Prepare for a Nationwide General Strike

Strikes are a union's primary weapon for a reason: they fucking work. We the People must prepare to "grind the nation to a halt."

I tried to unionize my workplace once.

We were underpaid, overworked, and micro-managed at ASA College, a for-profit school in the middle of Manhattan, just a few blocks from the Empire State Building — a fairly desirable bit of real estate, so we knew the boss had the money. Everyone was fed up and miserable, so I figured the time was right.

My personal breaking point came when the admin began rationing paper. Yes, paper. It’s often the little things that radicalize the people — the 50 cent upcharge for the subway ticket, the retirement age being pushed up one more year, and yes, even the price of eggs going up a dollar or two.

Educators tend to go through a lot of paper. We create study guides, worksheets, print off articles, short stories, essays, quizzes and tests.

“It’s not a big deal. I’ll bring my own paper. It’s not much for a packet of A4, like 10 or 12 bucks,” said an older colleague in the faculty lounge, shrugging.

I turned to stare, because I wanted to see what a bitch-made coward who’s given up on life looked like — a man too beaten down by the world to fight back even for himself, let alone for others.

He was maybe 15 years older than me. I didn’t know a lot about him, except that he lived in Queens, had kids approaching college-age, and a divorce that was turning out to be expensive. He was also perpetually exhausted, with deep, dark circles under his eyes. The kind that you see and think, “oooh, that’s permanent.”

Later that evening after two-too-many PBRs and bourbons, I composed an email overflowing with righteous anger and sent it to the entire school via “reply all” (this function was disabled for professors soon afterwards).

Emails from professors I’d never even met poured into my inbox, thanking me for standing up. My colleagues in the faculty lounge all patted me on the back, too. One guy even sprung for donuts.

“That took balls,” said Ratso (I didn’t know his name, but he had one of those rat faces), “but be careful. They’re gonna be watching you now. See, that’s why I don’t ever get involved.”

He had the temerity to say it like he was giving me a kernel of wisdom. “Don’t get involved” — motto of the world’s sad sacks and lickspittles, a phrase parroted among ineffective cowards forgotten by history, and handed down to the cowardly children they raise.

Whenever I hear “don’t get involved,” I imagine a German muttering it in Dachau during the 1930s, as a trainload of people pass by.

Galvanized by my little win against “the man,” I wanted to start a union. I’d start right away, while I was still Mr. Popular and had momentum. What better place than here? What better time than now?

“I’d be in, but I’m not putting my name down on anything,” said one.
“My father told me never to get involved with unions,” said another.
“I can’t risk it, man. My daughter is going to college next year.”
”No, and actually — really sorry — please don’t speak to me at work. We’re still friends! I just can’t be seen with you.”
“I don’t want to get involved.”

Some wouldn’t even hear me out. Initially I was angry, but over time, I understood. It was easier for me — I was in my early 30s (so one of the younger professors) and I didn’t have kids, or a mortgage, OR student debt. Sure, I had my rent (in Brooklyn, so like 70% of my income) but other lives weren’t depending on me. I could take risks.

Many of my coworkers could not, and that was 12 years ago. Today, Americans’ financial lives are more precarious than ever. Barely 20% of Americans have more than $5000 in the bank. A single unexpected expense is more likely than ever to put someone out in the street. Roughly 60% of Americans have less than $500 in their checking account, and it sure as shit isn’t because they don’t have enough Dave Ramsey books (it’s because very few are paid fairly for their labor).

Americans are struggling economically, yes. But how are they doing otherwise?

If my social circle is any indication, many of us have been having difficulty with things like: getting out of bed, putting on pants, shaving & showering, commuting to work, taking kids to school, buying groceries and continuing to put one fucking foot in front of the other.

And that’s understandable. It’s hard to stay motivated after learning the world is the plaything of a secret cabal of billionaire pedophiles, tech oligarchs and their lawyers — and that many occupy high-level positions in the current administration. Our Supreme Court, the final arbiter of law and interpreter of the constitution, is illegitimate. Its members openly accept lavish bribes from their billionaire masters, and raise cultish flags of Christian nationalism sects at their homes.

Going to work, paying our taxes, stopping at red lights, hell, even mowing the damn lawn — why bother? Daily tasks now feel empty and devoid of meaning. People are just going through the motions. The president pardoned a cocaine kingpin, for fuck sake. Most Americans were too desensitized by his crime spree to notice.

Whatever tiny, glowing red ember of faith Americans still held in the constitution and their government has been extinguished in a piping hot stream of foul-smelling piss. And it smells like beer piss (looking at you, Kavanaugh).

A federal immigration enforcement agent sprays Rev. David Black, of the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, as he and other protesters demonstrate outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Ill, Sept. 19, 2025. Photo Credit : Ashlee Rezin/Chicago Sun-Times via AP

If I had to pinpoint the moment it happened, it would probably be when Attorney General Pam Bondi told Amercians “the Dow is over 50,000” in response to questions about whether or not she would be going after a gang of billionaire sex criminals, or even doing the bare minimum of — I don’t know — interviewing the victims?

Bondi’s response becomes more insane the longer you think about it. She’s the Attorney General. Her job has nothing to do with the Dow Jones, or the NASDAQ, or any markets. Her job is to be America’s Top Cop. She is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. And she just told us that her policy as AG is to ignore kid-diddlers, as long as the market is roaring.

What do you even do with that?

To clarify: Miss an immigration hearing, and that’s a potential beat-down, indefinite imprisonment in a concentration camp where you’ll be served a diet of moldy prison food, and eventual deportation. But child rape? That’s now an industry that’s “too big to fail.” Look, Bondi seems to say, if we arrested everyone involved in human trafficking, there’d be no one left in Wall Street or Washington! These are load-bearing pedophiles, can’t you people understand that? It’s all enough to make you want to just stay in bed.

So I’d like to encourage you to do just that.

You still very much need to vote. And the more of us who get in the streets to march and protest, the better.

What I want to encourage is the idea of a nationwide general strike.

Lately, as rule of law disintegrates and the tires come off our once-great nation, I’ve been hearing a funny noise: the rumblings of Democratic optimism.

At a time when the U.S. is defunding every good thing they do, seemingly because they do good, threatening longtime allies, overturning alliances and trade relationships, looting the nation’s treasury to enrich the president and his family, kidnapping heads of state (and funneling their oil money into private offshore bank accounts), doing away with the very concept of environmental regulations, building concentration camps, and sending masked secret police to murder its own citizens in the street for exercising their constitutional rights — what do they have to be happy about?

Easy: they think they’re going to win the midterms. After all, Democrats flipped a blood-red district in Texas that went for the president by 17 points in 2024, and the rollout of this administration’s new mom-murdering policies has been deeply unpopular; the polls look disastrous for MAGA. Oddly, those mentioned most in the Epstein Files all seem to have high-level positions in what Thomas Massie is branding the “Epstein Administration.”

There’s the president himself, whose name appears so often it makes far more sense to call them the “Trump Files.” There’s DOGE-master Elon Musk, pathetically pleading with Epstein to invite him to his island orgies (“Girls FTW!”). Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is there, along with Dr. Mehmet Oz, RFK Jr., Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg, and Secretary of the Navy John Phelan. And remember: we still don’t have most of the files yet.

Know this: there is NOTHING this administration will NOT do to rig the midterm elections. As Steve Bannon (who, incidentally, is all over the files and was very tight with Epstein) has said: if they do not win, he will go to jail, and he won’t be alone.

The Epstein administration always intended 2024 to be the last election. They have a deeper bag of tricks than Kyrie Irving, and they will use every single one. Here are a few possibilities, many of which are already in motion (and big thanks to Ari Berman at Mother Jones, whose story I have liberally cribbed from to compose the following list):

1. Declare martial law due to ______, and suspend elections (they’ve been looking for an excuse to put in that blank in Minnesota, and will continue to look).

2. Order the military to seize voting machines in battleground states (something the president considered in 2020).

3. ICE (or the military) deploys to blue cities all across America, intimidating/beating the shit out of anyone attempting to cast their vote. “They’re petrified over at MSNBC and CNN that … since we’re taking control of the cities, there’s going to be ICE officers near polling places,” Bannon said on a podcast last year, followed by: “You’re damn right.”

4. Mail-in ballots are tossed/disregarded by executive order/burned in a heap like so many Harry Potter novels at an evangelical book burning.

5. The federal government begins requiring passports and/or birth certificates to vote in federal elections. The president has already issued an executive order to this effect, most of which has been blocked in court.
   But so what? In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re not doing the whole “do what the judges say” things anymore.

6. Republican-controlled states follow suit, suppressing the vote on a state level in addition to the federal actions. Many state election boards are already teeming with Trump loyalists.

7. The president dials up foreign interference (“Russia, if you’re listening”) and China/Israel/Russia straight-up hacks the vote — or, Russia simply keeps paying people like Tim Pool to parrot Russian propaganda to the nation’s gullible and poorly educated.

8. Block certification of the elections. Think Mike Johnson won’t? He already tried, voting against certifying Arizona and Pennsylvania’s electoral votes in 2020. Johnson also supported a lawsuit to overturn that election in four battleground states. He will be under a lot of pressure from the president.

9. Further weaponized the DOJ. Expect lots of investigations into “voter fraud” allegations in the coming months.

10. The Senate (somehow) passes the SAVE Act. Or the Senate rejects it, and it gets implemented anyway. Yes — we are there.

And let’s not forget what has already been done: the president pardoned violent insurrectionists (including the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers), supercharged gerrymandering in every state he could, his Supreme Court has eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has been all but dismantled, and its career public servants replaced with MAGA loyalists. Worsening matters, Bondi shut down an FBI task force dedicated to preventing foreign interference in elections. This all adds up to an open, engraved invitation to election meddling.

Alexandra Chandler, a military intelligence analyst for over a decade, now works for Protect Democracy as director of the elections program. Chandler told Mother Jones, “The idea that we would unilaterally disarm our intelligence capabilities when the world is far more dangerous and more contentious and the role of the United States in the world is being challenged far more than in 2017, and yet we have far less capabilities aimed at protecting our elections, it’s madness.”

Director of Natl. Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was not in Fulton County, Georgia during the FBI raid of election offices because she had a hankering for lemon pepper wet wings — they’re cooking up a story. Expect a bowl of reheated bullshit about the ghost of Hugo Chavez rigging voting machines in 2020 to be the excuse they use to “fix” our midterm elections. I’m sure Maduro will testify.

All this is to say: yes, you need to be prepared to get off your ass and in the streets to protest. And you need to get out and vote.

But the most powerful weapon in our arsenal may be just sitting your ass at home.

Strikes are the primary weapon of unions for a reason: they fucking work. No one makes money if the workers don’t work. Now scale it up. What happens if the bus/train never arrives? Or the doctors don’t make it to the hospital? If the teachers don’t teach?

A national strike is a powerful thing. That’s why I was so encouraged to hear Senator Ruben Gallego bring it up on “The Court of History” podcast.

“We have to prepare for … the worst scenario, which is they try to either capture the ballot box as ballots are being counted, they try to stop the count, they try to surround polling places, whatever it is,” said Gallego.

“We need to make sure that we have an ultimate response to that which, I believe, has to be a true national strike in the sense that, if they do this, if they try to overthrow our democracy, if you are allied with democracy, do not go to work. If you’re a pilot, do not show up. If you drive a train, do not show up. If you’re a teacher, do not show up. We grind the country to a halt.”

The Epstein administration is desperate, and packed full of sociopaths, Christian Nationalists, and career criminals. They’ve been planning this for decades and this is their big shot. They know they’re unpopular and they know they can’t win in a fair fight. These midterms, we’re playing for all the chips.

Strikes are risky. You could lose your job, hurt your career, or miss a major car/home/tuition payment.

Know what’s even riskier, though? Letting Republicans steal democracy and just sorta hoping it all works out, because someone will do something, won’t they?

No. No one is coming to save us. “Someone else” got fired by DOGE. And fascism will not skip over you if you’re a good boy/girl. You can’t keep your head down and wait it out. It comes for everyone, eventually. Its enemies, but also its own architects.

Back at ASA College, I understood that not all my colleagues could risk unionizing. They weren’t going to risk their jobs over the cost of A4 paper. But what I also understood, even back then was this: it doesn’t END with the paper. It doesn’t end with the little things. That’s where it begins. And in America today, we are quite fucking far past the “little things.”

Eventually I quit the job. I came to realize it was a predatory for-profit, a scam of a school bilking both the government and students. And I forgave/made peace with my colleagues. Yes, even Ratso. I gave my 2 week notice, and the next day they fired me. So as a final fuck-you, I wrote a tell-all for The Huffington Post about how big of a shitshow the school was.

ASA didn’t lose their accreditation right away. That would take another eight years. They weren’t forced to shut down overnight, either. That would take another year. But their corruption caught up with them. They’re gone now.

For the midterms, the stakes are a wee bit higher. WHEN the president tries to rig the midterms/stop the voting/seize the voting machines/block the electors — and it is WHEN, not IF — we all need to be prepared. Prepared to hit the street and march to the ballot box, yes. Prepared to march right through ICE to get there, if necessary. And this time if you’re too scared to participate, I won’t forgive OR make peace. If you ain’t down — bullshit.

But also: prepared to sit your ass at home, and “grind the nation to a halt.” I’ll close with Senator Gallego’s words: “We’re not going to keep going to work and boosting the world’s greatest economy in exchange for us to give up on democracy.

“If we have to destroy the stock market to save democracy, we need to accept that and, more importantly, the richest and the most powerful people in the world and in this country need to understand that that is a real possibility. There is no economic stability without democratic stability. If you take away our democratic stability, we will take away the economic stability.”