Dateline: October 28, 2025
By: Cliff Potts

Introduction

This is the story of a lifetime spent fighting back — against ignorance, against greed, against the creeping shadow of fascism. From a fence in the mountains of Peru to the streets of Chicago, from Bible tracts to witchcraft, from Occupy to exile, it’s all the same struggle: the battle for human dignity.
I’m not famous. I never wanted to be. I’m one of the thousands who kept pushing when the headlines moved on. This is how it happened, and why it still matters.

1968 – The Fence in Peru

It’s a truism that around age ten, a child begins to see the world beyond parents, home, and school. In late 1967, I was ten years old, living in Cerro de Pasco, Peru — a mining village high in the Andes. My family lived in the “American compound,” fenced off from the native Peruvians who lived in the village below.

I used to wander to that fence line, trying to talk to the village kids on the other side. I didn’t speak their language, and they didn’t speak mine, but we tried. That’s where my activism started — not in ideology, but in curiosity. In realizing there were other kinds of people who weren’t better or worse — just different. And that difference didn’t make them less human.

It lasted only a few months, from November 1967 to March 1968, but it opened the door that never shut.

1968–1970s – Chicago, School, and the Fight to Exist

By summer of 1968 we were in Chicago — Jefferson Park — and the world turned hostile. The Democratic National Convention riots were on TV, and even at eleven, I felt the tension. My cousins treated me like an alien. They were pure Chicago kids: baseball, football, city tough. I was the odd one who’d lived abroad and didn’t care about sports. That’s when I learned how to fight — literally.

Street fights, grappling, bruises. Bullies tested me daily, and I fought back. School wasn’t easier. At Beaubien Elementary I got in trouble for correcting a teacher’s Spanish pronunciation — “llama” is “yama.” That turned into a battle with authority I never forgot. I also once wrote an essay saying the school “looked like a factory.” They didn’t like that either. I failed fourth grade, humiliated by teachers, classmates, even family.

At night, the same bullies who tormented me at school threw rocks at our house. The cops never did a thing. That was my education in power: the system protects itself, not the people. Chicago taught me to fight — in body and in principle. It took years before it ever felt like home.

1980s – Working for Jesus and Losing Faith

By the early 1980s, I’d traded street fights for moral outrage. The Reagan era’s nuclear buildup felt like collective insanity. I read Alas, Babylon and The Final Epidemic by Physicians for Social Responsibility. The message was clear: nuclear war wasn’t deterrence — it was suicide. I joined anti-nuke protests in ’82 and caught hell for it. My church, Forest Glen Baptist, treated me like a heretic. My father couldn’t believe I’d concluded on my own that nukes were bad for humanity.

After that came my “Jesus period.” I distributed tracts door-to-door for the youth group — dropping broadsides in screen doors across the neighborhood. We weren’t brave; we were just trying.

Then I ended up in San Francisco, working for Jews for Jesus off Haight Street, in the old counterculture heart of the city. For three years I ran the inserter machine in their production shop — printing, folding, mailing. I thought I was working for God. What I found was a corporate sweatshop with crosses on the walls. Professional Christians — back-stabbing, manipulative, sanctimonious — treating exploitation as holy service.

The breaking point came when I turned in my two-week notice. Instead of letting me walk out with dignity, they fired me just to prove they could. That’s when I realized how rotten the business of religion really was. The Southern Baptist Conference might have financed salvation, but what they sold was control.

1990s to 2000s – Marriage, Disillusionment, and the Turn Toward Witchcraft

After walking away from organized Christianity, I thought I was free. But religion sticks to you. In 1995, I got married. My wife was raised deep in fundamentalist Christianity, and when she got pregnant with our first son, she made faith mandatory. Bible studies, Christian radio, homeschool circles — all of it.

I went along, out of habit and misplaced peacekeeping. We bounced from California to Illinois to Wisconsin, chasing her illusions of “Christian community.” In 1998 she decided we’d move to Texas — her “Christian state.” Churches there were social clubs with Bibles. Friendly smiles the first week, cold shoulders the second.

Through a church contact she found a Messianic Hebrew group led by a man named Black. Overnight she decided she was Jewish now — and so was I. I tried. I couldn’t. I’m not Jewish, and pretending wasn’t faith.

By the early 2000s, everything fell apart. I put her through nursing school; she got her RN, then divorced me. Claimed it was my fault she had to work, as if survival was a moral failure. Later the lies surfaced, and after the dust settled, she converted to Judaism for real.

Around 2001, during long night shifts, I began meditating. What I found wasn’t God as the church defined Him — it was something older, bigger, and free of walls. I studied the occult, witchcraft, metaphysics. The universe wasn’t a hierarchy; it was a rhythm. That discovery broke the last chains of fundamentalism.

It wasn’t rebellion — it was liberation. I earned a doctorate in metaphysics later, but the real lesson was simple: spirituality doesn’t require permission. The churches said the universe was small and terrifying. Witchcraft showed me it was infinite.

Years later, I returned to Catholicism — not as a servant, but as an equal. The incense, the ritual, the rhythm — not for salvation, but for peace.

2000s to 2010s – Digital Activism and the Occupy Generation

By the 2000s, the streets had quieted, but the internet had teeth. I was working security nights, writing between patrols, firing off essays about Bush’s wars, the Patriot Act, and corporate rot. Texas wasn’t friendly territory for dissent, so I fought from behind a screen.

In July 2008, I published four books through WordText Press — and sold none. The economy crashed, and no one had money for truth. Obama’s election looked like salvation. It wasn’t. The banks got bailed out; the workers got sacrificed. “Hope and change” became “wait and suffer.”

That betrayal birthed Occupy. I joined early — mid-2011 — when it was just chatter online. I ran tweets, boosted live feeds, and when Occupy Chicago rose, I hit the streets with my camera.
I filmed everything: marches, cops, speeches, standoffs. Nearly four hours of raw footage, archived now on my YouTube channel WPS News Today. It’s the unvarnished record of what really happened — proof that ordinary people still cared enough to fight.

After the evictions, Occupy splintered but didn’t die. It re-emerged in Ferguson and later as Black Lives Matter. I amplified every signal, every truth. When BLM chose to center Black voices exclusively, we older allies stepped back — solidarity means knowing when to shut up and listen.

By the end of the decade, the rich were richer, the poor were angrier, and the fascists were louder. But the movement did its job: it taught a generation that power can be challenged, even if it can’t yet be defeated.

I’d gone from street fighter to night-shift blogger to digital journalist. Same fight. Different front line.

2010s to 2020s – The Rise of Trump and the Return of Fascism

By 2016 I’d been warning about fascism for forty years — and America proved me right. I backed Bernie Sanders, served as a delegate at every level, and watched the Democratic Party sabotage him. Hillary’s arrogance, Trump’s cruelty — two wings of the same dying bird.

Trump’s first term was chaos disguised as leadership. Then came COVID. Over a million Americans dead because the cult of stupidity outweighed science. When the simple act of wearing a mask became political, I knew the country had broken.

Then January 6th, 2021 — the fascists on parade. Not foreigners, not outsiders — Americans. Neighbors. Coworkers. Flying flags while they tried to end democracy.

I retired that February, sick of GoDaddy’s corporate hypocrisy and Iowa’s wage-slave politics. Luz was waiting in the Philippines. She told me, “You’ll breathe easier here.” She was right.

But fascism doesn’t stop at borders. By 2024, Trump was back, and I was fighting again — through websites, essays, and posts from exile.
I built EndFascism.xyz, my war room of resistance models. I expanded WPS.News to cover international authoritarianism, especially China’s bullying in the West Philippine Sea. Occupy25.com became the op-ed front, part protest, part catharsis.

Then Luz got sick again. Cancer came back savage and fast. She died on September 3rd, 2025. I kept working, because grief and activism are the same fuel — love that refuses to go quietly.

Now, as of this writing, it’s October 2025. No Kings Day protests are happening across the United States. The GOP calls Antifa “terrorists.” Trump calls dissent “treason.” Same playbook Mussolini used. Same ending coming, too.

2020s to Present – Luz, Exile, and the Mission That Remains

For the first month after Luz’s death, I existed in motion — posting, praying, keeping her memory alive. I ran daily prayers on Bluesky for forty days straight, not for sympathy, but to honor her strength.

A few weeks later, on a bus heading home, I looked out at the sky over the island — clouds, sea, mountains — and understood: Luz brought me here. She wanted me safe, grounded, alive.

I live small now. Simple. My computer’s dead, the power flickers, and repairs take weeks. But I write anyway.
EndFascism.xyz stays active — a guide to what real resistance looks like: labor, community, courage.
WPS.News covers the global front.
Occupy25.com calls out corruption in every form.

Bluesky carries the daily rhythm — my dispatches, prayers, and manifestos. Every post carries the same message: we build a better world, or they’ll burn this one to ash.

I don’t expect reform. I expect resistance. The system won’t fix itself. It never does. But ordinary people can still decide they’ve had enough.

I may be 8,000 miles away, but I’m not retired. I’m in exile — and exile offers clarity. You see patterns from here that Americans can’t see from inside the noise.

I want the next generation to know: you don’t have to be famous to make history. The fight depends on the nameless — the writers, organizers, night workers, the stubborn ones who refuse to quit. We’re still here, holding the line.

We kept politics out of our relationship. That was unspoken, and it worked. She knew what I did, and she respected it, but she didn’t have to live it every day. Luz had grown up in the Philippines during dangerous years — when speaking out could make you disappear. Her family once had to live in the jungle because the government thought her father was part of the anti-government resistance. She knew what oppression looked like up close. She didn’t need it explained to her.

That’s what made her so remarkable. She never lectured me about my activism, never tried to steer it or soften it. She just understood. She knew what I was trying to do — not save the world, but make it a little less cruel for whoever came next. She’d already seen what happens when governments turn their own people into enemies, and she knew that same darkness was rising again in America.

Luz didn’t give me peace so I could rest; she gave me peace so I could keep fighting. She grounded me in kindness, patience, and the beauty of small things — the sound of rain on a tin roof, the laughter of neighbors, the way light hits the water before sunset. She reminded me why the world is worth saving in the first place.

And that’s what I carry now. Not grief, not guilt — understanding. She knew. I understood. And she knew what I was trying to do.

Epilogue

It began at a fence in Peru in 1968 — a ten-year-old boy staring through wire at other children, trying to understand difference.
Half a century later, the fence is everywhere: between rich and poor, power and people, fascists and the free.

I’ve spent my life walking that fence line, trying to talk across it, trying to tear it down.

I may never see the wall fall.
But I’ll die knowing I pushed.