America’s nonprofit sector is pushing back against an ‘authoritarian playbook’

Christopher Justin Einolf, Northern Illinois University

Social scientists and commentators have for years been expressing concerns about what they call the “authoritarian playbook.” To be clear, no such book exists. But would-be and actual dictators do tend to follow a common set of strategies to consolidate power.

Since the 2000s, populist leaders from Russia to Venezuela have used their countries’ own democratic systems to overturn democracy itself. One reason for their success may be the fact that supporters of democratic institutions do not seem to have a defensive playbook to match the authoritarians’ offensive one.

Institutions that support democracy, including many nonprofits and media outlets, have few examples to learn from. And in many countries, their responses have been weak and disorganized.

I am a sociologist who researchers how membership in nonprofits can affect someone’s democratic values and how nonprofits manage to operate in nondemocratic regimes. Because there are many signs that the U.S. government is becoming increasingly autocratic, I’m now studying how U.S. nonprofits are responding to a spate of attacks on their freedom to operate.

I’ve found that many of them have been surprisingly successful.

Nonprofits under fire

The second Trump administration has cut billions in funding for nonprofits focused on improving access to healthcare and childcare and providing food for low-income people. It’s also slashing aid to developing countries.

Nonprofits that previously had contracts to carry out U.S. foreign aid priorities, such as Oxfam, Save the Children and the International Rescue Committee, have been especially hard hit after the Trump White House dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The Trump administration also restricted the ability of nonprofits to operate free from political interference.

For example, it changed the rules on a program that forgave student loans to employees of nonprofits, barring loan forgiveness to employees of nonprofits that the administration disapproves of. These include nonprofits that help undocumented immigrants, provide gender-appropriate medical care to transgender children, engage or abet what the administration calls “illegal discrimination,” or support political protests that might violate state laws against “trespassing, disorderly conduct, public nuisance, vandalism, and obstruction of highways.”

The Trump administration has also threatened to criminally prosecute nonprofits for doing advocacy work, even though advocacy by nonprofits is legal.

Congress is playing a role

Congress has added to the pressure on nonprofits by holding hearings that have accused some of them of smuggling undocumented immigrants and alleging that others made improper payments to former Biden administration officials.

At a February 2026 House of Representatives hearing, three Republicans – Jason Smith of Missouri, David Schweikert of Arizona and Tracey Mann of Kansas – accused the nonprofit Future Farmers of America of being connected to the Chinese Communist Party.

But much of this pressure is coming from the executive branch of government.

After the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10, 2025, Vice President JD Vance pledged to go after a network of nonprofits that he claimed, without evidence, “foments, facilitates and engages in violence.”

Later that month, President Donald Trump issued a national security memo that defined left-wing terrorism in terms so broad that it included protected political speech. The memo pledged to “investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations,” including “non-governmental organizations,” and designate them as “domestic terrorist organizations” if they support views that the administration considers to embody “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, extremism on migration, race and gender, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American beliefs on family, religion, and morality.”

In December 2025, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi issued instructions to field offices telling them to begin prosecutions of the “Antifa-aligned extremists” and “domestic terrorist organizations,” including nonprofits, that were described in the earlier national security memo.

That same month, Rep. David Kustoff, a Tennessee Republican, and Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, introduced a bill that would allow the Secretary of the Treasury to label nonprofits as a “terrorist-supporting organization” and strip them of their tax-exempt status.

The House passed a similar measure in 2024. It did not clear the Senate.

So far, the White House and Congress have followed up on few of those threats. However, the Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights nonprofit, on criminal charges in April 2026. The Trump administration accused the organization of fraud, not of having ties to terrorist groups.

The nonprofit response

In many countries, authoritarian attacks on the nonprofit sector have been met with ineffective resistance. Some nonprofits fought back, but in the end, most nonprofits either compromised with the new reality or were forced to shut down or go into exile.

But in the U.S., many nonprofits and large philanthropic donors are working proactively to unite and protect one another.

An April 2025 Zoom meeting where nonprofit leaders discussed their strategies crashed when more than 11,000 people tried to participate – it only had a capacity for 5,000.

Thousands of nonprofits have signed open letters protesting the Trump administration’s policies.

For example, in September 2025, 3,700 nonprofits signed an open letter protesting the national security memo that called for the prosecution of nonprofits for allegedly being “domestic terrorists.”

On May 20, 2026, the Open Society Foundations, the philanthropy run by the family of billionaire investor George Soros, responded to this threat by pledging US$300 million in legal and financial support to many of the nonprofits that find themselves targeted by the government.

Some large foundations, including the Marguerite Casey Foundation, the McKnight Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, have increased their grants to nonprofits that lost federal funding.

Bowing to pressure

Of course, not all nonprofits have pushed back.

Many of them have instead changed their mission statements, or the brief descriptions of their activities that they submit to the IRS, dropping references to anything that might displease the White House. One common revision: removing references to any efforts to advance diversity, equity and inclusion for historically disadvantaged groups because of the Trump administration’s efforts to wipe out DEI policies across the country.

Another self-preservation strategy is for nonprofits to change their websites. In February 2025, the National Domestic Violence Hotline removed information and resources for LGBTQ+ victims from its website. By July 2025, 1 in 12 foundations had censored themselves by removing DEI language from their websites.

In many cases, authoritarians come to power in countries where the nonprofit sector is weak. For example, Russia and Hungary had small, young nonprofit sectors that had only come into existence in the 1990s after the fall of communism. In poorer countries such as Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Indonesia, the nonprofit sector is vulnerable because of its dependence on foreign funding, which governments can easily restrict.

But the U.S. nonprofit sector is centuries old, well organized and very established. If successful, its efforts to resist the nation’s democratic backsliding may one day inform efforts in the rest of the world.

Christopher Justin Einolf, Professor of Sociology, Northern Illinois University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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This story was originally reported by Jenae Barnes, Climate Reporter of The 19th. Meet Jenae and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

As data centers rapidly emerge at unprecedented rates across the country, they are being met with increasing opposition — particularly from women, according to a recent Gallup poll.

More than two-thirds of adults oppose the construction of the massive and costly complexes used to power artificial intelligence, with a majority saying they’d prefer to have a nuclear power plant in their backyard instead. While women and men overwhelmingly expressed opposition, women did so more intensely. Out of 1,000 adults surveyed, 55 percent of women said they strongly oppose data centers, compared to 43 percent of men. In fact, men were more likely to favor data centers, citing their economic benefits and job opportunities.

Jeffrey Jones, a senior editor at Gallup and the study’s author, attributed the distinction to women having more empathy for public-facing issues like the environment and healthcare, and favoring Democratic policies that protect the environment. Resistance to data centers often focuses on the imposition of environmental and financial problems, like water scarcity, noise and air pollution, and excessive energy use that can result in higher utility bills and increased health complications for the low-income communities of color who live near where they are usually built.

“A lot of the opposition is based on environmental concerns about using too many resources, especially water,” Jones added. “Centers need a lot of water to cool the computing machines that they’re using. Land, electricity, and resources are the most common concerns people have.”

Gendered fears about the environment are nothing new, experts say. Women are disproportionately impacted by environmental degradation and at higher risk of poverty, food insecurity and gender-based violence when displaced by climate change, the United Nations reports. Studies have consistently shown that women are also key to driving inclusive, effective action to address the impacts of climate change. 

“I’ve been organizing for 15 years, and it’s always been the case that women are leading our fights,” said Danny Cendejas, a campaign specialist for MediaJustice, who works with grassroots movements across the country that are opposing data centers. “We are definitely seeing everyone join the fight, but we have to recognize the truth, and it’s women, trans, queer and nonbinary people leading the work.”

Cendejas pointed to environmental justice movements in places like Memphis, Tennessee, and Amarillo, Texas, which have already been overburdened by environmental pollutants and health impacts from gas and oil industries. Those impacts are now being exacerbated by data centers.

“There’s a big connection where big tech is targeting Black, Brown and Indigenous communities,” Cendejas said. “The progress that has been made over the years to shut down coal plants or gain protections… a lot of that is being undone, by big tech and the demand for data centers.” 

Data centers have become an increasingly pressing issue for candidates and their campaigns heading into the midterms in November. They’re also a rare source of bipartisan concern in a polarized political environment.

“There are really strong feelings about this. I see this playing out as a political issue, and now people who are running for governor, Senate, or local offices, are having to take a position on this, whereas this is not something people were talking about two years ago,” Jones said. “And now politicians across both parties are coming out as against data centers, which seems like the more popular viewpoint.” 

During a House hearing on Wednesday featuring the Environmental Protection Agency’s Assistant Administrator for Water Jessica Kramer, Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York held up jars of an opaque, brown liquid that she said had come out of a rural community east of Atlanta where Donald Trump got 70 percent of the vote in the last election. 

“This is the current drinking water in Morgan County, Georgia, right after a data center was constructed, the Meta data center was constructed,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “The only difference between the clean water and this was that data center.”

In New Mexico, first-time candidate Daisy Maldonado is running for county commissioner in Doña Ana County on a platform that includes opposition to Project Jupiter, a $165 billion mega data center under construction in the area. Maldonado was recently endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a proponent of data center regulation, adding to the national conversation about community resistance to AI infrastructure and environmental accountability.  

Women are also at the forefront of the opposition in Pittsburgh, where the majority of the data centers in Pennsylvania are being built.

“I see a lot of moms concerned,” said Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes, a researcher at the nonprofit Data & Society Research Institute who studied Pittsburgh’s data center industry. “It’s very connected to ‘I want a good future for my kids and if things go this way, I don’t know what world we will have for them in 15 years.’”

To Nunes, the Gallup poll’s results serve as a reminder and reflection of the gendered impacts of AI in society.

“A lot of the interviewees we had in Pennsylvania, when it comes to developers, or people in government, are mostly men, but people who are activists and doing work on the ground, they are mainly women,” Nunes said.

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Neal Morton, The Hechinger Report via The 19th.

SAN DIEGO — As an 8-year-old boy steered his bicycle in figure eights, his mother piled three plates with pizza and pineapple slices from an outdoor kitchen shared with more than a dozen other families who call this parking lot home.

She carried the plates past her family’s sedan — their last asset and, until recently, their only shelter — and placed the dinner inside a recreational vehicle assigned to them for the next six months. After dinner, she helped the third grader with his homework, then made sure he showered and brushed his teeth before bed. The next morning, she drove the 10 miles to her son’s school, where she works as a part-time site monitor. Their belongings and beds and private bathroom, meanwhile, remained secure at the city-owned lot, where homeless families like theirs find temporary stability. 

“He likes it here,” said the mother, M., who is being referred to by her first initial to protect her family’s privacy. “We can actually cook. I waste less money. There’s a lot to like.”

Since late last year, M. and her family have been living in parking lots opened by the city of San Diego, the local school district and a nonprofit partner. Priced out of San Diego’s housing market, they now call the RV lot their temporary home as they meet with a caseworker who helps them search for more permanent housing.

Family homelessness hit a record high in 2024, as the end of federal pandemic assistance and rising inflation pushed more families with children and unaccompanied youth out of their homes. A sluggish labor market and high housing costs have further strained family budgets. And now, as the number and visibility of unhoused families continue to climb, a handful of school districts are considering their parking lots as a way to shelter homeless students and their families. 

The city of San Diego began experimenting in 2017, when it partnered with nonprofit Jewish Family Service (JFS) to convert the first of what are now four parking lots into safe places to sleep. It added its first lot prioritizing families in 2023. A few months later, as the city pushed a sweeping ban on public camping, officials with San Diego Unified School District approached the city with the idea of turning a vacant elementary and other district properties into temporary shelters.   

The model is now spreading beyond California. In Ohio, the Cincinnati school district later this spring will open its first safe parking lot for families at a downtown elementary school. The teachers union for Fayette County Public Schools, in neighboring Kentucky, has asked its school board to follow Cincinnati’s lead. 

San Diego’s parking program has drawn some opposition, including from nearby residents and private developers who worry about crime and impact on property values. Progressives here also wonder, quietly, whether the program diverts attention and resources from addressing why families lose their housing in the first place. The Trump administration, meanwhile, also has criticized safe parking lots as “dystopian” and “reprehensible” — even as it plans for major cuts to long-term housing programs. With the exception of the Rose Canyon lot where M. and her family are staying, San Diego’s safe parking sites do not offer RVs. All sites offer security and portable bathrooms to families and most include microwaves and seating areas.

But some advocates for homeless people argue the safe parking sites are an effective, if highly imperfect, short-term fix, offering autonomy and dignity to people as they search for more permanent housing. 

“Parking lots are a terrible option, but there are options that are worse,” said Jennifer Erb-Downward, director of housing stability programs and policy initiatives for Poverty Solutions, a University of Michigan project to promote economic mobility. “Often the only other option is literal homelessness, in your car and on the streets. This creates a middle ground where you can get families into the system, where you can try to meet their needs and in a place that keeps them safe.”

The San Diego school district says students can’t learn unless they’re safe and healthy. It refers families to city shelters, but those don’t have nearly enough space to accommodate the need. 

“The goal is for this to be a way station,” Kristy Drake, the district’s liaison for homeless and foster youth, said of the school district’s lot. “When families drive onto this lot,” Drake added, “they come into this wider network of support and resources. The goal is to move on. Hopefully no one’s there too long.”

Never before have so many families in the U.S. lived without stable housing, according to the most recent data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Its annual homeless census from January 2024 found nearly 260,000 people in families with children experiencing homelessness — a jump of more than 50 percent since before the pandemic. And those figures are likely undercounts: Experts often note that HUD’s numbers don’t capture “hidden” homelessness, such as families who sometimes pay out of pocket to stay in hotels and motels or couch-surf with friends and families to avoid the streets. And while the agency still hasn’t released homeless numbers for 2025, early data from school districts and states around the country suggest youth homelessness continues to rise.

In California, family homelessness has risen 14 percent since before the pandemic. 

“There’s this huge amount of instability that exists for children in this country that goes unrecognized,” said Erb-Downward. “Pretty much the only point of true stability they have is their school.”

M., who grew up in nearby Calexico and has lived in San Diego since 2012, lost her housing after the expiration of the subsidy her family received through a federal rental assistance program Congress created during the pandemic. The program ran out of cash last year, and M.’s subsidy expired just as her landlord planned to hike their rent by nearly a third.

“It was like, there’s no way we can do that,” said M. “We tried to look for an affordable place,” she added. “They’re all asking three times rent and a 650 credit score. That’s impossible right now.”

In San Diego County, there are roughly 1,500 people in families experiencing homelessness, but only a handful of emergency shelters offer space for children and parents. San Diego, the county and several surrounding cities have recently closed their waiting lists for housing vouchers that subsidize the cost of rent. M. did not want to leave the city, but had few options.

As the family packed their belongings into storage, M. contemplated asking friends to allow her son to crash on their couch while she and her husband slept in their vehicle. But then the principal at her son’s school learned of their situation and encouraged M. to sign up as the first family to move into a new safe parking lot at the former Central Elementary School.

A security guard station separates the gates to the Central Elementary lot from construction on a busy boulevard in the eastern City Heights neighborhood. So far, 15 families have used one of the 40 spots for vehicles there. In a pair of old portable classrooms, the district and JFS added microwaves for families to prepare food. Parents can meet with case managers while students access Wi-Fi to do homework or play on the school’s old soccer field.

For M. and some other parents, the lots are preferable to shelters, many of which keep hard curfews, require that minors be supervised at all times and lack quiet space to do homework, said Jesse Mendez, director of the safe parking program for JFS. 

By contrast, the Rose Canyon lot provides each family with their own trailer. With philanthropic support, the city and JFS also recently added the covered communal area, which includes a small library, dining and study area, charging station for electronics and the shared kitchen. 

“Here, you’re choosing who gets to sleep next to you and in a place where you’re safe,” Mendez said. “Kids end up here by no choice of their own. I don’t want them to even realize they’re experiencing homelessness.”

Not long after the Rose Canyon lot opened for families in 2023, school district leaders began to consider converting the lot at the Central Elementary school campus into a safe parking site. Eventually the district plans to develop the school into affordable housing for teachers, custodians and other district employees, but construction crews aren’t expected to break ground for years. In San Diego, salaries for many district employees are low: Hourly school staff, like classroom aides and bus monitors, can earn as little as $1,832.64 a month, with median rent topping $2,200 for a one-bedroom apartment as of January. A two-bedroom apartment would cost M.’s family a median of nearly $3,000 a month.

“We have this vacant land, sitting in the middle of a city struggling with the problem of homelessness,” said the school district’s Drake. “Why not put up this land? We just ask that our families get first dibs on spaces.”

As she waited for funding from the city to materialize, Drake began calling every family in her database that listed their residence as either unsheltered or in a hotel or motel — anyone who might be living in their car.

When funding finally came through just before Thanksgiving 2025, she quickly could refer more than two dozen families to the lot. It’s a subset of homeless families who are eligible, notes Drake — families must have their own vehicle to qualify, meaning they need enough resources to own one but do not have enough to pay rent. 

The lot at Central Elementary is open to families each day from 6 p.m. to 7 a.m. There’s a row of portable restrooms, but families must wait until a nearby YMCA opens and allows them to shower. They have access to its food pantry as well.  

M. said she vastly prefers the Rose Canyon lot to the one at the school, though. There’s often construction noise from work on an apartment complex next door, she said, and “the area’s not great. There’s a lot of homeless people on the streets there. It matters, the location.”

Last year, San Diego County recorded a dramatic drop — 72 percent — in the number of families living without shelter. Some homeless and housing advocates say the city’s 2023 ban on public camping just pushed more homeless families out of sight.

Yet research on JFS’s safe parking model suggests it does make a difference for families longer-term: A 2024 study found that 40 percent of households that stayed at a JFS site between March 2020 and November 2021 had moved on to more stable housing, either permanent or temporary. Clients who had used both the parking program and emergency shelters “highly preferred” the lots, the study said. More recently, JFS reported that 53 percent of all households in the program and 76 percent at the Rose Canyon lot found more stable housing. (The national average for people moving from homeless services into permanent housing hovered just below 34 percent last year, according to HUD. And across San Diego, shelters generally reported a similar rate of only 9 percent, the study noted.)

JFS enrolls households for an initial 60 days, as case managers work with them to set goals and make progress toward stable housing. Many families stay longer. 

In March, that assistance finally paid off for Dezarae S. and her family.

She and her siblings spent most of their childhood homeless, living in San Diego’s emergency shelters, on the streets or in their mother’s car. Mendez, now with JFS, first met Dezarae years ago during one of her family’s stays at a shelter. They met again recently when Dezarae — whose surname is withheld to protect her children’s privacy — moved with her husband and their four kids onto the Rose Canyon lot.

Her twin sons, 2, are both autistic and met with specialists at the lot to prepare for preschool. The youngest boy, a 1-year-old, is a light sleeper. Her oldest daughter, 4, was potty trained in the RV.

“It doesn’t feel like we live in an RV,” said Dezarae last month, adding that her childhood memories fueled her motivation to keep her own kids out of shelters and off the streets.

Then, after three years on the city’s waiting list for a housing voucher, they finally secured one and moved into a three-bedroom apartment in late March.

“My kids are my world, and my kids are still happy,” Dezarae said. “We do everything in our power to keep their childhood innocence.”

Other districts are trying to help families experiencing homelessness by following San Diego’s lead. The Cincinnati Public Schools safe sleep lot is scheduled to open with a dozen spots; the district will hire security to monitor the lot seven days a week and build a structure to house a private bathroom, laundry and shower facilities.

Rebeka Beach, head of homeless services for Cincinnati schools, visited safe parking programs in San Diego and at Long Beach Community College before adopting the idea.

Beach acknowledged that the safe parking program was just a stopgap, with many more families needing help. She also spends more than $50,000 each year to place students and their families in short-term hotels and motels. “We know it’s not a solution. It’s just a bridge and response to an immediate crisis.”

Educators in Kentucky’s Fayette County Public Schools, which reported more than 1,100 students as homeless this year, shared a similar message. “Schools can’t take care of everything, but we feel we can help where we can,” Laura Hartke, an organizer with American Federation of Teachers-120, a local union, who is encouraging her district to adopt the model, told local media.

M., meanwhile, continues to weigh her options. She considered moving her family back to her hometown of Calexico, more than 100 miles away, but that would have meant leaving her job. The housing voucher program, now closed, isn’t an option for her family like it was for Dezarae’s. And with gas prices climbing and a high monthly bill to store their belongings, it’s difficult to save

“There’s no getting ahead,” she said.

But they find free ways to enjoy time as a family, at the beach and nearby tide pools. M. recently got her son’s bike out of the family’s storage unit too.   

Watching him ride the figure eights, she said, “We just got to make it work.”

Contact staff writer Neal Morton at 212-678-8247, on Signal at nealmorton.99, or via email at morton@hechingerreport.org.

This story about homeless students was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Last week, the Tampa City Council approved $35 million for a project known as Ybor Harbor. 

Ybor Harbor seeks to redevelop the dilapidated waterfront area between Ybor and Channelside. 

The $35 million from the Community Redevelopment Agency will go towards underground utilities, roadway networks, and a marine seawall at the site. 

All city council members voted in support. 

Developer Darryl Shaw leads the effort. 

During public comment, East Tampa resident and business owner Allison Hewitt praised the project while hoping the surrounding areas could benefit. 

“We need to make sure, in surrounding areas, those small businesses, those residences, are prepared and have incentives to be able to stay and take advantage of this incredible growth,” Hewitt said.

City council member Alan Clendenin called the project “transformational.”

“I fully support this project, so I’m looking forward to my kids, my grandkids, and everybody else to be able to enjoy this area. Thank you.” Clendenin said.

Developers of the 32-acre development say they expect to spend around 200 million dollars in total infrastructure funding, and ten percent of housing built on the site will be affordable housing.

According to developers, the industrialized site, which historically served Tampa’s maritime industry,  is currently highly environmentally contaminated. 

Avi Freedman Shaw, with developer Casa Ybor, mentioned at the meeting that there are two active brownfields identified by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection that require cleanup.

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A man convicted of fatally stabbing of his cousin’s girlfriend and the couple’s 4-year-old daughter has been executed in Florida.

Richard Knight was pronounced dead last night after a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison. It was Florida’s seventh execution so far this year and comes after a record 19 executions in the state last year.

The Tampa City Council voted 4 to 3 yesterday to approve a nonbinding memorandum of understanding for a new, 2.3 billion dollar Tampa Bay Rays stadium and surrounding development.

The agreement details a $976 million public contribution toward the cost of the stadium, with $796 million from Hillsborough County and about $180 million coming from the City of Tampa. Public comment was mixed. Some residents cautioned council members about making the deal, saying more conversations need to be had with the taxpayers. Michelle Dyson, a bartender at Raymond James, Steinbrenner, and Tropicana Field, supports the memorandum. Council members Charlie Miranda, Guido Maniscalco, and Lynn Hurtak voted no. Bill Carlson, Naya Young, Luis Viera and Alan Clendenin voted yes. On Wednesday, Hillsborough County commissioners voted 5 to 2 in favor of the deal..

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released its annual hurricane season outlook.

Florida Public Radio Emergency Network meteorologist ANDREW Wulfeck reports, NOAA is expecting a below-average year in the tropics, similar to Colorado State University.

Florida Senator Rick Scott is voicing concerns about the choice of the next University of Florida President.

UF announced Stuart Bell as the sole finalist earlier this week. He held the same position at the University of Alabama for a decade. Senator Scott says he does not know Bell, and that UF was not transparent about its search process. Under Florida law, applicants for state university president do NOT have to be disclosed. Before the search process, UF held three online listening sessions to get community input. Scott also criticized the contract of the current interim president Donald Landry — and questioned why HE was not a finalist. The contract says if Landry is not made the permanent president, he’ll be paid his base salary of 2-million dollars through August 2027. Scott says he was not aware of public discussion about the contract and there needs to be an investigation. Other criticisms of Bell come from conservatives who are opposed to diversity, equity and inclusion programs. But in a post on X, Governor Ron DeSantis supported Bell’s nomination.

On Sunday, the Tampa Immigrant Rights Coalition walked door-to-door on North Armenia Avenue in West Tampa.

WMNF’s Sofia Caballero reports, the group is sharing information with the community.

The Scoop: Tampa Bay & Florida headlines by WMNF

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Uncovering coded antisemitism online takes both human expertise and AI automation

Wendy Melillo, American University School of Communication; Jeff Gill, American University, and Nathalie Japkowicz, American University

This article includes examples of antisemitic hate speech.

The men accused of carrying out high-profile antisemitic attacks in the United States in recent years shared an important characteristic: They posted hate speech on their social media accounts beforehand.

The FBI said the man who drove his truck into a synagogue outside Detroit in March 2026 posted on Facebook that “Israel is a cancerous/malignant growth” and “Israel is pure evil.” The online footprint of the gunman charged with shooting and killing two Israeli Embassy staffers at the Capital Jewish Museum in May 2025 contained anti-Israel comments. The shooter sentenced to death for killing 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018 frequently used antisemitic hate speech in his social media.

Hate speech uses feelings, emotions and attitudes that seek to dehumanize individuals or groups. At times, animosity is clear. But it can also take a more hidden form, using code words or terms understood only by like-minded people. Coded hate speech can evade online content censors and recruit people who might balk at more clearly discriminatory speech.

There are an estimated 5.7 billion social media accounts worldwide. Even when hate speech is explicit, content moderators struggle with the volume and deciding how much to monitor users’ speech. There are also alternative – some argue extremist – sites that limit content moderation, including 4chan, BitChute, Gab, GETTR, Parler, Rumble and Truth Social.

We are a group of interdisciplinary researchers at American University who study the rhetorical strategies behind overt and coded hate speech on social media. Our Unmasking Antisemitism project uses artificial intelligence, qualitative analysis and survey experiments to develop studies and tools to detect both types of terms. This article discusses examples of antisemitic hate speech that are disturbing but illustrate types of terms and how to counter this dangerous influence.

Two types of hate speech

To understand the difference between direct and coded hate speech, consider shooter Robert Bowers’ language before the Tree of Life massacre. On Gab, he used older, virulently antisemitic slurs such as “kike,” a “highly offensive term used to insult and denigrate people of Jewish faith or ethnicity that is widely considered to be a form of hate speech,” according to the American Jewish Committee.

Other extremist terms are just as offensive but less obvious, such as “oven dodger,” which Bowers also used on Gab: a reference to how German Nazis systematically exterminated Jews during the Holocaust. Like overt phrases, coded terms often draw on older, well-researched antisemitic tropes, such as “Jews have too much power,” repacking them in new words and phrases.

They can also have double meanings, which makes hate speech harder to moderate. The original definition of “globalist” refers to a person who believes that policies should be planned with the whole world’s interest in mind rather than just one country. But globalist also has an antisemitic connotation.

As the American Jewish Committee “Translate Hate” glossary puts it, antisemites often use “globalist” to disparage Jews, promoting a conspiracy theory that “Jewish people do not have allegiance to their countries of origin, like the United States, but to some worldwide order – like a global economy or international political system – that will enhance their control over the world’s banks, governments and media.” This repackages long-standing Nazi and Soviet propaganda about Jews based on historical antisemitic tropes.

How terms develop

In the early days of social media, companies responded to criticism of the more hateful content on their platforms by using a combination of AI and human analysis to moderate content. The automated tools use natural language processing to analyze context, detect slurs and flag content. Human workers analyze more complex language, such as irony and slang.

But keeping up with the volume of posts is challenging, especially for more subtle hate speech. Our team’s goals are to identify coded antisemitic terms, understand how they develop, and create technology to track them.

The key is to understand that hate terms have a life cycle. Some take a path toward more public use, while others disappear.

New terms tend to emerge from a small set of people considered leaders or influencers in antisemitic circles online. In some cases, their communities adopt the term and normalize it; other times, it’s dropped from use.

The term “cultural Marxism,” which has its origins in the antisemitic belief that Jewish intellectuals seek to subvert Western culture, was adopted into wider use. “Jew jab,” on the other hand – a white supremacist conspiracy theory claiming that COVID-19 vaccines were a Jewish plot to harm people – soon disappeared.

Tracking hate

In our initial pilot project we started with 46 antisemitic terms, both overt and coded, from the American Jewish Committee’s glossary. We entered the terms in Pyrra, now called Alert Media – a private software company that allows users to scrape posts from a collection of social media sites.

Researchers trained in definitions of antisemitism, historical antisemitic tropes and hate speech detection identified 24 additional terms. White supremacists use the symbol “1488,” for example, to identify each other. The first part, “14,” references the “14-word” slogan of white supremacist leader David Lane. The “88” stands for “Heil Hitler,” based on “h” being the eighth letter of the alphabet. Other coded terms are less well known, such as “DOTR” or “Day of the Rope,” a reference to the 1978 book “The Turner Diaries,” which was written under a pseudonym by neo-Nazi William Pierce.

To track which coded terms have spread to the general public, we scrutinized mainstream media content and ran survey experiments to see whether people recognized them. We also developed an AI software tool designed to automatically track how coded language evolves. The app is trained on data from Pyrra and learns to identify new antisemitic terms based on the context in which they appear.

First, the app identifies distinctive terms based on how frequently they appear in each post, versus how rare they are on the platform in general. To find out whether these terms have an antisemitic connotation, we encode their context, such as other words in the post, and calculate whether it is close to the context of already known antisemitic terminology. Some of the terms our app has identified are explicit, while others are coded.

This approach can also be applied to hate speech targeted at other groups, such as Latinos, LGBTQ+ people and women. We aim to create a tool kit that can be distributed to nonprofit groups, think tanks and policymakers considering legislative efforts to curb hate speech.

Humans and machines

Given the massive number of posts on social media every day, our work illustrates how detecting new hate speech requires an interdisciplinary group of researchers working with machines.

One academic discipline working independently is too siloed, and humans alone can’t handle the scale. But machines alone can’t understand sophisticated human language, slang or context.

History shows that at every moment of profound technological change in our communication systems, incidents targeting Jews or other minority groups go up dramatically. This era’s technical innovation is unprecedented – but unfortunately, hate speech now travels around the globe almost instantly. Technology may be part of the problem, but its immense power can be harnessed to create a solution.

Wendy Melillo, Associate Professor of Journalism, American University School of Communication; Jeff Gill, Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, American University, and Nathalie Japkowicz, Professor of Computer Science, American University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The WMNF Song of the Day for May 22, 2026 is “How Soon is Now?” by The Smiths.

The Smiths were an English rock band formed in Manchester in 1982, composed of Morrissey (vocals), Johnny Marr (guitar), Andy Rourke (bass) and Mike Joyce (drums). Morrissey and Marr formed the band’s songwriting partnership. The Smiths are regarded as one of the most important British bands and one of the pioneers of 1980s independent music.

In retrospect, it’s easier to see The Smiths made such an indelible impression. The irrepressible Morrissey was the focal point, his baritone croon expressing lyrics rich with vulnerable emotions, mordant humor, a library of literary references and stories that felt like kitchen sink dramas reimagined through song. Guitarist Johnny Marr was his perfect foil: his distinctive arpeggios and chiming melodies exuding melody and musicality while maintaining a punkish back-to- basics approach. But The Smiths were more than the total of their front duo. Andy Rourke’s fluid basslines seemingly effortlessly complemented Marr’s leads as much as they did Mike Joyce’s propulsive drum rhythms.

“How Soon is Now?” is the SOTD to remind you that there is a WMNF Event featuring Ordinary Boys. Ordinary Boys, formed in Miami in 2010, were created to honor the legacy of The Smiths and Morrissey. The band takes its name from Morrissey’s song “The Ordinary Boys.” What started as a one-off show at the legendary Churchill’s Pub quickly turned into a beloved act among Smiths and Morrissey fans.

This is WMNF’s last event at Ybor City’s beloved Crowbar before it closes forever. Come celebrate Crowbar and experience a night of unforgettable 80s alternative music. Ordinary Boys promise to bring down the house with their set of 80s covers and Smiths classics that will leave you utterly breathless.

If you want to find out more about The Smiths: https://www.officialsmiths.co.uk/

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The Tampa City Council voted 4 to 3 to approve a nonbinding memorandum of understanding for a new $2.3 billion Tampa Bay Rays stadium.

The memorandum details a $976 million public contribution toward the cost of the stadium, with $796 million from Hillsborough County and around $180 million coming from the City of Tampa.

Councilmember Luis Viera said it wouldn’t be reasonable to vote the memorandum down.

“There are legitimate concerns that I obviously acknowledge, but, to me, the good far outweighs the bad in terms of moving forward at this time. It clearly does to me.” Viera said.

Public comment was mixed, with some cautioning councilmembers on making the deal, saying more conversations need to be had with the taxpayers.

Stephanie Poynor says the decisions should be put on the ballot.

“I have a real issue – my momma always says, my husband says you can’t spend other people’s money. And if we are voting on this, and I understand the MOU, and I understand how it works. But I also understand that you guys should not be making this decision.” Poyner said.

Council members Charlie Miranda, Guido Maniscalco, and Lynn Hurtak voted no.

Council members Bill Carlson, Naya Young, Luis Viera, and Alan Clendenin voted yes.

On Wednesday, Hillsborough County commissioners voted 5 to 2 in favor of the memorandum.

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