This is an excerpt from “For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness,” originally published at Convergence.

The truth is, most of the groups and organizations that make up our movements do not have a strategy for winning. They might think they have a strategy. They might tell themselves they have one. They certainly tell their funders or dues-paying members they do, and on their websites there is plenty of stuff written under the header “Our Strategies.” They have mission statements, vision statements or other grandiose paragraphs in flowing prose that say what they think they’re doing. They have lists of programs — the things they do, hope to do or once did.

But they have not, for the most part, spent real time and energy getting a grasp on the challenge their organization exists in order to solve. They are not usually clear on their purpose, beyond the visionary sense and in the narrower, more practical sense — the specific part of all this grave need around us for which they are going to actually take responsibility; the specific point of intervention they are going to make and how that specifically is going to add value to our greater project of liberation. They are rarely clear on the role they play in the broader ecosystem, nor are they willing to adjust it because of what else is going on around them. They don’t often, if we’re honest, have a coherent plan for how to get from here to there despite the real constraints they will face from the world around them and the opponents who continue to forward their own interests. They do not usually know what they want to win in practical terms, nor how they will measure their successes or failures. In fact, they do not often genuinely measure these successes or failures at all, beyond what ends up in self-congratulatory social media posts, glossy end-of-year reports, inflated fundraising documents and glowing emails to the base inviting them to the next thing. They do not, almost ever, know how to make the strategic decision to shut down programs that are failing or sunset their organization to make way for something else. They are aided and abetted in all this by leaders who are conflict avoidant, by members who are more concerned with their belonging than on good strategy, by consultants and facilitators who have made a living helping groups stay on the surface and maintain their business as usual, and by funders who expect this kind of behavior and decide on their survival based on it. And they push one another to do this too, by competing over media attention and limited funding, and bullshitting each other at conferences and coalition meetings.

I know, because I have been in movements for over two decades, played a leadership role at Occupy Wall Street, built organizations and supported some of the cutting edge movement groups of our time. I know, because I have led movements like this, run organizations like this, have been a facilitator like this, have been a fundraiser like this, have been a bullshitter like this myself. Mostly, I have done this out of fear of conflict. I thought I was being good, being noble: avoiding conflict to shield people from pain, to keep resources and activity flowing, to keep my people happy and connected, to keep the train moving. But none of this led to the work we were doing becoming greater than the sum of its parts, or prevented the pain of loss in the long-run anyway. And years later, I can see that I avoided conflict for selfish reasons, too: to shield myself from having to actually justify the thoughts and feelings driving me, to protect my ego, to protect my place in the group (and my income), to maintain an image of confidence and success and security that masked my fear of failure. I avoided conflict to protect my team from loss, but, honestly, to protect myself from loss too.

Conflict avoidance is widespread in our movements and the organizations that drive them. We avoid conflict by diffusing tension with humor, discouraging anger, expressing negativity with passive aggression and gossip instead of discussing things directly. We sweep conflict under the rug, find surface-level tensions on which to spend our energy or project grievances onto some external actor (like, for example, a facilitator). We replace deep planning with an untenable pace of doing, or with producing documents everyone can agree on but that ultimately don’t change much. We use tools like stack, where people are called on in the order they raised their hands, or progressive stack, where the order is arranged based on the facilitator’s sense of people’s identities. And these tools, although reasonable, often lead to circular, abstract conversations where people are not responding to one another directly but rather saying whatever they wanted to say when they raised their hands 15 minutes earlier. When we see tension come up in a conversation, we move on to the next person on the stack, and the opportunity for engagement flutters off into the ether instead of landing at someone’s feet. We encourage compromise toward a middle ground to avoid polarization, and though compromise is good in many contexts, it can also be the avoidance of choice — a way to mediate conflicting interests and desires rather than pushing to get somewhere deeper, sharper, clearer. We let folks stay on the surface, and accept indirect statements, behaviors that don’t line up with stated intentions and ideas that would fold under cross-examination. We hire facilitators who do all this for us too: steer us away from the bumps, protect the agenda at all costs, smooth things over to support the group feeling connected and help us get to the end instead of to the bottom.

But I have also seen good strategy, been led by people committed to doing the hard work of making it, and even — I am lucky to be able to say — tasted its fruits. It almost always rests on a real orientation to power — wanting it, being willing to sacrifice for it, and it almost always begins with the willingness to tell the truth, even when it is difficult.

On the precipice of good strategy

This retreat center has weird chairs. They are folding chairs without legs, so the bottoms lie flat on the carpeted floor, and the backs sort of crank backward into an L shape, but it’s easy to flop over or sink into them, especially late in the day. I often have to get the participants out of their seats to keep them from drifting.

It’s the fall of 2021 and I’m with Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, or CAAAV, a long-time New York City community organization that’s been remaking itself for the past few years, organizing Asian tenants to break the relationship between the real estate sector and the government so that their base — mostly Chinese and Bengali tenants — can afford to stay in their homes, in their neighborhoods, in this city. Right now they have an active campaign in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and are building a new base of Chinese, Bengali and Korean tenants in Queensbridge Houses, a public housing complex in Long Island City, Queens. We’ve spent some months now reading Richard Rumelt’s strategy book “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy,” designing what he calls a strategy kernel, and putting it through the wringer. They have gone toward conflict many times already — something we have learned together is critical to good strategy — and they are getting sharper and deeper, but something still isn’t quite landing.

We abandon the weird chairs, and move to stand in a half-circle around the big whiteboard where they’ve scribbled and diagrammed for the better part of a week. As we stare quietly, I am struck, not for the first time, by the scale of the task before them. I wonder how on earth they will beat this much more powerful opponent, how they will turn their small advantages against the opponent’s weaknesses. So I ask, What’s actually going well? Where are you growing? Where are you strong?

Emily, one of the veterans, says: Chinatown. They struggle there too, of course; they constantly feel under capacity, without enough time, without enough money. But they punch above their weight, are in the middle of a campaign that they really have a shot at winning, and are building a solid base. The others agree. They have been in the community for ages; this is the part of the work that CAAAV has always been known for.

I continue: Ok, so then why not take the Chinese organizers out of Queensbridge and put them there? Why not throw down where you have something going already, and really throw your full weight behind the campaign you’re in?

This question is not altogether innocent. I have a sneaking suspicion that no one has made this suggestion because if they moved all the Chinese organizers out of Queensbridge, it will more or less crush that operation, require them to let go of it. Someone says something to this effect. Most of the others nod, and seem to move on, accepting the boundary and continuing to gaze at the whiteboard, as if staring at it hard enough will reveal something hidden.

But then Em, a young Chinese organizer who has been doing that work in Queens, interrupts the quiet pondering: Well, what if we just . . . didn’t do the organizing in Queensbridge anymore?

We all take our eyes off the whiteboard and look at Em. It is significant that this question comes from Em, someone who is doing the work and demonstrating commitment and care for the leaders being developed there. It feels like people are taking this option seriously for the first time, but I know the group might still back away here. They are thinking now about the leaders who they have organized there — poor and working-class Asian tenants who are sacrificing so much to help build something there. They are thinking, too, about the Korean and Bengali staff who have been recently hired to do this work, talented and energetic people who have been trained and invested in, who won’t have a place in Chinatown. They are thinking, probably, about the conflict that going down this road might force them to have in this room, worried about its costs. Maybe they’re thinking also about CAAAV’s reputation, or funders, or partners. They are thinking, in short, about loss — this strange, dark shadow that often keeps us doing things that aren’t quite right because doing them is better than the risk of something new.

Conflict for the sake of good strategy

There are lots of reasons for the lack of good strategy we often see across movement organizations, but conflict avoidance is one of them. Facing that isn’t the only thing we need to do to correct course, but it is a prerequisite, because groups need the capacity to be in healthy conflict in order to develop good strategy and the ability to carry it out.

Sometimes the conflict we are avoiding is between one another on our teams, or between us and other organizations, or with our funders, or our members. But perhaps unexpectedly, often enough, the conflict is inside us — between the parts of us that want to be big and powerful and effective, and the part of us that is ambivalent about power, the part of us that is afraid of the loss that comes with all real choice. Many of us are truly not in the habit of telling the truth when it is hard; we prefer, instead, to stay on the surface, to keep doing what is comfortable and within reach, to keep one another happy, to avoid the hard choice that might put us in conflict with one another or force us to give up things we care about, to protect the little islands we have made for ourselves despite the tidal waves heading straight for us. Conflict avoidance most often looks, in the end, like dishonesty.

But groups that don’t tell the truth cannot form a winning strategy, and they are unlikely to be healthy and strong enough to actualize it even if they did. So much of good strategy — and strong movements more broadly — is about making choices, to prioritize one thing over another, to let go of some things all together, to say many nos for the sake of a strong yes. Good strategy is about painstakingly clawing our way toward the truth: what is real about the opponent, about us, about the world, about our role, about the best way to move from here to there, about what we will need to change, even if it’s painful, in order to get there. Groups that lie to themselves about these things make strategies divorced from reality. Groups that lie to themselves and each other about these things can’t make real hard choices. And groups that lie to themselves about the tensions that exist in their strategy or their group dynamics also lie to themselves about everything else — about what is realistic for them to accomplish, about their competence and levels of accountability, even about their deadlines and when they’ll start their meetings. 

It is understandable that we sometimes avoid the conflicts that might lead to good strategy, because conflict can be difficult and dangerous. Many of us, especially those most often on the receiving end of the systemic abuses of this empire, have faced devastating conflict in our work, in our social lives, even in our movements. We’ve seen conflict break things we care about. Not all conflict, after all, is healthy, and even healthy conflict can be painful. And we have so few models for generative conflict, and often find ourselves unequipped, unpracticed and unsupported to carry it out.

The truth is, if we move toward conflict, we will encounter loss. We’ll discover disagreements where we thought we were aligned, weaknesses where we projected only strength, messiness where there was previously order. Sometimes we will work it out, but sometimes we won’t. In our organizations, moving toward conflict will sometimes mean changing course, letting partners down, disappointing funders or members. Sometimes it will mean parting ways with our teammates, hurting or being hurt, firing or being fired. Sometimes it will mean the group dissolving, leaving before the job is done, finding ourselves without a vehicle through which to do anything about the things we continue to want to change. Sometimes it will feel like failure. I cannot even count the number of times — as a facilitator and as a leader — that I avoided the conflict beneath the surface to escape this pain, to protect the people around me from it, to protect myself. It wasn’t just out of fear and comfort; it was also out of love. I loved the people around me and thought that what was best for them was to stay together, thought that conflict would wreck that.

But failure is a tricky thing. Often when we imagine it, we see groups imploding from infighting, mass firings or quitting, the organization disappearing. This happens sometimes, and it is painful when it does, to be sure. But more often, failure doesn’t look like collapse at all: It looks like organizations continuing forever and ever in mediocrity. It looks like achieving far less of our potential because we aren’t willing to confront each other and get to the bottom of things to become a stronger team with a sharper strategy. It looks like a movement incapable of meeting the moment. Conflict avoidance makes this kind of failure much more likely than open conflict would.

People are, in the end, much more capable of facing the truth than we sometimes imagine; we do it all the time. All we need are small supports, encouragements, structures and processes to do it well. In fact, avoiding it takes an enormous toll, requires immense effort, relies on endless tricks. If we want to build powerful groups, powerful organizations, powerful movements, we will have to cultivate truth telling as a skill, a reflex, a superpower. 

From Chinatown to Zohran

There is a brief silence that covers the room with the weird chairs, as the organizers from CAAAV consider what Em has said. And then Sasha, the executive director, steps into the gap, walks through the door: No, really. This is an actual option. Let’s play it out.

It is rare to have leaders who are willing to say no to something important for the possibility of a sharper, clearer, more powerful yes; rare, I think, to find groups that are really, truly committed to sacrificing things they care about for the sake of winning. But when I am in their company, I can feel it like a kind of electricity, and it is humbling.

The group begins to loosen, and as they start to talk about what could shift, their eyes light up. Emily and Julie talk about what they could accomplish if Alina and Em joined them in Chinatown; it could mean the difference between winning and losing their campaign to prevent four luxury towers from going up and displacing many of their residents. Em breathes a sigh of relief at the possibility of having a real team, rather than working alone to organize Mandarin-speaking Chinese tenants in Queensbridge while Oni works alone with the Bengalis and Kit alone with the Koreans. They admit that they don’t have much of a chance of winning there.

They’ve knocked on every Asian door in Queensbridge, and even if CAAAV was successful in organizing all of them, it would make up only a tiny minority of the population there. Sandra reminds the group of the logistical cost of shifting their operation in such a big way again, offers some thoughts about how to do it. Alina says, voice catching, that she has always dreamed of organizing in Chinatown, where her grandma lives in a small apartment that she spent visiting as a kid and living in with her as a young adult. Every time I visit, she says, a tear escaping despite her best effort, I can see that my grandma is trying to hide some new pain over something lost and gone — a favorite restaurant closed, a service she needed suddenly shut down, an old friend pushed out of the neighborhood. Farihah and Oni start to wonder about Sunnyside, Woodside and Astoria, these neighborhoods in Queens that Bengali immigrants are making home — a huge new base of people to organize. When Farihah, whose ambition and determination are both inspiring and intimidating, shares that Astoria is where her own family landed all those years ago, the fire usually in her eyes is replaced by something softer and more vulnerable, something seemingly aware of the challenge and the need and the stakes. They all go on talking and scheming, and there is some laughter, some arguing, some more scribbling on the whiteboard. And then there is thoughtful quiet again.

Someone asks: But, what about the leaders in Queensbridge? The doubt creeps back into the new quiet, a doubt brought on by real costs — the real impact on real people’s real lives. They say the names of some of these leaders they have supported and trained and sometimes coaxed into the fight, these poor and working-class immigrants who have so much to lose, so few resources, such a hard road ahead. They talk about the time they’ve spent, about the work being unfinished. They talk about heartbreak.

And then Kit, clear and determined, says: We have to do it anyway. We aren’t going to win if we don’t get more strategic. We owe it to our people to build as much power as we can. This is the first time Kit has spoken, and there is a silence bigger than the others after she does, because everyone knows that what Kit is suggesting could very well cost her her job. Kit is Korean, was brought on to organize Korean-speaking tenants in Queensbridge, and one of the most likely scenarios of the pivot the group is moving toward will mean not only throwing down harder than before in Chinatown, but building a new base of Bengali tenants somewhere in Queens, likely Astoria. There may not be a role for her anymore.

I ask Kit how it feels to say this out loud and she replies: Honestly, I feel relieved. I know it’s going to hurt some of our folks. I know I might not have a job anymore. But winning is more important. And now it feels clear, even if it’s a little scary.

The silence now seems proud — reverent, almost. They look at one another with kind eyes, and it feels like a decision. Sasha comes in again to offer structure and process. They lay out the beginning of a plan to gradually phase out of Queensbridge in a way that helps the members there understand the choice, get themselves organized another way and continue on with CAAAV if they want to. They start to design a process to gather data about different neighborhoods in Queens where they might organize this growing Bengali community and make a plan to test the organizing on the ground. They talk about the campaign in Chinatown, which has always felt like a losing battle, but which they now suddenly feel they might actually be able to win. They set next steps to write out the new strategy kernel.

They can’t yet know, at this moment, that these shifts will result in them stopping the towers from going up in Chinatown, but also lead to the embodied conclusion that if they want more than partial victories in these never-ending defensive battles — want to win a city their people can afford to live in — they will need the power of city hall behind them; they can’t yet know that this will lead to their sibling organization, CAAAV Voice, having some of the first conversations, hushed and tentative at first, about throwing down for a longshot democratic socialist mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani; they can’t yet know that they will organize a formidable Bengali base to win a massive affordable housing campaign in Astoria against a private developer; they can’t yet know that pouring immense volumes of sweat and tears there will result — alongside the hard work of other immigrant-led organizations like Desis Rising Up & Moving, or DRUM, Beats, and the steady organizing of the Democratic Socialists of America, and others — in the creation of a new power base that will end up being essential to that longshot candidate actually becoming mayor. They can’t yet know that, some short months after this mayoral victory — because of a million small decisions made by a whole host of actors that add up to greater than the sum of their parts — the city will pass a historic rent freeze, something they have only barely dreamed of at this point. They can’t see the future, and neither can I.

But there is enough here: enough clarity about their leverage and their options, enough willingness to take risks and experience loss and enter into conflict for the sake of good strategy; there is enough courage, enough honesty, enough choice, enough possibility.

Telling the truth

Not having good strategy sends resources, attention and activity in different — even contradictory — directions. It’s a waste of what precious few tools we have; it usually means we lose. And the losing that comes with bad strategy shapes us over time, gets swallowed up in the form of despair, calcifies into ideas and behaviors that make up the politics of powerlessness — an ambivalence toward power, where we turn inward on each other rather than face outward to the public and our opponent. 

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In the end, breaking the conflict avoidance that blocks good strategy is really about telling the truth whenever we can. And if we want to be different, we’ll have to practice. We can all begin by doing the small but vital things that are in our control: say what we mean, steer toward tensions instead of away from them, ask follow-up questions when we sense there is something being left unsaid, get curious about what is inside us and inside others, be honest about misalignments when they arise. Every day, little by little, we can just be a little more honest, even when it is hard — about our groups, ourselves, each other, our fears and doubts, our hopes and dreams, the stakes, our plans. We can anticipate conflict, make time for it, create regular rhythms for feedback, have ongoing conversations about how power is being wielded in our spaces, regularly question our own strategic choices and put them relentlessly to the test. We can build all of this into our meetings, our retreats, our planning sessions. We can invite people from the outside to facilitate or advise us in these risky, delicate, transformative journeys; demand that they challenge us, help us fill our gaps, take us through the fire and not around it. 

We should do all of this for the sake of good strategy and stronger groups. We should do it because organizations and movements that have good strategy win more often, and those embodied experiences of winning are some of our best protections from the politics of powerlessness — the choice to stay small and pure and righteous over growing and opening and taking big risks. But we should do it, too, because telling the truth is central to transformation. It is a fundamental part of looking at what is and what might be and making the choice to climb the distance between; a chance to flex that muscle of becoming and becoming again; an opportunity to become bigger as individuals and greater than the sum of our parts as groups. And it is absolutely central to the task we have taken up as movements more broadly: to take control of our lives, to shape the world, to make of it something nearer to the world we all deserve.

This article Movements cannot shy away from conflict was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, an authoritarian presidency has been accompanied by a brutal crackdown on social movements. While there are strikingly new features of Trump’s reign, many of the assaults on freedom and the persecution of activists have parallels in the histories of U.S. imperialism, the anti-Vietnam war movement and the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, and the rise of the right in the 1980s.

And many of the questions organizers are asking today were in debate then. How do you balance militant activism with the need to build a mass movement? What role do creativity, theatrics and joy take in resistance? What does it mean to support those who are facing the brunt of the state’s criminalization of protest?

This is why “Levitating the Pentagon and Other Uplifting Stories: A Life of Activism,” a recent memoir by New Left organizer Nancy Kurshan, comes at a critical moment. Kurshan takes a magnifying glass to her decades of organizing experience in an attempt to pull out the lessons that are most informative for today. I talked with Nancy about her history in revolutionary organizations like the Weather Underground and the Yippies — known for their theatrical antiwar activism — and how she sees their choices years later.

Your book is named after the Oct. 21, 1967 demonstration organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (the precursor to the Youth International Party, or the Yippies), in which they claimed they would attempt to psychically raise the Pentagon building into the air. I don’t think you would be surprised that when I first heard that story, it was explained as a type of disconnect: These people really believed they were about to levitate the Pentagon. Can you put the levitation in context? 

We always claimed we did, in fact, levitate the Pentagon, but just not high enough — although I doubt a single one of us thought we would literally succeed. But we did hope to help end the war and, in order to do that, we did need to have those evil spirits expelled by enough people to help change policy. 

For instance, there was a young Daniel Ellsberg watching from an upstairs window of the Pentagon who later became a famous whistleblower by releasing the Pentagon Papers. So maybe we did succeed at driving out the evil spirits or at least hastening that process. Who knows?

As you discuss, this was a much more strategically conceived demonstration than it first appeared, even if it had some elements that weren’t that strategic.

That demonstration in particular was very strategic. We were not yet Yippies when a small group of us arrived in New York to help build a national antiwar protest in Washington. Our strategic goal was to build a larger, more militant movement and one that tapped into the energy of the emerging counterculture. Our little band of youthful agitators argued for the demonstration to be the at Pentagon, as opposed to the usual humdrum protest outside the White House. We wanted a target that made it clear this was not just about an argument of words but about a conflict in which millions of lives were being taken by weapons of destruction — over 2 million Vietnamese lives and 60,000 American GIs. And we wanted our slogan to be: “Shut it down!” 

And we wanted to do this by organizing mass civil disobedience. And the reason I stress mass is because there had already been very orchestrated, “stepping over the line” civil disobedience carried out by a few very wonderful, committed people. But it was time to massify it. And we did it. Hundreds were arrested. It was the largest civil disobedience of the anti-Vietnam war movement to that date. 

The other strategic aspect was we wanted to appeal to the youth of America. The hippie phenomenon was taking hold in many places throughout the nation, and the Pentagon protest was able to project a union of antiwar and countercultural streams. Later the colorful, satirical approach of the Yippies was very resonant with young Americans. 

What would you say is the value of these theatrical and performative protest actions?

Theatrical and performative protest are incredibly valuable. The whole Pentagon protest was a theatrical event, but one particular photo of Super-Joel placing a flower in the musket of a National Guardsman has traveled around the world. 

After Black Panther Fred Hampton and others were assassinated, and the guilty verdict in the Chicago Conspiracy trial came down, Anita Hoffman, Tasha Dellinger and I held a press conference and we burned judges’ robes in front of a banner referencing the Jefferson Airplane’s “We Are All Outlaws In The Eyes of Amerika,” [from the song “We Can Be Together.”] The photo went around the globe. 

During the wars in the 1980s in Central America, we went out in canoes and dyed the Chicago River red and left “bloodied” hands on the walls of the federal building. 

The 1,000 Grandmothers for Future Generations, a climate justice organization that I am a part of, has fantastical, huge puppets — the Water Protector, Flo the Hummingbird, the Fierce Protector and Winds of Change. The names alone are great, but the creatures are fabulous. And people, including children, love them. The incredibly original, creative banners and signs are proof that we are not “paid agitators.” Sometimes the movement’s fabulous art is reflected in the mass media, more often on social media. But always in our hearts and minds. 

Your book includes a deep dive into the Chicago Eight trial, in which eight antiwar activists were prosecuted for allegedly inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, including Yippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and Black Panther Bobby Seale (although Seale wasn’t present and had no connection). You were involved in court and jail support for the defendants, the kind of organizing that became increasingly important as repression against organizers grew. Can you talk about why this kind of prison solidarity and court support activism are so key, and what other campaigns you’ve been involved in?

I believe that prison support should play a central role in any vibrant movement challenging the status quo. I don’t think a movement can persist and grow if political prisoners are locked away without support. I was privileged to be part of a campaign to free 11 Puerto Rican independentistas, a campaign that was conducted in Puerto Rico, in Chicago and around the globe. After decades of imprisonment, their sentences were ultimately commuted by President [Bill] Clinton. That never would have happened if it weren’t for a persistent and intense campaign to free them across decades. I saw in that campaign what real loyalty looked like when day after day and year after year, decade after decade, there was a ceaseless attempt to hold the political prisoners in community, to tell their stories, to organize protests, to visit them, to raise funds and to incorporate them into the daily life of the community, primarily in Puerto Rican neighborhoods, but also among other allies.

I was part of the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown, a campaign in the 1980s and ’90s to end the ongoing lockdown at the United States Penitentiary Marion [now named Federal Corrections Institution Marion], a federal prison where inmates were confined to their cells for 23 hours a day and without normal contact and recreation. I wrote a book about it, “Out of Control: A 15 Year Battle Against Control Unit Prisons,” published by Freedom Archives. For 15 years we organized and protested to end mass incarceration and particularly long-term solitary confinement. That was our primary effort. However, we worked along with our Puerto Rican friends and others, incorporating demands to free political prisoners into our work, as they joined in fighting long-term solitary [confinement], which disproportionately fell on political prisoners like the 11. We also together assembled, published, collated and distributed four editions of “Can’t Jail the Spirit,” collections of biographies and photos of all the political prisoners we knew of at the time. 

I applaud the work of groups like The Sentencing Project and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. And when significant charges come down, whether on activists from the movement against Palestinian genocide or the immigration or climate movements, let’s show solidarity and have their backs. 

How did the struggle against white supremacy and for civil rights develop your consciousness as an organizer?

Anti-racism had always been, since high school, at the center of my political thinking. I was a Northern supporter of the Southern civil rights movement and then later, I was part of Students for a Democratic Society. I was committed to building an interracial movement of the poor. I was a middle-class white girl knocking on apartment doors of Black folks who were more hospitable than you can imagine. 

Then along came Malcolm X and the evolution of the civil rights movement into a movement for Black liberation. I heard both Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X speak and I got it: Black people are not the problem, and white people need to organize our own communities to oppose racism. 

My militancy grew in response to the way the Black movement had been treated and the response that ill-treatment generated in younger Black activists of my generation. We noted everything that was going on. The refusal of the Democratic Party to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the brutal murders of [James Earl] Chaney, [Andrew] Goodman and [Michael] Schwerner, and the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had a deep impact on me and many other activists.  

Over your years in organizing, how did you balance militancy and radicalism with the need to build a mass movement? 

Sometimes well, sometimes not that well. It was and is a conundrum wrapped in an enigma. This is a huge topic and I could look at each decade of my life and try to see how I – and we – dealt with that balance. But that would be a whole long piece. So I’ll just touch on it.

Previous Coverage

The day they levitated the Pentagon

I advocated for militancy in the form of nonviolent direct action, as exemplified by the October 1967 Pentagon demonstration. Our advocacy included satire and theater, thus the levitation. But our slogan of “Shut it down!” represented our militant intent, as did our refusal to leave. [The] Chicago ‘68 [Democratic National Convention protests] continued our militant trajectory and we were still able to grow the mass movement. 

Many of the Black youth in the movement were becoming more militant. The Black Panthers were sick and tired of being the victims of white hatred and violence, whether by the police or by racist white folks. So they marched into the Sacramento capitol of California with rifles and declared themselves the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. 

This was a time of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI COINTELPRO [counter-intelligence program], whose core objective was to “prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify, and electrify, the militant Black nationalist movement.” It involved overt and often illegal operations aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting and neutralizing domestic political organizations. Neutralizing? Scores of dead Black people give meaning to the definition. I was in Chicago when Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was assassinated. I walked through the bloody scene where they killed him in his sleep. He was old enough to be my baby brother. 

As Black, Puerto Rican, Mexican and Native (Indigenous, to use today’s language) contemporaries became more militant, we asked ourselves how we should respond. We supported what they were doing. So why wasn’t it appropriate for us to join in? Should we be onlookers or should we be like Old John Brown and his family — white folks who actively opposed slavery with their lives. 

For some of us becoming more militant meant joining the Weather Underground. By doing so, I never expected to become divorced from the mass movement. My passion was deep and I didn’t realize the mass movement would recede so quickly. 

What did that receding of the mass movement look like?

There were collectives around the country, particularly in college towns and other youth communities that persisted. I encountered many of them when a group of us traveled around the country in 1974. But in hindsight we could see that after the ending of the Vietnam War, and the repression of the Black movement, and also of Puerto Rican, Mexican and Native American [movements], the mass movement significantly receded.

By 1976 we in the Weather Underground Organization planned a Hard Times Conference in Chicago, a conference to address the economic recession taking place nationally, in large part to help reinvigorate a mass movement that would link a militant fight to combat racism and sexism together with the concerns of all working-class people. That didn’t work. I wasn’t there because I was delivering a baby at that moment. Large numbers of people showed up from around the country, but there was too much internal division for the convening to be successful. 

We made mistakes but perhaps objective conditions were not ripe. Our youthful passion often overlooked a clear view of objective conditions. We thought if we just worked harder, we could change anything and everything. 

You talked about your move away from the “straight left,” which was the term for the less theatrical and subcultural organizing left, in part because the cultural values of young people were coming up against the entrenched social conservatism you were fighting against, and this made many of the more buttoned-down leftist tactics seem antiquated. What was the value of this countercultural movement in terms of resisting the war and structural injustice? 

I lived in several different situations, but the most extraordinary was the Bachenheimer houses on Parker Street in Berkeley. The complex was a cluster of houses that went on rent strike for a couple of years. Bachenheimer was the name of the landlord/slumlord in charge of overcharging and under-repairing everything.

The rent strike meant much more than simply not paying rent. We, like so many others, had rejected the traditional materialistic values of U.S. society and were looking for more meaningful, cooperative and creative ways of living. We treated the houses as if they were our own, tearing down walls and rehabbing as desired. The backyards of the buildings ran together and there was a large outdoor common area.

The rent strike was a collective decision and action taken by all the Bachenheimer houses. We weren’t out to con the landlord. On the contrary, we believed that people had the right to decent and affordable living conditions, and we put our rent checks into an escrow account every month — payable when and if Bachenheimer brought the houses up to code. 

The nature of that community was not lost on the FBI. My FBI file [obtained through the Freedom of Information Act], indicates that: “This department had not had any success in developing any sources or informants … in the 2200 block of East Parker, Berkeley, California. … Because the residents of this block are ‘hippie type individuals,’ their attitude towards any type of authority or law enforcement official is somewhat negative, therefore, communication with them is also somewhat limited.”

I wonder if any left organization was better guarded against snooping FBI agents or undercover informants than the Bachenheimer houses. Although the rent strike may have been exceptional, there were communities of similar character all around the country.

Do you continue to see value for radical movements in the development of a counterculture as important?

I suspect that the melding of the antiwar movement and countercultural hippies probably led to the most successful influence on disaffected working-class youth [of any recent movement]. I can’t prove it, but I doubt anyone can disprove it. My family was solidly middle class by the 1960s, but I encountered countercultural working-class youth in Kent, Ohio as well as in Berkeley, California, the Lower East Side of New York, the Twin Cities, Minnesota, and in Manchester, New Hampshire, all of whom were antiwar. They were not that different from people I knew as a young child in Brooklyn. 

I also met with deserters from the U.S. Army in Sweden and worked with Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In fact, resistance to the war inside the military, and organizing on the outside at coffee houses set up near military bases, was essential to ending the war and most of the participants were working class, albeit not only white folks. Tremendously aided by the music of Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan but also the Rolling Stones; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff and so many others. 

That assessment of the past hasn’t changed. Yes, many people both from the political movement and the counterculture returned to the mainstream, but in doing so, many maintained, in varying degrees, the values and thinking of the political/cultural movements. The civil rights movement was probably the grandmother/grandfather of them all, but it can be argued that the counterculture advanced notions of sexual liberation that, although shot full of male supremacy, or perhaps partly in reaction to that, then led to the birth of the women’s and gay liberation movements. You could argue similarly about the current climate movement. The seeds were there in the counterculture.

And the antiwar movement, unique in that it led to the eventual, massive alienation from the war machine, is still having reverberations today. The war in Vietnam remained popular much longer than the current war on Iran. That is echoes of the so-called Vietnam Syndrome.  

So I suggest that the mainstream has actually been moving towards us. Perhaps a slow evolution but a change in direction. And of course subsequent movements were critical — Occupy and Black Lives Matter. All these movements encourage changes in consciousness. And what we are seeing in this era, is the counter-revolution, if you will. In other words, the collective “we” has had a great influence which is why there is such a fierce response. It’s hard to tease out the different elements but it’s clear that all the mass struggles of our people have planted seeds that have blossomed in subsequent generations.

I returned to Vietnam in 2013 as a guest of the Vietnamese government, in thanks for helping end the war. It was the first time that I completely internalized that yes, we had made a positive difference. 

What kind of advice do you have for organizers today who are asking questions about the role of cultural struggle?

Don’t give in to cynicism. The current powers that be would love nothing better. When asked if I’m hopeful, I like to quote the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci, “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” I take it to mean we have to see the reality for what it is, not through rose-colored [glasses]. But we have to continue to act. 

My wish is to see some massive nonviolent actions — I like the ideas people are putting forth of a general strike.

But there are many other tools in the tool box as well. Find your own voice and use it in whatever way you see fit. Ask yourself what you think needs to be done, and consider what your own talents and inclinations are.

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Let’s continue to deepen our connections in the communities where we live, at the same time as we keep an eye on and respond to world events because the people in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran, in Cuba are our sisters and brothers. We are all connected and they have been paying a heavy price.

Let’s build a big tent. Don’t get hung up on small differences. And let’s not throw anyone under the bus. Let’s continue to embrace the most vulnerable, and that includes the undocumented folks and trans people. We can build a big tent and do all that. 

The time is now. The place is here. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

This article The Yippies and the power of counterculture was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On June 29, thousands of people gathered at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar — the capital’s designated site for public demonstration — in the second week of a growing sit-in accompanied by a wave of online dissent. What is being called India’s first “Gen Z protest” was spurred by an education system that many young Indians believe has failed to offer fair opportunities.

Protesters arrived carrying the Indian flag, copies of the constitution and red roses, which they handed to police officers stationed at the venue. Volunteers reminded participants to remain disciplined, avoid confrontation and document events on their phones.

“The truth has no spokesperson except your camera,” organizers told the crowd.

Many participants carried signs reading “Main Bhi Cockroach,”  or “I too am a cockroach,” and wore cockroach masks, reclaiming the label that inspired the movement.

From simmer to outrage

On May 12, the government invalidated the results of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), India’s highly competitive medical entrance examination, citing allegations of exam paper leaks and widespread irregularities.

Nine days after taking the exam, more than two million students found themselves back to where they had started — preparing for one of the world’s toughest examinations with less than a month’s time, competing for fewer than 130,000 undergraduate medical seats. Reports of severe student distress, including at least 13 cases of student suicides, emerged from across the country.

The cancellation reignited longstanding criticism of how India’s examination system is administered and the mounting psychological pressure placed on students seeking professional careers. Since 2021, at least 93 suicides linked to the intense competition and financial burden of the NEET exams have come to light. Meanwhile, the NEET papers have leaked at least 89 times over the last 10 years, affecting 65 million students. 

Amid growing public anger, Supreme Court Chief Justice Surya Kant made a remark on May 15 that turned an already simmering online conversation into a wave of collective outrage. 

While questioning the conduct of lawyers he suspected of having fraudulent degrees, he turned toward the country’s unemployed youth, describing them as “cockroaches” and “parasites.”

“There are youngsters like cockroaches, who don’t get any employment or have any place in the profession,” he said. “Some of them become media, some of them become social media and activists, and they start attacking everyone.”

Justice Kant later said that his comments referred to individuals accused of obtaining fake degrees, and not the nation’s youth, whom he called the “pillars of a developed India.” 

But by then, the discussion had moved past the clarification.

In the midst of the online uproar, Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old Indian student based in Boston, casually posted a question on X, “What if all cockroaches came together?”

​The birth of Cockroach Janta Party

​Dipke’s call quickly sparked a wave of responses, with millions of young Indians embracing the cockroach as a symbol of resilience.

On May 16, Dipke announced the launch of Cockroach Janta Party, or CJP, a satirical political outfit. It was widely seen as a jibe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s political party, the Bharatiya Janta Party, or BJP, which has been in power since 2014.

“The CJP began as an idea after we saw millions of youth were repeatedly being denied a voice,” Dipke told me. “When authorities suppress people’s voices, that’s exactly when people should come together and raise their voices.”

The party introduced itself as “the voice of the burnt-out youth” and “a political party for the people the system forgot to count.”

DipkeHe set up a party website, outlining its objectives and inviting supporters to pledge their membership. Its requirements reflected the movement’s irreverent tone. Prospective members, the website joked, should be unemployed, lazy, chronically online and possess “the ability to rant professionally.”

Within a few days, tens of thousands of people had signed up through an online registration form, while the hashtag #MainBhiCockroach (“I too am a cockroach”) spread widely across social media. The movement also drew public support from several opposition politicians.

The party’s Instagram account has now surpassed 22 million followers, overtaking the official BJP account, which has around 9.4 million followers despite being widely regarded as the world’s largest political party by membership.

Its presence on X, however, has faced restrictions multiple times. The CJP account, which has attracted more than 200,000 followers, has been inaccessible twice within India, with users receiving a notification that “the account has been withheld in response to a legal notice.”

The manifesto

Behind the satire lay serious political concerns.

“We are not here to set up another PM CARES, holiday in Davos on the taxpayer’s salary slip or rebrand corruption as strategic spending,” the website said. “We are here to ask — loudly, repeatedly, in writing — where the money went.”

Its mission statement speaks directly to the generation driving the movement — a cohort that came of age amid economic uncertainty, competitive examinations and near-constant political engagement online.

“Build a party for a generation raised on promises, notifications and low battery warnings,” the statement reads. “A generation that is overqualified, frustrated, angry at what’s broken and financially confused,” the website further explained.

For supporters, the satire succeeded because it gave voice to frustrations that had been building for years. Behind the absurdity of a political party named after one of the world’s most resilient insects was a manifesto addressing issues that have long dominated public debate in India: the lack of judicial independence, doubts over free and fair elections, growing corporate control of media, frequent party defections and the underrepresentation of women in politics.

One proposal called for retired Chief Justices of India to be barred from accepting seats in the Rajya Sabha — the upper house of Parliament — after leaving office. The demand reflects concerns raised by critics that post-retirement appointments to political office blur the separation between the judiciary and the executive.

Another focused on electoral integrity. In deliberately hyperbolic language, the manifesto declared that election officials responsible for removing legitimate voters from electoral rolls be arrested under India’s principal anti-terror law — a key tool that the Modi administration uses to silence its critics — because “taking away voting rights of citizens is no less than terrorism.” The proposal referred to a recent controversy in which 9.1 million names were stripped from voter rolls in the West Bengal state elections won by the BJP in April.

Gender equality also features prominently. While India’s Parliament passed legislation in 2023 reserving one-third of parliamentary seats for women — a reform that has yet to be implemented — the CJP argued that women should instead hold half of all cabinet positions and seats in Parliament.

The manifesto also took aim at India’s media, proposing that television channels and news organizations owned by some of the country’s largest business conglomerates lose their broadcasting licenses to make way for independent journalism. Although framed satirically, the proposal echoed longstanding criticism from media watchdogs and opposition groups that growing corporate ownership has weakened the independence of India’s mainstream press.

It also targeted one of the country’s most persistent political problems: party defections. The manifesto proposed permanently disqualifying elected lawmakers who switch political parties after winning office, a practice that has repeatedly altered governments at both the national and state levels despite existing anti-defection laws.

Taken together, the manifesto is less a conventional political program than a vehicle for expressing public frustration through humor. Its proposals were intentionally exaggerated, but the concerns they referenced were familiar to many Indians.

From meme to movement

“Time to turn this tiny joke into a revolution,” the official CJP account on X posted after Dipke announced he was returning to India from Boston.

Upon his return on on June 6, Dipke travelled directly from the airport to New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, the capital’s designated site for public demonstration, where the party held its first protest, demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over the repeated paper leaks and other alleged failures in conducting competitive examinations that affect millions of students and job seekers.

Despite the movement’s massive online reach, fewer than 2,000 people attended the inaugural rally, according to media reports. The turnout highlighted the gap that often exists between digital support and physical mobilization.

Standing before the crowd in Delhi’s summer heat, Dipke gave Pradhan until 5 p.m. that day to resign. When no response came, he extended the deadline by another week.

“But this doesn’t end here. Dharmendra Pradhan has wronged an entire generation. If he is not removed or does not step down within the next seven days, we will be forced to continue our protest on the ground,” he wrote later on X.

Rather than fading, the movement continued to gain momentum and has now entered into its second month.

“So far, we have not seen any substantial and meaningful effort from the government to address our demands,” Dipke told me. “If our demands are not met, our movement will still remain peaceful and continue through constitutional and democratic means.”

Beginning June 11, CJP supporters organized demonstrations across cities like Pune, Lucknow, Amritsar, Hyderabad and Bangalore. The demand remained unchanged: Pradhan must quit.

When the minister refused, the organization escalated its campaign, announcing an indefinite sit-in at Jantar Mantar beginning June 20. “This protest will go on for as long as it takes,” Dipke declared. “Nobody will move till Dharmendra Pradhan resigns.”

“I am appealing to all cockroaches, parents and teachers from Delhi to come and join us at Jantar Mantar,” he continued. “We will stay put for as long as we can, but we will not be able to pull this off unless we have your support.”

Students, teachers, parents, lawyers, activists, trade union members and farmers began arriving from across the country. Volunteers coordinated food, water and medical assistance, while supporters continued to amplify the movement online. So far, 800,000 online petitions have been signed demanding Pradhan’s sacking.

Major support has come from student organizations such as All India Students Association and Students Federation of India, or SFI. SFI has been protesting against examination irregularities since early May, with several members detained during demonstrations in different parts of the country. 

“The students and youth have been frustrated for quite some time,” said Aishe Ghosh, joint secretary of SFI. “The repeated incidence of paper leaks and rising unemployment has made the students and youth hostile towards the government.”

India is home to the world’s largest population of youth between the ages of 15 to 29, and has recorded the highest unemployment rate among graduates, estimated at 15.2 percent.

For Ghosh, the demonstrations reflected more than a single policy failure. “The ongoing protest is just a combination of the long-term anger and frustration,” she said.

Among those who answered Dipke’s call was Dr. Dighe, a Mumbai-based physician whose son took the NEET examination in May.

He said the cancellation of the results had taken a significant toll on his son’s mental health, but that his decision to protest also came from his experience as a doctor.

“I understand how important this examination is for the medical students who later become doctors,” he said. “I am here at the protest for my son, for the future of several other NEET aspirants and to save the medical profession of this country.”

The protest was also expected to draw support from several farmers’ unions, which announced plans to join the demonstration on June 28. However, on the morning of the protest, several leaders were reportedly placed under house arrest, preventing them from reaching the site.

“If leaders are placed under house arrest before joining any peaceful democratic movement, it is a matter of grave concern,” Dipke told me. “In a democracy, every citizen and organization has the right to express their views peacefully. We believe that dialogue and participation strengthen democracy, while restrictions and oppression do not.”

A distinctly Gen Z protest

As the protest grows, the CJP has developed a style of resistance that looks very different from the traditional political demonstrations in India. Memes and satire heavily drawn from internet culture are becoming central to how young people express political anger. Videos shared across Instagram, X and YouTube show protesters blending humor with dissent, creating a protest culture that feels distinctly Gen Z while addressing long-standing concerns over education, unemployment and government accountability.

The movement’s online identity quickly spilled onto the streets. At Jantar Mantar on June 29, protesters carried hand-painted placards filled with political criticism with meme culture, Bollywood references and internet humor. One sign read, “We asked for ‘Make in India,’ you gave us ‘Leak in India,’” referring to Modi’s flagship manufacturing campaign and the repeated examination paper leaks that triggered the movement. Another simply read, “Bro is still employed,” alongside a photograph of the Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, while others promoted the campaign “Pradhan Go Back.”

Between speeches and performances, groups of students were also seen playing cricket, giving the protest the feel of a community gathering as much as a political demonstration.

The familiar slogan of “Azaadi” (freedom) was reinterpreted to express frustration with the education system. Organizers also asked demonstrators to bring candles “in memory of each student who committed suicide, and the ones whose government failed to protect.”

Visual symbolism has become another defining feature of the movement. Groups beat steel plates and spoons, reversing Modi’s 2020 call for Indians to bang utensils in support of frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. This time, the gesture became a demand for accountability from the government. Organizers launched  a “Diaper Donation Drive,” encouraging supporters to write messages on diapers demanding the education minister’s resignation and send them to his office.

Despite these colorful tactics, Ghosh said the movement has received little attention from the mainstream media.

“The state is careful and alert to any eruption of collective anger or dissent,” Ghosh said. “Hence, it is using all mechanisms to control the narrative of the ongoing protests. Except for a section of social media, mainly the mainstream media has been blacked out from coverage.”

But throughout, students documented the protest as it happened, filming Instagram Reels, livestreaming speeches and posting photographs that carried the movement beyond the protest site and onto social media in real time.

Under state surveillance

As the CJP protest gathers momentum, the police presence has become increasingly visible. Protesters arriving at Jantar Mantar were required to show identification and pass through a scanning machine before entering. 

The security arrangements extended well beyond the entrance. Plainclothes police photographers and videographers blended into the crowd, documenting the gathering from within. CCTV cameras have been installed and around 270 body cameras are being used by Delhi Police. Several police buses remained parked outside the protest site throughout the day, while drones hovered overhead, keeping a close watch on the demonstration from the air. The CJP alleges that the government is also monitoring protesters’ phone calls and chats. 

“If people participating in peaceful protests are placed under excessive surveillance or made to feel intimidated, it is contrary to democratic values,” Dipke said.

As evening fell, the atmosphere grew more tense. Police repeatedly announced that protesters would have to vacate the site.

Soon after, electricity to the stage was cut, silencing the sound system. Demonstrators allege that police then temporarily blocked food and drinking water from entering the venue and cut off the water supply in nearby restrooms.

Several hours later, electricity was restored, food and water supplies resumed and restrictions on movement in and out of the protest site were eased. Yet the sit-in continued under heavy police surveillance as it entered its third week.

Police intimidation extends beyond the protest site itself. Delhi Police put up a notice declaring the protest unlawful and has tracked down organizers in person to intimidate and interrogate them.

“Many supporters who have been helping the protesters with food and water are being targeted by the authorities,” said Samrat Sonawane, a CJP volunteer. “Large teams from the Delhi Police and Crime Investigation Department have been visiting homes of several Delhi-based protesters in the early hours of the morning.”

“The authorities are also going to protesters’ relatives’ homes and warning them not to participate in the protest, claiming it is linked to terrorist activities,” Samrat added.

Despite the growing restrictions, CJP organizers continued to seek dialogue with the government. They say they have received no response. “The government has become totally deaf, dumb and blind to the demands of the youth,” CJP spokesperson Sourav Das said.

Ghosh believes the government’s reluctance to engage with the protesters is deliberate.

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“The government is actually avoiding engaging with the ongoing protest as a tactical strategy to further avoid antagonizing the larger student community,” she said.

On June 28, the education reformist, climate activist and Ramon Magsaysay Award recipient Sonam Wangchuk, who had been at Jantar Mantar since June 6, announced an indefinite hunger strike — a form of nonviolent protest with a long history in India. 

“Hunger strike is not the first but the final democratic expression of a movement,” Dipke said of the strategic decision to move toward hunger strikes. “The purpose of this strike is not to confront anyone, but to seriously draw the attention of the government and society towards this issue.” 

Democracy in question

Many protesters spent their nights sleeping on roads and pavement despite Delhi’s sweltering summer heat. For many, it was the first time they had ever participated in a public demonstration. Several students chose to remain at the protest site even after retaking the examination on June 21, saying the movement had grown beyond the paper leak and had become a fight for accountability in India’s education system.

For much of this generation, Modi’s government is the only political administration they have known. Their protest unfolded against the backdrop of a decade in which demonstrations over issues ranging from the Citizenship Amendment Act to the years-long farmers’ movement have faced heavy policing, legal action against organizers and administrative restrictions. Civil liberties groups and opposition leaders have argued that these measures reflect a shrinking space for peaceful dissent. 

Previous Coverage

India’s farmers’ protests are about more than reform — they are resisting the corporate takeover of agriculture

“This government doesn’t want the coming generation to question it,” Samrat said. “The more the public turns towards illiteracy, the easier it becomes for the BJP to continue running the government.”

When asked about the ongoing protests, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan dismissed the CJP as a “B team of disruptive elements,” a remark that fueled further criticism from protesters, who said the government was choosing confrontation over conversation.

The heavy surveillance at Jantar Mantar, combined with repeated attempts to end the sit-in, reinforced the students’ belief that the government was unwilling to engage directly with their demands. Yet despite the barricades, police presence and administrative restrictions, they continue to return each day, insisting that their struggle was no longer only about a leaked examination, but about the future of public education and the right to be heard.

“Our protest is fully nonviolent and falls within the scope of our constitution,” Dipke said. “Instead of breaking the morale of the protesters, this situation has created more awareness towards their rights.”

Whether the protest ultimately compels political action remains uncertain. But for the hundreds of young people who have spent days and nights at Jantar Mantar, it has already become something larger than a demand to reconduct an examination or remove a minister. 

It is a test of whether peaceful dissent can still compel those in power to listen. As Dipke said, “Prime Minister Narendra Modi must decide whether [ten million] students or one incompetent minister is more important.”

This article The strategic satire of India’s Gen Z ‘Cockroach’ movement was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

During this year of celebrating our nation’s 250th anniversary, I’ve been experiencing an unexpected emotion: pride.

For months, it’s been something far different — a mixture of disappointment, disbelief and disgust at the undermining of our freedoms, our wellbeing, our children’s futures and even our prospects for survival.

But recently, something shifted for me. I saw the excitement and global unity of World Cup fans. I talked to small business owners here in my small town in Washington state who were placing signs in their windows to let immigrants know they are welcome. I saw my community come together to march and rally on Juneteenth, with speakers reminding us that all people deserve freedom — and that we still have work to do to achieve that founding aspiration of our nation. I watched gay and straight neighbors at a joyful and defiant Pride parade in Seattle.

So many people are choosing courage and freedom for all, doing the risky, heroic work of resisting a would-be dictator and his sycophantic henchmen. I am feeling more confident that the courage and strength of the American people will get us through this period of darkness — but only if we reckon honestly with how we got here.

That means doing exactly the work the Trump regime is working so desperately to prevent: coming to terms with our nation’s history of race-based violence, exclusion and displacement, beginning with the killing, land grabs and cultural suppression of the Indigenous peoples who were the original caretakers of this continent, and continuing with the cruel enslavement of people whose forced labor built the nation’s wealth.

The work we need to do is more than an anti-bias workshop. It is the deeper and long-overdue work our nation and institutions need. Instead of papering over inconvenient history and its continued harm, we can do the work that begins with the truth, allows healing, strengthens a culture of integrity and builds the solidarity needed to face the enormous challenges before us.

The conviction that this work is necessary led me to create a free zine, “Community Reckoning,” that offers a process for reckoning with our history. We don’t need to wait for leadership from Washington, D.C. to take on this challenge. We can start now in our communities, congregations, universities, civic groups and other organizations. “Community Reckoning” offers a path to doing this work together.

The framework is simple: Stop the harm. Tell the truth. Acknowledge. Repair. The STAR acronym echoes the North Star that guided enslaved people escaping bondage.

This framework grew out of lived experience when I co-led, along with an Indigenous tribal elder, a community group formed after the 2001 desecration of Suquamish Chief Seattle’s grave. Over several years, Native and non-Native residents countered the political influence of a property owners’ group that had been actively hostile toward the Suquamish Tribe (Stop the Harm). We learned and shared the tribe’s history (Tell the Truth). We acknowledged the harms done when tribal land was taken and the tribe’s very existence was under assault, and celebrated those working to improve relationships between the Native and non-Native communities  (Acknowledge). Finally, working alongside the tribal government, we helped win the return of land that had once been the center of the tribe’s village, where Chief Seattle had lived most of his life (Repair). The trust and transformation that resulted from this collaboration rippled outward for years.

The STAR path can also be seen in Georgetown University’s reckoning with the 1838 sale of more than 270 enslaved people to pay the university’s debts. Students and alumni who researched this history discovered that — contrary to the story the university had told — thousands of descendants of these families were still alive. Apologies followed: Rev. Timothy Kesicki, S.J., said, “The Society of Jesus which helped to establish Georgetown University and whose leaders enslaved and mercilessly sold your ancestors, stands before you to say that we have greatly sinned. … We are profoundly sorry.” Former President of Georgetown John J. DeGioia said, “Slavery remains the original evil of our Republic — an evil that our university was complicit in.”

The students persuaded the administration to rename two university buildings that had been named for the Jesuit leaders who arranged for this sale, and assessed themselves a fee in honor of those whose lives financed the institution’s existence.

The Jesuit order has donated and raised funds for a Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation, which is now giving $10,000 scholarships to descendants, supporting modest home improvements to allow aged descendants to remain at home and sponsoring educational events and dialogues on racial justice.

These stories and others, along with practical tools, resources and inspiration from wise leaders, are contained in the zine.

The zine is built around practical ways communities can begin this work: learning local history, acknowledging harms, preventing ongoing injustice and working toward meaningful repair. Every community’s path will be different. But every community has one, and the integrity and deepened relationships that result are well worth the hard work.

Integrity is the reward

Some people say we should put this reckoning off yet again — that there are more urgent matters as we face an authoritarian regime committed to entrenching its power, and other existential crises.

But we will only achieve sustainable progress when we heal our nation’s foundational wounds — a process that can’t wait for some ideal future.

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We need to build a movement that heals our nation’s traumas

For centuries, politicians and economic elites have used racial resentment to prevent working people of different backgrounds from joining together to win real improvements. They’ve turned natural allies into rivals while they consolidate power and ever-larger shares of our nation’s wealth.

The result is an increasingly powerful group of the ultra-rich supporting the right-wing surge in the United States and elsewhere. People of every race — but especially people of color — struggle to afford housing, education, health care, gas and even food, things most people in wealthy countries take for granted. Politicians answer to big money and to the lobbyists who flood the centers of power. The monied interests get their way, not us.

If we’re going to build power, we can only build it on a foundation of solidarity. And solidarity is only possible in movements that are fully inclusive — and have done the work of racial reckoning. Without it, internal fault lines caused by unaddressed trauma, unrecognized privilege and unintended harms will continue to undermine trust.

True reckoning means we don’t wait for a fracture. The burden doesn’t fall on people of color to identify the flaws or the injuries of institutions that have yet to reckon with their own history, biases and privilege. Instead, we collectively take on the needed work.

National healing

The benefits of this work go even further — they include the possibility of profound healing for all of us. Instead of accepting lies and half-truths, we build a foundation based on honest reckoning and the integrity that comes from insisting on the truth.

A person, an institution or a nation that papers over a traumatic and unresolved story doesn’t make it go away. The consequences of the falseness keep showing up.

We might prefer to tell ourselves we’re the greatest country on earth, the most free, the most exceptional; we might not want to think about what that greatness was built on.

Maybe what looks like American confidence — the swagger, the entitlement, the insistence that we have nothing to apologize for — is really a brittle facade. It’s what shame looks like when it doesn’t get named.

A university, a denomination, a nation that hasn’t told the truth about its own past has to keep defending a story that doesn’t hold up — and that takes energy and vigilance, and sometimes results in anger at any who would challenge the facade.

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The good news is that the alternative to living with half-truths isn’t shame. It’s something better than both swagger and shame. It’s integrity. A person, an institution or a nation that has told the truth about its own history no longer needs to defend a false story. It can simply stand on what’s true. That’s a sturdier foundation than any myth.

Our history has been one of atrocities — and extraordinary courage. An honest accounting of our nation’s founding injustices gives us the opportunity to make them right. When we do, we won’t need the swagger anymore, because we’ll have something sturdier: the real thing. We can be unified in pride for this country, and unstoppable in coming together to build what could truly be a more perfect union.

The zine, “Community Reckoning” is free to download, print and share here.

This article Finding real national pride on America’s 250th birthday was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Looking for a quintessentially American book to read this 4th of July? 

As we celebrate and/or mourn the 250th birthday of the most militarized, most violent, (almost) most corrupt, most polluting, most inequitable and most sad nation on the face of the Earth, I am reading “Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground.” Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s new book about his Weatherman parents is more than just a great beach read (which it also is, literally). It is the most appropriate book to read instead of subjecting yourself to a PTSD-triggering fireworks display.

It chronicles a small group of revolutionaries who used dynamite, bombs and guns to blow up buildings, statutes and police cars, break people out of prison and generally make mayhem half a century ago. But it is not just history to view on the page. It says so much to our MAGA moment.

It is a story of history, conscience and memory at a time of AI slop, official lies and active amnesia. It is a story of youthful rebellion against the Vietnam War that matures into revolutionary sabotage, political violence and life “underground” that eventually settles into careers in education and law outside of the mainstream. It is the story of surviving some of the most harrowing political moments of the last half century. It is a story of a family.

I grew up in a very different corner of the left than Ayers Dohrn. There were no drug-fueled orgies, shootouts with the cops or days of rage in the Catholic left. But there was a similar stridency, urgency and seriousness about my family life. There was jail and prison and fear of FBI infiltration and dirty tricks. There were people with no last names who showed up for a meal or a night and headed back into the underground. We also survived separation and secrecy, and I am also not raising my children on the knife’s edge of the revolution. So, Ayers Dohrn’s effort to tell his family’s story with truthfulness, curiosity and distance landed so very true for me. 

Don’t need a weatherman to know

Who were the Weathermen? They’ve been memorialized countless times on screens small and large, most recently (sort of) in “One Battle After Another.” But in real life, they were mostly white, mostly college educated, mostly middle-class young people who had been part of Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, before splintering off from that group in the summer of 1969 to join forces with the Black Panthers and incite revolution, laying waste to what they left behind. They felt like they had tried everything else!

In recounting this episode, Ayers Dohrn was able to use FBI notes and communiques to highlight their role in fomenting the clash between the more progressive and radical factions, manipulating members into all-out conflict with one another and essentially destroying SDS. Ayers Dohrn quotes Weatherman faction leader Mark Rudd reflecting that it was “the single greatest mistake I’ve made in my life … scuttl[ing] America’s largest radical organization — with chapters on hundreds of campus[es], a powerful national identity and enormous growth potential — for a fantasy of revolutionary urban guerrilla warfare.” What could have been is not explored.

At this point, we’d need speculative fiction to spin out the possibilities of true solidarity between the largely white, campus-based antiwar movement and the Black Panther Party and its affiliates. It sure scared the FBI! In fact, in a memo to agents in the field, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote that SDS and the Black Panther Party working together would “pose a formidable threat. … It would be a definite advantage if these two groups were alienated.”

This story is told with cinematic depth, gleaned from Ayers Dohrn’s interviews with participants and from declassified FBI files. The new organization was small, secretive and “fiercely committed to following the leadership of the Black vanguard, to fighting the police and to going out, if necessary, in a blaze of revolutionary glory.”

A declaration of a state of war

The mostly middle-class, young, white activists had been working on many fronts for years, but their “organizing and peaceful protest had failed to stop the war.” They were going to try something new — but actually it wasn’t new. It was old. It was violence. And, for a time, it was street riots against the police and property damage during protests. But then their friend and Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was assassinated by Chicago police and the FBI in a barrage of 90 bullets. And then the horrors of the My Lai massacre were revealed, and as 1969 became 1970, the Weathermen declared war on the United States.

Ayers Dohrn describes a series of bombings at the homes of judges, banks and police stations, and a complicated plan in New York City’s West Village that would have brought the carnage of Vietnam to a military Officer’s Ball at Fort Dix in New Jersey. The Fort Dix plan was thwarted not by the FBI or a rival faction of revolutionaries, but by chemistry. The bombs went off in the 11th Street townhouse the revolutionaries were using as a temporary safe house (while the parents of one of the Weathermen were on a St. Kitts vacation). Three Weathermen were killed in the blast and the house was obliterated. Bill Ayers’ girlfriend at the time was among the dead and he carried that grief and memory into Ayers Dohrn’s life. As a little kid, Zayd remembers going with his father to lay flowers at the site every year. 

Recalling that loss, Ayers Dohrn asks his father how he contemplated killing people with those bombs. Bill Ayers responded that “We often said things like, ‘I need to be a tool of the revolution.’ … Or ‘I need to be an instrument of the rebellion.’ And that instrumentalizing of our lives was more than a weakness. It was a horror.”

That realization and the other reflections Ayers Dohrn is able to elicit from his parents as they think back on their roles as revolutionaries are the backbone of this book. Bill and Bernardine Dohrn are able to reflect, see mistakes and missteps, explain their priorities, and accept responsibility for the harms they inflicted because they survived and so many other people who were part of this splinter movement did not.

It was a horror

It is difficult and brave that Zayd Ayers Dohrn contends with violence and memory without letting anyone — even his mother and father — off the hook. Against the backdrop of an administration and a president that can’t remember, or won’t admit to, crimes of three sentences ago, he holds his father and mother to a high standard. And they can take it. They survived the days of rage and purity tests and self-criticism sessions and the run-ins with the law and stretches of prison and dirty tricks that so many others did not.

His mother, Bernardine Dohrn, is now living with dementia, as is my own mother, and I found his present-day conversations with her the most poignant and difficult of the book. Memory threads all the way through this book. What do we remember? Why do some memories stick? 

Ayers Dohrn began his reckoning with family history in an extraordinary 10-part podcast called “Mother Country Radicals,” which was Fred Hampton’s term of endearment for the Weathermen. But as he researches his own past and excavates his own memory, there are things that don’t add up, don’t stitch together, memories that don’t bear up to scrutiny. There are contradictions that he can’t square.

Once the podcast was released, he received letters, diaries and phone calls from old fellow travelers. These new resources, along with 7,833 pages of FBI files, convinced him that there was more to the story and he sat down to write. The book is more in-depth, intimate and searching than the podcast. Ayers Dohrn is less star struck by his parents’ bravado too. Now, he is a parent, too, noting decisions that Bill and Bernadine made that put the family in jeopardy, that were hard for him, that caused him pain. He sees and feels the impact of his parents’ choice of the revolution over parenthood. “Over and over, you can see the same pattern, repeated: Asked to choose between solidarity and family, revolution and love, my parents and their comrades chose the cause almost every time.”

Family lore had it that Bill and Bernardine hung up their revolutionary bonafides when they became parents. But the documents Ayers Dohrn received after the podcast aired show that was not true. They continued to take risks even after they became parents of Zayd and his younger brother Malik. One memorable camping trip in West Virginia as a family turns out to be a trip to case Alderson Prison for Women where Black Panther leader Assata Shakur was serving out her sentence. She was eventually liberated from prison in another operation and Bill Ayers played a small — but very risky — role in that while Bernardine was home with Zayd.

Ayers Dohrn confronted his dad by asking: “What would have happened, not only to him but to me, my mother and my unborn brother?” Ayers responded: “It was a difficult decision. It felt monumental, it felt important. We were pretty clear that Bernardine would be with you. … But yeah, it was, in retrospect, really risky. And really on the edge.” But in the end, Bill Ayers played his part, “Because it mattered. Because the world needed it to happen.”

They continued to do leg work for the Black Liberation Army and other radical groups like Action Five even after they informally adopted 14-month-old Chesa Boudin. That should have been a clear warning to stop. Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, Chesa’s parents, had acted as getaway drivers for an Action Five robbery on a Brinks armored truck in October 1981. The job quickly went off the rails and three people injured, and three others were killed — Nyack police officers Edward O’Grady and Waverly Brown, and Peter Paige, one of the team from the Brinks truck. Boudin and Gilbert spent decades in prison for their crimes while the Ayers Dohrn family raised their son. 

Life underground

I described this book to a friend, and she got stuck on the word underground. “Wait,” she demanded, “you mean they lived underground, like moles or Hobbits?” No, they lived under assumed names, worked cash jobs, had fake IDs. They were on the run from the FBI, facing jail time and family separation. They had disappeared from “normal society” and were dependent on friends and fellow travelers for support.

A striking moment in the book comes when Ayers Dohrn recounts that at one of his father’s off-the-books jobs, as a longshoreman in San Francisco, he gets the sense that something is about to go down. Bill Ayers saw men on the rooftops and by the union hall, standing out in their cheap suits and cop-loafers. But he was already at the docks and there was nowhere to run. The docks are all of a sudden swarmed with police and his co-workers started yelling “La Migra! La Migra!”

 “It only took a few minutes; the feds rounded them all up, chasing them to the edge of the water or just tackling them down to the concrete of the parking lot. And they let all the white people go” Ayers Dohrn recounts.

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Daniel Berrigan and his fearless nonviolence, at 100

The officials were not looking for Bill Ayers, of the Weathermen. They were rounding up undocumented immigrants. Ayers Dohrn writes that his father had “always assumed, with the self-centered paranoia of a federal fugitive, that he was the only outlaw hiding out on the docks. … But it turned out that half of the men on his crew were invisible, even to him. They were all living on a different plane, off the grid. Undocumented. Underground.”

In his autobiography “To Dwell in Peace,” my uncle, Father Daniel Berrigan writes that while he was underground, avoiding a prison sentence for the Catonsville 9 action and speaking constantly to young people, he heard that the Weather Underground wanted to dialogue. On Aug. 8, 1970, just a few days before he was captured on Block Island, he made an audio recording and sent it off through intermediaries. It had been just six months since the three Weathermen were killed in the bomb blast on 11th Street.

A new kind of anger

In the message, addressed to his “Brothers and Sisters,” Dan Berrigan invites them to “a new kind of anger which is both useful in communicating and imaginative and slow-burning to fuel the long haul which is the definition of our whole lives.” He calls them away from violence for the sake of violence, noting that there is a great risk that violence “will change people for the worse and harden them against enlightenment.” He continues by sharing that “I hope your lives are about something more than sabotage.”

I looked around for evidence that Dan Berrigan ever sat down with the Weather Underground, or that his message received a reply. I did not find any, but the group did shift tactics after the 11th Street explosion. Ayers Dohrn writes of a meeting that his mother called a few weeks later where the group became the Weather Underground and “disavow[ed] deadly violence going forward.” They did not become paragons of pacifism after this, but they stopped a posture of open warfare against the American people. 

In “Absurd Convictions, Modest Hopes: Conversations After Prison with Lee Lockwood,” Dan shares that the Weather Underground did respond to his communications, saying, “In fact the response was almost beyond my hope, because it indicated that they really were serious and were growing more thoughtful about such things.” That’s where that thread ends, as far as I can tell, but it is beautiful to consider the “calling in” and constructive dialogue that could have followed, as both sides — motivated by a fervent commitment to racial equality and an end to war — kept talking.

In his message to the Weather Underground, my uncle has a beautiful formulation of the concept of underground, writing: “Instead of thinking about the underground as temporary or exotic or abnormal, perhaps we are being called upon to start thinking of its implication as an entirely self-sufficient, mobile, internal revival community, so that the underground may be the definition of our future.”

Ayers Dohrn dedicates his book to his wife Rachel and their children Dalin and Light. Late in the book, he writes that “every generation is born into a world desperately in need of transformation, and young people in every era have inherited a struggle — a fight to make things better — that stretches back long before any of them were born.” 

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I read “Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young” with horror and hope — in equal measure. There is plenty to rage about in the Mother Country these days. You do not have to look far to find a replay of the horrors that radicalized Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and their friends. The war lust, impunity and corruption of the Trump administration and the craven weaponization of the justice system under FBI Director Kash Patel makes President Richard Nixon and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover look like Boy Scouts, and that is saying something!

Our society is full of the dirty, dangerous, violent and young, but so much of the violence is turned inward into self-harm and online into self-referential time frittering. It does spill out into the streets and it is political, but it is not, for the most part, organized or coordinated. The political violence of the Weatherman and the Underground that felt so justified and satisfied, that urge to “do something” and to “take a stand,” did do something. But most of that something was sowing chaos, alienating potential allies and narrowing the political space available to others. That violence was used — over and over — to rationalize indiscriminate state-sponsored repression and violence. In the process, almost incidentally, they did build something of value, the idea of an underground, and that persists and continues.

There is a lot of hope here for me in this idea of a permanent underground that sustains and revives, a subculture of connection and support that is not on the same map (literally not plottable) as the systems that exploit and oppress.

Those who survived those harrowing years as fugitives, undergrounders and radicals, built community, raised families, showed up for one another. And they were able to do all that because they survived. Or, perhaps, they survived because they could do all that.

This article An intimate reckoning with the Weather Underground was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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.