The scenic campus of Birzeit University sits on a hill near Ramallah, 12 miles northwest of Jerusalem, in the occupied West Bank. Vast blue sky is visible from every road and sidewalk. Palestinian flags wave in the breeze.

The familiar campus bustle of classes, friends and events was violently interrupted on Jan. 6, 2026, when Israeli forces raided the university in broad daylight, firing live rounds and employing sound grenades and tear gas to disperse crowds of students. Forty-one people were injured, with three students sustaining gunshot wounds and three hit by shrapnel, according to Al Jazeera. Eight thousand students were trapped on campus during the military assault.

The raid coincided with the student union’s protest in solidarity with Palestinian political prisoners and a screening of “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” a film about a six-year-old girl murdered by the Israeli military during the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The Israeli occupation forces wrote in a statement that the raid was targeting “a gathering in support of terrorism.”

This was the 26th raid on Birzeit University’s campus since 2002 and the sixth since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza in October 2023. The other 25 universities in Palestine also experience raids, often in higher volumes, like Al-Quds University outside of Jerusalem. 

Attacking Birzeit’s campus, especially while class is in session, is part of a systematic policy “to intimidate students and undermine their right to education, with the aim of suppressing Palestinian consciousness and targeting national institutions,” said a statement from the university following the raid, authored by the Right2Education campaign. 

The right to education

Since its transition from a college to a university in 1975, Birzeit University has been forcibly shut down by Israeli military order 15 times. The longest period was 51 months, starting in January 1988, shortly after the start of the Palestinian uprising known as the first intifada. In response to these violations and forced hiatus, Birzeit student volunteers birthed the Right2Education campaign. They provide legal aid to students and faculty facing arrest and imprisonment by the Israeli occupation forces and have begun to develop an international network of solidarity around the human right of education for Palestinians.

The campaign has expanded beyond Birzeit University, with affiliated chapters at Hebron University in Hebron, Al-Quds University in Abu Dis and An-Najah National University in Nablus. 

The need for student legal representation has only grown more pressing. When Israeli occupation forces stormed the campus on Jan. 6, they arrested several students, part of a pattern of increased arrests since October 2023, with an estimated 9,000 Palestinians being held indefinitely in Israeli prisons. Sundos Hammad, coordinator of the Right2Education campaign at Birzeit University, said that student arrests have doubled since the genocide began and more than 150 students are currently imprisoned.

The campaign is also steadfast in its fight against scholasticide, which it defines as “deliberate destruction of education as a means to deny Palestinians the ability to rebuild their future and pursue justice and liberation through knowledge.” Scholasticide is part of the larger Israeli settler-colonial project that seeks to control, disrupt and ultimately erase every aspect of Palestinian life. 

Aya Dola, who studies English literature at Birzeit, joined the campaign because she wants people to understand “the difficulties that we suffer daily just to get a very basic right to education. Even though it’s a fundamental human right, it becomes a privilege here in Palestine.”

One of those difficulties is simply getting to school. Palestinians are unable to travel between Gaza and the West Bank, and checkpoints between local cities make travel tedious. “The number of the checkpoints and roadblocks [in the West Bank] after the genocidal war in Gaza have increased from 600 before to over 1,000 today,” Hammad said. 

In front of the Birzeit University campus stands the Atara military checkpoint. “If the occupation decides to close the gates, it deprives more than 10,000 students from going to their university,” said Dola. “They control the process of our education.” She said the closures take a toll on her mental health.

The barriers mean that many students are limited to the school or university nearest to their home. For Nael Bateer, who is from Tulkarem, a town northwest of Nablus, it previously took an hour and a half to reach Birzeit. Now, checkpoints have lengthened the journey to six hours, making it unlikely for other students from his town to attend the university. 

Bateer, a second-year accounting student and spokesperson for the campaign, explained that fragmentation — the “physical and academic isolation of educational institutions” — is a calculated tactic of movement restriction by the occupation to separate Palestinians who share the same national identity and history. 

“This isolation limits academic exchange. It prevents the unification of the educational system and forces each region to operate as a separate entity,” Bateer said. 

The Right2Education campaign documents Israel’s escalating attacks on education and urges global actors to “demand lifting of movement restrictions and the prevention of students from Gaza from reaching West Bank universities,” Bateer said. Such “divide and conquer” tactics, also a pernicious feature of the Israeli occupation for non-students, seek to squash Palestinian autonomy and collective power.

“We need more than solidarity”

The goal of Israeli scholasticide, and genocide generally, is erasure — to convince the world that Palestinians do not exist. The Right2Education campaign is involved in several efforts to confront scholasticide through transnational academic solidarity.

The campaign urges international academic institutions to cut ties with Israeli universities, partner with Palestinian academic institutions, and divest from weapons manufacturing and war profiteers, along with “any companies that invest in the occupation and apartheid that we live under,” Hammad said. 

Internationally, the demand for divestment from funding the occupation became louder after the genocidal assault on Gaza began in October 2023. Student movements globally and at over 150 universities in the U.S. created solidarity encampments for Gaza — including one at Birzeit University — and faced arrests, suspensions, expulsions and evictions.  

The academic freedom of students in the U.S. is also challenged when support for Israeli apartheid is on the line. Columbia University students Leqaa Kordia and Mahmoud Khalil, who are Palestinian, are among numerous student leaders targeted by the Trump administration for their anti-Zionist organizing. 

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How democratizing universities would supercharge the pro-Palestine divestment movement

University administrations around the world have engaged in divestment conversations, though many conceded only to provide investment oversight committees. Dozens of student governments have voted in favor of divestment and are still pressuring their institutions to take meaningful financial action. But there have been a few successes: In the U.S., the University of San Francisco voted in May 2025 to sell its investments in apartheid profiteers and enablers after 18 months of pressure from students. In New York, Union Theological Seminary became one of the first institutions in 2024 to completely divest from Israeli companies, and the CUNY Union representing faculty and graduate students followed suit. 

One particular target of divestment campaigns has been Palantir, a U.S. surveillance tech corporation, which holds several university research partnerships and investors, and has active contracts with the Israeli occupation forces, ICE and the U.S. Department of Defense, furthering state violence and genocide from the U.S. to Palestine.

In a 2025 report, U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese outlined “reasonable grounds” that Palantir allegedly laid the technological foundation for Israeli military-developed surveillance systems like Lavender and Hasbora (the Gospel in English) that are used in Gaza. These systems use artificial intelligence to generate automated airstrike and assassination targets in Gaza, according to +972. 

The American Friends Service Committee is championing the Purge Palantir campaign, mapping institutional stakeholders across sectors like education and healthcare. They pressure investors and institutions to end their relationships with the surveillance tech company. Even before October 2023, students have been resisting academic relationships with Palantir. In 2019, over 1,000 students across 17 U.S. colleges pledged not to work at Palantir due to their contracts with ICE.

After months of pressure from the student body and other actors, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, research program cut ties last year with Elbit Systems. Amid ongoing protests, students around the world and the Right2Education campaign are hopeful that other institutions like Cambridge University will follow suit and divest from war profiteers for good. 

Cutting ties to the military-academic complex 

In addition to boycotting and divesting from weapons manufacturers, the Right2Education campaign calls for international academia to sever relationships with Israeli universities — which have deep ties to the arms industry. 

Israeli weapons manufacturers Rafael, Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries were developed from military research infrastructure laid at multiple Israeli universities such as Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and the Weizmann Institute of Science, founded as far back as 1912. 

Israeli faculty and students of these institutions created weapons used against Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” referring to the ethnic cleansing and expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral lands to establish the state of Israel. 

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After 1948, Israeli universities stretched their campuses over ethnically cleansed villages and even used confiscated books from Palestinian homes to grow their libraries, anthropologist Maya Wind explains in her book “Towers of Ivory and Steel.”

Today, programs like Hebrew University’s “Havatzalot” unite academic study and military intelligence training. Many of its graduates have gone on to serve in Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s surveillance intelligence unit, similar to the National Security Agency in the U.S. The Israeli Defense Ministry also sponsors Hebrew University’s “Talpiot” partnership program — an even more selective program that is often a launchpad into the Israeli military elite. 

In the U.S., high-ranking universities like Columbia, Stanford and Princeton have active study abroad programs and other relationships with Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University and others in occupied Palestinian territory. The University of Michigan remains in partnership with Technion and Weizmann, whose academics helped facilitate the Nakba. 

At least eight U.S. universities have partnered with Ariel University, established in an illegal West Bank settlement of the same name. Ariel has given academic credits to student volunteers involved in Hashomer Yosh, a formerly U.S.-sanctioned youth organization known for settler violence against Palestinians. 

Last year, Harvard ended research ties with Birzeit University and the 12 universities in Gaza and instead expanded partnerships with Israeli universities. 

But others, like MIT, are taking a different path.

Academic partnerships

International collaboration with Birzeit and other Palestinian universities — a key tool to combat erasure — is growing. Recently, Right2Education conducted a tour in the U.K. that focused on expanding collaboration. The tour was fruitful in creating several paths to ongoing institutional cooperation, connecting Birzeit University and U.K. academics, faculty and students. This year, Birzeit University piloted the Palestinian Student Research Project, modeled after similar programs at MIT and funded by a grant from them. 

Birzeit University currently holds several other partnerships with international academic institutions, including in the Netherlands, Lebanon and Jordan. Birzeit is also discussing research and academic collaboration opportunities with Japanese universities.

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In Gaza, education is a daily act of quiet resistance

These partnerships are especially vital in Gaza. All of the universities in Gaza have been destroyed partially or completely. Over 193 professors and more than 18,000 students have been killed in Gaza since the genocide began. 

“The world is dealing with the universities in Gaza as if they no longer exist. But these universities have resumed their online teaching since last June 2024,” Hammad said. “Academic collaboration with Gazan universities affirms their right to exist and their right to education.” 

Birzeit University’s “Rebuilding Hope” campaign supports online instruction in Gaza in partnership with West Bank universities, provides resources to Gazan universities and seeks to rebuild educational infrastructure. 

Education as an act of anti-colonial resistance

Since its creation in 1948, the state of Israel has used education as a tool for the Zionist settler-colonial project, enforcing state control over Palestinian educational institutions. Although the Palestinian Ministry of Education oversees education in Palestinian territories, curriculums are censored by the Israeli government, removing references to Palestinian history, heritage and culture. This censorship serves to normalize Israeli narratives. 

Hammad explained that knowledge erasure is a type of “invisible violation,” different from the physical restriction of movement or other tactics. 

“The occupation wants us to say that ‘we don’t have a past, we don’t have history,’ because our past and history create our identity, and they want to erase our identity,” said Dola, the English literature student at Birzeit. “It is really difficult to experience [this] as a student, suffering and enduring all these things,” she continued. 

Regardless of occupation and genocide, Palestinians have always made space for their history, stories and reproduction of knowledge. “We believe in our education as a form of resistance. It’s a part of our lives to be educated,” Hammad said.

During the university closures of the first intifada, popular teaching projects emerged, fusing political and cultural education. Educator Yamila Hussein describes these efforts as a fight to “‘Palestinianize’ the curriculum with a vision of national identity and the national struggle.” Leadership during the first intifada distributed communiques seeking to bring a more revolutionary consciousness into the education sector and catalyze the mass mobilization of students and teachers to defy Israeli repression of education. “If knowledge were not resistance, the occupation would not be working against it,” Bateer said. 

The Right2Education campaign maintains emergency support for universities in Gaza and advocates to sustain education in the West Bank, especially for rural elementary schools like Al-Tahadi, which face ongoing settler attacks. The campaign also facilitates ongoing opportunities for students to tell their stories at international gatherings, despite the risks of arrest and repression.

“Ignorance is a potent ally of the settler-colonialism that we live under. It is a potent ally of the status quo that has been enforced on us,” Hammad said. “Education can change that status quo; it leads to the Indigenous empowerment of our people and our self-determination, which leads to our liberation.” 

This article Palestinian students are fighting for their right to education was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On Sunday night, the streets of Budapest were filled. Tens of thousands of Hungarians poured into the streets along the Danube River, singing folk songs and waving flags celebrating the end of Viktor Orbán’s rule. A young man named Mark Szekeres, his face painted with the colors of the Hungarian flag, told CBC News: “This election was about a clash of civilizations. Either you belong in a Western-type democracy or an Eastern-type dictatorship.”

For 16 years, Orbán controlled the country as the classic strongman. Orbán’s electoral defeat was sound — so much so that he conceded defeat before all the votes were counted. Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party captured more than 53 percent of the vote and approximately 136 of 199 parliamentary seats, a supermajority decisive enough to undo the constitution and other laws that Orbán rewrote. The turnout alone was a verdict: nearly 80 percent of all eligible voters.

For us fighting democratic backsliding, this is exceedingly consequential. Orbán wrote the authoritarian playbook now being used by Donald Trump and actively exported his approach, even giving Hungarian tax dollars to fund CPAC. The people’s playbook used to oust him is a critical case study to learn from — from how the opposition party organized in Orbán’s strongholds, to how they made repression backfire when he overreached, and more. 

Informed by talking with people on the ground, I’m writing an outside take of lessons gleaned knowing we’ll need more analyses to make the most of our learning. Already D-HUB, a network of international anti-authoritarian activists, has vowed a more thorough case study after more study and reflection. 

Orbán’s loss raises a question we all should learn from: How do you beat someone who has spent 16 years rigging the game?

Understand the bad

To appreciate what happened Sunday, you have to understand just how thoroughly Orbán had slanted Hungarian political life towards authoritarian rule.

Within months of taking power in 2010, Orbán began systematically dismantling independent journalism. He encouraged his oligarch friends to buy media. He created a new state broadcaster, called MTVA, as a government mouthpiece. And his party created a Media Council — staffed by party loyalists — that issued crushing fines for “unbalanced” news that didn’t toe the party line.

By 2018, more than 470 pro-government outlets had been merged into a single conglomerate called KESMA — the Central European Press and Media Foundation — making the concentration of power official. Orbán’s party and friends eventually controlled roughly 80 percent of Hungary’s media landscape. “You can’t write anything bad about the government,” one anonymous Hungarian journalist told Al Jazeera. 

Then the courts. Orbán passed a new constitution and forced 274 judges and prosecutors into early retirement in the first year alone. The judiciary became almost entirely a political instrument.

Then, most consequentially, he moved to rig elections: The maps were redrawn, and he gained control of independent institutions overseeing elections. Orbán shaped Hungary’s 106 electoral districts with no input from the opposition, concentrating urban voters into large districts while spreading out his rural voters into more districts. The results were staggering: In 2014, Orbán’s ruling party captured 45 percent of the vote — but 91 percent of the districts. “Free but not fair,” as the ever insightful John Oliver put it in his review of Orbán’s rule just ahead of the elections. “You are free to vote for anyone you want, whether it’s Orbán or whoever inevitably loses to him.”

Universities are often the birthplace of pro-democracy movements, and grinding them down was essential. The most famous casualty was Central European University, founded by George Soros, which was slandered and pushed out of the country. This was in line with right-wing and antisemitic attacks on anything Soros-related (even though Orbán had once received a Soros-funded scholarship). 

And finally, he created imagined enemies of the state. Like every authoritarian, Orbán used divide-and-rule to create people to fear and keep his own growing scandals and corruption off the front page. Like most authoritarians of late, he chose LGBTQ people and immigrants as his primary scapegoats. George Soros, the EU and Ukrainians were added to the roster of villains. 

When President Trump sent Vice President JD Vance to campaign for Orbán, Vance followed Orbán’s escalating attacks on EU bureaucrats, who had voiced concerns about how Orbán’s re-election would affect the future of the EU. With no sense of irony, at his campaign stop Vance called the EU bureaucrats “one of the worst examples of foreign election interference that I have ever seen or ever even read about.”

So with that much control, how did Orbán lose? And so badly?

Tyranny is unstable

One reason dictatorships can be appealing, at least to some, is that they appear effective. To his supporters, Trump gets things done. While the democratic process is slow and grinding, the dictatorial one is about action. It breaks through red tape and fixes problems.

There’s truth in this, so far as democracy can be messy and dictatorships simple to understand. But it’s also mythical. Because a dictator doesn’t run a country — they order others to run a country. 

Whereas power is traditionally seen as flowing downwards, in fact many pillars are required to hold it upright. These are groups and institutions — like media, religious institutions, the business community, civil servants and security forces — that prop up the regime. In Thailand, where I first learned about this model of the “pillars of support,” it was drawn as an upside-down triangle. 

A dictatorship is no exception. By keeping society functioning, these pillars support the regime, even if they may disagree with it in private. 

It’s important to recognize that power is never as stable as it seems. It is not the natural state of humans to be dictated to. 

As a parent of a 7-year-old, I can attest: Go to any playground and you will see a bunch of kids experimenting with ordering each other around. Kids don’t like being bossed around. So the wise ones learn how to ask, entice, convince. The bullies learn to just use fear.

The problem with ruling with fear is that it requires constant and ongoing pressure. It creates frustration from those who have been slighted, grudges get nursed and a level of control needs to be constantly applied.

Ahead of the election, many (but not all!) of the pillars propping up Orbán began to crack. The economy, the media stranglehold and the manufactured fear — all began to crumble.

The economy was the biggest crack

Most activists I talked with described the Hungarian economy as Orbán’s primary vulnerability. Hungary has suffered the worst inflation of any EU country over the past 25 years. Prices rose 57 percent over that period — nearly double the EU average of 28 percent. The health care system deteriorated badly, with hospitals crumbling and doctors fleeing for better jobs. Hungary ranked last in the EU on household wealth in 2025.

This is common for authoritarians. We know instinctively that authoritarians do not take orders from polls or the number of people in the streets. As Rebecca Solnit beautifully put it, authoritarians view power as a “conquering army that would terrorize and intimidate the populace into subjugation” — as opposed to that of a flower, where “when you treat others well, when you meet their needs, you can enter into relationships that serve you as well as them.”

The outcome is that authoritarians ignore the pleas of the people. According to research from the Varieties of Democracy Institute, authoritarians create four times as many economic crises — a threat very much in our sightlines in the U.S. They spend 50 percent less on social protections like health care. Unresponsive to the needs of the people, they spend less on education, with students in school for fewer years, receiving lower quality instruction. All this adds up to life expectancies that are 12 years lower and infant mortality rates that are 62.5 percent higher. And, of course, corruption becomes the standard way of life.

As Hungarians struggled in all of these ways, Orbán’s friends grew rich. Video footage circulated of an estate owned by Orbán’s father with zebras grazing near it. It turned out that the zebras were from a nearby estate owned by Hungary’s richest man, who is also a close friend of Orbán  — so they became a potent symbol of elite excess.

Stefania Kapronczay, a Hungarian human rights strategist, identified the core problem Fidesz faced: It thought it had a sales problem when it really had a problem with the product. “Instead of addressing [voters’] demands they resorted to creating enemies and being louder,” she explained. “The economy stalled in the past 4 years. The explanation that it’s somehow Brussels’ fault and soon there will be never-seen-before success rang empty. They also miscalculated how pro-European Hungarians are.”

Unable to campaign on any positive accomplishments, Orbán defaulted to fearmongering. As an analyst wrote in Foreign Policy, Orbán’s campaign was centered on “fantastical claims about Ukraine planning military actions against Hungary,” substituting conspiracy for governance. “After a while voters, especially moderates, become exhausted by constant messages of fear, hatred and vituperation.”

But conditions alone do not dictate election outcomes. I’ve been running around the U.S. telling the story of Zimbabwe. In the 2002 elections, President Robert Mugabe abducted activists and controlled elections. By the time the 2005 parliamentary election rolled around, a Zimbabwean colleague told me, “We’re already living in hell; it can’t get any worse.” The inflation rate had exceeded 100 percent. But Mugabe managed to buy and steal the election for his party again. By 2008 the economy had completely bottomed out with an unbelievable inflation rate: over 200 million percent. The colleague told me the same thing, “This time it can’t get any worse.” Still, Mugabe won — this time by attacking and torturing people so extensively that opposition candidate Morgan Tsvangirai withdrew from the race. 

My point here is this: It can get a lot worse and that alone won’t change the electoral outcomes. Organizing, not conditions, is most important.

A talented candidate 

The opposition party candidate who won the campaign, Péter Magyar, is not a left-wing hero. He was a loyal insider until 2024 — an Orbán man through and through. He married a government minister. 

His break came after a corruption scandal where — you guessed it — Orbán’s party pardoned a convicted accomplice in child sexual abuse. 

Magyar went public on Partizán, an independent YouTube channel, revealing the rot at the center of Orbán’s “Christian nationalist” project. “For a long time I believed in an idea, the national, sovereign, civil Hungary,” he wrote. “Today, I had to realize that all of this is really just a political product, a frosting that serves only two purposes, covering up the operation of the power factory and acquiring enormous amounts of wealth.”

His credibility as a defector — someone who had seen it from the inside — gave him a voice that no outside opposition figure could replicate.

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He was also a masterful communicator. Unlike traditional politicians who attempt to govern at a distance, he regularly walked the country and held rallies in small towns that the opposition party had “sewn up.” For years, he went directly and repeatedly to Orbán strongholds. In the final weeks before the election, he was visiting up to six towns per day.

As Kapronczay observed: “Tisza won because they went all-in: did not stop campaigning, went around the country to meet people and with an amazing political talent reacted to all the mistakes of Fidesz.”

Magyar did not rely on an anti-Orbánism message. He talked regularly about corruption, health care and everyday affordability — things people actually care about. Political analyst Zsuzsanna Végh of the German Marshall Fund described him as “focusing on policy responses, hitting a moderate tone and giving back agency to voters to decide about their and their country’s future.” A regular campaign slogan was a call for a “humane Hungary.”

And while a bad dictator versus a strong candidate is a good combo, that alone would not suffice to win. Civil society had to play its role.

Tisza Islands: organizing that reached everywhere

One of the most important tactical decisions of the opposition party, Tisza, was the creation of Tisza Szigetek, or “Tisza Islands.”

Beginning in mid-2024 after Magyar’s strong showing in European Parliament elections, the party began systematically building local chapters across the country — not just in Budapest’s liberal districts, but in the small towns and rural constituencies where Orbán’s party had historically been uncontested. By January 2025, social media analysis suggested there were 208 “islands” with over 20,000 members.

Inside the new chapters were a mix of brand new activists and experienced civic and political activists who had been working to reform Hungary for years. New and old, all were active supporters. They staffed campaign stalls. They distributed a volunteer-delivered newspaper called Tiszta Hang, or Clear Voice, launched in July 2025, specifically designed to reach rural voters who were only exposed to pro-Orbán media. 

That last point matters. The Tisza Islands were not top-down campaign field offices. They functioned with genuine local autonomy. The party even held closed primaries for all 106 of its constituency candidates — an internal democratic process designed to give local members real ownership of who represented them.

Crucially, this meant that by election day, Tisza was able to deploy a breath-taking 50,000 activists as election monitors across the country’s polling stations. I’m hoping Hungarians will write more about this polling operation, to relay both how it was set up and its effectiveness in assuring a wary public that elections would hold. This was an historic, organized and scaled effort of election protection.

Investigative journalism did what no campaign ad could

One other piece multiple Hungarian activists have raised with me was the critical role of journalists.

Remember that Orbán controlled 80 percent of the country’s media. And yet, a handful of outlets — Partizán, Direkt36, Telex, 444, Magyar Hang — managed not only to survive but to land body blows in the final months of the campaign.

Partizán gave Magyar the interview that broke open the sexual abuse pardon scandal. Direkt36 broke the story of attempts by government-connected operatives to infiltrate Tisza’s digital infrastructure. Telex published an interview with a police whistleblower about the government’s attempt to send Hungarian troops to Chad. As Martón Kárpáti, the president of the board of Telex, described it: “This campaign showed the importance of the free media.”

A key documentary — “A Szavazat Ára,” or “The Price of the Vote” — was released on March 26 by the investigative team at DE! Akcióközösség. Based on a six-month investigation, the film documented Orbán’s party’s systematic operation of vote-buying and voter intimidation and coercion in impoverished rural communities. It showed that Orbán’s mayors controlled who got food, housing and even drugs. Within days, the documentary had been watched 1.3 million times.

This weakened the intimidation network. For the first time, government loyalists felt that they might be exposed. As political scientist Gábor Toka noted, “Intermediaries are [now] far less confident that illegal activities won’t be investigated and punished.”

Ahead of the election, this led Euractic to conclude in a headline: “Hungary’s Independent Media Has Already Won the Election.” 

The public shakes off fear

The June 2025 Budapest Pride parade was a classic backfire moment. Orbán had been escalating his war against LGBTQ folks for sometime. LGBTQ rights activists had been pushing back for years. But last summer his party took an extreme step and all but banned the Budapest Pride parade. His party enacted extremely tight rules on when and where and how the parade could proceed, wild police oversight, further restrictions under the pretense of “child protection,” and encouraged local authorities to deny event approvals entirely. 

It was an overreach and the Pride parade swelled to massive numbers, with people clearly having fun and boldly proclaiming they would not let the government scare them off. 

“The unsuccessful ban on the Pride parade was a clear sign of Fidesz’s inability to regain the political initiative,” wrote Hungarian journalist Pal Daniel Rényi. Ahead of the elections, the people had signaled that they were not going to be cowed. The massive parades exposed the government as out of ideas and increasingly disconnected from the public mood.

This kind of moment has been described by Turkish-American economist and political scientist Timur Kuran as an “unanticipated revolution” — a moment when an otherwise powerful political leader who seems to have full support suddenly has it evaporate. 

Backfire happens when the public shakes off its fear, and the rift between the people and the authoritarian is revealed.

What activists should take from this

Here, then, are eight points about what the defeat of Viktor Orbán offers to people doing the long, unglamorous, essential work of democracy defense.

1. You have to meet people where they actually live. The Tisza Islands model is a direct rebuke to opposition campaigns that organize from the cities outward or from the top downwards. Magyar’s team built physical, relational infrastructure in communities that had been written off — not because they expected to win every seat, but because showing up is the message. The act of going to rural Hungary, of knocking on doors in Fidesz strongholds, communicated something no television ad could: that people in those communities were worth fighting for. Any opposition movement that limits itself to mobilizing its existing base is already half-defeated.

2. Anti is not enough — you need a proposition. Magyar ran on corruption, yes, but he ran for something: affordability, public health care, housing, a “humane Hungary.” He hammered relentlessly on what Orbán’s rule had cost ordinary people in their daily lives. The lesson for Democrats — and for any opposition movement — is painfully direct: Running against the other side’s failures, without a clear and compelling alternative vision, leaves persuadable voters with nothing to vote toward. 

3. Build for the long game, but deploy at election time. The underground LGBTQ organizing work and the Tisza Islands didn’t spring up in campaign season. They were built over many years, quietly, in communities across the country. Civil society organizations spent that same period building nonpartisan mobilization infrastructure, producing online videos and recruiting election monitors. The 50,000 activists who showed up as poll watchers on election day didn’t materialize from nowhere — they were organized, trained and ready. Democracy defense isn’t a sprint. It’s a marathon that occasionally demands a sprint.

4. Investigative journalism is infrastructure. This is perhaps the most striking lesson for movements in countries where independent media has been similarly squeezed. In a media environment where 80 percent of outlets are government-aligned, a handful of scrappy independent outlets broke stories that changed the trajectory of an election. The lesson isn’t just to support independent journalism (though that matters). It’s that, when coordinated with civil society organizing and election protection, investigative journalism creates a kind of immune system for democracy. When those functions work together, they become more than the sum of their parts.

5. Election protection is a form of power. Hungary’s activists understood something that is increasingly essential in systems where the electoral rules are rigged: You cannot simply outperform the fraud margin and hope for the best. You have to actively contest it. The 50,000 election monitors Tisza deployed were not passive observers — they reduced fear and combated intimidation. The documentary released weeks before the election served a similar function, activating public consciousness about what was happening in those rural constituencies. This combination — exposing the system, then flooding it with watchers — helped neutralize what had historically been a decisive advantage for Fidesz.

6. Plan for backfire. Yes, some moments just arise — in Hungary, wearing zebra costumes; in the U.S., frog costumes. But other moments are organized, such as the surge of people at the Budapest Pride parade. The folks at HOPE have created a curriculum to learn more about the dynamics of backfire. A key insight: Backfire isn’t automatic. Repression only sparks outrage when it’s seen, understood and emotionally felt, which means movements have to actively expose injustice, frame it clearly and help people connect the dots so what power tries to hide becomes impossible to ignore.

7. If you can only do one thing: Act courageously. Much of Orbán’s rule was marked by people publicly kowtowing. Timothy Kuran wrote a book called “Private Truths, Public Lies” about “preference falsification” — the idea that people fabricate their public preferences to match social pressure. When there’s enough social pressure, people conform — even if privately they disagree. This can generate a collective illusion that the authoritarian has broad support even when he doesn’t — until a sudden tipping point is reached and the whole facade collapses rapidly. Before that tipping point is reached, however, some individuals have to be very brave: acting noncooperatively, voicing dissent, organizing marches and protests, taking public stances, and going into strongholds to convince people they are being cheated. A few people acting courageously opens the doors for more.

8. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the winnable. Magyar is not a folk hero. He’s a politician who is, for now, best suited to dismantle Orbán’s authoritarian state. Magyar’s party does promote greater inclusion of women and Romani people in its platform. However, he remains socially conservative, and his history as an Orbán loyalist is more than cause for concern. But after left-wing parties failed to meet the moment, the people saw him as their best chance to defeat Orbán. Movements fighting authoritarianism will always face the tension between holding out for the ideal candidate and unifying behind the one who can actually win. 

The work continues

As with any electoral win, the work is only started. Orbán still controls Hungary’s media. He packed the Constitutional Court. He built an economy of patronage and dependency that reaches into every village. Magyar’s supermajority gives them the constitutional power to undo much of what was done — but the institutions, the oligarchic networks, the culture of intimidation, will not dissolve the day Magyar is inaugurated.

For organizers, this is the sobering coda: Electoral victory is a door, not a destination. But on a Sunday night in Budapest, they earned a moment to celebrate. And we should take a lot of hope from that, too. As U.S. organizer Ash-Lee Henderson noted in her response to Orbán’s loss, “I’m not trying to tell you that Hungary is America. It’s not. I’m telling you, though, that the math is similar everywhere. There are always more of us than there are of them. The question is never whether the people have the power. The question is whether we build something worth moving for.”

This article What we can learn from the playbook that defeated Orbán was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

When Dolores Huerta came out about the abuse she suffered from Cesar Chavez, Jenna Peters-Golden was not that surprised, because they had seen similar situations before. “I feel sadness, of course, for all individuals who are impacted by sexual violence, but I also feel a lot of grief at how much weaker and fragmented our movements and and wins can be because of the role that sexual violence plays inside of that,” Peters-Golden said.

When Peters-Golden was involved in the anti-Iraq War movement as a high school and college student, they both witnessed and experienced sexual violence and harassment, and saw how little recourse there was. Organizers they knew who had experienced sexual assault or misogyny felt like they had to chose whether to leave a campaign or commit to tolerating a culture that normalized those things.

Peters-Golden knew that there needed to be a change, and as a survivor, they wanted to be part of the solution. They got involved in Philly Stands Up, a transformative justice organization that aimed to hold accountable people who perpetrate sexual violence and abuse in movement and activist spaces. 

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Within movements, there is sub-movement to address sexual harm in organizing spaces. Many people who have done this work, including Peters-Golden, say a culture of putting the cause above oneself, or not wanting to make the movement look bad, results in movements becoming spaces rife with abuse. However, there are people who are working to empower survivors, keep organizers safe and hold perpetrators accountable through concrete and actionable steps.

Ana Avendaño, a visiting assistant professor at the City University of New York School of Law who has worked with the labor movement, is one of those working to prevent sexual violence and harassment in movements. She got into the work during the #MeToo movement, when she saw union men being exposed for sexual harassment and then uncovered union staff and leaders harassing workers at a labor-adjacent nonprofit she oversaw, which employed mostly women.

“I began to really study this, because I was shocked that a movement whose mission is to protect workers was allowing the kind of behavior that I saw happen — which was sexual harassment and abuse of young women,” Avendaño said. “The labor movement fights very hard against sexual harassment when it is being perpetrated by employers on the outside, but when they themselves as employers are enabling harassment, then it becomes taboo to talk about it.”

Now, she works to change the culture in organizing spaces to prevent sexual harm. She encourages unions and other nonprofit organizations to rethink the systems that are in place and put in new systems that don’t allow harassment to happen.

Reforming a culture

Avendaño stressed that understanding and reforming the culture of a group is key to preventing sexual violence and harassment.

While a lot has changed since the days that some unions wouldn’t even allow a charter for women workers, some of that male-centered culture remains and is a main driver of harassment, she said. Men still speak over women at meetings, appropriate their ideas and are celebrated as superstars for doing the exact same work that women do — sometimes less. Then there are the more overt examples — like an elected labor leader who, when asked about room accommodations on a business trip, told his staff that he preferred a “cheeseplate, wine and twins,” Avendaño said.

Meanwhile, organizers are taught to put “la causa,” or the cause, before their own personal needs or experiences.

“The culture demands silence, because when people raise issues of internal abuse, what we hear is it’s not the right time, the movement is under attack,” Avendaño said. “That leaves women and other marginalized people very vulnerable to abuse, because they know that either whatever complaints they raise are not going to be heard or they will be shunned for raising a complaint. This is a system that has existed for decades.”

In many cases, Avendaño added, those who do speak up find that their careers are over. 

“That’s the opposite of what the movement should be about,” Avendaño said. 

Avendaño does consulting work with nonprofit and organizing groups trying to transform their culture to prevent sexual harassment and abuse. One tool she uses and recommends is a climate assessment. First, she spends time with a nonprofit or organizing group and speaks with workers to get a sense of whose voice is heard or ignored. Based on what she hears, she creates a large questionnaire to identify points that make up a culture, seeking to understand, “What are the unwritten rules? What are the norms? Who gets resources, who is valued, who gets punished, who doesn’t, who gets away with stuff?” 

After reviewing the responses, she works with leaders and staff to develop systems that address the main issues raised. Solutions can include setting up independent reporting systems, codes of conduct with real accountability, investigations grounded in restorative justice principles and, importantly, education for employees to learn to stand up for each other and challenge harmful norms. 

Peters-Golden said that it is important everyone in the group contributes to reforming the culture. When it was active from 2005 to 2015, Philly Stands Up did transformative justice work to support activist communities in Philadelphia by helping survivors regain agency and changing the behavior of perpetrators. 

“That requires a commitment from every single member that ‘I’m not going to laugh at that sexist joke; I’m not going to normalize or think it’s okay for us to go get drunk after we canvass and be inappropriate with a field organizer; we won’t give each other passes about flirting with or trying to build relationships with new, young organizers who are coming into spaces,’” Peters-Golden said.

Rethinking leadership structures

One problem with organizational culture can be blind loyalty to a leader “who is equated with the cause,” as in the case of Chavez, Avendaño said.

Peters-Golden agrees that it is important to rethink leadership in organizing and union spaces.

“When there’s a culture where sexual violence is normalized, especially when leaders are getting away with it  … there’s something really important for us as movements to think about in terms of how we relate to leadership,” Peters-Golden said.

They said that a crucial element is to have channels for feedback to leaders and to have peer-based, rather than hierarchical, relationships within the organization. This is positive for leaders as well, they said.

“Supporting their leadership involves giving feedback: saying that something isn’t okay when we know it’s not okay, ensuring that there are actually expectations about behavior and consequences when anyone, including some of our brightest and most charismatic leaders, don’t live up to agreements or values that hold our movements together,” Peters-Golden said.

Additionally, Avendaño said that there need to be more women in power, especially people who have been personally impacted. However, she said that is not enough, and men also need to be part of the solution.

Amy Livingston, director of the Labor Education Service at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management, who also has a background in organizing and works directly with union organizers to prevent sexual violence and harassment within unions and unionized workplaces, agrees, and says that it’s especially important for men to step up in spaces where women are a minority.

“I don’t think that women and gender minorities need to wait for men to get on board, but I do think it makes sense for a union or a worker center to invest in this kind of education to help men understand,” Livingston said. “For the most part, cisgender men often need a little bit more hand holding to get to the point where they understand why gender-based violence at work is something they should care about, even if it doesn’t impact them directly.”

Worker-led solutions

Avendaño suggests that movement groups and unions can look to successful worker-led efforts to prevent harassment and build empowerment on the job, and apply those lessons to organizing spaces.

When Livingston works with survivors of workplace harassment and sexual abuse, she helps them to get justice and regain safe working conditions, and when it comes to those who caused harm, she ensures a fair investigation was done into their misconduct.

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“I really prefer teaching about how workers can regain some control over their workplaces through organizing … against gender-based violence, instead of just being in the position of a victim who’s like looking to the police or some outside agency for support,” Livingston said.

She has also conducted in-depth research and interviews to develop bystander intervention training curriculum for members of unions to intervene and deescalate a situation before it escalates to gender-based or sexual violence. She said it is important to build spaces where co-workers can support and trust each other so they have someone to confide in if something happens.

Similarly, Avendaño said that the SEIU-USWW janitorial union in Los Angeles adopted a peer education model of “by the people for the people,” inspired by the promotora model of health care outreach in Latine communities. Members are trained to talk to each other, recognize sexual harassment and understand how to intervene in those situations through a restorative lens by interrupting behaviors. The union also successfully organized in support of a California law mandating that cleaning services pay for worker- and survivor-led anti-harassment trainings.

Additionally, Avendaño points to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which has created a robust, quasi-judicial system where workers can file complaints to be heard by tribunals of farm workers, which practically eliminated sexual harassment in the fields.

“Those examples are inspiration that movements need to acknowledge and use as blueprints, start to build from that or come up with others, but also recognize that there is an internal structural problem is the first step,” Avendaño said.

This article How organizers are addressing sexual violence in movement spaces was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

When a homeland is decimated by war and life must be repeatedly rebuilt anew, how does one find the way back to purpose? 

Since the start of the war in Sudan, Sudanese theater director and artist Rabee Al-Hassan has brought theater to survivors of war and displacement across the country. He uses a kind of participatory theater that he calls “resistance theater,” which gives voice to many issues that remain taboo under oppressive laws and authorities in Sudan. Resistance theater confronts themes of human rights, social justice and equality, as well as despair, fear and post-war trauma. For Al-Hassan, theater also helps participants resist internalizing displacement as an identity, and instead “frees us from it in favor of our true identity.”

Originally from Al Jazirah, one of 18 states in Sudan, Al-Hassan has experienced displacement twice amid the war: first to the state capital of Wad Madani, and later to Port Sudan. When war broke out in Khartoum on the morning of April 15, 2023, Al-Hassan fled. This war “stripped us of our human and professional identities,” he said. 

An estimated one in three people have been displaced since fighting started, and they make up almost 15 percent of all internally displaced persons globally. Nearly 12 million people have been displaced within Sudan alone, with around four million fleeing across the borders. Under prolonged siege, some displacement camps like Al-Hasahisa in Central Darfur lacked medical care, food and water, while others saw people returning to land contaminated by explosives. 

“Most dangerously, it forced us to face questions we were not prepared to face,” Al-Hassan said. “How long will this identity accompany you? Will you be able to be an active and influential member of the society in which you experience oppression?” As a playwright and director before the war, he was faced with a choice like so many others who became displaced or refugees: let the war shape his story with what it took away, or use theater to confront the political, social and psychological issues at the root of conflict in Sudan. 

Al-Hassan himself witnessed summary trials when former President Jaafar Nimeiri imposed Sharia law in Sudan in 1983. Known as the “September laws,” courts were allowed to sentence amputations of hands and feet. Amnesty International reported that there were at least 140 sentences in under two years. The September laws not only remained under Omar al-Bashir, but the death penalty was added for apostasy (renouncing Islam). Through the genocide in Darfur, to the separation of South Sudan, to the present day, it seems no Sudanese family has been “spared from setting up a mourning tent for one of the dead,” Al-Hassan said.

Resistance theater challenges audiences with “their evils, fears and aspirations … and addresses the reasons that led us to kill each other,” Al-Hassan said. “From childhood until now, death has surrounded us.” This means confronting hate speech, violence and mental health, child labor, homelessness, and what it means to build a culture of peace.

Al-Hassan also isn’t afraid to tug at the shadows of patriarchal and misogynist violence.

For decades, Sudanese women have fought for reforms to discriminatory laws, including forced marriage, child marriage and morality police controlling what women can wear and do in public. From colonial British rule to the introduction of Sharia law in the 1980s (including punishment by flogging or being killed by stoning), women’s rights have repeatedly been dragged backwards by conservative governments. The sentencing of two women to death by stoning in February, while others face death sentences based purely on rumor, keeps the September laws alive.

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With discrimination especially violent toward working-class and poor women, gender equality was at the heart of the Sudanese revolution in 2019, as well as within numerous peace agreements. Sudan remains one of the few countries that has still not ratified the African Union’s Maputo Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa or the 1979 U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. 

And many continue to live in fear, as rape has been weaponized in the war between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, paramilitary, accused by Khartoum officials of being financed and armed by the United Arab Emirates. In siege after siege, combatants have abducted and gang raped women. Hala Alkarib, regional director for the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa, testified before the U.N. Security Council in February about systemic gender-based violence. She also highlighted the detention of over 840 women last fall by state forces, who were accused of being RSF collaborators solely based on their ethnicity.

Al-Hassan writes strong women into his scenes, the way they are written into the very fabric of Sudan, and just as they are reflected in Sudanese literature. He finds inspiration in women’s resistance, steadfastness and creative ability to preserve collective memory. In his plays, he draws on characters like the self-assured Nima from the novella “The Wedding of Zein” by legendary Sudanese author Tayeb Salih, who chooses her own love over the preferences of her village. With many women still facing the restrictions on freedom that Salih wrote about in the 1960s, Nima’s choice is revolutionary. 

The script with which he is currently preoccupied, “Hosna Bint Mahmoud, The Last Witness,” is based on Salih’s acclaimed novel “Season of Migration to the North.” Salih’s character of Mahmoud — a rebellious and independent woman who becomes a widow after the death of her first husband — commits murder-suicide to escape a forced and violent marriage with an elderly man. This story of anguish is still resonant as RSF fighters have forced marriages with women and girls to establish greater control over Darfur. “Women’s resistance in reality is subtle and almost invisible, while Hasna’s resistance was a blatant and violent tragedy,” Al-Hassan said. While war in Sudan has left its mark on all, “our mothers, sisters and lovers die a thousand times over.”

He sees real counterparts in the ordinary lives of women carrying households alone, demanding a future without violence for the farthest-flung villages, and organizing at the helms of resistance committees that keep a revolutionary dream of a common and equal Sudan alive. 

An artist will find light in the dark. It was war that united survivors from Khartoum and Wad Madani with artists from Port Sudan. Language itself became a bridge for connection, with performances in languages from Beja, Hausa and Nubian, to Arabic and Tigrinya.  

Al-Hassan and his troupe brought theater to over 50 displacement centers in Wad Madani. But when the RSF invaded Al Jazirah and took over Wad Madani in December 2023, he had to flee once again. In the following year, conflict would displace over a million people from Al Jazirah alone. Flooding and disruption of agricultural livelihoods has kept people struggling to settle throughout the past year. 

“This time, the displacement was difficult and harsh,” Al-Hassan said. “We walked on foot and rode on animals, terrified and frightened, night after night on our way to Port Sudan.” But by this time, he had a sense of clarity from the experiences in Wad Madani. “We did not have the luxury of resting or healing the wounds and sorrows of the second displacement and loss,” he said. The show went on. 

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In discussing his work, Al-Hassan draws parallels to two distinct types of theater: theater for development and forum theater, using elements of both forms in his practice. Drawing on oral history traditions, theater for development uses performance as a tool for social change by exploring political and economic issues, and sensitizing communities to one another’s experiences of trauma, marginalization or stigmatization. 

Forum theater was developed by Brazilian theater artist and political dissident Augusto Boal as one of the expressions of the Theater of the Oppressed that sought personal liberation and decolonization for the poor and working classes. Instead of being treated as spectators, audiences are urged to participate by acting out solutions and desired outcomes for a story. Theater was also brought into common spaces rather than being treated as a commodity kept behind closed doors. 

Some of Al-Hassan’s highest-attended performances were staged at the Lawyers’ Union Theater and the Culture Hall in Wad Madani, and Writers and Artists Union Theater in Port Sudan, but the impacts were most potent in the displacement camps. 

“The more we expand the opportunities for these audiences to participate in our theater, which methodologically relies on interactive theater techniques, the more we achieve resistance and revolution through our theater,” Al-Hassan said. “The times and the historical moment do not allow us to present theater for entertainment and amusement — important as they are.” 

In Wad Madani, performances were a “lifeline” for people in displacement camps, he said, and a way to “break from the monotony of their days.”

Moved by the potential for theater to help survivors of violence heal invisible wounds and overcome the sense of isolation that is seeded by post-war trauma, Al-Hassan wants to “enable as many theater practitioners as possible in all Sudanese cities to reach shelters.” Integrating psychodrama into conflict resolution, like the improvisational “playback theater” where performers act out audience members’ personal stories, has “proven effective in supporting and treating individuals in communities that have suffered from post-war trauma and disasters,” Al-Hassan said.

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Isolation is not just a product of the war, but of political repression persisting since Bashir’s regime. Free expression in Sudan is heavily stifled, with journalists and activists routinely detained and murdered. Artists saw cultural institutions and unions targeted and shuttered under Bashir’s reign. Nearly three years of war have again strained artists, as already scarce money and food dwindled. According to Al-Hassan, some face denial of employment opportunities, arbitrary arrest and prosecution if they engage in activities supporting an end to the war. Cultural centers and museums have been damaged by bombing, and many artists lost their lives to shelling or to illness in displacement camps. Many others have chosen to emigrate. 

Though war still rages, Al-Hassan sees the arts and cultural institutions as a vital part of rebuilding Sudan and calls on artists around the world to speak about Sudan, “in order to end the shameful international silence towards what we are suffering.”

“There is no safe Sudan, and we will not be safe unless the war stops,” he said. “We are all suffering loss and fearing death, both spiritual and physical.”

Today, Al-Hassan continues animating Port Sudan with resistance theater. And though he and his family survived the treacherous 600-mile journey from Wad Madani in the heat of fighting, many did not. 

Over 33 million people across Sudan need humanitarian assistance. Over 21 million people in Sudan face acute food insecurity. In Darfur, entire cities are starving or relying on takaaya (community kitchens) for survival. In February, Chad shut its border with Sudan, trapping people in Darfur and limiting the passage of humanitarian aid. 

As another Ramadan has passed without a ceasefire, Sudan is still tossed between oppressors. Yet, even amid war, artists like Al-Hassan reject fear and despair; instead they are amplifying narratives of survival and illuminating humanity during the most horrific of crises.

“This is not just a symbolic and aesthetic salvation, but a real and tangible one that theater can achieve,” Al-Hassan said. 

This article Sudanese ‘resistance theater’ animates a future without war was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

My relationship with cooking began at a young age, while in elementary school, when I had the choice between preparing whatever I could find in the kitchen or not eating. Little did I know that cooking with such constraints would serve me so well decades later when I was incarcerated. It would become the vehicle by which I would build community and connection with my fellow inmates.

For a kid without much guidance, it was a steep learning curve. Here is one of my earlier memories from that time.

The blare of the smoke detector snapped me back to reality, reinforced by the smell of burnt ramen and Teflon. I had lost track of time, consumed by an adventure with my He-Man action figures, and had boiled the water right out of the pot and burned my Top Ramen noodles to a wormy crisp. The noodles and the pot were a total loss, and I knew I was going to get in trouble when my mom and stepdad got home. But that was routine, a problem to deal with later. At that moment I had to figure out what I was going to make for me and my brother. At eight years old, my repertoire was limited, as were the groceries in the house.

I came to my love of cooking out of necessity. When I was a kid, my mom and stepdad were often gone for long periods of time. Sometimes it was for work, sometimes a quick trip to the store could take them hours. My brother and I never knew if their absence would stretch into days. Tom, older by three years, was resentful of being stuck with me and told me that if I was hungry, I had better figure it out because he wasn’t making anything. Once I started cooking, he would add, “Might as well make me some too, since you’re cooking already.” Well played, big brother.

So there was the eight-year-old me at the stove, trying to figure out this whole cooking thing. I burned my fair share of meals, but slowly I began to get the hang of it. My mac and cheese had fewer lumps, my ramen was respectably soupy, my Hamburger Helper didn’t have chunks of uncooked dehydrated potatoes. My growing proficiency gave me greater confidence, which led me to try new things.

When my mom was in the kitchen making a meal, I would be right there underfoot, like an irritating cat. When I would ask if I could help, she would find something for me to do — shred the cheese, cut the easy veggies, or stir things in the pots and pans. I would interrogate her about what she was doing, why she used the spices she used. I was soaking up all that I could. I thought I was just trying to learn to cook, but it would become so much more.

A few years later, I made mashed potatoes on my own for the family for the first time. They were bland, lumpy and had bits of peel all throughout. But something surprising happened when we sat in front of the television to eat and watch “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” one of the few things that our dysfunctional family did together. My stepdad, a notoriously mean and unkind man, smiled and told me I had done a good job. I felt close to him in a way that I can’t explain and don’t remember ever feeling again.

When I was 18, my brother and I lived in a dumpy single-wide trailer with a friend named Brandon. It was a place to call home even if it wasn’t much of a home. Tom and I worked opposite shifts and shared a room, each of us sleeping while the other was at work.

While living in that trailer I purchased my first cookbook, “Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book,” which covered a wide range of cuisines, and I aimed to make one new recipe a week. I have many pleasurable memories from that time, including learning how to make chocolate truffles, a lifelong favorite to eat and share. Another favorite was a tater tot casserole. Nothing fancy, but a hearty meal. 

Brandon remarked after eating my inaugural casserole that I must really like to make meals that stick to the ribs. I replied that I like to make meals that put smiles on faces. I was beginning to understand the joy created by making and sharing food with people, but the deeper potential of food to connect people still hadn’t hit me yet.

My love of food continued for years, into adulthood with my own family, holidays, parties and ordinary weeknight meals. In so many parts of my life, food was the vehicle for coming together and making memories. That feeling would intensify when I was incarcerated. 

When I first came to prison, I felt lost. Isolated from those I loved most, I was alone and vulnerable in this big scary place. All I knew about prison was what I had gleaned from a lifetime of media consumption: gangs, violence, corruption, a place where the worst of society comes to become even worse humans before they are released back into the world to perpetuate the cycle of crime and harm.

Those stereotypes can be accurate at times, but I also found a thriving community of people working to learn and grow as human beings, people focused on being better than the choices that led them to this place, people that recognize the value and power of folks coming together. I have been humbled to find some of the greatest people I’ve ever met anywhere, serving sentences alongside me.

It took me about a year to figure out that my approach to food and cooking outside of prison was possible inside, even with the meager list of items I had access to through the prison commissary, and only a microwave to cook with. Who actually cooks in a microwave? They’re just for heating up leftovers and making popcorn, right? I felt a bit like eight-year-old me again, cooking with constraints.

It took some time and experimentation, but I eventually started to make some tasty things. I constructed a cardboard A-frame, draped butter-covered tortillas over it, and made crunchy tacos. I used apple jelly packets to caramelize summer sausage meat sticks to make rice bowls. I used brown sugar, soy sauce and powdered garlic along with my old friend, ramen noodles, to make chow mein. These became staples of my prison repertoire, and I began to offer to make meals with folks on the tier.

The power of food to connect people to each other, to culture, and to history really hit me when a man on my tier, Josue, asked me to make him a meal for his birthday coming the following week. He told me he had been craving a childhood favorite, pozole, a Mexican soup that uses hominy. I happily took the challenge, knowing I was going to have to be creative. I couldn’t get hominy from the commissary, but it had corn nuts, the dried and seasoned snack. That got my wheels turning. If I soaked and rehydrated the corn nuts, they might prove a worthy substitute for the essential hominy. I prepared the soup, getting as close as possible to the ingredients for pozole, which I had eaten enough to know that I had made a pretty decent version.

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When I showed up at his cell, bowl in hand, Josue greeted me warmly and thanked me for the birthday meal. I jokingly replied that he shouldn’t thank me until he tried my concoction. He grabbed his spoon and took a big bite, and I watched something magical happen. His eyes closed and as he exhaled his posture softened, shoulders dropped and he stood there for a split second, savoring the bite he had just taken. When he opened his eyes, there was a brightness, a gleam that reminded me of a child coming into the living room on Christmas morning and seeing the presents under the tree. He smiled and told me that it tasted like his mom’s pozole, that it tasted like home, that for a moment he was transported out of this place and into his mom’s kitchen where he felt warm, safe and loved. In that moment, the true power of food hit me.

This food that I had been making and sharing — the tacos, rice bowls, chow mein and Josue’s pozole — helped me make connections with folks in my prison community. I was building bridges with people I would never have thought could be my friends. In the shared time and space that comes with breaking bread, we focus on the one thing we all have in common. No matter our race, gender, sexuality, affiliation, religion or political beliefs, we’ve found our humanity. We are all just people. And in that shared humanity, we’ve been able to build an incredibly supportive and family-like community in one of the most toxic environments anywhere.

With a sense of community comes a shift in culture. Guys feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves and become more likely to engage in nonviolent means to solve problems or settle conflicts. I believe people invested in community are less likely to offend against it because they value it. Not only that, with the common ground established via the sense of community, doors and lines of communication open. Men come together in ways that allow for organizing and advocating for inmates as a whole and for the common good.

The food we share connects us in the present, but it goes deeper. The things we eat tie us to the memories associated with those flavors and remind us of who we are and where we come from. Eating anchors us in a larger life beyond the walls, people, places and milestones that are connected by the food we came together to share in those moments. It is the thread that stitches together the fabric of our lives.

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For me, in my past, cherished memories of connection with my mom and brother are rooted in the food we ate and prepared together.

In my present, the meals we prepare in prison bring our ragtag little community together to acknowledge our shared humanity. They remind us that even though we are separated from our families and friends, we are still part of something bigger than ourselves and that we are stronger together.

One day in my future, I will cook and share food with the people who will form my new community outside of prison. What a delicious thought.

This article Cooking for my incarcerated community affirms our shared humanity was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article was originally published by Truthout.

On the morning of Feb. 11, the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, or BNYDC, a non-profit landlord responsible for developing the Brooklyn Navy Yard, convened a closed-doors meeting. One item of business concerned the lease of Easy Aerial, an AI drone manufacturer with material ties to the Department of Homeland Security and the Israeli military, and one of 550 businesses housed inside of the city-owned industrial hub.

Meanwhile, 30 community members with the grassroots campaign Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard, or DBNY, occupied the lobby of Navy Yard Building 77, where Easy Aerial is headquartered. “We arrived with noisemakers and drums; we chanted and gave speeches,” said Leila Rafiq, a DBNY organizer using a pseudonym to protect her privacy. Outside, dozens of additional protesters picketed the building entrance.

In September 2024, DBNY launched publicly with a clear and enticing thesis. “A militant, consistent and organized group that employs a multiplicity of tactics can win,” said Rafiq. After an intensive research process, the campaign landed on two primary targets: Easy Aerial and Crye Precision, a tactical gear manufacturer. What started as a small group of committed organizers now involves many community members, Navy Yard tenants and workers, students and neighbors, all with different roles and levels of engagement.

Unlike other segments of the New York City Palestine Solidarity Movement, which revolve around sporadic mass mobilizations, Rafiq contends that DBNY is showing an alternative pathway: hyper-local organizing targeting suppliers of genocide.

During the DBNY occupation, news broke that BNYDC had made a decision about Easy Aerial: the drone company would no longer be welcome in the Navy Yard when their lease expires in May. Felicity Doyle, a Brooklynite who participated in the morning’s action, described feeling “utter disbelief,” at the news. “It was a small shred of hope,” she said.

While BNYDC claims the non-renewal was “for business reasons,” Rafiq said that “What resulted in their eviction is pressuring them from so many different angles with consistency.”

Global and local implications

Alongside militant, disruptive tactics, DBNY also prioritizes community organizing. One effective communications approach has been emphasizing the global and local implications of the campaign. “This is about Palestine, but it’s also local because they’re supplying entities targeting migrants, Black and brown people,” said Rafiq.

A 2022 Times of Israel article reported that Easy Aerial drones are used by both U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, or CBP, at the U.S.-Mexico border, and by the Israeli military at the Israel-Gaza border. Since then, the Gaza genocide appears to have been good for business — in 2024, Easy Aerial’s co-founder and chief product officer, a former Israeli soldier, told Truthout about Israel’s “immediate need” for autonomous drones after Oct. 7. The company contracts with Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, supplying drones for Israeli ground and sea weapons systems. In August 2025, CBP solicited a $1-2 million contract from Easy Aerial for enhancement of its drone surveillance capabilities. Easy Aerial did not respond to Truthout’s request for comment about its DHS contracts.

DBNY’s other primary target is Crye Precision, a tactical uniform manufacturer that licenses camouflage technology to a supplier for the Israeli military, and has numerous DHS contracts, including a recent “rapid order” worth $40,000 to supply CBP agents operating in Maine with Crye Precision cold weather apparel. The federal agents who murdered Alex Pretti in Minneapolis appear to be wearing Crye Precision equipment. Truthout reached out to Crye Precision to verify if agents were wearing its gear and did not receive a response. DBNY is leveraging the recent surge of anti-ICE sentiment to increase public pressure on the BNYDC.

Doyle, a musician and artist, attended a DBNY teach-in outside the Navy Yard, where she got plugged into a civic engagement role. “With my theater and performance background, I am comfortable speaking in public,” she said. One venue for her skills is Community Board meetings, neighborhood bodies where civic leaders gather testimony from community members and share budgeting recommendations to the city government. Doyle has spoken about Easy Aerial and Crye Precision at several Community Board meetings, distributing flyers and encouraging audience members to sign DBNY’s petition.

The petition, which DBNY said has thousands of signatures, including hundreds of Navy Yard workers and tenants, demands that the BNYDC board of directors terminate lease agreements with Easy Aerial and Crye Precision. The BNYDC board is appointed by the mayor, but Mayor Zohran Mamdani has not appointed any new board members, nor taken a position on DBNY’s demands. Mayor Mamdani’s press office did not respond to Truthout’s request for comment.

Many Roles for Many People

One evening in October 2024, Jacob was taking an online exam for a graduate course in his apartment across from the Navy Yard, when he heard protesters banging drums and blaring airhorns outside. Jacob, who requested a pseudonym to protect his privacy, is an anti-Zionist Jewish organizer from Brooklyn. He described feeling dissonance while “participating in careerism, as organizers did the real work of trying to put their bodies in the gears of a genocide.” Afterward, he approached DBNY during a community outreach session outside the Navy Yard, gradually becoming a regular participant.

Weekly pickets and noise demos are the cornerstone of DBNY, “providing a baseline of pressure basically every week to remind people of our presence and the presence of these companies at the Navy Yard,” Jacob said. At these actions, organizers approach curious passersby and share information about the campaign, inviting them to sign the petition and join the picket. Unlike seeing a social media post, Jacob said, “You can’t scroll past bullhorns and drummers and chanting about the mechanisms of genocide you live next-door to.”

While these pickets are a consistent way for New Yorkers to engage with DBNY, the campaign spikes the pressure during strategic moments. “Whenever the board meets we put on a special show for them,” said Jacob.

These “special shows” can include multiple simultaneous tactics, demonstrating DBNY’s organizing approach: many pressure points, many degrees of escalation, many roles for many people. For example, during the September 2025 BNYDC board meeting, neighbors including Jacob held a press conference; civic engagement organizers attempted to enter the meeting to give public comment (and were denied access); protesters picketed outside of Building 77; and autonomous climate activists blockaded an entrance — all at the same time.

Jonathan Bloom, a labor organizer and community member who participates in DBNY, including outreach sessions with workers, believes that building labor power will generate additional pressure on the BNYDC board. Bloom engages workers at pickets and during their lunch breaks. “When I talk to people, I say, there’s an issue here in your workplace, where you can materially impact the supply chain of genocide. And that’s a really big opportunity,” he said.

The Navy Yard is marketed as an industrial center for small businesses, sustainability startups and justice-oriented entrepreneurs, offering below-market, tax-subsidized rental rates. But this has allowed Crye Precision and Easy Aerial — labeled by the Navy Yard as “fashion/accessories” and “fine art/photography” companies, respectively, to exploit the same benefits while obfuscating their military connections.

According to Bloom, after learning about their military contractor neighbors, Navy Yard workers have supported the campaign by organizing teach-ins, signing letters and joining weekly pickets. “If enough workers were to stand up and say this isn’t acceptable to have genocide suppliers in their midst, they have a lot of power to disrupt, whether that’s withholding labor or generally applying pressure from the inside, because BNYDC cares about their image and maintaining a community of artists, designers and makers.”

A few blocks from the Navy Yard, students at Pratt Institute have also participated in the campaign against Easy Aerial and Crye Precision. “Frankly, most students don’t actually know the Navy Yard is producing military equipment for the IDF and ICE,” said Alex Pell, a Pratt Students for Justice in Palestine, or PSJP, organizer using a pseudonym. “So our job right now is just to raise awareness and show solidarity by participating in their actions through PSJP.”

Pratt Institute, a private university known for its arts and design programs, leases space from the Navy Yard for graduate programs and promotes the Navy Yard as a community arts center. “Pratt carries a lot of cultural prestige within the neighborhood. And when we can expose the hypocrisy of its partnership with the Navy Yard, it puts pressure on both Pratt and the Navy Yard,” said Pell. When students show up at pickets with signs identifying themselves as such, Pell said “it makes it more difficult for them to hold this facade.”

Multiple DBNY organizers told Truthout that one of the most effective strategies that resulted in Easy Aerial’s eviction was personalizing the pressure toward members of BNYDC. In December, DBNY demonstrated outside the apartment of BNYDC President and CEO Lindsay Greene, greeting her with drums, chants and trumpets, while canvassing her neighbors about Easy Aerial and Crye Precision. “House actions are really important,” said Rafiq. “Telling their neighbors about who they are, and confronting them with their names and faces on a banner, that’s effective.” DBNY has also demonstrated outside the home of BNYDC Board Chair Hank Gutman.

“From my perspective, that’s a very direct method of applying pressure to the people who can really make the decisions,” Jacob added. “I think that Easy Aerial became toxic, like an albatross hanging around the neck of the Navy Yard. And it grew more costly as time went on.”

Now, DBNY sets its sights on the future. In addition to holding BNYDC accountable by ensuring Easy Aerial really leaves in May, the campaign continues to target Crye Precision. They are eyeing other Navy Yard tenants with military contracts, including Radical AI and CubeFabs, the latter of which is backed by Peter Thiel. DBNY also participates in the NYC chapter of a national campaign against Capital One — a major investor in Elbit Systems. “Our aim is to fully demilitarize,” said Rafiq. “We want to change the name to the Brooklyn Neighborhood Yard.”

On March 4, the campaign organized a noise demonstration at Navy Yard Building 77 to commemorate the recent victory. Picketers picketed, drummers drummed, bikers stopped to holler in approval, organizers flyered onlookers, and the crowd erupted in the chant: “Easy Aerial go to hell.” Soon, the sun set against the backdrop of the hulking Navy Yard facility, as it seems to be setting on Easy Aerial’s lease.

Before departing, picketers converged at the Building 77 windows, staring down NYPD officers posted inside, hollering “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” harnessing momentum for the fight to come.

This article How grassroots organizers pushed a drone company out of Brooklyn was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Before daybreak on March 2, in response to the U.S.-Israel attack on Iran and assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Hezbollah launched rockets into Israel from Lebanon. Israel retaliated with air strikes on Beirut and its suburbs, renewing the decades-old conflict between the two countries. Thousands fled their homes.

Over the course of March, Hezbollah attacks continued and Israel escalated to a large-scale military operation across Lebanon, including a ground invasion. There were more strikes on residential neighborhoods and “evacuation notices” spanning large parts of south Lebanon. 

Local initiatives like community kitchens and mutual aid efforts have become vital as Israel’s aggression triggers mass displacement and a growing humanitarian crisis. Foreigners living in Lebanon, as well as Lebanese expats abroad, are fundraising internationally in solidarity with the displaced and funneling the daily goods and cash necessary for survival to those living in shelters and tents around the country.  

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that over a million people have been displaced since early March — approximately 20 percent of people in Lebanon. As of March 28, around three weeks into the war, 136,148 people were registered as displaced in shelters by Lebanon’s Ministry of Social Affairs. 

Shelters began opening on the first day of the war, run by both the government and civil society groups. Schools and stadiums became official shelters. Churches, abandoned buildings and parking lots are accommodating many others. 

Local NGOs leapt to action to provide food and other essentials. Ahla Fawda, a humanitarian and environmental organization in Beirut that usually works on urban planning and initiatives like buying up plastic waste, instantly shifted their operations toward crisis response, according to founder Imane Assaf. Ahla Fawda’s Eco Hub, which provided relief during the 2024 war with Israel, is now operating as a place for people affected by displacement to get together for meals, share space and access clothes and other supplies. Ahla Fawda has partnered with the We Deserve Better Foundation to manage the space, and Barzakh, usually a library and cafe, is providing meals that are cooked on site by volunteers.

Nation Station, a community kitchen that was birthed as an immediate response to the Beirut Port explosion on Aug. 4, 2020, also resumed crisis operations. They have served over 28,761 meals a day since the war began and are always buzzing with volunteers. 

Volunteers show up at Eco Hub, Nation Station and many other sites daily. “The first day the displacement began, I began looking for places to assist and volunteer,” said Nour Haddad, an architect based in Beirut. “I went to Nation Station because I knew it is always open.” 

Officially, government shelters are meant to be open to all displaced people, regardless of nationality or migration status. But reports have surfaced of non-Lebanese people being turned away. Lebanon is home to more than a million Syrian refugees and 200,000 displaced Palestinians, many of whom now find themselves displaced again. Along with migrant workers, they are among the most vulnerable in Lebanon, with limited access to jobs and services like public health care. Over 180,000 Syrians have returned to Syria, a country that has remained relatively stable in the current regional crisis. 

Many migrant workers have ended up in informal shelters or camping out. Initiatives led by migrant workers have sprung back into action, some of them operating as part of Reclaim Our Rights collective, a coalition of women migrant workers in Lebanon who organize and advocate for rights of domestic workers and provide community support. A statement from Reclaim Our Rights said that its membership, made up of “community leaders, mothers and activists,” was assisting displaced migrant women through community kitchens, food boxes and assistance paying rent to informal shelters.

Many fundraisers and volunteers are putting their efforts toward those outside the conventional shelter system. “Recently, I’ve been trying to go towards other initiatives [besides Nation Station], too,” Haddad said, “to divide my time as per the needs announced on social media or spontaneous WhatsApp groups that have emerged since early March.” 

Social media groups have become a crucial way to connect NGOs and individual aid efforts with shelters that are outside the governmental system or lack support. One such hub is a WhatsApp group begun by students at the Saifi Institute for Arabic Language, which draws Arabic learners of all ages from around the world. Group announcements range from specific calls, such as an individual family that needs children’s clothing, to information like where to find medical assistance. The group has expanded to include other foreigners living in Lebanon, a few local residents and several NGOs, including a Brazilian humanitarian project and a fundraiser providing sanitary napkins.

Even as locals and foreign residents within Lebanon have mobilized, Lebanese expats around the world are also running fundraising campaigns to distribute aid and cash to displaced people across Beirut. Tania Shoukair, a mental health worker who lives in the Netherlands, is fundraising for the second time, after doing so during the 2024 war in Lebanon. “I feel somehow I have managed to make my way into the epicenter of privilege, and organizing mutual aid is the minimum I can do at this moment,” Shoukair said. 

Global political education on the Israeli war on Gaza has raised solidarity for the current situation in Lebanon, helping with fundraising, Shoukair added. 

Shoukair’s sister Chiri, a journalist and musician in Lebanon, is among the network that distributes the aid on the ground. A majority of the funds go toward direct financial support to families, who receive either $50, $100 or $150, depending on the number of people. Another 20 percent is spent on blankets, pillows and mattresses, and the rest goes to clothing, personal hygiene, food boxes and medicine, with some set aside to take care of stray animals. Chiri stretches the money as far as she can by collaborating with local businesses and initiatives, and buying items in bulk.

For Jad Essayli, a Lebanese-American lawyer who raised funds for the first time after the Beirut blasts in 2020, when he was still living in the U.S., tapping into a global network from his home in Lebanon has been essential. Lebanon has one of the biggest diaspora populations in the world and yet, Essayli said, “Most of our donations are coming from non-Lebanese people.”   

Essayli and others said that what’s challenging is not necessarily raising funds but getting them into Lebanon, due to its unique banking situation. The country’s 2019 banking crisis triggered a host of restrictions on withdrawals and transfers from abroad. Lebanon also lacks platforms and tools such as a GoFundMe or major credit card systems, Shoukair said. These issues also cause delays in dispersing funds to families, Essayli said.

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While food, water, gas and clothing are increasingly scarce as the crisis deepens, the most urgent need Essayli saw in Beirut, Saida and other southern cities was money for housing. “People were going back to homes made targets by Israel, because of the lack of money to rent another place,” he said.

Given the sheer scale of the crisis, volunteers and fundraisers are already overwhelmed, four weeks in. As Israeli aggression intensifies by the day, with plans to turn south Lebanon into an occupied “buffer zone” and some Israeli politicians even calling for an annexation, there is a deep fear of a protracted crisis and a sense that the response from the Lebanese government has left much to be desired. Essayli described a feeling that many share as they face a war with no end in sight: “I hope for an immediate response from the Lebanese government for dignified housing, with a long-term consideration.”

Even as the European Union and countries including Italy, France and Jordan have pledged aid, Essayli is concerned that the external aid is not sufficiently making its way to the ground. He also hopes for greater commitments of support as humanitarian needs in the country grow by the day. 

Assaf said that her greatest concern is not about funding for aid efforts, but about peace. “I hope I can sleep without having to wake up the next day to bad news, yet again,” she said. “We hope for all families to be able to return home.”

This article Mutual aid is a lifeline for the million people displaced by war in Lebanon was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

As federal agents and their state and local supporters began terrorizing communities on Jan. 20, 2025 with renewed vigor granted them by the Trump administration, something happened that may have surprised some observers: Clergy showed up. Not just with humanitarian work like food pantry boxes or grief counseling, but with their bodies, their preaching, their prayers, their public presence and their institutional credibility. Ministers organized rapid response networks. Priests, rabbis and imams positioned themselves as witnesses, as shields, as a very particular kind of good trouble.

If the broader progressive movement is going to understand what faith leaders bring to resistance work and why their contribution is irreplaceable, it has to grapple with something that can feel counterintuitive: Our robes, our collars, our candles and the sometimes ancient words of our prayers are not incidental to this work. They are the work.

I can speak to this as a queer and progressive pastor in Columbus, Ohio, and the executive director of a nonprofit working at the intersection of LGBTQIA+ identity and Christian faith. In years of organizing before I was ordained and since, my faith and the model I find in Jesus Christ, the brown-skinned Palestinian refugee living under colonial occupation, are what compel me to show up, act up and speak up against the lies of nationalism and authoritarianism. 

I want to make an argument to anyone who might be skeptical of people of faith, particularly clergy: You need us in this fight, and not just for our buildings or our mailing lists. You need the specifically theological, liturgical and prophetic tools that faith leaders carry. 

Why clergy are a distinct political force

Christian nationalists strive to control the Christian narrative and what it demands of Christians. Why? Because faith and the language of faith still carry extraordinary weight in American public life. That narrative has the power to grab people’s attention and inform how hundreds of millions of people understand authority, community, obligation and resistance. When the Center for Christian Virtue, an anti-LGBTQIA+ hate group with an office across the street from the Ohio Statehouse, frames its legislative agenda in the language of faithfulness, it is making a move that secular counter-messaging cannot fully answer. Policy arguments can rebut policy arguments. But the claim that God demands the exclusion and erasure of LGBTQIA+ people can only be most powerfully answered by other people of faith who demonstrate that lie for what it is.

This is the first thing people need to understand about clergy organizing: When faith leaders show up publicly for justice, we’re not just adding bodies to a coalition. We are contesting the theological ground that Christian nationalism depends on. Every pastor who testifies at a statehouse hearing in a clerical collar or a stole, every minister who stands at a protest with a sign that quotes scripture, every congregation that rewrites its liturgy to name and resist what is happening in this country, is committing an act of theological resistance. 

Physical presence as a tool

One powerful tool available to clergy is their physical presence. For Christian clergy, the clerical collar is a credential that reads differently than almost any other in American public life. It communicates moral seriousness and a claim to speak from within a tradition. When collared clergy appear at ICE actions, at state legislative hearings, at Pride marches, at protests outside detention facilities, they are deploying that credential in public. They are also countering the narrative that Christians are conservative, nationalistic and aligned with fascism and authoritarianism.

Clergy showing up at protests also changes the dynamics of those protests in ways that matter strategically. It complicates the narrative that resistance to authoritarian policies is purely secular or anti-religious. It creates moments of genuine cognitive dissonance for observers who have been told that faith and progressive politics are incompatible. And in moments of potential confrontation with law enforcement or counter-protesters, a visible clerical presence can function as deescalation, not because clergy are above the fray, but because their presence reframes the moral stakes of what is happening. 

This visibility matters for organizing. One of the persistent challenges in mobilizing progressive Christians is the sense of isolation, the feeling that they are anomalies in a tradition that has been captured by the MAGA-aligned nationalism. When faith leaders show up visibly and publicly, they give permission and accessibility to progressive faith leaders to start showing up and acting out. This public act of witness has the power to activate other faith leaders and people of faith.

For several years now, my organization has hosted an interfaith service during Columbus’s Pride week. We intentionally encourage clergy to dress in whatever garb is appropriate to their position in their tradition. Yes, it’s fun for us to break out the rainbow stoles, rainbow tallitot (Jewish prayer shawls) and rainbow forms of many religious garments, but we also understand the import. We are creating moments when LGBTQIA+ meet the first affirming clergy from their tradition or any tradition, which is a powerful witness to a community so often rejected by religious communities. And while the presence — the very existence in fact — of queer clergy is important, even more powerful is the sight of heterosexual, cisgender clergy de-centering themselves by explicitly making their quiet presence and solidarity known. 

Writing as a prophetic act

The prophetic tradition in many religions is, at its core, a written and oral tradition. The Hebrew prophets were poets and rhetoricians. They named what was happening in their lived realities, called it by its true name and insisted that the community of faith had an obligation to respond. Progressive faith leaders working in that tradition today are doing the same thing in op-eds, in open letters, in legislative testimony, in denominational statements and in the newsletters and social media posts that reach beyond the people actually sitting in pews.

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This writing is not merely commentary. It is a form of counter-narrative construction. When I write about LGBTQIA+ dignity, about the cruelty of anti-immigrant mass deportation, about the theological bankruptcy and moral perversion of Christian nationalism, I’m doing something specific. I’m claiming the language of faith for a different set of commitments than Christian nationalists have claimed.

For people of faith, the power of our prophetic traditions has less to do with hearing from the divine, though that’s important, and more to do with hearing from an otherwise normal person who has taken it upon themselves to challenge the establishment, the empire and the status quo. We respect them as much for their message as we do for the courage they had to speak that message. Prophets are rarely popular in their own times, and their messages are often silenced through exile, deportation and even death. Yet, the example prophets set and the fire of their messages persist. 

Liturgy as resistance

Liturgy, the sometimes structured, repeated and often communal practice of reflection and devotion, from highly choreographed pageantry to repeating mantras quietly, is one of the most effective tools for formation and communication that human communities have ever developed. What communities rehearse together, they become. What they name in worship, they are shaped to see in the world. What they pray shapes what they are willing to do.

Exemplified by the historic work of people like Fannie Lou Hamer and the modern activism of Bishop William J. Barber II, BIPOC faith communities have long practiced liturgy that is embodied in resistance. Progressive white faith communities are catching up to that understanding. Our liturgy shouldn’t just inform our resistance; it needs to be our resistance. Liturgy, ritual and worship that remain contained to the walls of a building aren’t true worship. We have to pray with our feet and worship with our bodies. “Friends, our service is ended, but our worship has just begun,” I say at the end of each Sunday service at my church. “So go now and proclaim the resurrection by loving and serving the Lord and each other.” 

For secular organizers, the implication is this: When you partner with faith communities, take the worship seriously. It’s not preamble, it’s where the formation occurs so that the work can happen out there, beyond the walls. Were you curious why it was so important to disrupt a service at Cities Church in Minnesota where the acting director of the local ICE office was also a pastor? This is why.

Organizing faith leaders: what actually works

We need faith leaders in this moment, but how do we get there? How do we bring faith leaders into progressive activism and advocacy? Organizing faith leaders is similar to organizing other leaders, but it has its own challenges and considerations. There are many moderate and progressive faith leaders out there, but some are uncertain about public engagement. To encourage them, start first with the theological and the scriptural. They are more responsive to a conversation about what their tradition requires than to a conversation about which side they’re on. All too often they’re accustomed to walking a thin line between their convictions and their role in maintaining communal harmony. Aim for open conversations rather than partisan framing.

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Third, remember, it’s a fallacy that clergy only work on their specific holy day. Many clergy are busy people and, with a few exceptions, they, too, have lives and families. It’s also becoming very common for progressive Christian clergy to work more than one job; some traditions do not pay their clergy as a matter of tradition or policy, and others cannot afford to. 

Fourth, remember that for many clergy, particularly those with large congregations, their specific position and often why we want and need them in the fight, is also their career and way they support themselves and their families. When I speak out or write publicly, under my name, with my ordination and institutional role attached, I know that I risk losing those positions. Activism will impact a clergyperson’s ability to secure future pastoral positions. It will have consequences for their ability to lead in certain church spaces or to speak in forums that even other progressive clergy can access. 

One of the most difficult positions for many progressive clergy, including those of us fully committed to justice, is when the activism our faith demands of us runs afoul of the opinions and sentiments of the congregations that employ us. Choosing between your livelihood and the call you sense from your God is more difficult than it might seem even to faithful observers. 

With those points in mind, make your asks specific: Will you sign this letter, will you show up at this hearing, will you stand with us at this action? These asks require a real decision, and that decision is itself formative. People who say yes once are more likely to say yes again.

When progressive clergy do step forward and speak out, secular activists can support and amplify their work in concrete ways: by platforming faith voices in progressive media and by including clergy in coalitions where their theological and scriptural framing will be heard by audiences that respond to it. 

What’s at stake

Christian nationalism is no longer a fringe movement, but a governing ideology with enormous institutional power. It has captured much of the federal executive branch, evidenced by the implementation of Project 2025, a Christian nationalist initiative if there ever was one, and explicitly Christian ideological statements made by President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. It has held hostage entire state legislatures, shaped court decisions and established itself as the default voice of American Christianity in too much of our public life. The progressive movement cannot counter that with secular arguments alone. Secular arguments aren’t wrong, but they don’t reach the people who most need to hear a different account of what faith demands, and they often lack the ability to affect people still hoping for a different and better Christianity.

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What progressive faith leaders offer is the ability to fight on religious and spiritual grounds. To say, from inside the tradition, with all the credibility that comes from living inside it and all the passion they share with true believers, that this movement masquerading as Christian is an aberration and perversion. 

The Jesus I follow was a refugee. He was born into an occupied land, lived under the forces of empire and was executed by the state for the trouble he had the potential to cause. The movement that bears his name has spent 2,000 years arguing about what that means and who gets to say. Right now, Christian nationalism appears to be winning that argument in the public square. Their theology isn’t sound, but they showed up and we didn’t.

Yet change is happening. Here in Ohio and across the United States, faith leaders are making a different kind of good trouble—in collars and stoles, in op-eds and testimony, in liturgy that mobilize people for courageous response rather than compliance. If the progressive movement can learn to see us as partners rather than curiosities, to make room for the theological alongside the political, we have a chance to contest the ground that authoritarianism depends on. The tradition that Christian nationalism has weaponized against the vulnerable was never theirs to claim. We’re taking it back.

This article What faith leaders bring to the resistance was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

In a corner of a displacement camp in Al-Mawasi, in southern Gaza, Alaa carefully tapes a sheet of white paper onto a worn wooden board. Dust moves through the air as the wind blows across the camp, where noise and movement rarely stop.

Around her, other tents stretch across the sandy ground of the camp, where thousands of displaced families now live. Children move between the narrow paths separating the tents, while the distant sound of generators and conversation fills the air.

Just a week before the war began in October 2023, Alaa, a 23-year-old fine arts student at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza, worked inside the university’s art studio, surrounded by paints and materials as she planned her graduation project — a collage made by assembling different materials on a single surface. Today, after being displaced during the war, she is trying to rebuild that project using simple materials gathered from friends and a few belongings she managed to retrieve from beneath the rubble of her family’s bombed home.

“When I lost my tent and the materials I used for painting, I felt like I had lost a big part of my soul,” Alaa said. “At first, I lost my passion, but not my hope. Later I tried to start again with whatever I could find, and with support from friends.”

What Alaa is doing is not unusual. Across Gaza, students are trying to continue their education under extraordinary circumstances. Universities have been damaged or destroyed, classrooms reduced to rubble, and electricity and internet connections are often unreliable.

Yet many students keep studying — sometimes inside tents, sometimes among ruins.

Education in Gaza is no longer simply an academic path. For many students, it has become a daily act of quiet resistance. Not because students are making political statements, but because continuing to learn under these conditions becomes a way of refusing erasure — of their futures, their identities and their right to education.

After more than two years of devastation in Gaza, the education system is on the verge of collapse. International estimates indicate that more than 97 percent of schools in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, and more than 12 universities across the territory have been severely affected or rendered unusable. This destruction has been caused by deliberate Israeli airstrikes and military operations, in an attempt to erase educational progress.

In many cases, schools have been turned into shelters for displaced families rather than places for learning. Some students now study in temporary spaces inside tents, damaged homes or online, without the tools they need to learn.

Before the war, tens of thousands of university students attended Gaza’s universities and colleges. Today, many of those institutions lie in ruins. Still, some students are trying to rebuild their academic lives in unconventional ways.

Ahmed, a 22-year-old fourth-year medical student, expected to spend this year in clinical training inside hospitals. Under normal circumstances, medical students spend their final years rotating through hospital departments and operating rooms, learning directly from doctors and patients.

But the reality in Gaza today is very different.

“Becoming a doctor in Gaza today means carrying a heavy responsibility toward your community,” Ahmed said. “Doctors here don’t only face medical challenges — they also work in extremely difficult conditions with limited resources.”

With hospital training often impossible, Ahmed and his classmates have developed alternative ways to keep learning.

“We discuss medical topics and clinical scenarios with each other as if we were in hospital rounds,” he said. “We ask questions and exchange ideas. It cannot replace real clinical training, but it helps us keep our clinical thinking alive.”

In some cases, students also find themselves learning inside field hospitals set up in tents. Gaza’s health care system has been pushed to its limits during the war, with hospitals overwhelmed by patients and many medical facilities damaged or operating under emergency conditions. For medical students like Ahmed, this reality has turned learning into something inseparable from the crisis unfolding around them, where temporary facilities become spaces for both treatment and learning.

Cooperation between students has become essential to continuing their studies.

“We share books and study materials, and whenever someone manages to get lecture notes or summaries, they send them to everyone,” Ahmed said. In this way, studying becomes more than an individual effort — it turns into a form of mutual aid, where students rely on one another to fill the gaps left by the collapse of institutions.

In those moments, he added, they feel like medical students again, despite everything happening around them.

For Alaa, continuing to create art under these conditions often feels nearly impossible. Fine arts education depends heavily on practical studio work and access to materials — many of which disappeared during the war.

Some students were forced to pause their studies temporarily, while others tried to find alternatives with whatever resources were available.

“Instead of canvas, many students now paint on tent fabric,” Alaa said. “Some have even drawn on prayer rugs. The idea is simply to use whatever we can find.”

In one of her recent works, Alaa used pieces of torn tent fabric as part of the artwork and added small fragments of shrapnel she found nearby, attempting to transform remnants of destruction into elements of the painting itself.

The artworks she produces now may not reach the level she once hoped for, but they carry a different meaning.

“For us, art is not just a hobby,” she said. “It is a way to express our feelings, our suffering and our reality.”

“Art is a powerful tool,” she added. “Through it we can show the world what we are going through. As long as art exists, hope still exists.”

Efforts to sustain education are not limited to students. Some university professors are also trying to keep the learning process alive despite the difficult conditions.

Whenever electricity or internet access becomes available, some professors record short lectures and send them to students or answer questions online.

In some cases, small learning meetings are organized — sometimes online, and sometimes in person once or twice a month in temporary locations such as a tent or another relatively safe space. Even with these limitations, these efforts help students stay connected to their education.

With formal institutions largely gone, students increasingly rely on one another. Some share books when they can. Others take turns using internet connections to download materials or submit assignments. Small study groups form whenever conditions allow.

For many students, studying is no longer an individual effort, but a collective attempt to preserve education, one that reflects a form of grassroots organizing in the absence of formal institutions.

In an attempt to support that cooperation, I created an online study group bringing together students from literature and translation programs. Within these groups, students share study materials, exchange lecture notes and help one another keep up with coursework despite electricity cuts, weak internet and the difficult conditions we are living through. What started as a simple effort to stay connected gradually became something larger — a small form of community-building, where students support each other not only academically, but also emotionally.

These small initiatives cannot replace universities or classrooms, but they help students keep going. For many of them, education has become more of a collective effort than ever before.

In Gaza today, resistance does not always appear in the form of protests or slogans. Sometimes it is quieter.

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A student reviewing notes by the light of a phone. A group of students sharing a fragile internet connection to submit an assignment. Or an art student completing her project using materials salvaged from the rubble.

For Alaa, painting became a way to continue and to express herself. For Ahmed, studying medicine has become a responsibility toward the future of his community.

As for me, a student and writer in Gaza, writing has become my way of expressing what we feel and trying to make sense of what we are living through.

In a place where universities have been destroyed and institutions have collapsed, continuing to study, write and learn becomes a simple but meaningful act — an attempt to keep the future alive even in the most difficult circumstances. For many students, continuing their education is also a way of refusing the idea that their future can simply disappear with the destruction around them.

The buildings may be gone, but what remains is a form of everyday resistance — one rooted in collective care, shared knowledge and a determination to keep learning despite everything. In that sense, these small acts of studying, sharing and creating are not only about education, but about sustaining a community and a future.

This article In Gaza, education is a daily act of quiet resistance was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The labor movement and other movement spaces have shaped who I am today. It is in these spaces where I have learned that collectively we are unstoppable. Even when I was afraid I did scary things in the movement. I organized farm workers in the orange fields of the Central Valley, was sprayed with pesticides while pregnant and still woke up the next day and went back out to organize. It is where I shut down the Los Angeles airport in support of hotel worker rights; it’s where I got arrested for the first time; it’s where I locked myself to other human beings with PVC pipes to hinder police from removing us from an intersection and reopening an immigrant detention center. That day, when I locked myself to other human beings, that was Mother’s Day 2010, I spent that night in jail, away from my kids. That was a sacrifice I chose to make; I made that sacrifice for immigrant mamas. It was beautiful.

The movement is beautiful, it is made up of brothers and sisters in the struggle that are willing to sacrifice time away from their families, their freedom, sometimes even their lives for the liberation of others, for our collective liberation.

Those are sacrifices we make, willingly. Choices we make because we believe in what we are fighting for.

It is what movements, what revolutions are made of.

But what happens when sacrifice becomes exploitation, when it becomes rooted in the very power dynamics we are seeking to change?

As I read of the sexual violence that Dolores Huerta, Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas experienced at the hands of Cesar Chavez and the secret they kept for decades, my heart breaks open. I didn’t have to read more to understand why they kept the secret, I knew it in my heart. They were afraid that speaking of it would harm the movement and the fight for farmworker rights. These three women, my sisters in the farm worker struggle, made a sacrifice, but it was the kind of sacrifice they should have never had to make.

I joined the United Farm Workers, or UFW, as a young 19-year-old organizer in 1993, just a couple of months after Cesar Chavez died. Sacrifice was quickly ingrained in me as a young organizer in the farm worker struggle. As soon as I walked in the door I was taught that nothing was more important than “La Causa.” In some ways it was beautiful. I lived a life of voluntary poverty, earning close to nothing while dedicating my life to a cause I deeply believed in while having my basic needs met, and working close to some of the best organizers in the movement, including Dolores Huerta herself.

I quickly learned that there was also a culture of acquiescence and these two things together, sacrifice and acquiescence, lead to a culture in which sexual harassment and abuse were not taken seriously.

Individual harms were seen as less important than the movement itself.

Remember that pesticide spraying incident I mentioned earlier? A dozen or so farm workers and I were sprayed with pesticides that day. Two of us were pregnant. We would sign away our rights to sue for harm in exchange for a union contract. I had no real way of knowing if the pesticides would harm my unborn child, or me over the long term. But we were taught, the movement came above all else.

If sexual abuse got in the way, or threatened campaigns or leadership, as was the case for Dolores, Ana and Debra, silence became the only option. No matter the harm to the three women.

The UFW, like much of the labor movement even into the 90s, was dominated by men, and organizing meetings were run by men. I was recently sent a photo of an organizing meeting I was a part of in Delano — in the photo everyone in the room was male except me.

Most women were relegated to administrative positions, rarely in roles with real power over organizing. I was organizing adjacent — an assistant to one of the members of UFW’s executive leadership.

Even so, being organizing adjacent was enough for me. The UFW was the first place I learned to build collective power. I won my first organizing campaign there, at Bear Creek Roses, in a landmark campaign to organize over 1,500 farm workers. I helped to organize the 1994 Pilgrimage from Delano to Sacramento. I won my first contract campaign at Airdrome Orchards. I wouldn’t trade these experiences there for the world.

But in the early 1990s, the UFW was still a difficult place for women. It was even more so for women who experienced sexual abuse within its ranks. Speaking up — naming what had been done to you — was often treated as inconsequential and dismissed. If the abuse felt unsurvivable, speaking up and being ignored made it even more so.

I learned I could survive both rape and speaking up when I survived rape in college, and I pursued filing charges. I had gone to the police and the district attorney looking for justice. I endured a sexual assault forensic exam at the hospital, and two grueling interviews by the DA as part of their “investigation” only to be told they wouldn’t be bringing charges against the “nice [white] boy” who had raped me. It broke me, but I survived. 

In my time in the UFW, I was sexually abused twice. Each time I spoke up and did not stay silent. Acquiescence did not come easy to me, and in my case speaking up did not challenge the union leadership. So although it was still hard, it did not feel impossible.

First, a fellow organizer, after weeks of rejecting his sexual advances at the UFW boycott house in LA, pulled me onto his lap and refused to let me go while he enjoyed himself. I don’t need to say more. Once again, I worked up the courage to tell someone. This time I told the wife of a senior UFW leader hoping she would help me. I wasn’t sure what I wanted her to do, but I wanted her to do something because I felt violated and unsafe. But she merely dismissed his actions as “just having fun.” Memories of the DA came flooding back and silence engulfed me. Eventually, he had a “talking to” and I didn’t pursue it further. I kept my disappointment to myself, and even if I was uncomfortable and afraid around my assailant, I continued to work as if nothing had happened. That was the sacrifice I was willing to make.

I was later transferred to La Paz, the historic headquarters of the UFW, and then Delano. I lived in Agbayani Village on 40 Acres, a retirement village for farm worker men owned by the UFW, where organizers were sometimes also housed as we organized in the fields of the Central Valley. I made friends with some of the retired farmworkers who lived there. One night as I talked to one of the men he pushed me against a wall and violently stuck his tongue in my mouth, refusing to let me break free. I finally did break free and ran back to my room. I told my then husband, and with his encouragement I found it within me to tell a leader of the union. The leader of the union had a talk with the man and once again left me to deal with the aftermath of my disappointment and fear until we moved again.

I do not want to diminish what it took to survive these assaults and to speak up. As many survivors have before me and many will after me, I portrayed myself as strong and capable to make it through the days, months and years that followed each act of abuse, and each time my call for help went unheard. I am not ready to speak publicly about the toll this took on me, suffice it to say that at times it did feel unsurvivable. But here I am. I have done the work and still do it every day. For me, speaking the truth is part of that work.

I’ve never spoken of these things until now. Until Dolores, Ana and Debra broke their silence and gave us all the power to speak.

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I’ve only spoken of La Union, La Causa, the farmworkers, the UFW, as the place where I learned to organize, lived amongst the hills of La Paz, the place of the beginning of my greatest love story — where I met my now husband 30 years ago. I’ve spoken of El Movimiento, where my daughter got her name, where her birth was announced on Radio Campesina in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley.

I speak of it now in all its truths, good and bad, because unions and movements have asked us to give everything to the fight, and also asked some of us to hold what was done to us deep within — to stay quiet, to protect the movement, even when the harm was coming from inside it.

I speak of it now for the women who aren’t yet ready to speak, who were told that their sacrifice was the price of liberation.

Movements may require sacrifice, but the sacrifices liberation asks us to make should be made in the sunlight, not in the darkness of silence.

It is these sacrifices that revolutions are made of.

If movements are to demand sacrifice, they must also demand self-reflection and accountability. That is what this moment requires of us. We cannot simply pin our defects on one man — as deserving as he may be — but must shine a light into every corner of our movements and choose a path forward that does better. No one who experiences sexual violence should ever be silenced again. And we must never again allow any man — powerful or not — to escape accountability for sexual abuse.

This article My experience in the farmworker movement helps me understand Dolores’ silence was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Witnessing the powerful images of the protests in Minneapolis against state violence aimed at brown and Black neighbors during this intense winter of ICE escalation, I saw a beautiful sea of brave humanity. I also noticed a lot of women — singing, shouting their rage and putting their bodies on the line.

The media is noticing, too. Right-wing media is so incensed by white women showing interracial solidarity in this anti-violence movement that they’ve gone on a crusade against “organized gangs of wine moms.” They seem entirely flummoxed by white women identifying with mostly non-white people the Trump administration seeks to dehumanize and brutalize.

The partial but important victory of activists in massively reducing the presence of ICE, and the historic nomination of the people of Minneapolis for the Nobel Peace Prize, underscores a truth that historians of women and gender have long documented: Peace activism led or heavily powered by women has been foundational and transformative. 

It’s also often been unappreciated. The Nobel Peace Prize, first awarded in 1901, went to only three women before 1976, and only 20 women total. 

Some of what needs greater appreciation is the invisible labor that makes street protests effective. In her cogent article, Barbara Rodriguez reminds us of a historical pattern: Underneath the visibility of people gathering in the streets is the less-seen caregiving work so often organized by women. 

In Minneapolis this winter, it’s been the diaper runs, the gas cards, the GoFundMe accounts for families in crisis, including Renee Nicole Good’s family, and the procurement and distribution of protest supplies like hand warmers and whistles. It’s the circles of mothers, teachers and caregivers who stepped up for families afraid to leave their houses, fundraising for food and rent and escorting children to and from school when their parents couldn’t. It’s the kindness reflected in the last words of Alex Pretti, who was remembered for his ethic of care as a nurse: “Are you okay?” It’s caregiving that sustains resistance to injustice in the name of peace. 

Another reason that women’s peace work has gone unrecognized is the fact that women mostly have not sat at the tables where peace and war are decided. But as is true throughout women’s history, innovation flowed from lack of presence at the power tables. Women have brought sophistication, a multi-faceted approach and a critical vision to organizing against state violence. 

A tender vision

The original vision for Mother’s Day in the United States was a mother’s day of peace, proposed by Julia Ward Howe. Howe’s 1870 poem, “Mother’s Day Proclamation for Peace” laid out her vision for mothers’ role in creating, or at least advocating for, a peaceful world, which she hoped would be celebrated each year. (The official U.S. Mother’s Day would lose its peace emphasis.)

Howe, a staunch abolitionist (and, ironically, the author of “Battle Hymn of the Republic”), believed the essentially maternal and moral perspectives of women could and should influence the big moral questions that underlie the politics and wars devised by men.

She wrote at a time when popular discourse on women and motherhood was infused with uncritical sentimentality. But her poem always tugs at my own sentimental heart: “We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.” By evoking what it means to be “tender” towards those who are not “us,” she links peace to bonds between mothers and sons, and by extension entire families, whom we will never know.   

Such tenderness exists today in Minneapolis, too, grounded in a clear moral vision. Emily, one of the organizers of a week of action in early March (after the demobilization of many ICE officers in the metro area), told the Pioneer Press: “What we don’t want to see is ICE leaving Minneapolis and taking their operations elsewhere to terrorize someone else’s community. … What we want to see is a national movement that can rise up and defend their neighbors wherever it’s needed next. We don’t just need ICE out of Minnesota; we need an end to ICE everywhere.”

The moral clarity, leadership and love went deeper in Howe’s poem, as she planted the visionary seeds of what would become the American women’s peace movement: “Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause,” she insisted. “Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.” In spite of women’s very limited public power, Howe sought to inspire mothers to refuse the violent ideas of what proving one’s manhood meant in a patriarchal and warlike culture, and to resist the claim of the state on the lives and souls of their sons.    

Howe lived through the carnage of the Civil War and wrote her poem in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. She went on to be a peace activist, advocating international cooperation and integrating pacifism into suffrage activism. She laid foundations for what would become the modern women’s peace movement.

Howe did not live long enough to ever cast a ballot. Her access to public spaces was limited by the gender restrictions of her time (though certainly wider than the Black women of her era). But her leveraging of women’s separateness from public spaces and decisions — and her insistence on the basic morality forged in intimate human bonds — would continue to animate the language of women peace activists over many decades. And as women’s access to education and public roles grew, so would the sophistication of their arguments. 

Linking peace and justice

“The new ideal of peace,” Jane Addams wrote in 1907, “demands that the people who desire it shall undertake the patient effort of securing justice in the industrial and social order.” Addams — the founder of the U.S. settlement house movement and a sociologist, suffragist, anti-child labor activist, ACLU cofounder and immigrant rights advocate — understood these linkages between peace among peoples, peace nurtured at home and social justice. Echoing Howe, she also argued in 1922 that “peace is not merely an absence of war but the nurture of human life, and that in time this nurture would do away with war as a natural process.”   

With suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, Addams co-founded the Women’s Peace Party in 1915 during World War I, and shepherded its evolution into the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, or WILPF, in 1919. For over 100 years, WILPF has championed disarmament and diplomacy and dared to envision a world without war. Addams and Emily Green Balch, who led the organization in the 1930s, were two of the first three to win the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1931 and 1946, respectively. WILPF resisted war and fascism during World War II, influenced the human rights framework of the early United Nations and went on to protest apartheid in South Africa, among other initiatives.

In 1961, American women formed Women Strike for Peace, or WSP. This housewife-driven movement, mostly comprised of white middle-class women, did not keep member lists so it could avoid the House Un-American Activities Committee. Members petitioned and organized a strike to oppose nuclear testing and the arms race. And they engaged in their own “feminine” political theater, showing up at congressional hearings with their babies and children, in white gloves, daring representatives to call them un-American. They rented a fallout shelter, took it to a shopping area and repurposed it into a “Peace Center,” where they distributed educational pamphlets. Later WSP would oppose the Vietnam War, and more women’s peace organizations would follow, like Code Pink, which formed to oppose the Iraq War and later became active in support of Palestine.

For most of the 20th century, white women were best positioned to raise the visibility of peace activism by leveraging ideas of white femininity as moral and maternal. But the activism of women of color, often more dangerous to undertake, continued apace. In the Vietnam War era, the women of color-led National Welfare Rights Organization and Third World Women’s Alliance protested the use of federal funds for violence against children overseas at the expense of domestic needs. And they criticized a nation that refused to support them in raising children and then drafted their sons to die.

For women of color, the war has often been right here at home, through police brutality, resource deprivation and disproportionate vulnerability to incarceration — a reality that more white people understand today as we’ve watched the brutality of ICE’s state violence in Minneapolis in 2026, and the murder of George Floyd by an agent of the state in that same city in 2020. Of course, wartime violence — mass bombings, large deployments of troops, mass deployment of chemical weapons and utter destruction of cities — are different facets of state-sponsored violence than carceral racism or the ICE thuggery now being turned onto our neighbors here at home, though the distinctions are blurring in the second Trump presidency. Still, the violence, fear and disruption elicit similar kinds of resistance. 

As we face a resurgence of state violence at home, we can look to Black women’s history of resistance, from the anti-slavery work of Harriet Tubman to the anti-lynching activism of Ida B. Wells to the anti-police violence work of the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement, founded by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Ayọ Tometi. Rooted in Black activism (often women-led), the movement also reminds us that, for the people most victimized by state violence, a critical component of peace and justice activism is stubborn insistence that their lives matter. This is part of the work of artists and activist projects like Say Her Name, which challenges the erasure of violence against Black women. As the Somali-American poet Ifrah Mansour recently wrote, “We remind ourselves that we are worthy of peace, of belonging, of dignity.”  

Women activists who link peace and justice show us a broader view of resistance, of what it means to build peace from the ground up, through our hearts and our hands. Today’s anti-violence movements draw, too, on immigrant rights, Palestinian liberation and LGBTQ+ activism, insisting on new ways to build coalitions and imagine peace and justice.

Of course, effective resistance to state violence, whether in international arenas or at home, requires organized action in the streets and in the halls of power, as well as an understanding of the connections between injustice and state-sponsored violence. 

But it also requires social imagination, tactical and strategic innovation, the logistical labor of caregiving work, “world-mindedness” education, the reshaping of public memory and yes, the tender vision of human connections, that women are often acting and speaking to in this moment. It’s the kind of vision we see in the Singing Resistance in Minneapolis, in the way that, as Mansour says, “there’s something magical that’s also happening [in Minneapolis]. There is an eruption of kindness.”

Women get results

The good news is that women’s peace activism often gets results. Erica Chenoweth, an expert on mass mobilization and political transformation, has demonstrated this through research at Harvard University’s Nonviolent Action Lab. In the first multi-decade study of women’s participation in resistance movements across the globe, Chenoweth and their team looked at movements from between 1945 and 2014 and uncovered a powerful pattern. Nonviolent movements with significant participation by women — both at the frontlines and at the organizational level — have greater success in confronting oppressive governments. So, too, she noted, do campaigns with gender-inclusive ideologies.

As we talk about the potential of women’s transformational work, it’s important not to essentialize gender and suggest, as Howe did, that women are intrinsically nonviolent. Women have participated in violent movements (for example, towards independence from colonial powers or regime change), as well as nonviolent ones.

Still, Chenoweth’s research reminds us that women’s participation in resistance movements is generally correlated with nonviolent action. And they found that women-heavy movements are more likely to maintain nonviolent discipline, which helps preserve movement efficacy and public support. Such movements, too, are also more likely to “elicit loyalty shifts from security forces,” Chenoweth wrote. Think Singing Resistance and pleas with ICE officers to come home to their humanity. 

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In some ways, early 21st century rigorous social science and 19th century poetic sentimentalism point in similar directions: Women’s leadership is crucial to successful nonviolent protests against war and occupation — and against militarization and oppressive governments at home. Though the sentimental essentializing of femininity makes us uncomfortable today, it had its place in creating a visionary underpinning for women-led or women-heavy peace activism in the decades before 1970s feminism. Its successors offered us something else: a more explicitly gender-equitable and gender-inclusive way to link peace movements to liberation for all of us. 

Memory and recognition matter, too, like the work of the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation, which recognizes U.S. peace activists through its U.S. Peace Registry and U.S. Peace Prize and is working to create a national monument to peace activists. Linking memory to multi-faceted activism allows us to continue to imagine a world in which we honor peace builders at least as much as we honor warriors.

In this urgent historical moment, with state violence escalating at home and outright war overseas, an appreciation for the activists who have come before us can provide fuel, inspiration and wisdom. The tactics of women-led peace movements will be especially important as we work to shorten the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran and build conditions for more peace and justice on the other side of it.

This article The Minneapolis protests recall a long lineage of women’s peace movements was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Every morning, across the nation, in red states and blue states, in urban and rural communities, we watch children walk through the doors of our neighborhood public schools, backpacks slung over one shoulder, lunch bags in hand. These are ordinary moments that contain an extraordinary promise: that education belongs to every child. But that promise — simple, powerful and profoundly democratic — is now under attack in ways we haven’t seen in generations. 

Asked what percentage of children she imagines should be in public schools going forward,  Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice — now with Project 2025 architect, the Heritage Foundation — told ProPublica: “I hope zero. I hope to get to zero.” 

Public schools, like so many pieces of our social fabric, have emerged from the last year battered. The Trump administration, in close partnership with state and local allies, and billionaire co-conspirators, is enacting, play by play, Project 2025’s education provisions and broader authoritarian agenda under the three pillars: vouchers, patriotism and prayer. And schools across the country — in blue states and red states alike — are facing existential threats we have never seen before.

These attacks on public schools are attacks on democracy itself. The classroom is where kids learn to listen to different perspectives, to collaborate, to understand that rules apply to everyone. These aren’t abstract lessons — they’re the daily work of becoming people who can sustain a democratic society. 

Schools are also perhaps the strongest example of public policy and public dollars being deployed to build our shared commitment to one another, regardless of wealth or creed. They’re the core of a social compact in which we each have a stake in the success of families and communities everywhere.

That’s why education and democracy advocates like myself have launched a mass base-building campaign with the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools in order to unite people across political party and geographical lines in defense of public education. Called “Free the Future,” the campaign is organizing parents, educators and other community members to explicitly refuse consent to policies that undermine our children’s education and our democratic values. The key idea: Create channels for people to speak out, attend trainings and then flow into escalating resistance, starting with a simple statement of refusal and building toward coordinated public action.

Building the appetite for “no”

The entry point to the Free the Future campaign is simple but powerful: a non-permission slip.

We’re all familiar with permission slips — those forms schools send home asking us to consent to field trips or activities. This is the opposite. It’s a public declaration that we do NOT grant permission for our children to be educated in ways that betray the promise of public schools. 

The non-permission slip, an online fillable form, is a low-bar, low-risk first step — something any parent or community member can do: Read, click through, sign your name and hit submit. But it opens doors to deeper engagement. People who sign are invited to share the non-permission slip with their networks and to attend a leadership training. Over the last few months, thousands of participants — parents and grandparents, young people and educators — have joined our trainings. Some attended action calls to learn about the dangerous and chaotic maneuvering of the Trump administration and its congressional allies, and find out how to take steps to voice their opposition, both online and offline. Others joined workshops about the links between authoritarianism, billionaires and the current attacks on schools, or took a four-week module on understanding power and basic organizing skills. 

The leaders being recruited are everyday people: parents, educators, public school alumni and concerned community members. Participants can also receive one-on-one coaching from experienced organizers and support for escalating actions in their local communities — learning how to recruit other families, push elected officials to fight for public schools, and use fun and humor to resist attacks on schools and protect families from government repression.

Initial small refusals — signing a non-permission slip, meeting with your superintendent, posting dissent on social media and in online forums, organizing rallies with fellow parents or visiting a representative’s office — create the foundation for larger ones like participation in mass mobilizations, civil disobedience and even general strikes. When people see their neighbors taking action, it becomes easier to join. When isolated frustration transforms into organized resistance, it becomes harder for politicians to ignore us.

We are also pushing local officials — superintendents, school board members and other elected officials — to make public their nonpartisan opposition to the administration’s attacks on public schools and act on it. We’re asking them to adopt policies to keep students safe from ICE, share the impact of federal grant losses and budget cuts, and urge their states to reject federal vouchers. When courageous people in positions of power defect from the authoritarian agenda — and do so publicly, and make clear the source of the harm — it makes it easier for others to do the same and harder for the administration to carry out its policies. 

The goal for our campaign is ambitious, but achievable: train thousands of leaders, draw out vocal support from officials and public figures who champion public education, and propel them to take public action in national mobilization events, including the upcoming No Kings Day marches on March 28, May Day Strong and Labor Day. We intend to cultivate what history shows is essential to resisting authoritarianism: the public’s appetite and courage for saying “NO.”

A movement building in classroom corners and sidewalks

Across the country, parents are already resisting — often in creative, unexpected ways that reveal how deeply people care about their schools, young people and the future of the nation.

In Idaho last year, in solidarity with a teacher who stood firm when administrators told her to take down an “Everyone is Welcome Here” sign, parents staged a “Chalk the Walk” event, painting the sidewalks outside schools with more welcoming words. 

In Long Island, New York, community members held a $1,000-a-cup lemonade stand to draw attention to the Trump regime’s proposed $12 billion budget cut to public schools. 

In Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Diego, Minneapolis and Chicago, parents and community members have organized “walking school buses” and neighborhood patrols to protect students and their families from ICE operations. 

In a school district in Minnesota, parents, students and educators banded together to fight a book ban policy organized by right wing extremist groups — and won. 

In Oldham County, Kentucky, the school board unanimously rejected efforts to create off-campus Bible classes during the school day for elementary school kids. 

And parents in Oklahoma re-purposed the law allowing parents to opt out of so-called “woke” curriculum to instead opt their children out of the new requirements for Bible lessons in social studies class.

These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re sparks of something larger and represent how parents and concerned communities are organically resisting in this political moment. 

That shared commitment creates potential to fracture the billionaire-fueled anti-democratic coalition currently threatening our institutions. When parents in conservative communities see their rural schools devastated by federal cuts, when they watch special education services disappear while the obscenely wealthy get tax credits for private schools, the contradictions become impossible to ignore.

Public education is one of the few issues that can unite people across the deep divisions of our current moment. Polling shows that parents across the political and geographic spectrum want their children to have well-resourced classrooms, trained teachers, safe buildings and real opportunities to learn and grow. That the $12 billion in proposed federal cuts to public education, initially passed in the House in 2025, was restored through a bicameral and bipartisan negotiation earlier this year, is proof that education transcends partisan fractures and that grassroots organizing can still have significant impact on federal policy.

Right now, wealthy interests and authoritarian politicians are hell bent on defunding, privatizing and ultimately destroying public schools. They’re betting that if they can divide parents over curriculum debates or convince us that “parental choice” means abandoning the public system, they can dismantle an institution that’s been central to American democracy for two centuries.

We can’t let that happen. And individual acts of resistance, as inspiring as they are, won’t be enough.

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History teaches us that authoritarian movements succeed when people comply in isolation and fail when communities organize collective refusal. Education resistance has shown it can challenge authoritarianism and fascism. Norwegian teachers prevented Nazi curriculum takeovers in 1942, Argentine educators undermined and subverted mandatory lesson plans under Juan Domingo Perón, Chilean teachers mobilized against Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, and most recently, Hungary’s Tanítanék movement has opposed Viktor Orbán’s attacks on schools.

The dismantling of democratic institutions requires public acquiescence — the quiet acceptance that “this is just how things are now.” Resistance requires the opposite: visible, coordinated action that says, “We do not consent.”

The truth is that the nature and scale of our current strategies aren’t sufficient to stop what’s coming. We need channels for public school parents and supporters to flow into sustained resistance. We need to move from individual frustration to organized collective action. We need to cultivate the courage for public refusal.

That’s what Free the Future is building: a movement that opens doors for every parent, educator, student and community member to take escalating action to refuse consent, join with others and defend an institution that, while imperfect, still holds democracy’s promise. 

This article When we fight for public schools, we fight for democracy was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

U2 are at their best when they are either angry or ecstatic. On Feb. 18, they released “Days of Ash,” their first new record in almost a decade, and one of their most scathing. Its lyrics, rooted in Bono’s philosophy of nonviolence, challenge us to act.

“I love you more than hate loves war,” declares the chorus of the headlining song, written for recent ICE casualty Renée Good. “American Obituary” is a song of fury … but more than that, a song of grief,” said Bono in the album’s release notes. “Not just for Renee but for the death of an America that at the very least would have had an inquiry into her killing.”

“You say you wanna change the world / well how you gonna get that right / one life at a time,” follows a song titled “One Life at a Time” about Palestinian nonviolent activist Awdah Hathaleen, killed by an Israeli settler in the West Bank. Its chorus addresses the sense of hopelessness that many feel — the idea that we’re powerless. “Our lives do have meaning, our votes do affect [the] lives of people we will never meet,” said Bono in a 2005 interview with Michka Assayas. “Politics matters. We grew up in a generation where we were told it didn’t, and we were bored: ‘No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.’ That’s wrong.” 

Bono, frontman and primary lyricist of U2, is well-known for his politicking. He has wielded his finances and fame over and over to exact change. At the turn of the century, he worked to eliminate the crushing debt that restricted the freedom of many African countries. He went on to found the ONE Campaign and Project (RED), with goals of economic opportunities and eliminating AIDS in Africa. “You can’t fix every problem. But the ones you can, you must,” Bono told Assayas. “It’s always the same attitude that wins the day: faith over fear.”

The rage Bono wrote into the new album is a key ingredient in the kind of nonviolent resistance that changes the world. But Bono’s politics have another ingredient — one rooted in the legacy of revolutionaries like Martin Luther King Jr. and Desmond Tutu. That ingredient is hope.

The songs on the EP are calls to action fueled by anger and rooted in hope — the belief that love and humanity can win out against a poverty of both. “I’ve always seen myself as a kind of salesman — selling songs, selling ideas, selling the band and on my best day selling, well, hope,” he said in his 2022 memoir “Surrender.”

In the album’s release notes, Bono writes that “We need problem solvers, not makers, we need a place to meet in the middle that’s not the middle of the road.”

Why hope is so important 

Hope is what authoritarian regimes work to crush first. If you are overwhelmed, afraid and hopeless, you will not act. Rather, the anger inevitably formed by the regime’s injustices will seethe in you, a fire eating away at the soul rather than fueling action.

“Anger is the demand of accountability. … Anger is the expression of hope,” said feminist activist Soraya Chemaly in her book “Rage Becomes Her.” However, when it is unprocessed, she adds that, “Anger threads itself through our appearances, bodies, eating habits and relationships, fueling low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, self-harm and actual physical illness.”

The research I’ve conducted into paradigm shifts — how sociopolitical movements change culture — reinforces the importance of coupling anger and hope. Both are crucial motivators; both are required together to generate real change. Without anger, there is no urgency. Without hope, there is no endurance. We are full of anger — but where is our hope?

“For the first time in many years, maybe in our lifetime, the moral arc of the universe, as Dr. King used to call it, was not bending in the direction of fairness, equality and justice for all,” Bono told Rolling Stone in 2017. “The baseness of political debate, the jingoism, the atavistic fervor of Trump’s verbiage reminded us that we were dreaming if we thought evolution applied to consciousness. Democracy is a blip in history, and it requires a lot of focus and concentration to keep it intact.”

Bono is no stranger to how conflict can divide a country. He grew up during The Troubles in Ireland, an ethno-nationalist conflict spanning 30 years, rooted in British colonialism and fueled by religion. He wrote his first songs about the conflict, and worked against funding its violence. 

“We were deliberately trying to dry up funds for the IRA [Provisional Irish Republican Army] in America,” Bono told Assayas of U2’s early years. “We hated the Irish ambivalence to violence.” Bono watched as his community oscillated between condemning the use of violence to fueling it. “I just felt that we had to take a position, which was clear — that this violent route was not making the lives of anyone any better.”

It is natural that Bono’s philosophy would be informed by the legacy of Nobel Peace Prize winners Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan Maguire. The two Northern Irish women knew that fighting could not continue if neighbors saw each other as exactly that — neighbors. They cofounded the Peace People and mobilized thousands in peaceful marches across the country. “One of the greatest blocks to movement is fear,” said Maguire. And fear, as authoritarians know, is the antithesis of hope.

The same kind of fiery faith fueled Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu while apartheid ate at South Africa. Rather than allow their anger to drive them to violence, they wielded it in a container of hope: the belief that not only could apartheid end, but that surfacing its atrocities via the Truth and Reconciliation Commission could put it to bed.

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor,” said Tutu. “If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

Finding hope in the US

The United States is boiling over with anger right now, with the president often framed as the source of all our woes. “Trump is not the problem,” Bono said in his memoir. “He’s the symptom of the problem. He’s not the virus. He’s the super-spreader. The virus is populism, and it’s as deadly as the plague. The real host is fear.”

The stress of living through so many horrors has us searching for answers and salves. Too often we find both in distraction — funny cat videos, shopping hauls. But what if we take our agency back, feel our anger fully and wield it for ourselves?

First, we need to have a vision, a hope for the country. One that is inclusive of all — even those we disagree with. The media has worked so hard to divide us that, for many, inclusion of certain groups now seems a step too far. 

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Even if it feels that way, what might the country look like if we listened once again to King, and saw even those different from ourselves as our neighbors, not as a threat? “Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves,” said King. “For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.”

A unifying future has to be believed in before we can wield our anger usefully. Bono put it succinctly in his memoir: “Compromise is a costly word. No compromise, even more so.” We cannot ask those with whom we disagree to compromise if we are not willing to do so ourselves.

Days of rage, days of hope

Anger without hope will burn the world down. It is the mindset that says, “If I go down, I’ll take you with me.” But with hope, anything is possible. Hope is inexorably tied to imagination; it cannot operate without it. “We need radical thinking, creative ideas and imagination,” said Maguire of the Peace People movement. 

And when hope runs out? In his memoir, Bono returns to his Christian faith, which has helped get him through his darkest days. “A good strategy for me is to continually go back to the source. To drop my bucket in the well in hope of a refill,” he wrote. “Why am I always talking about the scriptures? Because they sustained me in the most difficult years in the band and they remain a plumb line to gauge how crooked the wall of my ego has become. To [get] the measure of myself. This is where I find the inspiration to carry on.”

The last song on “Days of Ash” turns away from the anger of the album and instead centers hope. Rooted in the trenches of Ukraine, it cries “Volia,” over and over — “freedom” in Ukrainian. Though critics may say its tone is out of place on the album, it is very Bono. Our anger must have hope to be useful.

This article What Bono gets right about nonviolent resistance was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Like many of you, I’ve spent the last week hyper-anxious, refreshing feeds, trying to stay level-headed. Except this time — unlike the many other wars started or supported by the United States — I have family in the central firing zone. I’ve encountered images of explosions and chaos and tragedy that I can’t unsee, on streets I’ve walked. Some of it from videos sent by family, filmed from their balcony. It’s awful, it’s real, and it’s here.

A majority of Americans opposed the war in Iran before the U.S. first attacked — nearly 60 percent of  Americans disapprove. That’s never happened at this scale with a major U.S. military operation. For context, the Iraq invasion in 2003 launched with 72 percent public support. Afghanistan in 2001 had 90 percent. In Europe, majorities in Spain, Germany, Italy and the UK also oppose the strikes on Iran. The opposition is there, and it’s strong.

So why isn’t there more pushback? The first “day of action” during the war drew small numbers in most U.S. cities. London managed 50,000, which is an OK figure. But compare that to the million who marched against Iraq in 2003. The raw material for opposition exists — but it’s not converting into pressure.

What could be blocking that conversion? Three things: narrative, organization and the conditions organizers are working in.

Narrative

With Iran, the usual antiwar frame doesn’t stick. This is a messaging problem that movements haven’t solved.

Recall that Trump’s central justification for attacking Iran was the regime’s killing of thousands of its own protesters in January — a massacre Khamenei himself acknowledged, even as he blamed it on foreign agents. That gave this war a human rights framing that was more immediate than Iraq in 2003.

Holding two ideas at once — that the regime is brutal, and this war is illegal and catastrophic — is a tension movements need to learn to communicate. It shouldn’t be hard, but right now it is. The frame that’s winning is, as ever, the simpler one: Bad regime gets what it deserves. Until the antiwar side finds language that holds both truths without collapsing into either, the other side’s story wins by default.

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The two reflexes that are breaking the left 

Also, to Western audiences, Iran is not a sympathetic state. Much more than Iraq, the regime carries decades of baggage in Western public memory — the U.S. hostage crisis, Salman Rushdie and proxy wars. When London’s antiwar marchers get headlined as “pro-Iranian protesters,” you can see the trap in real time. Movements, especially those led by values-first thinking, are particularly vulnerable to this.

And unlike Gaza — where the Palestinian diaspora was unified against the military campaign — the Iranian diaspora is split on the strikes. Celebratory rallies drew hundreds of thousands in Los Angeles, Toronto, and Munich. That deprives the antiwar movement of a constituency that normally provides moral authority, and emotional urgency: people outside the country who know it, love it and are personally invested in its future.

This is a structural problem. It’s much harder to run a “hands off Iran” campaign when the community you’d expect to anchor it is often waving American (and sometimes Israeli) flags.

Organization

There is no infrastructure to turn opposition into action — on either side of the Atlantic.

In America, the antiwar grassroots that opposed Iraq never really regained its footing after Obama’s election. In Europe, the left lost ground electorally throughout the 2010s, and never rebuilt equivalent capacity in the street.

The Democratic Party — leaderless, without a narrative and often indistinguishable from the Republicans on foreign policy — offers no vehicle. Europe’s scattered left parties are in no shape to amplify what opposition does exist. Antiwar sentiment is real, but there’s no machinery to convert it into coordinated pressure.

And because Trump has sidelined international institutions, there’s no U.N. process to rally people around. Remember 2003: the fights over Security Council resolutions, weapons inspectors, the drama of institutional resistance? That gave organizers a focal point. With Iran, the U.S. has short-circuited all of that.

This isn’t specific to Iran, by the way. Trump has ordered strikes on seven countries since returning to office — Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Venezuela, Somalia, Iran — and faced no serious domestic opposition for any of them. Venezuela drew scattered protests in a handful of U.S. cities; Nigeria drew none at all. Neither generated sustained pressure or shifted the debate. Iran just makes the gap impossible to ignore.

Conditions

Several things are actively suppressing an activist response.

Much of the antiwar argument is framed in moral terms: international law, justice, solidarity. Those matter. But they don’t always translate into widespread mobilization when the war feels distant from daily life. When wars start to affect people materially — through conscription, prices, jobs, cuts to public spending — opposition tends to move from opinion into pressure.

Without consequences at home that people can feel, most people don’t have skin in the game. That’s not a moral judgment, it’s a structural one. And organizers need to factor it in. Every other condition holding activism back lands harder because of this.

Like the speed at which the war came about. Iraq was telegraphed for months. There was a vote in Congress and months of media build-up, which meant time to organize. The Iran strikes landed as a surprise to most people on a Saturday morning.

Yes, U.S. forces had been encircling Iran since January. But the fact that negotiations were happening made it look like leverage. This meant organizers were behind before they started.

Also, years of Gaza solidarity — marches and the largest student protest wave in a generation — produced a lot of energy and passion. But they didn’t shift policy. That reality has hit activists hard. “What good would it do?” is a feeling I keep hearing. When there’s no connection between effort and outcome, motivation can easily drain away.

I can’t discount the establishment’s repression of Gaza organizing, either. The ongoing de-banking, cancellations, criminal charges, police violence, all of it. Indications suggest it has had a chilling effect — on campuses, in the media and on the street. I’ve heard this from several organizers: People are scared to act. These authoritarian tactics work. I hate it, but I have to acknowledge it.

Another big factor is issue overload. Just look at 2026 alone: In the U.S., ICE raids and mass deportations; federal program cuts, including Medicaid; Gaza and Venezuela. The antiwar movement competes for the same finite pool of organizers. No sooner have you been outraged and figured out what to do, than the next outrage arrives. There’s no coming up for air.

And conflict has, scarily, become normalized. As mentioned, the U.S. has struck seven countries in just over a year. There’s a numbness to U.S. military intervention that didn’t exist even a decade ago.

So what can we do?

The real question to me isn’t why people aren’t in the streets. It’s what will it take to convert poll opposition into power? Here’s what I’m holding onto:

Spain. Unlike any Western government during Iraq, Spain has condemned the strikes as an “unjustified” and “dangerous” military intervention, refused to let the U.S. use its military bases, and held firm when Trump threatened to cut all trade. That’s not rhetoric; it’s material resistance at the state level. The kind of concrete refusal that organizers can point to, build on and demand from other governments.

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Contrast that with the U.K., where Prime Minister Keir Starmer initially refused to allow the U.S. to use two of its bases, then reversed himself within 48 hours, reframing this decision as a “defensive” measure. That’s the default European pattern: concern, then compliance.

Spain is the exception. The question for organizers is how to make the exception the rule.

And there’s this: The material conditions argument cuts both ways. As the war drags on, its costs will land at home — oil prices are already climbing, and the U.S. is spending an estimated billion dollars a day. It’s only a matter of time before that starts competing with domestic spending. 

When the war stops being abstract and starts showing up in people’s lives, everything can change. That’s when opinion starts converting into pressure.

A version of this article first appeared on Subvrt.

This article Where’s the resistance to the Iran war? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Kristi Noem defamed murdered Veterans Affairs intensive care nurse Alex Pretti by calling him a domestic terrorist. But she didn’t act on her own. According to Axios reporting, Noem took direction from Stephen Miller, who first called Alex “an assassin.” Noem explained, “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen.” 

Kristi Noem’s firing is a sign of shifting times. And while many eyes are on her successor, it may be a moment to set our sights a little higher. 

As my mentor used to tell me, “Being only on the defensive is another way of saying losing.” There is no pathway out of the authoritarian morass we are in without people developing offensive campaigns.

While the movement still needs a bigger and broader vision, one immediate step is turning attention from Noem toward Stephen Miller, and calling for his ouster. 

We can take a page from the firing of Kristi Noem: Movements don’t always convince powerful officials directly — they raise the political cost of their position until other actors intervene.

It’s okay to cheer — because we did this

It’s difficult to trace what caused Trump to finally axe Noem. His actions are guttural and reactive. But Trump was apparently livid after Noem told Congress that he had approved her emergency $220 million ad buys that gave money to her friends and featured her (at the expense of our children’s schools or fixing roadways). That means we don’t get to her firing without that disastrous Congressional hearing. 

And that hearing only came about from public pressure. Yes, the two murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good had garnered attention. But lawmakers are fantastic at avoiding controversy and keeping their heads down. They’ve fully avoided doing anything of consequence about an off-duty ICE officer killing Keith Porter Jr.; a federal agent killing Julian Bailey in Washington, D.C.; the ICE murder of Silverio Villegas González during a traffic stop; or the case of half-blind Nurul Amin Shah Alam, who was wrongfully picked up by ICE and then abandoned miles from his house — only to be found dead five days later. 

All of these stories involve people of color and have gained less notoriety. So let’s pause and remind ourselves that our attention matters a great deal here. Organizers made sure that the murders of Pretti and Good, at the peak of unrest in Minneapolis, in front of many witnesses, with multiple videos, were impossible to ignore.

Because we are quite powerful. The risk-taking on the streets of Minneapolis and the disciplined pressure on congresspeople became so great that Democrats are holding firm and (as of writing) have still not approved additional funding for the Department of Homeland Security. 

None of this would have been possible without our growing people power. 

We don’t have direct control over what those in power do. But we can compel it. It’s like politicians are a balloon. Tied to a rock, they are constantly being blown by oligarchs away from the people. But in moments where we activate and remind politicians that their power ultimately flows from us, we are able to pick up the rock and move them. Street activists create drama and spectacle that sharpen public attention. Insiders, meanwhile, must seize the brief windows when more radical steps become possible — and take them.

This was one of the lessons the civil rights movement gave us. One of our greats, Bernard LaFayette, who died on March 5, had been tasked with setting up the on-the-ground organizing for voter registration in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. When 600 Black marchers set off on a march from Selma to Montgomery to demand voting rights, Alabama state troopers viciously attacked them with clubs and tear gas as they crossed over Edmund Pettus Bridge, in what came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.” 

The public reaction pushed Lyndon Johnson to move Congress to pass voting legislation — the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that Trump is right now trying to destroy. 

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The real reason Musk retreated

This is the lesson of the Tesla Takedown movement, too. Elon Musk had so much to gain by staying in power. We didn’t control the specific moment that led to his fallout with Trump. But we forced his ouster through a combination of outside pressure at showrooms and boycotts coupled with inside bureaucratic resistance, like millions refusing to obey his demand for weekly  email updates from civil servants. All of these tactics created pressure on his shareholders, his workers, his fans and Trump’s cabinet members, which ultimately helped split him and Trump apart. 

And that’s what we’ll have to do as well with who some Trump officials are accurately and jealously calling “President Miller.”

Why Stephen Miller?

There are some awful characters in the White House. Most are cruel. Some are persuasive. A few are tactically and bureaucratically competent. Miller is the rare one that’s all three — and he has the influence in government to match.

Kristi Noem has been an honorable Trump lackey — obedient, dramatic, chaos-driven and cruel. But Stephen Miller is the Trump whisperer — a policy architect and ideological driver behind so much of the bad that’s happening. His role is uniquely powerful — as White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt explained to The Atlantic, Miller “oversees every policy the administration touches.” 

He allegedly orchestrated blowing up fishing boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific, killing at least 157 people — an act which senators and international law experts have called a war crime and crime against humanity. 

Attribution of Miller’s actions is sometimes hard because he eschews formal process. Allegedly he crafted the Compact for Excellence in Higher Education to rip up universities. He designed family separation at the southern border. He approved every executive order at the start of Trump’s presidency, including rolling back LGBTQ+ protections. And he, of course, is the primary architect of Trump’s violent and callous deportation policy.

As if destroying the lives of immigrants wasn’t enough, Miller is profiting off of it. He has invested as much as $250,000 in Palantir, even as policy decisions he makes could benefit the company. The Project on Government Oversight reported that ethics experts say it “raises conflict of interest” concerns — normal folks just call it corruption.

The Southern Poverty Law Center added Stephen Miller to their Extremist Files in 2020— alongside people like David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Klu Klux Klan. This designation came after leaked emails of his promoted white nationalist websites, “white genocide” books, and eugenics laws that Adolf Hilter used in “Mein Kampf.”

A new site called StephenMillerHatesYou.com shows how Stephen Miller hates you. If you’re Black. Gay. Poor. A small business owner. Muslim. Anti-imperialist. Native. Believe in the free press. Have a disability. Want a breathable climate. His policy portfolio is only outpaced by his hatred for most of us in this country.

An election about President Miller

Despite Stephen Miller’s incredible influence, no one voted for him. And he is deeply unpopular: A January poll found only 17 percent of respondents had a positive opinion of him. Imagine if we had coordinated campaigns displaying his contempt for this country!

Kristi Noem’s exit shows that it is possible to take on Stephen Miller. Her firing marks the first major cabinet dismissal in Trump’s second administration, in a return to Trump’s vintage move: “You’re fired.” White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has kept the cabinet stable, but this leaves the door open for more turnover.

It shows there are limits — even inside a chaotic administration. It vindicates the collective power of the people fighting this regime. And it puts the wind in our sails.

Some initial pressure is building. Following Noem’s ouster, Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said Stephen Miller is a “big problem” and “should go” — calls that should be echoed. On March 28, Free DC and the No Kings DC march will bring their message directly to Stephen Miller’s doorstep with an action at his home at Fort McNair. Their message: “join us to make it clear that No Kings means #FireStephenMiller.”

A campaign against Stephen Miller would likely follow a pattern similar to the pressure that built against Noem and Musk — a combination of inside and outside pressure that steadily raises the political cost of keeping him in power.

Rather than focusing on Noem’s replacement, it’s time to start focusing on direct accountability for Miller: publicly demanding his removal, confronting the administration with the question of why someone the public never elected now wields such extraordinary influence in the White House. 

Exposure is also critical: digging up and amplifying the long trail of controversies, statements and policies tied to Miller’s record. The goal is not simply criticism — it is repetition. The more the public hears his words and sees his record, the less support there is for the ideology he represents.

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Meanwhile, elected officials can be pushed to exercise formal oversight: investigations, hearings and public questioning that drag his decisions and influence into the light. When controversial figures are forced to answer questions under scrutiny, their power often begins to erode.

The strategy is simple: Turn the spotlight toward him and refuse to turn it off.

Some folks have created this very campaign: Oust Miller. Launched recently, it offers toolkits to help focus attention and build collective pressure.

Even using the phrase “President Miller” may help drive a wedge between him and Trump, since Trump can’t stand anyone else taking credit for his ideas. If the spotlight stays on Miller, one of two things happens: either the pressure becomes great enough that he is forced out of the White House, or the public face of the administration — and the upcoming election cycle — becomes more associated with the man whose ideology the vast majority of Americans reject.

Miller thrives in the shadows of bureaucratic power. He is combative, ideological and relentlessly focused on pushing a vision of the country rooted in exclusion. But that can also lead to his downfall. The more the country sees him, the clearer the stakes of the election and the future of our democracy.

So as we move toward bigger demands, one clear next step presents itself: Let’s oust Stephen Miller.

This article It’s time to oust Stephen Miller was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.