Americans are rediscovering an old, deeply un-American skill set: how to protest without being maimed by their own government.
You know — the quaint civic tradition where you show up with a cardboard sign, shout about liberty, and go home with a sunburn instead of a concussion and a felony charge.
Apparently, that’s passé now.
Today’s lesson, courtesy of a viral post circulating through Facebook’s Boomer Badlands like contraband samizdat from 1970, is Protester Tactics 101: “It would be a shame if…” protesters started carrying ¼-inch plywood to stop rubber bullets. Or wearing improvised armor made from duct tape and ceramic tile. Or using umbrellas to bounce tear gas away while forming a tight shield wall. Or jamming police scanners. Or buying respirators, gloves, helmets, and traffic cones like it’s Black Friday at the Insurrection Depot.
What’s wild isn’t that people are sharing it — what’s wild is how normal it suddenly feels.
Because that’s the tell.
When civilians start optimizing battlefield tactics for domestic protests, it means the government already escalated first.
And no one in power wants to say that part out loud.
In a healthy democracy, protests are a pressure valve. People yell, power listens (or pretends to), everyone goes home, and no one needs a ceramic plate over their ribcage.
In an authoritarian drift, protests aren’t a nuisance — they’re a threat.
And threats get managed by what the national security feds politely call “domestic counterinsurgency posture.”
We’ve been inching into that posture for decades.
Police departments acquired MRAPs and grenade launchers under the Pentagon’s 1033 program. Riot cops learned to shoot gas canisters at people instead of over them. “Less lethal” munitions became “we can blind you, but technically that’s not murder” weapons. The FBI dusted off old COINTELPRO instincts. DHS quietly turned into America’s favorite multi-agency Rorschach blob. Only now they get to call everything “critical infrastructure protection,” including city hall and police parking lots.
The Supreme Court’s shadow docket made quick work of injunctions that once slowed government excess. Prosecutors learned how to stack bullshit charges to make protest participation materially ruinous. And the private sector discovered you could fire anyone with a bullhorn faster than you could fire a CFO cooking the books.
Meanwhile, ordinary people learned something too:
Cardboard is for parades. Plywood is for governments that fear their own citizens.
The viral post circulating right now reads like humor on its surface — and that’s the camouflage.
The real message is:
“We remember how the last authoritarian cycle was resisted, and we remember how to do it again.”
Boomers didn’t invent defiance, but they did perfect the art of teaching it through winks and negative space.
That’s why the post is structured around “It would be a shame if…”
It’s counter-instruction disguised as etiquette.
It’s also exactly how people spread dissent in countries where dissent is punishable.
Which brings us to the most uncomfortable question:
Why does tactical protest literacy feel normal in America again?
This isn’t new — it’s cyclical.
1960s–70s US: helmets, shields, gas countermeasures vs police batons & FBI infiltration
Hong Kong 2019: umbrellas, traffic cones, leaf blowers, laser pointers, flash teams
Belarus 2020: encrypted comms, car caravans, optics disruption
Chile 2019: improvised armor, decentralized medics, street optics warfare
Portland 2020: leaf blowers, moms in helmets, laser brigades vs DHS tear gas
US 2024–26: plywood shields, respirators, scanner jamming, tactical donations
Every wave has the same underlying logic:
Power escalates. People adapt. Power criminalizes adaptation. People adapt again.
At some point, the adaptation becomes the crime.
Guess which stage we’re flirting with now.
Under the current administration, protests have once again become a national security question rather than a civic act.
ICE has been deputizing itself into an unaccountable internal security force. DHS has shifted posture toward “pre-emption.” DOJ has shown selective interest in prosecuting state violence while accelerating protest crowd control prosecutions. And the legal system has been increasingly tolerant of pretext — the authoritarian’s favorite wrench.
When a state starts confusing resistance with insurrection, the public eventually concludes the state is afraid of resistance, not insurrection.
That realization changes everything.
Let’s pause here to appreciate how fundamentally absurd and American this moment is:
After 250 years of chest-thumping about liberty, the domestic playbook for defending it is:
“Uh, go to Home Depot/Lowe’s. Buy plywood. Wear a respirator. Try not to get your skull fractured.”
You cannot tell me the Founders envisioned the Second Amendment as a constitutional right to purchase safety goggles during a police crackdown, but honestly? It tracks.
And the funniest, ugliest truth is this:
The state always reveals its fear through the equipment civilians decide to bring next time.
If people bring signs: the government isn’t afraid.
If people bring helmets: the government fucked up.
If people bring armor: the government knows it.
If people bring medics: the government planned it.
If people bring lawyers: the government escalated legally.
If people bring leaf blowers: the government escalated chemically.
If people bring scanners: the government escalated tactically.
We’re about three innovations away from discovering that a giant tarp can neutralize a riot line and three folding tables can break a kettling formation.
And you know what? History says it probably can.
Here’s the thesis buried under all the jokes and plywood:
When a government fears protests instead of hearing them, it has already lost legitimacy.
Not elections.
Not power.
Legitimacy.
And once legitimacy goes, the whole machine turns brittle.
Americans aren’t becoming more radical.
The government is becoming more insecure.
The plywood is just the symptom.
I write this shit with no sponsors, no newsroom sugar daddy, and no billionaire benefactor blowing cigar smoke over my shoulder. I’m retired, reader-funded, and allergic to polite journalism.
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If this hit you anywhere between the spleen and the frontal cortex, smash the Substack subscribe button, share it, and drop it in the group chats before Facebook deletes the plywood post again.
Today’s sister piece drops in Lotus Purrspective, tackling the same story from the cultural side: humans discovering they need armor against the state and somehow making it funny.
If Bastard is the anger, Lotus is the judgmental purr.
Read both. They complete the picture.
If this hit you anywhere between the spleen and the frontal cortex, smash the Substack subscribe button, share it, and drop it in the group chats before Facebook deletes the plywood post again.
Fuel for the fire. Keeps the lights on and the profanity flowing.
#UnredactedBastard #DemocracyDamageReport #ProtestLiteracy #HomeDepotRevolution #AuthoritarianDrift #CivicResistance #NoKings