The Art of Non-Violent Guerrilla Warfare

and the women who waged it best

It happened sooner than I expected. I thought they would wait a year at least to federalize the National Guard and deploy the Marines against the American people.

But I was wrong.

The fact is, this is MAGA's blitzkrieg. Or, at the very least, it is their Beer Hall Putsch, which, while it failed, raised the profile of the Nazis and their leader, Adolf Hitler.

If we are not wise, history will repeat itself.

Yet, even in these dark times I find myself with a great deal of hope. The American people are rising up. From Los Angeles to New York, from Great Bend, Kansas, to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, thousands of Americans are taking to the streets to protest the brutality of Gestapo copycats ICE and the unconstitutional actions of this regime. Millions more will join them this Saturday, June 14, in the No Kings Protests happening all across America.

To paraphrase Dolores Huerta, we are getting off the sidewalks and into the streets of history.

Make no mistake, this is the beginning of a new American Revolution. This is where we make our stand in defense of freedom and justice for all. And just as the first American Revolution, this will be a guerrilla war.

Yet, if we are to prevail, we cannot use violence in this fight. Not once. Not ever.

Even so, the principles of guerrilla warfare remain equally useful, and if we can successfully employ them, we will win.

Below, I've outlined the three principle rules of guerrilla warfare as defined by combat journalist Dickey Chapelle, who spent her career reporting on limited engagements and who died while covering the Marines in Vietnam. From Hungary to Algeria, Cuba, and Laos, she spent more time with freedom fighters around the world than any other journalist in history. Her expertise and insight are unmatched, and I hope you find my adaptation of her wisdom to our own moment helpful.

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Rule #1: Do Not Let Your Enemy Choose The Field Of Battle.

The Battles of Lexington and Concord, the first major military skirmishes of the American War for Independence, were not fought solely on the open field as the British would have liked. Instead, the Continental Army redefined the field of battle as one that existed behind trees, on rooftops, and in ditches. British forces were subject to potshots while marching, and the American troops spread misinformation through its network of spies.

The Americans - and not the British, defined the field of battle, and so they won.

By federalizing the National Guard and deploying the Marines, the Trump Administration is signaling they want to fight this battle on the field of violence because it is here they have the upper hand.

Not only because they have far superior firepower. But also because the vast majority of the American public believes that if the Armed Services are fired on, they are justified in firing back.

By moving the field of battle to one of non-violence, we gain the higher ground - not morally, not they go low we go etc - but from a strategic military perspective. It is here that we can most effectively fight with the weapons available to us.

Rule #2: Use Your Enemy's Weapons Against Them

During the Algerian War of Independence, the National Liberation Front relied on the resources it could seize from the French in its quest for liberty. This wasn't just about weapons but also about knowledge. Many of those in the NLF had fought alongside the French in WWII, learning important lessons about munitions and strategy that they, in turn, effectively deployed against their colonial oppressors.

In our moment, I am NOT talking about guns. I am talking about the media.

The greatest weapon authoritarianism has in this country is the corporate media.

If you decide to protest this Saturday, be sure to wear your best. Maybe that's a ballgown. Maybe that's a suit. Maybe that's your favorite T-shirt. Whatever it is, look like you're about your business, and your business is the defense of democracy. The media will have a hard time labeling us as insurrectionists if we show up looking like who we are - patriots and defenders of democracy.

If you are threatened with or even experience violence, do what you can to resist responding in kind. Not because we are weak. But because we are strong. We are committed to non-violence against all people. Non-violence for disappeared Native women. For ICE's human trafficking victims. For Black people. FOR ALL PEOPLE - even if that means that we must ourselves endure violence.

In the words of Gandhi, be the change that you want to see in the world.

Be non-violence.

The corporate media currently enabling the authoritarian aspirations of the Trump Administration will be unable to bend the light of your truth if you can adhere to non-violence.

Nor can we equate throwing flash bangs back, graffiti, or broken police car windows with the kind of state led violence that is being visited on citizens exercising their First Amendment Rights. This is the tactic of authoritarians to delegitimize our cause.

But know this: In large cities, undercover government operatives will be planted with protestors in order to incite violence. Be wary of anyone encouraging you to break the law - even if you have known that person for weeks, months, and sometimes even years. The FBI has long used these tactics to undermine social movements. Assume that they are now.

Rule #3: Never Stop Acting

The Cuban Revolutionary Army did not beat the US-supplied Military Dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista with superior firepower. Indeed, they were outgunned in every engagement.

While Castro turned out to be a tyrant, the intentions of the men and women fighting for freedom in Cuba were no less just than those of our own revolutionary founders. And they won because they never stopped acting. Part of that was their fearlessness in battle when they fired ceaselessly at their enemy.

But more, they waged a war of constant engagement. Before the firing began, the revolutionaries encouraged Batista's troops to defect. Prisoners taken by the revolutionaries were treated humanely and often released soon after their capture, but not before they told Batista was the enemy of the people and given an open invitation to join their side.

They took action in every moment of engagement and found moments of engagement wherever they could.

If you find the opportunity, talk to those on the other side, especially National Guardsmen and other military personnel who do not want to be where they are and many of whom know they should not be.

Rule #4: Wars Are Not Won On Maps But In Hearts and Minds

The Viet Cong and all their iterations were awful. Full stop. However, what they understood, which allowed them to defeat the French, American, and Chinese armed forces, was that wars are no longer won and lost on maps.

Victory is decided in the hearts and minds of the people.

That is what we must win. When you speak, move, act, chant, sing, have the hearts and minds of those you wish to connect with, sway, galvanize, and inspire at the core of your actions.

Rule #5: Remember What We’re Fighting For

This fight isn't about me. It isn't about you. It's about us. It's about We The People.

With every fiber of our being, we must act with the best intention for We The People this Saturday and every day. If we can do this, we will win this battle and also this war. And not just for us but for all humankind.

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For generations, women have been using these non-violent guerrilla tactics with immense skill to achieve immense success.

Here are 4 examples of such women who despite experiencing political violence persisted nevertheless and remained steadfast in their commitment to non-violence for all people

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Alice Paul

Alice Paul was no stranger to political violence. As one of the most effective suffragists of her time, she faced imprisonment, force-feeding, and physical assault at the hands of those determined to silence her. Yet through it all, she remained steadfast in her belief that nonviolent resistance was the most powerful tool for political change.

Born into a Quaker family committed to social justice, Paul was deeply influenced by the nonviolent teachings of her faith. After earning a Ph.D. in political science, she traveled to England, where she joined the militant suffrage movement and was arrested multiple times for her activism. Upon returning to the U.S., she brought with her the bold tactics she had learned abroad, picketing, parades, hunger strikes but adapted them to fit her unwavering belief in peaceful protest.

In 1917, as leader of the National Woman’s Party, Paul organized the Silent Sentinels, the first group to ever picket the White House. For months, the women stood with signs demanding the vote while enduring arrest, ridicule, and violence. More than once Paul and her compatriots were physically assaulted by passersby and the police. Along with several others, Paul was sentenced to solitary confinement, where she initiated a hunger strike and was subsequently force-fed, not for the first time. Her jailers shoved a large tube up her nose, then down her esophagus and into her stomach. They did it to break her. But she would not be broken.

Instead, Paul expertly manipulated the press in order to galvanize public support and shame the government into action. Her unrelenting moral clarity and strategic brilliance helped secure the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920.

Paul’s experience illustrates a profound truth: nonviolence is not passive. It is an act of courage and discipline in the face of brutality. Her legacy continues to inspire those who believe in justice through peace and reminds us that lasting change often begins with quiet resistance, held firm by an unshakable will.

Emma Tenayuca

In the searing heat of 1930s San Antonio, Emma Tenayuca stood on the frontlines of one of the most consequential labor struggles in American history. Just 21 years old when she led the 1938 Pecan Shellers’ Strike, Tenayuca rallied more than 12,000 Mexican American workers, mostly women, who worked under brutal conditions in the city’s pecan factories for starvation wages. Her courage and clarity of purpose made her a beacon for working-class Latinas. It also made her a target.

For daring to demand justice, Tenayuca was arrested, threatened, and violently attacked. Police routinely turned a blind eye as mobs gathered to intimidate her. In 1939, when she was scheduled to speak at the San Antonio Municipal Auditorium, a white supremacist riot broke out. Rather than arrest the racist, lawbreaking mob, the police shoved her the back door. She was forced to leave her city, blacklisted and branded a radical.

And yet, through it all, Tenayuca never wavered in her commitment to non-violence. Inspired by her Catholic upbringing and a deep belief in the dignity of all people, she saw organizing not as an act of war, but as a form of love, a collective refusal to accept injustice. “I was arrested a number of times,” she once said. “I never thought in terms of fear. I thought in terms of justice.”

enayuca’s story is a reminder that political violence is by those who fear the power of working-class women of color. Her legacy lives on in every movement that dares to link economic justice with racial and gender equality and insists, like Emma did, that true power is built in peace, but never in silence.

Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer’s political awakening came with violence, but her response to it was a resolute and radical form of nonviolence rooted in faith, community, and courage. Born in 1917 to Mississippi sharecroppers, Hamer understood from an early age the brutal realities of systemic racism and economic oppression. But it wasn’t until 1962, was fired from her job as retribution for attempting to register to vote, that she committed her life to the fight for Black political power.

Hamer’s activism placed her in constant danger. In 1963, after attending a voter registration workshop in South Carolina, she and other activists were arrested and brutally beaten in a Winona, Mississippi jail. The attack left her with permanent injuries, including kidney damage.

But Hamer refuse to retreat. “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired,” she declared, words that would become a rallying cry for a generation.

Despite the violence she endured, Hamer believed deeply in the power of peaceful resistance and grassroots organizing. Through the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), she traveled the country educating, registering, and mobilizing Black voters. In 1964, she co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the all-white Mississippi delegation at the Democratic National Convention, famously testifying on national television about the violence she faced simply for trying to vote.

Hamer’s belief in nonviolence was not about passivity; it was about moral authority, community strength, and confronting injustice without replicating it.

Her voice, clear, strong, and uncompromising, cut through the noise of American politics and forced the nation to reckon with its own hypocrisy. In her life and legacy, we see that nonviolence, when rooted in righteous anger and collective hope, can move even the most immovable systems.

Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day’s commitment to justice was forged in resistance and deepened by faith. Long before she co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement, she stood on the front lines of the suffrage struggle. In 1917, as a young activist, Day joined Alice Paul and the Silent Sentinels in picketing the White House for women’s right to vote, an act that led to her arrest and imprisonment in the Occoquan Workhouse. There, she endured the same brutal treatment that Paul and others faced, including unsanitary conditions and psychological abuse. It was an experience that left a lasting impression and ignited her lifelong belief in the moral power of nonviolent protest.

Day’s early brush with political violence helped shape her radical pacifism and unwavering support for the poor. In 1933, she co-founded the Catholic Worker, a newspaper and movement that fused direct aid, communal living, and political resistance. She stood against war, capitalism’s exploitation, and injustice in all forms, often at great personal cost.

Dorothy Day’s legacy lives at the intersection of protest and peace. Her solidarity with women like Alice Paul and her decades of anti-violence activism demonstrate how spiritual conviction and political courage can work in tandem. In her words and actions, Day reminds us that nonviolence is not just a tactic but a way of life. One that refuses to turn away from suffering and instead meets it with compassion, courage, and community.