Terms of participation

Credit is individual.So is responsibility.

The whole argument of this movement is that people should answer for what they personally did. That principle does not get suspended for us.

Kill the Precedent exists because of a specific failure: institutions built so that harm can happen and no individual can be pointed to. Immunity doctrines. Policy compliance. Chains of command. "The department's determination." Everyone acted inside a structure, so no one acted.

An organization that wants to end that cannot be organized that way itself. So here is how participation actually works, stated plainly enough that nobody can claim later they misunderstood it.

What participation means

You act on your own behalf. When you write, speak, post, organize, or show up, you do it as yourself. Not as a representative. Not as staff. Not on anyone's instruction.
No one here directs or supervises anyone. There is nobody assigning you work, reviewing it before it goes out, or responsible for what you choose to do. That is not an oversight — it is the design.
No one can bind anyone else. You cannot make a commitment, agreement, or statement on behalf of Kill the Precedent, and neither can anyone else. There is nobody with that authority, including the founder.
Your conduct is yours. If you break a law, defame someone, harass someone, or cause a harm, that is yours. It is not shared out across everyone else using the same research.
Their conduct is theirs. The reverse is equally binding. You do not answer for what someone else in another state said on a livestream. You were not asked, and you are not implicated.
Your work stays yours. What you make keeps your name on it. Nothing here absorbs your labor into an institutional byline.
The materials are shared; the conclusions are not. Using the research does not mean endorsing everyone else who uses it, and nobody should read it that way.

Why we say it this bluntly

Two reasons, and both are practical.

The first is legal. In a decentralized movement, the standard attack is to find the worst thing any participant anywhere has done and attach it to everyone else. That works when an organization has quietly claimed authority over its people. It does not work when the structure genuinely never had that authority and said so in public from the beginning.

The second is moral, and it matters more. A movement about personal answerability that quietly launders individual choices through a collective name would be running the exact scam it opposes. If the principle is real, it applies inward first.

What it buys you

This is not a disclaimer that protects an institution at your expense. It cuts in your favor, hard.

It means nobody gets to tell you your opinion is a problem because of how it reflects on the brand. It means your politics, your faith, your other affiliations, your other work — none of it is anyone's business here, because none of it is being spoken for. It means you cannot be quietly sidelined for saying something inconvenient, because there is no one with the standing to sideline you.

The people doing this work arrive from libertarian, abolitionist, conservative, radical, and religious directions. They agree that children are being taken and harmed and that nobody is answering for it. They do not agree on much else, and they are not required to.

Say it out loud when you need to

"I use Kill the Precedent's research and I act under my own name. No one directs my work, and I don't speak for anyone but myself."

The one line

Violence is not part of this. Not as a tactic, not as a threat, not as something anyone here treats as an understandable last resort. It is not a rule handed down to you — it is that the entire strength of this position is being the side that did not have to hurt anybody in order to be right. Anyone who crosses that is not doing this work, whatever they choose to call it.

Recognition

Because credit is individual, it is worth keeping visible. Good work gets named, attributed, and pointed at — not to rank anyone, but because in a structure with no titles, reputation is the only thing that carries. See the Ledger.