All of us are screwed. No one is going to get out of this intact. If you're very lucky, you'll just have friends and family who have perished or are alive, traumatized and possibly maimed or gone mad from the forthcoming era. The first step is to recognize your own future is FUBAR. Now you're living to fight so that future generations might have a chance at not having to do this.
Secondly, come to terms that you're going to be in harms way. The protests that matter will be sucking up CS gas. Paramedics will be digging less-lethal bullets out of their flesh. Riot police will beat the crap out of you, maybe permanently injure you, or kill you just as apathetically as Derek Chauvin nonchalantly murdered George Floyd. If you're lucky, it'll get captured on civilian video, there will be witnesses. You'll be dead, but that death will escalate the resistance movement. When the public sees the trauma it drives them to get involved, to take action, to realize that if they don't stand on the front line, the front line will come to them.
The protests that matter are ones that scare the MAGA movement, that scare VIPs, and they will either send the police to silence you, or get friends to send the police to silence you. So at the point you hear gunfire, or feel your eyes burn, or are facing a line behind riot shields and staring down the barrel of a sniper, it means the protest you're presently in is harshing the calm of the right people.
In proper COIN (counter insurrection) the police will want to contain protests, keep them from getting violent and let the protestors scream their heads off until they get tired. Meanwhile public officials make promises to fix the problem. Hearts and minds. Trump can't help himself but not do this. Nor can the rest of MAGA, nor the Seven Mountain Mandate or the general white Christian nationalist movement. They'll send the police in with full anti-riot ordnance, and it will suck. But this kind of behavior against peaceful protests will ultimately mobilize the public. When you have (about) 3.5% of the public active in the resistance, then it starts looking like an actual revolution.
When the police switch to real bullets (or let civilian militias do the same), it becomes a state of civil war. If you're a protest, the protest is over, and it's time to escape, rally, and look to serve the war effort. Expect everyone you know to end up either dead or not quite alive (maimed, critically wounded, traumatized, etc.) No one gets out intact.
Peaceful protests have a better chance of implementing change. The sooner we can face down the autocrats and their MAGA goons, the fewer people have to suffer trauma or die to stop them. In the worst case, Chinese bombers will hammer Washington until some official relays an unconditional surrender. Let's not let it get there.
