I don't know much about the Political Defiance approach you linked. Could you summarize it (the link is a whole book).

Overall, I agree with you. I don't like violence, and I think it's one of the least effective tools for constructive change. But I also recognize that if you're serious and honest about political theory you can't really just write off violence as "never the answer".

At the very least, folks need to think about approaches to defense when people with less compunction about violence come for them.

Also, I want to add that my personal theory is that combatting fascism requires a lot of separate approaches and distinct actors working in a way that is synergistic, even if people within that effort have strong ideological divisions.

My personal role is that I'm focused on efforts to demonstrate and promote the alternatives to fascism -- socialism -- locally through politics, labor and tenant organizing, and mutual aid. So I'm not picking up any guns any time soon. But I'm not going to tell the black bloc folks how to do their job and I expect they won't tell me how to do mine.

It's very rare for some blanket rule ... to be accurate

That's one of the few blanket rules that is accurate.

Almost every human situation has exceptions and edge cases that make strict binary rules a poor fit.

Something people often miss, is that a violent revolution is extremely painful, and has no guarantees of ever actually fixing the problem.

You need to have a very progressive government come in to fix all of the problems caused by fascism, as fascism almost always relies on an ignorant, angry population, that should be angry at wealth disparity and societal problems, but have had that anger redirected at marginalized people.

The thing is, how do you go from violence, to a progressive, reasonable government.

Even in Germany, their nazi party continues to gain steam over time.

It seems that the core problem is that money people would prefer anything except making the world fairer/making them make less money through taxes, or having them have to follow the same laws as everyone else, or losing their corrupt socialism for the rich and rugged boot strapped individualism for the poor.

It seems universal that the rich would rather redirect anger at the marginalized groups than that any hits to their wealth.

The thing is, the wealth problem is inevitably going to go out of control, so the question really is, how can we stop people from having their warranted anger, redirected in an unwarranted fashion, and I have no idea how to do that.

I feel like 30% of the population is naturally filled with hate, 50% go whichever way they think the public opinion is going, and 20% who generally try to do good by others.

The rich owning media and social media means that they effectively can control what the public opinion appears to be, and therefore can with significant effectiveness control that middle 50%.

Its happened with the Nazis and while not the same style of thing, happens with China and is happening in the US.

We badly need people to get out of the billionaire controlled bubbles they're in but places like where we are right now struggle to hit critical mass.

This kinda got rambly but I really don't have a positive outlook, because it looks like people will be passive until people are dying en masse.

I mean, just look at the recent protests. Its nice so many people cared, but 7 million, lets say 10 to be generous is not even 1% of the population, and they can effectively ignore them.

Anything else, any suggestions of civil disobedience or anything that could be considered violent rhetoric cant even be discussed on most platforms.

People also no longer have third spaces and cant really assemble for this like they used to be able to.

Basically, I'm not sure its possible to have a modern day super pair like Malcom X and MLK where one is the stick, and the other is the notes.

In the article I saw, it said that the account had identifying information, and the posts were deleted but archived.

My interpretation is that the campaign of Janet Mills -- his primary rival -- found all of this during opposition research and then sent it to CNN.