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This article How two phone booths connected strangers across party lines was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

In January 2026, a man installed two phone booths in cities 1,560 miles apart. 

One phone booth was in Abilene, Texas, one of the most conservative pockets of the country, and the other was in one of the most liberal, San Francisco. Signs on the phone booths read, “Call a Democrat” and “Call a Republican,” respectively. Anyone walking by could either make a call or pick up a ringing phone. 

There were 387 recorded conversations during the six-week “party line” experiment and, even though many were short, they were surprisingly profound. The word “love” was used 398 times (six times more than “Trump”) and people frequently showed solidarity toward one another, saying things like, “It’s us against the world, man.”

The man who installed the phones works for Matter Neuroscience, a self-described “emotional fitness” organization whose mission is to help people become more aware of how hormones and other brain chemicals impact one’s everyday outlook. The company is interested in exploring how seeking connection can help retrain our brains to boost feel-good neurotransmitters like dopamine and cannabinoids. 

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While the party line experiment may have been held in the name of neuroscience, it holds five key lessons for how we can organize more effectively in a hyper-polarized, digitally mediated world by prioritizing connection, curiosity and creativity.

1. People are eager to find common ground outside of politics

The participants in the conversations instinctively sought out areas of connection, no matter how small. They giggled about how odd it was to suddenly find themselves on the phone with a stranger. They chitchatted about the weather and their plans for the day. 

When one caller from San Francisco introduced himself as Christopher, the other excitedly replied, “Chris, man, that’s my brother’s name!” Steven and Stephanie chuckled at the similarities in their names. Another pair was amused to realize they were both 46 years old. 

When a woman in Texas asked a man in San Francisco what housing prices were like in the city, she was shocked by his reply that you can’t get a one-bedroom apartment for less than half a million. In Abilene, she said, you can get a house for $200,000.

But she added that a recently built data center had brought 15,000 new employees who were buying up homes in the city. They moved into discussing whether data centers use too much water and energy and wistfully agreed they wished we could return to the 1990s, a simpler time before the internet and artificial intelligence. 

And of course there is the state of the country. 

When one caller asked another, “Do you see the world as crazy as I do?”, she sighed and replied, “I do. It’s getting worse and worse every day.” 

2. Many people don’t fit neatly within party lines

Although the phones were labeled with the names of political parties, many of the callers were quick to point out they didn’t identify as either Republican or Democrat. 

When one caller in San Francisco asked a woman in Abilene if she was a Republican, she laughed and said, “Yes, I am.” But she then paused and backtracked. “Well, no. Hmm, I’m probably an independent, I would say, as I’ve gotten older.”  

Previous Coverage

Why I keep building bridges even when I’m full of doubt 

Early on in another conversation, a man in California began the conversation by saying, “I am not a Democrat per se. … I kind of abandoned the Democratic party.” 

More than 40 percent of callers said they didn’t identify with either party, which is an accurate reflection of the country: A record 45 percent of Americans now identify as Independent (while only 27 percent identify as Republican and 27 percent as Democrat). 

Importantly for organizing, the transcripts of these calls remind us that people are often more committed to values like fairness, stability and opportunity than to party labels.

3. Creative activities are an accessible way to engage people  

A recent Pew poll found that 90 percent of Americans feel exhausted when thinking about politics. 

When people are burned out, creativity can be one of the most effective ways to reengage them. While many of the people who made or answered party line calls might have been wary of, say, talking to a stranger campaigning on the street, the phone booths gave them a way to engage with politics that was novel and self-led. 

Activities like these don’t have to be expensive or complicated. In this case, Matter Neuroscience bought the phone booths on Facebook Marketplace for $300, painted them, got permission from two stores to install the phones in front of them, and put Verizon SIM cards in the phones to allow them to work like cell phones.   

Organizers can take inspiration from other participatory art, such as Yara El-Sherbini’s political art installations based on children’s games. For example, her piece “Border Control” reimagines the game BuzzWire. Participants have one minute to “cross” a wire shaped like the U.S.-Mexico border. If they touch the wire, sounds and lights flash. Or take New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s recent scavenger hunt, which led 5,000 New Yorkers along a route with seven stops leading to landmarks named after former mayors (with the prize of a bag of potato chips — a playful poke at former mayor Eric Adams passing a bribe to a reporter in an empty potato chip bag).   

By thinking creatively, organizers can draw people into activities and conversations that give them an unexpected, fresh and less combative way to engage with one another and with political issues.  

4. People are keen to see hopeful messages online    

In a media environment that is optimized for outrage, it’s refreshing to see images and videos that capture genuine human connection. They stand out because they resist the dominant narrative of polarization.   

Matter Neuroscience’s first few party line videos were liked by more than a quarter million people, and the comment sections were filled with people saying things like, “We all have more in common than we think,” “This is the answer. People talking,” and “This made me tear up. What a beautiful idea to bring us back together.” 

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Organizers who focus their online messaging on authentic connection and kindness can create the kind of community that people are excited to be part of.

5. Clear guidelines influence behavior  

Putting simple guidelines in place can help potentially inflammatory activities run more smoothly. For example, on each phone booth, there was a description of the party line experiment that included the line, “The goal for this project is for people from different places to have a meaningful conversation and enjoy common humanity.” 

That simple prompt seemed to work, as only five percent of calls had any kind of negative interactions (and none had sustained confrontation). 

Many calls have ended with both people saying they felt better and more positive about the country after the call. 

In a moment fraught with division, the party line experiment is a welcome lesson for organizers that to build the biggest, broadest coalitions possible, we must find creative ways for people to connect across their differences in order to seek out and nurture solidarity. 

This article How two phone booths connected strangers across party lines was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

April 16, 2026 – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SUWA Statement on Passage of Legislation Attacking Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness using the Congressional Review Act (CRA) – 4.16.26  Threat remains to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument 

Contacts:
Grant Stevens, Communications Director, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA); (319) 427-0260; grant@suwa.org

Washington, DC – Today, the U.S. Senate voted 50-49, passing H.J. Res. 140, which overturns the 20-year mining ban in the headwaters of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Northern Minnesota, the most visited wilderness area in America. Another iconic landscape – Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Southern Utah – faces a similar threat (undoing of the Monument Management Plan) using the same nefarious legislative tool: the Congressional Review Act (CRA). Below is a statement from SUWA Executive Director Scott Braden:  

“Today is a tragic day for the Boundary Waters and all who care about stewarding public lands and wilderness. Using the Congressional Review Act to undo protections is a short-sighted mistake – whether it’s the Boundary Waters or Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument,” said Scott Braden, Executive Director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA). “Congress should stop attacking cherished public lands.” 

Additional information re: H.J. Res 140 and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness can be found here. There is widespread and growing opposition to this outrageous use of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to attack Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. A compilation can be found here.  

About Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument & the Monument Management Plan 

Since its establishment, heightened protections for the Monument’s geology, paleontology, wildlife, plant communities, and ancestral sites have succeeded in preserving these unique values for generations to come, and local communities on the Monument’s doorstep have benefited as well. Nearly 30 years later, the numerous benefits of protecting Grand Staircase-Escalante are clear: the Monument preserves a remarkable ecosystem at the landscape level and sets the stage for future discovery about human, paleontological, and geological history on the Colorado Plateau.  

On December 4, 2017, President Trump ignored millions of public comments and unlawfully eliminated large swaths of the Monument, slashing it by 47 percent – roughly 900,000 acres. Thankfully, on October 8, 2021, President Biden signed a proclamation restoring Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to its full, original boundaries. In 2023, BLM began developing a new management plan for the full Monument. As a part of that work, the BLM engaged in extensive outreach to Tribal Nations, the State of Utah, local governments, stakeholders (including outfitters and guides, ranchers, local utilities), and the public. During the planning process, BLM received overwhelming support from throughout Utah and the nation for a holistic, conservation-based management plan worthy of this remarkable place. 

In August 2023, a Federal District Court Judge in Utah dismissed lawsuits brought by the state of Utah and others challenging President Biden’s use of the Antiquities Act to restore the boundaries of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments. The state and other plaintiffs quickly appealed that decision to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, which held oral argument on September 26, 2024, and may issue a decision at any time. Conservation organizations intervened on behalf of the United States to defend President Biden’s restoration of the Monuments, as have four Tribal nations. 

National monuments are overwhelmingly popular. Seventy-five percent of Utah voters support the President’s ability to protect public lands as national monuments. Three in four Utah voters, including a majority of Republicans, want to keep Grand Staircase-Escalante as a national monument. 

About the Congressional Review Act (CRA) 

The CRA is a federal statute enacted in March 1996 that requires federal agencies to submit “rules” to Congress for a mandatory review period “before they may take effect.” If Congress votes to overturn, or “disapprove,” the rule, it “may not be reissued in substantially the same form. . . .” The BLM has long maintained that its land management plans are not “rules” subject to the CRA. Other federal land management agencies, including the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service, have similarly not submitted their land management plans to Congress under the CRA. 

However, emboldened by a series of non-binding Government Accountability Office (GAO) opinions, Republican members of Congress have embraced the novel theory that federal land management plans are in fact “rules” subject to the CRA. This year, Congress has passed six CRA resolutions overturning previously finalized land management plans or other types of public lands management decisions.  The GAO issued an opinion regarding the Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument Management Plan on January 15, 2026. 

• While overturning the Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument management plan would not change the boundaries of the monument or alter President Biden’s proclamation establishing the monument, it is a serious threat with potential implications for all national monuments.  

• Monument management plans set expectations for how the land will be managed for wildlife, outdoor access, dark night skies, grazing, and other uses. The Utah delegation’s gambit threatens that certainty. Using the CRA to overturn the Grand Staircase-Escalante management plan disregards years of public input on how these lands are managed for the public, including hunters, hikers, scientists, ranchers, and others who hold permits to use public lands inside the monument. 

• Congress is ignoring Tribal Nations. Multiple Native American Tribes are connected to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition advocates for the conservation of their ancestral lands and for the continued protection and preservation of the cultural and environmental resources found within the monument. Tribes provide deeply valuable perspectives related to the management of Monument lands and cultural resources that tell the story of their peoples, and are integral to the history of the United States, and should be consulted before any changes are made to the Monument’s management plan. 

Additional Information 

• March 4, 2026 Press Release – Senator Lee, Rep. Maloy Introduce Joint Resolution to Undo Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Management Plan 

• February 26, 2026 Press Release – Senator Lee formally begins process to fast-track the destruction of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah  

• The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Inter-tribal Coalition who have spoken against using the CRA on the Monument Management Plan 

• Additional quotes can be found here. 

### 
The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) is a nonprofit organization with members and supporters from around the country dedicated to protecting America’s redrock wilderness. From offices in Moab, Salt Lake City, and Washington, DC, our team of professionals defends the redrock, organizes support for America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act, and stewards a world-renowned landscape. Learn more at www.suwa.org 

 

 

The post SUWA Statement on Passage of Legislation Attacking Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Using the CRA – 4.16.26 appeared first on Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

We invite you to watch this short “teaser” video of "Radical Visions Reconnecting Academia and Nature: A Community Truth, Reckoning and Right Relationship" from a two-day event in March 2026.

The post Radical Visions Reconnecting Academia and Nature: A Community Truth, Reckoning and Right Relationship appeared first on CELDF - Community Rights Pioneers - Protecting Nature and Communities.

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

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

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

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

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

Israeli forces raided Al-Quds University in Abu Dis in the occupied West Bank on April 8, 2025, attacking staff and students with rubber bullets, stun grenades and tear gas, and wounding dozens. (Birzeit University)

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

The right to education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We need more than solidarity”

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

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

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

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

Previous Coverage

How democratizing universities would supercharge the pro-Palestine divestment movement

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

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

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

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

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

Cutting ties to the military-academic complex 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Academic partnerships

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

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

Previous Coverage

In Gaza, education is a daily act of quiet resistance

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

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

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

Education as an act of anti-colonial resistance

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

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

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

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

Classes were held outside the university gates after Israel shut down Birzeit University during the First Intifada in 1988. (Birzeit University)

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

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

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

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

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently canceled a US$300 million grant program designed to support underserved producers across the United States.

In 2023, the USDA selected grantee projects across 40 states and territories to expand land ownership opportunities for marginalized farmers under the Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access (ILCMA) Program. Many of these efforts also offered agricultural training, promoted sustainable production practices, and helped farmers connect to markets.

In late March, the agency issued termination letters to 49 of the 50 projects. Farm Service Agency Associate Administrator Steven Peterson called the grants “discriminatory.” And the USDA claimed “most of the awards did little to improve land access” and that there was “excessive spending on outreach and technical assistance.” 

But the projects were hardly allowed to move forward, says Amanda Koehler, Manager of the Land, Capital, and Market Access Network, an independent group that brings together awardees and sub-awardees of the grant program.

“They froze the funding for four months. They cut off communication with awardees,” Koehler tells Food Tank. She says that program officers were trying to purchase land or create mini-grants for producers, but the required pre-approvals from officials never came. “The USDA really undermined this program and made it really challenging for these projects to do what they were designed to do.”

The kind of support that the ILCMA Program offered, however, is crucial to sustaining the agriculture sector, according to the National Young Farmers Coalition. USDA data show that the average age of farmers in the U.S. is on the rise and nearing 60.

The issue isn’t that young people don’t want to farm, Koehler says. It’s that the infrastructure doesn’t exist as they try to enter the sector. “We have a very fragile farm and food system right now, one that young people do want to be a part of, but we have so many barriers against us.”

Land access is the biggest challenges, but consolidation in the agriculture sector, student loan debt, and the rising cost of healthcare and housing are also holding back young and young and beginning farmers. The burden of these obstacles is particularly felt by Black farmers, who make up less than 2 percent of producers today.

But farmers are increasingly speaking out and sharing their stories, helping policmakers see the realities that they face. And Koehler is made optimistic by the solidarity she sees in her own community. The urgency is great, she says, and time is running out, but change is possible.

“Even if we don’t make progress in the next year or two, we will make progress on this in the long run,” Koehler tells Food Tank. “I am hopeful that we can right the ship.”

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Amanda Koehler on “Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg” to hear more about the challenges stacked against new and beginning farmers, the land transition that’s needed to support them, and hopes for the next Farm Bill and future agriculture policies.

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of USDA

The post USDA Terminates Land Access Program for New Farmers appeared first on Food Tank.

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L’accent mis par le capitalisme sur le travail acharné comme clé du succès occulte commodément une triste réalité : celle d’une main-d’œuvre confrontée à des conditions de travail qui se détériorent et à une précarité croissante, tandis que l’extractivisme a conduit la planète au bord de l’effondrement écologique. Des enseignements d’André Gorz à la quête d’équilibre entre vie professionnelle et vie privée de la génération Z, la libération du temps est au cœur des efforts visant à améliorer nos conditions de vie – non pas seulement pour consommer librement en tant qu’individus, mais pour nous rassembler en tant que communauté.

Dirk Holemans: Pour les progressistes un peu plus âgés, André Gorz a été une source d’inspiration. Mais une question fascinante est aussi ce que Gorz a à offrir aux nouvelles générations.

Céline Marty: Gorz mérite d’être redécouvert parce que c’est quelqu’un qui, dès les années 70, relie la critique du travail aux enjeux écologiques, et c’est quelque chose qui manque dans le débat contemporain. Cinquante ans après, penser le travail et l’écologie ensemble reste essentiel, sinon on réduit l’écologie soit à une sphère individuelle, soit à des changements d’infrastructure qui se feraient finalement indépendamment du travail et de la vie professionnelle.

Donc il y a, d’une part, le fait qu’il relie les deux et qu’il essaye de rassembler les mouvements sociaux du travail et les mouvements sociaux écologistes. Et ça, c’est toujours un geste militant actuel que d’essayer de faire converger les deux mouvements. D’autre part, c’est une pensée de la décroissance qui revient au goût du jour aujourd’hui dans le débat public. J’ai d’abord lu ses textes sur l’écologie politique et j’y ai trouvé une critique radicale, claire et franche du capitalisme. Donc c’est une écologie qui est unique, qui ne peut pas se compromettre dans le développement durable ou dans les petits gestes. Et ce faisant, c’est beaucoup plus radical, et en même temps clair dans les stratégies et les solutions à adopter.

Quand j’ai lu Métamorphoses du travail, qui date de 1988, j’y ai trouvé un texte qui s’appliquait complètement à notre société. Puisque, d’une part, la critique de l’idéologie du travail est toujours pertinente, parce que nous, en France, avec le « travailler plus pour gagner plus » de Sarkozy, on a complètement renforcé cette vision. C’est cette idéologie du travail qui avait été discutée dans les années 80 et qui avait permis de réfléchir à la réduction du temps de travail. Donc tout ce que Gorz reproche à l’idéologie du travail est toujours valable aujourd’hui. Et aussi sa critique à l’égard de la société de services, du fait qu’on cherche à tout prix à créer des emplois, même avec les promeneurs de chiens, même avec les livreurs de sushi, etc. : tout cela est complètement actuel.

On peut aussi dire qu’aujourd’hui, l’accent est trop fixé sur le pouvoir d’achat. Si cela reste central, les autres défis, eux, sont moins élaborés. Parce que combien d’argent on a besoin pour vivre, cela dépend du coût du logement, du coût de la nourriture, du coût des services publics.

C’est vrai que, finalement, on peut partir de cette revendication du pouvoir d’achat en interrogeant, d’une part, la redistribution des richesses. Et ça, c’est intéressant. Dans le débat public européen, on a tous les débats autour de Zucman, qui ciblent à nouveau l’augmentation énorme de la richesse des plus riches, et donc l’enjeu de redistribution, et donc de justice sociale et fiscale. Et de l’autre côté, il y a un enjeu plus qualitatif de défense des services publics, en montrant que la force du système français, par rapport au système américain, c’est que vous avez des salaires moindres, mais qu’en fait vous avez toute une partie du coût de la vie qui est socialisée. Puisque vous ne payez pas pour l’école, vous payez peu pour l’université, vous ne payez pas pour les transports publics en partie, etc., de même qu’avec l’assurance maladie et toute une partie de notre protection sociale. Donc finalement, une des réponses aussi qualitatives à cette revendication du pouvoir d’achat, c’est aussi de défendre des services publics collectifs. C’est aussi l’occasion de dire que ce ne sont pas seulement des revendications économiques et matérialistes, mais des revendications pour mieux vivre.

Et donc, en fait, ça ne s’arrête pas à la question des salaires : ça va de pair avec une fiscalité, avec des enjeux d’investissements pour l’avenir, et notamment des investissements vers l’écologie, par exemple.

Dans l’œuvre de Gorz, l’idéal de l’autogestion est très important, ce qui met à distance l’étatisme qui a dominé la gauche. Mais la justice sociale, la transition écologique, est-ce possible sans l’État ?

Je propose une relecture de toute la philosophie de Gorz à travers le concept d’aliénation et la réponse qu’il donne par le concept d’autogestion. Il parle d’autogestion de la vie sur le plan écologique, puis il place cela dans le rapport au temps : l’autogestion du temps, ce pour quoi il va défendre la réduction du temps de travail et le revenu universel.

Alors, sur le rôle de l’État, notamment pour instaurer la justice sociale : l’une des compétences premières de l’État, c’est de lever l’impôt. Et peut-être que, justement, là où on a besoin de l’État, c’est pour collecter l’impôt de façon plus juste que ce qui est le cas actuellement. Et donc là, on est en plein dans les débats actuels. Macron a fait beaucoup de cadeaux fiscaux aux plus riches, comme aux entreprises. Donc le rôle de l’État, c’est de collecter l’impôt. Et la question, c’est aussi comment on le redistribue et comment on permet, à différents échelons territoriaux, d’être autonomes en matière de finances pour pouvoir mener des projets locaux. C’est aussi un débat sur la fiscalité à l’échelon territorial.

Parce que sans cette autonomie-là, ils sont obligés de mendier auprès de l’État pour avoir des financements pour leurs projets locaux. Gorz disait déjà que les maires sont obligés d’aller mendier à Paris auprès de l’État pour avoir de l’argent afin de financer leurs projets. Et donc, on a besoin que l’État se dessaisisse d’une partie de son pouvoir. D’une certaine façon, et c’était ce que Gorz disait aux socialistes quand le slogan de Mitterrand en 1980 était « On va changer la vie » : eh bien, Gorz lui répondait dans les pages du Nouvel Observateur : « On ne veut pas que vous changiez notre vie à notre place. »

On a une société avec différentes générations. On parle de la génération Z qui, entre autres, est très axée sur l’équilibre entre la vie professionnelle et la vie privée. Est-ce qu’on peut comprendre cela comme une interprétation contemporaine de la philosophie de Gorz ?

Il y a des sociologues du travail qui disent que les jeunes veulent la même chose que les autres générations et que, pour eux, le travail reste important. Moi, je pense qu’on peut aussi expliquer les différences générationnelles par des vécus historiques différents. On a défendu un modèle en disant aux gens que la mobilité sociale passait par le statut de cadre, par exemple, et donc par le fait d’avoir fait des études. Et on voit aujourd’hui, en termes de conditions de travail et de conditions d’étude, qu’il y a une forme de déclassement.

C’est-à-dire que les jeunes se rendent compte que, même après un master ou deux, ce n’est pas évident de trouver un emploi qui les intéresse dans de bonnes conditions de travail. Je pense aussi que, quand on a 25 ans aujourd’hui, on a vu la dégradation des conditions de travail de nos parents, et donc l’idée que, si on jouait le jeu du capitalisme — avec les bonnes études, avec les bons postes —, tout allait bien se passer. En fait, on se rend compte que c’est un peu mensonger, parce que les cadres de 50 ans sont maintenant eux aussi maltraités par leurs conditions de travail.

Le capitalisme a-t-il donc changé de forme ?

Le fait que, dans le capitalisme financier actionnarial, on puisse vite se débarrasser des travailleurs, y compris des cadres dirigeants, alors que dans le modèle capitaliste plus paternaliste on prenait davantage soin des gens jusqu’à la fin, change profondément le rapport au travail. Moi, je pense toujours, par exemple, que les enfants des travailleurs suicidés de France Télécom ont un autre rapport au travail que leurs parents. Quand on voit que le travail est capable de tuer nos proches, quand on voit à quel point les conditions de travail peuvent faire souffrir les gens, ça génère un autre rapport au travail. Et donc je pense que maltraiter les travailleurs, maltraiter les parents, c’est à terme faire émerger des enfants assez rebelles, parce que ça crée une distance critique : on voit bien que vivre en suivant le jeu du capitalisme, parfois, ça n’avance pas, ça ne paie pas, et ça peut être très décevant.

Et donc je pense que ce qu’on appelle parfois des phénomènes de démission, de critiques, ou le fait de ne pas vouloir s’investir longtemps dans un emploi, de vouloir en changer rapidement, est en fait le résultat d’une grande perte d’illusions vis-à-vis du capitalisme contemporain. Perte d’illusions vis-à-vis du modèle où l’on devait avoir sa carrière, où l’on pouvait faire confiance à son emploi. Je pense qu’en fait, on a bien conscience qu’on peut se faire jeter, que ce n’est pas un contrat de confiance, aussi bien du côté des organisations privées que du côté des organisations publiques. Quand il y a des restructurations, des coupes dans les effectifs, cela amène une situation de distance critique.

Et ce n’est pas un point de vue générationnel au sens strict : cela se rejoue selon les classes sociales, selon les conditions d’employabilité. Quand vous avez confiance en votre employabilité, quand vous avez un premier emploi où ça se passe bien, vous vous permettez autre chose, vous vous permettez de changer d’emploi. Quand votre premier enjeu est d’avoir à tout prix un emploi stable plutôt qu’un emploi précaire, vous n’avez évidemment pas les mêmes exigences.

L’une des grandes idées de Gorz est la distinction entre le temps libre et le temps libéré. Ce dernier peut être utilisé de manière autonome, indépendamment de ce que le capitalisme exige de nous.

Sur ce temps libéré collectif en France, on a quand même une tradition de l’engagement bénévole. Je crois que les statistiques montrent qu’environ un quart de la population a un engagement bénévole, donc un engagement associatif. On a cette culture de l’engagement associatif qui peut commencer très jeune, par des activités sportives ou culturelles. Je dirais que c’est surtout au moment des études qu’il y a encore ces engagements, de différentes façons. Et c’est vraiment à l’entrée dans la vie active qu’on a l’impression que le travail prend toute la place et qu’il devient difficile de dégager du temps pour faire autre chose, puis d’être assez confiant dans son emploi pour pouvoir dire : moi, je pars tôt et je fais d’autres choses.

Mais en effet, c’est aussi un enjeu d’avoir des institutions collectives qui permettent de passer ce temps libre en dehors de la rationalité capitaliste. Parce que, bien sûr, on sait bien — notamment avec toute l’économie des réseaux — que leur but est de capter notre temps libre et notre « temps de cerveau disponible » pour nous faire consommer davantage par la publicité en ligne, etc. Là-dessus, je trouve qu’il est intéressant de revenir à ce qui s’est passé dans les années 80, quand on parlait de réduction du temps de travail, de société de culture, de « changer la vie ». Dans les années 80, on a mis en place beaucoup de politiques culturelles pour développer des bibliothèques, des piscines, des terrains de sport, pour développer le théâtre, etc.

Avec l’idée que réduire le temps de travail, c’était aussi proposer des infrastructures collectives pour passer ce temps-là, tout comme l’avait fait le Front populaire dans les années 30, en développant le sport et les infrastructures de vacances. Ce sont des politiques qui ont été mises à mal, puisqu’on coupe les budgets de la culture, du sport, des associations, et qu’on affaiblit toutes ces structures qui permettaient de passer le temps libre de façon collective et réflexive. Parce que c’est la culture, c’est le sport qui permettent aussi d’exister en dehors de notre fonction productive capitaliste. Quand vous participez à un groupe de sport, de théâtre ou de danse, vous existez en dehors de votre emploi. Et si on affaiblit toutes ces structures en dehors du marché de l’emploi et de la vie économique, on ne laisse pour le temps libre que des opportunités de consommation. C’est pour cela qu’il me semble hyper important de défendre, à contre-courant, par les services publics, une culture du temps libre.

Pour finir, qu’est-ce qui est le plus central et nécessaire pour la transition écologique ?

Je pense que toute la critique de l’idéologie du travail est une stratégie argumentative pour convaincre que la seule voie, c’est la décroissance et la sobriété. Travailler moins pour vivre mieux, faire mieux avec moins. Donc c’est hyper important de se rappeler que son horizon, c’est la décroissance. La crise écologique est une crise de surproduction, une crise de trop de travail, de trop de matières extraites, de trop de productions gâchées à de multiples niveaux.

La crise écologique est aussi causée par le mode de vie des plus riches, et c’est donc à eux qu’il faut demander d’en faire moins. C’est aussi cela, cet horizon de justice sociale. Et je pense que travailler moins est un idéal qui peut parler à toutes les personnes qui subissent leurs conditions de travail au quotidien.

Si vous proposez un projet écologique de sobriété du travail qui consiste à dire que l’écologie, c’est travailler moins, c’est quand même très attractif. Je pense que cette sobriété du travail est l’une des propositions les plus séduisantes que l’on puisse faire pour la transition écologique. En fait, ça fait du bien quand on fait une pause dans le travail, quand on travaille moins, et il faut l’assumer.

The capitalist emphasis on working hard as the key to success comfortably ignores an ugly reality: that the workforce faces worsening conditions and increasing precarity, while extractivism has brought the planet to the verge of ecological collapse. From the teachings of André Gorz to Gen Z’s quest for work-life balance, liberating time is at the centre of endeavours to achieve a better life – not just to consume freely as individuals, but to come together as a community.

Dirk Holemans: For older progressives, André Gorz has been a major source of inspiration, but even more interesting is what he could offer to new generations.

Céline Marty: Gorz deserves to be rediscovered because he’s someone who, even back in the 1970s, was linking critiques of work culture to environmental issues, a perspective which is sorely missing from contemporary discussions. Fifty years later, we still have to think about work and environmentalism in tandem; otherwise we risk reducing environmentalism either to spheres of individual influence or to infrastructure changes that ultimately take place beyond the confines of our work and professional lives.

Gorz’s efforts to unite labour and environmental and social movements still constitute a relevant political action today, but his way of understanding degrowth is also making a comeback in public debates. When I first read his texts on political ecology, I found them to be a radical, clear, and frank critique of capitalism. His is a unique form of ecology that won’t settle for sustainable development or small gestures. This makes it much more radical, and also much clearer in the strategies and solutions it proposes.

When I read Métamorphoses du travail (“Metamorphosis of Work”), I found a text that was wholly relevant to our society. Its critique of the ideology of work is still pertinent today. In France, Sarkozy’s mantra of “work more to earn more” firmly entrenched this mindset. It was this ideology of work that was debated in the 1980s, and which led to discussions about reducing working hours. Today, all of Gorz’s criticisms of the ideology of work are still valid, and his view of the service industry – the fact that we are trying at all costs to create jobs, even ones like dog walkers, sushi delivery drivers, and so on – is completely applicable to modern society.

We could also say that today, there is too much emphasis on purchasing power. It plays a central role, while other challenges are talked about less. But how much money you need to live depends on the cost of housing, food, utilities, etc.

Ultimately, we can approach this demand for purchasing power by exploring how wealth is redistributed. It’s actually very interesting. In European public discourse, we have all these debates around [French economist Gabriel] Zucman that highlight the enormous increase in the wealth of the ultra-rich. This naturally points to the issue of redistribution, and thus to social and fiscal justice. But there is also a more qualitative issue: defending public services and showing that the strength of the French system compared to the American system is that, despite lower salaries, much of the cost of living in France is socialised. We don’t pay for school, and we pay next to nothing for university. Moreover, we don’t pay the full cost of public transport, health insurance, or a significant part of our social welfare.

So, ultimately, one qualitative response to this demand for purchasing power is to defend public services. It’s also an opportunity to say that these are not just economic or material demands, but demands for a better life.

So, this is not just an issue of wages. It goes hand in hand with things like taxation and investing in the future, particularly environmental investments.

Another idea that is very important in Gorz’s work is grassroots autonomy. This distances him from the belief in centralised government that has dominated much of the Left. But are social justice and the green transition possible without the state?

I propose a reinterpretation of Gorz’s entire philosophy by examining the concept of alienation – and his response to it – through the concept of self-management. He notes that life is self-managed on an ecological level and then relates this to the self-management of one’s own time, for which he advocates reducing working hours and implementing a universal basic income.

Regarding the role of the state, particularly in implementing social justice, one of its primary responsibilities is to collect taxes, and that may actually be its most needed role: to do so in a fairer way than we currently do. That’s the current focus of public discourse as well, with Macron having given many fiscal gifts to the country’s richest people. The question is also how we redistribute wealth and how we can, at different geographic levels, be financially autonomous enough to manage our own local projects. This is also a debate about how to handle taxes on a local level.

Without this autonomy, people are forced to beg the state for funding for their local initiatives. Gorz criticised the fact that mayors are forced to go begging to the government in Paris for money to finance their projects. So, we clearly need the state to relinquish some of its power. In a way, this was what Gorz said to the socialists in response to [socialist president François] Mitterrand’s 1980 slogan, “We are going to change life itself”. In his weekly Le Nouvel Observateur Gorz replied: “We don’t want you to change our lives for us.”

But society is divided among different generations. For instance, Generation Z are very focused on finding a balance between their personal and professional lives. Can we understand this as a contemporary interpretation of Gorz’s philosophy?

Some sociologists who study work culture say that young people want the same things as other generations and that, for them, work still matters. Personally, I think that we can explain generational differences through different life experiences.

We have historically told people that social mobility depends on rising through the executive ranks, which itself requires a university degree. But today we see that the conditions for working people and students have declined. This means young people are realising that, even after completing a master’s degree or two, they can’t find a job that interests them and also offers good working conditions. I also think that if you’re 25 today, you’ve watched your parents’ working conditions get worse and worse. This undermines the idea that if you play the capitalist game right, getting the right degrees and experience, everything will work out. In fact, you might see it as a bit misleading, because even 50-year-old senior professionals are now working under poor conditions.

When we quit, criticise, or are reluctant to commit to a job, or when we change jobs all the time, this is in fact the result of a great loss of faith in contemporary capitalism.

So, has capitalism changed form?

In shareholder capitalism, workers, including senior managers, can be quickly dismissed, but under the more paternalistic capitalist model, people were looked after more closely until the end. This fact has profoundly changed how people relate to work. I still believe, for example, that the children of the France Télécom employees who committed suicide have a different relationship with work than their parents did. When you see that work can kill your loved ones, when you see how much working conditions can cause people to suffer, it creates a different relationship with work. Moreover, I think that witnessing their parents being mistreated at work ultimately leads children to become quite rebellious, because it creates a critical distance. Seeing that living by the rules of capitalism doesn’t necessarily get you anywhere can be very disheartening.

And so, I believe that when we quit, criticise, or are reluctant to commit to a job, or when we change jobs all the time, this is in fact the result of a great loss of faith in contemporary capitalism. It also signals a rupture in the idea that you need to have a career and that you can count on your job in the long term. I think that, in fact, we are well aware that we are disposable, and that there is no contract of trust in either the private or public sector. Restructurings and staff cuts lead to a situation of critical distance.

This isn’t a strictly generational phenomenon either – it plays out according to social class and employability. When you are sure of your own employability and have a good experience in your first job, you can allow yourself to imagine that there might be something else better out there. But when your primary concern is just finding stable employment instead of precarious work, you obviously do not have the same ambitions.

One of Gorz’s key ideas is the distinction between free time and “liberated time”. The latter of these can be used autonomously, free of the demands of capitalism.

In France, where we have this idea of collective “liberated time”, we maintain a tradition of volunteering. Statistics show that around a quarter of the population is involved in some kind of volunteering or community work, and this culture of community involvement can start at a very young age, through sporting or cultural activities. I would say that this kind of involvement even increases during one’s university years, and it’s only really when you enter working life that you start to feel that work takes up all your time. It becomes difficult to find time to do other things, and to be confident enough in one’s job to be able to say, “I’m leaving early, I’ve got other stuff to do.”

It’s also important to have collective institutions that allow us to spend this free time outside of capitalist logic. Because, of course, we know full well – especially with the online economy – that the goal is to occupy our free time and our “available brain time” and make us consume more through online advertising. On this point, I think it is interesting to look back at what happened in the 1980s, when there were discussions on reducing working hours, of a cultural society, and of “changing life”. During that time, many cultural policies were put in place to build things like libraries, swimming pools, sports grounds, theatres, and so on.

Talking about reducing working hours also meant proposing shared infrastructure and places where we could spend that time. The Popular Front did this in the 1930s by developing sports and holiday infrastructure. Subsequently, these policies were undermined by budget cuts to culture, sports, and associations, weakening the structures that enabled people to spend their free time collectively and reflectively.

Culture and sports also enable us to exist outside of our productive capitalist role. When you participate in a sport, theatre, or dance group, you exist outside your job; if we weaken all these structures outside the job market and the economy, our free time will be dedicated to consumption and consumption alone. That’s why I think it is extremely important to go against the grain and defend a culture of leisure through public services.

The environmental crisis is a crisis of overproduction, of too much work, of too much extraction, of wasteful production on many different levels.

What do you think is the most central and necessary element for the ecological transition?

For me, criticising the ideology of work is a deliberate strategy to convince people that the only way forward is to take degrowth seriously. Working less to live better, doing things better with less. It’s therefore vitally important to remind people that degrowth is the horizon we’re working towards. The environmental crisis is a crisis of overproduction, of too much work, of too much extraction, of wasteful production on many different levels.

The environmental crisis is also caused by the lifestyles of the wealthiest. They are the ones who must be urged to consume less, and this means it is also a question of social justice. I believe that the ideal of working less is appealing to everyone whose working conditions cause them suffering on a daily basis.

If we can put forward serious environmental projects that assert that the environmentally friendly way forward is working less, then that’s a very attractive idea. I think this idea of “work austerity” is one of the most appealing proposals that can be made as part of the ecological transition. It feels good when you take a break from work or work less, and that’s something we need to stand by.

California’s snowpack is melting faster and earlier than usual, driven by a recent heat wave and the long-term impacts of climate change.

The concern comes at a critical moment, as the state works to finalize the new environmental plan for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and San Francisco Bay. With extreme weather becoming more common, experts say that maintaining adequate water flows is essential to protect key species, ecosystems, and the communities that rely on these resources.

Morgen Snyder, Director of Policy and Programs at Restore the Delta, told ABC 7 that salmon, white sturgeon, and delta smelt are among the growing number of endangered species in the Delta. She emphasized the need for consistent, cold flows to support them. “Cold storage is going to be important to determine how we can adequately ensure flows to the system,” Snyder said. “And that is the really tricky part with this faster-than-usual snowmelt.” 

Read more from ABC 7 here or watch the full story starting at minute 33:30 here.

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"Tales from the Inner City" by Shaun Tan is a collection of incredibly original stories, rich with feeling, strangely moving, almost numinous.

The post Suggested Reading: Tales From the Inner City appeared first on CELDF - Community Rights Pioneers - Protecting Nature and Communities.

Rep. Lauren Boebert’s bill to open the door to nationwide wolf hunting has passed through the U.S. House of Representatives.

First International Conference for Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels Will Convene April 28-29, Santa Marta, Colombia

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: April 15, 2026 

New York, NY– Representatives from the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) will be on-the-ground at the upcoming First International Conference for Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels 28–29 April 2026 in Santa Marta, Colombia, as well as the related Global Science and Policy Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels (April 24-25). 

The conference, co-organized by Colombia and The Netherlands, aims to bring together countries that recognize the need for climate action to discuss pathways for a fossil fuel phase down. This is the first of a series of conferences that will develop a roadmap for this phase down. 

GAIA and the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) are co-convening a group of experts to develop recommendations for the phase down of petrochemicals as part of the roadmap, to inform government discussions at the conference. 

When developing strategies for a fossil fuel phase down, countries at Santa Marta cannot let petrochemicals fly under the radar. Petrochemicals are created from fossil fuels, and, and the IEA projects that the chemicals sector will increase energy demand by 2035 by more than any other industrial sector.  Plastics alone are on track to take up a third of the global carbon budget by 2050. Without setting a target phase down for the petrochemical industry, world leaders will fatally undermine their own progress in reducing fossil fuel extraction and use. 

The wars in the Middle East have also exposed the fragility of the fossil fuel/petrochemical supply chain prone to escalating conflicts, showing once again that relying on these industries is a risky business.

The development of this conference also signals that a critical mass of countries are willing to find common ground outside of the dysfunctional climate negotiations space. This could provide lessons for other multinational policy fora– particularly the plastics treaty talks, which have fallen prone to the same strategies that have stymied the climate talks, namely a small handful of fossil fuel-producing countries blocking meaningful action. 

GAIA’s policy experts, (Ana Rocha, Global Plastics Policy Director and Dr. Neil Tangri, Science and Policy Director) will be at the conference, and are available for comment on this topic in the lead-up as well as during and after the proceedings. 

Press contacts:

Claire Arkin, Global Communications Lead 

claire@no-burn.org | +1 973 444 4869

###

GAIA is a worldwide alliance of more than 1,000 grassroots groups, non-governmental organizations, and individuals in over 100 countries. With our work we aim to catalyze a global shift towards environmental justice by strengthening grassroots social movements that advance solutions to waste and pollution. We envision a just, zero waste world built on respect for ecological limits and community rights, where people are free from the burden of toxic pollution, and resources are sustainably conserved, not burned or dumped. 

The post GAIA URGES PETROCHEMICAL PHASE DOWN AS ESSENTIAL CLIMATE SOLUTION AT SANTA MARTA CONFERENCE first appeared on GAIA.

This article is part of Food Tank’s primer series, “Food Tank Explains.” Each installment unpacks the ideas, innovations, and challenges shaping today’s food and agriculture systems, offering clear insights into complex topics. To explore more articles in the series, click here.

Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are products constructed from industrially produced ingredients and substances that are typically not available for home cooking. UPFs are designed to be hyperpalatable, conveniently accessible, and highly profitable, and include a wide range of commonplace items from soft drinks, chips, and packaged bread to jarred sauces, cereals, and ice cream.

Over the past century, traditional dietary patterns centered on minimally processed foods have gradually given way to diets dominated by ultra-processed items. UPFs make up around 75 percent of the U.S. food supply and more than half of the calories consumed by adults in high-income countries. Among children, and households with lower income and education levels, the rates are higher.

The rise of UPFs is displacing unprocessed or minimally processing foods and long-established dietary patterns, driving the rise of multiple diet-related chronic diseases globally.

Food processing has existed throughout human history. Global communities froze foods to prolong storage times, fermented foods with salt to improve nutrition, and preserved foods in honey or sugar to create new tastes and textures. Unlike historically processed foods, ultra-processed products are not simply altered whole ingredients but are manufactured from refined components and additives.

NOVA, the most widely used food classification system, does not define UPFs as food, but as industrial formulations. UPFs are composed primarily of chemically modified and industrially produced ingredients generally unavailable in home kitchens, like protein isolates or concentrates, hydrogenated fat, and modified starches.

They typically contain additives to enhance taste, texture, appearance, and preservatives to extend shelf-lives and undergo processing techniques that leave the final products bearing little resemblance to the original ingredients.

The ingredients and processes used to manufacture ultra-processed foods make them highly convenient and appealing, but often low in nutritional quality and liable to be over-consumed. UPFs are typically high in added sugars, sodium, modified starches, and saturated fat, and low in fiber, micronutrients, and phytochemicals.

UPFs are designed to be exceptionally appealing to the human palate, and their composition can stimulate the brain’s reward system and overrides satiety signals, making it difficult to stop eating. A study published in Cell Metabolism compared the effects of consuming two nutritionally similar diets differing only in their degree of processing. Participants assigned to an ultra-processed diet ate about 500 more calories per day and gained about 2 pounds more than those on the unprocessed diet.

Ultra-processed foods are associated with worse diet quality and a long and growing list of adverse health outcomes. Multiple studies link greater exposure to ultra-processed food with increased risk of cardiovascular disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes, colorectal cancer, and anxiety and depression, demonstrating adverse outcomes across nearly all organ systems.

Food processing is not inherently dangerous, and certain processing methods offer clear benefits. Pasteurization improves food safety and processes like freezing and canning can reduce food waste. Fortified foods, like milk with added vitamin D to aid calcium absorption or cereal enriched with fiber, can improve nutrition and address deficiencies. And some processed foods like whole-grain brain, yogurt, and baked beans are associated with a reduced risk of chronic disease like diabetes and obesity.

Consumers should limit UPFs in their diets, but also understand that there is nuance, says Dr. David Seres, director of medical nutrition and professor of medicine in the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University Medical Center.

Most global policies aimed at reversing the rise of UPFs worldwide have focused on reducing consumption of foods high in added fats, sugar, and sodium, many of which are UPFs. But public health experts have called for stronger and broader policies that provide clear dietary guidance and health objectives, warning labels, and consumer education.

And Marion Nestle, Professor Emerita at New York University, highlights the need for legal authority to regulate television and social media advertising, retail product placements, sales and service in schools, and other promotions directed toward children. UPF marketing, Nestle says, “must be stopped.”

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Nico Smit

The post Food Tank Explains: Ultra-Processed Foods appeared first on Food Tank.

Les années 2020 ont été marquées par une montée spectaculaire des conflits armés à travers le monde : le génocide à Gaza, l’invasion en cours...

The post Comment les socialistes peuvent aider à bâtir un mouvement anti-guerre first appeared on Spring.

As world leaders gather in Washington this week (April 13–18) for the IMF and World Bank Spring Meetings to discuss debt and economies, a global coalition of 130+ organisations has a clear message for them: the system is failing ordinary people and it needs to change now.

While people in Iran, Lebanon, and across the region are being killed, while families struggle to heat their homes and put food on the table, fossil fuel companies and arms corporations are posting record profits. This is a system working exactly as designed. For them, not for us.

From Bangladesh to Brazil, Zimbabwe to Japan, we are all watching the same thing unfold and but we’re also letting our representatives know through an open letter: enough is enough.

We stand unwavering in our demands

In just one month of war, over $100 billion was extracted from ordinary people through soaring energy prices. That same money could have powered 150 million homes with renewable energy. Instead, it padded the wallets of fossil fuel executives and weapons manufacturers.

The letter calls for four urgent actions:

• a complete and permanent end to the war
• windfall taxes on the corporations cashing in on the crisis
• investment in food security and homegrown renewable energy
• and cancellation of the crushing debt that leaves Global South countries with nothing left to protect their own people.

Ceasefires are not enough. Temporary pauses don’t rebuild homes, bring back the dead, or lower energy bills. The war must end and those who profited from it must be made to pay. Learn more here.

Why this moment matters

This represents a genuinely global movement. From trade unions to climate groups, from faith organizations to youth activists — the breadth of voices shows this is not a fringe position. It is the growing consensus of people worldwide who are tired of paying the price for a crisis they didn’t cause.

The connection between war, fossil fuels, debt, and inequality is not abstract. It shows up in your energy bill. In the price of bread. In the public services disappearing around you.

What you can do right now

Simple: share this letter.

Post it on Facebook. Send it on WhatsApp. Put it on Bluesky. The more people who see these demands, the harder they become for governments to ignore. Every share builds the pressure.

This war is their business. Our pain. Our movement.

Share now and help make these demands impossible to ignore.

Share on Facebook
Share on WhatsApp

Share on Bluesky

 

The post They Profit, We Pay. It’s Time to Fix It. appeared first on 350.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understand the bad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tyranny is unstable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The economy was the biggest crack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A talented candidate 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tisza Islands: organizing that reached everywhere

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

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

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

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

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

Investigative journalism did what no campaign ad could

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

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

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

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

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

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

The public shakes off fear

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

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

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

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

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

What activists should take from this

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The work continues

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

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

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

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