The First Duty of a Revolutionary

What it actually means to be a revolutionary right now, in this country, in this moment.

November 6th, 2024

I remember standing in the kitchen, mindlessly washing a dish far longer than it needed, when my husband came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders and kissed the back of my head. The warmth of his gentle touch and calm energy radiated through my bones. I could feel the tears welling back up in my eyes and I turned to face him with soap suds still covering my hands. I had cried so much already that day.

“How do we survive 4 more years of him?”

He just cupped my tear-soaked cheeks in his hands and pulled me close. “We’ll be ok. We’ll get through this.”

I wasn’t convinced. I was struggling to see past the finality of it all. That Donald Trump, a rapist, a pedophile, and the biggest con-man America ever produced, would soon be sitting in the Oval Office again. I knew he was going to hurt my neighbors, my family, me. And this time, it would be worse. I knew after his first term that if he ever found his way back into the Oval Office again, my son would end up in a war nobody wanted. He joined the army during peacetime. I still can’t shake the feeling that he will probably receive orders to deploy soon. I can’t lose my son. We’ve been estranged for a couple of years now, and losing him will mean I will never get the chance to fix what was broken between us. For now, all I have is hope. If he dies, hope dies.

I realized I had to grieve first before I could even wrap my mind around how to plan for the next decade, because this isn’t just going to be a four-year thing. We will be dealing with the consequences of Trump for the next decade, at least. I had to grieve the life that was gone forever. I knew as soon as I saw he had cheated his way into the presidency again, life as I knew it was officially over. But then? After I took time to offload my anger and my sadness and my devastation, I got to work.

“The first duty of a revolutionary is to be educated.” ~ Ernesto “Che” Guevara

Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928-1967)

Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967) was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, and military theorist who played a pivotal role in the Cuban Revolution. Guevara, although known for being a “revered figure for leftists worldwide,” remained a controversial subject, criticized by opponents for endorsing authoritarianism and violence. He wasn’t wrong, though. Know thy enemy. Not as a slogan. As a discipline.

That means you understand how the networks function. Who funds whom. Who sits on whose board. Who wrote the policy that your senator just introduced word for word. The Heritage Foundation didn’t write Project 2025 in a vacuum. It was assembled by more than 80 far-right organizations funded by a constellation of dark money running through Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society, the Koch network, and donors who have been playing this long game since before most of us were paying attention. They have been patient. They have been methodical. Forty years of quiet, unglamorous, unviral work building toward exactly this moment. Follow the money. It will tell you everything the headlines won’t.

Read Project 2025. Not summaries. The actual document. Understand that it is not a wish list. It is a transition manual. Then read Project Esther, the blueprint for dismantling pro-Palestinian organizing by labeling it antisemitism, because the same authoritarian logic that criminalizes one movement will be used against all of us. It always has been. Then go further back. Study Weimar Germany. Study Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. Study every moment in history where a democracy was dismantled from the inside by people who used its own laws and institutions as weapons against it. History is not repeating. But it is rhyming like a motherfucker.

Then I did all of that, and paced back and forth in my house, and I still didn’t know what to do. That’s the part nobody warns you about. You think the knowing will tell you. It doesn’t. It just makes the weight heavier and the urgency louder and the question bigger.

Present Day 2026

What does a revolutionary actually do with what she knows?

I’ve been sitting with that. Arguing with it at 2am while my steady, brilliant husband slept soundly beside me. This isn’t new to him. To him, it’s just a Tuesday. Growing up Black in America taught him a resilience I am still learning to understand. I admire him, his quiet strength in the face of adversity and how he never lost his capacity for empathy through it all. He’s also a combat veteran who served two tours in Afghanistan as an All Source Intelligence Officer. He was the best of the best, handpicked by military leadership to lead them to high-value targets. He also participated in over 200 missions outside the wire because his analysis was trusted and he always puts his money where his mouth is. He knew what the hell he was doing and he did it well. So well, he proved it by putting his own life on the line along with the men he swore to protect.

But me? My mind raced all the time. Turning the information I learned over nonstop while I’m driving, while I’m in the shower, while I’m pretending to listen to conversations that feel impossibly small given what’s happening to our country. I kept coming back to the same point over and over again. The people who built this didn’t build it in a few news cycles. They built it in decades. Quietly. Patiently. While we were distracted and not paying attention. The rats do the worst damage when they stay hidden behind walls. They thought long when we thought short. They organized when we reacted. They played chess while we were flipping tables.

That ends now.

Not with a rally. Not with a post. With a decision about how you’re going to spend the next ten years of your life. But first, before any of that, you have to protect yourself. Protect your peace, what little we have left. Not as self-indulgence. As strategy.

I garden. I put my hands in the dirt and I remember that things grow even when the world is on fire.

My backyard garden, where I find peace.

Sometimes I reach into the dirt and let the tears fall as mother earth grounds my nervous system. It works. Crying releases the stress hormone. Crying is ok. Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise. I also write. I take hot baths. I make love to my husband. I stay present with my family in a way that this machine absolutely cannot monetize or manipulate or take from me. Phones go away. Devices go away. We have dinner together every single night no matter what is happening in Washington. We have family movie night every week. We walk in nature and we notice things — the light, the birds, the way the air smells after rain. We find joy in the ordinary because the ordinary is where actual life lives.

That is not escapism. That is revolutionary practice. Because they need you atomized. Isolated. Glued to a screen consuming an endless feed of manufactured outrage designed to keep your nervous system in a permanent state of emergency. A person in crisis cannot think strategically. A person who has lost their joy has already lost something the ballot box cannot restore. Protect your joy like it’s a weapon. Because it is. Come back to your body. Your garden. Your dinner table. Your people. The ordinary, beautiful, precise life that is yours and that no fascist can legislate away as long as you refuse to abandon it.

THEN pick up the fight. Informed. Grounded. Clear-eyed. Ready. Because they haven’t rigged everything. They’ve rigged enough to feel total. It isn’t. Their majority is thinner than it performs. Their coalition is more fragile than it looks. They are loud because they are afraid of exactly what happens when the rest of us get organized and stay organized.

So here’s how we unfuck this.

You hit them in the money. Not a week of rage-posting on social media — coordinated, sustained, targeted economic pressure on the corporations funding the machine. The donor class. The retail brands writing checks to Heritage and its satellites. The banks financing private prison expansion and detention centers. Follow the money and then follow it back out of their pockets.

We fight them in the courts. The ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Lambda Legal, the Center for Reproductive Rights are in courtrooms right now and they are winning cases the headlines aren’t covering. Every unconstitutional action this administration takes can be challenged. It is slow. It is grinding. But dammit, it is working.

We take back the ground game. They captured federal institutions. They have not captured everything. Blue states are firewalls. Local prosecutors, sheriffs, school boards, city councils — these are contestable and they matter more than most people realize. The revolution is local before it is national. It always has been. And you build the coalition they are terrified of. The moment Black liberation, labor, immigrant rights, queer rights, reproductive rights, and climate movements stop siloing and start moving as one unified front, they lose their ability to divide and conquer. That coalition has defeated authoritarian systems before. It will again.

But none of that is possible if you’re running on fumes and cortisol and doomscrolling at midnight. They are absolutely counting on you to burn out. They want you exhausted and reactive and demoralized. A reactive person is a controllable person. An exhausted revolutionary is no revolutionary at all. So you stop reacting. Completely. You see what they’re doing, you understand exactly what it is, and instead of flinching you look them dead in the eyes. You see the black soul behind them. And you curl your lip in a half-cocked grin and you RESPOND. There is a difference between reacting and responding that will save your life in this fight. Reacting is what they want. It keeps you off balance, chasing their agenda, spending your energy on their terms. Responding means you’ve already done the work. You know who they are. You know what they’re doing. You are not surprised. You are not scared. You are READY.

Keep your head high. Keep your fists balled. Show up in your body. Speak up every single time you see white supremacy shitting all over your neighborhood, your school, your workplace, your country. Every. Single. Time. Not because it’s comfortable. Because silence is compliance and you are done being complicit.

And women, when a man talks down to you? You don’t fucking shrink one bit. You don’t soften. You look him in the face and you tell him exactly where he can go and what he can do when he gets there. Gone are the days we lay down. Women’s voices are more important than ever right now. Let’s use them and don’t back down!

This country is everybody’s, not just one group’s. It belongs to every person who has bled for it, built it, buried children in its soil fighting for its promises. It does not belong to white supremacist Christian nationalist Nazis. It never did. And we still punch Nazis in this country. That rule still stands. They built this in decades of patience and discipline and belief that they would win. So will we.

The first duty of a revolutionary is to be educated. You’ve been educated.

Now get to work.

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