Waging Nonviolence

This article Portland is building a model for migrant solidarity under Trump was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

With the Trump administration’s aggressive anti-immigrant policies, community is more important than ever among migrant rights advocates. 

As Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, raids have ramped up across the country, and migrant communities have grown more fearful, many groups have shifted their efforts toward protection. One such group is the Asylum Seeker Solidarity Collective, or ASSC, in Portland, Oregon.

“The more immediate day-to-day priority is making sure that the people who we’ve been organizing with, asylum seekers over the past couple of years, know their rights and are prepared for what might happen,” said Natalie Lerner, an organizer with ASSC. 

Hosting trainings has become a more common practice for ASSC, but understanding their own organizing capacity has been a challenge.

“We did a couple big know your rights trainings with asylum seekers in November,” Lerner said. Since then, ASSC has had many requests for more trainings, but it just don’t have the resources to run them. 

A know your rights training in Portland in January.

Like many advocacy groups, it had to adapt to difficult, dynamic conditions. For example, ASSC shifted to other methods, such as train the trainer meetings, rather than directly hosting know your rights presentations over and over. 

In the onslaught of anti-immigrant actions by the Trump administration, it can be challenging to decide what to say “yes” to, and what to say “no” to. 

“It’s maybe the hardest thing to do as an organizer,” said Alaide Ibarra, another ASSC organizer. “The way that I’ve thought about it is really about strategy. If we have a strategy for it, then let’s say yes to it.”

With so much happening from the federal level down, the demands on community organizations can grow beyond what is possible to keep up with. 

“Right now there is a lot of urgency and anxiety driving the train,” Ibarra said. “I’ve found over my years of organizing that that is not a long-term, sustainable strategy when you ground yourself only in the chaos, only in the anxiety, only in the fear. You have to find a way of grounding in the things that you want to build.”

Building something better

In spring 2024, ASSC pulled off a major organizing success, passing $1.2 million in funding from Multnomah County to shelter migrants. 

At the time, dozens of families seeking asylum were coming into Portland every month and there were little resources to support them. 

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“We hit a breaking point around January of 2024,” Lerner said. “We were getting four or five families calling us a week and we had nothing to offer them except day-by-day hotel rooms through grassroots fundraising or sometimes a room in someone’s house. I would go almost daily to hotels to pay the night for families after we’d managed to crowdsource funds.” 

Without work authorization, at least 20 of the asylum families were facing homelessness in March 2024. ASSC was meeting with asylum seekers every week to talk about the possibility of camping and making plans to camp with the families, but this was an insufficient solution.

“We were working on legislation with a coalition of organizations, but we knew that money wouldn’t come through fast enough,” Lerner said.

Knowing it needed funding fast, ASSC launched a powerful campaign in Multnomah County. 

The group organized jointly with the International Migrants Alliance, held both larger group and one-on-one meetings with asylum seekers, and met with each of the Multnomah County Commissioners multiple times. On top of this, ASSC frequently testified in front of the board of commissioners and created a sign-on letter with over 75 community organizations in support of their budget ask. 

The group’s efforts prevailed and the funding passed.

While the political situation is different now, ASSC picked up many lessons from its success.

Community-based organizing

“There was no big fancy policy person that was accompanying that process,” Ibarra said about the campaign. “It was us and the community. It was a moment of truth and pride. The story of that money passing in Portland was the story of so many people.”

Both Lerner and Ibarra stress the importance of organizing as equals in your community. Working with asylum seekers directly, asking what they needed at the moment, was crucial to the process. 

“You really cannot organize people from a place of looking down on them or thinking that you know more than them,” Lerner said. “Obviously we all are little experts on our own issues. Do I know more about how the U.S. bureaucracy functions than some of the asylum seekers we’re organizing? Of course. But they also know more about their own things than I do.”

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Los Angeles is leading the way in resisting Trump’s mass deportations

For ASSC, organizing with the asylum seeker community meant doing so horizontally and without hierarchy. It meant examining the group’s definition of community and working with those directly impacted, finding out what works for them. When migrants are connected through WhatsApp, they switch to using WhatsApp. When people aren’t learning well through reading, they shift to videos and in-person trainings.

ASSC may not have the structure of a nonprofit, but it does have the freedom to address concerns rapidly and as they come. This adaptability goes back to their roots in both organizing and mutual aid. The asylum seekers were at the table with them, figuring out what was next, which ultimately led to an action-oriented approach to issues. 

“We all organized together for about a year before we decided maybe we needed a name and to stop just calling ourselves ‘people in Oregon who are at this meeting,’” Lerner said. “We all were mostly focused on just needing to get this thing done, [ignoring] the banner under which it’s happening.”

Organizing in this way was not without its challenges, though. Lerner and Ibarra knew they were agitating government officials at times, but this was part of the process. Even inside the community, things don’t always go smoothly. 

“Especially during the Trump administration, we need to ground in real people, and real people are messy,” Ibarra said. “Maybe when we tell this story it sounds really clean, but in reality there were 50 things happening at the same time.”

Sometimes the messiness requires taking a step back to approach the situation in a less conventional way. 

“In this moment when fear is the strategy, overwhelm is the strategy, isolation is the strategy …  [we’re] doubling down in community,” Ibarra said. “We had a know your rights training, but also a party. We had a New Year’s know your rights training. At the end, a five-year-old was like ‘When is the next one?’ as he’s all pumped up on sugar and full of glitter. [We’re] at a time when the emotional things are also a strategy.”

Having parties or organizing meals for families might not lead to grandiose political outcomes, but it does keep people going. 

“I really take inspiration, not just from big historical figures, but so many people across history who have fought their small fights to get some of the wins we’ve had,” Lerner said. “I don’t know that they were so exceptional, and I feel like I’m picking up that work from them.”

Doing the unsexy stuff

Ibarra got her start in organizing while defending her ability to go to college. She came to the U.S. when she was 14 years old, and like many young migrants, her undocumented status didn’t cross her mind often. That changed when the Kansas legislature considered repealing House Bill 2145, which allows undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition at Kansas universities.

She remembers being told to hide her accent in her testimony, as there were vigilante Texas Minutemen in the courtroom. Opponents of the bill said things like “w\We shouldn’t be paying for these people who don’t even belong here.” 

While Ibarra remembers the hate directed towards her, she also remembers successfully defending the bill and what that meant for future generations of undocumented youth. She carries that experience and shared struggle into her work in Portland.

At its core, ASSC is a group meeting people where they are at, grounded in trust and mutual respect. They don’t see their work as exceptional, but simply what should be done to help marginalized people in their community. 

National movements like the Day Without Immigrants are helpful, but someone also needs to do the unsexy stuff, the community work, which comes with its own challenges. 

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Not being able to guarantee safety is one of the most difficult things for Lerner, Ibarra and others in ASSC. Those months before the funding in Multnomah County passed, thinking about toddlers sleeping in the cold, it could be hard to face people.

When the tasks seem insurmountable, Ibarra remembers “I won’t be able to fix it, but I can be there,” and sometimes being there is the most important thing. 

“I think people that we work alongside have gotten to the U.S. and then in touch with ASSC due to the failure of so many systems that put making money over people’s lives,” Ibarra said. “Our organizing spaces are infused with humanness — laughter, crying, music, dancing. It’s a posture of refusing to let Trump or Musk or people in power be the ones who get to decide our worth. It reminds me of the world I want to build, not just the one I’m fighting against. And at the same time, I feel their vulnerability, and mine, to the system.”

For now, the community in Portland is gearing up for the worst. As of yet, there have been no official reports of ICE raids in the area, so ASSC plans to continue its education efforts while scaling up for possible difficulties ahead. If immigration enforcement ramps up, ASSC’s organizers know they will need to shift to more defensive tactics. 

“Of course, we are ensuring that there are rapid response networks, community care and all strategies on the table to defend our people, but I think for what we are facing, we will need more than that,” Ibarra said. “We will need a shit ton of community power and people unwilling to comply to enact suffering. That’s what I hope every person is helping build in smaller ways, by organizing in their neighborhood, and bigger ways, like helping organize people across Portland, Oregon and the U.S.”

This article Portland is building a model for migrant solidarity under Trump was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Serbia is once again trying to oust an authoritarian. What can we learn from its past success? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Serbia is witnessing its most significant mass protests in a generation, triggered by the collapse of a concrete canopy at the Novi Sad railway station on Nov. 1, 2024, which claimed 15 lives. The student-led movement protesting the public corruption they blame for this fatal tragedy has already won concessions: In late January President Aleksandar Vučić ordered the publication of classified documents related to the canopy collapse, and Prime Minister Miloš Vučević resigned days later. 

Yet civil resistance shows no signs of stopping until there is full transparency and accountability, or regime change. In the last two months, the protests have gained significant momentum and pose the most significant threat yet to the 12-year-old regime of President Vučić and the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, or SNS. Between Nov. 1 and March 7 (the last date for which we have data), Serbia has had 1,162 mass demonstrations across hundreds of cities and villages nationwide.

Scenes across Serbia in recent days reverberate like echoes of the landmark student-led nonviolent movement that ousted Slobodan Milošević, otherwise known as the bulldozer revolution. This past Saturday, some 325,000 peaceful demonstrators — and as many as 800,000 or 12 percent of Serbia’s population, according to organizers — shut down Belgrade’s city center. The rally was dubbed “15 for 15,” with the massive crowds holding 15 minutes of silence on March 15 in remembrance of the 15 killed. 

While many students hesitate to engage in conventional politics, anti-Vučić crowds have held signs or chanted “Gotov je!” (“He’s finished!”), an old bulldozer revolution slogan. The political opposition has also started to express solidarity with students. In early March, opposition lawmakers threw smoke grenades and tear gas in parliament, and even unfurled a banner that read: “Serbia rises up to bring down the regime.”

Screenshot of CNN’s coverage of smoke grenades going off in Serbia’s parliament earlier this month.

The cat-and-mouse game between dictators and pro-democracy movements is eternal. Which side prevails in Serbia matters for the future of democracy in central Europe and the European project. More broadly, the ability of pro-democracy movements to bring down dictators and authoritarian regimes will determine whether the arc of 21st-century history bends towards democracy or entrenches a new generation of populist strongmen.

Fortunately, there’s a wealth of information today’s movements can draw from to better their chances. Unfortunately, that kind of help is needed now more than ever, as global trends are pointing in the direction of growing authoritarianism.

A global wave of autocratization

As in 2000, Serbian students today oppose what they see as a corrupt, authoritarian regime. After more than a decade of post-bulldozer democratic rule, Serbia under the SNS suffered among the 10 worst cases of ongoing autocratization globally — only Hungary suffered a larger decline in liberal democracy score in Europe, per the Varieties of Democracy, or V-Dem, project. While electoral participation remains robust, electoral contestation and constraints on Serbia’s executive branch have weakened significantly since 2012.

Dimensions of Democracy in Serbia since 1945. (Data Source: John Chin replication of Vanessa Boese-Schlosser’s “Patterns of Democracy over Space and Time” using V-Dem 2025, v. 15)

More generally, the world is more than a decade into a “third wave of autocratization.” Political freedom worldwide has declined each of the last 19 years according to democracy watchdog Freedom House. Meanwhile, V-Dem notes that the world has fewer democracies than autocracies for the first time in two decades. Average democracy levels around the globe in 2024 were back to 1985 levels, with 45 countries autocratizing but only 19 democratizing. 

As the world enters an era of authoritarian sharp power — malign efforts by China, Russia, and others to pierce the political and information environment in other states — dictators and “wannabe dictators” around the world are increasingly curtailing democratic freedoms at home and cooperating with one another abroad in a so-called Autocracy Inc. or Axis of Authoritarianism. Civic space for NGO activism is shrinking. 

Authoritarian self-coup attempts are becoming more common, and strongman rule is on the rise as elected leaders personalize power over ruling parties and the security apparatus, in part as a way to deter and defeat peaceful pro-democracy mass uprisings.

Mass mobilization for democracy

Nature abhors a vacuum, and like a law of political physics, almost every autocratizing action sooner or later has an equal and opposite pro-democracy reaction. As a result, the current global autocratic surge has also led to unprecedented mass mobilization for democracy, with revolutions overtaking coups or civil wars as a means of irregularly ousting autocracies in the last couple of decades. 

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We live in the most rebellious era in history. The number of mass protests more than tripled between 2006 and 2020. Over half of all protests worldwide in this period were motivated by a failure of political representation. In 2024, there were more than 160 major election protests. In December, mass protests thwarted South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s attempted executive power grab. In 2025, we have seen mass pro-democracy protests around Europe, including Germany, Georgia, Hungary, Serbia, and Slovakia. In the United States, despite what some see as puzzling demobilization, hundreds of thousands have taken part in civil resistance, from boycotts to walkouts.

The nature of revolutionary upheaval has changed over time. In place of rural armed social revolutions, mass mobilization in an increasingly urban and developed world takes the form of what political scientist Mark Beissinger calls “urban civic revolutions.” These contests take place mainly in cities, and increasingly adopt modular nonviolent tactics. Data on nonviolent and violent campaigns and outcomes from “Why Civil Resistance Works” co-author Erica Chenoweth and other colleagues show that primarily nonviolent campaigns of resistance have become more common than primarily violent campaigns (e.g. civil wars) in recent years.

Historically, the success rate of nonviolent campaigns significantly exceeded violent campaigns. Unfortunately, the success rate of nonviolent campaigns has declined since about 2010. As journalist Vincent Bevins documents in “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution,” the mostly spontaneous, social-media mobilized, and horizontally-led protest movements of the 2010s largely failed to deliver real change.

While observers still debate the causes of this trend — from the rise of violent flanks to dictators getting wiser to movement over-reliance on demonstrations and digital organizing — I prefer to look for inspiration on how nonviolence can get its mojo back. That means going back to the pre-2010 era for clues to strategic nonviolent success.

In my course on Nonviolent Conflict and Revolution at Carnegie Mellon University, I have students watch the 2002 documentary “Bringing Down a Dictator,” which chronicles how the rag-tag student movement Otpor! brought down the dictator of the Balkans, Slobodon Milošević, in Serbia’s 2000 bulldozer revolution. Over the years, I’ve synthesized five lessons from this case and the growing literature on civil resistance.

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5 lessons on bringing down a dictator

1. Strategize and organize. In “How to Start a Revolution” – a documentary on the lessons of nonviolent theorist Gene Sharp — the first lesson is to plan a strategy. According to Sharp, the Tiananmen protests in China in 1989 failed not because the student organizers lacked numbers or passion, but because the students leading the movement lacked a strategy, which led to disunity when the state initially offered negotiations. “This Is An Uprising” authors Mark Engler and Paul Engler likewise argue that movements need to combine strategic planning with “spontaneous” mass protest into strategic campaigns of momentum-based organizing. 

A pro-democracy movement’s strategy must do several things. First, strategists must identify the incumbent dictator’s “pillars of support” and potential points of weakness. This includes analyzing partisan, elite and ethnic bases of support, each of which may shape strategies of contention to seek incremental shifts in the “spectrum of allies.” Second, strategists must employ inverse-sequence planning. That is, don’t start by planning tomorrow’s rally. Instead, start by crafting your “vision of tomorrow” or ideal endgame, then work backwards step-by-step from the end of the game tree to today.

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Overcoming despair and apathy to win democracy

The bulldozer revolution was made; it was not just a spontaneous uprising. From just a few dozen young activists at its founding in late 1998, it took Otpor! a year of active organizing to recruit thousands of followers. According to the how-to manual of former Otpor! leader Ivan Marovic, Otpor!’s strategy involved designing appealing actions to win recruits. They engaged in what former Otpor! leader Srdja Popovic calls brand warfare in his book “Blueprint for Revolution.” Whereas Milošević tried to burnish his image as a strong nationalist leader necessary for order, Otpor! offered a more compelling brand around hope and democratic normalcy. They started with a positive vision of tomorrow, then worked backwards to set goals, tally up resources and seek unity in diversity. 

2. Maintain nonviolent discipline. Pro-democracy movements must expect some repression due to what political scientist Christian Davenport called a “law of coercive responsiveness.” State counter-strategies often involve a variety of tactics, including encouraging troop loyalty (to follow orders to repress), neutralizing international sanctions and dividing the opposition. To those ends, dictators often try to discredit the opposition as violent radicals, making it harder to market rebellion to domestic and international audiences. For example, Serbia’s Vučić has adopted Russian-style talking points, demonizing protests as led by violent agitators and stoked by Western “foreign agents.” Vučić has even sponsored masked hooligans or regime supporters to beat up opposition or drive cars into protests; others will sponsor agent provocateurs to try to elicit violence. 

As such, movements must be vigilant in recruiting and training members committed to nonviolence. During the Indian independence movement in the 1920s-1930s, Gandhi famously had satyagrahis sign a pledge of conduct, including a promise of nonviolence. Gandhi’s gift was not just forging a multi-ethnic mass movement, but keeping it peaceful. The most successful Gandhian campaign, the civil disobedience movement of 1930-32, had high levels of nonviolent discipline (as exemplified during the Salt March), and resulted in key concessions, including the Gandhi-Irwin Pact (which allowed Indians to produce salt) and the Government of India Act of 1935 (which allowed provincial elected governments and extended the franchise to 30 million Indians). When authorities arrested leaders of the Quit India movement in 1942, the campaign turned violent and no policy concessions followed, but they were instead met with violent repression.  

During the bulldozer revolution, Otpor!’s nonviolent discipline helped generate momentum and undermine the regime’s pillars of support. Student leaders today smartly make nonviolence and cleaning up debris priorities, but nonviolent discipline is easier when the regime limits repression. To overcome fear of state repression, Otpor! developed protocols for arrest, lionizing those who got arrested and rewarding them pins or T-shirts — the most coveted in Belgrade was the black T-shirt with a fist in a white circle, as it was reserved for those arrested more than 10 times.

3. Avoid the pitfalls of horizontalism. Many historic successful pro-democracy campaigns in the 20th century had identifiable if not charismatic leaders, from Nelson Mandela in South Africa to Corazon Aquino in the Philippines in 1986. By contrast, there are no identifiable leaders among many recent protest movements, as they appear committed to democratic decision-making in long plenary debate sessions. 

But leaderless mass protests over the last decade have had trouble maintaining unity and momentum, as noted in Bevins’s “If We Burn.” One of the key contributions of Otpor!’s leadership of the 2000 electoral revolution against Milošević was pressuring the democratic opposition to unify during the election campaign. Students Against Authoritarian Rule formed a year ago at the University of Novi Sad, appears to be trying to play an Otpor!-like role and leading much activism against President Vučić today. Organizational leadership or “campaign infrastructure” is also important for regrouping after repression. Research shows that the presence of organizational leadership is an important factor in making repression backfire after massacres.

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4. Size matters, but generating elite defections is critical. Nonviolent resistance has a participation advantage, which promotes campaign success. Erica Chenoweth’s 3.5 percent rule suggests that participation of just this small share of the population almost guarantees victory. But, as Zeynep Tufekci, the author of “Twitter and Teargas,” points out, protest size by itself doesn’t matter. Instead, what is critical is generating elite defections. In fact, the single strongest determinant of whether or not a nonviolent revolution succeeds is whether or not security forces defect. 

The largest rallies in Belgrade in recent months have drawn crowds of more than 100,000, yet similarly large rallies by the Democratic Movement of Serbia from 1990-1992 and the Zajedno (or “Together”) protests of 1996-1997 failed to bring down Milošević. Over half a million joined the bulldozer revolution. The key difference: Elites abandoned Milošević in 2000, but not earlier. Protests in Serbia this past weekend may have achieved protest size on par with the bulldozer revolution, though as of yet there have been few major defections among Vučić’s political allies or among the security forces.

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Resistance is alive and well in the United States

For generating defections, it is not protest size but momentum that matters. The Women’s March in 2017 drew more than 3.3 million people across 500 cities, the single largest day of protest in U.S. history. Yet “the resistance” to Trump failed to maintain this momentum. Participation shrank to fewer than a million people by 2019, according to the Crowd Counting Consortium. The physics of dissent is only overwhelming when the perception is created that the status quo can’t possibly continue — that something must give.

5. Deploy dilemma actions. These actions force the state to choose between repression, which may backfire, or inaction, which makes the regime look weak. They are win-win for the resistance and are associated with campaign success. Otpor! often designed such actions with revolutionary humor, which let them laugh their way to victory, adopt tactical diversity, and create an attractive carnivalesque atmosphere.

For example, in a classic dilemma action, Otpor! would place an oil barrel with Slobodan Milošević’s face on it in a busy shopping area. Pedestrians were then invited to donate a “dime for change” into the barrel and in return be allowed to hit the barrel with a baseball bat. Unsure how to respond, police “arrested” the barrel to end the stunt. If populists try to claim the mantle of support of a “silent majority,” dilemma actions reveal that the emperor has no clothes. They force a “vibe shift” in favor of democracy.

While these five lessons don’t guarantee victory, they do give today’s pro-democracy crusaders — from Serbia to South Korea to the United States — their best fighting chance to combat corruption and achieve real democracy. 

This article Serbia is once again trying to oust an authoritarian. What can we learn from its past success? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Resistance is alive and well in the United States was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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“Where is the resistance?” is a common refrain. Our research affirms that resistance is alive and well.

Many underestimate resistance to the current Republican administration because they view resistance through a narrow lens. The 2017 Women’s March in particular — immediate in its response, massive in its scope and size — may inform collective imaginations about what the beginning of a resistance movement should look like during Trump 2.0.

In fact, our research shows that street protests today are far more numerous and frequent than skeptics might suggest. Although it is true that the reconfigured Peoples’ March of 2025 — held on Jan. 18 — saw lower turnout than the 2017 Women’s March, that date also saw the most protests in a single day for over a year. And since Jan. 22, we’ve seen more than twice as many street protests than took place during the same period eight years ago.

In February 2025 alone, we have already tallied over 2,085 protests, which included major protests in support of federal workers, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, Palestinian self-determination, Ukraine, and demonstrations against Tesla and Trump’s agenda more generally. This is compared with 937 protests in the United States in February 2017, which included major protests against the so-called Muslim ban along with other pro-immigrant and pro-choice protests. Coordinated days of protest such as March Fourth for Democracy (March 4), Stand Up for Science (March 7), rallies in recognition of International Women’s Day (March 8), and protests demanding the release of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil suggest little likelihood of these actions slowing down. These are all occurring in the background of a tidal wave of lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s early moves.

Historically, street protest and legal challenges are common avenues for popular opposition to governments, but economic noncooperation — such as strikes, boycotts and buycotts — is what often gets the goods. Individual participation is deliberately obscure, and targeted companies may have little interest in releasing internal data. Only the aggregate impacts are measurable — and in the case of Tesla, Target and other companies, the impacts so far have been measurable indeed.

Consider the protests against Tesla in response to Elon Musk firing federal workers and blocking federal funding. The multifaceted campaign has a quite specific goal: punish Tesla, Musk’s signature company. In addition to protests at Tesla showrooms and charging stations, people have also sold their Teslas. Others have called on mutual funds to divest from Tesla stock. The stock price has dropped significantly in the last month, perhaps in part due to Musk’s DOGE work.

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This shift toward noncooperation over large-scale protests may be strategically wise. In 2017, many who attended Women’s Marches remained deeply engaged in civic activity, funneling into groups and coalitions like Indivisible, Swing Left, Run for Something, Fight Back Table and the like. People who aligned with Indivisible and groups like it were almost certainly responsible for saving the Affordable Care Act in 2017, largely through pressure on elected members of Congress. The MAGA faction had not yet consolidated control of the GOP, and within a year the “blue wave” flipped the House during the 2018 midterms. Under such conditions, protests and political pressure made a lot of strategic sense.

Those groups and others still remain active, but today’s political terrain may call for a more muscular movement strategy. The MAGA faction controls the GOP and enforces strict discipline among its members through fear and the threat of a well-funded Republican primary opponent in the next election. The Supreme Court majority is solidly on the right. Elected GOP officials are abandoning town halls and discouraging constituents from calling their offices. Street protests endure but are increasingly surveilled and high-risk, as the detention of Mahmoud Khalil suggests. Uncertainty about whether the Trump administration will ignore the First Amendment and weaponize the government to persecute political oppositionists looms large.

In the face of such changes, the public’s most powerful options are often withholding labor power and purchasing power. Calling in sick from work or school, refusing to buy and stay-at-home demonstrations are notoriously difficult to police. Last month, an inestimable number of people participated in such actions to highlight a Day Without Immigrants. The prominence of billionaires in the administration and populist anger toward them make this type of approach even more viable in today’s climate.

Indeed, the diversification of resistance methods puts the United States on a similar trajectory to many democracy movements of the past. In anti-authoritarian movements of the 20th century, economic noncooperation — more so than protest alone — was the coordinated activity that split elites and made way for democratic breakthroughs. In apartheid South Africa, it was the enormous economic pressure — through boycotts of white-owned businesses, general strikes, divestments and capital flight — that brought the white supremacist National Party to heel and elevated reformers who were willing to do business with Nelson Mandela and the ANC. In communist Poland, it was the ability of trade unionists to credibly call for general strikes (and credibly call off such strikes) that gave the Solidarity movement the leverage to negotiate a peaceful democratic transition. Gandhi’s noncooperation campaigns in India made the colony ungovernable by British colonial authorities.

And when the Nazis invaded and occupied Denmark in the 1940s, noncooperation was near-total. No one remembered how to run the railroad. Teachers had to leave school early to tend to their gardens. Factory workers slowed down or stopped production altogether. Danes obscured the identities of their Jewish neighbors, gave them temporary haven, and secured their passage through fishing boats to neutral territory, saving thousands of lives.

Similarly, in Czechoslovakia, six days after the Soviet invasion in 1968, the newspaper Vecerni Prah published “10 commandments,” writing: “When a Soviet soldier comes to you, YOU: 1. Don’t know 2. Don’t care 3. Don’t tell 4. Don’t have 5. Don’t know how to 6. Don’t give 7. Can’t do 8. Don’t sell 9. Don’t show 10. Do nothing.” These oppositional habits of thinking and practice, nurtured over two decades through underground popular schools, art, literature and outlawed news sources, ultimately paved the way for the Velvet Revolution.

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Indeed, the United States has its own storied history of resisting authoritarianism through noncooperation. Pro-independence colonists living under the British crown organized campaigns to refuse to buy or consume British goods; refuse to abide by laws requiring colonists to export raw materials to Britain; refuse to serve on juries under crown-appointed judges; and develop alternative institutions including the Continental Congress itself. The Boston Tea Party was a defiant act of noncooperation — a refusal to import, consume or pay taxes on the crown’s tea. In 1815, John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson of his hope that historians would recall those acts of noncooperation — and not the war of independence — as “the revolution,” that “was in the minds of the people.”

Much later, during the civil rights movement, desegregation was first tangibly achieved in large part through noncooperation campaigns like the courageous school attendance by the Little Rock Nine, the Montgomery bus boycotts, the lunch counter sit-ins and boycotts of businesses in Nashville and elsewhere, strikes among sanitation workers in Memphis, and other acts of refusal to abide by the Jim Crow system of racial segregation. These took place in combination with marches and demonstrations that were powerful and dramatic displays of the moral power of the movement, and legal action that demanded the government abide by its own Constitution.

That Americans seem to be rediscovering the art, science and potency of noncooperation — combined with a robust protest capacity and legal action — shows that resistance against Trump’s agenda in America is not only alive and well. It is savvy, diversifying and probably just getting started.

This article Resistance is alive and well in the United States was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article There’s a new silent majority — and they need to be activated  was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Most Americans support democracy and oppose political violence. These shared values provide a foundation for organizing across the aisle to revitalize our democracy.

In November 2024, a plurality of Americans voted to bring President Trump back into office. During his campaign, he made numerous statements demonizing broad swaths of people, encouraging violence or vowing retribution for opponents. For many on the left, the election result generated a mix of despair, anger and incomprehension. Some have painted Trump’s voters with a broad brush — assuming their vote indicated support for his most extreme positions.

There are at least three reasons to believe that a vote for Trump should not be interpreted as 77 million Americans endorsing using the military to target the “enemy from within.” First, there is evidence that most Americans — liberals, conservatives and independents — agree on basic pro-democracy values. Before the election large majorities of Americans — over 80 percent —  consistently opposed political violence. Pre-election, there was also ample data suggesting a range of other values that crossed party lines, including the 90 percent of Americans who agreed that equal protection under the law, the right to vote, and freedom of speech are important to our country’s identity.

The election does not seem to have changed these views. According to a post-election survey by More in Common, openness to political violence remains relatively low, coming in at 14 percent. Most Americans also opposed Trump’s sweeping pardons for those convicted for participating in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

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Second, changes in the media landscape mean that at least some Trump voters were likely unaware of his most extreme positions. Most Americans did not receive information about the 2024 election from traditional news media. They may not have heard Trump’s vow to be a “dictator” on “day one,” while those in the conservative media ecosystem consistently heard Trump characterized as a victim who was working on their behalf.

Third, there is evidence that at least some Trump voters did not believe he would carry out his most extreme threats.

Understanding the values that many Democrats and Trump voters profess to share matters because pro-democracy liberals and conservatives will need each other in the coming years. Hate crimes and other forms of political violence increased significantly during President Trump’s first term. During his second term, America needs the broadest possible coalition to stand up for democracy and oppose political violence — a coalition that can and should include Democrats and Trump voters.

In 1969, President Richard Nixon made famous the term “silent majority.” In 2025, there is a new silent majority in American politics that — at least for now — remains committed to democracy and strongly opposes political violence.

I see the new silent majority every day in my work with The Carter Center. I lead a cross-partisan project made up of Americans volunteering their time to build trust in elections and mitigate political violence. The project’s networks — in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin — are led by Republicans and Democrats in tandem, many of them former elected officials with long records of public service. They have recruited thousands of civic leaders, including liberals, independents and conservatives. These are folks from urban and rural areas, with differences in racial, ethnic, sexual and gender identities.  

And they disagree on plenty. They disagree on abortion. They disagreed on the war in Gaza. Yet, like the rest of us in the new silent majority, they agree on basic values. Candidates who lose elections — and lose legal challenges in court — should concede gracefully. No one in public life should demonize their fellow Americans. No one should incite violence.

My work, as well as reams of survey data, make clear that there remains a robust pro-democracy majority in America. That’s the good news. The bad news is that this silent majority must be activated. Supporting certain values in the abstract is not the same as standing up for those values in practice — and American democracy has been backsliding. The University of Chicago’s Robert Pape, among others, argues persuasively that demographic change will provoke long-term backlash and violence by some American conservatives. This is not a surprising conclusion.

Much of my career has been spent working to address armed conflicts in the Middle East. That experience underscores that groups accustomed to being in charge can react very negatively — even violently — when they feel a loss of power. European scholars looking into drivers of civil wars since 1946, for instance, found that dominant groups’ loss of power significantly increases the risk of violent conflict. They noted that “a sense of unfairly lost entitlement and the lust for revenge” drive these conflicts.

These trends could drive increased violence and democratic backsliding in the future — but that should not obscure the reality in the present that most Americans share fundamental democratic values. Despite political rhetoric in recent years that increasingly demonizes our fellow Americans, only around 4 percent of the public consistently expresses support for political violence. Most Americans, including 81 percent of Democrats and 94 percent of Republicans, even share pride in being American, while being able to “acknowledge” our “country’s flaws.”

Activating the new silent majority requires at least three steps. First, you need to engage across party lines to get to know the other side and counter profound partisan misperceptions. In the November election, Republicans and Democrats alike listed inflation as their top priority. But Republicans erroneously perceived Democrats to be heavily focused on trans issues, while Democrats overestimated the extent to which Republicans prioritized immigration and abortion. With most Americans living in politically-segregated communities, finding and getting to know folks with differing political views can be challenging — but it’s still doable.

Living Room Conversations has guides for facilitating discussions on numerous topics. If you’re in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, or Wisconsin, join one of the cross-partisan networks supported by The Carter Center. Braver Angels regularly hosts cross-partisan dialogues on a range of issues. You are very unlikely to change the politics of folks who vote differently from you, but you can humanize each other and build trust.

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Second, you need to think ahead about the values that matter most to you — and know what your red lines are. Should this administration carry out its more extreme threats, the data cited above indicate that most Americans — those of us in the new silent majority — will oppose these steps. But being vocal in that opposition — speaking up and taking action to defend our values — requires first ensuring that we do not engage in “anticipatory obedience.” As Tymothy Snyder notes, when democracies fray, communities can conform “instinctively” to violations of the values they otherwise profess to hold. Not doing so requires considering in advance what you and your community will do if, for example, journalists are arrested or pro-democracy nonprofits are targeted. As David French recently wrote, “We don’t know our true values until they’re tested.”

Third, activating the pro-democracy majority requires proactive planning. It is particularly important to organize across the political divide, recruiting diverse community leaders and messengers to stand up for democracy and mitigate political violence. Be intentional about working with individuals of varying backgrounds and identities, finding local leaders who have credibility in their respective communities. One example was the bipartisan campaign against neo-Nazis in Whitefish, Montana, where a range of community leaders organized nonviolently to push these groups out of their community.

Nonviolence scholar Maria Stephan has a range of recommendations for building large, diverse movements capable of countering democratic backsliding. The Horizons Project and the 22nd Century Initiative offer a guide detailing tactics to nonviolently counter the threat of political violence. Over Zero has guides for building community resilience to identity-based violence.  

None of this is meant to downplay the damage that can be done by a small minority. But we can take comfort and courage knowing that most Americans still support democracy and oppose political violence. The task before us then is to build a vocal majority, planning and organizing across the political divide to stand up for the values that so many of us share.

This article There’s a new silent majority — and they need to be activated  was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Trump’s backpedaling shows he’s not invincible was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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In the opening two months of his presidency, Donald Trump has unleashed a historic assault aimed at destroying public services, punishing vulnerable communities and dismantling any semblance of social-democratic governance in the United States. This “flood the zone” onslaught has been designed to overwhelm and disorient opposition, making it hard to keep up with the outrages and easy to fall into a state of “shock and awe” paralysis. 

In this situation, it is easy to picture Trump as being all powerful. Those who discourage protests — such as Democratic consultant James Carville, who famously counseled progressives to “roll over and play dead” — imagine that the administration holds all the cards, and that opponents have little leverage to wield against it. 

To the contrary, the White House is not unfettered by political constraints, and popular protest can do much to strengthen them. Recent weeks have featured many examples of the Trump administration being compelled to reverse or scale back initial measures. And they have shown why building civil resistance to the administration is an essential task at this moment. 

In response to “flood the zone,” our job is to highlight political missteps, heighten public revulsion, and raise the political cost for Republicans seeking to push forward Trump’s radical agenda. Our aim should be to expand the capacity to resist by building movements and increasing participation in them. We cannot assume that public opinion will turn against the administration on its own — or that the public is even aware of the many controversial and potentially unpopular moves the White House is making, especially given that they are accompanied by endless lies and distortions about combating “fraud and waste.” Therefore, we must educate the public about the administration’s attacks on our communities and use the tools of creative resistance to amplify a backlash.

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There are a variety of reasons why the Trump administration has had to back off a range of its initial drives in past weeks. In some cases, they have found their actions to be politically unpopular: As Elon Musk has pushed forward with a “move fast and break things” mentality, Republicans have sometimes found that he may have done damage that could cost them politically. Other times their actions have been stopped by the courts, or the administration has discovered that its sloppy implementation has made the measures susceptible to legal challenges. In still other instances, federal cuts are doing harm even in deep red districts — leading state-level Republicans to balk — or are causing economic damage, creating fissures in the business community. At times when particularly clumsy or unpopular maneuvers have been exposed, Trump and his officials have hastily attempted to limit the damage, often denying that they ever took the actions in the first place.

Among the White House’s retreats, amid widespread anger and frustration in January, the new administration rescinded a memo calling for a spending freeze on federal grant and loan programs less than 48 hours after it was issued. In mid-February, as USA Today reported, the Trump administration gave tens of thousands of K-12 schools and colleges until Feb. 28 to comply with a “sweeping and vague” order to root out diversity, equity and inclusion on their campuses. A couple of weeks later, the U.S. Department of Education issued new guidance “softening that mandate and reversing course” on some of its provisions. “Perhaps most notably,” the story remarked, “the Department of Education acknowledged the federal government doesn’t have the power to dictate school curriculum.”

In February, the Trump administration reversed itself days after ordering legal groups that serve migrant children who arrive in America alone to stop their work. Not coincidentally, this happened after members of the public sent more than 15,000 letters to Congress in less than 48 hours demanding that the administration reinstate the program that provides these services. And by the end of the month, Trump had walked back funding and staff cuts to a federal health program for survivors of the 9/11 attacks  and reversed its plan to shut down the government website that ships free coronavirus tests.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture backtracked after firing key staffers so haphazardly that the administration’s ability to respond to bird flu outbreaks was compromised. And in March, Trump walked back his order to federal agencies to fire thousands of probationary employees in response to a judge’s ruling. The Office of Personnel Management then claimed it never actually ordered those firings. 

Prospective cuts to various social programs hurt people living in red states and have ended up causing problems for Republican lawmakers, with angry constituents voicing their displeasure. As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently noted, “At a town hall in rural Kansas… Republican Sen. Roger Marshall shut down the event after participants shouted over each other to express concerns about veterans’ jobs being cut and ask whether Marshall believes Russia invaded Ukraine.” Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that “In Georgia, Representative Rich McCormick struggled to respond as constituents shouted, jeered and booed at his response to questions about Mr. Musk’s access to government data,” while in Wisconsin voters pushed Republican Rep. Scott Fitzgerald on potential cuts to services. Such unpleasant interactions have become so common that GOP leaders are now actively discouraging Republican lawmakers from holding in-person town halls.

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Resistance to Trump is everywhere — inside the first 50 days of mass protest

In early March, Elon Musk had several closed-door meetings in which Congressional Republicans expressed frustrations to him directly. “With all due respect to Mr. Musk, he doesn’t have a vote up here,” Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma said before one meeting. “[Give] courtesy to the members. They’re the ones that have to go home and defend these decisions, not you. So why don’t you give them a heads-up.” He added, “You are certainly complicating the lives of individual members, and you might be making some mistakes and hurting some innocent individuals in the process.”

Potentially the most politically damaging moves on the horizon for Republicans are cuts to entitlement programs — and here the White House has had to scramble to do damage control. The budget passed by the House of Representatives could impose hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has called social security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” Recognizing that attacks on these popular and essential lifelines could create significant political fallout, the White House continues to backpedal and insist that it will not enact cuts: “They’re not going to cut Social Security, they’re not going to cut Medicare, they’re just not. That’s just fearmongering,” said Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita on March 14. 

After a report by the Washington Post revealed that Musk’s DOGE team was planning to eliminate phone service for people filling for social security and disability benefits — a move that would affect millions of Americans in claiming what they earned — the administration reversed itself and fought to ward off denunciations from watchdogs and opposition politicians alike.

Trump is also being disciplined by the market. Imposing tariffs has been one of the actions the president has pursued most doggedly. And yet, even here, he has repeatedly wavered, in part because of adverse reaction from Wall Street. As Trump has flipped back and forth between announcing new tariffs and then suspending their implementation, the prospect of trade wars has caused the S&P 500 to fall more than 10 percent below its previous peak, with Reuters reporting “U.S. stock market loses $4 trillion in value.” One major investor told the New York Times that the current stock market is “untradable” due to the unreliability of Trump’s positions. 

Of course, the market being able to punish politicians or the possibility of Wall Street exercising an effective veto over public policy is not something that should be uncritically celebrated. Historically speaking, the threat of capital flight and market downturn has far more often been used to constrain the left than the right. Nevertheless, it is notable that Trump’s policies are generating economic repercussions and fueling uncertainty. As Robert Reich noted on March 8, “This week’s data on consumer confidence showed it down to a level last seen in 2021. Data from the Commerce Department, out last Friday, showed consumer spending falling sharply in January, adding to angst about the economy’s prospects. After new data came out this week on trade and consumer spending, the Atlanta Fed is projecting that the U.S. is shrinking at a rate of 1.5 percent in this quarter.”  

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Whether it is through tariffs, deportations, suspension of services, cutting government contracts, or firing federal employees, the administration is hurting poor people, union workers, immigrant laborers, consumers and business owners alike. This opens the door for broad and possibly unusual alliances to form between and among groups that may not have much in common other than opposition to Trump. Emerging movements should leverage this and encourage everyone who will be harmed by White House policies to join in fighting against them.

While current polls on the administration are not all favorable to the opposition, there are some promising indicators: As during Trump’s first term, the portion of people who strongly disapprove of his performance (now 41 percent) is significantly larger than those who strongly approve (currently 26 percent). As of March 12, CNN reports, “a 56 percent majority of the public disapproves of [Trump’s] handling of the economy, worse than at any point during his first term in office.” Moreover, “Just 35 percent of Americans express a positive view of Musk, with 53 percent rating him negatively and 11 percent offering no opinion.”

Trump has done plenty of horrible things, and the fact that he’s been made to reverse course in some cases does not mean that the damage has been fully undone, or that there will not be efforts to extend the harm in the future. But it does show that Trump is not invincible. We know that Republicans can be susceptible to backlash, and that a wide range of resistance tactics can play a critical role in engendering it now — just as they have in the past. During Trump’s first term, widespread mobilization was essential in curtailing some of the worst abuses of the administration, including his signature attempt to repeal Obamacare. And it ultimately stripped the Republicans of their Congressional majority after the 2018 midterms, limiting Trump’s power.

Protests will not directly convince Trump to change his views. But they can create an activated base of opposition, move public opinion against the administration, bolster the resolve of dissident politicians, and raise the stakes for swing-district Republicans who will have to answer for White House policies in the midterms. If done well, they can produce plenty more backpedaling to come.

Research assistance provided by Raina Lipsitz.

This article Trump’s backpedaling shows he’s not invincible was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Schumer’s lack of fight is the real problem was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Trump and Musk’s administrative coup are creating bad options across the country. Friends ask: Do I resign my government job or sabotage from the inside until I get fired? Do I remove the “DEI-marked” books quietly or do I publicly make a stink and get fired? 

And now in public we had the question before Chuck Schumer: Do I shut down the government by not voting for the GOP spending bill or do I hand Donald Trump a win and accept the continuing resolution?

Now that he’s decided on the latter, something clear is emerging: We, the people, are now insistent that leaders have to be willing to fight. Whether you read Schumer as surrendering or taking a principled (if perhaps unwise) stance, it’s clear to most everyone he isn’t fighting, he’s capitulating.

This is the message to anyone who wants to be a leader in the years ahead: You have to take some risks, you have to show people you’re fighting, or you’re going to get tossed aside.

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On the question of whether Schumer was right or not, I’ll climb out on a limb and admit I had a level of uncertainty because I don’t know much about the details of a shutdown. Days ago I didn’t know who would decide which parts of the government would stay open. (Turns out it would be Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought — a Trump loyalist who wants federal workers to be “in trauma.”) 

So I generally listened to people I find smarter than me about these things, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. That hunch was affirmed by centrist but brilliant tactician Nancy Pelosi. She wrote, “America has experienced a Trump shutdown before — but this damaging legislation only makes matters worse. Democrats must not buy into this false choice. We must fight back for a better way.”

Critics of Schumer’s decision point to the $13 billion cuts in services, $20 billion cuts to the IRS, and the disgusting takeover of D.C.’s budget (screwing DC for no real reason). In a surreal Orwellian experience, Congress found a way to neuter its power to halt Trump’s tariffs by redefining “a day” for the purposes of the National Emergencies Act.

Of course both options are bad. And Schumer has a point that shutting down the government carried risks. Schumer said he thinks Trump and Musk both wanted the shutdown — and I think he’s half-right.

For Trump the calculation is simple. Trump’s a zero-sum hour-by-hour analyst who sees headlines and tweets. Trump wanted the victory of a bill. Trump seemingly confirmed this with a quote built to destroy Schumer’s career: “Again, really good and smart move by Senator Schumer.”

Donald Trump isn’t thinking ahead about how he’d govern with no functioning government. He trusts his improvisation skills.

But the coup co-leader, Elon Musk, has a different calculation. He’s driven by a more nihilist view of government. As Wired explained — in one of the best analyses of Musk — he wants to replace government “bloat” (i.e. workers and regulations) with AI-driven efficiency. (Yes, the same AI efficiency that’s wrong around 60 percent of the time.)

Wired has also argued that Musk could realize his vision much faster under a government shutdown. With a shutdown, Musk can fire people faster and all those furloughed workers couldn’t slow his progress. Most wouldn’t even be able to protest, because they would need to find other work amidst phenomenal uncertainty. Through his puppet Vought, Trump could arbitrarily adjust what agencies are open and closed — depending on where the most resistance is. And the country would require Republican votes to reopen the government at all.

But this is all behind us now. We don’t have to worry about whether Schumer is wrong tactically. What remains is his biggest mistake: He never took a fighting stance.

Schumer took a defeatist approach. He didn’t offer a course to stop Musk — just a course to lose the least. He backstabbed House Democrats, many of whom took political risks. He hasn’t boldly stood up to Trump for abducting Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident because of his free speech. No, instead he apologized when he called Republicans bastards.

It’s the lack of fight that’s going down in the history books.

I don’t have the energy to protest this man. (But by all means, if you feel it in your heart, go ahead. He’s going to have a helluva book tour).

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Notably, Schumer is not alone in his ineffectual approach to handling Trump. Here I’m pointing fingers at the cowardice of many elite law firms who haven’t come out swinging as Donald Trump undermines the rule of law and attacks their fellow colleagues. I’m looking at Columbia University — and all the elite universities experimenting with “going along to get along” as a strategy to appease a fascist. I’m looking at schools and corporations like Target that are over eager to comply and appease the anti-DEI police. 

Just as Schumer is going to pay a political price, mark my words, so are these institutions. Because of national boycotts, Target has already lost about $12.4 billion in market value. All of these companies risk losing core values and still being targeted by Donald Trump and being targeted by those of us wishing they took fighting stances.

Compliance won’t save you. Compliance won’t make the best of a bad situation. Compliance will speed up the process of authoritarianism.

Ultimately there’s only one option: Resist and fight. 

This article Schumer’s lack of fight is the real problem was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Resistance to Trump is everywhere — inside the first 50 days of mass protest was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

It’s been a long six weeks since Donald Trump was sworn into office amid a Nazi salute and a machine-gun barrage of 89 executive orders. We’ve been struggling for our lives, our country and our world ever since. 

From boycotts to mass noncompliance to street demonstrations, the response to the Trump administration’s policies has consisted of an impressive range of nonviolent tactics. 

More than just outraged protests, people are thwarting raids, refusing to obey unjust orders, standing up to bully politics and taking risks to do the right thing. The resistance is diverse, multi-stranded and feisty — and some of it is working. It has forced Trump to reverse course or push the brakes on numerous issues, including his original plan for 25 percent tariffs, funding freeze, federal worker buyout deal, firing USDA and CFPB workers, and more. 

And while there have been a deluge of unjust policies coming out of the administration, the hundreds of thousands of people taking action are showing that resistance is not futile. In fact, it may be crucial. If your friends are sinking in defeatism and wondering if there’s any point in protesting, here’s a detailed look at the astonishing amount of resistance happening — and why it makes a difference if they join in. 

First steps of resistance

On Inauguration Day, a fugue of stifling fear, defeatism and dread permeated the nation. But one brave minister — Rev. Mariann Budde, the first female Bishop of Washington, D.C. in the Episcopal Church — broke through that fear at the Inaugural Prayer Service by issuing a direct plea of compassion for immigrants, refugees and LGBTQ+ communities.

Rev. Budde’s open defiance — straight to Trump’s face, as he sat in the front row with his billionaire-backers directly behind him — unleashed the floodgates of popular courage. While Trump went on to sign 89 executive orders against DEIA policies, climate science, trans rights and more, people started posting alarmed comments on social media. 

When it came to on-the-ground actions, however, a certain reluctance to get onto the streets seemed to pervade. People’s March rallies were held in 200 locations around the country, including 100,000 people in D.C., but they only turned out a fraction of their record-breaking 2017 counterparts. What’s more, when the first 50501 protests were announced — calling for 50 protests in 50 states on Feb. 5 — many activists on social media issued warnings not to attend, fearing round-ups, violence from Trump supporters and the kind of chaos that could provoke martial law.

Fortunately, thousands of protesters in cities across 47 states took to the streets anyway, winning an important early victory against fear.

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DOGE is hiring. The response did not disappoint.

Another set of early campaigns that shifted people from worry into action were the mischievous — and fierce — efforts to flood snitch lines (the hotlines and emails set up by the federal government to receive reports of violations of Trump’s executive orders). These relatively safe actions offered a cross between expressing outrage and the satisfaction of overloading systems that targeted migrants, queer and trans individuals and DEIA policies. The hiring site for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, became another popular target. Each time someone submitted a crank response — like the script to “The Bee Movie” or a message by Scrooge McDuck — the humor and defiance further emboldened resistance. 

Thwarting ICE raids

In the first week of Trump’s second presidency, ICE raids started sweeping the nation, trying to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Migrant communities had been preparing for this onslaught for months. Drawing on decades of resistance strategies, some businesses prepared routes of escape out back doors or private areas that ICE could not enter by law. Field workers in California used stay-at-home strikes to evade agents with up to 75-85 percent of the workforce not showing up.

In school districts like Los Angeles, teachers refused to let agents enter the grounds. Sanctuary cities like Chicago flatly denied any cooperation with ICE. Sanctuary churches defended their historic right to provide shelter to the oppressed. Meanwhile, Day Without Immigrants — a coordinated day of action against unfair immigration policies and deportations — held strikes and work closures in 120 cities across 40 states. Thousands blocked a major freeway in Los Angeles protesting deportations. Similar protests were held in San Diego, Dallas, Houston and Olympia. Meanwhile, Los Angeles students walked out of class for five days straight to protest ICE raids. Student walkouts also occurred in Bakersfield, Sacramento and Redwood City. 

Opposition to mass deportations also spanned beyond U.S. borders, as Colombia, Mexico, Brazil and Honduras all coordinated resistance efforts. Pope Francis wrote a sweeping letter to U.S. bishops denouncing Trump’s mass deportation plans and Vice President JD Vance’s use of Catholic theology to justify the crackdown. Even the IRS got involved, refusing to hand over the personal data of 700,000 individuals, as Homeland Security tried to find the addresses of undocumented immigrants. Know Your Rights trainings erupted, training thousands of people in how to stop agents at the door. This was so effective that Tom Homan, Trump’s so-called border czar, complained that the legal trainings were “making it very difficult” to deport people. 

The immigration raids were a chilling sign that Trump 2.0 fully intends to follow through on some of its cruel promises. The resistance to them is sending a clear message: Just because he wants to do something doesn’t mean we’ll let him. The continued opposition to ICE was — and still is — one of the boldest, most widespread noncooperation campaigns seen in the United States in a long time. 

But this remarkable resistance is just one strand of the extraordinary response that erupted against the policies coming out of the Oval Office.

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Sounding the alarm on DOGE and Musk 

One of the most harmful and hated executive orders issued by Trump on day one was the creation of DOGE. Headed by the unelected tech billionaire leader, Elon Musk, this murky, secretive quasi-department has been rampaging through federal agencies, illegally demanding information and data access, firing federal workers, slashing budgets, freezing aid and sending out belligerent orders through the Office of Personnel Management. DOGE and Musk have become symbolic of the heartlessness, corruption, lies and frequent incompetency of the Trump administration. 

As DOGE attacked agencies, corresponding protests and refusals to comply erupted. Acts of creative protest have occurred everywhere — from the Super Bowl’s hecklers and halftime show that made Trump leave early to Vermont’s thousand-person protest, which sent Vance scurrying home without skiing. People hung upside down flags outside the State Department and at National Parks, including from the top of Yosemite’s El Capitan. The hacktivist collective Anonymous broke into TV screens at the U.S. Office of Housing and Urban Development office in D.C. and put up an AI video of Trump licking Musk’s feet. People visited Trump Tower in New York City to take selfies of themselves lifting the middle finger.

Major protests have been happening multiple times per week, organized under various banners, including 50501, Tesla Takedown, People’s Marches, No Kings On Presidents Day, Save Our Services, Stand Up For Science and National Parks Protests. These are turning out hundreds to thousands of people at dozens to hundreds of locations across the United States. (Check out the recently-launched Resist List, which is using social media to collect and share these stories, many of which aren’t making it into the mainstream news.)

Meanwhile, in D.C., unions rallied at the Department of Labor and more than 1,000 people protested at the U.S. Treasury. Hundreds, including Democratic lawmakers joined the blockade and demonstration outside the shuttered USAID offices. Inside the buildings, numerous officials threw up roadblocks to DOGE’s efforts to seize control. The USDA Inspector General refused to resign and was kicked out of the building. Treasury officials refused to hand over data access as long as they could, then sounded the alarm that prompted a federal lawsuit to halt the takeover. When the U.S. Digital Service was subsumed into DOGE, 21 tech workers resigned in protest, signing a statement warning that this rampage wasn’t about efficiency, it was about destruction.

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How movements can make courts play their role in defending democracy

These actions rarely halted DOGE for long, but they made known what was happening and catalyzed the federal courts to issue injunctions and fast track related lawsuits. Actions by judges have become the most robust line of institutional defense, blocking (at least temporarily) the federal funding freeze, alterations of Treasury data, attacks on birthright citizenship, orders to move trans women prisoners to men’s wards, the ban on gender affirming care, cuts to National Institutes of Health research funding and Trump-Musk’s buyout deal deadline for federal workers. Citing the First Amendment, a federal judge also put a preliminary injunction on parts of Trump’s anti-DEIA executive order. In addition, the Trump administration was ordered to release $2 billion in suspended USAID funds for work already completed. Many other cases are still pending.

Even as Trump and Musk violate some aspects of certain rulings, the injunctions build a clear track record of lawlessness that undermines the administration’s credibility and sets up the groundwork for legal consequences down the road. It provides evidence that this administration is not normal and must be resisted — and ended. 

It’s also worth noting that achieving these injunctions for any one of these issues prior to this year would have been a significant victory for our movements. These are not normal times. Day after day, regular Americans are doing the impossible, scarcely even noticing the magnitude of what popular dissent has tackled and accomplished already. 

Trump is not invincible. Resistance has also forced Trump to rescind his heavy-handed memo freezing federal funds, back off his original tariffs plan and settle for minor concessions during a 30-day pause. Trump had to backtrack on slashing jobs at the National Park Service and the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, USDA bird flu staff and public power workers. He also reinstated some of the CDC scientists, nuclear safety workers and EPA workers, as well as 6,000 USDA workers. In addition, he was forced to restart legal aid for migrant children held in detention centers and funding for a 9/11 World Trade Center attacks survivors program.

Do not obey in advance

What’s making the protests powerful is pairing them with acts of noncooperation and noncompliance — some of the most effective tools in nonviolent struggle. While protests can rally the people, sound the alarm and galvanize supporters to take action, they are rarely strong enough on their own to pressure decision makers into reversing course. On the other hand, refusing to comply, disobeying unjust orders, boycotts, strikes, and walkouts have both immediate and long-term impacts that raise the costs of maintaining the objectionable policy. We’re seeing a significant uptick in the use of these tactics, especially among federal workers.

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We are stronger than we think

On day one, Elon Musk tried to get federal workers to voluntarily quit by offering them a buyout offer, but it backfired. Workers were insulted and outraged by Musk’s threat. Activists, unions, and legislators alike urged workers not to take this potentially illegal offer. On Reddit, federal workers reacted with statements like, “I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible, RTO be damned. Hold the Line!”

This led to a stay and defy strategy in which workers chose not to quit, but rather resist from the inside until they were fired. Numerous groups circulated resistance guides that showed people how they could refuse cooperation and disobey unjust laws or policies. “Do not obey in advance” became a widely quoted strategy drawn from authoritarianism expert Timothy Snyder’s book “On Tyranny.” From governors upholding trans inclusion to schools maintaining DEI initiatives, there’s a rising trend to reject voluntary compliance and start with defiance — thus forcing the administration to expend time, money and effort to enforce their policies. 

One of the most dramatic examples of this occurred when Elon Musk ordered all 2.4 million federal workers to send an email listing “5 Things You Did This Week” to the Office of Personnel Management or risk being fired. While the White House Press Secretary claimed that around one million federal workers complied, this figure was unverified and likely also included protest messages. Even if taken at face value, it’s likely that 60 percent of the 2.4 million non-military federal employees flat-out refused, making it potentially one of the largest acts of mass noncompliance in U.S. history.

This sense of direct power is appealing — and not just to federal workers. Boycotts and economic resistance have found widespread popularity among the people.  

One of the most successful campaigns of economic resistance so far has been Tesla Takedown. After Musk flashed what looked like a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration, the internet rebranded his vehicles as #swasticars. Tesla Takedown built on this burning dislike of Musk and channeled it into a robust, coordinated effort to tank Tesla stock and sales. With divestment efforts and protests at Tesla showrooms, the campaign has been mobilizing thousands of people in locations across the U.S. and abroad to crumble Musk’s primary source of wealth. Their efforts are having an impact. Tesla stock plummeted 28 percent in February 2025 and sales have dropped 8-12 percent in the U.S., 45 percent in Europe, 70 percent in Australia, and 49 percent in China. Musk also lost a $400 million armored car deal with the U.S. federal government after massive outcry against favoritism. The campaign sends an important message to all the billionaires: Hands off or it’ll cost you. 

Other economic resistance campaigns are similarly taking aim at megacorporations, particularly the ones that have reversed DEI policies or aligned with the Trump administration. In January and February, more than 25 percent of all U.S. citizens dropped one or more favored brands over political issues, with the trend leaning more toward supporting DEI, social justice and progressive values. After Target dropped its DEI policies, Black Lives Matter issued calls to boycott the company. Now a broader campaign, the 40-day Target Fast aims to show “Black spending power in real time.” Target is already struggling, losing $12.4 billion in market value by the end of February 2025. The company also took a hit in web traffic sales on the Feb. 28 National Economic Blackout, along with Walmart. A rotating list of corporate boycotts is taking aim at Target, Walmart, McDonalds, Lowe’s and Amazon. #LatinoFreeze aims to get Latinos to stop spending as much as possible until attacks on immigration, DEI and other issues end. People are being actively encouraged to shop at stores like Costco and Aldi’s, which have made public declarations that they will uphold DEI policies. 

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The economic boycott caught fire. What’s next?

Noting the popularity and interest in these types of actions, Boycott Central has launched an online tracker on the many campaigns, their effectiveness and how people can get involved. The trend toward canceling services that don’t align with one’s values has also hit Google, which saw users switch to other search engines and map services after it changed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America following Trump’s order. Calls to boycott all Musk products have led to an “X-odus” from his social media platform, with so many users switching to Bluesky that the new social media site has swelled to over 30 million users.

Speaking of social media, the multi-platform account Alt National Park Service — which started on Twitter in 2017 when Trump banned protest on official parks social pages — has been documenting the administrative coup in detail and mobilizing resistance. Over the past six weeks, its network of federal workers has swelled from 10,000 to over 160,000 and expanded into a coalition of 40 #AltGov entities, including Alt CDC (they/them), Alt FAA, Alt FDA, Alt FEMA, Alt Library Of Congress, and Rogue NASA.

Together, they organize resistance within federal agencies, report on what’s happening and also publicize fact-based information currently banned within their organizations (like climate science, public health updates and gender-affirming care). They have also worked with Resistance Rangers and other groups to organize hundreds of protests at National Parks to stop layoffs and budget cuts, using tactics like sand-writing on beaches, inverted flags for distress, front gates rallies and more. 

All of this — from street protests to the surge in calls to legislators to direct noncooperation from federal workers — has kickstarted politicians into more courageous stances. A growing number of schools and districts have refused to back down on transgender policies, reaffirming their commitment to some of their most vulnerable students. Alaska’s legislature rejected Trump’s name change for Denali. Governors have made bold stands in opposition, becoming an important bulwark of defense against Trump policies. Maine’s governor stood up for trans women in sports, Michigan expanded anti-hate laws to include attacks on LGBTQ+ persons. Delaware refused to participate in migrant round-ups. Massachusetts upheld DEI policies. These stands by governors are worth keeping an eye on, as they’re important lines of defense, and politicians are taking risks to maintain them. With federal funding on the line, it’s important to shore up the governors’ convictions and hold steady. 

Democratic U.S. congressmembers are notably lagging behind their state and local counterparts, though they have attended protests at federal agencies, spoken out in the media and held an all-night filibuster to try to stop a cabinet nomination. During Trump’s joint address to Congress, Rep. Al Green disrupted the speech until thrown out; others held signs or walked out in protest. But the overall lackluster response is one reason why traditionally left-leaning electoral politics and legislative action groups like Indivisible and MoveOn.org have been putting pressure on politicians both left and right, using tools like 5Calls to flood phone lines and overload congressional calling systems. Constituents have also packed contentious town hall meetings across the nation, leading conservatives to advise against open meetings — a flagrant attack on democracy. With Indivisible’s new toolkit for the congressional recess, they’re aiming to bolster Democratic action and drive a wedge between conservatives and Trump. 

At the same time, international outrage over tariffs and imperialism has goaded Canadians to boo the U.S. national anthem, cancel their vacations in the U.S., boycott U.S. businesses in favor of Canadian products, tear up a $100 million Starlink contract, propose a 100 percent tariff on Tesla vehicles, threaten a 25 percent electricity tariff and prompt 263,000 citizens to sign a petition to have Musk’s citizenship revoked. In Denmark, thousands of people signed a satirical petition to buy California, protesting Trump’s idea to turn Greenland into “red, white and blue land.” South Africa suspended U.S. businesses after the administration made racist sanctions in retaliation over South Africa’s land reparations efforts. Protests broke out in Panama over threats to take over the canal. Trump’s approaches on Gaza and Ukraine have garnered widespread condemnation from world leaders, and the Gulf of Mexico renaming has angered people across the globe.  

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Donate Building on successes and scaling up

All of this action — from protests to disobedience, national and abroad — is but a taste of what is coming next. During the congressional recess from March 15-23, Indivisible is putting the pressure on politicians, both left and right, to halt federal budget cuts and DOGE’s abuses. There’s growing engagement with campaigns for tax resistance. A long list of boycotts is targeting a rotating set of corporations over anti-DEI policies, immigrant raids and other issues. The call for a general strike has been repeatedly issued and close to 300,000 people have signed a “strike card” indicating their readiness to join in.

Although prolific, many of the actions we’ve seen so far haven’t yet scaled up to a size required to achieve their goals. Instead of a couple hundred people protesting federal agency closures, there needs to be thousands of people blockading the doors for days — or however long it takes to force Trump and Musk to back off. Beyond a one-day shopping strike, there needs to be sustained boycotts involving millions of people on billionaires’ most vulnerable enterprises. Recruitment, expansion and reaching into ever-widening circles needs to be a concerted effort by everyone. Coalition building and coordinated campaigns are key. 

In the next weeks and months, we are likely to see scattered and reactionary acts of noncompliance shift to coordinated campaigns of noncooperation. We’ll need that level of training and preparation. In the next round, the costs and risks to each side of the struggle will be raised. Trump is already falsely claiming that the Tesla boycott is illegal. His administration is already threatening and freezing millions of dollars of federal funding to states that stand up against his policies. In the face of this, activists need to be more strategic and prepared to weather repression and make it backfire. Up until now, rapid response actions play an important role, but the next phase requires sustained campaigns and careful strategy. 

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What the US can learn from South Koreans who stopped an authoritarian power-grab

And what is the end goal? Trump has pulled an administrative coup, maliciously dismantled our public services, threatened national security, tanked the stock market, blown up international relationships, ignored the rule of law, engaged in self-beneficial corruption, and violated human and civil rights. If we don’t want to spend four years fighting one devastating policy after another, we need to take a look at the long list of abuses and make a strong case to our fellow citizens that an unprecedented political crisis like this requires an unprecedented response. (Unprecedented in the United States, anyway — since numerous countries worldwide have seen movements rise up to force autocratic leaders out of power, including Serbia, Philippines, Chile, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Liberia, Indonesia, and most recently South Korea.)

At the same time, we must ask: Is overturning Trump’s abusive policies one after another enough? Or do the many strands of resistance have a shared vision for the future of this country that can be articulated and won?

Emerging from stifling fear into widespread protest in a few short weeks, resisters have already achieved important steps. They’ve mobilized tens of thousands repeatedly. They’ve put significant economic pressure on Trump and Musk on multiple fronts. They’ve rolled back and halted a long list of the administration’s policies. In the next six weeks, or six months, the resistance can build on these successes and dare to achieve the impossible. Trump may be attacking everyone, but remember: He’s surrounded on all sides.

This article Resistance to Trump is everywhere — inside the first 50 days of mass protest was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article How pro-Palestine student activists are fighting increasing repression was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The student movement for Palestine is once again in the news following reports that ICE detained Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of pro-Palestine organizing at Columbia University. The Trump administration appears to be delivering on its promise to go after foreign students who participate in the movement for Palestine. Trump has already passed several executive orders as part of this McCarthyist attack on universities.

The outrage against Khalil’s detention is clear. In just over a day, a petition calling for Khalil’s release has been sent over 2.3 million times. Student Workers of Columbia, the union representing instructors, teacher assistants and researchers at Columbia released a statement denouncing the Department of Homeland Security and ICE’s presence on Columbia’s campus — as well as demanding the reinstatement of the university’s sanctuary policy to protect international students.

On March 10, over 1,500 New Yorkers marched through Manhattan demanding Khalil’s release, according to PROTEST NYC. That same day a federal judge blocked Khalil’s deportation.

The attack on Khalil has put university activism for Palestine in the national spotlight, but even before his detention, the movement has been fighting increasing repression. For well over a year, universities across the United States have been one of the most important arenas of pro-Palestine activism. This became clear last spring when student activists at more than 100 college campuses across the U.S. launched Gaza solidarity encampments to protest Israel’s war on Gaza and apartheid policies toward the Palestinian people. These encampments also highlighted how universities throughout the United States make Israel’s anti-Palestinian policies possible through investments in the state of Israel and the U.S. weapons industry.

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Columbia students are sick at heart — just as we were in ‘68

The encampment wave made national headlines and drew comparisons to the historic movement against the Vietnam War. In the aftermath of the encampment wave, which ended in part due to violent police raids against student activists and mass arrests across the country, university administrators, politicians at the state level, and the Trump administration have all been ramping up attacks on the university movement for Palestine.

As a result of the increasingly hostile environment for pro-Palestine activism, some in the movement are thinking of how to build campaigns that channel broader opposition to the attacks the movement is facing. One person trying to build this perspective is Sammie Lewis, a community activist in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who is facing felony charges for participating in the Gaza solidarity encampment at the University of Michigan.

“The encampment served as this space to really bridge any gaps that there were between students and non-students,” Lewis said. “I think that what the state and what the university fails to understand is that the more they repress us the more we will stand together.”

Lewis is one of 12 community activists facing charges for engaging in two separate protests on campus (the encampment and a die-in, which took place in fall). Lewis argued that it is essential to build public support for the activists as a way to politicize the larger community against attacks on the movement for Palestine, and to get the charges dropped. As part of this effort the activists have gotten community members to pack the court anytime they have gone before a judge.

“We’ve had really good shows of support where the court has actually had to limit how many people are allowed in,” Lewis said. “They had to also, at times, clear the court so that our people could go in, and with that there’s still people in the halls.”

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The activists have made an effort to provide public updates to keep the community informed about the case and have begun reaching out to activists fighting repression in other cities.

Lewis added that this perspective comes in part from their participation in the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising and organizing against repression of that movement.

“During that time there was a lot stronger of a ‘drop the charges’ campaign nationally, and you know times are different now,” Lewis said. “But I think it’s still really important to have that national campaign.”

In New York City, Lucien, a pro-Palestine activist at the City University of New York, or CUNY, has been organizing to support eight community activists facing felony charges for their participation in CUNY’s Gaza solidarity encampment. Lucien, who asked to only use his first name to avoid retaliation from the university, has also been in communication with the University of Michigan activists. He mentioned that both the University of Michigan and CUNY leaned into bringing out broader community support to their encampments, taking advantage of the public nature of the two universities.

“Painting people as outside agitators in the media and then charging them with intense charges for participating in an encampment at an open public university goes against the very public nature of what CUNY is,” Lucien said. “This is an institution paid for by the taxpayers of New York accountable to the communities that the campuses are in.”

Like the University of Michigan activists facing charges, the “CUNY 8” have packed the court with supporters from the community. They have even received support from Mumia Abu-Jamal, a well-known political prisoner from the Black freedom struggle.

“One of the things that has been really moving for me to see is the intergenerational support coming from an older generation of political prisoners,” Lucien said.

CUNY faculty call for the dropping of charges against their students in 2024. (X/@CUNYFSJP)

He added that faculty at CUNY have played an important role in resisting the attacks that students are facing. He mentioned a few moments during the encampment where rank-and-file union members organized to support the students. This included faculty blocking the entrance to the encampment and chanting “To get to our students, you’ll have to get through us.” CUNY faculty also held a grassroots assembly where hundreds of workers voted to support the pro-Palestine demands put forward by the encampment, and organized a wildcat sick-out against attacks on the encampment.

Lucien added that many of the initiatives from CUNY faculty have been organized despite opposition from their own union leadership. “I would like to see the leadership of the [union] show up against this repression,” he said. “That has not happened, which I think is really an abdication of their responsibility.”

There have been other powerful examples of university faculty organizing in support for the student movement. At the University of California, university workers organized in UAW Local 4811 went on strike to defend their students’ right to protest for Palestine. In December 2024, two different faculty unions at Rutgers University passed resolutions calling for Rutgers and the American Federation of Teachers to divest from Israel. Earlier this year CUNY faculty went even further and voted for their own union to divest from Israel.

Lucien also spoke to the importance of a campaign against repression at the national level.

“The playbook is being replicated because these administrators are looking at what each other are doing. They’re in conversation with one another, coordinating national strategy around repressing the movement,” Lucien said. “As a movement we need to be in conversation with each other about how to tune our strategy to push back against this repression.”

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Despite the crackdown on the movement, there is broad support for those organizing in solidarity with Palestine. A recent Gallup Poll shows that Americans’ sympathy for Palestinians has reached a record high, while support for Israel is at its lowest level in at least 25 years.

Lewis believes that the repression of the movement is galvanizing people in the movement to show even stronger solidarity with one another.

“The charges are actually fueling us to fight more and to fight harder,” Lewis said.

They added that the fight against repression is an important opportunity to show that the attacks on the movement are connected to the oppression of Palestinians and attacks on other oppressed peoples.

“We want people talking about this,” Lewis said. “We want people to understand how it’s connected to the protesters that are facing charges where they are. We want people to understand how it’s connected to everything. That if our rights are being stripped away from us then it’s only before time that it’ll happen to them. Right now it’s for Palestine, but what’s next?”

This article How pro-Palestine student activists are fighting increasing repression was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Lessons on trans liberation from the US South was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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In a recent exchange between President Donald Trump and Maine Gov. Janet Mills, she publicly declined to comply with Trump’s executive order banning transgender athletic participation. The governor’s act of defiance made headlines as electeds, advocates and organizers grapple with how they might respond to the president’s anti-trans agenda. 

This practice of defiance and dedication to trans lives is nothing new to reformers in the U.S. South who have a message to national organizers: the fight may look different but the endgame remains the same. We have to protect our trans neighbors fearlessly and without exception. 

On the campaign trail, then-candidate Donald Trump and allies spent over $215 million on anti-trans ads. Since his inauguration, the president has taken aim at gender-affirming care, transgender military service, any practice of inclusion in sports and schools, and so much more. This new far-right political landscape is a change of ideology nationally, but in states like Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina and others in the South, providing resources and safe spaces for trans people in spite of conservative anti-trans legislatures is nothing new. 

“The focus for folks across the movement has to be on helping [trans] people through this crisis,” said Adam Polaski, communications and political director at the Campaign for Southern Equality, or CSE. 

CSE is a North Carolina-based organization that in 2023 launched the Southern Trans Youth Emergency Project, designed to close the gap between the consequences of anti-trans laws and the support that transgender youth and their families need. One way the initiative supports transgender youth is through direct emergency funds, small grants that support travel and lodging for individuals seeking gender-affirming care with unimpacted providers. After providing over $500,000 in direct emergency funds to 1,000 families and individuals across the south, CSE expanded the project to serve trans folks in need on a national scale — renaming the project the Trans Youth Emergency Project. 

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“These bans and executive orders are unfair and cruel, but also they are not the end game for families,” Polaski said. “And there is help that’s available. It is going to be harder to access your care, it is going to be unnecessarily expensive, but it is possible and the Trans Youth Emergency Project is here to help people through that.”  

In 2023, North Carolina advocates and organizers faced three bills targeting trans youth. The bills ban gender-affirming care for minors, restrict how gender identity can be discussed in schools, and prohibit transgender athletes from competing on girls’ sports teams. While organizers with Equality North Carolina, the state’s ACLU, and North Carolina’s Association of Educators worked in opposition to the legislative efforts, they all became law under the Republican statehouse. Initiatives like the Trans Youth Emergency Project seek to mitigate the damages of these Republican-led initiatives and provide protections and resources for trans folks outside of traditional political lobbying. 

“Sometimes we have to reimagine the way that it looks like to win or to have influence,” Polaski said. “And so maybe you can’t stop the bad bill from passing, but let’s create a program that helps work around the bill, or helps blunt the impact of the bill.”

That route of influence, through direct community service, is a note that Polaski hopes carries significance for activists and organizers on a national scale. 

“I hope more organizations are considering the ways that they can respond to people’s immediate needs, which could be through financial resources,” Polaski added. “It could be through tangible guidance and tangible information that often has to be kind of custom and tailored, and one on one. Folks have unique experiences, a fact sheet is not going to help them through a particular crisis.”

CSE’s national program expansion is a model with southern roots that finds consistency with work being done in other southern states. 

“In the South we’re focusing on survival,” said Brooke Lever, a community organizer in Memphis who has been producing queer showcases and installations for over seven years. “There is an anger, and I don’t know how best it can be directed, but I do know people that have actually been doing the grassroots organizing for years in Memphis.” 

Lever specifically mentioned My Sistah’s House, a grassroots, transgender-led organization in Memphis, Tennessee, that provides services for primarily Black and brown transgender and non-binary individuals. My Sistah’s House provides safe spaces, emergency shelter and access to health and social services in a state ranked “negative” in every category of LGBTQ equality by The Movement Advancement Project. 

One of the organization’s founders, Kayla Gore, converted a six-bedroom house into an emergency housing facility for “TLGBQ people in need of shelter.” As the organization looks to expand impact they have raised funding to build 20 tiny homes to increase their capacity to offer housing services to the communities they serve. 

Local organizations addressing gaps in care with direct services continue to be a proven model of impact in the South. But meeting the needs of trans folks at this moment is even deeper than direct services.  

“Social media is propagating this idea that we [trans people in the South] are isolated and alone,” Lever said. “So planning in-person events and having opportunities to work with one another and collaborate with one another artistically is like a spiritual activity. In Memphis, I’ve been seeing a really great response in sort of doing what I think we’ve always done. The people who care [about trans people] find places to make space.”

Addressing the needs of the community and making space for that community to exist, are two directives coming from organizing in the South. Similarly in Atlanta, groups are meeting this new political moment with the things that have always worked: fighting shoulder to shoulder. 

“If you don’t fight now, when are you gonna fight?” said Jason Arnold, an LGBTQ organizer and co-chair of community outreach at PFLAG Atlanta. “I have a voice. I have a platform. And with those things, I want to be able to lift my trans siblings up here in Atlanta. Ask trans people, how can I support you? How can I show up for you? What do you need from me?”

PFLAG Atlanta’s work involves community education, where hard conversations create room for growth. PFLAG Atlanta is moving to support trans folks and their families through support groups tailored to trans teens, parents and allied groups. 

“When I lead conversations about gender-affirming care I will ask folks, ‘Who here takes Viagra? Who takes hormones? Who’s had hair transplants? Who’s on birth control?’” Arnold said. “Welcome to gender-affirming care, because you don’t even know it, but you engage in it every day. So it’s not a case of them, it’s a case of us.” 

Putting these attacks aimed at trans people in a larger community context is essential to opposing harmful legislation, according to Arnold. This work is happening at a time when Georgia’s Republican state senate voted to pass Senate Bill 39, which would block state money for gender-affirming care in state employee and university health insurance plans, Medicaid and the prison system. The bill faces another vote in the House and potential legal challenges before it could become law. 

As national organizations and activists search for answers on how to protect trans rights under a Trump administration, the messages from organizers in the South are to double down on services, education and resistance. 

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“We don’t see enough direct support for folks,” Polaski said. “There are families and people who are uniquely impacted and really tangibly impacted by these attacks. They need information. They need financial support. They need community. And so I think that should be a focus of the movement for the coming years.” 

While activists have lost some political influence to protect the trans community, Polaski says that showing up in every other means of care will be essential over the next two years. 

Providing care means providing direct services but it also means showing up. Queer visibility can also be a form of resistance and protest, which is a note that Lever says national organizations should pay attention. 

“I was taught to believe that queer visibility and queer power is radical,” Lever said. “I definitely have felt a shift as I’ve gotten older. What are the priorities for an LGBTQ rights organization? Is it to make enough money to self-sustain and grow? Or is it to distribute resources until it’s empty?”

Listening to organizers working on trans liberation in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and other southern states tells a story of communities eager to do what they can to meet this moment by defending trans folks in new ways and old ways alike. 

“When we fight back, that is how they see our presence,” Arnold said. “We’re fighting like we’ve always been fighting. Now we get vocal, now we get loud, now we show them our strength in numbers.”

This article Lessons on trans liberation from the US South was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article The economic boycott caught fire. What’s next? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article is adapted from a Boycott Central newsletter email.

Across social media, many are arguing about the value of the Feb. 28 economic boycott. That boycott was called as a 24-hour economic blackout to protest corporate greed and companies like Target, Walmart and Amazon that have rolled back their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts following pressure from President Donald Trump. The event was called by one person and organized nearly entirely online through memes and varying descriptions of its goals.

When assessing what happened on Feb. 28, there are two realities: no one-day boycott has ever achieved its ultimate outcome. And in the United States, this was one of the largest one-day boycotts ever.

However, with no central organizing infrastructure, it was hard to tell how many people participated. 

The boycott was turned into organizing, like Chicago clergy who held a press conference endorsing it, a gratitude demonstration held in Athens, or the Resistance Revival Chorus in New York singing, protesting, and urging people to participate in their Tesla action the next day.

The boycott was a chance to say no and yes. Folks at Free DC hung signs outside of Target saying no but also made a booklet of local stores to support. Many places compiled local businesses to support, including Magic City Books in Tulsa and Auntie’s Books in Spokane.

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The boycott was endorsed by many celebrities: Cyndi Lauper, Pearl Jam, Taraji P. Henson, Stephen King and John Leguizamo.

Companies had a vested interest in showing there was no economic impact. But there are reports of the boycott having impact, like a cashier saying, “it was so slow they only needed to have two registers open most of the day.”

It forced many people to reflect on their personal spending priorities: Do we want to give money to big corporations who keep screwing us? What alternatives do we have?

For many people, it was their first public step against this ghastly regime of bullies and billionaires. We agree with Zi Teng Wang, who wrote: “If you see someone who has never taken any action before doing a symbolic one-day boycott, don’t tell them that their actions are futile. … People need practice doing things!”

How do you measure the success of a boycott?

The ultimate yardstick of a boycott is this: does the target accede to your demands?

In this case, the boycott was so nebulous it didn’t even have any clear demands. Boycotts cause economic pain, but then the company needs to know what it needs to do to stop it. And the people boycotting need to know when they have won. Having no clear demand was one of many valid critiques made about this day of boycott.

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Behind the sprawling, chaotic movement to boycott Trump

The boycott was poorly organized in that it didn’t have a structure and couldn’t gauge either economic impact or even rough estimates of people participating. Again, valid critiques.

But it clearly caught fire.

And there are other measurements that matter: how much did you show people want to take action — and is this a tactic they’re willing to try?

In that regard, we think of Feb. 28 like exercising. You don’t get muscles after your first workout. You have to push your muscles over and over again, and prepare for more.

By the yardstick of getting interest and practice taking action, the boycott was a wild success.

Still, if the extent of action truly is just one day, companies can weather the storm and return to business as usual.

Boycotts can work, but not without structure

The quality of organizing boycotts needs to increase. The People’s Union USA, who initially called the Feb. 28 action, has a litany of follow-up boycott days with different targets. But its lack of organizing people into any structure or any clear demands means the tactic will inevitably fail — and successive failures will lead people to the wrong conclusion that the tactic can’t work.

(Instagram/@martharich63)

A group of us created Boycott Central because we saw there was clearly an appetite for boycotting as a tactic. We list some common boycotts and have created a list of over 4,000 people who are interested in effective boycotts — for whatever groups want to design ones grounded in real strategy. Our website describes elements of what’s needed in a good boycott, because they can work. 

The United Farm Workers’ grape boycott was an industry-wise boycott against California grapes that forced growers to negotiate in good faith with farmworkers. It worked after months of carefully planned organizing: organizing support groups across the country, a national tour by farmworkers, pickets outside grocery stores, and more.

Boycotts in the social media era have often struggled. People often skip the organizing and just launch it as a social meme. But to work, boycotts require structure and ways to measure pressure. For example, the infamous Bud Light boycott was highly successful (21 percent loss in sales) — it had these elements.

Boycotts traditionally require a lot of coordination to make them work. They require:

• a target (who is supposed to change behavior)
• a demand (so the target knows what they have to do to get the boycott to stop)
• boycotters (a lot of people who used to be customers refusing to be customers anymore)
• leadership/negotiation committee (people who can show the target they’re hurting their bottomline and negotiate over demands)
• a way to communicate with the boycotters (a structure and massive social reach!).

Most of the boycotts launched since Trump took office do not have these. But that’s not a reason for despair, because good boycotts take time to organize well.

There are experiments brewing. Atlanta-area pastor Rev. Jamal Bryant has called for a 40-day fast from Target starting March 5, which marks Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent (targetfast.org). Latino Freeze is calling for an ongoing freeze on money from companies that abandoned their DEI policies (latinofreeze.com). There are so many different calls that haven’t yet coordinated themselves and their dates.

Many of us are watching Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, which is taking their time to do research and negotiation before picking two targets. They will announce their plan in about 45 days.

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The Tesla boycott campaign is the most effective boycott right now — it’s not just a social media meme. It involves pressure on shareholders (American Federation of Teachers just sent a letter to major asset managers) and street protests. Tesla Takedown has been organizing actions at Tesla showrooms all across the country. 

Already they’ve notched serious damage to Tesla’s brand. In 2024, Telsa had a 1.1 percent slump in worldwide sales, the first decline in a dozen years. And the recent sell-off of Tesla’s stock has knocked over $100 billion off of Elon Musk’s net worth.

More boycotts are going to be called in the future. As each of us share memes, we’ll need to assess if they have the ingredients to be effective and become more selective so that energy doesn’t wane. But the vast interest in the economic blackout on Feb. 28 shows that there is a deep hunger to hit major corporations where it hurts.

Update (March 7):

On Wednesday, Forbes reported that Target web visitors dropped 9 percent compared to previous Fridays and its most loyal customers (app users) was down 14 percent. Walmart similarly had a 5 percent reduction (though Amazon’s app and some other companies rose during that time).

The next day they published an op-ed that noted that there were 11 percent fewer people in Target stores on the boycott day as well. Most startlingly, 16 percent of consumers in a poll said they were participating in the Feb. 28 national shopping boycott — which if statistics held would mean over 40 million people!

This article The economic boycott caught fire. What’s next? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article We’re seeing the beginnings of mass noncompliance was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article is adapted from a Choose Democracy newsletter email.

The dynamics of this administrative coup are taking shape. Trump whisperer Steve Bannon has called the approach “muzzle velocity” and “flood the zone.” It has been relentless and already there are countless losses for the American people.

The aim of flood the zone is to move at such speed that it’s impossible to organize — and that resistance efforts are constantly distracted by the latest news and in constant disarray. For the first several weeks this strategy worked and was virtually unchecked and largely unchallenged. That’s been stage one: shock.

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The economic boycott caught fire. What’s next?

Keya Chatterjee of Free DC has trained over 2,000 people in the last week, in just D.C. alone. In one workshop she explained that we are moving into the next stages: gathering strength and cycles of interference. People are finding each other, brand new networks like 50501 are being born and many are engaged in a whole array of interference: boisterous town halls, protests, boycotts, digital sabotage, callers to right-wing talk shows and on and on. Some of these will work, some will not.

But just last week we saw the first glimmer of what mass noncooperation can look like — and it created some new cracks in the Trump-Musk administrative coup. 

Over the weekend, unelected billionaire Elon Musk and his rogue crew told the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, to send an email to federal workers demanding they answer the question “What did you do last week?” in five bullet points.

On social media, Musk wrote, “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

Interestingly, Musk had wanted the threat of termination to appear in the email OPM sent, but it somehow got cut or never made it in.

Why wasn’t it included?

It’s not because Musk didn’t want it in there. He made the threat in his tweet very clear (and later doubled-down).

It’s not because Musk knows it’s illegal. He’s broken plenty of laws and regulations.

It’s not because Musk is having a change of heart. He’s a billionaire bully.

It’s undoubtedly a sign of internal pushback beginning to take place. And that’s only because of the lawsuits, the pressure, and your calls and protests!

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The media completely missed this — instead focusing on Musk’s cruelty and incompetence with headlines like, “Musk threatens workers who don’t respond.”

What happened next, though, was even more important: Within minutes of receiving Musk’s email, texts on the encrypted messaging app Signal began flying. On one channel, a worker wrote:

1. I did [classified]
2. Also [classified]
3. Also [classified]
4. Also [classified]
5. Finally [classified]

Another replied, “No! Don’t send him anything. He’s not your boss!” Across the country, thousands of courageous federal workers wrote and advised each other to refuse to reply to those emails. 

Soon the federal workers’ unions followed suit and told workers to ignore the email completely. The National Treasury Employees Union sent an advisory with a huge headline: “DO NOT RESPOND TO ELON!” The ball was rolling.

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By this point, the Department of Defense joined in and told its people to ignore the memo. Finally, even some of Trump’s inner circle — sycophants like FBI Director Kash Patel, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard — told their staff to not comply.

This is how noncompliance works. It’s a chain reaction of smaller to bigger dominoes — the smaller ones knock down the bigger ones and on and on until the bigger dominoes fall.

What we just saw is the largest mass noncompliance with Elon Musk (so far). The White House press secretary claimed that around one million federal workers have replied, which means that nearly 1.5 million people engaged in noncooperation.

This is the general direction we need to go. Musk says “jump” — and we all say “nope” and return to our lives.

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DOGE is hiring. The response did not disappoint.

Notably, traditional press mostly only caught the story once Patel and Rubio joined in. The resistance starting from workers and unions went largely unnoticed and unreported — meaning Americans had little chance to see and understand how people power really works.

After humiliating headlines of impotence, Trump and Musk only know how to double-down. That means we need to prepare for more flailing, drama and horrific acts to follow.

Even as the onslaught continues, though, we have to note the cracks — if only to remind ourselves and each other that the people have the power. 

Since Musk’s failed email, federal workers are now suing Musk over his threat to fire them and 21 DOGE workers have quit in protest, saying “We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services. We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions.”

This is just the beginning.

This article We’re seeing the beginnings of mass noncompliance was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Los Angeles is leading the way in resisting Trump’s mass deportations was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On Jan. 20, during President Donald Trump’s inauguration, more than 2,000 people and 20-plus grassroots organizations gathered in Los Angeles to protest the administration’s immigration policies and promises of mass deportations. Waving flags of Latin American countries, chanting “Si Se Puede” and holding signs that denounce ICE and Trump, hundreds marched from Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights, California, to the federal Metropolitan Detention Center downtown where many detained by ICE are held. They joined over 60 community organizations such as Black Lives Matter LA and the Palestinian Youth Movement in protest.

Since Inauguration Day, those in Los Angeles, particularly East L.A. and Boyle Heights, have held several rallies and protests nearly every day against ICE and in support of the undocumented community.

“People want an end to the deportations,” said Gabriel Quiroz Jr., an organizer with Centro CSO who helped organize the Inauguration Day protest. “They’re seeing ICE in their neighborhoods. They’re hearing reports about ICE activity. There’s a lot of fear. But then there are a lot of people that are gonna stand up and fight back against this. They’re not gonna take this quietly.”

Quiroz said that while Central CSO and other community organizations in Boyle Heights and East LA have been leading activism efforts, there have also been a lot of spontaneous protests of people in the community showing up to gather and wave flags downtown. Quiroz has led and attended multiple protests since Trump’s inauguration, including student-led walkouts. As a community organizer, Quiroz has helped guide the youth protesting. He provided them with a megaphone and a banner that said “Lucha Contra Trump.”

Following the inauguration, there have been several walkouts of high school students from their schools in protest of the Trump administration and ICE raids, particularly in East LA and Boyle Heights, which are areas that are over 90 percent Latino.

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“People are out there for their parents, out there for their grandparents, or they’re out there for themselves,” Quiroz said. “Even if we’re documented ourselves, our parents probably aren’t, our grandparents probably aren’t, so we know that we are not removed from that struggle. It’s important for us to be out there.”

Carlos Montes, a member of the Centro CSO, who was also a participant in the East LA walkouts in 1968 — a student-led uprising over 50 years ago in which thousands of Latinos in the area walked out of their schools to demand equal treatment — also helped organize the inauguration protest, attended several others and guided the students in their walkouts. 

Montes said he is “thrilled and exhilarated that the young generation has taken the initiative to come out and say no to deportations and the Trump attacks. I think it’s awesome that the students are continuing the traditional tactic of the walkouts that we popularized in ‘68.” 

Leilani Mercardo’s daughter, a sophomore at Garfield High School in East LA, participated in the student walkouts against ICE. Once Mercado heard about the walkouts, she joined her daughter and the two protested in Downtown Los Angeles together.

“I was actually very happy and proud of her,” Mercado said. “It brings me peace to know that she’s aware of her surroundings. She’s not going to abide by ignorance and ignore what’s going on around her, so it was kind of a bittersweet moment, definitely an opportunity for us to bond.”

Mercado said she has been to three of the protests, one on the inauguration and two that followed. She said it is important for her to participate because it helps her feel like she is being part of the change by being outside and outspoken. 

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Having grown up in East LA and raising a daughter there, Mercado feels strongly for her community. She said that the protests are bittersweet because “it’s unfortunate that the rights of undocumented people and our families are being violated, but at the same time, I felt like we were doing something about it together.”

“It’s very close and dear to my heart,” Mercado said. “I come from a family of immigrants. I think that almost everybody in this community does. We’re all affected on some level, and ultimately this is against the human rights that our people deserve.”

Mercado said that she saw a lot of signs during these protests, but one that resonated with her the most was one that said “Don’t bite the hands that feed you.” She said her grandfather, uncle and cousins were farm workers, so that sign meant a lot to her. Another sign she said was memorable to her was one that read “Education, not deportation” because she has many close friends that are on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which allows children brought to the U.S. to go to school and work without threat of deportation.

She said that immigrants and undocumented people are often misrepresented and dehumanized in the media, and she hopes the protests will change the perception of the false narratives that are against them.

“They’re good people,” Mercado said. “They’re good humans, and aside from them having a significant contribution in the community and family values and respect for the land, they also do contribute financially with their work, their labor and good morals.”

Quiroz said that the protests were filled with youth, families and community members in Los Angeles, many waving flags from Latin American countries and dancing to traditional Mexican songs like “La Chona,” and supporting street vendors selling candies and ice cream.

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“You got young kids, everybody dancing to music, waving flags, using the ‘Si Se Puede’ chants, ‘Pueblo Unido’ chants,” Quiroz said. “It’s pretty cool, because these are chants their parents … and their grandparents were probably using decades ago. It is beautiful — that Latino resistance.”

At protests organized by Centro CSO, they have had community members, advocates and elected officials speak out about why it is important to fight Trump and support the undocumented community. They also had a “know your rights” workshop built into a play put on for the community, which ended in ICE agents being defeated because the community knew their rights.

Quiroz said that he has noticed an increase in police and ICE presence in the community since Trump’s inauguration. He said that he has heard reports of unmarked cars passing by residential areas and markets. Even at the protests, Quiroz said they faced a lot of police repression. At one of the protests, police showed up in riot gear, broke up the crowds with their batons and fired projectile weapons. Some people were detained at the protests, though no one was charged. As someone who is experienced with protests, Quiroz was able to help manage.

“In that situation, I think that having been organizing and being activists for a couple years now, our leadership is very needed,” Quiroz said. “So I think it was great for us to be there in that situation, because we kept people from getting arrested, getting themselves hurt, because you can’t be protesting here if you’re in jail and you’re hurt.”

Quiroz said that grassroots organizations will continue to take the lead and work alongside the community to push the protests forward. He said the protests are building on Los Angeles’ rich history of Chicano activism, which includes the East LA walkouts for equal education and the March 2006 student walkouts in support of immigrant rights.

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In mid-February, over 60 community organizations in Los Angeles formed the Community Self-Defense Coalition, which is committed to patrolling neighborhoods and spotting ICE. Quiroz said that they have been informed on how to spot ICE, verify reports of ICE activity and inform the community of their activity. He said they are also careful not to spread fear, but to spread knowledge. 

Mercado said that there have been people creating platforms for others who want to participate and want to help. She said many in the community are also continuing to promote events and donating their time, money or supplies in support of the protests to ensure a safe environment.

“If people don’t actually step foot on the ground, go outside, hold a sign and get the attention of bystanders or the media, nothing gets done,” Mercado said. “Attention is attracted by holding signs and being vocal about what it is we want, and it encourages other people to do the same. Then they come to realize that we’re all affected by this. It just unifies everyone.”

This article Los Angeles is leading the way in resisting Trump’s mass deportations was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.