By The Intrepid in Nosideism — 18 Apr 2025

End Times vs. Refusal

A Field Note for the Present Storm

Prelude: The Bunker Instinct

The Guardian article hit like an alarm bell. “End times fascism,” it declared—a phrase engineered to vibrate in the bones. Trump, Musk, Christian nationalism, tech authoritarianism, economic collapse. It was, in many ways, correct. A real-time catalog of rot. But something about it also felt… sealed. Like a broadcast from inside a bunker already bricked shut.

What followed was predictable. On social media, mutual aid was invoked like a magic word. Protest footage was clipped, captioned, reposted. Lists of things to do—donate, organize, resist—made the rounds. And then came the usual institutional response: nothing. Or worse, fundraising emails that skipped over April 5th’s mass protests entirely, as if resistance were a seasonal campaign rather than a structural imperative.

If you’re like me—more normie than radical, more neighbor than vanguard—you might’ve found yourself wondering: Okay, but now what? If the crash is coming, are we just supposed to hunker down and ride it out on vibes and GoFundMe’s? Is this it? Build community and hope ICE doesn’t kick in your door? Tape up the windows and watch the algorithm burn?

The problem isn’t that the article rang false. It’s that it offered no shape to refusal. No continuity. No way of being that felt human and strategic.

We’re told to resist, but not how to endure. We’re shown collapse, but not the contours of continuity. We’re warned about the flood, but not handed a boat.

This isn’t a critique of Klein or Taylor. Their diagnosis is valuable. Survival demands more than diagnosis—it demands a blueprint. And it turns out someone already wrote one. Not in a thinkpiece, but in a book that understands the long arc of refusal as both history and strategy.

We Refuse, by Kellie Carter Jackson, doesn’t ask you to hunker. It asks you to hold.

The Guardian’s Warning

It’s not hard to see why the article resonated. Klein and Taylor didn’t pull punches. They gave name and contour to something many have felt building for years: the coalescence of Christian nationalism, tech-bro authoritarianism, and supremacist survivalism into an actual governing logic. No longer just a fringe vibe—now policy.

They named names. Trump and his cabinet of eschatological zealots. Mike Huckabee, Pete Hegseth, Russell Vought—men who speak not of democracy but dominion. Musk, recast not as a rogue billionaire but as the architect of DOGE: the Department of Government Efficiency, a neoliberal fever dream made flesh. Deportations rebranded as logistical triumph. Public institutions defunded under the guise of optimization. All wrapped in the rhetoric of innovation and inevitability.

The piece lands because it doesn’t pretend this is all hypothetical. This isn’t “could happen”—it is happening. Venezuelan immigrants sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador. Tariffs sold as economic independence while the supply chain buckles. Protesters called puppets. Agencies dismantled. A new normal defined by walls, purges, and private satellites.

And yet, for all its moral clarity, the article leaves the reader in a familiar place: surrounded. The tone is one of siege—of preparing for impact rather than preventing it. Even resistance is framed in survivalist terms. Mutual aid is invoked, but mostly as a kind of civil society triage. Protests are covered as flashes of dissent, not a movement with strategy or structure. The authors call for a “snowball” effect but give little sense of slope or direction.

What we’re left with is a kind of politics of endurance. Hold on. Brace. Dig in. Maybe your community will be resilient enough to weather the storm. Maybe the economy will bend before it breaks. Maybe protest energy will cohere into something more—but the article doesn’t show how.

And here’s the uncomfortable part: the tone of siege in The Guardian’s framing mirrors the logic of those it condemns. The far right’s Project 2025 architects aren’t denying collapse—they anticipate it. They see the Jenga tower, too. Their response is to accelerate the fall, consolidate power, and build a fortified order in the rubble. It’s supremacist survivalism as governance.

But the left’s answer, as Klein and Taylor present it, often echoes the same survivalist register—just with better ethics and worse funding. The adversary bunkers in with weapons and ideology; the counter-move is to bunker in with mutual aid and moral clarity. Both speak the language of catastrophe. Both imagine endurance as the central mode of resistance.

What’s missing is the refusal to accept the frame. A strategy not built in response to collapse, but in pursuit of continuity. Not protest as flare, but as scaffold. Not just surviving the fall, but deciding how to stand.

That’s where We Refuse enters.

The Refusal Framework

There is another way to face the storm. Not by denying it. Not by fleeing into fantasy. And not by bracing alone in a moral silo. But by refusing the frame entirely.

We Refuse, by Kellie Carter Jackson, offers no panacea. It doesn’t promise deliverance or victory. What it offers instead is a set of tested coordinates—five tenets drawn from centuries of Black resistance that refuse erasure, passivity, or despair. They are not slogans. They are strategies.

Jackson names them clearly:

Revolution: The pursuit of collective systemic change—not adjustment, not reform. Overhaul.
Protection: Shielding the vulnerable—through community defense, legal aid, and daily resistance to disposability.
Force: Disruption as a moral imperative. Boycotts, strikes, direct action—calculated, targeted, sustained.
Flight: Strategic withdrawal. Migration, evasion, exit—when rootedness becomes a trap.
Joy: The audacity of laughter, music, and communion in the face of dehumanization. Joy not as escape, but as resistance with a pulse.

Together, these tenets form a refusal schematic. A way to remain whole while resisting systems designed to break, scatter, or consume us.

Refusal doesn’t mean retreat. It means definition.

Tenet-by-Tenet: Reframing the Resistance

Revolution vs. Collapse

The Guardian article warns of systems hollowed from within—agencies gutted, tariffs weaponized, immigrants detained en masse. It paints a picture of democracy in terminal decline. The implication is collapse.

We Refuse begins with revolution. Not metaphor—precedent. The Haitian Revolution. Reconstruction. The long arc of people who stopped asking and started building. Revolution here isn’t destruction. It’s construction under fire.

Revolution asserts that we are not stuck. We are only unfinished.

Protection vs. Punishment

Klein and Taylor describe a world of punishment: deportations, disappearances, scapegoats. The state criminalizes presence.

We Refuse answers with protection. Not just safety—solidarity. From the neighbor filming an ICE raid to the underground networks shielding the hunted, protection becomes a public act of refusal.

Protection says: you will not take this person without going through me.

Force vs. Futility

The article cites boycotts, protests, drop in Tesla sales.

We Refuse makes force a strategy—not a scream, but a lever. Strikes. Blockades. Sit-ins. Economic pressure with targets and timelines.

Force doesn’t destroy. It interrupts.
Force doesn’t scream. It pressures.

Flight vs. Fortress

Where Klein implies digging in, We Refuse names flight as survival strategy. The Great Migration wasn’t surrender. It was strategic refusal.

Sometimes refusal looks like leaving. Opting out. Preserving the spark by taking it elsewhere.

Flight is not weakness. It’s wisdom.
It’s knowing when to walk—and where to walk to.

Joy vs. Doom

The Guardian skips this part. No mention of joy. No mention of community celebration. Just shadows.

We Refuse lifts joy as a tenet. Dancing in the ruins. Potlucks on protest days. Laughter that survives the raid.

Joy is the refusal to let your spirit be outsourced.
Joy is the war drum you dance to.

The Ledger of Refusal (and What We Carry Into It)

“I got a letter from the government the other day / I opened and read it… / It said they were suckers.”
—Public Enemy, Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos (1988)

Some of us learned to say “I refuse” from history books. Others from protest lines. And some of us from mixtapes handed down in the backseat of someone’s rusted-out hatchback. The delivery method doesn’t matter. What matters is what you do when the letter comes.

We don't need a perfect plan. But we do need a record—a quiet, visible map of what we won’t become. A list not of policies or platforms, but of boundaries. Convictions. Lines drawn in ink that doesn’t run, even when everything else is sliding downhill.

That’s what the Ledger of Refusal is: a living document, written not just in opposition to power, but in devotion to what must be protected.

Position and Presumption

This framework—this whole essay—comes from a particular place. I am not the most targeted. I write, speak, and act from a position that’s both embedded and adjacent: close enough to feel the heat, far enough to not be consumed by the first wave of flame.

That matters. Because refusal without self-awareness is just stubbornness in a clever coat.

This essay assumes a few things:

That collapse is not theoretical—it’s already underway, just unevenly distributed.
That organizing works better with structure, not just vibes.
That armed resistance is a fantasy we can’t afford—and community continuity is the harder, more revolutionary path.
That most people—the so-called “normies”—are neither apathetic nor radical. They’re looking for a way to act without pretending to be someone else.

And maybe most of all: that survival is not enough. That we owe each other more than endurance.

A Few Lines from My Ledger of Refusal

I refuse to treat collapse as spectacle.
I refuse to perform politics I don’t believe in.
I refuse to confuse critique with carelessness.
I refuse to act like armed revolution is waiting just offstage.
I refuse to let grief become a reason to disappear.
I refuse to abandon joy.
I refuse to flatten history to fit a narrative.
I refuse to fight for the future without protecting the people already here.
I refuse to speak in code when clarity is called for.
I refuse to become the thing I’m resisting.
I refuse to wait for permission to act.
I refuse to believe the work must be joyless to be serious.
I refuse to lose the thread.

What Comes After “Hunker Down”

There’s no shame in sounding the alarm. The Guardian piece by Klein and Taylor did exactly what many needed it to do—it named the threat, traced its tendrils, and called it what it is. Fascism dressed in modern garb. Bunker politics made policy. An ideology that doesn’t just prepare for the end of the world—it tries to profit from it.

They were right to ring the bell. We need people who can see the storm and say so out loud.

But we also need something after the alarm.

This week, The New York Times offered its own version of the warning. Ross Douthat wrote about “the age of extinction”—a cultural and spiritual bottleneck where much that is fragile may not make it through. His answer? Purpose. A deliberate choosing of what to carry, and how.

But fragility doesn’t always mean destruction. And even destruction doesn’t always mean finality. What breaks can be rebuilt—sometimes stronger, sometimes stranger, sometimes more honest than what stood before. The test isn’t what survives untouched. The test is what gets remade with intention.

It’s a different language, but the question is the same: How do we move with intention, not just instinct?

We need people who can stay on the line when the signal fades. Who can build not just barricades, but continuity. Who can say “I refuse” and mean it—not as withdrawal, but as orientation.

Refusal isn’t a retreat. It’s a commitment to build from a different center. And that can look a hundred different ways: forming a neighborhood hub. Hosting a joy night. Running interference for a friend targeted by a system that treats them like a threat. Pulling your money from the fire. Showing up. Staying human.

What matters most is that refusal becomes movement—not just sentiment.

The five tenets from We Refuse—revolution, protection, force, flight, and joy—don’t give us a map, but they offer coordinates. They let us move without spinning. They let us say: we will not go quietly, and we will not go alone.

Because what you save from the fire is as important as what you leave behind.
And what you reclaim and rebuild afterwards may be even more important than the first two.

So if you’re standing at the edge of “hunker down,” wondering what comes next—step into the storm with your eyes open. Say your line. Find your others. And write down what you’ll never give up, even when the lights go out.

Because this isn't the end of the story.

This is just the moment we begin to tell it differently.

Postscript: On Oregon and the Castle

Meanwhile, the official channels keep sending the same message—emails from state parties filled with phrases like “clarity and courage,” virtual town halls, and guarded talking points. No mention of the April 5th protests. No acknowledgment of the crisis language circulating in the streets and on screens. Just business as usual in higher resolution. The language of leadership, not of listening. It’s not ill-intentioned—but it is insufficient. And that’s why refusal must also apply to the scripts we’re handed by those who claim to speak for us.

And to be fair—Oregon, for all its silences, still offers structural shelter that many states do not. Abortion access. Public health protections. A firewall against the worst federal excesses. There is gratitude in that. But the presence of a roof doesn’t mean we stop demanding heat, light, or a way in for those still outside. A head start is only useful if you keep running.