banned.

Another aspect of propaganda involves publicizing all the division in the Republican Party. Each time a Republican takes a stand against a Trump policy this must be noted. For example, the public needs to see more stories like this on CNN:

Psychological warefare

This is related to using propaganda effectively. It involves recongizing two things. One involves exploiting the vulnerabilities in Trump’s personality. He is notorious for his reactivity. While Trump tries to distract with his craziness, he is just as easily distracted. He makes exploitable errors on a regular basis. A good example was how he made the DC plane crash all about him. Even today he turned the National Prayer Breakfast into a poltical rant. (See 'Christian Nationalism, y'all': Internet mocks Trump's 'heresies at prayer breakfast') These incidents should be publicized by the non-MAGA media. 

The other aspect of psycholgical warfare is using it to gradually get through to those Trump supporters who haven’t been totally brainwashed. This involves but isn’t limited to tryng to instill empathy for those who Trump is hurting and spotlighting how his policies are hurting them. Trump supports should be reminded of all of his broken promises.

Subversion

This can be done by Democrats in Congress. There are ways they can throw molasses in the GOP’s gears which won’t grind the Republican juggernaut to a halt but it will slow it down. See “How Senate Democrats Can Delay & Defy Trump's Agenda with Procedural Hardball” from Indivisble.

Excerpt:

Trump’s blitzkrieg power-grab begs a question: what, if anything, can congressional Democrats in the minority do? Are they powerless? Republicans in the Senate love to act like their majority gives them unchecked power—but it doesn’t. The rules of the Senate are designed to protect the rights of the minority, and Democrats have tools at their disposal to grind Senate business to a halt if Republicans try to ram through Trump’s extremist agenda. The three biggest weapons? Blanket opposition, quorum calls,and blocking unanimous consent—parliamentary guerrilla tactics that can slow, stall, and obstruct at every turn.

Diversion

Trump, as I wrote about yesterday, is doing this already. This is related to subversion. When done effectively subversion forces the Trump and the GOP to pay attention. Trump throws out annexing Greenland and Gaza and owns a long news cycle. For example, Rep. Al Green announced that he plans to file an impeachment bill against Trump. It is doomed to failure. Even senior House Democrats are brushing it off. But it is still a diversion and while not headline news, will be covered. More importantly, it may lead Al Green, who is described as a bombastic back bencher, into someone MAGA media wants to have on their shows.

Protests

Losing the Vietnam War was the primary reason for the American defeat and withdrawal, however leading up to that, the massive anti-war protest movement made country and its leaders ready to get the hell out of there. Added to the growing number of American casualties, LBJ had to have been relieved when that last helicopter left Saigon. Those of us old enough remember the chant “hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today.”

Above, LBJ and Robert McNamara from LBJ and the VietNam War.

Donald Trump and Musk stopping USAID funding is killing kids. Unforunately there’s no resonant rhyme the resistance can use to highlight this psychopathic cruelty. “Hey, hey, Trump and Musk, how many kids did you kill today” doesn’t have a ring to it, but we should use it anyway. 

There’s one major weapon in the resistance armory tthat the World War II underground, the Viet Cong, and the anti-war movement didn’t have:

The Courts

Lawsuits are already being used to challenge the illegal moves being employed to enable Trump to become a dictator. His birthright citizenship executive order has been derailed by two court rulings. There are numerous lawsuits about his firings of Civil Service employees. There are suits about the effort to go after DEI hires and what Musk is doing at the Treasury Department and other attempts to steamroll over the law. Individualscansue too. For example the Defense Department backed down when a transgender soldier sue and the court seeming inclined to take their side (Article).Trumo and Musk have become lawsuit lightening rods. 

As these lawsuits work their way through the court system, some are likely to make their way to the Supreme Court. This is where the rubber will meet the road. None of these suits charge Trump himself with doing something illegal. The court has already ruled that Trump is above the law in this respect. If lower courts rule aganst what Trunp has done and the suits reach the Supreme Court, they have to decide whether or not what he did was constitutional. It will be the ultimate test as to whether the right-wingers on the court are totally in the bag for Trump, or actually believe in. the Constitution. 

Again Trump works his misdirection magic, this time with Gaza distraction, by Hal M. Brown

 

 

Trump worked his David Copperfield distraction beautifully yesterday when he suggested that the United States should take over Gaza, using the military if necessary. A good magician sometimes uses distraction and misdirection to pull off an illusion:

Whether the magic is of a "pocket trick" variety or a large stage production, misdirection is the central secret. The term describes either the effect (the observer's focus on an unimportant object) or the sleight of hand or patter (the magician's speech) that creates it.

Everybody, look here while I'm doing this here.

He's doing the same thing with his DEI purges and his scrubbing certain words from government websites. He's doing this with his nominations to misdirect from the worst of the worst.

On the website word scrubbing, he even had Rachel Maddow wasting time in her smiling and chuckling introduction about government websites scrubbing words with the story of sprinter Tyson Gay whose name was changed automatically to homosexual in some media in an effort not to be offensive. This led me to wonder if there were books reivews which changed the names of novelists Gay Talese, or worse, Gay Courter, but then that's the way my mind wanders since Gay Courter has been a friend since she was my childhood neighbor. Her name would have been Homosexual Courter.

Trump's lunacy has even led my mind to be misdirected.

Rachel wasted time with her lead story. We couldn't stand her smiling as she told her story. We turned off her show, and watched some streaming video. Then we turned MSNBC back on to watch Lawrence O'Donnell soberly address the cuts to USAID. He talked about how people were dieing because of this. That is one of the issues the media should be addressing. Website scrubbing is a comparatively minor story. Even these aren't the most important stories.

There are two major stories about what Trump is doing. One is, obviously, about what Trump is doing to destroy democracy and how he is becoming a dictator. The other is about how the media is being taken in by his misdirection.

Not every outlet is taken in all of the time. As I write this Mika  Brezinski is talking about how Pete Marocco was putting in charge of the USAID. He was a participant in the Jan. 6th attack on the Capitol. 

Look this way: Greenland, the Panama Canal, RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Krist Noem, even Leon, uh, Elon Musk. Pay attention to Trump flubbing Musk's name. I think Trump does his Leon thing on purpose so it makes the news.

Musk's machinations are marvelous misdirections as well. Consider:

With a cadre of engineers as young as 19 years old, and with the encouragement of Trump, Musk has demanded and been given access to sensitive government databases and the Treasury Department’s payment system with an unprecedented series of bureaucratic maneuvers. NBC News 

Put one 19 year old in a position like this and that will be a major part of the story. Don’t look too closely at the ramifications of what Musk is able to do at Treasury.

Most importantly, just don't look too closely at Kash Patel who is about to turn the FBI in Trump's personal Gestapo.

Trump's misdirection can be dealt with by the media if they explain how he does this to hide what he really is doing. He is paving the way for a modernized Hitlerian Project 2025. 

The media should explain that Trump is like Hitler in many ways, but unlike him because he doesn't care about initiating a thousand year reich. He wants to reign over his personal reich (German for realm or empire) for as long as he lives. After that he doesn't care what happens.

I'd like to see someone develop and publicize a checklist from both Project 2025 and the things Hitler did in the 1930's and call it "Steps On The Road To An American Dictorship" and as more and more of the steps are attempted and then accomplish the list should be republished.

There could be a countdown clock similar to the Doomsday Clock. It is a symbol that represents the estimated likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe, in the opinion of the members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. As of 2025 the most recent clock shows us to be slightly less than 1½ minutes from midnight due to the "continuing Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Middle Eastern crisis, increased nuclear proliferation, effects of climate change, biological threats, and advancing technologies." I think that it needs to be updated in light of what Trump has done in the last few weeks.

The media needs to prioritize. Everything from the blowback caused by Trump's tarrif threats to the price of eggs, including stories about Waffle House raising breakfast prices, should be covered. These are like straws added to the camel's back. Eventually they will break Trump's back. But until that happens more and more of the 50% of Amercians who still approve of Trump need decide that they really don't want to live in a cruel dictatorship which has it's own Gestapo.

They need to be reminded of the Martin Niemöller poem First They Came:

First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me

Update: 4 explanations for Trump’s shocking Gaza proposal (Washington Post, subscription) - the first is exactly what I am saying:

1. It’s a distraction

An often-overwrought criticism of the media is that it succumbs to Trump’s “distractions” — the wild ideas he floats that are intended to avert journalists’ and the public’s gaze from other, more prosaic and boring but more legitimate controversies.

But just because that theory has been overwrought doesn’t mean it’s not a real strategy. And there’s no question that Trump, more than ever, is “flooding the zone” with bold (and often legally dubious) actions that challenge everyone to keep up.

“It’s working,” former Trump White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon told my colleagues late last month. “It’s just stunning to me what they’re doing, and it’s not getting covered because it’s too much. They’re overwhelming the system.”

The other three are that it’s a negotiating ploy, that he’s leaning into the madman theory even more, and his sudden imperialist streak is very real.

Overly Dramatic Afterthought:

I liken what Trump is doing to what you see in movies where criminals or terrorists use a celebration like the Fourth of July or a Superbowl game to pull off a bank robbery or an attack elsewhere in the city.

Addendum

I would agrue that Heather “Digby” Parton’s featured column about Trump’s Gaza proposal (or threat) in Salon today is an example of how Trump misdirects and distracts. I wish she had addressed this in what she wrote.

Just look at four of the five trending stories on RawStory.

Here's HuffPost:

Afternoon:

I post my Substacks (formerly blogs) on several platforms. They are on Substack where, if you want to submit your email, you can be notified of all new blog posts. They are on HalBrown.org. They are also on Stressline.org I also post them on Medium because this enables them to be easily found on internet searches

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The Federal Role in Education, from the Dept. of Education while it still exists, saved by Hal M. Brown

 

Federal Role in Education

Copied from the Dept. of Education website on Feb. 4, 2025

OVERVIEW

Education is primarily a State and local responsibility in the United States. It is States and communities, as well as public and private organizations of all kinds, that establish schools and colleges, develop curricula, and determine requirements for enrollment and graduation. The structure of education finance in America reflects this predominant State and local role. Of an estimated $1.15 trillion being spent nationwide on education at all levels for school year 2012-2013, a substantial majority will come from State, local, and private sources. This is especially true at the elementary and secondary level, where about 92 percent of the funds will come from non-Federal sources.

That means the Federal contribution to elementary and secondary education is about 8 percent, which includes funds not only from the Department of Education (ED) but also from other Federal agencies, such as the Department of Health and Human Services' Head Start program and the Department of Agriculture's School Lunch program.

Although ED's share of total education funding in the U.S. is relatively small, ED works hard to get a big bang for its taxpayer-provided bucks by targeting its funds where they can do the most good. This targeting reflects the historical development of the Federal role in education as a kind of "emergency response system," a means of filling gaps in State and local support for education when critical national needs arise.

History

The original Department of Education was created in 1867 to collect information on schools and teaching that would help the States establish effective school systems. While the agency's name and location within the Executive Branch have changed over the past 130 years, this early emphasis on getting information on what works in education to teachers and education policymakers continues down to the present day.

The passage of the Second Morrill Act in 1890 gave the then-named Office of Education responsibility for administering support for the original system of land-grant colleges and universities. Vocational education became the next major area of Federal aid to schools, with the 1917 Smith-Hughes Act and the 1946 George-Barden Act focusing on agricultural, industrial, and home economics training for high school students.

World War II led to a significant expansion of Federal support for education. The Lanham Act in 1941 and the Impact Aid laws of 1950 eased the burden on communities affected by the presence of military and other Federal installations by making payments to school districts. And in 1944, the "GI Bill" authorized postsecondary education assistance that would ultimately send nearly 8 million World War II veterans to college.

The Cold War stimulated the first example of comprehensive Federal education legislation, when in 1958 Congress passed the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik. To help ensure that highly trained individuals would be available to help America compete with the Soviet Union in scientific and technical fields, the NDEA included support for loans to college students, the improvement of science, mathematics, and foreign language instruction in elementary and secondary schools, graduate fellowships, foreign language and area studies, and vocational-technical training.

The anti-poverty and civil rights laws of the 1960s and 1970s brought about a dramatic emergence of the Department's equal access mission. The passage of laws such as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 which prohibited discrimination based on race, sex, and disability, respectively made civil rights enforcement a fundamental and long-lasting focus of the Department of Education. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act launched a comprehensive set of programs, including the Title I program of Federal aid to disadvantaged children to address the problems of poor urban and rural areas. And in that same year, the Higher Education Act authorized assistance for postsecondary education, including financial aid programs for needy college students.

In 1980, Congress established the Department of Education as a Cabinet level agency. Today, ED operates programs that touch on every area and level of education. The Department's elementary and secondary programs annually serve nearly 18,200 school districts and over 50 million students attending roughly 98,000 public schools and 32,000 private schools. Department programs also provide grant, loan, and work-study assistance to more than 12 million postsecondary students.

Mission

Despite the growth of the Federal role in education, the Department never strayed far from what would become its official mission: to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.

The Department carries out its mission in two major ways. First, the Secretary and the Department play a leadership role in the ongoing national dialogue over how to improve the results of our education system for all students. This involves such activities as raising national and community awareness of the education challenges confronting the Nation, disseminating the latest discoveries on what works in teaching and learning, and helping communities work out solutions to difficult educational issues.

Second, the Department pursues its twin goals of access and excellence through the administration of programs that cover every area of education and range from preschool education through postdoctoral research. For more information on the Department's programs see the President's FY 2025 Budget Request for Education.

Staffing

One final note: while ED's programs and responsibilities have grown substantially over the years, the Department itself has not. In fact, the Department has the smallest staff of the 15 Cabinet agencies, even though its discretionary budget alone is the third largest, behind only the Department of Defense and the Department of Health and Human Services. In addition, the Department provides over $150 billion in new and consolidated loans annually

Mission

Despite the growth of the Federal role in education, the Department never strayed far from what would become its official mission: to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.

The Department carries out its mission in two major ways. First, the Secretary and the Department play a leadership role in the ongoing national dialogue over how to improve the results of our education system for all students. This involves such activities as raising national and community awareness of the education challenges confronting the Nation, disseminating the latest discoveries on what works in teaching and learning, and helping communities work out solutions to difficult educational issues.

Second, the Department pursues its twin goals of access and excellence through the administration of programs that cover every area of education and range from preschool education through postdoctoral research. For more information on the Department's programs see the President's FY 2025 Budget Request for Education.

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Mission of the U.S. Department of Education

ED's mission is to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.

Congress established the U.S. Department of Education (ED) on May 4, 1980, in the Department of Education Organization Act (Public Law 96-88 of October 1979). Under this law, ED's mission is to:

• Strengthen the Federal commitment to assuring access to equal educational opportunity for every individual;
• Supplement and complement the efforts of states, the local school systems and other instrumentalities of the states, the private sector, public and private nonprofit educational research institutions, community-based organizations, parents, and students to improve the quality of education;
• Encourage the increased involvement of the public, parents, and students in Federal education programs;
• Promote improvements in the quality and usefulness of education through Federally supported research, evaluation, and sharing of information;
• Improve the coordination of Federal education programs;
• Improve the management of Federal education activities; and
• Increase the accountability of Federal education programs to the President, the Congress, and the public.