Everyday Antifascism: 14 Ways That Solidarity Keeps Us Safer

Long-time anarchist author and organizer Cindy Milstein presents a collection of stories about everyday resistance to fascism.

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Coincidentally—or sadly—I’m finishing up this zine in the midst of many days of doing intensive support, side by side with some remarkable anarchists, for a beloved friend of ours suddenly kidnapped by various Feds and facing the full brunt of christofascist state repression. It’s “lucky” that I’m writing this on a computer screen, for my tears would be smudging the ink if it were being penned on paper. But I’m reminded that this solidarity effort, in which numerous trusted folks are dropping everything to throw themselves voluntarily into legal, logistic, and emotional care, is precisely the stuff of “everyday fascism,” even if not visible.

And coincidentally now, this isn’t just a zine—although zines, when containers of rebelliousness, are amazing for their own sake. Sadly, the friend we’re lending our hearts to until they are free is charged, in part, with the “crime” of possessing zines. It always bears repeating that, as the Zapatistas maintain, “our word is our weapon.” So, too, is our solidarity, whether in the form of zines to circulate beautiful ideas and sparks of inspiration, or in the varied other forms within these pages—and so many, many more that you and others are dreaming up and putting into lived practice these brutal days.

When I posted the “call for submissions” for this humble project, many folks shared it for me. In doing so, one friend noted that it was another in my series of “hopeful” zines. Just to set the record straight (or queer), I’m not hopeful. This zine does not offer sugarcoated “hope” to somehow smooth over these utterly distasteful times. Yet I believe strongly in cracks in the edifice of hierarchical power and the promise they hold, and that there are always cracks even under the worst conditions. This zine, then, is a small sampler of acts of solidarity that just might keep us safer under fascism in order to get more of us to the other side, toward a world without fascism.

—Cindy Barukh Milstein

1.

Decolonial art is resistance, survival, and testimony. Against the backdrop of ICE terror and systemic violence, we created bracelets embedded with the local rapid response hotline number, a direct tool of protection and solidarity for undocumented farmworkers and their families on California’s coast. These bracelets are wearable shields, reminders of communal care, and messages of defiance in the face of fear.

Crafted by and for the farmworker community, this practice centers art as a collective act of defense, autonomy, and love. In a world that criminalizes migration and extracts labor from bodies deemed disposable, these bracelets assert a right to safety, dignity, and belonging. The creative process becomes a way to hold grief, transform it, and imagine otherwise. Each bead woven is a refusal of erasure; each knot tied affirms “you are not alone.”

—Winsor Kinkade

2.

In the small town I live in, one of the leaders of Unite the Right was outed, and people got super pissed. Rallies happened at the university where the neo-Nazi went to school. There was a march on the city council. People flooded the campus with flyers and wheat-pasted posters on walls. They did a call-in campaign, and banners were dropped. The pressure mounted as the school bent over backward to protect this guy. It got so bad that he dropped out and took online classes. As a community, we literally ran that fucker out of town. Pretty soon after that, he also dropped out of his fascist group.

—a small-town antifascist

3.

My family lives on a small side street in South Brooklyn. Five years ago, with a vision of mutual aid and an intergenerational community of care, I began knocking on doors to initiate summer block parties. I printed hundreds of flyers, went to every house and rang every doorbell, and ended up bringing people of all ages out to a neighborhood BBQ and potluck.

The second year, I raised funds to purchase our first collectivized piece of equipment: a giant bouncy castle. (Why give money to a shitty corporation to rent it when we could have one to share for all?)

By the third year, we had a WhatsApp group for bartering, volunteering to do litter removal, and supporting street animals. Some neighbors started a small tool share, and others offered to help elders who needed groceries carried upstairs.

Now, in our fifth year, folks have begun to reach out directly to each other to share vulnerable, intimate requests for aid, such as immigration assistance or domestic violence support. I believe the fascist state has an insatiable desire for surveillance, and any purported assistance comes with the cost of identity verification and the constant potential of incarceration. We’ve localized many forms of care, and are able to use our relational resources to avoid the state entirely while respecting each other’s need for privacy and anonymity. Every time we solve our community’s challenges and whisper strategies for avoiding the state in person is, in my view, an antifascist win. Whether it is mediation, a place to sleep to cool down from a heated exchange with a partner, or immigration court escorts, we joyfully keep each other safer.

—Carson

4.

Over the past few years, middle-aged fascists and their youth organizations have increasingly started to mobilize against Pride events here in Germany. Here in Leipzig, antifascists are able to block fascists at the train station to keep them from disrupting the inner-city parade and festival. In small towns and rural areas, though, most of the Pride participants are minors with little to no experience in the streets. So radicals living in larger cities began organizing travel groups, bringing not only solidarity but additional expertise to the demonstrations as well. Self-defense groups were formed to protect both the tiny Prides and travel groups. The amount of people coming from bigger cities has made the fascist counterprotests look ridiculously small.

I’m a wheelchair user, so it isn’t always easy to get to these rural areas, where the public transport infrastructure isn’t accessible. But there have always been people willing to carry my chair and help me out. Everyone looks out for each other, and the self-defense groups have been incredibly successful in assuring the safety of both us out-of-towners and the locals (in comparison, in the German tradition, the cops protect the fascists).

Also, while those of us traveling to these smaller places might not usually agree on our ways of organizing, and coalitions within our big-city bubble aren’t common, protecting queer and trans liberation has fostered an incredible sense of unity among us anarchists and the general Red front.

This has all made for the most heartwarming protest experiences I’ve had in my eight years of activism.

—Tea “Kára” Drobniewski

5.

Alongside community defense actions, our collective wanted to do community education on antifascism—in a large, spread-out suburb where isolation is real. Thus Coffeehouse 36 was born—not a coffeehouse at all, but a roving feast of ideas in action.

Rather than host educational events at a single fixed time that folks have to plan for and travel to, we decided to bring them to people where and when they are already. To do that, we drop in at local coffee shops a few times a week (as our energies allow) and have antifascist conversations right there. Anyone in the place is invited to come over and participate—as much or as little as they like. And we, of course, include the café workers.

The first round of coffee and snacks are always on us (through donations from events and zine sales). Printed materials are offered to folks who might want to read them on their own or share them elsewhere. The discussions are conversational—coffee chats—not didactic exercises. There’s no presenter or audience, though someone may kick off a dialogue with a bit of an intro to a specific topic, like current organizing, info on local fascist and fascist-adjacent groups, and historical cases.

Coffeehouse 36 has created space for people to address their feelings of detachment from collective care and raise their personal concerns about fascism in our context—such as fascists waging campaigns against trans people at schools, or targeting unhoused people and migrant groups. From these conversations, other community defense activities have blossomed, and we’re building real connections of solidarity.

—Jeff Shantz

6.

Huutgna, so-called Southeast Los Angeles (SELA), has become an epicenter in the new wave of colonial terror: the enforcement of “immigration laws” on a stolen land built into an ecocidal, death camp settlement. The air is as thick with paranoia and fear as it is with pollutants. ICE is the Trump regime’s federal secret police, and its invasion of Los Angeles is an attempt at displaying its imagined dominance over California’s largest symbol of migrant pride. As for why some areas are being raided harder than others, it’s difficult to pinpoint, but what we do know is: They picked the wrong city (or cities) to fuck with.

On June 19, 2025, ICE attempted another kidnapping at a car wash in the city of Bell, CA—trapping a family inside a car surrounded by agents. Rather than flee immediately after being spotted, ICE agents stayed around long enough for the locals to discover they were there. People from Bell and other SELA neighbors mobilized en masse to let ICE know that it wasn’t welcome in the hood.

Multiple ICE vehicles had their tires slashed and windows broken. The tear gas shot by the SELA police department to protect ICE agents was thrown back. ICE was forced to let the targeted family go, and then the agents left in shame after local police and fire departments bailed them out from the righteous fury of SELA. Direct action taken by brave individuals who illegally risked their health and freedom is what successfully stopped the abduction in this case. ICE left out of fear, not respect.

—Yum Kaax

7.

From our corner of Lake Michigan, Chicago sees around 5 million migratory birds representing an estimated 250 species pass through the city during their long trips between hemispheres every year, making most of our 300 local species not “ours” at all. We share our more-than-human neighbors with communities across Central and South America. Barn swallows, common in the city, migrate as far as Chile. Sandhill cranes, which fill Chicago’s skies twice a year by the thousands, can be found from Siberia to Cuba. Migration is an essential, inherent process for living things.

We put together the Birds Against Borders bird walk as a way of leveraging what we have on hand—an inordinate knowledge of bird facts along with a community ready to come together to care for each other—to mobilize donations for the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund in response to ICE kidnappings in our city. In a moment when power is consolidating around fascism so quickly, we see close observation of our world as a necessary tool to understand what is happening around us. Birding offers a lens for more carefully observing the quiet, everyday ways that our worlds are linked. Borders are fake, and the birds know it. Our shared lives, ecosystems, and futures across the globe are tied together, and nature helps us to see these connections.

—Ren

8.

Greetings from the underground. We are the autonomous insurrectionary network of anticapitalist horticulturists, aka the Anarchist Gardeners Club.

We strike at the heart of technofascist machinery. We make our own food, medicine, and happiness. We grow flowers in the cracks. We seed bomb every desolate corner of the scrubland. We enjoy a brew and a biscuit as we do it.

We take inspiration from the Luddites, Diggers, Zapatistas, Animal Liberation Front, and the little people—those mischievous elves of lore. Authorities can’t see us because they don’t believe in elves. We are practically invisible. We have no command structure, no spokespersons, no office—just many small groups working separately, seeking targets of capital, the state, and fascism, and practicing our craft.

The garden is a self-governing space. A canvas on which we create, grow, and nurture. We see nature and the infinite symbiotic relationships that exist within it as inherently anarchist, based on mutual aid, subterranean networks, and solidarity.

Every garden grown is a strike against the boredom of capital!

If you want to join us, then OK, good, you’re in! If you want to start a new autonomous cell, then OK, good do it! See you on the front lines (probably the veggie patch)!

All empires will rot!

All fascisms will whither!

All cops are brutal!

All cultivators are beautiful!

—Anarchist Gardeners Club

9.

The decision came back in United States v. Skrmetti—the US Supreme Court case saying that it’s fine for states to make it impossible for people under eighteen to access gender-affirming care. I know it’s scary. It feels like something really important is being taken away from us by the government refusing to recognize and protect us.

The terror and dread can obscure something crucial, though: we’ve had a couple years of this lovely reprieve where sometimes, in some places, a person of any age can say, “I’m trans and here’s what I need,” and the care they need is made available. But this reprieve is very recent. Mostly, when we wanted to do stuff, we had to do it ourselves. The memory of when it was hard before is still alive. All the skills and networks, loopholes and intergenerational info sharing, and ways we show up for each other are still here too, already active or being reactivated.

The trans community is creative and resilient and crafty, and if you haven’t already found ways to get what you need, those ways are growing all around as an antifascist response to these times. My therapist just told me that their teenager went to a punk show and came home with a year’s supply of estrogen. I know hundreds of parents who will move heaven and earth to make sure their children can access what they need to access, and I know networks of thousands of queer and trans people all across this continent who are reaching out for your hand to say, “Hey, I love you, and I’m here for you. There’s a story of the future that has you in it.”

—Andy Izenson

10.

My eyes were starting to glaze over when I heard a small crowd forming behind me.

“You see that shit in Paris?” one masked teen asked. “They took potatoes and smashed them into the street so the cops would slip and fall if they tried to rush the crowd.”

“Yeah, so?” retorted another.

The kid dropped down and opened his backpack. “Yeah, well I brought a shit ton of potatoes!”

All it took was for a small black bloc cadre to start smashing unwashed russet potatoes into the driveway of the Portland, Oregon, ICE facility for others to join, creating a slimy, congealing mess on the concrete in front of a fortress already adorned with abolitionist graffiti and surrounded by what had at this point become a permanent encampment.

It delayed ICE as it sent out a heavily armed battalion of Border Patrol and Homeland Security officers, who brought brooms alongside their “less lethal” munitions so they could spend the better part of half an hour cleaning the entrance—after which a new round of mashed potatoes was delivered.

It was a small act, but no one came through the entrance while it happened, and it created a feedback loop: the more the crowd could do, the more likely people were to stay.

This isn’t just here. In Los Angeles, groups have set up community self-defense hubs to maintain a constant presence to challenge ICE, and where people can receive and share mutual aid — like grocery or medication deliveries for those too afraid to leave their homes due to their immigration status. And there are noise demos at hotels where ICE agents are sleeping.

And this isn’t just in LA. In New York City, people are organizing accompaniments for immigrants who have to visit federal court facilities, which are now being regularly swept. They use these same networks to rapidly block ICE arrests, identify officers, and publicly shame them. In Chicago, a recent protest stopped immigration court, stalled ICE operations for the day, and de-arrested dozens of activists while clogging downtown.

Solidarity is a bet — and a long shot at that: that we gain more by relying on our communities than on the established institutions of state and capital. When all of civil society is under attack, solidarity may literally be all we have left. Practicing it together offers clarity: it’s probably all we ever had. And when we do it, we’ll do it with what we have, and what we can.

—Shane Burley

11.

On more than one occasion in occupied Palestine, amid clouds of US-made, Israeli-fired tear gas in an urban center or Israeli forces marauding through a small village, I’ve had to knock in panic on the door of a complete stranger’s home, seeking safety. Invariably that door was opened and a haven was offered, despite the supposed gulfs of nationality or language. We both understood which side we were on, and that was cause enough for complicity. Be they an infirm elderly couple or parents with a house full of young children, they sheltered me, aware of the costs involved if their act was discovered. On the surface, we could exchange nothing more than basic pleasantries and gestures. Beneath that, there was a solidarity that needed no interpretation. In opening that door and letting me in, they risked far more than I did. They taught me we all play a role in the struggle with the tools that we have. Sometimes it’s as simple as opening the door.

—Scott Campbell

12.

Six Gregorian calendar years ago, on October 27, 2018, the antisemitic “great replacement theory,” shaped by fascism, xenophobia, and Xtian white supremacy, led to the murder of eleven Jews belonging to three different shuls in Pittsburgh.

As a friend observed, it’s hard to feel anything but rage on this 2024 yahrzeit. It’s difficult to understand how so much organizing, community self-defense, and mutual aid six years ago could bring us to this place, where things are so much worse.

This place, on this anniversary, is a public park. It isn’t the first time many of us have come here to rebelliously mourn. So we gravitated to a familiar corner by what we’ve dubbed the “weeping tree” because of similar rituals here before.

We stretched string between our tree and another, then hung a banner with the words “Kaddish to Counter Fascism” and two poppies painted in red. We torn strips of fabric and wrote the blessed names of our dead on them, tying them on the string. On the ground below, we laid out an altar of tea candles and antifascist zines by Jews and Muslims, using acorns to hold the paper, and sprinkled rose petals. Someone added pieces of a broken plate, and someone else a cake. We sang, communed, and opened up, speaking aloud our grief as the sky darkened.

I learned that this park is a block from where one of the eleven worked as a beloved doctor, and that everyone who came had some relation to these dead — including the medics and security-minded folks who were there “just in case.” After all, things are worse; publicly grieving as antifascists increasingly involves risk and bravery. Our sacred spaces, even if ephemeral, are where we rededicate ourselves to fighting the worsening ugliness and sharing in the beauty of our solidarity.

—Cindy Barukh Milstein

13.

Delaney Hall, located in Newark, New Jersey, is the largest migrant jail on the East Coast. It’s operated by the private prison company Geo Group. Those held inside are constantly abused; the building is physically unsafe; visitors and immigration lawyers have been denied entry for weeks; and meals are served frozen, and sometimes not at all.

On June 13, 2025, after going over twenty hours without food, about fifty incarcerated people banded together to smash through one of the prison walls. The guards fled, and soon, word got out that there was an uprising inside and a handful of detainees were able to escape.

Outside the detention center, crowds of everyday people—sick of seeing neighbors, friends, classmates, and families get kidnapped off the street—began to gather, using their bodies to prevent ICE from entering and exiting the facility. Throughout the evening, ICE vehicles were brought to a complete standstill, vans were forced to retreat back through the gates, and the driveway remained barricaded with roadway dividers and wooden planks. The mobilization—an act of tangible solidarity—diverted ICE personnel and disrupted the search for escaped detainees, if only for that one day.

The ability to show up on that June 13 built on far more “routine” but crucial work, done multiple times a week for months: hitting the streets and conducting outings to talk to people in busy neighborhoods, public parks, encampments of those who are unhoused, and apartment buildings as well as at transit hubs. Bringing along flyers, listening, and most important, forging relationships.

—Lisa

14.

Three days ago, one of my best friends was taken. In the first twenty-four hours, his name disappeared from the jail’s system and didn’t reappear until the next day.

As immigrants, we came here “for a better life,” but really it’s because we have no other choice. Our home countries are destabilized, bled dry by the greed of capitalism. Often I hear people say, “If it’s so hard being an immigrant, why don’t you go home?” but I don’t know if I can or want to.

So what is there to do? I ask my friends who care so much about the land and water. Maybe we create our own worlds. Maybe we build collective homes and share the chores and figure out how to get through conflict together, and love each other so much that it stops mattering who is from here or there or anywhere.

I became a farmer because I wanted to help build these worlds. I love the feeling of dirt between my toes, and my body was built for hot days in the sun.

A friend and I made soup last week. We ate it on my back porch beneath a canopy of trees and rain, and he told me that the Appalachian Mountains are older than Saturn’s rings. I pictured these beautiful ancient mountains gazing at this big ole planet, marveling as it changed shape and form. 

Today I’m going to plant more corn. It will grow so tall that no one will ever be able to find me. The leaves will wrap themselves around my body, and I will live off kernels until I am old. And just as Saturn grew rings, me and my people too will transform and become untraceable. Until this world accepts that the displaced will always find a way to survive.

—Mar

NOTE:

Everyday Antifascism is an act of love and solidarity—intended for everyone on the side of liberatory lives for all. Share this zine widely.

For other zines in this “series,” check out Don’t Just Do Nothing: 20 Things You Can Do to Counter Fascism and Anarchist Compass: 29 Offerings for Navigating Christofascism, and most recently, Ritual as Resistance: 18 Stories of Defending the Sacred, all freely available at ItsGoingDown.Org.

I extend my gratitude to printmaker Tara Murino-Brault for the cover artwork, titled “Resistance” and borrowed from the free graphics section on justseeds.org, and Casandra (www.houseofhands.net) for yet again kindly turning my design and layout into PDFs.

July 2025