Forgive me for discussing internet drama. Unfortunately this specific drama has a close relationship with real life.
Lately people have been very mad at Will Stancil, a man social media seems to think every person in Minneapolis (social media does not know there are other cities in Minnesota) has an opinion on. They were mad at Will Stancil first for talking about being kicked out of rapid response (RR) chats for doing press and taking videos of himself, because this made people feel unsafe, which the internet has laundered into "violating opsec" and similar phrasing; now they are mad at him for taking video of masked agitators lighting a dumpster on fire in the aftermath of Alex Pretti's murder, because he was asked not to film "faces", and a document about diversity of tactics from the 2008 RNC protests means that anyone demanding not to be filmed must be obeyed immediately regardless of mitigating circumstances like "you are already being filmed because news crews are here" and "it's fine for people who live in the area to demand random LARPers not pollute an occupied city with half-baked barricade attempts". The online response to this has been to claim Will Stancil is endangering people, is an opportunist posting for clout, is going to get people killed, etc. If you ask people making these claims why they feel so confident in boosting one another's analysis, you mostly get ignored OR you get offended huffing followed by a block, e.g.:
All of this is obviously very stupid. If I have forced you to learn about people or personages you were previously unaware of, I apologize. But there are two very important concepts (debates, even) buried among the self-aggrandizing nonsense, and I would like to bring them to the surface, since thinking about them is as much a part of what I'm doing right now as the actual boots on the sidewalk work—and these sorts of issues shape the real work, and will surely impact that work's resiliency and longevity.
The first is Signal, "opsec", why and how we do what we do. People seem to love throwing around "opsec". You can justify almost anything with it. I went to get vetted for a local RR chat recently. This process looked like: I went to a local friendly business; some twenty-somethings sitting in the corner volunteered their Signal handles; I observed their Airtables from a distance; they looked at the mail I brought to prove my address, glanced over my ID, and added me to the chat (the description of which was already leaking info when I requested to join).
To anyone with an amateur's background in internet or real-world security (I have the former), this is a process that would be easy to game. Fake IDs are easy to purchase or even make, mail is easy to steal or falsify. I don't say this to impugn these people's efforts, but rather to set expectations for what vetting, what the "opsec" actually looks like in this context: it's a vibe check with a low barrier to entry.
RR chats are spun up daily; taken all together, they are networks of hundreds-to-thousands of people, most out watching for ICE, some running plate checks against semi-centralized databases, some relaying sightings to other chats so vehicles can be tracked across neighborhoods or even cities. Many chats open calls during RR shifts, so anyone driving or walking in an area might be part of the same call, sharing information in real time. These chats are known to have been compromised by far-right "journalists" as well as left-wing press posting incognito (Cam Higby did the former, Talia Jane did the latter); I can't speak to how every single chat does this, but in general the advice I have seen is to assume that these chats are not 100% secure. Stancil and others are chasing ICE in their cars, specifically; this matters because they are never anonymous. If you use your car for RR you explicitly cannot use it for grocery delivery or other mutual aid work, because it is likely-to-certain that ICE knows who you are.
I do not think there is any value in trying to remotely adjudicate whether or not the chats Stancil was part of were right to kick him. I do not care. That is neither my circus nor my monkeys. But the repeated insistence that Stancil's inattention to "opsec" endangers others really alarms me. A man you don't know recording the Signal call you're both on may make you uncomfortable, but if the Signal call you're both on can be assumed to be compromised by an unknown number of infiltrators, then he is not endangering you in any meaningful sense. If you take your phone with you, and your phone is not running Apple or GrapheneOS, Signal, and nothing else, then your phone itself is a serious risk vector, and ICE can identify you using it. Similarly, when ICE is surveilling protesters and when they have barely-fettered access to existing state and private video surveillance (Ring cameras, CCTV cameras, etc), I do not believe that one of your fellow RR activists recording things from his car meaningfully endangers you. I would go further on the latter and say that when RRs are regularly recording their work and posting these videos, and when this is integral to the comms of the movement—when these videos go viral, when this work is essential both to prevent abductions and to get media attention on the state, to demonstrate the severity of the problem and the illegality of ICE's tactics—assuming you're being recorded should be not just encouraged but lauded. This movement demands situational awareness.
It also demands acceptance of a baseline level of risk, and that is the other thing that troubles me about the fetishization of illusory privacy. Stancil has taken heat for saying RR is safer the more people do it publicly. I think it is just objectively true that trying to conceal your identity is a fool's errand; beyond that, I think it is historically true that the more people engage in mass resistance, the safer individuals are. We are, right now, winning the propaganda war; part of that is because ICE patrol is done by normal people, who look normal. By this I do not mean they look white or clean-cut or heterosexual; I mean they do not look like, well, ICE. They aren't wearing balaclavas, they don't seem to have arrived on the scene looking for a fight. Optics matter. So too do numbers. If everyone shows up masked, it's relatively easy to pick off the two who don't cover up tattoos or identifying clothing well enough. Those become the people you prosecute. If everyone shows up looking like A Guy Who Lives here...who do you prosecute? All of them? It's expensive! Add that to the fact that, again, if you are driving, ICE already knows who you are, and I do think that strength in numbers is a persuasive argument.
However.
It is disingenuous for people who do not live here to claim anyone saying "there's strength in numbers" is saying "resisting ICE is safe". We all know that resisting ICE is not safe. Two of us got killed doing it in the space of three weeks: yes, we know perfectly well that it's not safe. But anonymity doesn't make it safer, and numbers do. There is something very worryingly dishonest about occluding this reality with references to past murdered movement leaders. It reads to me a bit like cowardice. A lot of people seem to genuinely believe that if resistance can't be made 100% safe, then no one should do it with their name attached, and only people who can be 100% anonymous should do it at all, but of course this would mean that RR wasn't feasible: there simply is no way to do this en masse, which is what the structure of the resistance requires, while staying anonymous. If CBP hunts down RRs months or years from now, that means we have lost and we live under a fascist state. This is pretty different from a situation like Ferguson, a conflict that was unpopular with the (racist) public and which directly implicated local police. Local police behave like gangs; Black protesters are endangered by virtue both of proximity to the cop-gangs, and by systemic racism. A federal agency returning months or years later to gun down multiple Minnesotan rapid responders would be a massive escalation even over the already-dirty already-inhumane already-fascist day-to-day functioning of corrupt police departments (but I repeat myself).
That does not mean no risk exists. It only means that the risk for any given individual does not scale directly with their anonymity. I have said on social media and here, and will probably say again, that I do not believe in lying to people and pretending there is a risk-free way to resist fascism. It doesn't exist. Yes, you might die doing this work. You should do it anyway. All insisting upon fake anonymity does is create more friction to onboard more people; in other words, it makes us less safe.
Also, strictly speaking, most of this is comsec, not opsec.
The second issue I have with all of this is simply that the people Stancilposting and insisting he's a fed or a clout-chaser or an appropriator or an entryist or whatever else, in addition to being wrong about opsec/comsec and more obsessed with Will Stancil than anyone in the entire state of Minnesota (barring, maybe, Stancil himself), have middling records with the sort of mass resistance Minnesota is currently engaging in. Kelly Hayes dislikes being called a "professional activist" because she is a writer, but her website identifies her as an "Author, organizer, educator". Gwen Snyder identifies herself as an "Organizer, writer, mom". These are people who have, indeed, been very active in movement spaces for many years. They were there for Occupy. They were there for BLM. They were there for Charlottesville. They were there for earlier ICE surges. But they have not, in fact, successfully led any cities, states, or countries out of the fascism they are dedicated to fighting. They have, in fact, presided over an era of Internet-focused activism that lays claim to very few durable wins, and many losses or misfires. When you have been loudest and most active during a multi-decade period of decline on the left, when the left you claim to be a leader within has racked up L after L after L, I would not so gently suggest that you should at least be open to and curious about what other people are doing. At a bare minimum, you should think about what you might not know about a mass resistance movement in a place you do not live in, and perhaps consider that your friends "on the ground" or your experience in "street movements" do not grant you a more informed perspective than people who are actually here, doing the work you are opining on. Not "the work" in a romanticized, general sense, but the literal actual day to day work of trying to fight ICE on the streets of Minnesota.
A concrete example of what I mean:
Gwen Snyder, specifically, went hard on being mad at Will Stancil for disregarding black bloc tactics. The context here is that he was objecting to random masked black bloc types arriving to the scene of Alex Pretti's murder, as the community was gathering, and lighting a dumpster on fire, as part of a series of provocations intended to escalate into overnight violence (this is not speculation on my part). Stancil filmed some of them and was punched in the head for filming people's faces at a protest. But of course, this wasn't a protest but rather opportunistic violence during a spontaneous gathering; there were many many many individuals and organizations recording the exact same scene; nothing about "black bloc tactics" means you have to let random people endanger others and pollute the air in the name of creating a barricade; no one owes Gwen Snyder or anyone else deference when discussing tactics we disagree with or even wholesale disapprove of. But to Movement Leaders, none of this matters. What matters is that she has a resume, and thus her general experience can replace geographic and temporal specificity.
A more discerning "organizer, writer, mom" might realize she's missing a few details. I can fill some of them in: when Alex Pretti was murdered, it was on the heels of increasingly provocative deployments of smoke bombs and tear gas in nearby residential areas. Many people living on or near major corridors, including the part of Nicollet known as Eat Street, remember the incessant air pollution during the 2020 uprising, and have no desire to repeat it, particularly when this specific enemy is not local PD but rather an invading federal force. Alex Pretti and Renee Good gave their lives and many others have given their time, livelihoods, mental health, physical health, or some combination thereof, in pursuit of mass nonviolent resistance. Part of that resistance involves gathering in, honoring, and maintaining the sites of our martyrs' murders. It also involves establishing collective safety in gathering crowds, particularly when staties or feds are looking to provoke violence. The work we are all collectively doing does in fact give us the right to veto random assholes who think provoking a riot is a better idea. "Protest etiquette" does not overrule this. "Black bloc tactics" do not overrule this. Online activists who like to yap about these concepts, you guessed it, do not get to overrule us.
I am not blaming any of these people for not stopping Trump-fascism. I am simply advocating for critical thinking and results-driven strategizing. A lot of leftist people and organizations, in my experience, are really brittle when it comes to interpersonal conflict, and that is definitely an issue here: disagreement over tactics is framed as a violation of orthodoxy or flexing of privilege (Snyder went on to talk about how Stancil's posting was taking credit for or disregarding work women in the movement have done). This is an issue others have commented on many times (call yourself a community organizer even though you're not on speaking terms with your roommates, etc). In addition to incompetency with regards to basic interpersonal conflict, I think that the modern American left gets really caught up in the cyclical nature of our struggles and the durable nature of oppression: if you can't solve virulent misogyny or racism, then surely your presence in the struggle is all that matters. If you lose, then probably the most important thing is that you fought; you may learn from your loss, but there's no sense in understanding the lost fight as having been potentially winnable. We are fighting monsters, after all, and we are outnumbered and outgunned, so what else can be expected of us?
But sorry, I do expect more. I am a scoreboard leftist. I am interested in interrogating why we lose and how we might win more in the future. I care about tactics that work. I do not care about being don't-you-know-who-I-am'd from the left. Everyone outside of Minnesota needs to take what is happening way more seriously. People who do the work here are not looking for a guarantee of absolute safety. We are also not looking for advice from tourists and opportunists. My personal belief is that security theater shrinks our coalition and, as theater, endangers people who need actual real security. Others here, in the city or state, manifestly disagree. I hope my side wins because I'm right; but either way, it's not a debate you can dominate if you don't live here, because you straight up do not understand the nature of the resistance, and it shows when you try to discuss it. (See the many appeals to "the organizers of the protest", when referring to spontaneous gatherings of neighbors who hear about an event through the grapevine).
There is one remedy for this: get your head in the game and focus on finding, implementing, and magnifying what works. Trade notes with people in other cities instead of doing leftist resume slapfights with them. Evaluate your work honestly, from the perspective of whether or not it helps us win. Most importantly, rather than surrendering in advance by casting yourself as the doomed hero of an eternal fight, understand yourself as a free person who, with thousands of other free people, has the legal and moral right to do the work we are doing, to adjust our strategies when they're not working, to disagree with each other as coequal members of the struggle, and to fucking win.
And stop talking about Will Stancil. This is not a request, it is a demand. Stop talking about Will Stancil right now or I'm going to kill* the hostages**.
* yell at
** more of you on social media
