The Three Tier Model for Reclaiming Democracy.
Bottom Line Up Front: This article is the introduction to a free 32-page booklet. The booklet explains the three-tier framework for state-level opposition: uncooperative federalism (refuse to help), soft secession (build parallel systems and institutional independence), and oppositional federalism (go on offense through prosecution, litigation, and legislative aggression). Each tier creates the conditions for the next. Download it here: Just click on this sentence.
Check out The Existentialist Republic YouTube channel for more: Just click on this sentence.
So far in 2026, the administration has bombed a foreign capital, kidnapped a head of state, and announced it would seize the country's oil. An ICE agent killed an American mother in Minneapolis. The administration refused to charge him. Agents began telling residents they would shoot them in the head too.
The Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into the chair of the Federal Reserve. The State Department paused immigrant visas for seventy-five countries. The administration withdrew from sixty-six international organizations. A Reagan-appointed judge said cabinet secretaries engaged in an unconstitutional conspiracy.
The previous year brought approximately 317,000 federal workers departing government service through layoffs, buyouts, and resignations, more than 66,000 people held in immigration detention, and camps operating across the country to hold the surge. Courts issued more than 200 orders blocking administration actions, and officials defied, delayed, or manipulated roughly a third of adverse rulings. The Supreme Court sided with the administration in twenty of twenty-five emergency cases, often without written explanation.
Here is what we need to understand about the people doing this: they didn't build the machine. The Republican Party spent decades constructing infrastructure to entrench minority rule through gerrymandered maps, captured courts, and voter suppression laws. The current administration took it over and added something the establishment never had: a strategy for chaos. Flood the zone, move faster than opponents can react, break things before anyone can stop you. Now they have both the infrastructure and the tactics, the captured courts and the willingness to ignore them when convenient.
Even winning the midterms won't undo this. Congress can't enforce its own subpoenas, lower courts issue rulings the administration ignores, and the Supreme Court takes years to hear challenges while rubber-stamping emergency orders that let the administration proceed. Every conventional path runs through institutions that have already failed. The federal government is captured.
Assume nobody is coming to save us; that's a strategic necessity.
Assume no court will ride to the rescue. No election will undo what's already been built. The cavalry isn't late; there is no cavalry.
Those are helpful assumptions so we can plan with the resources we know are at our disposal. Here is what we have: they didn't capture everything.
Fifty state governments with their own criminal codes, their own prosecutors, their own courts, and constitutional authority the federal government cannot override. When a federal official commits a crime within a state's borders, that state can prosecute them under state law, and no presidential pardon can touch the conviction. When the federal government demands state cooperation with enforcement, states can refuse, and no federal command can compel them. These powers build on each other: refusal creates space, independence creates resilience, and both create the conditions for attack.
The doctrines are not theories. The Supreme Court has affirmed them repeatedly. Conservative jurists built the framework, and now it's available to anyone willing to use it.
The booklet explains how. By the end, you will know exactly what to do and why it can work.
They flooded the zone because they understood that the side moving faster wins. They went from 4chan message boards to the Situation Room in two and a half years. We have fifty state governments, twenty-two coordinated attorneys general, and constitutional doctrines they cannot pardon their way around.
Now we flood the zone back.
Download the full booklet (free, 32 pages, fully cited): Click this text
Check out The Existentialist Republic YouTube channel for more: Click this text
"We have it in our power to begin the world over again." — Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
Written by Chris Armitage
Author, Former Law Enforcement, Policy Advisor. https://www.goodreads.com/chrisarmitage https://www.amazon.com/author/armitage TheExistentialistRepublic.com
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