Guilly's Guide Day Ten

Hold. The. Line.

Day 10: Hold the Line

Greetings Beloved: You may have noticed I am missing a few days from time to time. 

Some of it is just caring for my own battered nervous system. Some of it is my frustration with legacy media, and how we still fall for their ruses and games to manipulate clicks at the expense of the public's collective psyche. 

You see sometimes the stories that matter, or the stories that I think are being under reported, or missed, or I just want to rant about, haven’t really developed fully. Media hates to say: we don't know. 

One of the interesting things about having a press pass and paying for wire alerts is you realize that a lot of the big news orgs are almost instantaneously and simultaneously just repeating what came over the wire as breaking news. So you stop.

I’m a writer who writes about the news. Not CNN, WaPo, or the Times. When you are trying to record history in real-time you learn to stop reacting to news in real-time. In other terms, when you are forced to look at every story by examining closely what led up to a moment and what this moment may lead to without the shackles of adding to the deluge of info dumping most people call new consumption nowadays, no editor up your ass, and no real plans to “make it,” you start to notice the patterns. 

These headlines we are all racing to consume and react to are often left in half formed pictures and worded in ways that are designed to alert your nervous systems. To the maximum almost instantaneous reaction. AP may have beat you to the headline, but you're the first on your timeline to share and show outrage. 

Don't pretend you haven't been that person. A lot of us have. That’s what social engineering does. It engineers societies. 

Put another way by Jay Z: You know why they call the projects a project, because it’s a project! An experiment, we’re in it, only as objects. 

I try not to do that anymore, but certainly have been guilty of it in the past. It’s a writer's tool, but to be used sparingly or it becomes a blunt instrument. I write as if I am being way too calm about a State that appears to be on the swift march towards chaos at a minimum, and authoritarianism as an end goal. 

It is a tactic, and you should learn about tactics, propaganda, misinformation, information systems, communication etc. 

So today I want to talk about holding the line. 

I don't know if you have ever been in a protest where you were at the vanguard and you hit riot cops and shields like a wall. Or had to lock arms with comrades, or raise your own shields as fasc, chuds, racist, self declared white supremacist, or just the latest useful fools for that movement try to rush your lines. There is something that gets yelled in those moments: Hold. The. Line. 

I implore you beloved to hold the fucking line. 

Day one I told you there were 100 executive orders we would see come out in a flurry. All of these orders you have experienced, and I believe a few left to be implemented, were clearly laid out in Project 2025, in about a dozen other side projects that produced publicly available white papers. 

There will be more punches, uppercuts, jabs, and some haymakers thrown our way. It is literally what the Trump's appointees have been saying. Shock and awe to the federal government and the life long civil servants who thwarted them last time with things like morals, rules, and human decency in the last administration. To make them take illegal buy outs of their positions rather than use the means at their disposal to fight them. This is what gangsters do. 

They make you an offer you can't refuse. 

To my white and cis siblings : do you have any idea how you fucking sound to your black, brown, and indigenous counterparts right now? Or to your trans friends? Your constant lamentation about changes that most likely won't affect you at first, or possibly at all, is wild.

Calm down and follow those about you who are moving towards community building, mutual aid, community defense, skill building, and if you haven't: have the talk with your spouse, loved ones, partner, or friends. The kind of “talk” every radical, patriot, and even the Rev. Dr. King had to have with his family. 

Will you be going out to the inevitable protest? Will you be talking to your faith community about leveraging your important role in the community, will you provide sanctuary in defiance of ICE policy? Do you have bail money put up if you live in a parsonage because you can’t put that up for bail. Who is your church authorities lawyer? Who is your lawyer? What’s your and your families redline, when do they pull you out of activism when you can’t stop because of trauma and the siren call of others pain? What does safety look like for your family? Does your denomination  health insurance cover injuries acquired while protesting (ELCA had that dropped in 2022, lolz, call portico.)

If you are not clergy these questions apply. I just know a lot of clergy read this newsletter still even if they don’t go sharing it on their socials. I get the stats.

This is a much better way to spend your time, offline, rather than sharing hot takes yall. There was a time when social media gave us information we otherwise wouldn't be able to experience or witness. That time is for the most part over. Social media took advantage of our joy of shared communal experience and shattered it into fractured and broken information systems that no longer convey useful information. Or give us a communal public third space. It is an elevator shaft and an echo chamber and every open door isn’t an invitation. 

Hold. The. Line. 

The bum’s rush is sure to continue. Let them. I hate to admit this but I even think the Democrats are playing it smart this time. The Trump administration keeps talking about a “mandate” from the voters that just isn’t objectively or statistically there. The Democrats know only 30%, out of 50%, of the 30% of Americans who bothered to vote in 2024 want these policies. 

They are waiting for our collective rage. They are waiting until the most brutal, thuggish, bullying, and heartless tactics are on full display for the country to see, and held up in court. 

They are waiting for America to remember itself. It’s a dangerous ploy that I feel was better suited for 2017, but it’s actually the first collectively smart thing I have seen them do. Don’t be a resistance, be a loyal opposition party. It is a better long term win for them, let’s just all hope we don't pass the point when long term political wins for the midterms don’t matter. 

Next post will be on what I believe to be an imminent danger and that's the DOD and Pete Hegseth as SecDef. 

This post is a great primer to this guy for folks! 

https://substack.com/home/post/p-151792376

Written in love and liberation 

rev. lenny duncan

P.S I did write a then irrelevant book in 2022 about a second trump administration: Jus sayin.

Dear Revolutionaries