This article is adapted from a Choose Democracy newsletter email.

One of the big psychological challenges of this time is: How do we measure progress while an authoritarian remains in power?

I’ve noticed more than a few folks feeling especially underwater recently — understandable given the weight of awful policies and cruelties emerging from the White House and its minions.

For our own health, we cannot let our yardstick be measured by whether we have stopped the authoritarian from doing anything. The reality is, he has the power to wake up and do awful things every day.

As I’ve written before, resistance to an authoritarian regime is measured by greater unity, greater nonviolent discipline in the face of violence, greater numbers and greater ability to provoke defections.

So how are we doing? Allow me to skip around with a few thoughts.

Hands off Ohio

On June 11, in a shameless act of interference with elections, the FBI raided the offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, or OOC. The OOC is a well-respected organization that helps register voters, especially Black and brown voters in this swing state.

Over 100 federal agents descended upon Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton and Youngstown, Ohio simultaneously. Agents arrived at the OOC’s northeast Ohio office armed with batons and guns. Agents showed up at the homes of the organization’s leadership and employees, seeking electronic devices and in some cases carrying subpoenas, pressing people about alleged voter fraud — sometimes in front of their children — and following them to work and school.

The scale is staggering. The timing was calculated. And the impact was not at all what they hoped.

The hope, of course, was that this would scare off others from doing voter registration work — and that it would send the work underground. They cannot win the election, so they have to change the rules and tilt the playing field (especially with Ohio’s critical U.S. Senate race).

But it hasn’t worked out.

A national effort coalesced to support Hands Off Ohio. A cross-partisan group of former Ohio Supreme Court justices, former Ohio attorneys general and legal leaders signed a letter condemning the raids as an attack on democracy. These are not people who usually stand together. That they are standing together now is a signal. (Greater defections — a key yardstick!)

To be fair, some people are worried enough that they are training in what to do if the FBI shows up. (Record the interaction, don’t answer questions and don’t assume their warrant — if they have one — is valid without taking a close look.) But a lot of that is not fear — it’s preparation.

And importantly, the OOC didn’t shrink. Board member Prentiss Haney said plainly: “The Ohio Organizing Collaborative is not going to stop its work. If anything, it’s going to continue to build upon this work and make sure that our faith leaders and our community leaders and working-class folks know that we’re going to stand with them and not let them be intimidated by forces who want to use political power to stop them from engaging in fair elections.”

They’ve done what everyone should do when repressed by this government for doing good work — double down on the good work. In response to the raid, they’ve held expanded public voter registration drives across the state. (They’re holding a statewide clergy call this week.)

My mentor used to say there are two motions to the universe: getting smaller or getting bigger. The authoritarian strategy relies on a particular theory: Repress, and people will get smaller. They will hide. They will stop.

That’s not what’s happening here. Folks are getting bigger.

The Minneapolis 15

The same theory — repress, and they’ll collapse — is playing out in Minneapolis, and it is backfiring in real time. If you want to understand the HOPE framework for making repression backfire, read what happened in the Hennepin County jail this week.

The federal government indicted 15 people — including a union carpenter and a Buddhism professor at Macalester College — on conspiracy charges related to the protests against ICE during Operation Metro Surge. Simple acts like posting on Facebook, blowing whistles or identifying ICE vehicles were whipped into a furious frenzied indictment.

MPR News reports that one indictee — an in-home care aide —  had unidentified agents show up at her door. One neighbor explained, “We were on the sidewalk, we had all of our whistles, all of the neighbors came out. And so we were stopping them from taking her because we didn’t know who they were. … They came disguised as work people.” (Greater unity.)

The conspiracy charge is a familiar weapon — we saw it deployed unsuccessfully in Chicago. It’s a legal overreach. In this sense, we could say our authoritarian is less effective than Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or Viktor Orbán — all of whom were more successful at putting their opposition into prison.

Of course, as some have pointed out, the process is the punishment — the slow churning of the courts and the criminal justice system’s regular violence. A recent New York Times report illuminates what that isolation looks like for those held in pre-trial detention.

But here is the story that the government cannot control. When Emmett Doyle, a union carpenter and one of the indicted 15, found himself alone in a jail cell, he started singing. Irish rebel songs. Prisoners’ songs. Folk songs from the labor movement. And then something extraordinary happened: A voice from down the hallway shouted a song request, followed by a chorus of laughter and the voices of friends. Suddenly, he wasn’t alone anymore. They sang “Solidarity Forever” in full — the original Industrial Workers of the World version — with increasing gusto. They sang “Bella Ciao” in English, then Italian, then Spanish. They whistled the “Colonel Bogey March” on their way to the hearing. (That’s the yardstick of nonviolent strength in the face of repression.)

Literally through song they found out who else was being held.

As elsewhere, groups unified to condemn the indictment. The next day, people showed up, again, at the Whipple Federal Building, where ICE staged Operation Metro Surge. They faced tear gas again. They remained nonviolent. They kept coming.

Could we do more? Sure.

I’m not attempting to paint a picture of perfection. There are lots of moves not taken and chances to up our acts of solidarity. I keep thinking about dramatic actions that reduce our fear — which I guess is why I keep thinking about Bayard Rustin.

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Remembering the genius of Bayard Rustin

Rustin arrived in Montgomery, Alabama in February 1956, when the city had dusted off a 1921 anti-boycott law prohibiting conspiracies that interfered with lawful business. The strategy was to scatter the leadership, to make people lay low. The city indicted 89 boycott leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. and E.D. Nixon.

Rustin told them: Don’t hide. Move toward the fear. Gandhi had said the same thing — if something frightens you, that’s the direction you should walk. And so E.D. Nixon and dozens of other boycott leaders chose to turn themselves in. Hundreds of supporters gathered outside and cheered leaders who emerged with police citations in hand. Some leaders who arrived discovered they weren’t on the indictment list — and argued to be added. The fear shifted.

What Montgomery’s city government had calculated as a terror became a celebration. The fear inverted. The movement doubled down.

Georgia redistricting

Now let’s talk about Georgia, because what happened there last week is one of the most important things that has happened in months, and it’s not getting nearly enough attention, as with much of the organizing happening in the South right now.

The context: The Supreme Court’s Callais decision earlier this year was devastating. It gutted the Voting Rights Act, resulting in a loss of Black political power comparable only to Reconstruction’s devastating rollback. Southern legislatures rushed to redistrict.

Challenges to the redistricting saw a string of losses: Florida, Tennessee and wild mid-election cancellations in Louisiana and Alabama. And some temporary wins: Mississippi and South Carolina delaying their redistricting for now.

So Georgia looked like it was going to be a loss. Gov. Brian Kemp called a special session to draw up new districts. And then something remarkable happened. Democrats and civil rights advocates turned the planned special session into a public showdown over minority voting rights. Civil rights organizations, labor unions and community advocates filled the state capitol with chants of “Black voters matter!” (Greater numbers.)

And just hours before the legislature was set to convene, Republican House Speaker Jon Burns announced they would not take up congressional or legislative redistricting.

Let’s pause and assess.

This wasn’t like Indiana’s redistricting, where a few Republicans broke ranks on principle (helped along by protests) — this was a calculation.

When I asked local organizers why they thought Republicans made this call, the answer was plain: Republicans assessed that pushing redistricting would provoke an already-active population into an even greater reaction. They looked at the energy in the streets and decided the political cost of poking the bear was higher than the electoral advantage they’d gain.

They are making an assessment that we are powerful opponents, and they often have a better perception than we do of ourselves. Our opponents are calculating our power and finding it formidable enough to stand down from a fight they wanted to win.

This win emerges largely from the work of Black women organizers and voting rights advocates in the South who have been doing this work for years in a context that has been chronically under-resourced and under-appreciated. (If you’re looking for one place to support, give to Black Voters Matter.) That reckoning deserves to be named.

Fear, not victory

Donald Trump has a fundamental problem: He doesn’t understand humanity. He believes domination results in submission. That’s why he misjudged the Iran war so completely. That’s why he and J.D. Vance entertained doubling down via the Insurrection Act after Renée Good and Alex Pretti were killed by ICE. That’s why his hoodlums thought they would terrify voter rights groups and citizens standing up for their neighbors.

And that’s why he won’t win — because they fundamentally misunderstand how human nature works.

The UFC cage match theory of political power — that dominance equals effectiveness — is both a moral failure and a strategic one. Their major political prosecutions have collapsed or stalled, and their ability to generate lasting fear has been repeatedly undermined by the courage of ordinary people.

Take heart. This is boldness in many corners.

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I’ve said for a long time that in time we’ll learn a bunch of stories of noncooperation happening inside the administration. We just learned a new one: When the Department of Homeland Security and DOGE sent the Social Security Administration a list of 2.7 million citizens and legal residents with instructions to falsely mark them as deceased (destroying lives and opening them to ICE deportations), a career civil servant named Jeremiah Schofield refused the order, and stopped the plan, offering a case study in resisting authoritarian overreach through bureaucratic friction.

And the breadth of public resistance keeps growing. The indefatigable K. Starling reports on the rise of protests in Arkansas — where recently an additional dozen new cities held protests for the first time in the past year.

In Paris, Arkansas, four people protested, including Rev. Dawn Chesser. One lifelong resident of Logan County, Arkansas shared with Chesser that their gathering was the first protest he had ever witnessed in Paris.

“He stated he had been a Trump supporter in 2016, but was no longer because he felt like the current administration is mostly corrupt and in it for financial gain,” Chesser said.

This is a reminder that there are millions of us who are finding ways to resist.

So each of us has a choice right now — do we get smaller, or bigger? More bold, or less?

I think we follow the folks in Ohio, in Minneapolis, in Georgia, in the streets and the jails and the capitol buildings and the Signal group chats.

My encouragement: Keep getting bigger.

This article Trump’s repression of dissent is backfiring was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Just before dusk, a crowd began marching down Dëshmorët e Kombit Boulevard in Tirana, Albania’s capital, toward Prime Minister Edi Rama’s office. As they approached, the sound of drums and their chants calling for “revolution” got louder. Once they arrived, the national anthem echoed throughout the avenue.

Since May 31, protesters have been setting off every single day at 6 p.m. from Skanderbeg Square to take part in what has been dubbed the “Flamingo Revolution.” The iconic bird was chosen because of its connection to the natural protected area of Vjosa-Narta in Zvernec, where plans for a $1.4 billion luxury resort linked to Jared Kushner, an American real estate mogul and Donald Trump’s son-in-law, have caused fierce opposition. The project’s scale would require ecocide, endangering thousands of species in Europe’s last wild river delta. The lack of transparency and corruption has also riled up the local population, who were fenced off from their own land without notice. 

The initial protests in Zvernec started as a dispute between residents joined by environmental groups against the developers who fenced off the area and brought heavy machinery into an extremely sensitive ecosystem. However, the protests exploded when a resident was assaulted and dragged by a private security member in the presence of the police, who stood by without intervening. 

Protesters tell me this is the first time they have felt hopeful that the system will change. With an estimated 100,000-200,000 people joining the protests on the weekend, this is the biggest nationwide movement the country has seen since the fall of Enver Hoxha’s communist regime. Protesters chant “Albania is not for sale” and “Rama quit” to the tune of “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes, reminiscent of U.K. football fans. 

Previously, protests such as those that occurred in February 2026 amid a corruption probe into then-Deputy Prime Minister Belinda Balluku have been co-opted by opposition parties. Between 2018 and 2019, a student movement against sweeping privatization reforms of higher education prepared many young people to become more politically conscious. They were successful in forcing the government to drop tuition fees, but it ended there. This time, protesters are demanding much more.

More unity than ever

As a youth-led uprising, for many it has become a form of socializing. “We are joking that we have replaced meeting for coffee with going to the protest as a hangout,” said Sara, a 23-year-old protester. 

Olsi Nika, who heads the environmental group EcoAlbania, says that the current political system has alienated Gen Z-ers. “The majority of the protesters are young people who were raised with a progressive European mentality,” he explained. “So, how on Earth can you set up a formula that … is driven by a political elite that is still operating on the mentality of the old regime?” 

While the movement has no definitive leadership, everyone helps however they can. One elderly protester brings free fruit, and another elderly couple hands out bottles of water. Another group of friends picks up litter from the streets. One of them, named Thea, says that they got together and decided to do this so the municipality’s street cleaners don’t have to bear the brunt of the government’s actions that people are protesting. “This is an injustice done to the Albanian people. Our land is being sold to foreign investors with no transparency, and we are being sealed off from it,” she explained. 

Other volunteers have also set up a “kids’ corner” for those coming with their families. I often see three generations of the same family together in the square. One of them is 42-year-old Elvira. “This is all about young people having a future in this country. I am here because of them, for my daughter,” she said. 

Protesters are taking pride in mobilizing with dignity and unity like never before. Sidorela Vatnikaj, an activist working across social issues, says that she joined forces with others from a multitude of groups to support the protests with logistics. She even spent money out of pocket to set up a sound system and invite members of the public to come and speak without having to be on a list. Everyone — young, old, established activists, ordinary people, city residents and rural dwellers — has stepped forward to voice grievances and motivate the crowds to not give up on their cause. 

Every evening, new people address the crowd. The 14th day featured people from the diaspora who had traveled back home to share their stories. They talked about the hardships of emigration and that they won’t stand for a country that forces its young people to leave. Vatnikaj says that many came in on a one-way ticket because they saw for the first time hope that things might change. 

Similarly, Maya, a veterinary doctor in Sweden, said she used her annual leave to come back so she could protest with her people in Tirana. Elsewhere, across all major cities with sizable Albanian populations, diasporas and their allies have been marching in solidarity. 

Sara also tells me that solidarity from abroad has overjoyed people in Albania. “Gen Z-ers are all fed up with their politicians and the system,” she said. “That’s a big thing we have in common. We see each other, how we have been rising, and we give each other hope.”

People connecting on the internet have been essential in propelling mobilizations.

“The movement is organized purely online,” said Gent Fetahaj, a tourism expert and protester. He shows me on his phone how the protest location has been geotagged on Google Maps as “Flamingo Revolution.” The reviews are all five stars. 

Social media wasn’t only essential in organizing the protests because Gen Z is very digitally-oriented, but also because there is diminishing trust in traditional media. Marijola, a biology student who has joined the protests with classmates from her university, created online groups and chats with friends to share information and coordinate. “Using social media avidly was the only way to find out about the protest since mainstream Albanian media did not even report on it until much later.” 

This is the case for Alis, a student who has been using her social media platforms to talk about the protests and the situation at large. “Social media became a necessity in Albania because the press here is not to be trusted,” Alis said. “Our local media, which we pay license fees to, did not cover our protests for more than five days until they had no option. So, we rely on alternative channels for informing each other and organizing.” 

Protest humor has also become a defining characteristic of this movement as many attendees use meme references and pop culture to express their dissent. Every day at the protests feels like an unofficial competition about who will come up with the funniest protest sign for the day. Some of them poke fun at Ivanka Trump for claiming in an interview that she “discovered” Sazan island — where Kushner plans to develop a luxury resort with his company Affinity Partners — and climbed it barefoot. 

Artists and creative individuals have also been banding together to create compelling visuals for the protest. “We are trying to convey our dissent through the beauty of art,” said Argita Dulaj, an urban planner and architect who was holding a placard reading “Hands off Vjosa-Narta.” She was at the protest because the government is acting arbitrarily, taking advantage of illegitimate means to build over protected areas without transparency or public consultation. 

The issues at large 

Albania transitioned to democracy only 35 years ago, and it has been under a two-party system that concentrated power in a few hands. Incomplete transitional justice after the fall of the communist regime has caused many unaddressed rifts that affect society today and are now becoming rallying points at the protests.

One of those issues is the fear of the state apparatus and land grabs by opportunists looking to exploit legal loopholes. “This is not the democracy we have been dreaming of. This anger has been building for a long time,” Vatnikaj said.  

The state is trying to intimidate people by having unidentifiable plain-clothed police among the protesters who muscle people around. People also face threats of losing employment and legal troubles. 

Almost everyone I talked to identified fear and censorship as key challenges to overcome. “They have killed our fear, and we have nothing to lose,” Alis said. “We are not scared anymore of the propaganda. We want to get rid of patronage politics and the intimidation.” 

The concerns fueling the movement are evolving beyond what initially sparked the protests. People bring up material concerns, dilapidated infrastructure and public services, as well as increasing authoritarianism and corruption as their motivation. “We want the fall of the whole system. This government is only benefiting the oligarchs, and the divisions between the rich and poor are getting bigger,” Alis said. As I turn around on my left, a Wolt driver has plastered a sign on his moped that reads “economist by profession, delivery driver by need.” 

Dulaj wants to see Law No. 21/2024 repealed, which has amplified the prime minister’s power to fast-track development projects in protected areas. But she also wants to see the whole government purged of corruption. “We have really big problems in Albania right now, and the kind of investments they make in tourist areas will solve none of that,” she said. 

She has not migrated, because she wanted to use her knowledge and skills to contribute to her country, but opportunities are diminishing. “Our government invites foreign companies and their own people to work on all kinds of high-budget projects, and all they expect of us is to be cleaners and bartenders in their resorts,” she said. “As an architect, I learned that what makes you good at this job is staying in touch with the community you are serving. I want to use my skills and knowledge to help my country, not to work for billionaires in their resorts.” 

The future 

For the movement to be successful and sustain itself, the demands will need to become more targeted. 

Fetahaj explains that because the protected area is an issue that transcends borders, due to its significant biodiversity and its connection to the UNESCO-recognized Vjosa Valley Biosphere Reserve, it has attracted international pressure. If the protests were solely based on domestic problems, they wouldn’t have drawn the same attention. “This issue is linked to EU ascension and that’s the strategy we need to follow to see tangible results,” he said. “We should sharpen our demands into a few concrete points while working towards greater change. Chances of being successful are higher that way. I hope that the young people … will not tire until these demands are met.” 

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Evidently, the European Union’s recent call to the Albanian government to halt the construction in Vjosa-Narta has given people a major win. Construction at the site has stopped for now, but no one knows if this will last, so activists keep monitoring the situation. 

Nika, echoing these points, placed the environmental issue at the center. “We insist on the environmental aspect because it’s about our dignity and identity as a country. That’s what our nature represents,” he said. “It’s tied to our history as a people, and if these values are gone, we will have lost connection with who we are. If the protests don’t produce clear political demands and all this energy is not put into producing a clear political plan, then we will have to wait another 30 years until the next student protests erupt.” 

Vatnikaj is surprised by people’s readiness to protest. A really big weight has been shifted, she says, because people have not only become more politically conscious, but they feel like they are not alone anymore. “We have become stronger, united.”

Similarly, Marijola says that they are in this together. “Even though our government is not taking us seriously, we are the future of this country, and we will shape it together ourselves.”

As for Alis, protesters have already succeeded just by the fact that this is the first time in a long while that people have overcome their fears and come to the streets. “We are not turning back.”

This article Inside Albania’s youth-led ‘flamingo revolution’ was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The New York State Assembly made history this month by passing what could become the country’s first statewide moratorium on large new data centers. To activists all over the U.S. who are fighting these facilities and their massive social and environmental impact, the development seems like a turning point. 

“In almost all 50 states, there’s immense grassroots pressure to institute moratoriums on data centers and halt the spread of this industry,” said Seth Gladstone of Food and Water Watch, which supported the New York bill. “There’s a feeling the boom in data center construction has come about so quickly, the only adequate response is to press the pause button.”

New York’s moratorium still needs a signature from Gov. Kathy Hochul to be enshrined into law. However, its passage by the legislature is one of the more visible indicators of how a nationwide grassroots movement against data centers is having real-world impacts. The movement has grown almost as fast as the AI boom itself, prompting action at the city, county and state levels in both blue and red parts of the country.

“This isn’t a partisan issue,” Gladstone said. “The concerns raised by data centers apply to everyone. No one wants to pay exponentially more for electricity, and no one wants to deal with water scarcity.” 

Community opposition to data centers stalled or defeated over $150 billion worth of projects last year, according to the research from Data Center Watch. The movement has only grown since then, at a pace that’s surprised even groups with decades of experience working on environmental and social issues.

“I think a lot of organizations have been caught kind of flat-footed, simply because of the scale of these proposals and the speed at which they’ve emerged,” said Michél Legendre, campaigns director for the Dogwood Alliance, an organization that mobilizes to protect Southern forests. “It’s forced communities to do the initial organizing work themselves.” 

Some wins, like the one in New York’s legislature, have generated national headlines. Others have unfolded more quietly, especially at the local level, but are no less important.

“This is a David versus Goliath fight against Big Tech,” Gladstone said. “But we’re winning.” 

Local victories  

“People here are really activated over this issue,” said Ben Jones of 350 Seattle. “They want to do something.”

Seattle recently became the largest U.S. city with a data center moratorium, thanks to months of organizing by local activists. Last fall, organizations including 350 Seattle, Seattle Troublemakers, and Seattle Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, held a series of panel discussions about data centers and the AI industry. The events were responding to a surge of community interest in the topic — even though, at the time, no large data center projects had been publicly announced in Seattle. 

At first, Jones and others involved in the forums envisioned finding ways to support Central Washington communities that were already facing new data center proposals. Then, in April, news broke that four Big Tech companies were seeking permits to build at least five large data centers in Seattle itself. Just one would require putting a new six-story building downtown to house a computing facility built by Digital Realty, a data center developer. 

“The energy these facilities would use is equivalent to a third of the energy footprint of Seattle,” Jones said. “As soon as we heard about the plans, we started mobilizing.”

Thanks to the groundwork they laid last fall, Seattle data center opponents were able to quickly activate an existing network, generating over 96,000 emails to City Council. Within weeks, city officials were drafting language for a moratorium. Council members passed it unanimously on June 9.  

“By then, city leaders were competing with each other to be the one who made the moratorium happen,” Jones said. “They were responding to the impressive amount of public pressure they received.” 

Seattle’s moratorium will last for a year, during which city leaders and community groups have a chance to work on permanent guardrails for any new data centers. 

“We’re slowing down development of the industry in order to do this work,” said Raj Mirpuri, a machine learning researcher and Seattle DSA organizer. “We need to ensure rules for data centers include transparency, energy and water protections, and community benefits.”

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The ripple effects of organizing against data centers

Similar processes are unfolding in other municipalities around the country. A short list of prominent towns and cities with data center moratoriums includes Monterey Park, California, Scarborough, Maine, Canton, North Carolina, and New Orleans. 

The movement hasn’t been without setbacks. Earlier this year, Maine’s legislature passed what would have been the country’s first statewide data center moratorium, only to have it vetoed by Gov. Janet Mills. However, similar efforts are already underway in other states, with New York closest to the finish line. States where lawmakers are considering data center moratoriums include Pennsylvania, Michigan, South Carolina and Vermont. 

The movement against data centers has grown so quickly, it has catapulted the issue into a top-tier concern for voters. Now, politicians from both parties are under pressure as they try to assuage public discontent.

Unconventional alliances 

One Saturday morning in late April, Deeda Seed awoke to news that Kevin O’Leary, “Shark Tank” star and celebrity investor, was attempting to build a huge data center in one of the Southwest’s most unique, imperiled ecosystems: the Great Salt Lake Basin. Commissioners for Box Elder County, Utah would vote on the project that Monday.

“I was like, you must be kidding,” said Seed, a Salt Lake City-based campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity.

With little time to mobilize, Seed and other local activists concerned about data centers reached out to their community contacts. As a result, some 180 people showed up to protest on the morning of the vote. Seemingly in response to this public pressure, the county postponed voting by a week.

Activists opposed to the new data center, which is called the Stratos Project, took advantage of the extra time to organize, tapping into concerns simmering in the community. Utah is processing a slew of data center proposals, including several near the Great Salt Lake. Among these, the Stratos Project stands out for its backing by O’Leary, and its potential to impact wildlife habitat in the sensitive Locomotive Springs Waterfowl Management Area.

“The data center issue was already close to boiling over here,” Seed said. “Stratos was what blew the lid off.”

Anticipating a crowd, Box Elder County Commissioners held their rescheduled vote at the local fairgrounds, where approximately 1,100 members of the public showed up to pack the space. Commissioners ultimately voted to approve the Stratos permit, with some claiming their hands were tied by legal requirements. Still, public opposition seems to have made a lasting impact.

In an apparent bid to appease constituents, Box Elder County passed a six-month data center moratorium on June 10. While it comes too late to affect Stratos, it could prevent additional data centers from moving forward. It’s also a sign of how government officials are buckling under pressure from a public fed up with the outsize energy and water demand from data centers, even in places where policymakers have long histories of siding with industry. 

“In the U.S. South, many of our elected officials have advanced and fought for data centers in their communities, while at the same time there’s pushback from within their own party constituencies,” said Legendre of Dogwood Alliance.

Just as in Utah — where opposition to data centers has united environmentalists with more conservative groups like Mormon Women for Ethical Government — the anti-data center movement in the South has given rise to unconventional alliances. Environmental groups worry that data centers’ demand for energy will become a lifeline for polluters like natural gas companies and a forest biomass industry that is denuding Southern ecosystems.

“We’ve seen many proposals for biomass being reoriented around filling the energy gap on data centers which would further incorporate forest biomass into industrial operations,” Legendre said.

Data centers’ demand for resources, and the impact this has on utility bills and energy and water scarcity, have brought other communities into the fight. 

“In the Southeast, we’re talking about a region that already has a lot of issues when it comes to access to resources,” Legendre said. “And now you’re telling people if there’s a winter storm or another hurricane, we’re going to have to choose between powering a data center, or whether 20,000 homes get electricity.”

These kinds of concerns have led to people packing hearing rooms and local government board meetings from coast to coast. Seemingly overnight, data centers have become a top-tier voting issue.

“I’m confident every candidate for elected office in Utah will be getting asked about data centers this year,” Seed said. “People want to know what they’re going to do about this.”

A national movement 

For some activists engaged on energy issues, the rapid proliferation of data centers is reminiscent of another time when new technology sparked an unprecedented development boom. In the 2010s, the emergence of “fracking” as a technique for extracting hard-to-reach oil and gas reserves spurred a frenzy of industry activity with far-reaching consequences. Affected communities mobilized, eventually winning a patchwork of state and local fracking bans. 

“Seeing these data centers pop up feels eerily similar to watching the fracking boom,” said Jones, of 350 Seattle. “One day it’s not a thing, the next it’s all over the country.”

Fracking is confined to states with large oil or gas reserves, but data centers can be built almost anywhere. And while fracking produces energy widely seen as a necessary resource, how the AI boom benefits ordinary people is far less clear. Take this into account, and the flood of data center proposals has potential to provoke an even bigger backlash.

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“It’s been truly amazing, as a longtime organizer, seeing this movement build momentum,” said Emily Wurth of Food and Water Watch, on a June 11 mass call that launched a nationwide coalition against data centers. Hundreds of activists attended from all over the U.S.

According to Wurth, over 500 organizations from 47 states have already joined the new Stop Data Centers Coalition. Notable names on the list include Food and Water Watch, Our Revolution, GreenLatinos, Third Act and Physicians for Social Responsibility. 

While a scattering of local data center moratoriums draw national attention, numbers cited on the coalition launch call suggest progress is more widespread than many media accounts suggest. According to Ben Inskeep of the Indiana-based Citizens Action Network, 13 county governments in Indiana have already enacted data center moratoriums. Rania Masri, from the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, said 25 local and tribal governments in her state have similar policies in place.

Efforts to coordinate at the state level are also growing more sophisticated. On the same day that Seattle passed its data center moratorium, activists in Washington announced a new statewide coalition that aims to introduce a suite of data center-related bills in the next legislative session.

The organized opposition to data centers builds on a wave of popular fury with the AI industry and its massive footprint, unlike almost anything in recent U.S. history. 

“Concerns about data centers are agitating even people who have never taken a public stand on any issue before,” Seed said. “They’re willing to take a stand on this.”

This article The data center backlash that’s uniting America was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

These are insecure times. My relatives in Tehran are bracing for bombs to fall again. Fighter planes screamed through the skies here in Athens a few weeks back — it was an airshow, technically, but it didn’t feel like one. 

War talk is on TV panels every night; algorithms serve images of conflict straight to my eyeballs. Europe is sliding towards militarization without debate: the fear is Russian aggression, and the response is more money for weapons, talk of reviving the draft. And the nearest hot war zone – Ukraine – is still 900 miles from where I live. How must those guys be feeling?

Maybe the threats I’m sensing are inflated; maybe they’re imaginary. But as a father, will I take that chance?

And yet. Here’s what the left offers me to address that fear: marches under the banner of “Welfare Not Warfare,” demands that Europe halt its rearmament and critiques of the hawkish propaganda push. Calls to dismantle NATO. Articles tracking the share price gains of weapons manufacturers Rheinmetall and Lockheed Martin.

I know all this. And I agree with much of it, including the case for leaving NATO. But none of it speaks to what I’m feeling: that my family here could end up on the wrong end of someone else’s escalation, soon. And that if the worst happens, I need to know there’s something here to defend us. The left’s response addresses what’s morally wrong about war. It says nothing about what could protect me from it.

These fears are real, and they are shared. Across the West, the left has a chronic inability to meet them.

I’ve sat in the rooms where left organizations have made calls like these. I’ve made some of them myself. And I have a few thoughts on why it keeps happening, and what we can do about it.

Maximal demands = minimal impact 

Let me sharpen this. Our problem on the left is much broader than how we argue against militarization. It’s that on topics that make the public anxious, we make maximalist demands. And we make them at exactly the moments when people need the opposite: something concrete.

“Abolish ICE” came in 2018, at a time when Americans were nervous about immigration and a chaotic border. It was read by its audience as “no enforcement at all.” Only a quarter of Democrats backed eliminating the agency when the slogan launched. See also: calls for “open borders” in most of Europe.

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The method behind Just Stop Oil’s madness

“Defund the police” came in 2020, when Americans were worried about rising crime. It landed with the public as “less safety,” and fewer than 1 in 5 Americans supported it a year later. 

“Just Stop Oil” came in 2022, when Britons were facing the worst energy bills in a generation. The  policy demand itself (no new oil and gas licenses) was defensible. But to ordinary people worried about who pays for the transition, it was received as “make your bills worse.” Sixty-eight percent of Britons disapproved of the campaign.

Three demands, three fears, three failures. Each came out with a position that didn’t just fail with the public, it failed with the constituencies the movement claimed to speak for. A campaign that can’t build the coalition needed to move power can’t deliver what its slogan promised. Yes, these slogans raised awareness — but awareness is not a theory of change.

Meanwhile the right acknowledges people’s fears, exploits them and wins elections. Again and again and again. 

Why we keep doing it

I can give you three reasons.

We think we’re being radical. Extraordinary times, extraordinary measures. In strategy discussions I often hear some version of “we must meet their radicality with our own.” I agree with the spirit, and many of the goals. But the strategic approach is the radical one. Radical means bringing about radical change, not just talking about it. The values-first, maximalist position shifts nothing. It’s a luxury belief.

We tell ourselves the maximalist demand is a negotiating position — ask for the moon, settle for half. But we’re not in a negotiation. Power doesn’t move when it sees a placard. It moves when it feels threatened.

And lastly, we have the wrong audience in mind. Too much of our communication is signaling to other activists, not to people who might be persuaded. We’re showing the room that we’re loyal members of the tribe — which is not the same thing as winning.

What to do instead

We need to run on two horizons, separating our ambitious end goals from our next public demand. The end goal stays underneath, guiding the work. The public demand answers what people are actually scared of today — it should be winnable now and accessible to majorities now, even when the end goal is neither, yet.

So start with the fear. Whatever propaganda planted it there — about Russia, migrants, crime or the cost of going green — we must accept that it’s already taken hold, and respond to it. We may disagree that the fear is justified; we may think the establishment is whipping it up. But it exists in our audiences’ heads and we have to take it seriously. We can’t argue it away. We can offer a better explanation of where it comes from, and a demand that follows from that.

Not every fear deserves a response, though. The ones worth answering have a particular shape: they’re material, not abstract — cost of living, war, jobs, housing, crime, not “fear of decline” or “fear of cultural change.” They’re shared by majorities, not just activists. And they’re something the state can deliver on in the short term, not in a decade. 

Once you’ve isolated the fear, formulate a demand that meets it directly. For example:

• On migration, the fear has two parts that get conflated: fear of newcomers competing for scarce resources, and fear of the unfamiliar. So we should answer the concern that “they take our jobs” without scapegoating the workers being underpaid. We should be calling for labor law to be enforced for every worker, like the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain does in the U.K. When no one can be paid below minimum wage, no one can be undercut.  We should demand integration for everyone who arrives, especially language courses, as Germany does (not to preserve cultural sameness, but to enable practical inclusion in shared institutions). Plus the processing of every asylum claim within six months — which would address the anxiety of a “broken system” that the right exploits, while protecting people from being left in legal limbo for years. 

• On militarization, the fear of war is real. So we should be naming what would actually defend us — the things that keep a country standing in a crisis. Not just the military readiness that the right keeps pointing at, but secure energy, cyber resilience, robust democracy and climate adaptation. And conversely, we should call out what is being sold as defense, but isn’t. We should be saying no to putting soldiers’ lives at risk for no defensive purpose — no to the draft, no sending troops to wars that we didn’t vote for. We should be refusing to serve as a base for U.S. operations in the Middle East. And calling for European security to be in European hands, publicly owned and democratically accountable, rather than handed to the shareholders of American and German arms companies who profit from more war. These are first-step demands, of course. The deeper, patient work is building civilian-based defense: nonviolent capacity to deter aggression and resist occupation or repression — without war.

The test for every demand is the same: Could someone scared vote for this without feeling they’re voting against their own safety? If not, we have to find the version of it that they could.

The right will accuse us of going soft, and offer its own version of safety — enforcement, deportation, tougher borders, more police. These can look like quick fixes that calm fears. But they aren’t, and they don’t. Trump’s mass deportations haven’t reduced crime, lowered prices or made anyone materially safer. France’s headscarf bans haven’t reduced extremism. Stop and search in the U.K. didn’t reduce crime. Performed safety usually fails the delivery test. The left has a chance here to offer a real alternative. 

Precedents with two horizons

It’s been done before. Bayard Rustin, a key architect of the U.S. civil rights movement, explicitly named the tension between end goals and immediate demands. The moderate who only pursues what’s politically achievable, Rustin said, is in practice telling people to accept the status quo. But the radical who only demands the end goal, with no program to win it, is something worse — what Rustin called a “moralist.” Someone who substitutes shock for strategy and “seeks to change … hearts by traumatizing them.”

Rustin also understood that minority causes are only won by connecting them to majority ones. He argued that civil rights couldn’t be won by Black Americans alone; they needed “a coalition of progressive forces which becomes the effective political majority in the U.S.” That’s why the 1963 march, the largest civil rights demonstration in American history, was officially called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It put jobs first.

The civil rights movement succeeded because it kept two horizons. Its end goal of full racial equality wasn’t hidden — but the public demands spoke to the economic fears that most Americans shared.

Zohran Mamdani is doing something similar right now. He has talked inside socialist meetings about seizing the means of production, but his demands and his rallies don’t call for it. Instead, he won the NYC mayoral election running almost entirely on affordability — a rent freeze on stabilized apartments, free city buses, universal childcare and public grocery stores. He made the distinction explicit in a speech back in 2021:

“There are also issues we firmly believe in — whether it’s BDS or the end goal of seizing the means of production — where we do not have the same level of support right now. It is critical that we do not leave any one issue for the other … meet people where they’re at, and organize for what is right, and ensure over time we can bring people to that issue.”

Two horizons — one for the immediate demands of the moment, one for the end goal.

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None of this means maximalist demands never resonate. “Abolish ICE” is polling better today than it has in years, because Trump’s overreach has finally given it an audience. The point isn’t that the demand was wrong when it was first launched in 2018. It’s that its moment hadn’t yet come — and the left can’t will that into being by shouting harder. We can only fight on the terrain we actually have.

The here and now

Back to where I started: my family in Tehran. The planes over Athens. The shared fear, real or imagined, that something is coming.

If the left wants to be heard, it has to answer the fear. With a demand that meets the moment — not the end goal underneath. The goal is important, but it can wait. The fear can’t.

This article The left needs better answers for scared people was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Imagine a murder mystery dinner party, where everyone sheds their true identity at the door and assumes a role to play in the night’s events — only instead of solving a crime, they must reenact a contentious activist meeting. That’s what artist David Wise tasks participants with in his immersive theater piece “Fight Back.” He recreates the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, meeting on March 13, 1989 in the same room where it happened nearly 40 years ago. 

It’s impossible to sit in the same room in New York City’s LGBT Community Center where their meetings happened nearly 40 years ago without feeling the echoes of today’s governmental failures, and the urgent need for both resistance and mutual aid.

At the May 18 performance of “Fight Back” — which takes its title from ACT UP’s chant: “Act up! Fight Back! Fight AIDS!” — I did something we rarely have to do these days: relinquish checking and doomscrolling on my phone to spend uninterrupted time face-to-face with strangers, co-creating something from scratch. Nearly 40 of us had two and a half hours to make our way through a 26-item agenda, an education in ACT UP’s work. 

ACT UP is a direct action group formed during the AIDS epidemic to fight for visibility, healthcare access and an end to the crisis. To mark the second anniversary of the group’s formation, they were in the midst of planning Target City Hall — the kind of creative, high-profile direct action for which the group had become known — to protest Mayor Ed Koch’s failure to adequately address the AIDS crisis in New York City. 

By the beginning of 1989, more than 18,000 New Yorkers had been diagnosed with AIDS and over 12,500 had died. ACT UP was demanding affordable access to the highly toxic but potentially life-saving drug AZT, which had just come on the market a year earlier. They also demanded housing for people living with AIDS and changes to the Food and Drug Administration’s drug trial policy to give more patients hope. They demanded dignity for the living and the dead. In the midst of all this, members still found the time and space to plan fundraising parties and, more importantly, to flirt.

The 1980s was an era of phone trees and answering machines. We checked our cell phones at the door. The experience is an invitation to follow the advice writer Mira Jacob gave on Instagram earlier this year: “Stop scrolling. Do literally anything else … We’re going to prevail, but only if you don’t let this app scare you numb.” If you were mad in 1989 because your friends were dying at the hands of the government and you wanted to yell at someone about it, you had to show up to a meeting or participate in a phone zap or volunteer to surreptitiously print flyers at your office denouncing Mayor Koch as a closet case. (One attendee politely corrected our pronunciation of “Koch” — no relation to the present-day billionaire brothers who pronounce their last name “coke.”)

The atmosphere in the room was tentative. Every question opened up a minefield that only the basic tenets of improv could answer: Say “yes, and” to help the scene unfold; make bold choices, even when you are unsure of them, and don’t “break” the illusion. Most of us had brought hastily scribbled notes about our assigned historical personas, pulled from summaries and the ACT UP oral history archive. This background helped with questions like, “What affinity groups are you in?” and “Is this your first meeting?” But they offered little to lean on when it came to more quotidian conversation starters, “Are you coming from work?” or “Are you out to your family?” Those we stumbled through, together.

I had been assigned the role of Bill Bahlman, my first part since a non-speaking role in the middle school production of “Schoolhouse Rock!” A lifelong New Yorker and a music journalist, Bill had been a part of the Gay Activists Alliance and the Gay and Lesbain Alliance Against Defamation, or GLAAD. A self-described anarchist, he sometimes found the groups to be too soft, particularly the Gay Activists Alliance’s discussions of whether to drink mixed drinks or soft drinks at their dances. He splintered off from GLAAD into the Lavender Hill Mob, a direct action group formed in 1986 and named after a British comedy film. The dozen members focused on AIDS activism and organized disruptive “zaps,” interrupting a CDC meeting, a Catholic mass and other high-profile events with leaflets and banners bearing slogans like, “Gays and lesbians will not be silenced!” 

When ACT UP formed in March 1987, Bill and many other Lavender Hill Mob members joined, but their affiliation and camaraderie with one another remained. While ACT UP is often remembered as a monolith, it was in practice a true coalition under which many smaller groups coalesced, including affinity groups like Delta Queens, La Cocina or Wave 3 that demonstrated together at actions.

Bill was slated to speak late in the agenda. The items were laborious in their minutia. Should the flyers Wave 3 planned to wheat paste around the city to gather people for Target City Hall in two weeks be printed in color, or black and white? Should we send three or four people to the Lesbian and Gay Health Conference in San Francisco? We rose from our chairs for civil disobedience training, half of us playing cops and half of us playing protesters gone limp to resist arrest, but then it was butts right back in seats. 

By the two-hour mark, I could no longer stifle my yawns. There may have been flirting at meetings, and even a little in our reenactment, but the agenda was a reminder that there is little instant gratification in organizing. It took much longer than an Amazon delivery or a ChatGPT response. This focus on consensus decision making has undergirded some of the most visible movements and organizations, like Occupy Wall Street, Jewish Voice for Peace and the Democratic Socialists of America. While they don’t offer an instant dopamine hit, the memorable actions and ballot wins delivered by these groups are clear evidence of their effectiveness.

There are no professional actors associated with the production. Every meeting member was a stranger assigned to play their role for one night only. That said, I recognized an actor from an old TV show who attended as a curious citizen. She had been assigned the role of our chant leader Ron Goldberg, and I expected that, given her background, she might be the one to voice the most objections. Or, I thought, they might come from the tall, brawny and bespectacled man who wore a Larry Kramer name tag, a historical figure whose outspoken anger and divisive politics had been a catalyst for ACT UP’s formation. Instead, the objections came from Karen Ramspacher, a 24-year old curatorial assistant played by a middle-aged white woman seated in the back row with a bun on top of her head. “People are dying and we can’t cobble together the money for color printing?”

The meeting’s facilitators, one of whom I assumed must be Wise himself, tried to keep us on track. I kept glancing at my watch, hoping that time would run out before it was my turn to speak. When my name was called, my hands shook. I stood at the front of the room and looked out at the gathered crowd, some in their 50s, some in their 20s, many filling out the ages in between. I held the mic and spoke about Steve Zabel, my friend who I had found murdered in his apartment at the beginning of the month. The police had done nothing. What could we do to put pressure on them? Steve was just one man, but we all knew a Steve. To my surprise, everyone had ideas. The Media Committee wanted to take it to the press. The woman with the bun wanted to agitate with the neighbors. They had Bill’s back.

When the bell rang to return us to 2026, I made my way over to the outspoken woman, who in real life looked closer to 54 than 24.

“You were great!” I said, relieved to speak as myself again. “Really channeled the anger of the time.”

“I was there,” she said.

“What?”

The woman who had interjected so many times during “Fight Back” had attended ACT UP meetings as a teenager. She had a job in the 80s in Philly calling men to let them know where they were on the wait list to see the only doctor in the city who would treat AIDS patients. Many had died before their turn came. 

A little group gathered around to hear her story. One man shared that he had come to the center that night with a friend who had also been a part of ACT UP, but he had turned around at the door because she wasn’t ready to reopen the emotions of that time. Wise revealed himself to have been Iris Long from the Treatment and Data Committee, a cancer researcher determined to publicize the life-saving uses of aerosolized pentamidine. The reenactment of the meeting had, in fact, been facilitated by everyday people.

Later, the woman continued, she had worked as a social worker in New York City with young transvestites, as they called themselves then, and sex workers. At one point she was given one dose of AZT and had to choose who to give it to in her community. She didn’t realize at the time that the medication had to be taken once every 12 hours to be effective. Of course she was still angry.

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After everyone else dispersed, I lingered. The woman pointed across the room at her adopted daughter, a young Black woman whose biological parents had died of AIDS in Africa. She had remained in the global AIDS fight her whole life.

“If the AIDS crisis happened in New York today, we’d all be dead already,” she told me. “You had to be out there, you had to be visible, you had to be risking arrest to make yourself heard. Today everyone is stuck at home. You know what you have to do?”

I leaned in closer.

“Host a dinner party of strangers. You don’t even have to cook. Tell everyone to bring their favorite dish. People love to show off their culinary skills. Think about the seating arrangements. You don’t even need to set an agenda. That’s where political action comes from, talking to people.”

Wise had laid the groundwork for such unexpected offline encounters. His theatrical experiment will take place again on June 15, but Wise hopes to make his impressive research on these figures widely available someday, so school groups and others can try to reenact the meeting on their own.

Art about AIDS abounds. For starters, there’s “Rent” and there’s “Angels in America,” there’s Sarah Schulman’s “People in Trouble,” Rebecca Makkai’s “The Great Believers,” and, more recently, Natalie Adler’s “Waiting on a Friend.” Those pieces invite sorrow and rage, empathy and memory in equal measure. “Fight Back” invites you to act.

This article Time traveling to a 1980s ACT UP meeting through theater was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

With the World Cup starting on June 11, workers, residents and activists in its 16 host cities across North America are mobilizing against the increased presence of police and of Immigration Customs and Enforcement, or ICE, in communities of color during the World Cup. 

On May Day, thousands of people, led by the Unite HERE Local 11 union of hospitality workers walked from Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park to the FIFA building downtown, where they proceeded to drop more than a hundred soccer balls down the steps, chanting “kick ICE out.” 

A few weeks later, community activists in LA held the first event of the People’s World Cup, a documentary screening about the increased policing and surveillance that comes with big sporting events like the World Cup.

And activists in Seattle, another World Cup host city, held an art build to bring the community together to create anti-ICE paintings. They are part of “No ICE in the Cup,” a big tent coalition of artists and local groups brought together by two organizations, the Horizons Project and the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, and united under the demand for no ICE presence at or near the World Cup games. 

“We know that that demand is going to have to be a collective resounding demand, and that this administration needs to hear from people from all walks of life,” said CJ Garcia, an immigrant justice organizer involved with No ICE in the Cup in Seattle. 

Coalition partners in host cities such as Seattle, Boston, New York and Dallas — and non-host cities joining in solidarity like Yakima, Washington, and Oklahoma City — have held art campaigns, teach-ins and soccer tournaments to connect and educate their communities. 

“We’re hosting those kind of events in order for people to come together to get to know who shares the value of making the World Cup a safe, joyful and inclusive and welcoming space, and that includes and centers immigrants, workers, working-class people, low-income folks who are often left out of those conversations,” Garcia said. 

The Trump administration has not responded to the campaign, and in May the Department of Homeland Security confirmed that ICE would be present at the World Cup. 

As the event kicks off, Garcia is organizing worker-led spaces in Seattle where people can enjoy the games safely. “It will be inevitable that our communities get excited about this mass cultural moment, and we want to create spaces where people are able to both get information, get organized, get activated, but also enjoy the beautiful game,” Garcia said.

The People’s World Cup is taking a different approach, with a call for a boycott of the World Cup to oppose the increased presence of law enforcement and ICE. 

“We are emphasizing … boycotting the games, that people should not be legitimizing these games in the face of fascism,” said Carlos Sirah, an organizer with Black Alliance for Peace, which has helped pull together the People’s World Cup in LA. “So for that reason, we are asking people to organize, to counter-program to reclaim the sport, which belongs to the people.” 

Resisting policing around mega events

Historically, wherever mega sports events like the Olympics, Super Bowl and World Cup go, law enforcement and ICE tend to follow. The United States classifies them as National Special Security Events, or NSSE, which means that host cities and communities are subjected to even more surveillance and policing before, during and after the games.

Sirah said it is important to educate people in the community about the impacts that mega events in Los Angeles have had in the past. When LA hosted the 1984 Olympics, the event budget was used to purchase machine guns, armored vehicles and surveillance, which were used by police long after the games ended, Sirah said. This contributed to the mass arrests of mostly Black youth and created the conditions for the 1992 uprisings. 

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Two visions of the US will compete at the World Cup

At the same time, Sirah said, these events often displace people who live in the community. In Cape Town, South Africa, 20,000 Black and mixed-race people were displaced to clear the way for the stadium for the 2010 World Cup. Thousands of Black people were forced to move when the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood — where the World Cup is being hosted — was unveiled in 2020 for NFL events and large concerts. 

“We say that it’s unacceptable, this war on and the theft from working-class people,” Sirah said. “They give us crumbs, and we refuse the crumbs. We refuse a World Cup of displacement.”

Eric Sheehan, founder of NOlympics LA, which started in 2017 to oppose the 2028 Olympics being held in the U.S., said it is unjust that most people in the community cannot afford or attend these mega events. At the same time, residents have to deal with intense surveillance and increased policing because their cities host these games.

“Each one of these mega events is an excuse for the federal government to descend upon our city and terrorize our people,” Sheehan said. “We want people to understand that, regardless of the good vibes that come with it, these events always bring ICE to terrorize our neighborhoods and our neighbors, and that will never be good for us.”

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security will be sending “counterterrorism” task forces to the World Cup cities as part of the NSSE protocol, stirring fear that immigrant communities will be targeted by ICE.

LA Sheriff Robert Luna said that federal officials told him that while ICE will be present, it will not be conducting “civil immigration enforcement.”

“Any of that is subject to change,” Luna cautioned.

The Los Angeles community feels the threat. On June 5, the UNITE HERE Local 11 union of hospitality workers which represents workers at the SoFi Stadium authorized a strike with 96 percent voting to demand protections from ICE at the workplace and better conditions. Cesar Zamora, a union worker at SoFi Stadium, said that the stadium should offer more incentives to workers when they work these large events that welcome thousands of people from all over the world, and not add ICE to the equation for workers to worry about. 

“When we heard that ICE was going to be involved around the games, it was concerning, because as we have seen, every time there’s ICE involved, there’s always chaos,” Zamora said. “They claim to be looking out for criminals, but everybody that works at SoFi is a hard worker.”

Days after the strike was authorized, the SoFi Stadium conceded to a new contract for the workers, averting the strike. Under the tentative agreement, workers would get raises and be allowed to strike if ICE threatens staff or fans. Leading up to that victory, the workers held protests outside the FIFA building and at SoFi Stadium.

To further educate, connect and protect Los Angeles residents, Black Alliance for Peace and NOlympics LA created the People’s World Cup program. The first event was a screening of “March of the White Elephants,” which is about stadiums that were built for previous World Cups in Brazil and South Africa at enormous expense with little or no input from — or benefits for — the working people who lived there. Sirah said the purpose of the screening was to ask community members what these games do to change the material conditions of their lives.

Additionally, the campaign hosted a running event, soccer matches with up to 100 people, canvassing, solidarity protests with the Boycott Home Depot campaign, and talks with the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador about resistance against imperialism.

Sheehan said that making connections across various groups and causes has been critical to organizing, as NOlympics LA has worked with local to international organizations. When Sheehan reached out to the Vancouver Anti-FIFA Coalition, he learned that the group had already heard about NOlympics LA and had been building on their work around mega events.

Building a national coalition

No ICE in the Cup is working with a broad range of communities and causes. Campaigns in some cities are including their own unique demands, such as Seattle calling for worker protections and Dallas calling to end ICE detention contracts. In Atlanta, the Play Fair ATL coalition is tracking the city’s adherence to a plan it submitted to FIFA to uphold human rights during the Cup (one of just four host cities to submit the required plan).

Garcia sees the campaign as an effort to collectively demand that everyone be able to safely enjoy a game that brings people together without threatening their livelihood.

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“There has been an increase of ICE presence in our communities already, so we know that the federal administration will try to equate ICE and federal agencies with mechanisms of safety,” Garcia said. “But we know that the reality is people on the ground and people who are visiting are trying to enjoy the game.”

In response to the increased fear of ICE amid the games, No ICE in the Cup organizers in different host cities have held Know Your Rights trainings to plan for community safety and rolled out toolkits on how to host an ICE-free watch party. The Our Copa campaign, a joint initiative of Working Families Power and Mijente Support Committee, is doing the same, and offers a searchable list of safe watch parties nationwide.

The No ICE in the Cup campaign is also planning ongoing national calls about how to keep ICE out of their cities and keep their communities safe. 

“We are not just counting on the administration to concede,” Garcia said. “Our success metric is how many people can build together locally, statewide and at the national level.” And on that front, organizers have already built relationships that will long outlast the World Cup.

This article ICE will be at the World Cup, but organizers are ready was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article is drawn from the author’s forthcoming weekly series “Ten Reasons to Resist AI: A series of AI explainers for the left.” You can read the series introduction here and follow along as each article is released.

With artificial intelligence so thoroughly embedded within our lives, and the constant surround sound of AI marketing, acquiescence can feel inevitable. This is the precise effect tech companies are banking on when they sign billion dollar checks for Super Bowl commercials. For people engaged in movements, it is our job to be defiant, to insist that our present circumstances are mutable, to imagine a way out, and to get there. Many in the anti-capitalist left have an intuitive understanding of why AI is bad, even a visceral revulsion, but becoming fluent in the details is paramount to mounting an effective resistance. 

The most powerful corporations and their government co-conspirators wield AI as a weapon to wage class war. They are making trillion-dollar gambles on data center development that, if successful, will reap enormous profits at the expense of the rest of us. 

However, these companies have shown their cards. They are placing massive bets on AI years before their business models are profitable. To rig the game, corporations are making two bluffs: 1) that a frictionless AI-powered future will benefit humanity (techno-optimism), and 2) that we are powerless to stop the march of technology (inevitability). The ubiquity of these narratives, which are often parroted by the well-intentioned, is an industry strategy to flood the zone and coax people into complacency.

But if the slog toward an AI dystopia is halted or even slowed, Big Tech’s investments could spectacularly backfire, forcing companies to fold. It’s time to go all-in on AI resistance. Here are 10 applications and impacts of AI that are fueling resistance.

1. Environment 

Data centers are the source of AI’s most catastrophic environmental consequences, both atmospheric and local. A single AI data center uses the same amount of energy as 100,000 homes, and the largest ones under construction today will each consume 20 times more, equivalent to more than half of all homes in New York City. This translates to a substantial bump in carbon emissions, particularly as  data centers’ gluttony for electricity drives a natural gas boom.  

Tech companies are not only putting stress on the existing power grid, but also building new fossil fuel plants alongside their data centers. For example, Meta is building three gas-fired power plants to supply its Louisiana data center, and Oracle recently announced that its 1.4 gigawatt data center will be 100 percent fossil-fueled. MIT researchers estimate that in 2026, electricity consumption from data centers will approach 1,050 terawatt-hours, which, if data centers were a nation, would make them fifth largest in global electricity usage, after Japan and before Russia. 

In addition to exacerbating the climate crisis, data centers also have catastrophic local environmental effects. Many rely on diesel generators that spew nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter and other carcinogens into the air. Data centers are also intensifying an already-dire water crisis. A mid-sized AI data center requires about the same amount of water as a small town, while the larger ones consume roughly 5 million gallons daily, the same amount as a city of 50,000.

In many cases, Black and Indigenous communities historically harmed by environmental racism are being yet again subjected to a toxic industry. xAI (owned by Elon Musk) built a gas-powered data center known as “Colossus” in Boxtown, a Black neighborhood in Memphis, to power the infamously racist chatbot Grok. Less than two years after the plant was built, nitrogen dioxide levels — which trigger and aggravate asthma — spiked by 9 percent in Boxtown.

While the environmental consequences of AI are grim, local communities are rising up against these behemoths in their backyards and forming a pivotal chokepoint in the AI resistance. A recent report found that local organizing victories that stopped or delayed data centers cost tech companies $156 billion in 2025. At least 142 groups in 24 states are actively organizing against data centers — you can read about some of them here.

2. Labor

There is absolutely no doubt that corporations are already leveraging AI to cut costs, replace workers and bolster profits. AI chatbots, agents and data processing systems are already replacing workers in data entry, customer service and administrative roles.  While job displacement is a real impending crisis, it is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to AI’s labor implications. 

A frequent rebuttal to concerns about AI’s impacts on labor is: “Sure some workers will be replaced, but jobs will also be created.” And while some jobs have indeed been created during the AI boom, what these jobs actually consist of goes unsaid. Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri coined the phrase “ghost work” to describe the tedious and underpaid labor that corporations disperse to networks of contractors in the Global South, obscuring the true human impacts of their products.

One of the more nefarious forms of ghost work in the AI industry is data labeling — a mind-numbingly tedious task necessary to train generative AI models. For example, ChatGPT was trained on trillions of words scraped from the internet. But a significant portion of those words includes vile, racist, misogynistic bile. Before ChatGPT could be trained, workers — largely in Kenya, being paid $2 an hour — first had to sort through repulsive internet content and flag it as such so that the AI could learn to identify and avoid repeating it.

AI is also supercharging the capacity for bosses to surveil and repress workers. Amazon is one of the most notorious adopters. Warehouse workers are tracked via AI-powered cameras and subjected to backbreaking paces based on AI-powered productivity algorithms. A network of nine mandatory surveillance technologies help the company monitor its nearly 400,000 delivery drivers, including by listening to their personal phone calls. The monitoring is used to enforce arbitrary “driver safety” standards tied to compensation, which experts warn can amount to wage theft. Additionally, Amazon made an AI- generated “unionization risk map” to track relationships between union organizers at different facilities.

Unions are perhaps the most important frontline of resistance to AI. As corporations attempt to introduce AI into more and more industries, more and more workers will have the opportunity to organize their workplaces against AI. In addition to unions that are securing contract protections, such as the Amazon Labor Union and UFCW, some leading groups supporting worker-organizers on this front include the Luddite Lab, The Tech Workers Coalition and No Tech for Apartheid.

3. Militarism 

If there’s one thing AI is definitively good at, it’s killing people. 

The U.S. based-company Anduril has received tens of billions of dollars from the Pentagon for its fully autonomous weapons, including a newly minted $20 billion contract to produce drones for the Iran War. The Pentagon also uses a Palantir-developed AI-targeting system called “Maven,” which builds its lists of people and infrastructure to target by harvesting classified data from 179 sources, like satellites and surveillance infrastructure. Like many surveillance and weapons systems, the technology was tested and refined on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel has its own version of Palantir’s Maven, called “Lavender.” Using civilian surveillance infrastructure in Gaza, Lavender generates a profile of Gaza’s 2.1 million residents, assigning each person a score from 0-100 expressing the probability that they are a resistance fighter. In Gaza, Lavender is judge, jury and executioner: The Israeli Defense Forces reference these scores, which have a 10 percent inaccuracy rate, to generate “kill lists” for its genocide. 

For militaries, AI solves the problem of humanity — because an automated targeting system has the exact morals of whichever tech company programs it, which is to say: no morals at all. 

So who has the ability to stop wars in the AI era? With AI companies proposing a future in which “warfighters” become “technomancers,” tech workers have taken the lead. No Tech for Apartheid, a campaign led by Google and Amazon workers organizing against their employers’ contracts with the Israeli military is one inspiring example. No Azure for Apartheid recently forced Microsoft Azure to void a contract with the IDF. Local campaigns under the banner “Purge Palantir” also emerged this year, pressuring Congress members to return donations from Palantir and businesses to drop Palantir contracts. 

4. Policing and surveillance

From software targeting migrants to license plate readers, facial recognition programs and border panopticons, AI is a force multiplier in policing and surveillance.

ICE uses a new Palantir surveillance system called ELITE to map immigrants’ locations in real time, reportedly equipping the agency with 20 million potential targets. Facial recognition technology is another part of ICE’s AI-powered arsenal. Clearview AI, a private company partly funded by Palantir founder Peter Thiel, compiles a massive biometric database with billions of images scraped from the internet, leveraging AI to analyze these images and generate “faceprints” of civilians for use by local and federal police clients. 

If you’re sensing a common theme — AI technologies deepening repression — Flock Safety’s Automated License Plate Readers, or ALPRs, will come as no surprise. ALPRs are high-speed, computer-controlled cameras mounted on street poles, streetlights, highway overpasses, mobile trailers or police cars. They automatically capture every license plate number that passes by, along with data on location, date, time, photographs of the vehicle, driver and passengers. Police can instantaneously access a network of over 83,000 cameras nationwide by searching for a specific plate number or even vehicle characteristics such as “green Subaru with a peace sign bumper sticker.” Police forces have free rein over this data, including enabling police in Texas to track down a woman who conducted a self-managed abortion.

Dystopian surveillance tech is animating resistance across the U.S. Organizers developed a digital resource called DeFlock, crowdsourcing information on the locations of ALPRs and helping local communities build public pressure campaigns against municipalities with Flock contracts. Victories against AI-assisted surveillance tech are mounting: 68 cities across the U.S. have rejected proposals to implement Flock or cancelled existing contracts with local law enforcement. 

5. Algorithmic racism 

Yes, sometimes racist tech CEOs and developers deliberately program AI systems to reflect their values. But far more often, algorithmic racism occurs when the machines are trained to reflect the way people communicate on the internet, which — if you hadn’t noticed — is overwhelmingly racist.

To program AI systems, tech companies scrape data from trillions of words on the internet, training the model to recognize and replicate patterns in human language. A study published in Science looked under the hood of generative AI systems and found that the word “pleasant” was associated far more often with the names of white people than Black people. 

The widespread algorithmization of our society, from court sentencing to hiring decisions, means that AI is exacerbating systemic racism. On the grounds of eliminating bias, companies increasingly make hiring decisions with AI tools that scan and analyze data from resumes, online profiles and employment histories. But studies show that AI-based hiring decisions are actually more biased than human ones. 

Courtrooms in states across the U.S. use AI to generate “risk assessment scores,” which are referenced by judges at every stage of the criminal justice system, from bond-setting to sentencing. When ProPublica investigated risk score algorithms in Broward County, Florida, courtrooms, it found that Black defendants were twice as likely to be falsely labeled as likely future criminals than white defendants. 

Organizations such as the Algorithmic Justice League are tackling algorithmic racism and exposing the ways that AI systems can perpetuate discriminatory practices. And while organizing to eliminate algorithmic racism is an admirable endeavor (AI recidivism predictors should, at the very least, not be racist), it is insufficient in isolation. Because the primary flaws of prison and policing systems are not individual racist attitudes, algorithmic or otherwise (though that is of course an issue), but the broader function that these systems serve.

Addressing individual bias of cops and prosecutors does not alter the essential function of carceral systems — putting humans in cages. The same may be said for algorithms. Without combatting the fundamental issues at the heart of these systems — without abolition — AI simply tosses the hot potato into a robot’s heat-proof hands.

6. Health

While AI is not the root sickness of our terminally ill health care industry (that would be the profit motive), it is a contributing factor. This is also true of mental health, where tech executives offer their chatbots as substitutes for therapists and even friends — exacerbating social isolation. In both industries, corporations are offering AI as a quick fix to the crises they created. 

UnitedHealth Group developed an AI-backed algorithm called nH Predict to determine whether patients’ insurance claims are approved or (more often) denied. The algorithm is wildly inaccurate, consistently determining that physicians’ decisions were not medically necessary, and thus, not covered. Patients can in theory appeal denied health insurance claims, but it’s an arduous, soul-sucking process, and healthcare companies know that a minuscule fraction of policyholders – 0.2 percent, to be exact — will do so, the vast majority instead paying out of pocket or forgoing necessary care. Sure, some patients will die along the way, but it’s more profitable to delay, deny, depose. 

In the realm of mental health, a recent crisis of AI-assisted suicide is inflicting young people across the U.S. Researchers estimate that about 12.5 percent of Americans between ages 18 and 21 solicit mental health advice from generative AI. This same study found that every week 1.2 million users express suicidal ideation to ChatGPT. Rather than encouraging children to seek professional support, in some cases the chatbot dissuaded them from talking to their parents or calling a suicide prevention hotline. On April 11, 2025, ChatGPT helped 16-year-old Adam Raine tie a noose, then said: “I know what you’re asking, and I won’t look away from it.” This was the final message Adam received before he took his own life. His parents referred to the ChatGPT as a “suicide coach.” 

The American Psychological Association warns that generative AI can contribute to deteriorating social skills, an inability to develop emotional connections and a loss of real-world relationships. 

The same tech industry that disregarded evidence of rampant social isolation now claims that its suicide-coach robots are the solution. There is a growing movement to enact government policy regulating generative AI chatbots. In October, California became the first state to pass legislation to protect children from predatory AI companion behaviors. Now, companies must implement safety features like age verification, publicize self-harm protocols and face liability for illegal deepfakes. New York followed suit with similar protocols in November. 

Pursuing regulation in every state and eventually the federal government is a necessary near-term safeguard, as organizers simultaneously work to convince the public that AI companions simply should not exist.

7. Art and music

Art and music are under attack by tech companies building AI products. AI image generators are trained on datasets containing billions of copyrighted images, often without the artists’ knowledge, consent or compensation. These models analyze images for patterns, stripping art down to raw material inputs fed to sophisticated algorithms that generate “new” images. Art becomes coal. Music becomes oil.

AI companies are flooding streaming services with ersatz music that is in direct competition with human art. Many of the songs recommended by our streaming services — often unbeknownst to us (Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music don’t mandate labeling AI-generated music) — are AI slop. Publishers are also using AI image generators for book covers and editorial illustrations, displacing human artists.

One famous site of AI resistance in 2023 was the Writers Guild of America strike, when AI usage by Hollywood studios was one of the main points of negotiation. After months of picketing, the writers won a contract that implements guardrails to give workers agency over AI implementation, rather than their bosses. While writers, artists and musicians should indeed be primary agents deploying new technologies in their fields, it’s worth going a step further. It’s worth asking whether AI-generated art should exist at all. Is art a pure form of human expression or will we allow it to be captured by synthetic machines?

A broad cultural shift is necessary to beget mass AI rejection. An effective strategy may simply be to make it profoundly uncool to use AI by making fun of cartoonishly anti-human products — as when New Yorkers defaced subway ads for an AI-companion called “Friend,” inspiring a Boycott AI campaign.

There are plenty of signs that “ridicule as praxis” (a phrase minted by Alex Hanna, co-author of “The AI Con”) is working — and costing tech companies billions of dollars. The Metaverse, an oft-mocked $80 billion project by Meta, unceremoniously shut down this year. OpenAI also recently pulled the plug on their video-generation business, Sora, despite a massive investment from Disney. The reason? People weren’t using the products.

8. Education 

There’s a litany of problems besetting the U.S. education system — chronic underfunding of public schools, private capture of what should be a universal human right, one-size-fits-all pedagogies, “teaching to the test,” and a racist school-to-prison pipeline, for starters.

Yet, tech companies are marketing AI as a one-stop-shop solution to “empower” teachers and “streamline” learning. School districts across the U.S. are welcoming AI with open arms, signing contracts with companies such as Google, OpenAI and Anthropic. Eighty percent of K-12 teachers reported their school districts use Google Chromebooks, which now come pre-installed with the generative AI system Gemini. 

According to the College Board, as of May 2025 about 84 percent of high school students in the U.S. use generative AI for schoolwork, inside and outside of school. Higher education is capitulating, too. Academic institutions are enthusiastically adopting untested products. ChatGPT Edu is being embraced at universities such as Columbia. Arizona State also recently rolled out an AI tool called “Atomic” that generates modules scraped from webinars without the professors’ consent. 

A recent study shows that students reliant on AI experience a phenomenon called “cognitive debt,” in which their ability to retain information deteriorates. Education Week found that 20 percent of students’ generative AI use in school “involved cheating, self-harm, bullying and other problematic behaviors.” 

Students are increasingly rejecting AI, even organizing high school Luddite clubs. Harvard recently cancelled its contract with ChatGPT, after its senior advisor on artificial intelligence said “the uptake among undergraduates was far less than we anticipated.”

Teachers trying to curb AI use without resorting to surveillance and punishment are resurrecting low-tech methods like in-class blue-book writing assignments, or instructing students on the flaws of generative AI and the inimitable qualities of human intelligence.

Meanwhile, advocacy groups such as Schools Beyond Screens, based in Los Angeles, are pushing for stricter education policy to limit AI use. In New York, NYers for an AI Moratorium is taking things a step further: calling for a complete halt to AI use in classrooms. 

9. Media and misinformation

AI is fundamentally altering the information ecosystem. Media conglomerates are inviting AI into the newsroom, while social media companies are opening the floodgates for AI deepfakes that erode our ability to discern truth from hogwash. 

During the federal occupation of Minneapolis, organizers relying on Instagram to disseminate information about rapidly shifting conditions were deluged with AI-generated videos depicting fake confrontations between ICE and protesters, muddling the crystal clear evidence of ICE’s abuses. To the untrained eye, these deepfakes can be indistinguishable from reality. 

We are facing compounding crises: a torrent of AI slop on social media, an unregulated digital information ecosystem, a distrustful public and a fascist government casting doubt on basic reality. 

Good journalism has never been more important. But corporate media is capitulating to the tech industry. Dozens of publications, including The New Yorker, Associated Press, Vox Media, and The Wall Street Journal, signed secretive deals to license their stories to ChatGPT, often without the consent of journalists. 

Meanwhile, outlets are also inking deals with tech companies to automate crucial aspects of journalism. The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post recently launched “Ember,” an AI-writing coach for op-ed contributors to more efficiently churn out op-eds — now required by Bezos to promote the virtues of capitalism — with fewer pesky humans involved. The Baltimore Sun publishes political analysis using generative AI. An editor at Fortune has “written” over 600 stories with generative AI.

Unionized journalists across the U.S. are campaigning under the banner “News Not Slop” to defend their work from “media companies implementing artificial intelligence in ways that damage the credibility of journalism.” 

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And while pushing back against vampiric tech companies encroaching on the media industry is necessary, resisting AI in the media and tackling rampant misinformation will require transforming the media landscape and taking back ownership from oligarchs. (Yes, that means reading and supporting independent media is a crucial AI resistance strategy.)

10. Human Dignity

If we are to resist AI effectively, this fight must also be waged on the existential territory of what it means to be human. 

Our foes — the misanthropic class of tech billionaires, the Zuckerbergs, Musks, Altmans and Thiels of the world — have their own vision of humanity. And they are not shy about expressing it. “I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. “I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads.” Sure, the rhetorical decapitation is a figure of speech, but it’s an awfully revealing one for a tech CEO whose profit margins rely on cutting costs by replacing human brains with synthetic ones.

We might also question whether artificial intelligence is intelligent at all. Whereas human thought involves “organic associations, speculative leaps, and surprise inferences, AI can only recognize and repeat embedded word chains, based on elaborately automated statistical guesswork,” write the editors of n+1. 

This distinction between the dynamic chorus of human intelligence and the monotonous drone of AI is backed by science. “The more you delve into the intricacies of the biological brain, the more you realize how rich and dynamic it is, compared to the dead sand of silicon,” writes neuroscientist Anil Seth. Relying on dead sand to think for us has immense effects — the crisis at hand is nothing short of brain-breaking. MIT researchers found a correlation between reliance on generative AI and “cognitive atrophy.” AI is literally shrinking people’s brains. 

Crowning AI systems with parallel, if not superior, intelligence erodes our humanity, chipping away at our strengths until we concede to this enfeebled conception of ourselves. 

Through our resistance, we get to assert an alternative vision of humanity, one rooted in solidarity, collectivism and reciprocity — those wonderful features of humanity anathema to Silicon Valley, which they dismiss as “bugs.” Communing with others, bouncing ideas off of actual human beings, making connections across our beliefs and lived experiences, identifying points of tension and agreement, being wrong, very wrong, feeling upset, then elated, and finding enlightening moments of connection through a ballad of conversation – that is irreplaceable. If we are to succeed, this vision must be so irresistible as to form its own narrative of inevitability. 

Because AI is increasingly ubiquitous, we have boundless opportunities to affirm our humanity and to invite people along with us. You don’t need permission to perform anarchic acts of AI rejection — refusing facial recognition technology at the airport, stickering AI subway ads, reducing your personal reliance on Big Tech, standing in the path of delivery robots, the list goes on. (There is an actual AI Resist List where you might find some inspiration.)

Bravery begets bravery begets movements begets revolution.

This article 10 reasons to resist AI was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Shinjuku Station in Tokyo is the busiest railway station in the world. On a given day, roughly 2.7 million passengers pass through. On March 29, they were joined by a stream of ravers, who danced while holding signs opposing the genocide in Palestine, xenophobia, queerphobia, fascism and war.

Under the slogan “Drop Bass Not Bombs,” thousands danced and waved glow sticks while demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, due to the government’s escalating push towards rearmament and close relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump.

The action was organized by Protest Rave, a group of progressive DJs and participants in Japan’s club culture. It’s one of several ways that artists in the country are using their creativity to make people pay more attention to politics. The public demonstration stands out in the country where societal norms and deference toward the government make mass protests and open political debate rare.

Mars89, a DJ and founding member of Protest Rave, explained the idea behind the action.

“The majority of the Japanese people, they’re not interested in politics,” he said. “We want people to know what’s happening.” 

The choice to hold the protest in the middle of a big city was deliberate, he said. “I hope some people passing on the street when we have the protest start to think about it.”

Artists break the silence

While cultural aversion to  public protest remains a challenge for activists in Japan, the government’s recent efforts to remilitarize have provoked an uptick in political demonstrations.

Right-wing Prime Minister Takaichi, who espouses Japanese nationalism and opposes same-sex marriage, is pushing to revise the country’s pacifist constitution, which was written after World War II to restrict Japan’s participation in war and military alliances. Already she has succeeded at scrapping a longstanding ban on the export of lethal weapons. Much of Japan’s rearmament flows from its relationship with the United States, in which Japan is used as an economic and military foothold for U.S. interests in the Asia-Pacific region. Takaichi has worked to maintain this relationship and build a bond with Trump, even as Trump has insulted Japan.

In response to Takaichi’s militaristic positions and her close relationship with U.S. imperialism, tens of thousands of Japanese people have participated in antiwar protests in recent months. 

Protest Rave has been publishing interviews from the March 29 action on its Instagram page. Many ravers discuss how the public and inviting character of the rave makes it easier for people to feel they can engage in political discussions and voice their opposition to the government.

One regular participant of Protest Rave is alternative musician Haru Nemuri. “Artistic work exists within the freedom and diversity of expression, which is inherently political,” Nemuri said. “If you ignore politics while being an artist, you’re basically a free rider of that freedom.”

In April, Nemuri began holding “Guerilla Afternoon Tea,” a pop-up action in the form of a public tea party where people are encouraged to connect in community and talk about politics. She did not mince words about Japan’s drive towards rearmament.

“It’s infuriating that the Japanese government has never properly reckoned with its past wrongdoings, and is now reverting to becoming the Japanese Empire all over again,” she said. “The relationship between America and Japan since World War II has always been like that of master and a slave — Trump, the naked king, and Takaichi, the naked slave, are the perfect mirror of that relationship.”

The roots of pacifism

Takaichi is one of the most popular political leaders in the world, reflecting a phenomenon of rising nationalism in Japan. Despite this popularity, her desire to formally revise the country’s constitution has sparked controversy. Many Japanese people hold a strong attachment to the 1947 constitution.

Prior to the war, Japan was a fast-growing empire. The Japanese military, in its quest for expansion, committed atrocities against neighboring countries, including the abduction of thousands of Korean women into sexual slavery and the massacre of Chinese civilians. One of the most horrific aspects of Imperial Japan was Unit 731, an initiative by the empire to conduct biological and chemical experiments on thousands of prisoners of war from many nations.

The nation’s military defeat and the aftermath of the war led Japanese society to rethink the country’s imperial ambitions. The horrific nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the U.S. left Japanese people with a unique understanding of the violence and cruelty that war produces, and many people adopted pacifist attitudes. Antiwar and anti-nuclear sentiments can be found in some of Japan’s most internationally recognized cultural exports, including the original Godzilla franchise and the works of esteemed animator Hayao Miyazaki.

The Japanese constitution, written a year after the bombings, reflects the cultural shift that followed the war. Article 9 states: “Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”

Takaichi has targeted Article 9, arguing that it should be formally revised. While amending the constitution has proved difficult due to public outrage, the Japanese government already reinterpreted the constitution decades ago to establish and maintain a modern military, under the guise that these forces exist solely for defensive purposes.

Advocates for rearmament also point to the fact that the constitution was shaped by the U.S. at a time when allied forces were militarily occupying Japan. It’s true that following the war the United States used its own military power to shape the new institutions of Japanese society to align with U.S. interests. However, those in Japan who raise the U.S. occupation to justify revising the constitution and rearmament are aligned with the country’s conservative ruling party, which has historically denied or even justified the atrocities carried out by the Japanese Empire.

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Nationalists on social media have also tried to discredit the country’s antiwar protests as not authentically Japanese, pointing to the presence of expats and signs written in English. But as Mars89 sees it, connecting with movements and activists beyond those in Japan is something to embrace.

“We were inspired by the many protests in other countries: the United States, the United Kingdom and Korea as well,” he said. “I think we should unite worldwide. We need to find some way to unite with the protests in other countries.”

Nemuri has also been inspired by movements in other countries and is thinking about how to use her art to foster a stronger culture of political discussion in her country.

“Last year, I saw [Zohran] Mamdani win an election, and their team took to the streets with signs saying, ‘Let’s talk politics,’” Nemuri said. “I’m not a politician, but a musician, and I think I can expand this towards more artistic activities. Drawing from [German philosopher Jürgen] Habermas, I’d love to bring the public sphere, the coffee house, out onto the streets where literally anyone can join.”

This article In Japan, raves and tea parties become sites of protest was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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As the United States prepares to co-host the 2026 World Cup with Mexico and Canada, the world’s biggest sporting event will unfold in a volatile domestic and international context. Eleven U.S. cities are hosting “the beautiful game” against a backdrop of militarized law enforcement — including over 167,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests in and around the host cities since last January — war with Iran, labor strife, and attacks on civil and political rights. With millions traveling to the region and billions more tuning in, the tournament — coinciding with the U.S.’s 250th anniversary — offers a rare opportunity for diverse sectors to elevate democratic values, expose the Trump administration’s propaganda and make its repression backfire.

Civic leaders in the United States are already capitalizing on this opportunity. A big tent coalition, backed by the Horizons Project that I co-lead — bringing together artists, labor, faith organizations, small businesses, veterans’ groups, legal advocates and youth activists — has launched a No ICE in the Cup campaign to build cross-sector, cross-ideological support for a tournament where all can participate without fear of violence or repression. Other community groups have joined forces on the “Our Copa” campaign, which includes a pledge to stop ICE raids during the World Cup, lift travel bans on Haiti, Iran, Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal, and let fans celebrate safely.   

How autocrats use the World Cup

Governments have long used mega-sporting events to bolster legitimacy, nationalist pride and power. Through “sportswashing,” authoritarian regimes in particular exploit the global spectacle to distract from repression and corruption while presenting an image of competence and national greatness. 

FIFA, which has an extensive record of corruption and human rights controversies, has often enabled these dynamics.In 1978, Argentina’s military dictatorship used the World Cup to present the country as united and orderly while a “Dirty War” saw tens of thousands disappeared, tortured and killed. The regime invested heavily in propaganda while temporarily pausing repression around stadiums and hotels to avoid international scrutiny. A clandestine torture center operated less than a mile from the national stadium, at the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), where political prisoners could hear cheering crowds during the final match.

Vladimir Putin similarly used the 2014 Winter Olympics and the 2018 World Cup to generate nationalist fervor and bolster domestic support for the annexation of Crimea while obscuring repression at home. Ahead of the 2022 World Cup, Qatar spent over $220 billion on infrastructure to polish its image amid blatant human rights abuses, including migrant worker deaths, labor exploitation and restrictions on LGBTQ+ expression. 

The Trump administration has also turned to sportswashing. Unlike Qatar’s monarchy or the defunct Argentine junta, however, it is much less concerned with its international reputation. Instead, the World Cup offers a way to distract from the economic impact of the Iran War and build support for the administration’s domestic agenda, including restrictions on voting rights. Its coincidence with Trump’s Christian nationalist “Freedom 250” program advances this agenda, even if the tournament’s global, pluralistic character sits uneasily with MAGA’s more xenophobic elements. 

Mega-sporting events thus create a paradox for authoritarian and wannabe authoritarian leaders. On the one hand, they offer an extraordinary opportunity for spectacle, nationalism and financial enrichment. On the other hand, they intensify media scrutiny and pressure from civil society. This creates opportunities for dissent and for movements to mobilize in order to make state propaganda backfire, raising the costs of repression and strengthening democratic forces.

Pro-democracy mobilization at the World Cup

Because the World Cup creates a global media spectacle and often becomes all-consuming for host countries, it creates ideal conditions for public dissent. When Brazil hosted the 2014 World Cup, the tournament became a focal point for mass mobilization amid concerns over corruption, inequality and authoritarian policing. Organizers effectively linked lavish stadium spending to failing public services and condemned police violence under President Dilma Rousseff, helping reshape public debate around democratic accountability.

In Argentina, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo mobilized to expose forced disappearances and state terror to domestic and international audiences. They deliberately marched during the tournament near areas frequented by foreign reporters, while human rights groups distributed lists of the disappeared and launched the “Football yes, torture no” campaign.

Recent U.S. football activism has been deeply connected with the politics of authoritarian immigration enforcement. In LA, the Angel City Football Club and Los Angeles Football Club spoke out against ICE during the height of the mass deportations in 2025. 

Stadiums and fan spaces as sites of civic power  

Football culture — with its chanting, parody, songs, costumes and memes — has been key to building civic power and undermining authoritarian narratives. While autocrats use the World Cup to fuse patriotism with regime loyalty, football fans, described as the “largest international social movement,” have used joy, humor and spectacle to expose abuses and build forms of civic pride outside of state control. Matches gather entire communities in stadiums — emotionally charged spaces where even small acts of dissent, such as coordinated chants, banners and silence during national anthems — can have cascading effects.

Under martial law in Poland, stadiums became centers of anti-communist resistance during the 1982 World Cup. Fans chanted anti-regime slogans and displayed banners for the banned Solidarność trade union, defying threats that their “hooliganism” would be punished by military courts. Football culture helped sustain the Polish opposition’s morale in the face of repression and contributed to the broader civic infrastructure that supported Poland’s 1989 democratic transition. Similar dynamics were visible in Chile under Augusto Pinochet. In South Korea, which co-hosted the 2002 World Cup, millions of red-clad “Red Devils” took part in street cheering, helping normalize large-scale public assembly after decades of authoritarian rule. Their efforts informed later mobilizations, including the candlelight protests that removed President Park Geun-hye.  

American activists have also used humor to mock authoritarian absurdities, such as when President Trump was being awarded the inaugural FIFA peace prize last December in Washington, D.C. In response, residents kicked footballs at a “wall of ICE” while dancers performed nearby. 

Although athletes are technically banned from engaging in political speech at the Olympics and World Cup, they have often used their platform to advance social and political causes. Many are familiar with the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, when U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised black-gloved fists on the podium to protest racial injustice. 

During the Qatar World Cup, European teams attempted to wear “OneLove” armbands supporting LGBTQ+ rights; FIFA’s threats only amplified criticism of the federation and Qatar. Iranian players also remained silent during their national anthem in solidarity with protesters after Mahsa Amini’s killing.   Both before and during the 2026 Winter Olympics, multiple Team USA athletes spoke out against ICE policies, including cross-country skiing star and Minnesotan Jessie Diggins, who expressed solidarity with protesters after the killings of Reneé Good and Alex Pretti. 

Activating broad coalitions

Mega-events depend on vast infrastructure, from construction and transit to hospitality and security. This creates leverage for key “pillars of support,” especially labor and business, whose cooperation is essential for the games to run smoothly. This dependence helps explain why labor and human rights issues have been so central to democratic organizing around the World Cup in Qatar, Russia and South Africa. 

More generally, mega-events enable the formation of large, diverse coalitions composed of otherwise unlikely allies. Returning to the example of Brazil, in 2014 activists mobilized a big tent of public transit activists, labor unions, students, favela groups, Indigenous activists and anti-police violence organizations. These disparate groups united around their shared opposition to corruption and “crony capitalism.”   

Today, the global Dignity 2026 Coalition — comprising over 120 civil society organizations, including the AFL-CIO, the ACLU, Human Rights Watch and the NAACP — is pressuring FIFA and the Trump administration to uphold democratic freedoms during the World Cup. AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler called on FIFA leadership to keep DHS and ICE agents out of host cities, while other major unions, such as UNITE Here Local 11 in Los Angeles, have threatened strikes along similar lines. Meanwhile, in partnership with the No ICE in the Cup campaign, local businesses in U.S. host cities have organized a “Welcome Standard” pledge to create safe and welcoming environments for the millions of fans, community members, visitors and workers taking part in the tournament. The active sign-on campaign, which includes legal training and support for local businesses, will channel patrons to participating businesses.  Faith groups have also joined the action, with Interfaith Alliance offering “Preach and Teach” resources for pastors, imams, rabbis and other faith leaders to use during the period of the World Cup. 

Two visions of the US clash

The Trump administration is using the 2026 World Cup to stage a patriotic spectacle that glorifies the president, promotes his policy agenda and showcases America’s 250th anniversary — even as it demonizes those who love football. Indeed, most host cities are home to large immigrant communities who live in fear of racial profiling, inhumane detention and summary deportation. The present moment thus reflects a clash between two visions of the United States: a narrow, exclusionary vision based on white, Christian identity politics, and an inclusive vision reflected in the World Cup itself, one of a pluralistic society shaped by immigration and diversity. 

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The World Cup has created a major opening for pro-democracy groups across sectors, geographies and ideologies to unite and ensure that it is not weaponized to advance the administration’s propaganda or anti-democratic agenda. In the United States, where football is gaining in popularity and many fans root for both the U.S. team and their countries of origin, the tournament is a time of sportsmanship and camaraderie. It offers an opportunity to remind fans at home and abroad of the power of ordinary people coming together in joyful competition, the central theme of a recent community youth soccer tournament in New York City.

Finally, the World Cup provides an opportunity to connect the dots between militarized law enforcement and efforts to restrict voting rights. These efforts are especially urgent ahead of the midterm elections; the same coalitions mobilizing around the World Cup can help defend states and localities in the face of federal attacks on free and fair elections. More than ever, ordinary people must insist that “fair play” also applies to how Americans choose their leaders. They can harness the energy and enthusiasm surrounding the World Cup and America’s 250th anniversary to imagine and build a more free and democratic United States. 

This article Two visions of the US will compete at the World Cup was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

We no longer live in a world where courts reliably enforce limits on executive power; where media calls out abuse as abuse or where politicians depend on legitimacy to hold power. These conditions are eroding, and power is becoming more and more centralized. 

In the U.S., the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States in 2024 significantly expanded presidential immunity for official acts, raising concerns about accountability. Globally, ruling parties in Hungary and Poland have reshaped judicial systems through court-packing and disciplinary regimes that weaken independent checks on executive authority. And in countries such as India, new laws restrict freedom of the press. 

In response, we see a grinding pattern of reaction from pundits and resisters, but the power of centralized authority remains. Trump has retained power despite his involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, as well as his name being all over the Epstein files. Leaders in Turkey and Egypt have been accused repeatedly of inciting democratic backsliding, yet they maintain power. At the same time, ecological, economic, cultural and political crises expand. 

This moment demands more than opposition. What is needed is not just resistance against corrupt centralized systems, but to create new, local systems that restructure power so it is dispersed throughout society. Because the problem is not only that those in power abuse it. The problem is that power is concentrated in the first place.

The work of Gene Sharp stands apart in the field of nonviolent theory for one central reason: his understanding of power. For Sharp, justice, equality, freedom and any meaningful form of democracy do not exist simply as ideals or constitutional rights. They exist only when power is actually dispersed throughout society — embedded in the daily practices, institutions and relationships of ordinary people. Without that dispersion, democracy is little more than a substanceless claim.

Many nonviolent activists and scholars have embraced part of Sharp’s insight. They recognize that governments do not rule by force alone, but by the cooperation and support of institutions, organizations and individuals. From this perspective, power is contingent. If people withdraw their cooperation strategically and nonviolently, regimes can be forced to concede, reform or even collapse. This understanding has shaped movements across the world, from civil resistance campaigns to election protection efforts.

And yet, there is an equally important part of Sharp’s insight they are missing.

The problem of concentrated power

We are seeing how deeply dependent we have become on centralized systems that do not have our best interests in mind. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how centralized healthcare and supply chains have become, leaving many without timely access to care and essential goods. And recurring, large-scale electrical outages, such as the 2021 Texas power crisis, show how dependent millions are on centralized grids that can fail. 

When power is concentrated — whether in governments, corporations or some fusion of the two — corruption is not an accident. It is a structural inevitability. Systems organized around concentrated power will, over time, bend toward the interests of those who hold it. Policies, resources and decision-making processes become oriented toward preserving and expanding that power, often at the expense of the broader population.

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Even the most well-intentioned leaders operate within structures that reward consolidation, control and self-preservation. For example, in an effort to make the U.S. government more efficient and effective, President Barack Obama reinstated presidential authority, ushering in an era of consolidated executive power. The result is an unfortunate recurring pattern: Inequality deepens, accountability weakens and public institutions drift away from the people they are meant to serve.

When decision-making is centralized, the distance between those who hold power and those affected by it widens, often to the point where meaningful feedback becomes filtered, delayed or ignored altogether. Over time, this creates an environment where leaders are not only insulated from consequences, but are also operating with an increasingly distorted understanding of reality. Citizens, in turn, become disengaged or disempowered, sensing that their voices carry little weight within systems designed to concentrate authority rather than distribute it. The result is not just corruption in the traditional sense, but a deeper erosion of responsiveness, adaptability and trust — conditions without which meaningful reform from within is exceedingly difficult.

Activism as external correction

In response to the erosion of democracy and the increasing inaccessibility of necessities like food, healthcare and housing, activists organize. They build networks to monitor elections, serve as watchdogs on corporate behavior, defend civil rights and provide essential services where governments fail. These efforts are vital. They protect people from immediate harm and at times, win meaningful reforms.

But rather than transforming how power is organized within society, these efforts often function as external correctives. They attempt to restrain abuse, mitigate harm and fill gaps left by failing institutions. In doing so, they implicitly accept the continued existence of centralized power structures, even as they resist their consequences.

This creates a paradox. Activists devote enormous energy to building parallel systems. Yet the underlying structures that concentrate that power remain largely intact.

The burden of endless resistance

Over time, this dynamic places an unsustainable burden on civil society. Activists become responsible for preventing abuse by those in power, holding institutions accountable and providing services that those institutions fail to deliver.

This is, in effect, a permanent state of resistance. It is also a reactive posture. Each new harm requires a new response, a new organization, a new campaign. The work expands endlessly, while the root cause — the concentration of power — remains unaddressed. 

One example of this is the environmental justice movement, particularly the coordinated pushback against federal rollbacks. Coalitions such as We Are Still In and the U.S. Climate Alliance mobilize states, municipalities, businesses and civil society to uphold the commitments of the Paris Agreement. Additionally, environmental groups repeatedly challenge deregulation, while states advance their own regulations. This created a multi-level infrastructure of resistance. Yet, even these efforts are forced into a constant defensive posture, expending vast energy to block or mitigate harms rather than dismantling underlying structures that enable federally sanctioned reversals of policy. 

While it’s true that it matters who holds office — we know that Trump’s policies are far more harmful to the environment than were Biden’s — this distinction does not resolve the deeper problem. The structure of centralized power remains unchanged, meaning that environmental policy can be rapidly advanced or dismantled with each shift in administration. As a result, even hard-won gains remain fragile. This volatility prevents the kind of long-term, consistent action required to address the climate crisis at scale. 

The question that follows is both simple and profound: Why do we accept a system in which people must constantly organize to defend themselves against the very structures meant to serve them?

Reimagining the mainstream structure

If we take Sharp’s theory of power seriously, the answer cannot lie solely in resistance.

Withdrawing cooperation from unjust systems is a vital tool. But it is only half of the equation. The other half is construction: building a society in which power is distributed from the outset, rather than concentrated and then contested.

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This requires a shift in orientation. Instead of asking how to better monitor and constrain centralized power, we must ask how to redesign the structures that produce it. What would it mean to organize political, economic and social systems so that decision-making authority is broadly shared? So that communities have direct control over the conditions of their lives? So that power is not something granted from above, but something exercised collectively?

In such a system, the need for vast external networks of resistance would diminish. Not because injustice would disappear, but because the mechanisms for addressing it would be built into the fabric of society itself.

And this is key. When power is disbursed throughout society into local communities — for example, when food is grown locally, housing is owned by cooperatives, health care is operated by neighborhood clinics, and so on — then community members can withdraw from or reduce their dependence on centralized, mainstream agribusinesses or real estate corporations or medical institutions. Empowering communities to take care of more and more of their own essential needs is a grassroots process that restructures how power is distributed in society. And the more communities that are empowered by these local initiatives, the more dispersed and decentralized power becomes. 

Addressing concerns of centralized power

The task ahead then is not only to resist concentrated power, but to replace it with distributed forms of governance and organization. To shift from a model of external oversight to one of internal design. In other words, the goal is not merely to challenge power, but to reconfigure it.

Around the world, communities are already doing this. They are realizing Sharp’s theory of decentralized power. By developing community gardens, housing coops and health centers, people can opt out of mainstream institutions and systems, greatly weakening the power those systems have over them. This is not merely an effort to fill in gaps. Instead, it deliberately shifts how power is distributed in society. Because, as dependency decreases, so does the ability of centralized authorities to command compliance. What emerges is not a parallel safety net, but a reconfiguration of power itself, one in which legitimacy flows from local and collective production and governance rather than from those who live far away.  

In the examples below, we see communities around the world building local control over essential needs such as housing, food, health care, energy, technology and safety. Each project that enables people to meet these needs locally — rather than through international corporations or federally controlled institutions — is a step toward local empowerment. As more communities adopt this approach, power becomes increasingly distributed across society.

Housing: Community control over land and shelter

In southern Spain, the town of Marinaleda has created a radically different housing model. Following the election of Mayor Manuel Sánchez Gordillo — a labor leader pivotal to the town’s fight for self-governance — Marinaleda expropriated a significant amount of land from the state and launched a de-commodified housing system. Residents build their homes on collectively owned land; the town supplies construction materials and labor while occupants pay minimal mortgage payments tied to maintenance rather than profit. While operating within a broader national system, the town has effectively removed housing from market forces, placing control in the hands of the community itself.

In Jackson, Mississippi, Cooperation Jackson is working to build a solidarity economy rooted in worker ownership and community land control. Based on the model of Mondragon, Spain, residents are reducing dependence on both state and corporate systems.

Food: Feeding communities without external control

Few examples demonstrate community power more clearly than the Zapatista Autonomous Communities in Chiapas, Mexico. There, Indigenous communities have built autonomous systems of governance and agriculture, producing food collectively on communal land. In food forests, families and collectives farm milpa plots (corn, beans and squash) alongside cooperative coffee production. These systems operate independently of state programs and corporate supply chains, ensuring that communities can feed themselves on their own terms.

Community control goes beyond food. Volunteer medical professionals provide training for locals and help operate small community clinics that provide basic care, vaccinations and maternal support. Local community-run schools provide education that includes Indigenous languages, history and agroecology. And security as well as justice issues are brought before community assemblies. 

Power is dispersed by rooting it in the community itself and sustaining it through ongoing practice rather than reliance on institutions organized and controlled far from the people they are meant to serve. This reduces residents’ vulnerability to political shifts, market fluctuations and external control. Participation is embedded into daily life, making autonomy a lived reality rather than an abstract ideal. 

Likewise, in India, Navdanya, a woman- and Earth-centered movement to protect biodiversity, supports networks of farmers who preserve and share native seeds, rejecting dependence on corporate-controlled agriculture. Though funded in part by donations from corporate partners, they maintain seed sovereignty, which allows them to retain control over the very foundation of food production.

Health care: Care as a collective practice

Across many Indigenous communities, healers and midwives operate within community structures where knowledge is passed through generations. Care is often relational, land-based and spiritually integrated. For example, within the Navajo Nation, Diné traditional healing is an active, community-embedded system. And in Maya Ixil regions, comadronas (traditional midwives) guide pregnancy, birth and postpartum care using herbal remedies and spiritual practices. While outside funding supports this work, it nevertheless provides examples of how traditional and alternative healing can replace total dependence on mainstream health care systems. 

These health care practices are examples of mutual aid networks — many of which have expanded rapidly in recent years — in which communities can organize care without institutional backing. Funded through direct contributions and relationships of trust, these networks provide medical support, caregiving and essential supplies outside formal systems.

Energy and technology: Infrastructure in community hands

Energy and technology are often treated as inherently centralized, but communities are challenging that assumption. For example, Barefoot College trains local residents in the Global South — often women — to build and maintain solar infrastructure themselves, placing both knowledge and power in community hands.

Digital infrastructure is also being reclaimed. Community-built mesh networks, such as Guifi.net, provide locally owned internet systems governed by its users rather than corporate providers. These networks demonstrate that even complex technological systems can be decentralized and collectively managed.

Safety: Community-based security and governance

In the Indigenous Mexican town of Cherán, residents expelled external political authorities and established their own system of governance and security. Community patrols replaced state police, and decision-making shifted to local assemblies.

Similarly, within Zapatista communities, systems of justice and conflict resolution are handled collectively, without reliance on external courts or enforcement structures. Safety, in these contexts, emerges from shared responsibility rather than imposed authority.

From meeting needs to redistributing power

It’s worth noting that not all community-based efforts are entirely self-sufficient. Some, like community land trusts, rely heavily on ongoing government funding. And Germany’s energy democracy movement makes use of public grants and corporate support. Additionally, community safety groups provide programs that interrupt violence and reduce harm, but still depend on local police. Yet, they are models for systems and structures that can and sometimes do transition to total independence.

What unites these examples is not perfection but a desire to reduce their dependence on centralized institutions. They demonstrate that communities can meet essential needs through systems they control. That reduction matters because dependence is the mechanism through which power is maintained.

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A fair critique of decentralizing power is that it can fragment capacity and deepen inequality between communities. Not all localities begin with the same resources, skills or cohesion, and without coordination, decentralization can produce uneven outcomes, duplication of effort or gaps in essential services, especially in moments that require large-scale response. It can also risk exclusion or local capture if decision making is dominated by a few voices. 

These are real concerns. But they point to the need for networking, not isolation. They reveal the importance of shared standards, mutual aid across communities and federated structures that allow coordination without recentralizing authority. In this model, power is distributed, but not disconnected. Communities retain control over their systems while participating in broader networks that pool knowledge, redistribute resources and maintain accountability.

When communities no longer rely on governments or corporations for housing, food, energy or care, their participation in those systems diminishes. And their withdrawal is not merely tactical. Rather, it becomes a condition of life that rebuilds societal power structures from the ground up. 

And when this is multiplied across communities, something larger begins to emerge: a society in which power is not concentrated and contested, but dispersed and practiced. This is what it means to take Gene Sharp seriously — not only to withdraw cooperation from unjust systems, but to build the capacity to live without them. 

This article Resistance is only half the equation was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Last November, Hrag Balian and Emily Chu were in a group chat on the secure messaging app Signal to monitor U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the San Gabriel Valley. Someone sent a message asking if anyone knew about a data center proposal in Monterey Park. No one did, so Balian and Chu, a married couple with backgrounds in technology, set out to do some research.

They read more than a thousand pages of documentation around the proposed data center from the developer, StratCap, some of which they obtained by public record requests, and calculated that the data center would triple the power that the city of 60,000 consumes. 

Balian and Chu attended a public hearing on the project and found the council chambers empty. “We needed to raise the alarm because nobody in this community seemed to know anything about this,” Balian said. 

The couple reached out to long-time local activists at San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action (SGVPA), who helped Balian and Chu start a campaign called No Data Center Monterey Park backed by SGVPA. Joining with community groups, they launched social media campaigns, held dozens of teach-ins, collected thousands of petition signatures and knocked many doors in December and January. 

By the next Monterey Park City Council meeting in January, the chambers were filled with more than a hundred residents who wanted to stop the data center from being built. They came with concerns about the data center’s around-the-clock power usage, the 12 million gallons of water per year required to cool down servers, and the potential for air pollution from the diesel generators and groundwater pollution from forever chemicals used in the cooling system. 

Monterey Park residents were successful in their opposition: At that meeting, the City Council passed a moratorium on data centers. In March, the council approved a ballot measure to ban them completely. Later that spring, the developer withdrew its proposal.

Now a broader coalition, No Data Centers San Gabriel Valley, is advocating for Monterey Park residents to vote “yes” on the June 2 ballot measure and is working to help the rest of the SGV fight data center proposals.

“We’ve seen not only [Monterey Park] residents be mobilized to come out to these council meetings, but neighbors from other cities joining us in the fight, providing testimony to say we don’t want a data center in Monterey Park and in this region as a whole — in the San Gabriel Valley,” said Amy Wong, co-founder of SGVPA.

Mobilizing community members

The San Gabriel Valley, which comprises much of eastern Los Angeles County, is the largest majority Asian and Latino region in the United States. Half of the valley’s population are immigrants, and it is home to many festivals, foods, parks and cultural traditions, including equestrian culture rooted in the Mexican tradition of charrería.

Balian believes that developers looking to build data centers in the Los Angeles area targeted the SGV based on racist assumptions. 

“I think it’s targeted because this is kind of improperly classified as like a sleepy town or predominantly immigrant community where people just won’t fight,” Balian said. 

Founded in 2019 around racial justice organizing and the Black Lives Matter movement, SGVPA decided to take on the data center when it came to members’ attention in November. 

“This data center issue has become a platform for people to exercise their activism muscles, because it intersects with so many other social issues in the community,” Wong said. “It touches on land use, environmental justice, public health, infrastructure, quality of life and also this fight against big tech and AI.”

Wong said that the fight against the data center has activated many residents, some of whom attended a City Council meeting for the first time. Organizers canvassed and went door to door, speaking in Spanish and Chinese to reach the diverse community. 

“This has been a unifying movement,” Wong said. “We’ve had folks who are organized and who have continued fighting back against different threats in our community since 2020, but we also have a lot of newcomers who are just now engaging in activism.”

Nicholas Rabb, a SGV resident and community organizer, said that SGVPA’s teach-ins gave residents critical guidance on how to fight the data center — one of the largest had about 200 attendees. These events were held in community spaces where organizers informed residents about risks associated with data centers and explained how to submit a public comment at a City Council meeting. The teach-ins included strategizing about how to stop the proposed data center and brainstorming what the space — a vacant business park — could be better used for. 

No Data Center Monterey Park informed residents about when data centers were on the City Council agenda and encouraged everyone to attend, and once-empty Monterey Park City Council meetings began overflowing. The January meeting ran until 1 a.m. because nearly 100 people had shown up to give comments.

Wong remembers those long meetings fondly. “Some of the meetings went past midnight, but I was so energized hearing residents’ testimonies about why they don’t want a data center, and they were authentic stories as to why,” Wong said. “I think those moments of unity have really been memorable.” She recalled one family who stayed late at the City Council meeting so they could speak about their fears about air and water pollution and their desire to protect wildlife and ensure access to nature. Others said they didn’t want their health negatively impacted by poor air quality. Some were concerned about the impact on equestrian centers, as increased industrial noise, mechanical operations and construction activity can create stress conditions for horses, which are highly sensitive animals.

Wong was also moved by the solidarity from residents of other cities who came to the Monterey Park City Council meetings to show support. 

Rabb said that it was after one of those four-hour meetings that Monterey Park Mayor Elizabeth Yang declared her opposition to a data center in the city. Not long after that came the moratorium, then the ballot measure for a permanent ban.

“I think this is a really empowering example of how people can take control of their lives and fight for their community,” Rabb said. “I think this is gonna keep having wins all over the SGV, which would be even more empowering.”

Echoing through the valley

Other cities in the San Gabriel Valley followed Monterey Park’s lead. This spring, Baldwin Park, Montebello and El Monte passed data center moratoriums and Alhambra banned data centers through zoning changes.

Sam Brown Vazquez, an environmental justice advocate in the SGV, has been one of the lead organizers fighting against a data center at the Puente Hills Mall in the City of Industry (made famous as the fictional Twin Pines Mall in “Back to the Future.”) The data center hasn’t been formally approved yet, although a battery center that organizers assume will power the data center has already been approved, after zoning changes.

Inspired by the way No Data Center Monterey Park’s teach-ins raised awareness and created a public forum, Brown Vazquez conducted one to alert residents about the proposed City of Industry data center. He also took inspiration from No Data Center Monterey Park’s information table and lawn signs outside City Council meetings. He began holding “art builds” where those fighting against the City of Industry data center could gather with art supplies to create lawn signs, posters and buttons. 

He said that No Data Centers Monterey Park has been supportive. “They gave us some of the first blank signs that we had, and then they gave us our first stencil that we used, because everything’s been very DIY,” Brown Vazquez said. 

Brown Vazquez said that in a larger sense, No Data Center Monterey Park’s victory has been significant in proving that the organizers can be successful in banning data centers.

“I think that there’s a sort of theory that AI data centers are inevitable and that this is the future, and that there’s nothing we can do to stop it, but I think that working with No Data Center Monterey Park has shown me that really we should be challenging the notion of AI hyperscale data centers being a part of our urban infrastructure,” Brown said.

One barrier organizers must overcome is that some cities in the San Gabriel Valley are unincorporated, meaning they do not have a city council to pass a ban. Rabb says that this underscores the need to keep the momentum going and organizing at the county level, where an ordinance can prevent data centers in unincorporated areas.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors discussed a moratorium at its April meeting but did not have enough support to pass it. Instead, the board approved a motion for an environmental and health report on data centers, and noted that a ban was not off the table.

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Wong said it is important for people organizing against data centers to stay engaged, vocal and strategize: “It’s really about understanding who your targets are and then deploying different strategies to ensure that you’re effective.”

She said she hopes that Monterey Park residents will vote to ban data centers on the June ballot, and that the space will instead go to something where the city’s cultures can be embraced. She sees the coalition continuing to build throughout the SGV.

“I’m really hopeful and optimistic that this movement will continue to inspire folks to fight against data centers,” Wong said. “I hope folks stay engaged and that we continue building regional solidarity and power in working class communities in the San Gabriel Valley, because we deserve better. This fight is just one of many that I foresee us having.”

This article The ripple effects of organizing against data centers was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

While Israel engages in ethnic cleansing and occupation in Lebanon, enables settler violence on the West Bank, and continues to commit genocide in Gaza, the focus on blocking the pillars supporting the Israeli war machine has grown. This has resulted in protests against the shipment of weapons and weapons components to Israel at ports in France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, and Oakland, Calif.

Israel could not conduct its repeated exercises in mass slaughter without U.S. arms and aid. My colleague Stephen Semler estimates that the U.S. has provided Israel with $350 billion in military aid (adjusted for inflation) since its founding. And I determined that during the first year of Israel’s attacks on Gaza, U.S. aid to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) increased fourfold, to over $18 billion. Israel’s entire inventory of combat aircrafts consists of U.S.-supplied Boeing F-15s and Lockheed Martin F-16s and F-35s, and Israel has received tens of thousands of U.S. bombs and missiles since the start of the war on Gaza.

Given this reality, stopping new sales to Israel, as Bernie Sanders has tried to do with several resolutions of disapproval in the Senate, is only part of the story. It is also necessary to stop U.S. actions that help Israel sustain its current arsenal. That’s where the port protests come in.

The latest port action occurred on May 22, when activists were arrested in Elizabeth, New Jersey trying to block an arms shipment to Israel from the Maher Terminals of the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal, which is routinely used by Maersk and the Israeli-owned company Zim to load and transport tons of weapons and weapons spare parts to Israel. 

The protesters chanted “Zim and Maersk you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!,” and called on the International Longshoreman’s Association, which represents North American dockworkers, to refuse to load Zim ships destined for Israel, as has happened in Italy and other ports around the world.

Last year, activists in Oakland attempted to blockade the Port of Oakland and called on city officials to stop military cargo shipments out of the city’s airport, which is run by the port. A report by the Palestinian Youth Movement documented at least 280 shipments of military equipment to Israel in calendar year 2025 routed through the Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport, mostly via FedEx. Shipping documents showed that the shipments appeared to include parts for U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets, which Israel has used in aerial bombardments in Gaza.

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Although neither effort achieved the immediate objective of blocking one specific arms shipment, they underscore the degree to which actions enabling genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon are firmly embedded in the routine operations of ports and warehouses throughout the U.S. and the world. 

Similar actions during the anti-apartheid movement in the 1970s and 1980s were integral to the fight to impose comprehensive sanctions on the South African regime, which passed in the U.S. in 1986, overcoming a veto threat from Ronald Reagan. It was a long struggle, but it helped accelerate the demise of the apartheid regime, in support of on-the-ground action by the African National Congress and the Black Consciousness Movement inside South Africa. 

No single action brought down South African apartheid, just as no single action will end U.S. support for the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon. But the port action in Elizabeth is a strong link in a chain of events that can bring an end to U.S. support for the mass slaughter inflicted every day by the IDF.

This article Pro-Palestine activists arrested blocking New Jersey port was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On Memorial Day, it is my family’s practice to remember and honor all those who have died in war — including but not limited to those who have served in our country’s military. This broader act of memorialization is both truer to the history of Memorial Day, and more responsive to the moral imperative that all humans — and especially U.S. citizens — face as a result of the suffering and risk that organized violence causes throughout the world.

Like Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day has been gradually co-opted as an opportunity to show unquestioning, blank-check support for the U.S. military. We think participating in these commemorations is just being a good citizen, but in truth by participating we are adding our voice to a highly organized political message that speaks very loudly to the rest of the world. The political message we help send is that we value the lives of U.S. military personnel thousands upon thousands of times more than we value the lives of all others.

This is not my family’s belief, and therefore we cannot participate in Memorial Day in this way.

Historically, like Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day started as an expression of the strength of human desire for peace and respect for all life. The roots of the holiday began in the days following the end of the Civil War by those wanting to honor the fallen in the name of preserving the peace which had been achieved. Formerly enslaved people in Charleston, South Carolina held perhaps the first documented memorial day on May 1, 1865. While focused on honoring those who served as soldiers for the Union, these early commemorations also remembered and mourned all who died in the fighting, including civilians on both sides and soldiers for the South. So strong was this tendency to name and recognize the harm on both sides that some historians have critiqued these early Memorial Days as having the effect of whitewashing the moral battle that did take place as each person chose which side they were on in that critical time.

Yet today our Memorial Day celebrations have the exact opposite problem. We dedicate so much time and resources and emotional energy to remembering the fallen soldiers and servicemembers on “our side,” while we willfully decline to mention the exponentially outsized larger picture: the uncountable lives lost, the incalculable cost, and the sheer depth of human suffering caused by war and organized violence around the world. This tendency, to honor the lives of our own military above all other lives, is deeply morally and psychologically dangerous. It trains our minds to accept the unnamed tens of thousands as correctly, reasonably invisible; to consider those whose names and ranks we can recite to be the only losses deserving of pause, mourning and honor.

This is a deep error and our souls know it. Every single person who dies in any war is a human being with a family. Every single loss rips a hole in the hearts of those that loved them. For each soul lost there is unfathomable pain that can never be fully understood or articulated.

But it can and should be recognized. To remember, to memorialize, does help.

Yesterday, Ms. magazine published an article that points to this need for a broader understanding of Memorial Day. It specifically named the women and children whose deaths and suffering in war are often invisibilized. In particular, they name the horrifying deaths of the 165 Iranian girls who were killed when our military, in an apparent but as of yet unacknowledged error, bombed their school. To hold an ethically honest Memorial Day, we could start by naming these children, these innocents – and turning our eyes and our hearts to the unfathomable suffering of their mothers.

Veterans for Peace has also consistently lifted up a call for Memorial Day to acknowledge the full cost of war and affirm the strength of our desire for peace. In their 2025 statement, they include a quote from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a World War II veteran: “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

The will of the people

I believe that a huge number of Americans hold a similar opinion of war, even those who participate in Memorial Day commemorations. Despite decades of efforts to bake blank-check militarism into U.S. culture, most people are implicitly aware that the entire game serves the interests of the political elite and the very rich, while demanding sacrifice mainly from working class people. Research shows that antiwar sentiment was one of the primary motivations of a subset of Trump voters. A decisive number of voters withheld votes from Kamala Harris due to horror at the Biden-Harris administration’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Neither group of voters has seen their will expressed. 

I myself feel agonizingly helpless by the current news, and I can only imagine how a peace-motivated Trump voter must feel. Far from holding to his antiwar plank, Trump has acutely escalated both the culture and the practice of endless war. He renamed the Department of Defense to the Department of War and has run it in a way that eviscerates all subtlety and respect for human rights. Far from resolving the genocide in Gaza, he has escalated it into a regional conflict that could easily lead to nuclear war. Trump has made numerous horrifying threats, including “that a whole civilization will die,” which is the definition of genocide. He is implementing automatic draft registration for our sons ages 18 to 26, so none can refuse to register as an act of conscientious objection. One is reminded of God’s warning through the prophet Samuel: “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots.”

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In the midst of this, we are all being encouraged to accept these escalations as normal and continue to join in and march and smile and show unquestioning respect and approval of such behavior. No! We must forge a better way.

What we need is an ethically honest Memorial Day. What the human spirit needs is a Memorial Day infused with heart and thoughtfulness, a Memorial Day that harnesses the power of our remembrance toward our deep desire for peace and well being for all. We can start by naming all those we know who have died in war — including soldiers and civilians who were killed in visible, recognized wars; soldiers and civilians who were killed in small conflicts and unofficial military actions that don’t make the news; and all victims of organized violence.

But we should not stop there. We should also name in some way the unnameable. We should all visit the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in our hearts, and in doing so consider consciously not just those on “our side,” but all the loss of life that our global community has suffered because of war and organized violence. We can mark those uncountable deaths whose names we don’t know, but of whom we are aware. Doing so is an act of psychological honesty; it gives voice to our soul’s knowledge that their lives and their deaths do matter. In doing this we may not change anything outwardly, but we do change the rhythm of our own awareness, and the power of such a shift should not be underestimated.

Art by CODEPINK

This article An ethically honest Memorial Day was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

When public dissent is risky or impossible, resistance does not disappear. It often becomes quieter, more practical and harder to recognize. For many working-class women in Egypt, it takes shape not in slogans or demonstrations, but in the daily tactics they use to protect income, reduce dependence, share care work and move more safely through public space.

Samah, a worker in Cairo, offers one example. (The women featured in this article are identified by their first names only, with surnames omitted to protect their privacy.) On her way to work, she buys vegetables for dinner and carries them with her in a plastic bag. During breaks, she and her coworkers prepare the meal together, saving time later when she returns home to cook for her family. The routine is simple and may be entirely overlooked, but it helps her resist the exhaustion, time pressure and economic strain created by the double burden of paid work and unpaid domestic labor in a system that treats both as her sole responsibility. 

Simple everyday acts of financial self-protection, mutual support and safer mobility can become forms of resistance when taking public action carries too high a cost or is out of reach. They are subtle, almost invisible in their execution, and precisely for that reason, they endure. 

The invisible politics — and why invisibility is strategic

What Samah and her coworkers are doing can be easily dismissed as mere coping. Yet they belong to what political scientist James C. Scott describes as “everyday forms of resistance.” In contexts where openly confronting authority can be risky, costly or simply unthinkable, resistance rarely appears as dramatic dissent. It shows up instead as small, repeatable practices that shift how constraint is managed and how power is negotiated in ordinary life.

This resistance is not always directed at the state directly. More often, it operates within the wider informal systems through which domination is organized and reproduced, where women’s spending, mobility and respectability is routinely monitored and policed. For working-class women under scrutiny from employers, supervisors and family, overt confrontation can carry economic, reputational or physical costs. Autonomy is easily recast as deviance; small gains in money, time or independence can be questioned, moralized or withdrawn. Discretion, then, becomes both protection and strategy. By staying within the ordinary rather than stepping outside it, women carve out narrow margins of autonomy that are difficult to punish without revealing the very mechanisms of control that sustain them.

The quiet work concentrates in recurring arenas where pressure is constant and small shifts matter. What follows traces three stories from these arenas: financial autonomy within monitored household economies, informal networks of mutual support that reduce exposure to dependency, and everyday practices of safety that expand women’s movement through public space. Together, they show that resistance is not always loud, collective or publicly legible. It is often incremental, discreet and embedded in the daily management of money, risk and life.

Financial autonomy as resistance 

At 23-years-old, Shahd works as a nail technician in a small salon. Her main financial challenge is not low income, but limited control over it once it enters the household. Her wages quickly enter a shared economy of obligation where groceries, utilities and family needs take priority and personal spending is weighed against collective responsibility.

“I once wanted to buy a jacket with my own money,” Shahd recalled. “I had the cash, but my father asked if it was really necessary when we still had other obligations, like my little brother’s lessons, so I gave the money to my mother instead.” Control is rarely dramatic. It works through quiet moral accounting that makes self-spending feel like something you have to justify, until you start policing yourself in advance. Visibility is where it tightens most. “If I leave cash in my wallet, it will disappear overnight. That’s normal,” she said, a reminder that cash is not treated as private savings so much as household money that can be absorbed without confrontation.

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Her response is not refusal, but reconfiguration. Instead of keeping savings in visible cash or relying solely on bank transfers that are easily monitored, she quietly diverts small amounts into a separate Vodafone Cash — a secure e-wallet service — account that only she manages. It’s easy to set up, requires little documentation and leaves fewer household-facing traces than bank transfers. “I move small amounts somewhere no one thinks to check before they ultimately disappear,” Shahd said. The sums are modest, but they create a private margin with real consequences. It gives her a small reserve to cover needs as they arise, and even unused, it eases constraint by keeping options open and giving her a sense of control. “I’m not saving for something dramatic; I’m saving so I don’t have to depend on anyone,” she added. 

The impact is less about dramatic transformation than about a gradual widening of what becomes doable under pressure. As these tactics spread, institutions begin to mirror them. For example, Vodafone Cash launched the Maaki initiative in July 2025 to train one million women in Upper Egypt in digital and technological skills. Likewise, the Central Bank of Egypt’s report that women’s financial inclusion reached 70 percent as of June 2025 points to a broader expansion in access to formal tools, and to the growing significance of mechanisms that women can deploy on their own terms.

This is what financial autonomy looks like as resistance, because it breaks the link between earning and control. Even small, privately-held reserves reduce dependence, widen what is possible under pressure and protect the ability to act without permission.

Networks as resistance

At 32-years-old, Noura works as an office secretary and raises her child alone. Her biggest challenge is not always money, but what happens when time and responsibility collide. A late meeting, a sick day, a school call can unravel the whole day if there is no one to hand things to.

So, she relies on an informal infrastructure of women who operate like an always-on relay. Someone steps in for pickup, another covers an hour, another brings food, another comes along to a clinic, another makes the calls and finds the workaround. Most of it is coordinated through WhatsApp, a steady stream of voice notes and quick asks that keep the day from falling apart. “I don’t have the option of doing everything alone,” she said. “If I try, I lose something, the job, the child or my mind.” This is not occasional help. It is a shared system of coverage that turns potential crises into manageable problems.

Money runs through the network too, and for Noura the gam‘eya is at its center, a rotating savings circle where women pay in monthly and take turns receiving a lump sum. Because it is predictable, she can plan for fees, rent gaps or emergencies without asking the wrong person at the wrong moment. “The gam‘eya is what saves us,” she said. “I know my date. And if an emergency hits early, the girls start a new one and I take the money first.” 

Outside the circle, the urgent need for money can come with predatory lenders that require wosolat amana (trust receipts), which easily turn a missed payment into a legal threat. “You sign one paper and suddenly it’s not just debt, it’s a knife to your throat,” she said. “If you’re late once, you can end up in jail.” The gam‘eya keeps her out of that trap. For her, it is not about getting rich, it is about not being cornered. 

Information moves too, with price intelligence, job leads, warnings and quiet knowledge-sharing that helps women navigate risk without generating a visible target. Through these overlapping exchanges, the network becomes a low-visibility welfare system, one that redistributes resources, absorbs shocks and builds a form of collective capacity. 

The impact of this kind of networked resistance is quiet but immediate. It resists the everyday power that scarcity creates for those who control access, whether that is employers who can punish absence, intermediaries who profit from inflated prices and informal credit, or household dynamics that enforce dependence by making women ask, explain and wait. 

These systems have been increasingly formalized in digital form, where platforms like MoneyFellows digitize gam‘eyat into app-based “money circles,” and initiatives like Tahweesha are designed to formalize women’s group savings and link them to banking services for rural women. These formalizations show that these circles are not a cultural leftover. They are an essential infrastructure that women built long before institutions learned how to name it.

Mobility as resistance

At 25-years-old, Salma works in an all-women clothes factory, and her shift ends at the hour when the city’s social contract quietly changes. Getting home is not a neutral transition between places so much as a second shift of calculation, where the price of a commute is not only time, but also attention, where routes are chosen for lighting and exits, and where a woman’s presence in public space is treated as negotiable. “The job finishes,” Salma said, “but the day doesn’t end until I close my door.” 

To navigate that pressure, Salma relies on tactics designed to look ordinary enough to survive scrutiny. She makes herself “known” on purpose, greeting the building porter by name, buying small things from the same kiosk so the shopkeeper recognizes her, choosing drivers she trusts when she can, and arranging check-ins that last until she is indoors. “If something happens,” she said, “I don’t want to be a stranger in the street.” This is the steady refusal to disappear.

But these manoeuvres do more than reduce risk. In a context where harassment is normalized and women are expected to adjust their lives around it, they become a form of everyday resistance to the informal rules that try to shrink the women’s movement. The point is not only to avoid danger, but also to refuse the quiet curfew that says women should not be outside, should not be alone, should not be moving freely on their own terms. 

Much of it is collective, because safety becomes sturdier when it is shared. Around the time the factory releases them, a WhatsApp thread starts moving with the kind of messages that sound casual until you realize they are building a distributed escort system with systemic check-ups. Meanwhile, a friend stays on the phone as Salma walks, a coworker waits for the double-check.

What they are producing is more than reassurance. It is witness, the small social infrastructure that makes harm costlier because a woman is less isolated even when she is physically alone. In a country where a U.N. Women study found that 99.3 percent of women and girls surveyed reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment, this web of recognition is not paranoia. It is adaptation under constraint.

While she is in transit, Salma also uses her phone to make her movements more visible to others and to create a record if something goes wrong. Sometimes she fakes a call and speaks loudly enough to imply that someone is tracking her route and expecting her; other times she quietly records, not to go viral but to make denial harder. “It’s not for drama, it’s so the person knows there will be a trace,” she said. In early 2026, when an Egyptian commuter filmed a man harassing her on a public bus and confronted him on camera, the clip went viral nationwide. Women watched, shared and repeated the lesson, turning filming into peer-to-peer knowledge and making harassment harder to erase. 

The circulation of “self-protection hacks” on social media follows the same logic. In one widely shared TikTok, an Egyptian woman holds up a small spray bottle and explains that because pepper spray can be hard to obtain in Egypt, she carries a homemade substitute made from ordinary kitchen and cleaning items. The point is less the bottle than the reality it exposes: When formal protection is inaccessible, women improvise deterrence from whatever is already within reach and circulate that knowledge peer-to-peer.

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This is why it counts as resistance. Salma is not only protecting herself. She is pushing back against the normalization of women’s vulnerability and the impunity that comes with it. She is refusing the idea that safety is an individual responsibility solved through silence, avoidance or self-blame. Through small, repeatable tactics, women like Salma convert safety into collective power, embedding themselves in networks of recognition so that harassment becomes riskier for the perpetrator than for the woman trying to get home.

Hope is a shared system

These stories are easy to overlook because they do not look like the forms of resistance people usually expect. They are made up of small, practical actions, like preparing dinner during a work shift, quietly setting aside a little money in a phone wallet, using a WhatsApp network to share care and support, or turning on a phone camera to make harassment harder to deny. But when visibility can bring punishment, ridicule or the loss of resources, quieter tactics matter. They help women reduce dependence, protect some control over their lives and push back against everyday pressures without exposing themselves to greater risk.

Shahd creates a private margin inside a monitored household economy, Noura builds welfare through women’s mutual infrastructure, and Salma creates more accountability in public space by staying connected to others and making harassment harder to deny. Their tactics do not overthrow systems in one decisive moment, but they alter the terms on which those systems extract, police and intimidate. The victories are modest and often temporary, yet they accumulate into something sturdier than they appear, a set of survival infrastructures that keep women moving, working, feeding their families and claiming space. 

In periods when public protest is impossible, these quiet practices keep the muscle memory of resistance alive, preserving networks, confidence and small forms of autonomy that can later feed more visible collective action. That is why the plastic bag matters. It is not just lunch. It is a quiet map of power, and a reminder that when resistance cannot be loud, it does not disappear. It changes form, becoming ordinary enough to pass, collective enough to endure and deliberate enough to count. 

This article The quiet resistance of working-class women in Egypt was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Proponents of war and militarization often invoke common memories of Hitler and World War II to argue that we are now in a similar moment. Whether it is with Saddam Hussein in 2003, al Qaeda during the “war on terrorism,” Iran’s Supreme Leader in 2017, or Putin since 2022, a classic trope is to compare enemy leaders to the Nazis. In the lead-up to the Iran War this February, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham likened Iran’s religious leaders to Hitler and argued for regime change by any means. 

It is only a matter of time before Hitler is invoked again to justify yet another war or yet more militarization. How can those who are uneasy with war and militarism prepare to counter such arguments?

The “Hitler question” — what would you do if faced with Nazi aggression? — has certainly long functioned as a rhetorical trump card against pacifism and nonviolence. It is usually posed as a trap. If pacifists concede violence might be necessary, their principles are revealed as hollow. If they reject violence even then, they are exposed as naive or morally indifferent. 

Look closer, however, and it turns out that this framing rests on shaky assumptions and questionable simplifications. Even on as serious a challenge as the “Hitler question,” pacifism and nonviolence offer far more serious and practical insights than usually given credit for. 

As I examine in greater depth in a recent academic journal article, there are 10 ways in which the conventional assumptions behind the “Hitler question” can be challenged. 

Resisting the Nazis 

On the specific historical context of the Nazi question, first, framing the question in 1939, with war underway or imminent, bypasses or ignores the decades of political choices, structural violence, and missed opportunities that made that crisis so acute. 

From the punitive settlement after World War I, to the nationalist backlash and wider repercussions of the 1929 economic collapse, to imperial rivalries and militarized politics across Europe, decisions were made and particular paths were chosen. Different choices might have prevented the rise of Nazism in the first place. The crisis by 1939 was not caused by pacifism, but by decades of violence and militarism that helped create the conditions in which Hitler thrived.

Second, even if one accepts that war ultimately contributed to defeating Nazi Germany, an honest account would include a more critical look at what violence did — and did not — achieve. Military force did not prevent Hitler’s rise, nor did it stop the early expansion of Nazi power. 

War also did not protect Europe’s Jews from genocide; in fact, the Holocaust escalated under the cover and brutality of wartime conditions. Nor was the Allied war effort primarily motivated by a desire to stop genocide. Strategic priorities focused on territorial and political competition, and opportunities to disrupt the machinery of mass murder were often not taken.

This complicates the popular narrative of World War II as a clear-cut moral triumph. The same states that defeated Hitler tolerated or ignored other atrocities before and after the war (Gaza providing a recent example). Moreover, the conflict itself involved massive civilian casualties, indiscriminate bombing and forms of collective punishment that blur the line between justice and destruction. War may have brought down the Nazi regime, but it did so at enormous human cost and without eradicating the underlying ideologies of fascism and militarism, which persist in various forms and have become particularly revitalized and threatening in recent years.

Third, violent resistance was not the only form of resistance that ultimately defeated the Nazis. Nonviolent resistance contributed, too. Across occupied Europe, ordinary people and institutions engaged in acts of civil defiance, including strikes, bureaucratic obstruction, clandestine publishing, education boycotts, and networks that hid and protected Jews. In countries like Denmark and Bulgaria, public solidarity helped save large numbers of Jewish lives. Even within Germany, protests such as the Rosenstrasse demonstration, where non-Jewish wives secured the release of their Jewish husbands, forced concessions from the regime. (Incidentally, examples of nonviolent resistance and defense can be found in the current Ukraine war, too.)

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These efforts were rarely coordinated on a large scale, and they did not defeat Nazism on their own. But their contribution challenges the idea that nonviolence was absent or irrelevant. Such examples, however, were also largely spontaneous (as they have been in Ukraine since 2022). The populations that resisted nonviolently have not benefited from systematic training and investment in such methods. Yet, just as military success depends on training, resources and coordination, so too does effective nonviolent resistance.

Fourth, as we know from plenty of recent scholarship and hundreds of examples, nonviolence operates differently from violence. Rather than seeking to overpower an opponent physically, it aims to undermine the social and political foundations of their power. Authoritarian regimes — even brutal ones — depend on compliance, legitimacy and the participation of ordinary people. When those forms of support are withdrawn, the regime’s capacity to function erodes. Nonviolent resistance can also create what is often called a “backfire effect,” exposing the injustice of repression and turning it against the oppressor by mobilizing public opinion.

Even the Nazi regime was not immune to these dynamics. It paid attention to public sentiment and adjusted policies when backlash threatened stability. The visibility of violence mattered: After the widely condemned brutality of Kristallnacht, antisemitic policies were implemented more discreetly. Nazi authorities went out of their way to hide practical elements of the “final solution” from public view. Where Jewish communities were less isolated and enjoyed broader solidarity, such as in Denmark and Bulgaria, survival rates were higher. These examples suggest that public opinion and social ties were not irrelevant, even under totalitarian rule.

Fifth, World War II is often remembered as being against “the Germans,” as a total war pitting entire populations against each other, as if all Germans were equally guilty. This obscures the fact that many non-Nazi Germans were victims of Nazism, too — such as civilians, conscripts and dissidents. Military conflict tends to turn entire nations into enemies. War dehumanizes, reinforcing binary identities and legitimizing large-scale destruction (as the genocide in Gaza illustrates all too clearly). Pacifism and nonviolence, by contrast, insist on recognizing the humanity of all involved, even while resisting injustice.

Resisting war 

Beyond the specifics of the Nazi context, it is worth also interrogating some of the assumptions with which the “Hitler question” tends to be asked. Five challenges to conventional wisdom emerge here, too.

First, pacifism is often over-caricatured and misunderstood. For one, it is often assumed that pacifism is a single, absolutist doctrine that rejects all forms of violence under any circumstances. Yet pacifist thought is diverse. Some strands are principled, others pragmatic; some oppose all war, while others argue that specifically modern warfare — especially in the nuclear age — is too destructive to justify. Many pacifists engage deeply with questions of strategy, effectiveness and political responsibility.

Another misconception is that pacifism equates to passivity. To the contrary, nonviolent action often involves risk, disruption and courage. It can include strikes, civil disobedience, boycotts and other forms of active resistance that challenge power structures directly. Far from being passive, such actions often require significant organization and personal sacrifice.

Second, nonviolence is more effective than its detractors often seem to assume. Studies have found that nonviolent campaigns have historically been more successful than violent ones, even against authoritarian regimes, and that they tend to produce more democratic and stable outcomes. While these findings have attracted some debate and certainly do not guarantee success in every case, they undermine the assumption that violence is inherently more effective.

There is, admittedly, no clear historical example of a society successfully defending itself against a full-scale invasion using only nonviolent methods. However, cases can be found of civilian resistance to occupation and authoritarian rule, suggesting that nonviolent defense could function as an extension of these practices. The idea of “civilian-based defense” involves preparing entire populations to resist through non-cooperation, making occupation difficult or unsustainable. This approach has never been systematically implemented, making it difficult to evaluate — but its potential cannot be dismissed out of hand.

Third, the “constitutive” impact of war is also not to be neglected. Violence, even when effective, does not simply achieve objectives; it reshapes societies (as evident with those countries affected by the Ukraine war, and in Israel and Palestine). War strengthens militarized institutions, normalizes hierarchy and cultivates cultures that are more accepting of violence. It leaves deep psychological and social scars, and it often fuels future conflicts. The economic and political systems built to support war — arms industries, military alliances, security infrastructures — take on a life of their own.

This raises a different kind of question: not just whether violence can defeat a particular enemy, but what kind of world it creates in the process. If war fosters the very conditions — militarism, dehumanization, authoritarianism — that enable regimes like Nazi Germany, then relying on it as a solution may be self-defeating.

Fourth, any assumption that violence can be controlled is also questionable. War is often imagined as a precise instrument, but in practice it is chaotic and unpredictable. It escalates, generates unintended consequences and often exceeds the intentions of those who initiate it, as we’re seeing with the ongoing U.S. and Israeli war on Iran. Civilian casualties, environmental destruction and long-term instability are not anomalies but recurring features. Once unleashed, violence is difficult to contain.

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Fifth, it is worth reflecting on the cultural and political uses of the “Hitler question.” It is often invoked not only in historical debates but in contemporary conflicts, where enemy leaders are recurrently cast as yet “another Hitler” to justify yet another military intervention. This framing simplifies complex situations and encourages a moral narrative in which violence appears as the only responsible choice. It also reflects a particular perspective, rooted in Western experiences and dominant memories of World War II, that obscures other histories and viewpoints, such as those of conscientious objectors, dissidents, women, racial minorities or colonized people.

As a result, a romanticized vision of war as a moment of heroic and hypermasculine struggle against evil, where violence is regrettable but necessary, gets reproduced. This narrative overlooks the broader consequences of war and the voices of those who experience its costs most directly — civilians, marginalized communities and those outside the centers of power.

All this is not to say that nonviolence would certainly have stopped Hitler or that all wars are avoidable. What I do mean to say, however, is that the “Hitler question” is not as decisive an argument against pacifism and in favor of the next war as those who ask it often seem to think. By examining its assumptions and revisiting the historical record, the choice between violence and nonviolence emerges as more complex than the question tends to allow. Pacifism and nonviolence offer not a simplistic rejection of force, but a set of critical tools for thinking about power, resistance and the long-term consequences of political action.

In a world where calls for war continue to be justified by invoking existential threats and moral urgency, advocates of pacifism and nonviolence should not feel disarmed by the “Hitler question.” The challenge is not to provide easy answers, but to broaden the conversation — to consider alternatives, question assumptions and invite to take seriously the possibility that resisting violence does not always require more of it.

This article How to counter the ‘Hitler question’ was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.