ADOPTING THE ST. PAUL PRINCIPLES
Let’s begin with a thought experiment, because the best arguments always do and the worst ones skip straight to the yelling.
You and nine strangers agree — bone-deep, beyond debate — that you hate the same thing. You’re going to do something about it. Together. The only question that matters before you take a single step is this: do you spend your energy fighting the thing you hate, or do you spend it arguing with each other about the correct way to fight the thing you hate?
If you answered “the second one,” congratulations. You have just described American progressive activism for roughly forty years, several revolutions that ended in firing squads, and every group project you did in school where one person did everything and everyone else argued about the font.
This is not a character flaw. It is a structural problem. And structural problems — unlike your uncle’s politics, your group chat, or the American healthcare system — can actually be fixed.
Enter the St. Paul Principles.
Born from the organizing chaos surrounding the 2008 Republican National Convention — when St. Paul, Minnesota became a temporary surveillance state and activists of wildly different flavors had to figure out how to coexist without eating each other alive — these four principles became one of the most quietly powerful frameworks in modern American movement history. They have no celebrity spokesperson. No Super PAC. No merch table. They just work.
Here’s what they say. Here’s why they matter. And here’s why, if your organization isn’t operating by them, you are — with full sincerity and zero pleasure in saying it — doing the government’s job for free.
Principle One: Respect for a Diversity of Tactics
“Our solidarity will be based on respect for a diversity of tactics and the plans of other groups.”
Translation: your way of fighting is not the only way of fighting, and it would be genuinely embarrassing if the state didn’t have to neutralize your movement because you neutralized it yourself.
Some people make art. Some people make noise. Some people write court filings and some people generate the kind of scenes that end up in court filings. Some people pray, some people picket, some people block traffic, and some people dress in ridiculous costumes and hand out protest dildos.
The person who believes that only their tactic is valid is not a strategist. They’re a hobbyist who got political. A general with one move isn’t running a campaign — they’re running a play, and when the defense adjusts, they’re done.
Every successful social movement in recorded history operated as a broad coalition with diverse methods. The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the sit-ins and the freedom rides were not the same tactic. The legal challenges, the street heat, the economic pressure of the Civil Rights Movement were not interchangeable. They were a symphony. Every instrument matters. The mistake is auditioning people out of the orchestra because their instrument sounds different from yours.
You don’t have to love every tactic. You don’t have to participate in every tactic. You are allowed to have opinions about every tactic — and you are encouraged to share them in the room, at the meeting, over bad coffee and worse folding chairs. What you are not allowed to do, under any framework that has ever actually worked, is take those opinions public in a way that feeds the opposition’s narrative and hands the state a pretext.
Principle Two: Separation of Time or Space
“The actions and tactics used will be organized to maintain a separation of time or space.”
This is the operational one. It’s the one most often mistaken for bureaucratic fussiness by people who have never had to explain to a lawyer why they were at a location they technically weren’t supposed to be at while someone else was doing something they technically weren’t supposed to do.
It is not fussiness. It is architecture.
You do not hold a candlelight vigil directly adjacent to a building occupation. You do not run a legal permitted march and a direct action from the same organizing infrastructure, the same Signal group, with the same names on the permit application. Not because either is wrong. Because when they bleed together, everyone gets painted with the same brush — by the state, by the media, by the prosecutors actively looking for reasons to expand the scope of an indictment.
Consider the current landscape. The FBI is actively investigating Minnesota Signal groups used to track ICE movements. ICE has deployed facial recognition in the field. Surveillance contractors are building “day-in-the-life” profiles of activists from social media, location data, and cell tower records. Federal agents are knocking on doors asking who paid for protest signs. This is not paranoia. This is the documented news cycle of the last six months.
Separation of time and space is not a formality. It is load-bearing infrastructure. It is how movements survive contact with a state that has significantly more resources than they do.
Principle Three: Keep Criticism Internal
“Any debates or criticisms will stay internal to the movement, avoiding any public or media denunciations of fellow activists and events.”
Oh, this one. This one.
This is the principle every activist organization learns the hard way — usually around the time someone posts a seventeen-part thread denouncing a sister organization’s tactics, which gets picked up by a right-wing account with four hundred thousand followers, which gets screenshot by a journalist looking for an “activists divided” story, which becomes the entire news cycle about your movement instead of the thing your movement was actually trying to achieve.
Let’s be precise about what this principle is and isn’t. It is not a gag order. It is not a demand for compliance or the suppression of legitimate grievance. Movements that cannot self-critique calcify and die, and nothing in the St. Paul Principles suggests otherwise. The principle is not “shut up.” The principle is: have the argument in private, not in the press.
There is a difference between accountability and ammunition. When you publicly denounce a fellow activist in a way that can be — and will be — used by the state or hostile media to discredit the broader movement, you are not performing accountability. You are doing the opposition’s communications strategy. For free. Without a contract. Without benefits. Without even the dignity of being paid to undermine your own cause.
“People have made the mistake of confusing the methods with the objectives. As long as we agree on objectives, we should never fall out with each other just because we believe in different methods or tactics or strategy to reach a common goal.”
— Malcolm X
COINTELPRO didn’t try to destroy the Black Panthers by being stronger than them. It destroyed them by being inside them — manufacturing conflict, feeding paranoia, forging letters, turning the movement’s energy inward until there was nothing left to aim outward. The lesson is not “don’t have internal conflict.” The lesson is: keep internal conflict internal, or someone else will use it as a weapon against you.
The movement has real enemies. They have resources, lawyers, databases, surveillance contracts, and a Justice Department that is classifying protest as potential domestic terrorism. What they cannot manufacture and cannot buy is your solidarity. Do not give it away for the temporary satisfaction of being publicly right.
Principle Four: Oppose State Repression. Full Stop.
“We oppose any state repression of dissent, including surveillance, infiltration, disruption and violence. We agree not to assist law enforcement actions against activists and others.”
This is the one that makes some people squirm, and the squirming is almost always a reliable indicator of how thoroughly the system has been internalized.
“But what if an activist does something actually bad?” you ask, reasonably. And the answer is: there is a court system. There are lawyers. There is a whole elaborate apparatus designed, in theory, to adjudicate human behavior. What there is not, and should not be, is you providing law enforcement with operational intelligence about fellow organizers because you disagreed with their methods, because you found them embarrassing, because a federal agent knocked on your door and seemed genuinely understanding about the whole thing.
They are trained for that knock. You are not.
Law enforcement officers are legally permitted to lie to you. Enthusiastically. With a straight face and a business card. Federal agents can threaten your family. They can present false evidence. They can tell you your friend already talked, so you might as well. They can make a situation feel so inevitable that cooperation seems like the only rational choice. None of this is hypothetical. All of it is documented. All of it is legal.
The best defense is to say nothing and call a lawyer.
“Don’t assist law enforcement actions against activists” is not moral cover for anything. It is a clear-eyed recognition that the legal system, when deployed against social movements, is not primarily interested in justice. It is interested in disruption. It is interested in chilling effect. It is interested in making the cost of organizing feel prohibitive.
Don’t be a mechanism of that interest, even inadvertently, even with good intentions, even under pressure.
Why This Is Imperative, Not Merely Advisable
The St. Paul Principles are not romantic. They do not make for a stirring speech. They will not trend. They are the unglamorous, load-bearing plumbing of a movement that wants to last longer than one news cycle, survive one election cycle, outlast one administration’s particular brand of repression, and actually change something instead of becoming a beautifully documented episode of noble failure.
The state doesn’t need to beat you. It just needs you to beat yourself.
Adopt these principles. Not because they’re comfortable. Not because they feel good. Because the alternative is losing — slowly, publicly, and almost entirely by your own hand. And frankly, the people on the other side of this are already insufferable enough without giving them the satisfaction of watching you do their work for them.
The thistle — prickled, ornery, impossible to uproot — does not survive by fighting itself. It survives by being rooted deeply enough that nothing from the outside can pull it out.
Cultivate resistance. Keep it internal. Respect the diversity of how it grows.
Rook T. Winchester is the founder and editor of Closer to the Edge, a 100% reader-supported gonzo journalism publication based in St. Paul, Minnesota.
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