Do It Anyway

DO IT ANYWAY

By Brochan Thorn

I am a son of Appalachia.

I know what despair feels like. Not as a concept. Not as a political talking point. As a way of life. My father was a janitor. My mother was a babysitter. We raised our own food — corn, beans, tomatoes, chickens, and rabbits. You learn things growing up like that. You learn that hard is not the same as hopeless. You learn that you get up anyway. Because there is no other option. Because the corn doesn’t care how you feel.

I have been called a curmudgeon. A paranoid man who sees trouble coming from a mile away. I’ve been told that telling the truth makes people uncomfortable. Well, good.

When I set out to write this series of essays, I thought I knew how bad it was.

I didn’t.

Ten essays. Ten threads pulled. Language stolen. Symbols stolen. Religion stripped of everything that made it noble. Institutions gutted and sold. Your privacy — not taken, you handed it over and they made you feel clever for doing it. And now, sitting here with the research spread out in front of me, I am going to tell you something I don’t say lightly.

I am angry. I have been angry since Essay 1. That hasn’t changed.

But underneath the anger, if I’m honest with you — and I’ve been nothing but honest with you for ten essays — there is something else.

Helplessness.

Not defeat. There’s a difference. Defeat is when you stop. Helplessness is when you don’t know where to put your hands.

If you’ve read this far — all ten essays — I suspect you know exactly what I mean. Because you’re sitting in it too.

When I look at all the protests going on I see performance. Not real action, but the pretense of action. But when I watched those regular people stand up in Minneapolis, I felt something move in me. It wasn’t just pride, though I was proud. It wasn’t just hope, though it did give me hope. It showed me the America I knew from the 1960s. Yes, there were “Four Dead in Ohio”, but there was a backbone to the protests and we Did Not Give Up. The youth of America were being sent to die in Vietnam and we had had enough. It’s a different decade but the same fight. Different costumes but the same enemy. Now it’s happening again and the people have had enough. The masked thugs Cos-playing as federal agents killed at least two innocent people on the streets of Minneapolis. Murdered them in cold blood. Renée Good and Alex Pretti murdered and called terrorists by a government that more closely resembles terrorists than the murdered victims. But that didn’t stop the people of Minneapolis. No, they doubled down and they got the top two leaders of ICE removed from their positions. I saw these housewives, these plumbers, these regular Americans stand up to armed, masked thugs. And for the first time in a while I believed. I believed in us. I believed in the people once again. We can do this. Yes We Can!

I still believe in us but now I have seen the man behind the curtain and unlike the Wizard in Oz, this one is malevolent, twisted and ridden with greed. The people that are infected with this greed seem to have no control over their affliction. And like streams and rivers they simply flow downward until they hit a dam. We must be the dam. The people of Minneapolis showed us how. Now we have to take the energy of the “No Kings” performance and transfer that energy to real physical resistance. We have the numbers and the people have their eyes open. The No Kings protesters have the right anger. They have the numbers. But anger in the streets is a show. It’s a show of numbers and that’s good. But the powerful have learned to wait for the weather to change. What they cannot wait out is disruption that costs them something. So now we have to find a way to put that power, those crowds where they would cause real disruption. Because as my generation found out there is no change without disruption. But the enemy has tools. They are watching you. Listening to you. Tracking you. When you march they know. When you are protesting they are gathering information with an array of devices and systems so that even your face can be used against you. They have face recognition software. They can track your phone. But for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Or so some wise man once said. So we change tactics. Put in the effort to find and implement devices of our own. Use methods of camouflage known to thwart facial recognition. Use video cameras other than your phones and don’t take your real phone to an event, especially one that is causing real disruption. Organizers need to think about this when they are putting these protests on. The numbers are the key but put them in the right place at the right time.

Numbers. Timing. Place. These are things our enemy understands very well. And we have to have some nuance here. We absolutely can’t use violence because that would play right into the tyrant’s playbook. But when those people rioted at the Capitol they weren’t there on their own accord. They were motivated, directed, moved like pieces on a chess board. But the people who put them there knew that the place and the time and the numbers were the disruption they needed. If we have any chance of getting through this mess in one piece we have got to get smart. Strategic. And we have to adopt any non-violent tactics we can. We have to get sneaky and we have to be where the battle is being fought. On the ground. In the room where it happens. Not above it. I loved the Obamas but I have to tell you, when I heard Michelle Obama say “when they go low, we go high”, I had a sick feeling in my gut. What I heard was “we the privileged can go high…high up into our penthouses and avoid the fray.” Oh Hell NO! We have to be where the battle is. That’s what Minneapolis did. They got down and dirty. And they won.

I’ve touched on the surveillance methods being used on the street. Now let’s talk about something much more sinister yet common. The surveillance in your home. Smart TVs. Your phone. The Ring cameras they sold you to keep your family safe that are now used to inform police and use your videos against you. And in case you didn’t know, Ring is owned by Jeff Bezos, the same man that owns Alexa, Amazon and the Washington Post. And he made sure that the Post didn’t endorse Kamala Harris. Bezos gave two million dollars to the current administration and produced the Melania Documentary. That’s way more than the cost of doing business. But let’s be clear. This is not just a businessman navigating a difficult political environment. What it is, is a man publicly, explicitly, expensively, and purposefully choosing a side. The company that made Bezos his first fortune, Amazon is currently facing a federal class action lawsuit — certified in July 2025, covering millions of registered Alexa users — alleging the company recorded billions of private conversations and stored them indefinitely, including conversations involving children, even after users specifically requested deletion. Amazon denied wrongdoing. They’re still in court.

So we can’t take any of these devices for granted. They are owned and operated by a man who is one of the clearest examples of how the rich, like rivers, flow lower and lower, morally, until the bottom collects what bottoms always collect: sediment and trash and the bodies of the innocent. It’s a psychopathy of convergence driven by their obsession. Their greed. And like Thiel, Musk and others, he always wants more and will do anything to get it.

But it’s not just the rich that end up flowing downward into the stagnant pool of moral depravity.

Ben Palmer is a Nashville comedian who is known for his “Palmer Trolls” persona. He set up a fake ICE deportation hotline. To be fair, Palmer made it seem very official. He specifically targeted the online “troll” culture surrounding the immigration topic in social media. The resulting phone calls were an up close and personal encounter with Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity. And it fooled people. One person it fooled was a kindergarten teacher who called in to report the parents of one of her students. The child was only six years old and born in New York. A citizen of the United States of America. The teacher knew this. She called anyway. She had gone so far as to access the school’s confidential records beforehand to build her case. Palmer acted as an agent as he questioned her about her actions. He asked what evidence of illegal status she had on the parents. The teacher was unable to provide anything other than her own biased assumptions. Palmer read his notes back to the woman, “Teaches at school, wants kindergarten child’s parents deported” and the teacher responded, “you make it sound terrible.” Then Palmer brought in a fake supervisor and the teacher complained that, “He’s acting like I’m this terrible person because I’m going to deport a six year old.” Self awareness was not her forte. When The Washington Post reported it they referred to it as “the banality of evil personified.”

So the problem is systemic not constrained to the rich. People like the kindergarten teacher are enabling, encouraging and abetting the rich elite in their single-minded quest for “more”.

So what do we do? What do you do? Something. Anything. You can start by picking one thing off this list and you do it. You take what I’m giving you and you make it yours. Use your mind, your imagination and take that first step. I have found that the first step always, always leads to the next one and the one after that.

Start here. Write this number down. 1-866-OUR-VOTE. 1-866-687-8683. It is the most important number most voters in this country have never heard of. It exists to protect your vote. Use it.

And don’t forget the “No Kings” protest. It may not be a game changer but it inspires people to do more. So it does have its place. But it’s not the kind of disruption that makes the powerful uncomfortable.

Then consider this. August 11, 2026 is National Poll Worker Recruitment Day. Nobody marches for poll workers. Nobody puts them on a poster. They show up in church basements and school gymnasiums and they make sure your vote gets counted. Unglamorous. Invisible. Absolutely essential. You want to do something real? Do that.

You want to fight the surveillance machine legally? The Electronic Frontier Foundation is already in that fight. And they need reinforcements. Individual action is the fuel that powers the engine. Legislation dismantles the machine. Both matter. In 2021 Apple forced app tracking to require your consent. Ninety-six percent of American users opted out. Ninety-six. That is what informed choice at scale looks like. You have more power than they want you to know.

That first step could be simply talking to one person — really talking, the way you talk to someone you’re trying to reach. This has been documented as being more effective than marching. The Horizons Project puts the number at 51.7% versus 7.5%. Deep canvassing versus performance. One real conversation beats a crowd with signs. And the best part is you already know how to do that. You’ve been doing it for years.

While in prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: “We have learned a bit too late in the day that action springs not from thought but from a readiness for responsibility.”

“A bit too late in the day.” He wrote that from a prison cell, fourteen months before they hanged him. He knew exactly what too late looked like. And he acted anyway.

We can’t wait any longer.

I began this series of essays because I was losing my dearest, most cherished friend to propaganda from the right. The barrage of slogans and talking points had mesmerized him. I watched the critical thinking of a tournament level chess player decline to the point of regurgitating those talking points as if they had been handed down from Moses himself. I asked myself, “how does this happen.” That question led me to Bonhoeffer, and then to Robert Cialdini, who could give me the scientific explanation. He calls it the Commitment and Consistency Principle. You get someone to agree to something small. Then something slightly bigger. Then bigger still. Each yes makes the next one easier. After enough yeses the groove is worn so deep that the big ask — the one that would have horrified him twenty years ago — slides right in like it was always supposed to be there. Fox News didn’t build that groove in a day. Neither did Facebook. They built it yes by yes by yes, over years. It’s not stupidity. It’s engineering.

Voltaire knew it three hundred years ago. “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

So this is where just talking to someone becomes the single most important thing. I spend every chance talking to my friend. Yes we argue but that has always been the nature of us. Like brothers do. But now I go into each conversation with the knowledge of how he was trapped. It started with Reagan convincing him that it was poor people on welfare that was the problem, not rich men sending our jobs overseas. Thereby not only saying yes to the small ask but also priming him to aid and abet the elite class to ask the next and the next.

Bonhoeffer was a pastor. So it is apt that I quote him here: “Jesus himself did not try to convert the two thieves on the cross; he waited until one of them turned to him.”

So this is, after all, what we can do. We can’t convert the masses. But we can be there when they turn.

I can’t drag my friend back. He has to gradually find his way. So that’s what I do. I show up. I have the conversations but I go in armed with the knowledge of what ensnared him. And I just keep showing up. Because I know that the friend who could see around corners, the one who could play a game of chess with me in our mind without a board, is still in there somewhere.

Well, I have given you everything I have. I have done the research and shared it with you. I have been honest and open. So now I’m asking you to take what you can from me. Take it and move the needle. Even if it’s just a tiny bit. There are millions of us moving it just a tiny bit. That’s something.

Brochan Thorn is still listening. And getting angrier by the day.