Dildos and Turtles vs. ICE: Use Mockery in Protests (Saul Alinsky Podcast: Rules For Radicals)

• Frog Confronts Federal Agents - Common Dreams
• Protesters Wield Sex Toys Outside ICE Facility - Block Club Chicago
• “South Park” showed Trump in bed with Satan discussing Jeffrey Epstein, the White House attacked the series as a “fourth-rate show” - NY Times

What does this have to do with Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky? Saul Alinsky shares 13 tactics by which the have-nots can push back against billionaires and corporate greed through grassroots activism and community organizing. Tactic #5 is “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon”. Dildos, turtles and more ...

Dildos vs. ICE

• Protesters Wield Sex Toys Outside ICE Facility In Broadview For ‘Operation Dildo Blitz’. With dildos in hand, protesters gathered outside Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s processing center in Broadview Saturday as part of series of nationwide protests against ICE. The protests outside immigration facilities in Broadview, Portland and Los Angeles, as well as the ICE headquarters in Washington, D.C., with dildos donated by a sex shop that went out of business in Minneapolis. - Block Club Chicago

Trump Ain't Right

You have to be able to laugh

The Bright Blue Dot billboard features a likeness of Trump — complete with bright red MAGA hat — trying to use a gas pump for a phone while gasoline jets between his ears. The caption beneath the billboard features the common southern saying: “He Ain’t Right.” “You have to be able to laugh at it because right now, we’re powerless unless they enact the 25^th Amendment,” said Bright Blue Dot organizer Joellyn Beckham, who designs most of the organization’s public images. - Alternet

Rules For Radicals - Sauly Alinsky

Power organizing tactics

1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
2. Never go outside the experience of your people.
3. Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy.
4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
8. Keep the pressure on.
9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
10. The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Recent examples of creative resistance

• Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, dressed in a bulletproof vest borrowed from his security detail, walked the streets of downtown Chicago joking about the “utter mayhem and chaos” gripping the city. In the backdrop, people were visibly moving about their day without issue or care.
• Inflatable frogs have been practically omnipresent, especially after a video went viral last week of a law-enforcement official shooting pepper spray into one of the frog costume’s posterior air vents.
• Two of the costumed protesters even got married in front of the ICE building on Friday, and Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden offered his congratulations to the happy couple.
• The “Arrest Me Daddy” videos trolling law enforcement officials (just watch them, trust me) have been taking off online thanks to Chicago-born rapper Adamn Killa.
• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chided Stephen Miller for his height, inspiring Fox News to dedicate a segment to the subject. 1 Miller clarified that he is actually 5 feet 10 inches, slightly above average for American men. Ocasio-Cortez responded by feigning (we think) shock that Miller took her bait.

Haves and Have-Nots

"Society has three groups: the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores. On top are the very few Haves with power, money, food, security, and luxury. They suffocate in their surpluses while the Have-Nots starve. The Haves want to keep things as they are and are opposed to change. They are cold and determined to freeze the status quo. The Haves always justify the status quo. Religious, economic, social, political groups attack demands for change as immoral, fallacious and against God, country, and mother.

On the bottom are the most people. Have-Nots. They are chained together by the common misery of poverty, rotten housing, disease, ignorance, political impotence, and despair. Their jobs pay the least and they are deprived in all areas basic to human growth. Caged by color, physical or political, they are barred from an opportunity to represent themselves in the politics of life. The Haves want to keep; the Have-Nots want to get. Many Have-Nots have given up and resigned to their fate. But there are glowing embers of hope which can be fanned by the building of means of obtaining power. The power of the Have-Nots rests with their numbers." - Rules For Radicals

Add humor to your messaging

Cartoons cut through the noise. People get the point at a glance. They work across language, age and education. My favorite source of cartoons is Cagle Cartoons collects and licenses political cartoons from the best editorial cartoonists.

TakeAway: Resist creatively. Learn Saul Alinsky's Rules Ror Radicals.

Deepak
DemLabs

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One final cartoon to go