The rapid escalation of violent, deadly, militarized policing in this country has left most of us frightened and confused.
Oppressed peoples say, welcome to our world.
These past months of praying, studying and writing about settler-colonialism in this land have been accompanied by a small voice asking, who is colonized now? As a white male, I have been among the privileged in this society. At least until lately.
The colonizers are the beneficiaries of the settler state, which is a continuous structure rather than a historical event. The originally colonized are the Indigenous peoples whose land, assets, and sovereignty were stolen to create the United States. Every land deed held by a settler individual or institution is rooted in the 15th-century legal heresy known as the Doctrine of Discovery, which gave Christian monarchs a perceived divine right to seize non-Christian lands. Today, the “Economic Draft” expands the definition of the colonized to include those trapped by manufactured scarcity: the poor funneled into the military through the Poverty Draft, the working class captured by Job Lock through employer-sponsored healthcare, and the educated class held in Indentured Servitude by student debt.
The Economic Draft is the silent mechanism and enforcement arm of Christian Colonial Capitalist Violence (CCV). This fused system of violence compels participation in harmful industries not by legal statute, but by weaponizing the existential necessity of survival. It leverages the threat of starvation, homelessness, and medical bankruptcy to force populations into the service of extractive capitalism and the war machine. The carceral state—police and prisons—exists primarily to protect the property relations established by colonial theft. In the architecture of the Economic Draft, the police are the enforcers who execute evictions and criminalize the poverty that the draft preys upon.
The response of the New Conscientious Objector (NewCO) is an active refusal to participate in this fused architecture of violence. The NewCO response requires a Symmetrical Antidote built on three inseparable pillars: LANDBACK, Mutual Aid, and Abolition. Mutual Aid serves as the logistics of the response, providing the “rations”—unconditional food, housing, and care—that allow individuals to “desert” the Economic Draft without facing deprivation. Abolition involves systemic non-collaboration with the carceral state, divesting from systems of harm and investing in community-based safety like the Healing Justice House. LANDBACK is the foundational requirement because it addresses the original theft that enables the contemporary Economic Draft. By returning land to Indigenous stewardship, the NewCO removes the legal pretext for state-enforced evictions and creates the physical territory necessary for Mutual Aid.
Indigenous leadership is the non-negotiable foundation of this framework. The NewCO model requires “Transformative Accomplice-ship,” where participants defer to the strategic leadership of Indigenous-led organizations like the Great Plains Action Society (GPAS). GPAS provides the strategic vision, moving beyond protest to the construction of a decolonized future through ReMatriation. As a Quaker, I have been working to implement this as an expression of Radical Faithfulness, acting immediately when a spiritual crisis occurs rather than falling into the trap of gradualism. Local implementation must include conducting forensic title research to audit Meetinghouse deeds for roots in the Doctrine of Discovery and treating the meeting’s presence on stolen land as a tenancy requiring a monthly voluntary land tax paid to the Honor Native Land Fund (HNLF), for example
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