Appeal to Theil to talk to the king.

Prayer mostly. Or actually fixing the congress.

Trump did once note an additional option.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/us/politics/donald-trump-...

Liberals really should arm themselves before these people finally classify "disagreeing with daddy" as a mental disorder. [0] It is obviously hilarious to think the "conservatives" and "2A enthusiasts" would possibly help defend lefties' right to bear arms at this point, as they've shown themselves to be utterly devoid of actual values.

People across the political spectrum have an obscene amount of faith in "can't happen here" beliefs being an actual impediment to authoritarianism.

[0]: https://davidson.house.gov/2025/5/rep-warren-davidson-introd...

If you’re not armed yet, you’re already behind the curve. No one is going to protect you except you and potentially your sphere/community.

unless you can arm yourself with a nuke, “arming” yourself for a fight against US government is laughable :)

You don’t have to defend yourself from the entire US government, just the government representation who shows up and decides to violate laws or your rights (and your life is in imminent danger). “Better to be judged by twelve vs. carried by six.” Otherwise, you’re default dead. Odds are better in jail on US soil than an El Salvadorian prison. I agree full out civil war against the US military on US soil is a different threat and engagement model. 5 million people participated in the No Kings protest, more than double total active military members on US soil, for example.

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-are-in-the-us-...

https://www.militaryonesource.mil/data-research-and-statisti...

(position derived from first principles and threat modeling, with input from several US military service members and a physical defense subject matter expert)

> You don’t have to defend yourself from the entire US government, just the government representation who shows up and decides to violate laws or your rights (and your life is in imminent danger)

No matter how much I hypothetically might train on firearms, I'm pretty sure if a SWAT team (or the federal equivalent) shows up at my house, they're going to arrest me no matter what I do. Well, no, that's not true: if I pull out a firearm, they'll kill me. No need for an arrest then.

And sure, maybe just one or two officers show up at my home. Either I still lose in a firefight, or they leave and come back with more firepower, and then I lose. I suppose before their second visit I can run? Not sure to where, though, and not sure how I'll get out of the country, living nowhere near a land border.

> 5 million people participated in the No Kings protest, more than double total active military members on US soil, for example.

I'm not sure which position you're taking here, but I don't buy the idea that one armed civilian is equal to one member of the US military when it comes to predicting who is going to win. I don't even buy the idea that two armed civilians are equal to one military member. Also consider all the right-wing nut-job militia groups in the US; they would certainly join in, on the side of the military.

Training, coordination, and access to the best weaponry (and ammunition) will win. US military will beat down 5 million civilians, no problem. Probably even 10 or 20 million. I could even see the military bombing cities; Trump already seems to think LA is "in rebellion" based on his National Guard and Marine deployments. Only hope there is that enough people in the military realize what they're doing and refuse to fight. Not sure I'd want to bet on that, though.

For people who believe the US will slide (or already has slid) into authoritarianism, and believe they have a strong chance of being targeted by the government in the future, the only sane thing to do is to leave the country now. It really hurts me to say that, but that's where we are. 77M people voted for this disgusting garbage, so this is what we have.

Read the history of authoritarian movements.

The tip of the spear is consistently a bunch of incels and incel-adjacent losers. Think Meal Team 6, not Seal Team 6.

The vast majority of Americans won’t “see” anything, but there could also be all sorts of opportunists taking advantage of social dysfunction.

A million good reasons to go buy a gun, and the only reasons not to are either fatalism that you’re completely fucked or blind faith that nothing could possibly happen.

It is illogical to think either of those but find the in-between state so implausible that it’s not worth hedging with $<1000.

I am prepared to leave the country semi permanently on very short notice (having prepared for this), but I’m also arguing/proposing that everyone should be prepared to defend themselves from other humans that would harm. You can hope for good faith and positive intent, but hope is also not a strategy. No one is coming to save you. Doesn’t mean you’ll succeed, just improves the odds.

Lawyer. Passport. Locksmith. Gun. (A Talk About Risk and Preparedness) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33509164 - November 2022

> This is a presentation about risk, preparedness, and how to do make your best attempt to build defenses against some of the worst threats and potential problems that might ever arise in your life. Keeping your loved ones as well as your community safe is something to always keep in mind and this presentation walks through some of the most critical steps that it is possible to take... before your world explodes in a disaster.

(I work in risk management)

Worked pretty well for the Vietnamese and the Afghans

It didn't though. It was really really bad for them.

Well, for a country that's faced attempts to be "tamed" by three superpowers over 200 years, Afghanistan's holding up pretty well. It exists and independent! By the way, it crossed my mind that all the superpowers that tried their luck are no longer superpowers. Britain's just a weak shadow of itself, the USSR completely collapsed. What fate awaits the USA?

same

Even beyond the lives lost on the side of the anti-US fighters in those places, who wants to bet on if the US would give up and walk away and just let any random local armed community in its own territory ignore it?

Will you see eventual retreat, or will you see eventual overwhelming force? The US didn't want to bulldoze these other countries and jail or kill everyone and set up a new state; very different than how the US would handle more Wacos.

Waco wasn’t a problem due to any separatism or resistance to law enforcement.

It’s because they were raising children to rape them.

So tired of this equivocating on what those people were about.

The Vietnamese were being backed by the Soviet Union and China. The Taliban has piles of soviet era equipment and US military and intelligence training.

The Middle East managed to fight the US government since 2003 without using Nukes. I guess nobody told them AK-47s and IEDs were ineffective

Using private weapons to fight against the government to protect your rights is a laughably-low-probability-of-success scenario. Even when insurrections or rebellions succeed they often end up... not so great.

We have seen what you get when you have an armed populace. Highly armed cops. Highly armed federal agents. Military equipment for civilian forces. All necessary in order to compete in the arms race against the "bad guys." All cheered for by conservatives, of course!

All that make it that much more easy to start cracking down. Maybe as a first step, issuing pardons for the rebels on your side while increasing the use of force against those protesting you.

Guns are not defensive tools. If you have a gun, but the government shoots first, you still lose.

Hitler's SA (the brownshirts) weren't government officials, nor were Mussolini's blackshirts. Nor are the Proud Boys. There are many more modern examples of pro-government militias in Venezuela and the mid-east.

You never know who's going to deputize themselves as "law enforcement", with the quiet encouragement and plausible deniability of the ruling political party. Guns are unquestionably useful defensive tools against these people.

Correct.

This is the actual use case. It’s a pretty established pattern of non-governmental actors like those mentioned being the tip of the authoritarian spear.

Those people should be shot in the face upon entering their first few homes or businesses, while courts and juries will still have the wherewithal to acquit anyone defending themselves.

Listing a bunch of examples of militias causing problems is not changing my opinions on the dangers of having easily-accessible arms...

(This is also something I was alluding to with "issuing pardons for the rebels on your side" which is already happening, of course.)

And so then it just falls back to "the good guys just need to shoot the fascist armed militia members before they shoot the good guys" which is... difficult to guarantee...

Who said anything about guarantees?

Either way, so long as it's legal to have guns, but they are disproportionally distributed along political lines, it makes sense to try to counterbalance that.

As it is, with gun ownership leaning firmly right, Trump has a massive number of armed paramilitaries that he could lean on. In any large-scale suppression of political dissent, those would be the people breaking your door at night, not uniformed feds (there simply isn't enough of the latter). Thus even if you're anti-gun in principle, it still makes sense for left-leaning people in this country to arm given the overall political climate.

If for no other reason than to disabuse right wingers of the notion, as much as possible, that the left wing isn't armed. Which FWIW I think left-wingers are actually quite a bit more armed than the ammosexuals would presume.

There's more of us than conventional wisdom would have you believe, but the disparity is still very large.

You're gonna have better luck leaving the country before the civil war than you are shooting the people trying to break into your house in that scenario. There are at least a couple million "regular" US soldiers + feds; if we're worried about millions more private citizens on top of that, what exactly is the gameplan to win in any meaningful sense regardless?

The gameplan is for people to quickly realize that it's not just a "rape and pillage whatever you want" type of mission they're embarking on. The vast majority of people have little appetite for actual resistance (as your comments reveal), and so a little resistance will very likely go a long way.

There are far more people willing to defend their homes than there are people willing to get shot in the face breaking into someone's home.

that was in May? Jesus, every fucking month has felt like a year.