This article was originally published by Truthout.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Global and local implications

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

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

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

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

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

Many Roles for Many People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why clergy are a distinct political force

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

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

Physical presence as a tool

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

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

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

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

Writing as a prophetic act

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

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

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

Liturgy as resistance

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

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

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

Organizing faith leaders: what actually works

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s at stake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the reality in Gaza today is very different.

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

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

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

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

Cooperation between students has become essential to continuing their studies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is what movements, what revolutions are made of.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is these sacrifices that revolutions are made of.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A tender vision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Linking peace and justice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Women get results

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building the appetite for “no”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A movement building in classroom corners and sidewalks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why hope is so important 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding hope in the US

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

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

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

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

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

Days of rage, days of hope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Narrative

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

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

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

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The two reflexes that are breaking the left 

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

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

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

Organization

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

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

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

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

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

Conditions

Several things are actively suppressing an activist response.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what can we do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

A version of this article first appeared on Subvrt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s okay to cheer — because we did this

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The real reason Musk retreated

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

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

Why Stephen Miller?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An election about President Miller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone lovingly called him “Doc.”

Today is my last morning waking up in Japan after an incredible 20-day trip through Taiwan and my homeland. This morning, I woke up to a flood of text messages telling me that Dr. Bernard LaFayette, who everyone lovingly called “Doc” had passed away.

Doc, in addition to being one of the most important teachers I have ever had, was a legend of the civil rights era — the first organizer to go to Selma, Alabama, co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, national coordinator of the original Poor People’s Campaign — as well as the co-author of the Kingian Nonviolence Conflict Reconciliation training philosophy and author of his personal memoir, “In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma.”

Being on the other side of the world, moving through long days of travel and family schedules, I thought I would not have much time to process it. But today, on our last day here, we decided to let our daughter nap at home instead of going out. Suddenly I found myself with a couple of quiet hours to myself. In the stillness, memories of Doc began flowing, and I felt the urge to sit and share a few stories about the man so many of us loved.

Like so many wise elders like Desmond Tutu or the Dalai Lama, Doc had a childlike quality to him. He was always joyful and playful, almost carrying an innocent, naïve presence despite the violence he had lived through, experienced, and fought against — having been beaten and arrested dozens of times and surviving an assassination attempt. He had an unwavering hopefulness about him, a lightness that somehow coexisted with the immense history he carried.

After my first ever Kingian Nonviolence training, I was so inspired that I called him on the phone. I told him right then and there: “this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

A few months later, I found myself attending the Kingian Nonviolence summer institute in Rhode Island, studying to become a certified trainer. This was where I first met Doc in person. Now, almost 17 years later, it is still what I am doing — pursuing a deeper understanding of the word nonviolence and what it means to become a better practitioner of it.

Each evening during the summer institute, he gave a lecture where I felt like I was trying to write down every word that came out of his mouth. Not only did that experience deeply ground me in a principled approach to nonviolence, but I was also blown away by how strategic he, and the leaders of the civil rights movement, were. It felt like all of the organizing I had done up to that point was being put to shame.

I remember him telling me that he and his colleagues would often plan to engage in civil disobedience on Friday afternoons, so that by the time they were getting booked in jail, the courts would be closed and the city would have to keep them over the weekend. This put additional pressure on them, since they would now have to house and feed dozens of students over the weekend.

He shared that when they held marches and they did not have a large number of participants, they would march two-by-two with a little bit of space between each pair to make the march look longer than it actually was.

I was clinging to every word, realizing that this tradition carried a depth of discipline and strategy that I had barely begun to understand.

It was such an honor to hear his stories. Doc loved to tell stories. Once, he casually told us about eating ribs and playing pool with Dr. King — “Martin” he called him. Stories that collapsed the distance between the historical figures we read about in books and the real human relationships that shaped the movement.

I also had the honor of co-facilitating multiple workshops with him, including one in Santa Cruz, California. After the first day of that training, I found myself in his hotel room listening to stories late into the night. At some point, it was getting pretty late and his wife Kate had fallen asleep on his shoulders. I was also getting tired, so I remember looking over at my friends and saying something like, “It looks like Kate’s tired, so maybe we should get going.”

Doc immediately stopped me and said, “Oh no, it’s fine, it’s fine…” and just kept talking. For hours.

Elders can talk forever. But I loved that about him.

It was also sweet to witness his relationship with Kate, herself a civil rights icon. After all those years together, he still opened the door for her every time. They always held hands. She would tease him about the sweets he’s not supposed to be eating. There was such tenderness between them. It was a quiet, beautiful expression of the love that sustained them through a lifetime of struggle.

Many of his stories stayed with me, but one in particular always moved me deeply. On his first day organizing in Selma, he was beaten bloody. His white T-shirt was stained with blood, and he wore that same shirt for days afterward so people in Selma could see how serious his commitment was.

I remember him telling me of practicing the teachings of Rev. James Lawson, the original trainer of the movement, and trying to look compassionately into the eyes of his assailant even as he was being beaten.

That kind of courage is hard to comprehend.

I had the honor of being with him in Selma once. Doc was the first organizer from SNCC who wanted to try to organize the city where, as he always liked to remind us, “the white folks were too mean and the Black folks were too scared.”

Despite the fact that Selma was considered a “no-go zone” by national organizers, Doc went and set the stage for what would become Bloody Sunday and eventually the Voting Rights Act. Walking around Selma with him, I felt like I was in the presence of living history (people often referred to him as a national treasure). Every time we walked into a restaurant, people would recognize him and stand up to greet him. You could feel the weight and gravity of the history he carried with him.

And yet he never seemed heavy with it.

I also remember a meeting once with the executive committee of an organization I was part of. The committee, made up mostly of people my age, had gotten into a conflict. Doc happened to be sitting in on the meeting. He didn’t interrupt or intervene. He just sat there, watching and smiling quietly as the heated conversation unfolded.

At the end, we asked him if he had any thoughts.

He said that watching us reminded him of how he and his colleagues in the civil rights movement used to argue with each other all the time. He told us that movements spend about 40 percent of their time in conflict with each other, and that we shouldn’t worry about it too much.

It was grounding hear that sort of perspective from someone who’d lived through it all. Even the elders of the civil rights movement fought with each other. Conflict wasn’t a sign that something had gone wrong, it was simply part of the work of being human together while trying to change the world.

Doc carried history in his bones. He had lived through brutality and transformation, through moments that reshaped the course of a nation. And yet what I remember most about him is not just the history, it’s the spirit.

His joy.
His stories.
His hope.

His undying commitment to his golf game. For a period of his life, he refused to travel for workshops and speaking engagements unless he could fit in a round of golf. The only time I ever played a full round of golf was with him. And, to be completely honest and candid here, his game probably should have been better than it was given how much he played. But he still kept at it, with that ever-present smile.

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This morning in Japan, as messages kept arriving on my phone, I felt the loss of someone who shaped my life in ways I am still discovering. I am still clinging to the wisdom that came from listening to Doc. Sitting here in the quiet while my daughter naps in the next room, I am reminded that the work Doc gave his life to was never just about one generation.

It moves from hand to hand, story to story, teacher to student.

Doc helped pass that torch to so many of us. And now it is our responsibility to carry it forward — to keep studying, practicing, organizing and striving toward the Beloved Community he devoted his life to building.

One day, when my daughter is older, I hope I will be able to tell her stories about a man everyone called Doc. About his courage, his laughter, his hope, and the way he believed so deeply in the power of nonviolence.

What a gift it was to know and learn from him.

This article Remembering civil rights icon Bernard LaFayette was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

After previously representing the ICE agent who killed Renee Good, Minneapolis attorney and Republican politician Chris Madel ended his gubernatorial bid, saying “I cannot support the national Republicans’ stated retribution on the citizens of our state, nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so.” Meanwhile, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which as a group has offered only limited resistance to accelerated attacks on democratic norms, issued an unusual “special message” denouncing indiscriminate mass deportations. And the National Rifle Association, or NRA, which has been closely aligned with the Republican Party since the 1970s, criticized the Trump administration after Alex Pretti’s killing for “demonizing law-abiding citizens” who exercise their constitutional right to protest and bear arms. 

These are examples of loyalty shifts: individuals, groups and institutions moving away from anti-democratic leaders, movements and parties, and in the direction of pro-democracy forces or values. As the quality of American democracy continues to decline under the second Trump administration, effective resistance will require a multifaceted strategy, including mobilizing voters, nominating viable candidates, delivering on the material needs of ordinary people and strengthening accountability mechanisms. However, a crucial, if overlooked, part of this strategy must involve creating the conditions for loyalty shifts among those who legitimize and provide resources to the administration. This will weaken its hold on power and open space for a renewal of American constitutional values.

What are loyalty shifts?

Imagine a spectrum of loyalty to authoritarian forces, moving from active loyalty to passive loyalty, neutrality, passive disloyalty and then active disloyalty. Loyalties shift whenever an individual or group moves from one position to another. The spectrum is a useful visual because it captures the incremental nature of loyalty shifts. Most people will not ordinarily move from a place of loyalty to disloyalty — a sharper break that can be called defection. What’s more, movement across the spectrum may be neither linear nor irreversible. For example, although the NRA criticized the administration’s Minnesota conduct, it simultaneously said that “progressive politicians like Tim Walz have incited violence against law enforcement officers who are simply trying to do their jobs.”

Loyalty shifts take many forms: speaking out against unconstitutional abuses of power, resigning from jobs that further authoritarian agendas, remaining in one’s job but refusing to carry out specific directives, participating in protests or boycotts, and mobilizing other defectors. For example, ICE and CBP officials have continued to work with the administration while simultaneously expressing their frustration and disillusionment with its rogue tactics and systemic lack of training.

Importantly, loyalties can shift by both “breaking” from and “binding” within the groups and institutions where one is a member. The resignation of Minneapolis FBI supervisor Tracee Mergen after Renee Good’s death represents one highly visible tactic or “moment” of breaking. (At the same time, resignations can be strategically fraught decisions, as one’s successors may be even more sympathetic to authoritarian agendas.) By contrast, the many internal conversations Mergen likely had with her colleagues to persuade them to resist political pressures represent an important kind of binding. Binding tactics — which can even include trying to nudge a fellow churchgoer away from MAGA over dinner — may be more difficult to observe, but are perhaps more common and no less important than breaking tactics.

Loyalty shifts are rarely isolated events and often set off cascades of similar shifts, as can be seen in the growing number of resignations by federal prosecutors in Minneapolis. Following the initial refusal by the law firm Perkins Coie to bend to pressure from the Trump administration, others like Jenner & Block and WilmerHale followed suit, filing lawsuits against the administration instead — a strategy that has worked to those firms’ advantage.   

Once “first movers” have taken a stand, others will be inspired or emboldened to follow them, either by changing their beliefs about constitutional abuses or by acting on beliefs that they had held all along. This phenomenon was widely analyzed at the end of the Soviet Union, where people previously had the incentive to conceal their true loyalties for fear of being ostracized, punished or worse. Acts of increasingly open defiance changed this and helped topple a Soviet dictatorship that had lasted nearly 70 years. As repressive governments are seen as less powerful — when it becomes clear that the emperor has no clothes — and others demonstrate against it, large numbers of people can suddenly withdraw their support.

Why do loyalties shift? 

Much of our knowledge of the causes of loyalty shifts comes from research on military defections. During the 2010-11 Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings, for example, militaries withdrew their support from autocrats who had been in power for decades. These events might not seem initially relevant for our understanding of loyalty shifts among faith leaders or businesses. Yet many factors that determine whether soldiers will shift their loyalties or not — fear, ideological discomfort, economic self-interest — will resonate with the experiences of civilian defectors.

Pragmatic motives loom large in loyalty shifts: Will defecting help or hinder myself and my family — physically, financially and otherwise? Will I be respected by movements opposing the regime and protected from retribution, or scapegoated for the regime’s crimes? Psychological, moral and ideological factors also play a key role: these include the costs of aiding a repressive regime and disillusionment with its lies or broken campaign promises. Of course, these factors can also discourage loyalty shifts, insofar as defectors lack a support system or an alternative community to join. It is critical in places where right-wing authoritarians are in power to build up conservative business or religious associations, media outlets and community groups that back pro-democracy agendas. 

Loyalty shifts often hinge on social ties. For example, police officers will be less likely to arrest or shoot people in the communities where they live. This is surely part of why so many ICE agents in Minneapolis came from distant states, such as the South Texan officers who killed Alex Pretti. 

Social networks are also critical to activating one’s higher loyalties — such as political duties to uphold the Constitution or universal moral duties — that transcend partisanship and can provide a principled basis for defection. Yet material consequences are critical too, especially when appeals to principle and social networks alone may prove insufficient. Accordingly, it may be worth emphasizing material pressure (e.g., boycotting an authoritarian-aligned business), social pressure (patronizing the business and persuading its owner), or both.

People make choices to defect based not just on what they want, but on what they think other people and groups are likely to do. Shifting social norms and normalizing dissent by former regime supporters can thus send a powerful signal that encourages further loyalty shifts. To that end, it is a promising sign that protest is growing in rural and conservative areas of the country, and that greater fissures within the MAGA base are becoming evident. These are driven by anger over the Epstein files, rising living costs, and FEMA withholding aid from red cities in blue states. Beyond protests, participation in community support activities like providing food to distressed families, organizing “quilt-ins,” and accompanying people to court appointments have provided meaningful on-ramps to people from across the political and ideological spectrum.    

Offering moral and material support to potential defectors is key to encouraging further shifts. At the same time, doing so raises a key tension or tradeoff. On the one hand, it may be necessary to encourage a “way out” for defectors and provide selective amnesty in the name of defeating autocrats. On the other hand, doing so can undermine efforts to ensure accountability and prevent future abuses. This “persuasion-punishment tradeoff” will have key implications for reconciliation and the rebuilding of democratic norms.

In addition to these more individual and social factors, structural factors — such as the economy  — play a key role in motivating loyalty shifts. Poor performance convinces corporate leaders or political elites that the administration is unable to govern effectively. Conversely, businesses may refuse to defect because they fear the loss of quid pro quos with the regime.

Dysfunction within the authoritarian party also influences loyalty shifts: whether it becomes unpopular, unable to secure election victories or policy goals for its members, divided into acrimonious factions, or loses control of the media narrative. All of these make it difficult to sustain politicians’ loyalties. In addition, as the party becomes more “personalistic” and unpredictable, defection may seem like a reasonable way of minimizing uncertainty. 

By the same token, democracy will be especially fragile — and oppositions will struggle to resist unconstitutional abuses — in places where authoritarian parties or leaders are very popular.

Loyalty shifts matter

Social scientists have shown that loyalty shifts are critical to whether authoritarian governments are successfully removed from power as well as whether subsequent governments can improve levels of freedom and democracy. As authoritarian leaders consolidate power across the world, loyalty shifts can help bolster both democratic resilience and resistance. Resilience refers to how social and political institutions — courts, media, opposition parties, civil society organizations — persist over time and recover from authoritarian attacks. This will demand loyalty shifts among the judges, bureaucrats, journalists and others who occupy such institutions. Their unwillingness to enforce unconstitutional measures will limit the administration’s capacity to weaponize political institutions for authoritarian ends.

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By contrast, democratic resistance refers to the efforts and agency of pro-democracy forces. This includes building alliances to defeat autocrats, suing autocrats and organizing demonstrations. Loyalty shifts will bolster these efforts by increasing the size and diversity of pro-democracy movements, especially when they actively welcome regime defectors. All of this is crucial for success, as it removes the sources of power that autocrats rely upon.

Strategic implications

To reverse the present state of erosion, we all have a role to play in creating the conditions for loyalty shifts. A large number of factors motivate these shifts, many of which stem from self-interest and are specific to one’s position: businesses shift their loyalties as autocrats intervene in the free market, religious leaders as autocrats repress or jail their congregants, and judges as autocrats undermine judicial autonomy. Democracy advocates should continue to emphasize that authoritarianism is bad for business, patently unchristian and a disgrace to the freedoms that veterans have fought to uphold.

A second, related implication concerns the salience of democracy as motivating loyalty shifts. It is a mistake to assume that democracy movements will be composed of individuals and groups for whom democracy is of central importance. Although for some the trampling of democratic freedoms will matter a great deal, some or even many loyalties may shift simply because the administration is perceived as weak or the economy as faltering. Members of conservative religious groups may defect from an administration they see as deprioritizing a pro-life policy agenda.
 
This last point highlights a tension of sorts: on the one hand, it is important to emphasize shared democratic principles as transcending policy disagreements; on the other hand, effective organizing may still require emphasizing concrete policy failures such as affordability, rampant corruption, or law and order. Navigating these and other tensions will remain a critical challenge for the U.S. democracy movement in the months and years ahead.

This article Why loyalty shifts are key to defeating autocrats was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article was originally published by Truthout.

As news broke that the United States and Israel had launched war on Iran, two posts kept showing up over and over on my social media feeds. One was from the Israeli military’s official account, which stated an oft-repeated phrase: “Israel has the right to defend itself.”

The other was a video from the Iranian city of Minab, where the first reports of casualties were emerging. The joint U.S.-Israeli attack had hit a girls’ elementary school; the death toll kept ticking higher and higher. At the time of publication, Iranian authorities said 108 people, mostly schoolchildren, had been killed in the strike, with many more injured.

Plenty has been written, in Truthout and elsewhere, about the totally incoherent justifications for this war, the illegality of it, the potential for regional disaster, the joke it has made of the very idea of diplomacy. All of this was and continues to be true, and all of it is important to raise. But more than anything, we in the U.S. need to reckon with the fact that so much of our state wealth, capacity, and technology goes toward burying children in rubble.

Last year, when Israel and the U.S. launched the strikes that would be prelude to this attack, I wrote that the two countries were “shedding even the pretense and facade of the principles of a rules-based international order that has already worked in their favor.” In the wake of those strikes, once the immediate violence ceased, we largely heard crickets from U.S. lawmakers. This, despite the fact that those strikes, like these, were illegal under U.S. and international law. We cannot let this continued lack of accountability stand. If we do, what will happen next?

Over the years, U.S. and Israeli leaders have become increasingly vocal about their hopes for “greater Israel” — the boundless expansion of an apartheid state. Before the start of the current assault on Iran, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a favorite in the country’s upcoming elections, accused Turkey of being the hub of a threatening axis “similar to the Iranian one.” This war is not about Iran’s nuclear program. It is not a war to free Iranians from a repressive regime. This is a war to preserve U.S. power and hegemony across the entire region.

It is also not accurate to say that Israel is dragging the U.S. into a war against its choosing. Reporting has shown that these two nuclear powers were in lockstep in their planning of this attack. In order to stop this violence, we need to really contend with how it started. The U.S. is hardly a victim here.

This state of affairs is intolerable. I am disgusted to know that my tax dollars are being spent to bomb my ancestral homeland. I was sickened to wake up to messages from family members telling me that the city where they live was under attack from the country where I live. I’m terrified now that Iran’s government has cut internet access yet again, leaving us disconnected from our loved ones. No fear, of course, can compare to the terror of being on the receiving end of missiles or guns, whether they are wielded by a foreign power or your own government; Iranians have been killed by both in horrifying numbers over the last year. But for those of us in the diaspora, the fact that it has now become routine to check in on family and friends living through untold violence does not make it any less traumatic.

Despite the abject horror of this moment, we cannot afford to slip into despair. There is still space for things to get much worse, but, more importantly, there is still so much left that we must protect. No one can predict what will happen over the coming days and weeks, but we know they are likely to be filled with more violence and uncertainty. We need to use every single tool at our disposal to chip away at the war-making systems inflicting this horror, which are so thoroughly embedded in the heart of the United States.

We can start, of course, by demanding that Congress immediately pass a war powers resolution to put an end to this destructive assault. Beyond that we can lift up the call being made by groups like Defending Rights & Dissent for Congress to impeach not only Donald Trump but every single member of his cabinet who had a hand in making this unjust and illegal war possible.

But we shouldn’t stop there. Our elected officials need to publicly explain why they hemmed and hawed over a war powers resolution before these attacks occurred, despite an obvious military buildup.

We must demand that every member of Congress who has voted to increase our military budget to nearly a trillion dollars account for their choices. We must push those members who have personal investments in the military machine — to the tune of tens of millions of dollars — even further. They need to explain their conflicts of interest, and why they continue to profit off this death and destruction. Lawmakers who take money from groups like AIPAC that are relishing in this war especially need to answer for their votes.

It’s also imperative to not view this war in a silo, but instead see it as part of the same violent, hegemonic project that has been conducting genocide and spreading violence across Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and beyond. We must hold elected officials accountable for failing to uphold U.S. and international law by continuing to support the transfer of weapons to Israel as it commits genocide against Palestinians. We must make it politically toxic for those lawmakers not to support legislation like the Block the Bombs Act, which aims to stop such transfers.

We also can’t expect elected officials to do more just because we ask them to. We need to build power. We must support grassroots movements like the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement that seek to make war, apartheid, and genocide too costly to wage. We must back campaigns like Taxpayers Against Genocide that are searching for legal avenues to keep federal funds from being used to violate human rights.

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We can wage campaigns against death-dealing corporations and make sure that war-profiteering is exposed and subjected to public outrage. The No Tech for Apartheid movement has long been organizing to push Silicon Valley to stop supplying the Israeli military with computing power, and has already found some success. The Israeli military’s use of artificial intelligence (AI) in Gaza has received a great deal of reporting; now that OpenAI has announced a deal to allow the Pentagon to use its models in their classified networks, the fight against AI has taken on renewed urgency. Campaigns across the country against data centers are now also a crucial nexus of resistance against militarism.

So too are campaigns for immigrant rights and against deportations. In the wake of the U.S. strikes against Iran last June, the Trump administration rounded up Iranian immigrants for deportation. Those deportations continued into this year, even as the Iranian government staged a brutal crackdown on protesters. As we prepare for war to rage across the region, we can demand the U.S. and Europe open their borders to people fleeing violence and despair. We can continue to show the links between the occupation of cities by federal immigration agents here at home and imperial wars waged abroad. The enemies of democracy here are also the enemies of democracy abroad.

Some of these demands may seem futile under this murderous president, backed by an obedient Congress, and with a Supreme Court that has offered comparatively little restraint. But this unaccountable bureaucracy makes it all the more essential that we build grassroots power to issue these demands and force those in power to heed them.

Polling shows that this war is unpopular. Trump may be an authoritarian, but he is not entirely invulnerable, nor are the elected officials who have given him pass after pass. We cannot let him believe for a second longer that he can get away with something this wildly illegal or recklessly dangerous without accountability. And we cannot let the leaders who follow him believe that they, too, can unleash such violence without consequences. After all, would we be here if there were any real repercussions for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, or the continuing genocide in Palestine? We need true accountability for these crimes. And the only way to get it is to wage a struggle against militarism every day — not only in moments of crisis, but whenever and wherever it rears its ugly head.

This article Trump and his enablers must be held accountable for the war on Iran was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The dream of a national general strike to paralyze multiple major industries or corporations is gaining traction. 

Across the nation, voices are rising with a righteous call for collective action at scale, especially in the wake of ongoing local economic strikes and protests against the ICE occupation of Minneapolis. The Day of Truth and Freedom on Jan. 23 gave a glimpse of the power of everyday people to make the system tremble. Over 50,000 people poured into downtown Minneapolis in the middle of the workday, braving temperatures of 20 below zero. Roughly a thousand businesses were shuttered, and organizers estimate that a million Minnesotans supported the action. The level of participation demonstrated the power of strikes to energize activists even as we have been grieving the murders, blatant cruelty and torture perpetrated by ICE agents. 

What has happened in Minnesota will only add momentum to other efforts to build toward general strikes: There is a national call to strike when 3.5 percent of the current U.S. population commits to it, an ongoing push for regional strikes by Blackout The System and a plan by the United Auto Workers for a general strike on May Day 2028. These calls for general strikes reflect a yearning to reclaim agency from systems that profit from exhaustion, division and despair. They also emphasize that to halt the slide into fascism and climate collapse, we must disrupt business as usual, awaken a shared sense of moral and civic sovereignty, and wield our collective economic power.

Recently, Aru Shiney-Ajay, a Minneapolis-based organizer with the Sunrise Movement, said in an interview that Jan. 23 “was a fantastic start.” But to get to a real general strike, she added that “it’s going to take a lot more work.” 

Indeed, pulling off a successful long-term general strike in this large and diverse country will require unprecedented organizing. It will place great demands on each of us — on both a personal and collective level.  

This need for deeper organizing could be seen when the call for a “general strike” on Jan. 30 did not materialize nationwide despite the increasing momentum after Alex Pretti’s murder. 

As we lay the groundwork for future strikes, we should not overlook another essential ingredient to their success: Strong movements require deep mutual support. We must ensure that strikers and their families have their fundamental needs met when conventional economic systems are being challenged. We need to support one another despite the messages we receive from our culture that it is unsafe to rely on one another. In other words, we will not be able to strike at scale and over the long-term unless we learn how to collaborate through distrust, fear and trauma.

Practicing interdependence amidst trauma

We must learn to depend on one another for our very lives: for food, shelter and safety from violence. This sort of dependence is called, in movement speak, mutual aid. Mutual aid — the practice of voluntary, reciprocal exchange within a community — is not a peripheral support activity; it is the essential infrastructure that will make a prolonged strike possible. The promise of mutual aid is that we learn to depend on one another rather than rely on the broken institutions we’re striking against.

In the past, notable mutual aid networks have been organized in response to the COVID pandemic, natural disasters and to support teacher strikes, among many other causes. And under tremendous risk, inspiring and self-organized mutual aid efforts have sprung up — neighborhood by neighborhood — in Los Angeles, Minneapolis and other cities targeted by ICE over the last year. 

Previous Coverage

How LA is uniting to provide mutual aid for those impacted by ICE raids

However, the scale of mutual aid needed for a long-term general strike will be much larger than anything we have seen to date. It wouldn’t be just the marginalized or immigrant families that will need “aid.” People who are currently employed and supporting others will also need to survive without relying on mainstream structures. The mutual aid networks that emerged over the past two months in Minneapolis are a solid step in the right direction. Beyond the rent assistance and food delivery systems for immigrants sheltering at home, restaurants, places of worship and coffee shops have opened their doors to feed neighbors for free and supply ICE patrollers with gas masks, hand-warmers and whistles. We need to continue building on this momentum.

The hyperindividualistic capitalist script tells us to rely only on ourselves, that we must work hard and make enough money to secure our own food, health and shelter. But that system is designed to fail, and too many of us and our neighbors are vulnerable, exploited and denied access to our basic human needs. A poorly planned strike risks making those injustices even worse if people step away from their sources of income. This is the trap: We wouldn’t need to strike if we had a safety net, but without a safety net, striking is far more difficult.

Mutual aid is how we break this circular logic. But here’s the big problem: Collective traumas have robbed our society of the willingness to depend on one another — to give and receive support as if our lives depend on it. Mutual aid is a trust fall, but many of us still need to learn to trust one another. Past or ongoing money and class trauma make some of us believe that our economic privilege was justly earned — that we have the right to hoard our resources and to not share what we have with others. For others, financial stress keeps us stuck in the systems that are killing our biosphere and degrading our souls. Racism causes a similar spiritual degradation, teaching us that some people are more deserving of our support than others.

Our bodies are so traumatized that interdependence feels unsafe for most of us. We believe the narrative that living alone with a six-figure salary is safer than living in deep interdependence with our community. Or that working four part-time jobs to pay our rent is our destiny, and no one can help us change this fate. Our inability to trust one another is capitalism’s great victory. The unspoken truth is that we are lonely, traumatized, dysregulated and grieving. We are trying to build a movement with bodies and hearts locked in states of fight, flight or freeze. We can make brilliant intellectual arguments for mutual aid, but without an embodied sense of safety, healing and belonging, these networks remain abstract — impossible to lean on when the paychecks stop.

But I am not traumatized!

“But I’m not traumatized!” I have heard this so often in my work of bringing trauma healing practices and frameworks to activist communities. Especially from men and white people. Any conversation about emotions can seem like a waste of time in a culture obsessed with productivity and rationality. But in a world in which we are bombarded with news of genocides perpetrated with our tax dollars, unhoused people dying on our streets, a mental health crisis among children, an opioid epidemic, police brutality, mass extinctions and unfolding climate chaos, none of us are shielded from the violence of this world. Our collective stubborn insistence that we are “just fine” can actually be a symptom of disassociation and trauma, not a sign of true well-being.

Crucially, the most insidious and primal traumas are personal. Too many of us did not receive the unconditional love from our families and society that is so essential for human flourishing. We were treated as less than the sacred beings that we are. Even worse, many of us have experienced acute familial violence. I also never fail to be struck by the fact that 60 percent of kids in the U.S. have faced at least one of the following: sexual abuse, physical beatings, domestic violence or alcoholism in their family. And personal trauma can be rooted in many realities of life beyond childhood abuse: intergenerational racial pain, dysfunctional societal power dynamics, and income and wealth disparities.

How do we enable more people to participate in the mutual aid that will be essential to carrying out a general strike? We can share information about how neighborhoods can meet fundamental human needs. We can advocate for healthy, grassroots decision-making. We can educate one another about conflict resolution processes and transformative justice. But does information and political education alone inspire people to act? No.

It is important to recognize that an intellectual understanding of mutual aid is fundamentally different than actually practicing mutual aid. Many of us understand that our daily actions harm the water, soil or other species, yet we continue engaging in them. We understand that there is no truly ethical consumption under capitalism, and yet we continue to consume. Our habitual consumption despite knowledge of its harms can intensify pain and trauma.

Consider the legacy of scarcity: A person might intellectually champion a political movement, but when the moment comes to contribute, they are flooded with a paralyzing anxiety they don’t understand. Later, they remember a story: “My mother lived in her car before I was born.” This isn’t just a memory; it’s an inherited, somatic warning that shouts, “Your safety is your money alone! Sharing is risking destitution!” The body’s survival impulse overrides the mind’s political commitment.

Or consider the shame of dependency: Another organizer, eager to dedicate themselves fully to the movement, feels a knot in their stomach at the idea of quitting their corporate job. The obstacle isn’t a lack of conviction, but shame at the thought of becoming dependent on others. In a society that equates self-sufficiency with virtue, the vulnerability of needing support can feel like a profound moral failure. Trauma whispers in our bodies that we should stay in a compromising job rather than face the perceived humiliation of mutual reliance.

Moving from the theory to practice of mutual aid means confronting the emotional and traumatic barriers that block us from exercising true interdependence. To build a resilient movement, we must bridge this gap between knowing and feeling. We must embody the beauty and joy of radical interdependence with other humans, and with the Earth itself.

Unless we can access the subterranean emotions preventing us from living this radical practice, it will remain little more than an intellectual exercise for most of us. Political education, when not coupled with emotional sensitivity, doesn’t land in our hearts. In fact, political education without trauma awareness can bind us deeper into our siloed opinions where we don’t see each other’s genuine needs and grief under the surface of our opinions. Many of us debate meaningless political differences rather than actually practicing mutual aid.

A trauma-informed practice of mutual aid in our daily life would look like us acknowledging our past traumas, fears or hesitations and yet offering our time, money and even bodies to our community members. This ability to “see” our traumas and act in spite of them is possible when we can tap into a strong sense of groundedness — and even joy — in our sense of belonging to our community, and hopefully our spiritual practice.

The power of multiracial coalitions

A general strike — and the mutual aid effort necessary to sustain it — requires a multiracial coalition. A multiracial coalition is crucial not just as a moral necessity, but also as a strategic necessity rooted in demography, economics, history and the current reality of who serves as essential workers. Historically, some of the most militant and class-conscious segments of the U.S. working class have been workers of color, precisely because they face the compounded exploitation of low wages, unsafe conditions and systemic racism.  

A multiracial coalition will make the movement less vulnerable to attempts by the ruling class to break strikes by exploiting racial differences through the age-old tactic of “divide and conquer.” Workers of color are disproportionately concentrated in the most exploited and strategically vital sectors (e.g. warehousing and logistics, hospitality, domestic care and agriculture) where a strike would have maximum impact. Therefore, a multiracial coalition would be able to mobilize workers at the economy’s critical chokepoints and build on the most effective traditions of labor struggle. A strike without this foundation is a ship with a hull breach; it may set sail in calm weather, but it will not survive the storm.

Building a multiracial coalition depends on confronting racial trauma. This trauma isn’t an abstract concept. It lives in the daily, embodied experiences of our potential comrades. It shows up in our meetings, in our resource sharing and in our silences. We witness it arise when a low-income femme of color calculates how to ask for rent help from her community while listening to others casually plan their summer vacations. She may wonder, “Can they truly understand what ‘mutual aid’ means when my survival is only an abstraction to them?” 

Or imagine a gentle, well-intentioned white man who can recite the statistics on racial wealth disparity but cannot feel in his body the pain of the mother in his group who works overtime to make ends meet. He overlooks her deep fatigue, the fear of a single missed shift, or the weight of an entire lineage of forced resilience. His intellectual declarations for justice become a wall, not a bridge. He has an inability to fully embody the empathy he feels. Such a man needs to move beyond intellectual understanding to feel the pain of his friends as if it were his own. He can only do this by opening up to his own layers of grief and trauma.

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These moments are not mere interpersonal friction; they are the manifestations of unhealed racial and class trauma. They are why, despite our best intentions, our coalitions fracture. Why, for example, the #MeToo movement fractured under accusations of racial bias.

Unaddressed trauma — the wild inner impulses of wrath and grief — does not vanish by suppression or avoidance. This pain can only begin to transform when it is wisely witnessed with love by our own selves and fellow human beings. By shining a light on emotions and experiences that feel neglected and shameful, we can begin to heal and move towards deeper solidarity with one another.

How can we face this trauma? 

Modern psychotherapy could be a good starting point for different kinds of activist groups. But we do not have enough well-trained and affordable therapists to confront the scale of trauma we are facing.

Many ancient healing lineages, including Indigenous and Eastern spiritualities, have also been offering us pathways for healing. In contrast to the individualist approaches common in Western healing, these approaches emphasize the creation of belonging with one’s community and the Earth itself. Modern spiritual leaders like Joanna Macy have curated pathways for healing collective ecological trauma, drawing on some of these ancient lineages. Some younger and people of color leaders are creating new integrated practices that address other kinds of trauma from both modern psychological and ancient spiritual community-based frameworks (search for facilitators here). 

Healing is, of course, not easy — it’s full of pitfalls, but it cannot be bypassed. Our mass movement must admit that a general strike can only succeed if we face our traumas head-on.

As we prepare to engage in nonviolent struggle, we must also learn to care for each other. This is the quiet, unglamorous work of our time. We must slow down to build the relational fabric for true mutual aid that will make any future strike not merely possible, but unshakable. 

This article A successful general strike requires trauma-informed mutual aid was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

As a senior, I’m trying to do my part to push back against the daily dismantling of the nation by the Trump administration. And I’m not alone.

Around 25 percent of adults in the United States are seniors. We are a powerful demographic for reclaiming and restoring democracy in this country. We want to build upon the 250 years of its existence and support its return to a position of international leadership.

In my 85 years as a citizen of the U.S., I’ve done my best to be a good one. Never shy to engage with worthwhile causes, I have been involved with disability rights, vocational rehabilitation, special education, domestic violence prevention and rehabbing offenders, senior services, youth services, food and water security, and immigrant and minority rights. I have tried to advance justice in the U.S., and some 16 plus other nations in which I have worked. Yet, since 2016, my pride in my own government has waned precipitously.

I now live in a senior independent living facility with some 50 other seniors. We are often willing to overlook our increasing infirmities and dwindling resources to engage with passion and determination. We take great pride in having a positive influence on our children — both biological and otherwise — by teaching them our values and how to uphold them.

I have scores of senior friends and family members — some are more physically capable, but many have limited mobility or are even homebound. However, all of them are engaging in civil resistance in meaningful ways. I’ve learned from them that there are many opportunities for peaceful engagement in the resistance.

Those with limited mobility are posting and commenting on social media. Those with economic means are donating to progressive candidates. Many are phone banking and writing postcards to voters and potential voters with groups like Seniors Taking Action. Others boycott businesses that support the current administration, write letters to the editor and call in to radio talk shows.

I’ve seen many seniors (and non-seniors) with canes, walkers and wheelchairs at all of the protest events I have attended. At one demonstration, an elderly, disabled fellow showed up in a wheelchair equipped with hydraulic lifts that put him at eye level with the other protesters. He was not only able to see what others saw, but others saw him, his sign and his strength as a demonstrator with the same passion and potency.

I have a friend who turns 100 later this year and uses a walker to travel any distance from our communal residence. She is one of my role models, and has taught me how to maximize my presence and impact at large demonstrations. Last summer, she made careful preparations for the No Kings protest, which was planned at the federal building located roughly a mile from our home. Before the event, she made two round-trip trial runs to build stamina and reassure herself it was doable.

When I arrived at the protest, she had already strategically placed herself where her homemade sign could be seen and she could see, hear and engage fully with the activities. At a subsequent event, with yet another sign, she was one of several League of Women Voters who sported a banner extolling their values. My friend is a firebrand who never misses an opportunity to participate.

Another friend in her mid-70s has been totally blind since early childhood. She marches in most if not all demonstrations in her area. She religiously contacts her elected officials at both the federal and state levels, expressing her appreciation for deeds well done, dismay for bad moves, and suggestions or demands for more effective action. As a Latina woman who grew up in a poor neighborhood in El Paso, the child of a single mother and sister to four younger siblings, her life experience and upbringing has taught her the importance of advocating for herself and for others. With ICE violating the rights of so many minority folks right now, she is standing up in both English and Spanish, and making sure she is heard loud and clear.

My spouse, Stan Coleman, a director, actor, vocalist and pianist, directed a local theater production of the 1936 play “It Can’t Happen Here,” based on the novel by Nobel Prize-winning author, Sinclair Lewis. The performances opened the audience’s eyes to the existential threat Trump and his followers pose to our way of life.

Other seniors have engaged in the boycotts of Target, Disney and ABC, as well as Tesla Takedown. Other elders are leaning on their alma maters to support critical issues like student organizing and protesting, avoiding campus repression, standing up for immigrant student rights, and refusing to buy into the authoritarianism of Trump’s campus compact. Since schools depend on alumni for financial support, especially through legacies, seniors are leveraging their position as potential donors to shore up their colleges’ willingness to defy Trump’s efforts at coercion and control.

As part of our resistance, my spouse and I have chosen to be active founders and members of the local chapter of States Win, formerly known as Sister District Project. This national effort works to support key state-level candidates for office through marches, bar trivia fundraisers and direct donations. Seniors make up more than 50 percent of our chapter. Additionally, our queer, senior walking group (called the “Talkie-Walkies” because we do more talking than walking) frequently sits for hours in front of our main library here in Eugene, Oregon, inviting passersby to register to vote.

Two of the founders of our States Win chapter, both women in their mid-to-late 70s, regularly travel to the home area of the candidates we are supporting and spend days knocking on doors to promote them. They report few negative reactions to their presentations. Could their age or the fact that they are seniors — and have expended considerable effort and expense to do what they are doing — be a factor in this positive reception? SDP’s impact nationally has been formidable: We helped flip both Virginia and Washington State from red to blue trifectas, where all three branches of the state government are now dominated by Democrats.

Making donations is one advocacy activity many seniors can do with little effort. Almost every person I know participates as a donor, in small or large amounts, often as just one way they engage in political activism. My spouse and I have developed a profile for those we support: We look at their platform and what in their history informs it; how they have performed in other political positions, in advocacy groups and in movements; how they have overcome difficulties to be successful; their support for minority rights; and their passion for all of the above.

Phone banking has been shown to be effective in swaying non-voters and regular voters to vote for progressive candidates. It is an activity one can do from home with proven impact. Many, many of my elderly friends participate. Writing postcards can be a solo act from the comfort of one’s kitchen table or a social event with a group of like-minded activists. Seniors might be the largest demographic engaged with postcard writing. One friend, in particular, has handwritten over 1,000 postcards in the past two years.

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Signing petitions, joining and supporting advocacy groups such as Southern Poverty Law Center, Amnesty International and the ACLU, door-to-door canvassing, writing letters and emailing, are all methods of civil, peaceful resistance that countless seniors are involved in.

Additionally, with isolation being associated with dementia, the social value of many of these activities can be meaningful. Being with others builds awareness and commitment, both of which foster mental health, along with civil resistance. In Eugene, many of us gather at a store called Materials Exchange Center for Community Arts, or MECCA, where people make signs using both new and used materials, and share ideas with others of similar persuasion. My 84-year-old supper tablemate never fails to show up at a demonstration with a new and clever sign she created at MECCA. Folks often photograph her with her sign.

Importantly, all of these resistance efforts are nonviolent, which has been shown to be the most effective way of waging struggle. Trust us on this. Not only have seniors lived long enough to know what works, the book “Civil Resistance: What Everybody Needs to Know”proves it. Erica Chenoweth demonstrates that nonviolent movements have succeeded twice as often as violent ones over the last century. Along with my fellow senior activists, I often attend Chenoweth’s webinars with the Ash Center at Harvard University.

The activism carried out by our nation’s elders is laudable and extensive. Attend any rally, march, protest and look at the amount of white hair in the rising sea of protesters. Today’s seniors are not sitting at home knitting sweaters for our grandkids or pasting memory photos in albums. Nope, we are out there pushing back and fighting for a far better gift for them: We are assuring a future where we have a fully restored and improved democracy.

Don’t mess with seniors!

This article Elders are a powerhouse of the US pro-democracy movement was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.