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Nothing by itself. But if it can encourage other senators to filibuster, and more importantly, to organize to filibuster together , the impact could be paralyzing.

To take an obvious example, for half a century, from say 1910 to 1964-5, there were more than enough votes in the US senate to enact civil rights legislation, as southerners only made up 22 or so of the 96-100 senators then (no Hawaii or Alaska for part of that).

But that legislation never happened. And the reason why it didn’t was that southern senators were able to filibuster so effectively that the legislation could never be brought to the floor, or to force its withdrawal if it got there.

It’s not that the votes on that specific bill weren’t there. It’s just that under the leadership of Sen Richard Russel of Georgia (who the “Russel Senate Office Building” is named after), the southern senators understood the way to block legislation was to filibuster not just the bill in question, but any law that was about to lapse that was so important economically that senators couldn’t afford to let that happen.

So they organized, filibustered key bills, set up “watches” where at least one senator had to be on the floor to defeat any quorum calls (which ends a filibuster, as you do not actually have to be talking to filibuster a bill), and filibustered not just votes on key bills, but even votes on motions to bring those bills out of committee to the floor.

Moreover, since these filibusters weren’t on the bill itself, it was easy for an individual senator to say they were against another bill, or another motion, and make it seem like an unrelated objection, when it was really all part of a comprehensive strategy.

Eventually, the impending economic doom created enough pressure to get any civil rights bill withdrawn in order to let those other bills pass, which was the southerners asking price.

Obviously, the democrats now aren’t doing that. But they could. And by generating headlines by filibustering, he encourages other senators to do so, if only for popularity.

They did write this manual on how to resist facism, which went viral recently, so I guess there’s that?

https://www.404media.co/content/files/2025/02/simplesabotage.pdf

Also operation Argo to rescue 6 trapped US diplomats during the Iranian hostage crisis.

Depending on your perspective, operation paperclip, which brought 1,600 German scientists to the US after WW2, might also qualify, though that will depend on:

A. How “forced” you think their Nazi party affiliations were, and how culpable you believe they were for the Nazi’s crimes in general

B. What you think their lives would have been like had they stayed in Germany or, more likely, been “recruited” by Russia in their own competing operation, as indeed many were.

Are you a good swimmer? If so, lifeguard certification only take a few hours plus for training, and if you do it at a pool, no chance of you not missing a drowning person/dealing with strong current.

Did it in HS and college, great summer job, also can flirt with girls. Highly recommend

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“Langer demonstrated this fact by asking a small favor of people waiting in line to use a library copying machine: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush?”

The effectiveness of this request-plus-reason was nearly total: Ninety-four percent of those asked let her skip ahead of them in line.

Compare this success rate to the results when she made the request only: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?” Under those circumstances, only 60 percent of those asked complied.

At first glance, it appears that the crucial difference between the two requests was the additional information provided by the words “because I’m in a rush.”

But a third type of request tried by Langer showed that this was not the case. It seems that it was not the whole series of words, but the first one, “because,” that made the difference.

Instead of including a real reason for compliance, Langer’s third type of request used the word “because” and then, adding nothing new, merely restated the obvious: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies?”

The result was that once again nearly all (93 percent) agreed, even though no real reason, no new information, was added to justify their compliance.”

Excerpt From Influence Robert B. Cialdini, PhD