I think many kind-hearted liberal folks might think "fighting back" means lying and cheating like the GOP.
It doesn't have to.
We can fight for democracy and rights using something called the OODA loop.
"The strength of OODA thinking is that incorporates adversaries."
Many kind-hearted people don't like confrontation.
OODA is perfect for you.
It lets you be strategic in such a way that your opponent defeats themselves.
The OODA concept was created by Colonel John Boyd
fighter pilot, dogfighter,
designer of jets, teacher, leader,
and an exceptionally literate master strategist.
Observe means to have situational awareness, to identify dangers, to spot trends, to notice vulnerabilities and possibilities in the problem at hand.
Mindfulness of what is going on inside you, your surroundings, in your community, and in the world.
Orient pre-supposes you know what you want. To orient is to align yourself with your goal or desired outcome in accordance with what you observe in preparation for later thought and action.
Position yourself so that you can have maximum impact while suffering minimal damage.
Decide is taking the theory of the world you've developed and coming up with a hypothesis or plan for achieving what you want.
To reduce gun violence,
to improve policing,
to reduce institutional racism,
to disrupt the fascists' operations...
you decide on a course of actions.
Act is to carry out your plan, and to pay attention if your actions are having the desired effect.
Which leads us back to observe.
In real life, this is a model of how it is to be in the world and survive, continuously doing all four at the same time and refining each as time progresses.
For more intellectual pursuits, you may do it more sequentially, like when the adversary is not a person but something like a logistical challenge or a business problem.
Same when a group of people is addressing a problem -- you can step through it sequentially.
The beauty of OODA is that it lets you form a theory about what your opponent's OODA loop is.
You can analyze your opponent
and identify
what is available for observation to them,
what their orientation is,
what their decisions may be, and
what their actions are likely to be.
This is how using OODA can let kind-hearted people fight like noble warriors Sun Tzu would be proud of...
by disrupting you opponent's
orientation
decisions
and nullify any gains their actions may bring.
No confrontation, angry words, nor violent action needed.
"The greatest victory is that which requires no battle"
The problem with "conservative" philosophies is they assume human nature is eternal, that we're flawed and selfish.
Combined with a closed view of scarcity - finite resources - means their analysis tends to justify selfish behavior.
"When there's so only so much to go around, the most fit will strive to dominate and control resources to ensure they survive and thrive in the future; they also assume all intelligent actors will have the same bias"
Such a view overlooks the dynamism of intelligence and time.
Energy is constantly flowing into the biosphere; insight is constantly re-aligning knowledge.
Given Gödel's incompleteness theorem, any finite view we have today is imperfect, and only in time can it be reframed and re-synthesized...