hexFeb 7, 2025

Hey anarchists and general leftists organizing in #RuralAmerica and deep red territory! I know you exist, but a lot of folks don't. This might be a good time to share your experience so others doing similar things can learn from them.

What strategies have you used?
What lessons have you learned?
What successes can you talk about?
How do you talk about your ideas and frame your conversations?
What organizations exist to make that type of organizing easier?

Edit: I forgot about this episode
https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co/episode/92cbcf70/sabot-media-on-rural-organizing

#USPol

S1E71 - Sabot Media on Rural Organizing

# Episode Summary Margaret talks with Sprout and Charyan from Sabot Media and The Blackflower Collective about organizing in rural areas and how that can be different from organizing in more urban areas. Sprout and Charyan talk about the different projects that Sabot Media and The Blackflower Collec

Live Like the World is Dying
Show threadFishercatFeb 7, 2025

@Hex Hey. You're encouraging folks to publicly post information about themselves that could land them in jail or in an exciting new position fertilizing someone's cornfield.

Maybe take a look at some of the stuff @hakan_geijer has posted recently about #OpSec, and reconsider.

#opsec #opsec101 #anarchism #uspolitics #USPol #anarchists

Show threadhexFeb 7, 2025

@Fishercat @hakan_geijer I am not. The majority of organizing that folks can do is both legal and not high risk. Anyone who is doing high risk work should absolutely not share anything about that.

The majority of folks in rural areas are not nearly as scary as city folks tend to think... And most of them hate the few loud Nazis and good ol' boys who run a lot of small towns.

If you're doing things like abortion support or trans healthcare, yeah, don't talk about that. But you can just do things like organize 4H (as a leftist), organize marches with Quakers, or be involved in other community organizations, or organize folks to be more active in local government. That stuff tends to fly under the radar.

Show threadFishercat

@Hex @hakan_geijer

I'm glad to know I misinterpreted you. Thanks for telling me. What I read from what you wrote was a general encouragement to share, with no caveats. That's why I responded the way I did; it's reassuring to know that's not what you meant.

I don't know enough about folks in rural areas to really have an opinion about them one way or another. I'd guess that they're a mix, just like everywhere. But when loud Nazis and good ol' boys run a place, it's easy to be concerned about the dangers of not flying under their radar.

My other concern is that it doesn't much matter whether one's activities are legal or not. Fascists gonna fash.

Feb 7, 2025 at 5:37pmWeb
Show threadhexFeb 7, 2025

@Fishercat @hakan_geijer rural areas are strange. I had a Nazi try to convince me the race war was coming after I gave him a computer I salvaged. A friend of mine, who's black but can be white passing, had a dude try to teach him the 14 words and he was just like, "dude, I'm black. The fuck are you doing?" Then the dude tried to back track. Weird shit happens. It can be dangerous but a lot of the time even the worst of them are either too cowardly to actually do shit, or just never considered the possibility that they were wrong.

Now, if you were doing police accountability work in rural areas you'd absolutely better be invisible because there are all kinds of Nazi cops running meth and shit. If you're putting the good ol' boys in danger, you could disappear and no one would bother to investigate... And also cops know which roads *they* aren't allowed to go down because they aren't always the biggest fish in the pond.

You might get attacked because you have the star of David in your window, but you might be a black dude who tells a room full of Nazis to go fuck themselves and have one of them come and apologize to you after. It all depends on what you're doing and who has your back.

All that's to say, the rural threat model is weird, custom to the situation, and unlike anything you find in cities, IMHO.