If fear is the goal, then solidarity is the antidote

This article If fear is the goal, then solidarity is the antidote was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Many of us are angsting these days about the mounting repression coming from the White House. 

In my community, many are worried about rumors of possible executive orders targeting climate and other nonprofit groups. The concern is well-founded. As Bloomberg reports, these executive orders — expected on Earth Day — would try to strip some groups of their tax exempt status, similar to the threats the president has made to Harvard.

I’m now thinking about the many teachers, students, nonprofit staff, lawyers, university staff and faculty and beyond who are worried, concerned and uncertain about what is coming. The common denominator is that we’re all afraid. How do we handle these mounting fears?

An authoritarian derives a good deal of their power from fear. Fearful people want answers. Fearful people crave an end to uncertainty. Fearful people can be more easily duped, controlled or kept silent. Fear is a goal.

Or as Frank Herbert advised in “Dune,” “Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

Donald Trump’s plan is simple: Accumulate power at an unprecedented rate and punish those who he doesn’t like. It’s not based on proof. It’s not based on harm. It’s based on the bully’s strategy of making everyone cower by singling people out. The power of a bully lies less in their fists than in the fear they create. 

More and more of us are wrestling with that fear. We wonder if our organization or company will be targeted. We are anxious about the future — and many of us aren’t practiced at living in uncertainty. Uncertainty is okay and making some peace with it will help us. But gut-wrenching fear needs attention.

Fear is all the more visceral because we’ve already seen many people’s lives disrupted. Like a coal plant, this administration fills the air with a dangerous smog of fear that we are all inhaling.

Fear can manifest in that voice inside of ourselves that says to get small or to flee. These strategies are not entirely illogical and may support safety to a certain degree and in certain situations. But Trump likes people who are tiny and cowering, and he has no problem beating up on them. 

By this point we can see that trying to protect yourself by scrubbing materials from your website doesn’t work. As the humiliation of Columbia University taught us, trying to appease Trump only emboldens him to demand more of you. The elite law firms who thought they could negotiate their way around Trump are lessons to us that a deal with Trump is fickle — he keeps moving the goalposts.

Be as strands, standing together

Breathe in and breathe out. Fear lessens once we accept that the only viable pathway forward is to face the bully.

The best antidote to fear is fellowship. Trump moved effectively against law firms and universities, showing how being isolated from each other made them weak. He has been more successful when he can pick them off one-by-one.

But folks are getting better organized and prepared. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that faculty senates at four universities have passed resolutions creating a “mutual defense compact,” where they will pool resources to resist attacks against any of them by the administration. Much of this follows encouragement from grassroots pressure — letter-writing and increasingly organized groups like We Are Higher Ed or the American Association of University Professors, which recently held a Day of Action for Higher Ed.

By no means is this limited to university life. Teen Vogue has been covering the increasingly organized resistance by teachers to ICE raids, with examples like D.C. teachers and students preventing ICE from taking their school nurse. Or in the labor world, the AFL-CIO, Democracy Forward, American Federation of Government Employees and a slew of other unions built the Federal Workers Defense Network — a project to support illegally and wrongfully fired federal workers. These new institutions are built for greater solidarity.

This solidarity makes us like strands of wire combining together. The end result is far stronger because it’s made up of many parts. This possibility is tantalizing for the power it possesses.

Connect with the people in your life who love you — feel that connection and let it touch your fear. Connect with allies in your network, organization or company. And find some outside of those, too, to share in these moments. Whenever you can, send signals out to other sectors that you’re with them in spirit — and look for avenues of allyship.

Even conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks is getting in on this “seek new allies” moment. He is now quoting the Communist Manifesto (“We have nothing to lose but our chains”) and encouraging a mass uprising complete with “lawsuits, mass rallies, strikes, work slowdowns, boycotts and other forms of noncooperation and resistance.” 

We are a little out of practice when it comes to being in solidarity with each other — but we are just getting started.

Pulling back the curtain

No matter what we do, Trump is going to say and do wild things. His executive orders need to be treated less as legal documents and more as propaganda. Take power over the headlines blaring “Trump does THIS” and rewrite them in your mind: “Trump wants us to believe that he can do THIS.” (It’d be nice if editors rewrote their headlines, too.) If Trump can trick us into believing what he claims, it all adds to the Wizard of Oz’s aura of power. 

The alternative: Pull back the curtain. Do not comply. Look for voices who are knowledgeable about these systems — who are regularly saying it’s illegal and that he doesn’t have that authority. Much of what he has attempted to do has no legal standing (and much of it has been blocked), including rolling back climate laws, increasing election interference, targeting law firms, invoking an array of brutal immigration plans, ending birthright citizenship, allowing so much of DOGE’s destruction and so much more. Let’s all help each other lean in that direction so we don’t feed Trump’s fantasy of having unlimited power.

He may declare “I’m revoking the IRS status of your organization!” Right away, you should not just cave and comply. Instead, hear it as: “Trump wants us to believe he can revoke the IRS status.” This flies in the face of 26 U.S. Code § 7217, aptly named “Prohibition on executive branch influence over taxpayer audits and other [IRS] investigations.” Not that we expect the Department of Justice to investigate him — but let’s not cede the ground without a fight.

Let’s say the IRS — which just churned through three leaders last week — still takes up his executive order. They have an administrative procedure which has several stages of appeals — all while nonprofit status continues until a revocation order (and even then, appeals are possible).

Again, we cannot get swept into the tide of saying “he’ll just break the law.” If we skip the outrage and just “accept” the outcome, if we give in to helpless resignation, then we’ve acceded to the authoritarian — then we’ve complied. Do not comply.

‘It outlaws me, and I outlaw it’

My mother, a history professor, taught me a story that has always grounded me in fearful times.

In the mid-1800s, Rev. Jermain Loguen escaped from slavery and landed in upstate New York. He lived as an itinerant preacher for many years and was hailed as the “Underground Railroad King.” 

But when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, any slave catcher could threaten the safety of every free Black person living in the North. The law’s racist intent was plain: When ruling on whether someone was free or not, judges were given $10 if they ruled in favor of the slave catcher and $5 if they ruled in favor of the free Black person. 

Loguen never had protection from the rule of law. He never believed the courts would save him. All he had was the community around him and his faith. And the stakes he was facing — returning to his vicious and violently revengeful slavemaster — were nearly as high as they get. 

Days after the Fugitive Slave Act’s passage, Loguen stood up in a mixed-race town meeting to persuade the community to brazenly disobey the law. He thundered to the crowd, “If you will stand by me — and I believe you will, for your freedom and honor are involved as well as mine — I say if you will stand with us in resistance to this measure, you will be the saviors of your country… I don’t respect this law — I don’t fear it — I won’t obey it! It outlaws me, and I outlaw it.”

He proceeded to print in the local Rochester newspaper — with his name and home address — a simple message: To any worried runaway slave, come to my house and my wife and I will get you to freedom in Canada. His was one of the most public stations on the underground railroad — and he lived that way until the natural end of his days.

We would do well to take refuge in each other. We can focus on the fear or we can focus on the acts of courage around us. There are Jermain Loguens in our time. We would do well to steel our wills and gird ourselves — for these times require great courage. And courage is contagious. 

So let this be our mantra: It outlaws me, and I outlaw it.

This article If fear is the goal, then solidarity is the antidote was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/04/if-fear-is-the-goal-then-solidarity-is-the-antidote/