Waging Nonviolence

This article How Brazilians pulled off Lula’s surprise win was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On Oct. 25, Brazilians made history by resisting hopelessness and achieving, for the first time since the return to democracy in 1985, a comeback in the runoff of a presidential election. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won reelection by more than 4 million votes after losing the first round to opponent Flávio Bolsonaro by over 2 million votes.

Lula, a former metalworker and union leader who co-founded the left-wing Workers’ Party, was seeking his fourth term as president. Flávio, by contrast, was the candidate of the far-right Liberal Party and was running as the successor to his father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally who was convicted and imprisoned for attempting a coup d’état.

The first round suggested that Flávio and his party were on track to gain an enormous amount of power. The party won more seats in Congress than any other — nearly a quarter of the lower house and more than a third of the Senate — which, together with other right-wing parties, gave the right a majority in both houses.

Two days after the vote, Flávio said he would use that majority to “change the Constitution” and “re-democratize” the country. Asked what he meant, he proposed limiting the powers of Supreme Court justices, lowering the age of criminal responsibility and ending presidential reelection, and he left open the possibility of extending the presidential term from four to five years.

“I really think the desperation and fear after the first round changed everything. There was a need to act with more urgency, and this desire to organize.”

In addition, whoever won in October would be able to appoint up to four of the 11 justices of the federal Supreme Court, the same court that convicted Jair Bolsonaro. A Flávio victory would have given the far right control over all three branches of government, amid the advance of the far right in Latin America and the United States.

As a result, after the first-round results came in on the night of Oct. 4, the mood among Lula’s supporters was one of deep discouragement and fear. But this fear quickly turned into forms of popular organizing that were diverse, complementary and consistently nonviolent — and they changed the course of the race. The mobilizations included a large-scale effort by politicians, activists, content creators and ordinary supporters to organize and amplify pro-Lula content on social media, and an equally massive occupation of the country’s streets in peaceful demonstrations.

Students took center stage in the street mobilizations, with thousands turning out for protests such as one led by the National Union of Students, or UNE, at the Candelária church in Rio de Janeiro, and one led by UNE and the University of Brasília’s student council on the Esplanade of Ministries in Brasília. People in the streets and on social media acted together and complemented each other.

Beyond protests and online activism, people organized to make sure that those who had not voted in the first round would go to the polls, including elderly people and those who live far from their polling places. They also got off the internet and talked in person with undecided voters who had not yet made up their minds, a process that had a name: vira voto, or flip the vote.

For Gabriel Rochlin, a director, actor and teacher who took part in a vira voto group in Rio de Janeiro, this was a way to get out of the social media bubble. “The work of vira voto has a lot to do with breaking through the algorithm,” he said. “The street has this real quality of not having an algorithm that separates people: you’re going to meet people you would never meet on your feed.” He saw the fear engendered by the first round as the turning point: “I really think the desperation and fear after the first round changed everything. There was a need to act with more urgency, and this desire to organize.”

From demoralization to esperançar

Given the collective feeling of fear and hopelessness after the first round of voting, the first challenge was to shift the mood of the left. It was on Oct. 5, the day after the results, that popular mobilization began in earnest.

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“When we got hit with the news that Flávio had more votes, there was a kind of desperation,” said Nayara Ruiz, a social media strategist with 280,000 followers on Instagram. “A huge shock, a feeling of fear, and a replay in our heads of 2018 [when Jair Bolsonaro was elected].” At first, Ruiz recorded a video about that fear. “And while I was editing it, I started to feel really bad. And I said: I’m not going to post this video, this is not the path I need to take.” She came across a news story about how online fandoms dedicated to Brazilian and international musical artists like Taylor Swift, BTS and Anitta were putting their networks at the service of Lula’s campaign. “The moment I saw that, I said: ‘That’s it, I have to talk about this, about esperançar.’”

“Esperançar,” was a term used by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire to mean “hope in action,” as opposed to “esperar,” which in Portuguese means both to hope and to wait.

Ruiz then recorded a video talking about the fandoms and about esperançar, and why it matters for organizing. She explained that esperançar demands three things: seeing a possible future, understanding that there is a path to that future, and feeling that you can do something to make that path a reality. She wanted to show that there was a path to defeat Flávio if people came together.

The video was viewed 5 million times, the most of any she had posted, and brought her 40,000 new followers, Ruiz said. It was one of many videos and posts in the days after the first-round vote that spoke to people’s discouragement and helped turn it into a willingness to act.

Social media activism may have been one of the left’s most innovative strategies in this campaign. A WhatsApp channel called Exército do Lula, or Lula’s Army, was created by André Janones, a federal congressman from the state of Minas Gerais. What set it apart was its scale and its structure. It quickly grew from 50,000 to more than 10 million followers in less than three weeks, in a country where WhatsApp had been the far right’s most effective tool since Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 campaign.

“We learned together, we mobilized together, we practiced esperançar together, we believed together, and Lula’s Army was a place that brought all of that together.”

The channel’s growth came as the Lula campaign charged that Meta, which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, had limited the reach of Lula’s posts and favored Flávio’s. (Leaked communications from inside Meta supported this, and Meta acknowledged “technical problems” with the Lula campaign’s paid promotions, but denied any bias.) For Lula’s Army, the WhatsApp channel had the advantage of delivering messages directly to its followers without an algorithm throttling their reach.

Rather than relying on a few official accounts to broadcast the Lula campaign’s message, it turned millions of ordinary supporters into active participants. It also gamified the organizing for the second round. Because voting is compulsory in Brazil, the goal was less to get out the vote than to reduce abstention and win over undecided voters. Through frequent audio messages, videos and texts, Janones handed out missions to participants, calling on them to share content, boost posts, promote hashtags, invite new members and amplify messages supporting the campaign. Everyone was given a rank and could advance up the ladder by completing these tasks. Janones “promoted” Ruiz from soldier to captain of the Army in a lighthearted video because of the explainer videos she made about the channel.

She believes one of the initiative’s contributions was fostering a kind of political digital literacy among supporters. Janones taught the channel’s followers how platform algorithms work, so that messages from Lula and critical information about Flávio would rank higher on social media. Until then, the far right had dominated social media, partly because of the high engagement its posts generated. Participants in Lula’s Army came to understand that part of that engagement came precisely from their reacting to far-right content that bothered them.

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How a strong messaging strategy helped defeat Brazil’s Bolsonaro

Janones’ strategic directive to Lula’s supporters was that they should stop interacting with opponents’ posts and concentrate their collective strength on producing and circulating their own content. To that end, participants were instructed to watch videos to the end, and to like, comment on, save and share posts, using the platforms’ different features to expand their reach.

“Maybe Lula wouldn’t have won without this, without the Army, without this feeling that swept over people, without the sense that we weren’t fighting alone,” Ruiz said. “We learned together, we mobilized together, we practiced esperançar together, we believed together, and Lula’s Army was a place that brought all of that together.”

Ruiz credits Janones with turning that collective energy into a coordinated effort. “Janones calls himself a general, but I also see him very much as a conductor who led an orchestra that was disorganized, who tuned the instruments and managed to set the rhythm and organize the whole mobilization that took place and that is now being replicated around the world,” Ruiz said.

Taking to the streets

Social media also played an important role in spreading the word about and organizing the occupation of the streets during the weeks before the runoff. In the three weeks between Oct. 4 and Oct. 25, massive peaceful protests brought together hundreds of thousands of demonstrators across the country. These protests featured politicians, renowned Brazilian musicians like Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, and grassroots artistic groups. Together, the iconic faces and grassroots artists helped bring in a very broad diversity of people.

“As we saw the big street protests, the power we had, not only inside the university but also in the streets, on social media too, it started creating a movement of hope.”

University students played a fundamental role in this occupation of the streets. They were the ones who kicked things off on Oct. 5, and throughout the three weeks between the first and second round of voting, they were a major force calling people to the protests, often organizing through their own social media.

The first street protest of the runoff campaign took place in Niterói in the state of Rio de Janeiro on Oct. 5, organized by students from Fluminense Federal University. Those students set an example, according to Gabriel Shpielman, a mathematics student and activist with the Rebellious Youth Union. “I think if that hadn’t happened on the first day, it would have been totally different,” he said.

Student mobilization quickly spread to other universities, including the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, or PUC-Rio, which also began organizing the day after the first round. Shpielman and a classmate created an Instagram profile and called on students at the university to attend an assembly, from which the PUC-Rio Antifascista movement was born. Around 200 students packed the auditorium, heard from a representative of the National Union of Students and decided to go together to the protest in downtown Rio the following day.

According to Shpielman, this helped “put people in the position of seeing themselves building the comeback.” For him, it was in this experience with their collective strength that fear gave way to organizing: “At first it reflected despair, but as we saw the big street protests, the power we had, not only inside the university but also in the streets, on social media too, it started creating a movement of hope.”

The call for student protest started by word of mouth, in classrooms and WhatsApp groups, and gained reach through PUC-Rio Antifascista’s Instagram account. The account shared collaborative posts — Instagram posts that appear on several accounts at once — with other accounts, like Protesto Estudantil (a page run by high school students from Colégio Pedro II), the PUC-Rio Graduate Students’ Association, and with public figures such as Dani Balbi, Anielle Franco, Wagner Moura and Chico Buarque.

Students march in a rally for Lula at PUC-Rio on Oct. 22, 2026. (Photo by Tatiana Chain)

Shpielman called the process cyclical: The more visibility PUC-Rio Antifascista gained, the more partnerships it secured, and those partnerships increased its visibility. The page has now reached over 30,000 followers. Even so, for him, social media was at the service of the streets. “What really turned the election around were the streets, the protests,” he said. “Social media reflected that mobilization. It’s so much better to see a protest with a million people than a page with 10 million people.”

Getting voters to the polls

Another point of concern in the first round was the abstention rate, which was the highest since 1998: Over 21 percent of eligible voters, or 33.4 million people, simply didn’t vote. In light of this, much of civil society’s mobilization sought to make sure people went to vote. This took place through crowdfunding drives to arrange transportation for those living far from their polling places, ride-sharing initiatives, providing information for undecided voters in the streets and vira voto campaigns.

Diego Zuculin is one of the founders of Casa Marighella, a cultural and artistic production company and organization in São Paulo that put all of its work on hold to get out the vote. After the first-round results, “everyone looked at each other and said: ‘Wow, we’re screwed. What are we going to do?’,” Zuculin said. The next morning, the team decided “almost everything could be postponed in the face of the end of democracy.”

The first idea was simple: He would offer his own car to neighbors whose grandparents had no way to get to the polls, and a friend would offer his motorcycle. They soon realized that many people were probably thinking the same thing and decided to create a platform connecting those who could offer rides on election day with those who needed them. That’s how Carona Solidária, or Solidarity Ride, was born.

The team developed the first version of the platform in-house in two or three days. As word spread, partner collectives, artists, tech people and lawyers joined to help with legal issues and with outreach. The platform circulated on Instagram and WhatsApp, and in a second phase, the group reached out to journalists and pages in Brazil’s North region, where there were still few ride offers.

“The heart of vira voto is its humanity. It’s a place for building bonds, for looking people in the eye.”

“We had an idea, we put it to work, then it went to social media and it spread across all of Brazil,” Zuculin said. A total of 22,000 rides were offered, in every state and the Federal District, and the real reach was even greater. “Some people told us: ‘I registered two people, but I took two, and on the way back I took three more, and then five more.’ One person posted a video saying they drove 13 people, another 15, and only registered one or two.”

He also says that the reasons users gave when requesting a ride — such as a distant polling place, no nearby buses, advanced age or having to work on election day — could serve as a basis for public policy. In the second round, abstention fell to 19.22 percent, the lowest for a runoff since 2006, the result of an effort of which, Zuculin acknowledges, Carona Solidária was only one part.

Complementing these efforts, numerous vira voto campaigns took place across the country, in which people organized in groups to go out on the streets and talk to voters, especially those who were undecided or planning to abstain. Lula himself issued this call in a video posted on Oct. 7: “Come on, everyone, to the streets, let’s talk to people.” 

In Rio de Janeiro, the local WhatsApp group that Gabriel Rochlin belonged to started with fewer than 10 people and ended with 60. Over two and a half weeks, according to the group’s own count, they flipped 181 votes. “Thinking of vira voto as collective action gives you a much greater sense of accomplishment,” he said. The group set up at Largo do Machado square and in front of the Catete Palace because, according to Rochlin, Workers’ Party congressman-elect Marcelo Freixo had indicated that there were many undecided voters there. WhatsApp was used to organize the actions and to make sure volunteers were always together and in safe places, given the risk of violence.

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In their conversations, they used QR codes linking to informational materials, such as videos from Revelando, an investigative documentary series launched in September by the Brazilian podcast Calma Urgente in which well-known Brazilian figures voiced criticisms of Flávio. They also encouraged people to search Google for information about Flávio, something that Lula’s Army also urged voters to do. More than the information, however, Rochlin believes that “the heart of vira voto is its humanity. It’s a place for building bonds, for looking people in the eye.”

Oct. 25, the day of the runoff vote, went down in history. Brazilians achieved the unprecedented: They overturned the first-round result, elected Lula and halted the far right’s advance in just three weeks. The internet was flooded with powerful images — streets completely packed with peaceful demonstrations by Lula voters, the elderly voting, people journeying long distances to cast their votes, and entire Indigenous communities traveling to reach their polling places.

Ultimately, the movement to reelect Lula succeeded through a diverse range of civil resistance tactics. Right away, Lula supporters saw that to contain the far right’s advance, it was necessary to occupy the streets, deluge social media and create support structures so that people would vote and could reach the polls. They also saw the importance of mass participation: People from a broad range of social groups — of different ages, genders, social classes and regions of Brazil — acted together. In “Why Civil Resistance Works,” Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan identify mass participation like this as one of the key factors explaining why civil resistance is more likely to succeed than armed struggle.

But one insight runs through all these actions: People need esperançar, the capacity to transform fear into action. Millions organized and, following Paulo Freire’s advice, resisted when it felt hopeless. The far right, which has been advancing in many parts of the world, constantly uses hopelessness as a tool. Brazil’s civil mobilizations shows that esperançar is political, capable of acting as an engine of organization, social action and transformation.

This article How Brazilians pulled off Lula’s surprise win was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Democrats should wield their power to return agency to ordinary people was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Too often, we have seen a fundamental asymmetry at work: When Democrats win power, they might pass a modest minimum wage increase. When Republicans are in power, they do things like decimate public sector unions. In the long term, this is an imbalance that leads to ruin. 

Last week’s “blue tsunami” represented a resounding repudiation of the Trump agenda. While it is common that a sitting administration will lose seats in the midterm elections, swings of the magnitude that we have just witnessed are rare and important. For certain, Trump will still try to use the executive branch to wreak havoc on democracy and provide egregious giveaways for  the billionaire class. However, Democratic control of the Senate and the investigatory power of its majority in the House should provide an important check on his ability to do damage. 

Perhaps more importantly, progressive forces made critical gains at the state level. The Democrats won six new “trifectas”: in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Now, if current leads in Kansas and Alaska hold, “about 75 percent of Americans will live in states with Democratic governors,” and roughly 53 percent will reside in places where Democrats control both chambers of the state legislature as well, Newsweek reports.

Of course, we should not assume that Democrats will use their newfound power effectively if left to their own devices. There are significant blocs of the Democratic Party wherein centrist politicians have made careers of “playing to the middle” and embracing pro-corporate neoliberal politics. Should this tendency prevail, the Democrats will have squandered a historic opportunity, to the detriment of social movements and the broader American public alike.

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Forging an alternative path will mean pushing newly empowered legislators to think and act differently. Passing policies that make a real difference in the lives of working people is critical; however, this is only a first step. For movements for social and economic justice to secure long-term wins, they need to be advocating for how they — and their allies in office — can pursue structural reforms. 

A few years ago, after the 2022 midterms, my brother Paul and I wrote an article looking at the trifecta power that Democrats had gained in multiple states and asking, “Will they actually use it?” More specifically, it asked whether they would use their mandate “to enact changes that increase democratic participation and build progressive power” over the long haul.

When Republicans have gained majorities at the state level “they have used their power to push through reforms that weaken left-leaning constituencies and undermine the Democratic base,” we wrote at the time. “In contrast, when Democrats have been in the majority, they often have failed to reverse these changes or enact meaningful structural reforms — the kind of changes that both improve people’s lives and build power for the grassroots groups that can help them govern on an ongoing basis.” 

Structural reforms can come in many varieties: labor rights, campaign finance issues, measures to encourage and expand voting, redistricting, preemption laws determining whether issues are handled at the state or local level, free speech protections, regulatory modifications that allow for community involvement, and changes to the tort system, to name just a few. More than the specific issue or need addressed by a policy, being attuned to structural reforms means paying attention to how a change gives grassroots forces greater room to maneuver and reach for more in the future.

For social movements, structural reforms are a key mechanism of inside-outside politics, through which grassroots organizations work to elect champions into office who then, in turn, use the power of government to strengthen democratic participation and boost outside campaigns for social justice. Unfortunately, the right often has a better understanding of this process than liberals do.

A dramatic example of how Republicans used statewide governing power to alter the balance of forces was how Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, upon gaining a trifecta in 2010, sought to permanently kneecap unions. Recognizing the importance of organized labor as a foundational part of the Democratic coalition, conservatives made Wisconsin a so-called “right-to-work” state. They also passed the notorious Act 10, which severely restricted the bargaining rights of public sector unions and subjected them to an onerous series of requirements to even continue existing. As a result, these unions lost approximately 70 percent of their members by 2021.

In contrast, when it comes to fighting back, Democrats have a distressing track record of failure and self sabotage. When Iowa Gov. Chet Culver presided over a Democratic trifecta in 2008, he vetoed a bill restoring labor rights, despite having run on a promise to reverse right-to-work. In his fecklessness, he was joined by Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, who similarly vetoed several pro-union measures, despite having heavily relied on the support of the labor movement to gain office. Both ended up being one-term governors.

In understanding the difference in outcomes, we need only consider what conservative anti-tax leader Grover Norquist chillingly wrote about the impact of Republican actions in Wisconsin: “Trump’s tweets attract attention,” he remarked. “Act 10 moves forward. Quietly. Inexorably. Changing the political landscape like a glacier.”

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Making our demands both practical and visionary

Democrats commonly talk about reforms that might help people in their everyday lives, like improving public education or incentivizing developers to create more affordable housing, but they don’t focus on shifting power in the long term. “Even in trifecta states, Democrats’ strategy still amounts to playing defense,” Paul and I wrote. “Going on offense would entail learning from the Right’s unashamed boldness. It would mean using Democratic majorities to build social movements and redistribute power and resources in a more durable way — putting a premium on the types of changes sometimes discussed as ‘policy feedback loops’ or theorized by socialists as ‘non-reformist reforms.’”

Which brings us to today. In the last two years, we have seen a relentless program from Trump not just to advance conservative policy objectives, but to punish social movements and shift the balance of power in favor of reactionaries. Much of this has happened at the federal level, although it has often been backed up by state-level action. The administration has continued the broader Republican strategy of systematically attacking unions, ending collective bargaining rights for over one million federal employees, and advancing a broad slate of anti-worker policies. 

But while the labor movement is a critical pillar of support for the left that has been under siege, it is hardly the only one. Trump has systematically targeted social institutions perceived as refuges of progressive values, such as universities and the nonprofit sector. The administration launched an assault on large law firms that might once have filed lawsuits to help provide some accountability for administration misdeeds. He has likewise aggressively sought to restrict voting rights, encouraged Republicans to pursue new heights of gerrymandering, terrorized the immigrant community, and worked to criminalize dissent.

Each of these moves has something in common. They do not merely aim to enact conservative policies; they seek to permanently consolidate the power of right-wing groups and weaken the ability of any opposing institutions to resist.

In this election, the Republican attempts to entrench themselves failed to overcome the backlash generated by an unpopular war, high gas prices and increased cost of living, Trump’s brazen corruption, and the shocking federal occupation of major cities in the name of immigration enforcement. Movements worked hard to fuel this backlash, but we cannot count on such dramatic surges in public disgust to appear regularly. And we should not underestimate the impact of structurally minded maneuvers, which at times have protected conservatives from successful democratic challenge for decades.

The need for progressive movements and their elected allies to pursue structural reforms is not about tit-for-tat retaliation. There is a fundamental difference between enacting changes designed to reinforce privilege, profit, minority rule and the power of the wealthy, and those designed to expand voting rights, bolster democratic participation, and increase the ability for ordinary people to have a voice in their workplaces and in the public sphere alike. The goal of structural reforms by progressives is not to consolidate the power of a tyrant like Trump, but to increase power that is wielded democratically. Indeed, the danger is that centrist Democrats — themselves beholden to wealthy donors and often susceptible to threats of capital flight — prove unwilling to challenge fundamentally anti-democratic forces when given the opportunity.

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There have been some reasons for hope — and some examples of what the pursuit of structural changes can look like. Responding to a concerted campaign by organized labor, Michigan Democrats did, in fact, reverse their state’s “right-to-work” law in 2023, making Michigan the first to ever do so. The victories of progressives in Minnesota, who used inside-outside strategies to pass a variety of important gains, including expanded organizing and voting rights, is also a model that has become increasingly heralded in recent years. 

In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has created an Office of Mass Engagement, meant to encourage people to actively involve themselves in city politics outside of elections, and an Office of Worker Power, designed to help workers exercise their rights to organize. These are important examples of how government can seek to strengthen grassroots movements, even as it delivers on issues of affordability. 

Overall, the yardstick by which we measure Democratic progress should not just be whether the policies they pass provide immediate benefits, but how these initiatives serve to reduce corporate power and return political agency to ordinary people. 

The damage that Trump has wrought will not be easily reversed. But if progressive movements are to revitalize democracy and reverse trends toward oligarchic rule, we must think structurally and push for the kind of reforms that build power that can last for more than one wave.

This article Democrats should wield their power to return agency to ordinary people was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Trump and technofascism took a hit — now we must act was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The midterm election was a repudiation of Trump and of his Silicon Valley billionaire enablers. This has created a huge opening that we should celebrate — yet we should be clear-headed about the challenges ahead. Victory over Trumpism and Silicon Valley technofascism is by no means assured. Trump’s appointment of Stephen Miller, a white nationalist, to chief of staff is a flashing warning sign. 

Trump and Miller have massive power to use the Justice Department, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and other tools of the federal government to target Trump’s opponents. And the Silicon Valley billionaires will use their extraordinary wealth and power to try to crush attempts to stop the build-out of massive data centers, which they desperately need to power their AI expansion. There are growing fears that AI investments have created a stock market bubble that is leaking and ready to burst. The $2.5 trillion sell-off of AI and tech stock on Nov. 5 is a terrifying illustration of how AI speculation may crash the whole economy. So while we should breathe in the hope the electoral results have delivered to us, we must also redouble our resolve and prepare for the battles ahead.

Over the past two years, many of us felt overwhelmed, strangled and suffocated by unrelenting attacks that came from every direction, from ICE kidnapping our neighbors, to the U.S. bombing and warring on other countries, to absurd conspiracy theories and racist ranting by Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their ilk. As we can now see, the increasingly vicious nature of their words and actions was also a sign of their weakness and growing desperation. 

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But weakness and desperation should not be confused with surrender. As our history reminds us, the forces of entrenched power and wealth are nothing if not resilient. They will use every tool at their disposal to deflect or dilute reform, divide their opponents, and prepare countermoves that will roll back our gains. The Reconstruction of the post-Civil War years gave birth to the reactionary “Redeemers,” who succeeded in undoing efforts to advance racial equality. The forward thrust of the New Deal was blunted by the Red Scare. The civil rights gains of the 1960s were challenged by the Southern Strategy and the Reagan Revolution.   

So we should prepare ourselves for the reality that the forces that we have been fighting will not simply throw in the towel. We should not assume that the lawless ways of the Trump presidency will suddenly cease or that its billionaire backers will retreat to the comfort of their gated communities and private jets and cease their efforts to commandeer our future. Far from it. We must expect that they will use every bit of the considerable power they still hold to thwart real change.  

Silicon Valley AI billionaires have made clear that they aren’t content with just becoming billionaires and trillionaires. Their goal is far more expansive and scary. They want to eliminate democracy altogether and replace it with a CEO autocracy. Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel is worth $37 billion and publicly says, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” 

Defunding AI

The election has shown that the popular mood is behind us. We have a unique window to thwart the Silicon Valley billionaires and to build and exercise power. None of us has a road map of how to do this, but there are some promising paths we can take. A central task is figuring out how we stop funding, bankrolling and purchasing from the technofascist billionaires. We need to stop financing our own destruction. 

There are a series of exciting campaigns already happening that are trying to do exactly that, and each one offers opportunities for people to be involved individually and organizationally. These campaigns offer, if successful, a vehicle to organize and activate hundreds of thousands of new activists directly in the fight for democracy and against the Silicon Valley AI overlords. 

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10 reasons to resist AI

The $6 trillion of public employee pension fund assets and $900 billion in university endowments are currently a key source of capital for Musk and other oligarchs. We need to cut off, or at least limit, the massive flow of capital to the AI oligarchs and drivers of data center construction. It is a form of assisted suicide for union pension funds and public employee pension funds to invest in the very corporations whose goal is to destroy unions and public sector jobs and services. 

Unions and union members have a central role to play in protecting their pensions from AI investments that are both risky and self-defeating. They should call for this money to be invested in things like affordable housing and green retrofitting programs that create good union jobs, address pressing issues like climate change and the housing crisis, and support local economic development. Members can start speaking up en masse at public pension board meetings. Local unions can pass resolutions like the Chicago Teachers Union did in October 2025, with a “Resolution For A Pension Fund that Provides A Dignified Retirement While Promoting a More Just Society.”   

Students and higher education workers have an opportunity to challenge heavy investment by many university endowments in AI. The University of Michigan was one of the first investors in OpenAI. The University of North Carolina holds significant shares in SpaceX SuperIntelligence after the merger of SpaceX with xAI in February. The UNC fund made its initial SpaceX investment through Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel’s Silicon Valley “Founders Fund,” which heavily funds AI start-ups. Duke University also has $70 million in assets tied to the Founders Fund.

The work challenging these investments has already started with the Action Center on Race and the Economy’s Stop Funding Billionaires campaign, which is organizing members of unions and community groups to oppose continued investments in AI and bad corporate actors. Stop Funding Billionaires is working with Americans For Financial Reform, the American Association of University Professors, California Common Good, the People’s Lobby and others to halt Anthropic’s upcoming trillion dollar initial public offering.

The #BlockTheIPO campaign is calling on banks, institutional investors and stewards of public funds to boycott the Anthropic IPO, to pause all investment in AI and data centers, and to pledge not to bail out AI companies with public taxpayer and retirement funds until the financial and safety risks of AI are addressed. The campaign has combined research exposing the dangers of AI investment with direct action and protests targeting both Anthropic’s offices and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, whose bank is part of a syndicate of banks underwriting the IPO.  

Protestors gathered outside of OpenAI’s office in New York City to demand a pause on AI and data center development. (Gina Randazzo)

Labor has another critical role to play in this by adopting the approach of Bargaining for the Common Good, or BCG. BCG builds power by bringing unions and their community allies together around shared demands that benefit both workers and communities. When it comes to corporate accountability, BCG can look like organizing and bargaining campaigns that target the financial powers — Wall Street, private equity, hedge funds — whose influence determines the behavior of corporate CEOs and government officials alike. Such campaigns provide a model that can facilitate the alignment of labor unions and popular movements against the rampant spread of data centers, and in defense of democracy.

This isn’t an exhaustive summary, but it gives a feel for what is developing and what roles we can play. We are educating and organizing an army of union members, students and higher education workers to demand no more investments from pensions and university endowments in AI tech corporations.

Democracy defense

Even as we push back on data centers, we must also continue to challenge corporations whose actions have been eroding our democracy. Cities and states should stop using our tax dollars to subsidize, buy from or give tax breaks to companies that have won Trump administration contracts through corrupt “pay to play” procurement practices. Municipalities should also stop enriching corporations carrying out Trump’s authoritarian agenda. Not with Our Money is working with elected leaders and allies around the country to halt purchasing from companies like Palantir that are powering the surveillance state, ICE’s deportations and detention centers. 

Another example of this work is the global Purge Palantir campaign, which is fighting the spread of the surveillance state and the model of algorithmic governance. It’s calling public and private sector employers to stop using Palantir products and politicians to refuse political contributions from Palantir. Similarly, Tesla Takedown has focused on Elon Musk and Tesla and has conducted nonviolent protests at dealerships around the country to protest Musk’s many nefarious activities, beginning with his stint dismantling the government through DOGE.

Campuses should also organize to expose university investments in private equity companies that have teamed with Trump to threaten the future of higher education. The University of Michigan and Washington University are two of many examples of endowments that have invested in the private equity company Apollo, despite CEO Marc Rowan’s role as a key architect and promoter of the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” — an attempt to enforce ideological conformity, censorship and political oversight on universities, including an unconstitutional loyalty oath. 

The All Eyes on Yass campaign is organizing to make it unacceptable for politicians who want labor and community support to take contributions from billionaires like Jeff Yass who are spending millions supporting school vouchers and undermining public education. Like the Purge Palantir campaign, the All Eyes on Yass campaign is telling politicians they have to pick which side they are on.

The path to the future we want and need is certainly more open today than it was only a week ago. But we have a long and treacherous road ahead and significant obstacles to overcome.  

Building our immune response to fascism 

As I think about the challenge that confronts us, I think of a lesson I have had to learn the hard way. You see, I am allergic to bees. I have been stung by a yellow jacket, and I know that terrifying feeling of my throat swelling, of feeling the air being cut off, and literally fearing that I could go into shock and die within minutes. It’s the same suffocating feeling many of us in occupied Washington D.C. are experiencing as Flock cameras, ICE, the National Guard, police checkpoints and the surveillance state increasingly impact every part of our lives.

I’ve learned that being deathly allergic to bees means that you can either hide inside, out of fear of being stung, or you can study and learn about bees to limit the possibility of being killed by them. I have made it my business to deeply understand bees, and specifically, the yellow jacket, the only bee that has ever stung me. I’ve learned yellow jackets are most dangerous when they feel their nests are being encroached upon, and that this danger surges in the fall, when the weather is getting colder and they know they will soon die off for the season. They strike out and sting you for no apparent reason when they feel their time is coming to an end. 

I see waning Trumpism as analogous to yellow jackets in autumn. Like yellow jackets facing encroaching winter, those whose support made Trumpism possible know the demographics of the country are changing, that whites won’t always remain in the majority. They fear that we might be developing an immunity to their politics of division and hate. They also know how much their wealth and power depends on the bailouts, theft, fraud and massive financial manipulations that their control of the political system has allowed them. They know that their dominant role in this country and the world can come to an end if they can’t hold onto power now. 

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If we are wise enough to grasp their psychology, if we are strategic, if we organize, if we are prepared, if we are inspired and moved by knowing our season is coming, we can do more than just survive this change of seasons. 

For most of my life I’ve carried an Epipen to inject myself if I got stung. A combination of careful avoidance and life-saving injections have kept me alive despite multiple stings. But after learning to accommodate and survive bees, I’ve realized that surviving is insufficient; fear isn’t the way I want to live. So I have started a multi-year course of bee venom injections that over time will make me immune to bee stings. Soon, getting stung by a bee may be a painful annoyance, but it won’t threaten my life.

Similarly, we can start to inoculate ourselves against fascism. That means preparing ourselves to engage in mass noncompliance and nonviolent civil disobedience directed not only at the lawless administration that still holds power, but at the corporations that are supporting and profiting from Trumpism. Each time we engage in non-compliance — standing up to defend our immigrant neighbors from ICE — we start to build our immunity to fear. When we sit-in and engage in nonviolent civil disobedience at a corporate office or an airport, we build the systemic response that can ward off the stings they will no doubt seek to deliver in the weeks and months ahead. I know from my own experience with yellow jackets that they will reemerge in spring if we don’t destroy their nests.

This article Trump and technofascism took a hit — now we must act was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article The Democrats have a mandate for peace — here are 4 urgent priorities was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Voters in the midterm elections dealt a decisive blow to Trump’s war agenda and have created new possibilities for challenging militarism and ending the debacle in Iran. The blue tsunami that swept across the country was driven by many issues, including tariffs, corruption and higher prices, but voter discontent was rooted in opposition to the war against Iran and the high fuel costs and inflation that resulted. 

The election outcome presents an opportunity for activists to intensify pressures to end the war, reverse excessive arms spending, restore necessary funding for vital social and environmental priorities, and protect democracy. We need to elect a government that will build the foundations for a forward-looking, progressive foreign policy by expanding essential diplomatic capabilities and restoring U.S. support for global cooperation.

The current electoral realignment can be compared to the dramatic political transformation that occurred in the 2006 midterm elections. That year, the Iraq war was the decisive issue in helping Democrats pick up 31 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and six in the Senate. Then as now, affordability and immigration were important issues, but the dominant concern was war in the Middle East. As analysts argued at the time, Iraq was the “Archimedean lever” that shifted voters toward Democrats. 

But when the new Congress assembled in 2007, Democratic Party leaders equivocated. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid proposed a legislative agenda for the new Congress that ignored Iraq. 

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As Tom Hayden wrote in  “Ending the War in Iraq”, antiwar activists were furious. Constituents bombarded Democratic leaders with demands to prioritize withdrawal from Iraq. Protesters gathered outside Pelosi’s San Francisco home. An estimated 100,000 people marched in an antiwar rally in Washington, D.C. 

Democratic leaders quickly got the message and agreed on a legislative strategy to establish a timetable for withdrawal, which Congress subsequently adopted. 

We may need to exert similar pressures now to ensure that the new Congress fulfills its political mandate to end the Iran war and takes action to reverse other elements of Trump’s dangerous foreign policies. 

The threats to peace have grown significantly in recent years, and they are enormous and multifaceted. An unending, illegal war in Iran and related carnage throughout the Middle East; the arming of repressive regimes, up to and including enabling genocide in Gaza and occupation and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon; the skyrocketing of military-related spending (proposed at more than $1.5 trillion this year) and an accelerating nuclear arms race. All of this is occurring while the Pentagon is moving rapidly towards the deployment of AI-driven weapons systems that can operate without human pilots or human control.

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The threat or use of force has taken precedence over diplomacy, economic development and peacebuilding programs. The White House has rebuked democratic allies in Canada and Europe while coddling authoritarian regimes in Russia and Saudi Arabia. 

The human, economic and environmental consequences of these militarist policies have been disastrous — trillions of dollars wasted, hundreds of thousands of lives lost and tens of millions of people driven from their homes.      

The pursuit of peace abroad depends on the defense of democracy at home. Legislators must protect democracy by removing obstacles to the exercise of basic rights, including the right to vote, the right of assembly, freedom of speech and an end to discrimination based on race, gender, religion and sexual preference. We need to create an America where every person is cherished, and every person is treated with the dignity they deserve — and then we need to extend that ethos to the rest of the world.

For cooperation, not confrontation

On the foreign policy front, we must demand congressional and executive action on the following major goals:

1. End the Iran war: Prohibit the use of funds for military hostilities over, in, or off the shores of Iran. Work through the United Nations to reach a comprehensive diplomatic agreement to open the Strait of Hormuz and contain Iran’s nuclear program. Close vulnerable American military bases in the region.  

2. Halt and reverse the arms race: Enact major reductions in the bloated Pentagon budget, roll back spending on nuclear weapons systems and rein in the rush towards automated warfare based on artificial intelligence. Block funding for renewed nuclear testing and the production and deployment of additional nuclear warheads.

3. Stop arming genocide and repression: Cut military aid and arms transfers to Israel that violate U.S. human rights law and enable genocidal policies in Gaza, and accelerate dispossession and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and aggression in Lebanon. Stop providing arms and aid to repressive and undemocratic regimes in the region. Terminate the Saudi nuclear deal.

4. Roll back the war at home: End militarized immigration enforcement, the unlawful detention of immigrants and ICE repression — including murder — of peaceful protesters. ICE should be eliminated as part of a thorough revamping of immigration policy.

Together these points form a peace agenda that lays the foundations for a progressive foreign policy that rebuilds critical diplomatic capacities and U.S. support for multilateralism.

Congress already started to take action on some of these priorities, even under Republican majorities. And the Democrats in Congress have started to take stronger stands against endless war and excess military spending in a way that has not happened in decades. In June of this year, the Senate joined the House of Representatives in adopting House Concurrent Resolution 86 under the War Powers Act, directing the President to end military hostilities in Iran, although the White House ignored the order. 

In July Senate Democrats refused to authorize the bloated $1.15 trillion request for funding of routine Pentagon operations over concerns about the Iran war. Congress needs to follow through in the lame duck session to oppose any increases in the Pentagon’s topline budget. 

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Also in July, almost half of the Democratic members of the House voted to eliminate U.S. aid for Israel as part of groundswell of opposition to Israeli policy in Gaza. Congress must follow through with actions to end U.S. complicity with war crimes. Prospects for success on these and related legislative measures in the new Congress will increase with the arrival of dozens of new representatives and senators elected on a mandate against endless war. But success is not assured.

A new Congress as a new beginning

While the realignment of Congress in the midterm election is a victory for sanity and peace, it is only the beginning of the struggle that lies ahead. To become law, the peace agenda needs the backing of a strong, growing movement of coordinated national and grassroots public action. This will require dialogue and relationship-building across the various movements fighting for justice and peace, a process that is already underway in many places.  

We must demand that the leaders of the new Congress prioritize the proposed peace agenda, as part of a pivot toward developing and reinvesting in an alternative foreign policy for peace. If the newly elected members waffle or refuse, we should protest in Washington, D.C. and assemble at their local offices to demand that they act. 

We will need to undertake coordinated and systematic efforts to brief new members of Congress on the key issues and the legislative options for ending the war in Iran, reversing America’s militarized priorities and preventing oppression and violence in the Middle East. 

Plans are needed in the coming weeks and months to convene community meetings and teach-ins on the proposed peace policy agenda — both at the national level and in dozens of key states and districts. It is essential that members of Congress hear the demand for change not only from lobbyists in Washington, D.C.  but from voters in their home districts.

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We need to be clear that creating a new foreign policy means more than an end to Trumpian policies, as unconscionable as they are and have been. America’s penchant for war without public or congressional consent has persisted under presidents of both parties, as has unstinting support for Israel’s brutal conduct in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Iran, as well as the repression and political machinations of oil rich states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. 

To craft a new foreign policy, we need more than the absence of Trump.  We need the presence of an alert, mobilized citizenry committed to radically changing America’s approach to the world. Our mission is to turn our country toward diplomacy and international cooperation rather than war, and to hold officeholders of both parties to that standard.

We need a foreign policy of, by, and for the people — all of us, not just a narrow, self-interested, corrupt elite. Foreign policy should serve the aspirations of everyone for peace, sustenance and basic human rights, regardless of race, religion, place of origin, gender or sexuality. Not just changing America but also joining hands with movements and peoples around the world in struggles for peace and democracy against war and repression.

This article The Democrats have a mandate for peace — here are 4 urgent priorities was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Voters repudiated Trump. Grassroots momentum will shape what comes next. was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The broad strokes of the midterms are clear: a massive repudiation of MAGA’s fascist wave has ended the Trump 2.0 era of congressional complicity with his authoritarian takeover. Trump’s lame duck presidency now begins. 

This lopsided electoral rejection is historically rare: Flipping control of both the House and Senate in a midterm has only occurred three times since World War II (1946, 1994 and 2006). The breakthroughs are astounding: the first Native American female governor and senator, five Black governors, the first majority of Democratic governors in 16 years, and critical downballot wins like the first Democrat to win as Texan oil regulator since 1990 and the first openly transgender state legislator in Alabama.

Authoritarians do not do well when trapped — and with a famously norm-busting president, anything is possible. But, critically, election deniers like Darline Graham and Greg Abbott are conceding their races. Donald Trump is already saying he’s “absolutely willing” to accept the results and told CBS, “Congratulations to the Democrats, and I look forward to working with you for the good of our country.”

So what do we do now?

1. It’s OK to exhale

These midterms have left me, like many, with abundant free-floating anxieties. The “what if” scenarios have been abundant — and while some of the most extreme versions did not happen, the federal government was weaponized against the election system like never before.

Because the times have been so rough, it can be hard to exhale and accept a win, especially since elections are not material changes — they are promissory notes that the future may be different. Until Jan. 3, we live under the same dangerous authoritarian government, even if the atmosphere has changed.

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Before I advocate for you to breathe, let’s affirm all the many hard reasons to not exhale. The wins were not universal, as some big losses cut deep. There’s a reality that all of this is ephemeral if Democrats cannot govern a policy of change — if we only manage an economic status quo it will disillusion and likely result in yet another whiplash election in the other direction. And it’s hard to breathe in a dizzying moment.

Further, the attacks on elections were treasonous. I won’t list the complete litany of federal assaults — but we have a Department of Justice captured by authoritarian forces using its power nakedly for partisan goals. The far right openly prepared sham legal theories to refuse certification of Democratic representatives. While we did not get systematic federal law enforcement terror at polls, we saw National Guard throughout Washington, D.C. We still have too many election officials committed to the Big Lie. And ongoing structural impediments to a fair election are consequential: In Mississippi, the Senate margin remains tiny while any win may be marred by equipment trouble, poll changes, and voters unexpectedly removed by data purges from the voting rolls.  

Notably, the election maps themselves have been gerrymandered by racists to ensure power — though their greed rebounded multiple losses in these redistricted seats. (Groups like Black Voters Matter deserve a huge shout-out for fighting in the South and in races Democrats had abandoned.)

Despite all that, we managed a pro-democracy win that was too big to rig. The country delivered a shellacking to MAGA politics — an encouraging sign for all of us who are hoping for a better future. Ultimately, the election proceeded with voters refusing to be intimidated.

Buddhists remind me we can take a breath anytime. But this moment seems as good a moment as any, especially when we remind ourselves exhaling isn’t signaling that things are over. Exhales are how our body gets in tune with this moment and releases the latest tension. Bracing doesn’t make us wiser, just tenser.

So really, take five breaths right now. As you breathe, read in a poem by Jarod Anderson: “You can be still while the world is whirling. / You can be silent while your heart is thundering. / You can be alone while your memory is teeming. / You can live forever in the span of a moment. / You can grow kindness in the soil of hatred. / You can decide purpose. You can decide victory.”

2. Celebrate our unsung heroes

As we breathe in — exhale and inhale — it’s worthwhile to remember the overwhelming number of people standing up to authoritarianism right now.

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Will historic protests against ICE shape the midterms?

Media have focused on tariffs, affordability and the Iran war as the defining issues of the midterms. But, as usual, they’ve skipped over the resistance that has taken root in this country. People lost their livelihoods exposing this regime’s corruption and risked their lives resisting ICE.

We got to this moment thanks to many unsung people.

Here we could begin listing thousands upon thousands of names. The list would include top election officials in all 50 states who refused to be cowed by the DOJ’s threats to arrest them for doing their jobs. (Some of them are quite hilarious, like Oregon’s Secretary of State Tobias Read, who mocked the DOJ hacks who misspelled his name: “my name is spelled R-E-A-D, as in ‘read the Constitution.’”) But those names extend deep through the electoral ecosystem, with many officials running extreme training scenarios steeling themselves against federal overreach, like Boulder’s County Clerk and Recorder Molly Fitzpatrick, and others coming up with creative solutions, like Georgia’s Irwin County Election Supervisor Ethan Compton who added “panic buttons” for poll workers to get immediate back-up support.

Recognizing how election officials remain under attack, Protect Our Election set up a way to thank them online, and the National Conference on Citizenship created Election Hero Day as a “national celebration recognizing the tremendous contributions” of election officials.

But, of course, credit extends beyond officials. It goes to people like Keith Odom, a 62-year-old forklift driver, who joined over 5,000 at the “All Roads Lead to the South” rally in May, pushing back against the Supreme Court’s Callais decision undoing civil rights legislation. Credit is due to organizers like Chanae Jackson of Florida for All and Bill Hogseth of Grassroots Organizing Western Wisconsin, and Cassandra Welchlin of Mississippi Black Women’s Roundtable who collectively trained thousands of election defenders.

All that worked mattered greatly to avoid the worst scenarios. 

When the FBI raided the Ohio Organizing Collaborative — a get-out-the-vote community group in Ohio working primarily with people of color — it could have broken. Instead its past director, Prentiss Haney, struck a defiant public stance, naming the raid for what it was: “a political act to try and intimidate people from voting.” The Ohio Organizing Collaborative kept going — and were backed by allies across the nation under the banner of “Hands Off Ohio.”

Despite all the threats, voters voted. And that’s thanks to Tobias, Ethan, Molly, Keith, Chanae, Bill, Cassandra, Prentiss, and the tens of thousands who fought to keep the election more fair despite the authoritarian attempts to subvert them.

Civil resistance researcher Hardy Merriman developed a helpful framework for understanding the full election cycle in authoritarian times. It’s four steps: Fight, Win, Prove, Enforce. Fight for every legal voter to vote. Win pro-democracy electoral victories. Prove what actually happened and expose manipulation. And finally: Enforce the will of the voters — and stop any attempt to overturn it. 

We don’t get to where we are right now without successfully moving through these early phases — Fight and Win. Take a moment to consider how you’ll appreciate those unheralded heroes — because you can be guaranteed the punditry class largely won’t do them justice.

3. We are entering Prove phase: count every valid vote

The election was decisive, but it’s not over. The current phase of battle includes wrangling over ballot counts — and making sure those counts are understood as significant despite all the shenanigans.

Anyone in or near a closely contested race can help in this phase by volunteering to cure ballots — the process of helping fix ballots with minor imperfections like a missing signature. Rules vary widely, so contact a local election or campaign office or find efforts at We Are Ground Control.

As of writing, Mississippi is one of the hottest of these races, with Scott Colom on track to win narrowly if a clean election process unfolds, a challenge given the state’s messy, rickety election verification process. The Colom campaign feels confident that they will win.

Our job remains to be grounded in facts. Turn to trusted, verified reporting, like Votebeat or Brennan Center for Justice. Pause before sharing any election information and try to verify its authenticity. And we must remind ourselves that this win was not inevitable, it was “despite” — despite DOJ lawsuits, despite ICE threats, despite gerrymandering, despite consistent attacks on voters, and despite the many ways the federal government tried to keep voters from voting.

While Trump, Vance and MAGA will make up lies, what happens next will depend in part on what their potential accomplices will do. Some groups like May Day Strong are wisely pressuring corporate targets now, knowing that corporate accomplices make disenfranchisement much easier. They’ve notched some important wins: For example, the entire city of Culver City, California approved the Business for Democracy Pledge, pledging public business opposition to any post-election shenanigans.

Which reminds us that proving the results doesn’t just happen in courtrooms and elections — it happens in the streets, too.

4. Don’t be scared of taking to the streets

A key lesson here comes from the 2000 presidential contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Folks who are old enough remember that it came down to Florida, which was decided by a margin of a few hundred votes out of the six million that were cast. As the recount began, paid Republican operatives screamed and pounded on doors of the Miami-Dade counting office, intimidating staffers and causing a halt to the recount. A history-changing moment unfolded: Democratic operatives told activists to not go into the streets and protest — trust the courts, they said. The courts sided with Bush, cleared the way to never count the ballots, and the legal coup was cemented. (Three members of today’s Supreme Court were part of that Republican effort to halt the recount.)

The No Kings movement just proved the value of going to the streets. They experimented with gathering folks for Vote Early Day, to help surge turnout. Indications are this was very critical for the win. A TargetSmart analysis compared places with and without the No Kings Early Day mobilizations. The results were remarkable: a 19 percent increase in turnout for early voting where they had activations.

So coupling street heat with elections boosted energy and turnout.

Previous Coverage

How Serbian students toppled an authoritarian

The pattern affirms what we learned from Serbia and Brazil — in both countries, an unprecedented number of people voted and overcame huge challenges with a drumbeat of protests leading up to the elections. Serbia experienced a record 70 percent turnout and Brazil’s Lula won the largest number of votes in Brazilian history.

A recent detailed review concludes that anti-ICE/pro-immigrant actions have reached historic levels, even in Trump-won counties. They cite research linking bases of support activated by protests and how they translate into previous midterm outcomes. The authors ask the question: “Will historic protests against ICE shape the midterms?” It appears they did.

So while our election infrastructure appears to be holding, our readiness to take to the streets only strengthens our hand. Local Indivisible and 50501 chapters have plans to hold upbeat “Count every vote” rallies (you can find ones in your area on Mobilize). This is wise because it creates a narrative counterweight — especially as MAGA is expected to fill the narrative field with garbage.

Famously, in 2024, Philadelphia responded to Trump’s outrageous threats against the people counting the vote by holding an upbeat dance party outside of the Philadelphia Convention Center — a visible demonstration of countering ugly fear and threats with joy and life.

5. Get ready if we need to Enforce

Trump and Vance have developed a narrative about fraud that they could use to discredit selective election results. We know the DOJ is captured completely by Trump and subject to his whims.

We know Trump is too impulsive not to do something. Reading exactly what he’ll do and where is an exercise in reading tea leaves, but it appears more likely he’s following the path of victimhood, attacking Republicans for their lack of loyalty. Alongside telling the New York Times that he “look[s] forward to working with” Democrats, Trump has posted furiously on TruthSocial attacking Greg Abbott for losing because he was a Republican In Name Only, or RINO, writing “FoxNews bears responsibility for these losses” or asserting that the Republican Party as a whole would have won if he was on the ballot.

Alaska remains another state to watch, given MAGA’s claims that Alaska was stolen. For now the courts have rejected the DOJ’s Alaska gambit to force the state to refuse certification if the Republican candidate for Senate loses. And the drumbeat to stop Alaska’s certification has been dulled underneath the electoral avalanche that has descended on the Republican party.

Losing appears to be growing Republican in-fighting. That’s understandable, since Trump is clearly no longer the mighty savior he once appeared to them to be. They, too, need to adjust to the new reality of the end of Trump 2.0 and discover what life under lame-duck Trump is like.

Part of the Enforce phase also means getting the message of the elections right. The most dominant message needs to be: the country looked at fascism and fully rejected it. This door must remain closed — and now we turn our attention to debating how we solve people’s pocketbook issues such that we don’t have a return to fascist populism.

Here are three actions to stay prepared:

1. Each person in a state with yet-to-be-called races or candidates who have not conceded should find if there are local ways to help with ballot curing and tracking their own state’s certification dates. If you’re not in one of those states, get ready to act in solidarity with other states.
2. Circle Jan. 3 as a key date to anchor our planning — that’s when Congress is seated and our “end date” of the election cycle.
3. Get your list of people that you would want to go into the streets with. There likely are local groups you can connect with. 

So if you haven’t already: Write down the names of three or four people you would be willing to go into the streets with if something happens. Talk now about how you will contact one another, how you will make decisions, and what kinds of actions you are prepared to take. Agree on basic commitments: stay nonviolent, check information before acting on it, look after one another, and do not let a rumor become the plan.

To get plugged into national response, No Kings has set-up an election pledge to join mass nonviolent action in rapid response to election disruption and subversion if needed. Mass calls are already prepped for nationwide updates and mobilizations: Nov. 4 a No Kings Mass Call and Nov. 5 a Working Families Party Mass Call. If you’re looking for more guidance on forming election-protection groups, Hold the Line and Strike Ready offer trainings and resources.

6. And then there’s the Sustain phase

Activist Nadine Bloch has helpfully added a fifth phase to Hardy’s model: Since the elections are not an endpoint, we must Sustain — which is about sustaining the energy and movement for the long-haul pressure campaigns that come after. We still have a whole body of work in front of us.

One tempting mistake is to waste the bulk of our ammunition against each other. We are not out of the authoritarian woods and the big tent attitude that got us here is still required, even as tensions are going to fray over strategy and direction. 

Still, some reckonings are overdue. In Florida, mainstream Democrats were shocked by Angie Nixon’s primary win and canceled their planned unity rally. Her loss in the general election stings, especially because her organizing juggernaut defied centrist expectations and lifted turnout and downballot wins across the state. Running progressives did not, as some folks worry, result in devastating losses — quite the opposite.

Still it’s unhelpful for anyone to get cocky and claim the American public has embraced their entire platform. This was less a blue wave and more a red repudiation. 

This period of lame-duck Trump presidency remains precarious as progressives, centrists, populists, and anyone at all still have the chance to prove they have ideas that help people’s pocketbooks. Regular folks still want practical problem-solving, but know the system needs more than tweaks to get there.

With Democrats locked out of the executive branch, some policies remain out of reach. We have to communicate that often — so people do not lose sight of the need for a 2028 win and get needlessly discouraged that this moment does not result in faster change.

That means constantly telling a compelling story about the structural problems we face so that the solutions become more evident, while also showing that government can work. Think of Mamdani’s constant videos about the big challenges we face, paired with solving everyday problems like fixing potholes. We got into this authoritarian mess because of much bigger issues than Trump. The social isolation. The drive of capitalism to pull wealth from the Earth and our own pockets. The way politics drives wedges between communities. 

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All these problems require big structural fixes and strengthening local civic relationships. There is work everywhere and, as Nadine reminds us, the election is not an end but a beginning.

It’s important that we be ready to advocate for new policies that get us out of the forever gerrymandering wars. Restoring the Voting Rights Act, for a start. Protect Democracy is pushing for proportional representation, both because it provides a pathway to meaningful alternative parties, which we desperately need, and because it also allows states to be more representative of their population. Plus, it can be implemented without a change in the Constitution.

We’ll need these kinds of bootstrapping solutions that move us closer to the democracy we have always deserved. Thankfully a range of groups are trying to help us fill this need: Issue One has been gathering policymakers to create legislation to steer money out of politics and reduce executive overreach — which did not start with the Trump administration. Go From Here is aiming to grow multiracial working class power using new rights, legal rules and governing strategies. Democracy Revival Center has been offering trainings called “How to Fix Our Broken System.” They offer a set of options on what we can do to get out of the authoritarian doomloop, echoing ideas like proportional representation, expanding the courts and subjecting judges to actual ethical guidelines.

These are important structural fixes that need to be joined with policies that directly speak to the “affordability” crisis. This crisis, just newly discovered by the media, has been around for my entire lifetime — folks struggling to get by on wages that are too low and health care costs that are too high. Pollsters tell us “Medicare for All” and other ways of saying guaranteed health care for everyone in the U.S. keep growing in popularity. 

This Sustain work isn’t just big national policies. There is a lot that needs to be done in our local communities to reengage civil society and experiment with new versions of community to rebuild trust and repair. I’ve been inspired by many groups, like Michelle Alexander and Nyle Fort’s Spirit of Justice, which is experimenting with new religious formations; or Common Justice, which is modeling alternatives to incarceration in New York City that are victim-centered and result in a stronger community — not the diminished one offered by the carceral state.

All this to say, it took a lot to end this devastating chapter of Trump 2.0. Now let’s exhale, appreciate the unsung folks behind this historic win, and roll up our sleeves — there’s much work to be done in this next chapter.

This story was co-published with Truthout.

This article Voters repudiated Trump. Grassroots momentum will shape what comes next. was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article The fight after the vote was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The good news is that the courts closed off most of the routes by which the Trump administration could have impeded, intimidated or purged voters before Election Day. On September 14, the Supreme Court blocked the Postal Service’s restrictions on mail ballots, and in June it upheld grace periods for ballots postmarked by Election Day. The Justice Department has reportedly lost nearly all of its 30 lawsuits seeking states’ voter files. And federal law already bars armed federal agents from polling places, a protection seven states reinforced this year by advancing bans of their own.

Pressure doesn’t disappear when one door closes. It moves to the next one. With the front end of the election largely protected, the softer targets are now the count, certification and the seating of the new House.

What to expect

The most likely danger is also the most familiar: a fraud story built on slow counts. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia count ballots that arrive after Election Day, so in many places the results will take days. That delay is normal, and it’s a sign the system is working. But it’s also an opening for anyone who wants to claim that votes counted later are suspect, and the ground is already prepared. One survey found that fewer than half of voters expect a fair election.

The second danger may already be under way. The “sanctuary surge” the administration announced in late September is bringing immigration enforcement into 11 states in the days before the vote. The Homeland Security secretary says agents will appear at polling places only in response to “a threat” or with a warrant. Whatever happens at the polls, the surge’s real effect may be to frighten eligible voters in immigrant and mixed-status families into staying home.

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After the votes are cast, the fight shifts to close races. Democrats need a net gain of about six seats to win the House, so a handful of tight contests could decide who controls it. Expect recounts and lawsuits in every one of them. Expect, too, that some county boards will refuse to certify results. Courts have forced certification every time a board has tried this since 2020, but each refusal buys time and headlines for the story that something went wrong.

Two darker scenarios are less likely but would do far more damage. The first is the seizure of ballots or voting machines by federal authorities. That would break the chain of custody that makes results trustworthy, and it isn’t hypothetical: The FBI has already raided election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, and Maricopa County, Arizona. The second would be a fight over seating the new House on January 3, in which a newly installed House clerk could leave contested Democrats off the roll. Scholars call that far-fetched, and it could only work if control of the House rests on a handful of seats. But the fact that it’s being discussed at all tells us how much of our democracy now depends on officials choosing to follow the rules.

The work after the vote

What can grassroots groups and local officials do once the polls close? The honest answer is that the most useful work will be slow and procedural. It isn’t glamorous. It comes down to three things: making sure every valid ballot is counted, making sure certification happens on time, and keeping the public calm while both are under way.

The first 72 hours matter most. The deadlines to fix rejected ballots, known as cure deadlines, run only a few days, so coalitions should be helping voters amend ballot mistakes right away, while trained observers watch the count. Their public message should be simple and repeated until it sinks in: Slow counts are normal. Local election officials have a parallel job. They can give daily public updates on the count, open counting rooms to observers from all sides, secure ballots and machines, and refuse to release any of them without a court order.

Over the following two weeks, the action moves to county canvass and certification meetings. Coalitions should attend every one, document problems and report them to election protection lawyers, and thank election workers in public, because many of them have been threatened for doing their jobs. Officials, for their part, should certify on time and say in advance that they will, with county and city attorneys ready to go to court the same day any board refuses.

From then through January 3, the work is endurance. Coalitions need to stay organized through recounts and lawsuits, keep local reporters supplied with accurate numbers, and hold mass mobilization in reserve for a real trigger rather than spending it early. Local officials can issue joint statements across party lines affirming the results, and coordinate with their state attorney general on any federal demand for ballots or equipment.

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A few principles hold through the whole period. The first is that losers conceding matters as much as winners winning. A local candidate who loses and says so plainly does more for public trust than any press release, so ask them to do it. The second is to witness, not obstruct. If federal agents try to take ballots or equipment, the grassroots job is to film, call lawyers and alert officials. Physically blocking agents would hand over the pretext for a much wider crackdown. The third is that sheriffs and police chiefs have a particular role to play. They can say publicly that they will protect counting sites and lawful assembly, and that they answer to state law on election materials. The fourth is to use unusual messengers: Republicans, veterans, clergy and business owners vouching for the local count will reach people that advocacy groups never will. And the last is to hold on to the volunteers. Whoever shows up in November should be invited into a standing structure before December, whatever the result.

If the result holds, don’t stand down

That last point matters more than any other, because it’s where the breakthrough trap begins. The breakthrough trap is the pattern in which a movement wins a breakthrough, an election or a transition, and then goes home, while the forces it defeated regroup, wait and come back. It has happened around the world. It happened here. In 2020 we won, exhaled and demobilized. Four years later, the movement we had beaten returned with a plan, a party and a governing agenda we never matched.

A House majority won in November will not spell safety. It will be an opening, and openings close. The people who show up this fall to watch the count and defend the result are the beginning of something we’ve never had enough of: a permanent grassroots demand system that can hold new leaders to account and defend what we win.

Winning is the breakthrough. Holding it is the job.

This story was adapted from The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook, which has a post-election checklist here.

This article The fight after the vote was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Will historic protests against ICE shape the midterms? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Tomorrow’s midterm elections are widely viewed as a referendum on Trump’s second presidency. Prior studies have found strong associations between protest and U.S. election outcomes, including the 2010 and 2018 midterm elections. Protests can influence popular opinion on policy issues, boost turnout among eligible voters, and shape how candidates set policy priorities.

At the Crowd Counting Consortium, or CCC, we have tallied an extraordinary number of protests since Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025. The majority of protests in Trump’s second term so far have named democracy or the presidency itself as a primary claim — think the nationwide Hands Off and No Kings protests in 2025 and 2026. 

But among protests focused on more specific policy domains, one key theme stands out. The administration’s anti-immigration policies and expansive, violent crackdown on immigrants have generated active, grassroots support networks in neighborhoods across the country and fueled a wave of protests in support of immigrants’ rights. During Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis and St. Paul, protests took place in over 30 percent of counties containing 80 percent of the nation’s population. March 2026 may have been the month with the highest number of pro-immigrant protests in U.S. history. A significant proportion of these protests occurred in counties that Trump won in 2024. 

Trends in immigration-related protests since January 20, 2017

Of course, the current wave of protest builds on a longer-term foundation of pro-immigrant demonstrations. Since the CCC started collecting data on protest in the United States in 2017, we’ve seen that protests against the federal government’s immigration policies have been a constant feature of the protest landscape across all three presidential administrations — Trump 1, Biden and Trump 2 (see Table 1). 

Table 1: Immigration protest events as a share of all left/liberal protests

Little more than a week after Trump’s first inauguration in January 2017, numerous protests took place around the country in response to his Jan. 27 signing of Executive Order 13769, sometimes called the “Muslim Ban,” which restricted citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the U.S. On Jan. 28 and 29, mass protests occurred in and around airports, where immigrant rights groups and community members assembled to ensure the safe arrival of citizens of those countries who were in transit when the executive order went into effect. Protests against the executive order continued in February 2017 under the slogan “No Ban No Wall.” The Trump administration ultimately revised the executive order to a narrower version that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld as lawful; multiple protests followed on June 26, 2018. 

But the biggest jumps in protest participation came on coordinated, nationwide days of action related to the administration’s immigration policies. The first, on June 30, 2018, was a national day of action declaring that “Families Belong Together.” These protests demanded an end to the administration’s “child separation policy” — the practice of separating migrant children from parents and caretakers upon arrival at the U.S.-Mexico border — which was in effect under the Obama administration but escalated under Trump. This protest campaign was highly effective: The pressure placed on the administration led the White House to end the policy through an executive order, though loopholes remained.

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On Jan. 19, 2019, the third annual Women’s March on Washington represented an additional increase in coordinated nationwide protests in which immigrants’ rights were a core issue. And July 12, 2019 saw the Lights for Liberty day of action, which attempted to pressure elected officials (particularly in the newly Democratic Congress) to close detention centers and adopt more humane immigration policies. Ultimately, congressional Democrats introduced legislation in 2021 to reunite immigrant children with their families. In sum, the first Trump administration saw an impressive range of protests on behalf of immigrants’ rights, some of which had powerful impacts. 

Overall, the Biden administration saw a decline in such protests, with about 60 percent fewer than during the first Trump administration (seven percent to 11 percent as a share of overall left/liberal protests, respectively). Notable days of action during the Biden administration included continued protests calling for closure of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, detention centers, as well as protests against ongoing family detention and separation practices, and protests against asylum restrictions during a major surge in deportations in 2024. 

During the second Trump administration, such protests have seen a breathtaking rise. 

Figure 1 provides a comparative view of the number of immigration-related protests under the second Trump administration, compared to the first. The y-axis, showing the cumulative number of immigration-related protests since Trump’s two inaugurations, demonstrates the massive scale and steady climb of protests during his second term so far.

Figure 1: Counts of pro-immigrant protest events during Trump’s first and second terms

Figure 2 shows the frequency of such events on a monthly basis. There have been more protests in support of immigrants in seven of the months since January 2025 than in any of the 48 months of Trump’s first term. In 10 of the first 17 months of the current term, protests against Trump’s immigration policies made up over 20 percent of total protests. Few other protest claims have animated the public with such enduring salience over time.

Figure 2: Pro-immigrant protests in the U.S., January 20, 2017 – May 31, 2026

Figure 2 also shows clear increases in the number of immigration-related protests during nationwide anti-Trump protests. Spikes in activity occurred on April 19, 2025 during the Hands Off protests; on October 18, 2025, when many No Kings protests adopted opposition to ICE and Trump’s mass deportation agenda as a central claim; and on March 28, 2026, when the third No Kings protests again made immigration a primary claim. Our tallies have also documented 170 repeater events (protests that are scheduled to take place daily, weekly or monthly) that specifically mention immigrant rights or opposition to ICE in their stated claims.

In Illinois and Minnesota, protests started local and went national

Trump’s immigration policies have produced particularly intense local mobilizations in areas that saw escalated ICE deployments, which then diffused to solidarity protests nationwide. For example, from early September to mid-November 2025, ICE launched Operation Midway Blitz targeting immigrants in Chicago. During that period, the CCC documented 3,491 protest events in opposition to Trump’s immigration policies, starting in Chicago and spreading across the country during the No Kings mobilization on Oct. 18, 2025, which named immigration as a central issue.

Operation Metro Surge, the federal immigration enforcement operation in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region, also provoked powerful opposition locally and beyond, with over 4,400 protests taking place between Dec. 2, 2025 and Jan. 31, 2026. Significant numbers of protests responded to specific, publicized government abuses, such as aggressive law enforcement actions against immigrants, the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, and the detention of a 5-year-old child of a Colombian immigrant. Three waves of action stood out: the ICE Out For Good weekend of action on Jan. 10-11; the Day of Truth & Freedom on Jan. 23, which was concentrated in Minnesota; and the National Shutdown and ICE Out of Everywhere actions, which mainly spanned Jan. 30-31, with some events lasting into Feb. 1. 

Figure 3 shows the number of counties that saw pro-immigrant protests in Illinois and Minnesota, respectively, after Operation Midway began in Chicago and Operation Metro Surge began in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Overall, these two states saw higher-than-average numbers of counties featuring protests, including among counties far afield from the major cities in which ICE focused its deployments. 

Figure 3. Pro-immigrant protests in Illinois and Minnesota during and after ICE operations in Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul

Nationwide, the total volume of protest produced during early 2026 is extraordinary. 

January 2026 alone featured the fourth-most protest events recorded in all 10 years of CCC data, owing to the massive number of protests in Minnesota and around the country in opposition to Operation Metro Surge and its impacts, and to Trump’s immigration agenda in general. 

And the events in Minnesota seem to have been a flashpoint. Anti-ICE protests continued in February and March 2026, and anti-ICE claims were central to the nationwide No Kings mobilization on March 28. March 2026 may have been the month with the highest number of pro-immigrant protests in U.S. history (see Table 2).

Table 2: Top 10 months by total protest events, January 20, 2017 – May 31, 2026

Protests opposing Trump’s immigration policies were reported in 933 counties during Operation Metro Surge, between Dec. 2, 2025 and Feb. 1, 2026 — about 30 percent of all counties in the U.S. These counties were densely populated: Together, they contain more than 80 percent of the U.S. population (see Figure 4). From March 2026 through May 2026, the CCC continued to record thousands of events protesting ICE, with hundreds of distinct civic organizations and hundreds of thousands of people participating. 

Figure 4: U.S. immigration protests following ICE deployments to Minneapolis

Nor are protests against ICE operations an exclusively liberal phenomenon. Instead, there has been a stark increase over time in the number of pro-immigrant protests in counties that Trump won in 2024 by at least a 5-point margin (see Figure 5). Among the pro-immigrant protests that occurred in March 2026, about 40 percent of them occurred in such counties. 

Figure 5: Pro-immigrant protests in counties Trump won by >5 Points in the 2024 Presidential Election, January 20, 2017 – May 31, 2026

Across the country, a broad range of constituencies using a variety of means have expressed opposition to Trump’s immigration policy. Demonstrations have just been one method. Those activating on behalf of and in support of immigrants include people forming human chains to protect immigrant workers; neighborhoods organizing support networks for affected immigrant families; students engaging in walkouts from schools and protests at college career fairs; people engaging in hunger strikes in support of international and undocumented students; knitters engaging in “craftivism”; people holding encampments outside of ICE facilities or noise demonstrations outside of hotels in which ICE agents were housed; consumers engaging in boycotts and sell-backs at Target and Home Depot; clergy engaging in civil disobedience; communities holding vigils for slain immigrants or those killed while advocating for them; community members building raised beds across thoroughfares to prevent ICE vehicles from accessing facilities, and more. Institutions and employers have raised their voices: Local businesses and business associations have called for the end of ICE operations in their towns, ranchers and farmers have decried treatment of their immigrant employees, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has condemned mistreatment of immigrants as well.

Counter-protest was minimal

Trump’s immigration policies have supporters in the country, particularly among Republicans. But few people have rallied or marched in defense of them. Right-leaning protests made up fewer than two percent of all immigration-related protests during the first 14 months of the first Trump administration, and less than 0.7 percent of immigration-related protests during the same stretch of his second administration. 

The frequency of pro-immigrant protests during Trump’s second term has eclipsed that of anti-immigration protests by 145 to 1. The vast majority of anti-immigration protests have been counter-protests occurring at demonstrations in support of immigrants and their rights. 

However, right-leaning protests have been increasingly characterized by anti-immigrant claims over the past three presidencies. Whereas anti-immigrant protests constituted 1.68 percent of all right-learning protests during Trump’s first term, that proportion has increased sevenfold so far during his second, to 12.43 percent. 

Table 3: Anti-immigration protest events as a share of all right/conservative protests

A powerful and growing pro-immigrant constituency

Today’s mass protests in support of immigrants’ rights build on a durable pattern of pro-immigrant and anti-ICE protest in the U.S. To wit, the CCC has documented a prayer protest outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois that has been held every Friday for the past 20 years. 

But the recent increase in pro-immigrant protests and their intensity is notable. The breadth and volume of pro-immigrant protests show that committed activists and organizations have succeeded in rallying huge numbers in favor of justice and dignity for immigrants, indicating a durable underlying infrastructure. In this essay, we focused on street protest as one indicator in the overall picture. But community mobilization on behalf of immigrants has meant far more than demonstrations. Mutual aid and neighborly support, observing and documenting ICE operations, litigation, support to immigrants in detention, and direct appeals to public officials have all been central to America’s response to Trump’s immigration policies. The growth of pro-immigrant protests reflects a (potentially growing) constituency willing to take risks to defend a multicultural vision of America, potentially widening its appeal. 

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In short, we see capable organizers and the mass public pushing hard for humane treatment of immigrants for the foreseeable future. Neither political party has figured out how to address immigration in a way that resolves the need for safe and secure borders and the need to treat everyone on U.S. soil with dignity, decency and due process. But the impacts of Trump’s policies on immigrants, their families and their broader communities provide a galvanizing issue for Americans who otherwise agree on little else. For example, some conservative faith communities and various progressive groups increasingly find themselves on the same side when it comes to immigration. 

Policymakers often resist turning to activists, civil society organizations and community groups for policy solutions. But the persistence of multi-sectoral immigration activism, as seen through protest alone, also reflects a powerful and growing constituency in favor of just and humane approaches to immigration. Protests reflect and shape the existing moral consensus but also can reorient constituencies in favor of a new consensus. We hope the members of the next Congress pay attention.

This article Will historic protests against ICE shape the midterms? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article A North Carolina movement asks voters to reject corporate tax breaks was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The affordability crisis is hitting people hard across the country, but it’s especially acute in North Carolina. For the sixth year in a row, North Carolina holds the distinction of being the worst state in the nation for workers based on its wage policies, worker protections, and rights to organize, according to Oxfam. Nearly half of renters in the state are struggling to afford their homes, while nearly a third of households are cost-burdened (spending over 30 percent of their income on housing).

North Carolina voters’ eyes may light up when they see two proposed constitutional amendments on their November ballots: one to cap the state personal and corporate income tax rates at 3.5 percent, down from a cap of seven percent, and another to limit how much local governments can levy in property taxes. On their face, they appear as if they might bring much-needed tax relief to North Carolina’s working class. 

The amendments are deceptively framed as being beneficial to working people and homeowners, reading as if they would lower individual taxes when there’s no indication that they will, according to Todd Warren, statewide campaign strategist at Down Home North Carolina, a member-led organization that endorsed a “no” vote. Instead, Warren said, the measures would be a giveaway to corporations and wealthy individuals by limiting how much they pay toward the public good — and a “scam” for voters.

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Since the passage of the two Republican-sponsored bills that placed the amendments on the ballot this past May, Down Home NC and over 20 other groups have come together as the NC Vote Against coalition to defeat them, as well as to oppose a third amendment that would enshrine voter identification requirements in the state constitution.

Each organization has its own expertise and its own tactics, but a common message: The amendments will not benefit working-class people, but rather corporations and the ultra-wealthy. Each group is playing its part in collecting a total of 100,000 pledges from North Carolinians who commit to voting against the amendments.

The fight to fund the future

Down Home NC joined together with another coalition member, the Carolina Federation, to launch the Fund the Future campaign, deploying nearly 200 paid canvassers.  

Jenn Frye, co–director of the Carolina Federation, spent part of this weekend canvassing at the poll at a Durham, North Carolina library, where she convinced an older couple to vote “no” on the amendments. After a member-led endorsement process that included political education on the amendments, a leadership summit and a vote at a statewide membership meeting, the Carolina Federation decided they wanted to deeply engage in the amendment fight. “We see more and more people in North Carolina who agree that corporations and the wealthiest individuals aren’t contributing what they owe when day in and day out, North Carolinians are working really hard,” Frye said. “We pay our taxes, and we contribute what we owe.”

Down Home NC and the Carolina Federation were founded in 2017 and 2018, respectively, in the wake of President Trump first taking office and Republicans winning control of both North Carolina’s state legislature and governorship in 2013 (for the first time since Reconstruction). The groups share a long-term goal of loosening corporate power’s grip on the state legislature and supplanting it with people power.

The Fund the Future campaign campaign is knocking doors, talking to voters at the polls, getting resolutions against the amendments passed by local governments and school boards, and placing signs in small businesses and in yards, among other tactics. So far, the Carolina Federation’s canvassers have knocked on over 600,000 doors across six counties, collecting over 33,000 pledges, while Down Home NC’s canvassers had knocked 500,000 doors across 20 counties and collected about 8,000 pledges.

“Whatever the outcome of this amendment fight, Federation’s members plan to launch a statewide campaign next year with other organizations like Down Home and Siembra to demand that the legislature pass fair tax policies that make corporations and the wealthiest individuals pay what they owe our communities in taxes,” Frye said. “That may be a multi-year fight. It is one our members feel is worth waging.”

North Carolinians deserve funding for real solutions, Frye said, such as property tax assistance programs, childcare tax credits, an increased minimum wage (it’s currently the federal minimum, $7.25 per hour), and protections against corporate landlords.

Todd Warren of Down Home NC said he has never seen such a robust response to a single issue in over 20 years of working and organizing in North Carolina.

Because Down Home NC’s chapters run organizing campaigns to make sure that local budgets go toward working people’s needs, members recognized immediately how the amendments would exacerbate the underfunding of local services. Like the Carolina Federation, its members endorsed a “no” vote in addition to endorsing political candidates who are supportive of its platforms.

Many voters don’t know about the amendments, Frye said, and if they do, they’re often not sure what to make of them or inclined to support them because they’re exhausted and stressed out due to the affordability crisis. But when they are engaged in conversation about how the amendments affect services they rely on, “then people are movable,” she said.

North Carolina residents march to the polls with signs opposing tax amendments on the ballot during early voting in Guilford County on Oct. 27, 2026. (Guilford For All)

Frye gave the example of her own mother, who recently suffered a series of strokes. Fortunately she was living in a North Carolina county with adequately funded Emergency Medical Services, or EMS. But residents of counties with underfunded EMS operations could face a life-or-death situation during medical emergencies.

“Right now, people feel like ‘taxes’ is a dirty word,” said Warren, a former public school teacher. “But if they connect it to something that they care about, like, ‘Oh, in Johnston County, we have explosive population growth. We need to build a new high school. These amendments would limit our ability to [do that].’ Then they’re like, ‘I’m gonna vote “no” on it.’ We can do that in a five-minute organizing conversation. It doesn’t take much for people to see through the scam.” 

North Carolina’s allegiance to corporations

North Carolina has lost out on almost $18 billion in annual tax revenue since Republicans began overhauling the tax system in 2013. Personal income tax reforms are so regressive that the state’s lowest earners pay more than 10 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while the highest earners pay only six percent. For corporations, the income tax has dropped from seven percent to two percent, the lowest in the nation, and will be phased out completely by 2030. As tax revenue shrinks, so does local governments’ ability to fully fund vital public services.

“Our public services, the things that are supposed to strengthen our communities and support all families in all counties in North Carolina, are being stretched to the limit by the tax cuts,” Frye said. “These amendments want to take that and enshrine it into the [state] constitution.”

Exploitation has marked North Carolina’s economy since the days of chattel slavery. Post-slavery, Black families like my own (in Bertie County) sharecropped for a living well into the 20th century — jobs now carried out by migrant workers who experience poor labor conditions. The Duke family once had a monopoly on the state’s tobacco industry and founded both Duke Energy and Duke University, two institutions notorious for not paying their fair share.

Now the state and some local governments are subsidizing data centers, of which over 60 have been built and at least 30 more are planned or under construction. Under pressure, the state eliminated some tax breaks for data centers in July, but three remaining sales tax subsidies are projected to rob the state of $250 million in revenue annually. Meanwhile, between 2017 to 2024, the average electricity bill of a North Carolina household rose by nearly 30 percent. The state is subsidizing wealthy corporations as regular folks struggle to keep their lights on.

A history of underfunded public schools

On May Day this year, thousands gathered in the capital city, Raleigh, to rally for fully funded schools. Tax cuts have already contributed to the state being ranked last in the country in public school funding by GDP.

Isabell Moore, a coordinator at North Carolina Families for Public Schools (a project of Down Home NC) and a public school parent, said the amendments could be “catastrophic” for public education. North Carolina Families for Public Schools comprises countywide, districtwide and schoolwide teams of volunteer organizers who are calling for equitable, fully funded public schools. These teams are currently circulating a pledge to fund the future for children that includes voting against the amendments, along with measures like fair funding for special education; higher teacher pay; and safe, inclusive schools for all students, including those from immigrant families. 

North Carolina Families for Public Schools had already voted on its 2026 platform when the amendments dropped in May but decided to incorporate them because they stand directly in the way of their goal to win fully funded schools. Their organizers have been tapping into their personal networks to turn people out to vote against the amendments, holding house parties and school-based parties to educate people on the amendments, and more. 

“Everyday working people and public school parents are creative and tough and scrappy,” Moore said. “If we commit to not just voting ‘no’ but also organizing other people in our networks and in our school communities, that’s when we really start to build the power to defeat the amendments.”

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Even public schools in wealthy counties like Durham, home to Duke University (which has a $14.3 billion endowment) and Duke University Health System (which made nearly $766 million in profits last year), are chronically underfunded. The riches of these two tax-exempt nonprofit institutions haven’t trickled down. Among other demands, the Durham Rising coalition—made up of workers, students, and community members—is calling for Duke University to help fund public schools and educator salaries by making a voluntary payment to the local government called a PILOT, or payment in lieu of taxes.

Since the summer, Christy Patterson, vice president of the Durham chapter of the North Carolina Association of Educators, or NCAE, and a middle school teacher for students with disabilities, has been knocking on doors to tell folks the amendments are for billionaires, not everyday people. The NCAE, which functions as a professional organization because North Carolina bans public-sector collective bargaining, is part of the NC Vote Against coalition and was one of the main architects of the “Kids Over Corporations” rally in May.

“Our voters and our community are engaging us in conversation on the doors,” Patterson said. “We’ve had some conversations that really made us think. Constructive friction on the doors is always good because everybody’s not going to say the same thing or think the same. They’re just so ready to open the door and talk to us, so we are grateful for that.”

Organizing for the long run

In a September poll by Elon University, 67 percent of respondents were in favor of the income tax amendment, and 72 percent supported the property tax amendment. Organizers are working hard to turn that tide.

However, even if they don’t get their desired outcome, there is an entire movement that will continue holding North Carolina corporations and wealthy households accountable until they contribute their fair share to the public good. Organizations like the Carolina Federation, Down Home NC, and the NCAE have been engaging in this work for years and are in it for the long haul.

Warren hopes the Fund the Future campaign can help shift the narrative so that people understand that “taxes” aren’t inherently bad but rather a tool for improving quality of life for themselves, their families, and their communities. 

“Through years of listening and campaigning, we know what working people across North Carolina want,” Warren said: well-funded, well-staffed public schools, healthcare access, transportation options and recreation programs for kids, infrastructure for effective disaster response. “When we talk to people about those things, even when they understand that it may involve an increase in taxes for them personally, they support funding those types of programs.”

This article A North Carolina movement asks voters to reject corporate tax breaks was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Tens of thousands get ready to defend the vote was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Garnet DeGrave and other organizers with Citizen Action Wisconsin watched in shock as news broke this June that FBI agents had raided the office of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a nonprofit that hosts voter registration drives and does political organizing. The incident was largely understood to be an attempt to intimidate progressive organizers in the state and foster uncertainty in the state’s elections. DeGrave realized if a similar situation happened in Wisconsin — if a government agency interfered with community organizers or, in the worst case scenario, the election — they were woefully unprepared. 

“There weren’t enough people that were organized in the western half of the state to be able to handle that,” DeGrave, Citizen Action Wisconsin’s northeast organizer, said. 

This spurred the organization to try to fill the gap. At the end of September, Citizen Action Wisconsin — which does grassroots organizing around electoral and issue-based campaigns for social and racial justice — partnered with local organizations to pivot to election protection  ahead of a crucial midterm. 

It’s one of many community organizations and advocacy groups across the United States that have built out their election protection and defense work this year in an effort to combat misinformation and protect election integrity — a basic tenet of democracy that has come under attack from a president who is an election denier. Alongside national groups like the ACLU, which has had 68,000 sign-ups for its Democracy Defenders Task Force program, these state and local organizations have undertaken an unprecedented coordinated effort to bolster voting rights amid efforts by the federal government to undermine election results. 

According to DeGrave, the work falls into two categories. “Election protection” is pre-election work to help people overcome any barriers to voting — a process that differs in every state. This can include challenging laws that might restrict voter access, running voter assistance hotlines or holding voter education campaigns.

“Election defense,” on the other hand, is work during voting and after polls close to ensure every vote is counted and to defend election results. This can include nonpartisan poll watcher programs and community-led trainings that prepare people to mobilize in the event of a contested count due to political interference. 

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For Citizen Action, the pivot was a natural one, as the group had done small-scale election protection work and occasional direct action, DeGrave said. Citizen Action partnered with GROWW, a grassroots group that organizes behind progressive candidates in western Wisconsin, to host training sessions on how to mobilize in the event of election interference. In Michigan, Voters Not Politicians is running a similar election defense program, taking inspiration from protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. In Maine, organizations like the League of Women Voters have worked to grow a statewide poll watching program — a tactic also being used by groups in Florida and California.

Though election protection and defense efforts have been an integral part of American politics for decades, part of the reason this year’s efforts have grown in size is because the stakes feel so high.

“This election is such an important moment for us to be prepared for, in order to vote out authoritarians,” DeGrave said.

A surge of volunteers

In the lead-up to the 2026 midterm elections, the Trump administration has intensified tactics that advocates say are meant to intimidate or disenfranchise voters. 

On the pretext of combating voter fraud — which experts say is virtually nonexistent in the U.S. — the administration has demanded sensitive voter information to identify alleged noncitizen voters from every state. Its attempts have been consistently denied by judges, though that hasn’t stopped the administration from trying to remove 20,000 people from voter rolls in California or from creating a federal voter database that’s incorrectly flagged some voters as noncitizens. The administration also tried to make voting more difficult for Americans with new Postal Service restrictions on mail-in voting, which a district court put on hold until after the election. 

State Republicans have followed President Donald Trump’s lead. Since Trump entered office in January 2025, at least 19 states have passed laws that will make it harder to cast ballots in the midterms. 

Government officials have also repeatedly implied they will deploy armed federal agents to poll sites, an action illegal under national law since it could constitute voter intimidation. The administration has also indicated its intention to send around 1,000 Department of Justice federal monitors to all 50 states to observe voting procedures, which advocates say is another intimidation tactic. And privately, Trump opponents worry he could claim that foreign governments interfered in the election as a way to discredit results. 

“It’s highly, highly unlikely. But if ICE were to be around the polling places, we want our observers to report it.”

Jen Lancaster, League of Women Voters of Maine

Mel Neal, legal counsel on voting rights issues for democracy defense organization the Campaign Legal Center, characterized the Trump administration’s actions as undermining trust in the election system. “They are attacks on democracy and are an attempt to sow distrust in our election system so that election results can’t be trusted,” she said. 

In response to these threats, organizers have built statewide coalitions of nonpartisan poll watchers: people who travel to poll sites during early voting and on Election Day to ensure that people are able to vote without difficulty. 

Such poll watching programs have been around for decades, explained Amy Keith, executive director of Florida’s chapter of Common Cause, a national voting rights group founded in opposition to the Vietnam War in 1970 whose initial campaign successfully reduced the voting age from 21 to 18.

Poll watching emerged first and foremost to document any and all issues that could discourage voters trying to cast their ballots: police presence, overlong lines, lack of disability access, language barriers, etc. Jen Lancaster, the deputy director of the League of Women Voters of Maine, said the league’s poll watching program emerged during COVID-19 to ensure all polling places followed public health standards, such as by implementing plexiglass or acrylic barriers. 

“We are always watching for anything that could intimidate or deter or make it harder for voters,” Keith said. The goal, she added, was “to make sure that polling places are calm and welcoming, so that everybody can have that experience to cast their ballot and to participate in the process.”

But this year, organizations have also begun advising volunteers about what to do if agents from federal agencies like the FBI or ICE show up. 

“It’s highly, highly unlikely,” Lancaster emphasized. “But if ICE were to be around the polling places, we want our observers to report it.” The presence of any officer, including ICE agents, near a polling location can discourage voters, which is why organizers look out for it. “It can be scary to walk by an armed officer in order to cast their ballot,” Keith said. Poll observers don’t typically engage in direct action themselves when these situations arise; instead, they alert their teams, who often have experienced advocates or lawyers on standby to provide advice or assistance.

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Maine’s nonpartisan poll watching program has grown to around 400 registered volunteers. “For Maine, this is a pretty big number,” Lancaster said. In Florida and California, poll watching programs co-run by Common Cause chapters reported over 1,000 recruits. They are part of a nationwide boom in poll watching volunteers, which state-level chapters of Common Cause and the League of Women Voters have worked quickly to accommodate. 

Eileen Ma, director of democracy and national initiatives at the Asian Law Caucus, which has co-led an election protection program in California since 2012 with Common Cause, said the program could only channel the surge of volunteers into trained roles because of years of  infrastructure development.

“We have the capacity to bring on and train 1,000 volunteers because we built up over time the materials and the expertise and the practical knowledge of how to do that,” Ma said. “The work over the last decade [has] been critical to our being able to respond in this moment.”

Combating misinformation and building trust

Advocacy organizations have also, for years, operated national and state-level voter hotlines where prospective voters can call to clarify any questions they have about voting and make plans to cast their ballots. All day, including on weekends, Keith and her team at Florida Common Cause field calls about early voting, ID laws and polling locations. 

Lately, the Florida Common Cause team and other organizations with voter hotlines have fielded questions related to new voter ID laws, which have gone into place in several states. These laws have caused confusion about what identification can be used to vote, organizers said. 

Keith sees clarity on voter laws as crucial to combatting voter misinformation, which she and other advocates characterize as an unfortunate side effect of the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine election results. 

Misinformation has included false rumors about the number of noncitizen voters in elections, how ballots marked by poll workers could be disqualified, incorrect guidance about how to register to vote, and more. 

“We want people to have the correct information, not misinformation — whether it’s disinformation being spread by bots or [others] intentionally trying to confuse people, or it’s misinformation because they don’t understand the process,” Keith said.

By combatting these rumors through voter education and voter hotlines, which are increasingly available in more languages, Keith believes trust in the electoral system — the number one defense against attempts to overturn election results — could be restored. 

The League of Women Voters of Maine distributes a community newspaper at a No Kings rally on October 17, 2026. (League of Women Voters of Maine)

Groups around the country are using various channels to get correct information to voters. In Wisconsin, the legal advocacy group Law Forward has invested in its social media strategy, and used social media and op-eds as avenues to combat voter misinformation. 

Democracy Defense Foundation adviser Brian Jones said the organization, which was founded in 2024 in part to reverse the erosion of trust in the U.S. electoral system and operates in eight states, has heavily invested in partnering with community organizations like churches and local nonprofit groups to get information about elections out.

In Maine, where internet access in rural areas remains an issue, Lancaster said the League of Women Voters prints a newspaper with information about candidates across the state. This year, they distributed 50,000 copies in 16 counties. In rural counties, they left the newspapers in town hubs — community centers and libraries — for people to see. 

“There’s a transparent system here and play,” Jones said. “People need to understand that and ensure that faith and trust in their elections, and it’s not driven by just a partisan point of view.”

Ready to deploy

Unlike Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, organizations that have worked in voting rights spaces for years, like Citizen Action Wisconsin and GROWW, don’t have a volunteer base dedicated to this type of work. In the past month, Citizen Action Wisconsin and GROWW have trained about 70 volunteers across Wisconsin in voting rights and post-election mobilization, and then trained those volunteers to conduct outreach to get others involved in election defense. 

“If they talk to five people and those five people talk to five people, then we can actually end up at over 700 people that are motivated and organized and ready to be deployed in a rapid response situation if something does go wrong with the election,” DeGrave said.

Volunteers will be posted outside of key polling sites across Wisconsin when ballot counts begin, and will remain at the ready to host vigils and press conferences outside polling sites if any issues arise.

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In Michigan, Voters Not Politicians, which primarily focused on distributing information about early voting and ballot drop-off locations to voters across the state, has worked on recruiting dozens of volunteers to mobilize in anticipation of election interference. 

Communications director Melinda Billingsley said the organization plans to have volunteers watch polls and, if needed, advocate for voters experiencing issues at the ballot box as part of a statewide nonpartisan poll watching program. 

In the event of a contested election, “we’re recruiting folks to be willing and able to go to any place they’re needed and to throw a party and create a joyful, safe atmosphere,” Billingsley said. This strategy is partially inspired by anti-ICE protests across the United States, which has involved organizers utilizing creative approaches to defend community members from federal agents.

Staying on watch

Though organizers have welcomed the increased interest in poll watching and voter education programs this year, many are wondering how to sustain that energy in future election cycles, where the stakes will arguably be just as high. 

“It’s even more important because in 2028, we have a presidential election year and in 2030, we have a census year,” Darius Kemp, California Common Cause’s executive director, said. Census counts help determine congressional districts, and voting rights organizations are advocating and educating against legislation that would skew a census count, such as a proposed rule to not count noncitizens.

But beyond ensuring fair and accurate elections safe from federal interference, organizers see the expansion of their work as critical to restoring Americans’ faith in the electoral system, which has dropped in the past decade. 

“It is not just a one-day struggle,” said Ma, from the Asian Law Caucus. “It’s not just a one kind of activity kind of struggle. It has to be a full-frontal assault or full-frontal defense, however you choose to look at it, in order to preserve people’s voting rights.”

This article Tens of thousands get ready to defend the vote was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article How Serbian students toppled an authoritarian was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On Oct. 25, Serbia voted and the Student List won. Late that evening, President Aleksandar Vučić — the man who has dominated the country’s politics since 2012, steadily hollowing out its courts, media and elections along the way — went on television and admitted that his Serbian Progressive Party and its allies had lost. The final count isn’t in yet, but the result is not in doubt. Candidates selected by the Students List protest movement have more than half the vote and a majority in the 250-seat parliament.

For more than 20 years, our team at the Belgrade-based Center for Applied NonViolent Actions and Strategies, or CANVAS, has worked with activists from dozens of countries on one question: How do ordinary people defeat a government that looks unbeatable? This time the answer came from our own streets, again. We want to explain what happened, because movements elsewhere will try to learn from it, and we’d like them to learn the right lessons.

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You can’t understand Sunday without understanding the 14 years before it, since Vučić first came to power.

Most people in Serbia learned to live with a low, constant fear. You assumed your phone wasn’t really yours. Amnesty International later confirmed what many suspected: Spyware was being installed on the phones of activists and journalists, sometimes while they sat in a police station. If you spoke up, a tabloid might put your face on the front page the next morning with a story about who was supposedly bankrolling you. People lost jobs and contracts for being on the wrong side. Plenty stopped saying what they thought, even at the kitchen table.

We see this pattern in almost every country we work in. That kind of power doesn’t have to arrest everyone. It only needs everyone to believe they could be next.

How it started

On Nov. 1, 2024, the concrete canopy at the Novi Sad railway station fell and killed 16 people. The station had just been renovated. Everyone understood immediately what that meant: The money meant to keep people safe had gone into someone’s pocket. Within days, “Corruption kills” was written on walls across the country.

Students shut down their colleges and refused to go back to class. Many observers abroad missed how important this was. A march lasts an afternoon. The blockade of the universities lasted for months and took a whole part of society out of normal life. In our field we call that noncooperation, and it is far more powerful than protest alone. Every regime depends on people showing up and doing what is expected of them. The students stopped.

For two years the students were arrested, followed, slandered and called foreign agents. Cars drove into crowds. People were beaten. The government gave them every excuse to respond with violence, and they didn’t.

A protest marshal at the front of a crowd during the largest march in Serbia’s history on March 15, 2025 in Belgrade. (Gavrilo Andrić / protesti.pics)

At the largest protest in Serbia’s history, in Belgrade on March 15, 2025 — with between 275,000 and 325,000 people, according to the independent Archive of Public Gatherings — student marshals in yellow vests kept the crowd calm and blue flares showed people the way out if things went wrong. None of that was improvised. The students organized themselves. The assembly of each fakultet (a specialized college within a university) chose its marshals. Before every big action they went over the same things again and again: how to spot provocateurs, how to calm a tense moment, how to move a crowd out safely. At CANVAS, we teach this in every training we run: Nonviolent discipline doesn’t happen by itself. It is planned, practiced and repeated until it’s second nature. The students did exactly that.

Here is why it mattered so much. Violence was the one thing the regime wanted from them. A single burning car would have given the government its “terrorists” and sent the cautious middle class back indoors. 

Because the students stayed nonviolent, everyone could join. Grandmothers did. Farmers did. People who had never been to a protest in their lives did.

What it cost

People sometimes talk about nonviolent action as if it were the soft option. Anyone who watched these students over the past two years knows better.

They walked across Serbia. They arrived with bloody socks and taped-up blisters, slept wherever someone offered a floor, and set off again in the morning. In village after village people stood by the road with bread, hot tea and blankets, and a lot of them were crying. Those marches reached places that no rally in Belgrade ever could, places the government thought it owned.

Wherever they stopped, they talked with people. In town squares, school yards and village halls, they explained why they were marching and listened to what local people were angry about. They also urged residents to set up their own citizens’ assemblies, and in many towns people did, often for the first time in their lives.

Their professors paid a price, too. When fakultets sided with their students, the government cut university salaries to a small fraction of what they had been. Some professors received nothing at all for months. The president went on television and said that instead of salaries, they would get potatoes. Schoolteachers who backed the protests were punished the same way. These are people with children, mortgages and parents to look after, and they stayed with their students anyway.

A list with no politicians on it

Then the students did something we had not seen done quite like this anywhere.

They didn’t hand their momentum over to the opposition parties, and they didn’t run for office themselves. They wrote their own rules for the slate of candidates that they would support. No students could be on the list. Nobody from the ruling coalition. No officials from the opposition parties. No extremists.

For more than a year, over 80 student assemblies in six university cities proposed names, argued about them, interviewed people and vetoed the ones they didn’t trust. It was slow, messy and deeply democratic. We think that is exactly why it worked. Nobody could say it was cooked up in a back room.

What came out was a list of 250 people, one name for every seat in parliament, who were respected long before politics: professors, teachers, doctors, actors, artists and athletes. 

Serbia doesn’t have local districts. The whole country votes as one constituency for party lists, seats are shared out by each list’s share of the vote, and they are filled in the order the names appear. So the order matters, and the first name on the list was a cardiologist from Novi Sad. A former governor of the National Bank shared the list with one of the best basketball players this country has ever produced. Several opposition parties pulled their own lists and backed the students instead, which could not have been easy for them.

Tens of thousands gathered at Slavija Square in Belgrade on Oct. 22 ahead of the general election. (Gavrilo Andrić / protesti.pics)

The people on that list don’t agree about much. Some are on the left, some on the right, and some have never thought of themselves as political at all. State-owned media called that chaos.

We see it the other way around. Movements win by bringing huge numbers of people on board, and huge numbers of people never share one ideology. If the list had looked like one camp, it would have attracted one camp. Because it looked like Serbia, almost anyone could find someone on it they trusted.

What held it together was simple. Nobody wants another leader the whole country has to obey and adore. Nobody wants to live again in a place where a handful of people get rich off everyone else. The students put it on their posters in three words: “Serbia or Mafia.”

Healing from a cancer

The best way we can describe where Serbia is today is this: we’ve had the diagnosis, and treatment has just started.

For years the country lived with a cancer — with captured courts, captured media, public money flowing into private pockets, and fear as the normal background of life. It spread slowly into nearly every institution.

Sunday’s defeat of Vučić didn’t cure it. Sunday made treatment possible.

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Anyone who has sat next to someone they love during chemotherapy knows what comes next. It takes a long time. It hurts. Some weeks the treatment feels worse than the illness. There will be setbacks and bad results, and people saying things were better before. The old networks won’t leave quietly, and some reforms will fail the first time they are tried.

But this cancer can be beaten. And the whole body has to heal, including the neighbors, relatives and colleagues who voted for the other side on Sunday. They aren’t the disease. They’re part of the country that has to get well.

What we ask of each of us

No government can do this healing by itself. Here is what we think it will take, and from whom.

1. The new governing majority: Start with institutions, not with settling scores. Establish courts that are actually independent, a public broadcaster that tells the truth, and clean elections — all of which will outlast any government. And open a full, public investigation into the surveillance of citizens, so no one is tempted to do it again.

2. The movement: Don’t let the assemblies fade away. They built this list, and they are the best protection Serbia has against the next strongman, including one who might come from inside the movement itself.

3. Friends abroad: Support Serbian institutions and citizens rather than personalities. In practice, that means long-term funding for independent media, watchdog groups and local citizens’ assemblies; sending judges, auditors and prosecutors from your own countries who can work alongside Serbian colleagues rebuilding theirs; and support tied to concrete rule-of-law results rather than to warm words for whoever is in office. And please stay for the whole treatment, not only the first week.

4. Activists in other countries: Don’t copy the slogan. Copy the method. Go beyond marching to real noncooperation, train for discipline instead of hoping for it, and build unity out of your differences.

Serbia has just shown that nonviolent action still works when it’s planned, patient and carried by many hands. Now it has to show that a country can heal. We intend to be part of that work: training the next generation of organizers, writing down honestly what worked and what didn’t, and holding the new government to the same standard the students held the old one.

A version of this article first appeared on CANVAS’ newsletter.

This article How Serbian students toppled an authoritarian was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Inside the resistance to Spain’s crackdown on migrants in Ceuta was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On July 30, images streamed across TVs, social media feeds and newspapers of thousands of people approaching a fence along the beach, in boats and by foot. Migrants, including children and families, were attempting to cross into Ceuta, a Spanish enclave bordered by Morocco. Facing violent border guards and the threat of drowning, over 70,000 people made it to Ceuta, with hopes of eventually reaching the Spanish mainland. Officials in Ceuta said that 100 people died in the crossing — either by drowning or being crushed — and sources on the ground believe the number was higher. 

“I lost my phone, my money, my ID card, everything I had,” one Moroccan teenager recalled. “At one point I got pulled to the bottom, so far down that my feet touched the sand. When I looked around me, I saw women and babies who had drowned.”

“There was no proper humanitarian response from the local authorities — whether it is basic hygiene, food or shelter,” said Ric Fernández, coordinator and spokesperson for humanitarian and migrant advocacy group No Name Kitchen, or NNK, about the first days after the mass crossing. “Instead, there was an institutional response of pressuring people to ‘voluntarily’ return to Morocco. … There was repression, violence against people on the move in every form — legal, administrative and physical, and the forced expulsion of people.”   

Facing intense pressure and violence from both the Spanish police and military, within 96 hours most people returned to Morocco. Estimates about how many migrants remain are in flux, but the Spanish government said in late September that up to 10,000 people are still in Ceuta.

While the global mainstream media quickly moved on from this story, the situation in Ceuta has remained tense over the last three months, with increased violent harassment by the police, evictions and collective expulsions. In recent weeks, “voluntary returns” and evictions from makeshift camps on the beach have ramped up.

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Irene Estébanez Gutiérrez, a family and community doctor in Madrid, spent two weeks in Ceuta as a volunteer. “An information campaign has been waged that portrays people on the move as invaders, violent and dangerous,” she said. The media coverage, she believes, has failed to adequately address “the resulting humanitarian crisis, the systematic violation of rights, the lack of protection for minors, and the systematic violence and discrimination to which people are being subjected to, particularly by the military.”

Those who remain include Moroccan men and women, alongside Sudanese, Syrians, Palestinians, Malians and Nigerians. According to NNK, a significant number are minors. They are still stranded; the majority of them have slept in the street or in makeshift tents since they crossed into Ceuta over two months ago. 

Kora, who uses a pseudonym as an activist to protect her identity, arrived in Ceuta to volunteer in early August and found the violence and the lack of access to basic necessities particularly angering. The authorities were “not letting them access the supermarkets to get food or water,” she said. “They turned off the publicly and freely accessible water [to shower or drink] on the beaches and beat them or scare them in the middle of the night … to purposefully making their lives more miserable.” 

Organizing solidarity, facing criminalization

This violence, however, did not prevent activists and migrants from developing forms of organizing and resistance. Hundreds of migrants staged a protest on a popular beach in Ceuta in August to demand asylum. On Sept. 21, Migreurop, a Euro-African network of organizations, activists and researchers that monitors European migration policies, noted in a joint statement with over 100 organizations: “We have witnessed forms of resistance in everyday survival practices.” They mentioned the sharing of information, food and medicine, as well as safety and protection practices. 

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Besides migrants’ self-led efforts, civil society has stepped up to help, with the Spanish Red Cross distributing food at Trampolín Beach, the site of one makeshift camp. Other local charities like Luna Blanca, have been providing between 2,700 and 3,500 meals a day in five locations with initial funding from the Spanish government. NNK, a group started by Serbian activists in 2017 that supports migrants along the Balkan and Mediterranean routes to the EU, has been working in Ceuta since 2021. It has grown from a fixed team of four to more than 21 volunteers, after a call for help in early August through social media and Signal groups with other grassroots organizations providing aid to migrants in EU borders. Operations have shifted in the three months since the migrants arrived, and NNK is now cooking and serving over 1,200 meals a day in a new industrial-size kitchen. 

Fernández shared how the group has adapted its work on the ground to keep up with a crisis situation. “For more than a month [after July 30], we were not able to do proper legal accompaniment, because the system was broken and we were just trying to register people,” he said. “We tried to divide our work into four different teams: legal, health, cooking, awareness.” To keep things coordinated, aid groups in Ceuta hold a weekly meeting to share information and needs. The most pressing needs are for immediate humanitarian assistance, including clothes distribution, housing for vulnerable groups and phone charging. 

Volunteers arrive from Spain and mostly other European countries, contributing what they can based on their experience. “I provided direct basic health care because of the barriers to accessing medical care and the huge health needs due to violence and living conditions,” said Irene, the doctor who volunteered with NNK. She said she assessed dozens of cases involving wounds or injuries resulting from assaults, mostly perpetrated by the Spanish military. 

The hostility of authorities toward migrants has also extended to volunteers, who carry out their daily work under intense police monitoring. Police constantly ask for identification documents and conduct searches, including of food containers meant for distribution. Reprisals against volunteers and grassroots groups have taken multiple forms, from administrative fines to criminal charges of “trafficking.” A volunteer who had previously spent time in Ukraine and Syria reported that the seven-square mile enclave of Ceuta felt considerably more militarized than either of those countries.

Lessons learned and the way ahead 

Spain’s response to the people who crossed into Ceuta has been shocking to many observers, especially for a country that has been considered among the more progressive in the European Union on migration. This comes at a time when states are slowly beginning to implement the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, a new and comprehensive reform to migration management which includes a focus on external borders. Legal advocates argue that this pact, coupled with the use of emergency laws, could suspend migration and human rights law in the EU during mass border crossings like the one in Ceuta. 

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Solidarity groups have also come under attack and are looking for ways to move forward in this new atmosphere. Greece is among the first countries to implement the pact and one that has led the way in criminalizing humanitarian efforts to support migrants. This increasing criminalization is happening “through the misuse of the criminal justice system to target and persecute activists and people in solidarity for their work, as well as through administrative law, such as harsher requirements for the registration of civil society organizations,” said Eleni Sirri from the Border Violence Monitoring Network, a network of NGOs, associations and collectives that monitors human rights violations at and within European borders. 

Anna Gruber is the advocacy manager from Collective Aid, an NGO working with migrants in the borderlands of Serbia, Bosnia and Greece. She shared how Collective Aid also had to reorganize and strategize about the way ahead, given the increase in crackdowns on humanitarian work, as well as the anticipated changes because of the EU pact. “We are now focusing more on capturing conditions in detention, [and] mapping deaths and disappearances on the borders,” she said. “While these are hard to trace, bringing all the scattered evidence we can find together helps showcase the EU’s focus on detention camps and the containment of migration that is at heart of the new pact.” 

Like other groups navigating the criminalization of migration and anticipated changes under the new pact, NNK feels it is important for grassroots groups across the EU and beyond to come together around migrant rights. Fernández believes putting energy into growing networks and collectives of grassroots groups is the way forward. “The far-right in Europe and instrumentalization of migration will continue to grow,” he said. “We need to prepare for that and learn from each other to be stronger.” 

Kirsten Dimovitz, the advocacy coordinator for the Border Violence Monitoring Network and a volunteer in Ceuta, contributed additional reporting to the story.

This article Inside the resistance to Spain’s crackdown on migrants in Ceuta was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Beating burnout in social movements requires strategy was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

I recently showed up to a protest for the first time in months, looked around, and thought: “Who the hell are all these people?” 

Friends I could once rely on running into at protests when I was younger were missing. 

The fact that I hadn’t been to a protest in months was unusual. I’d had a hard season of exhaustion and cynicism, and I felt I was falling out of the loop. In the last few years, I turned 30 and moved back to my hometown, and the once-intense focus on social movements that I had in my 20s was now jostling for attention with work and family. 

The absence of my comrades at that protest seemed to signal that others, too, had burned or faded out of organizing.

It’s a trend that Chris Dixon describes in his new book, which is about sticking around for the long haul in the fight for a better world: “In radical activist scenes especially,” he writes, “people tend to age out by their 30s, if not before.” 

When the manuscript of Dixon’s book came my way, it spoke to my fear of burning or fading out of the movements that have given my life meaning and momentum. (I sit on the editorial collective of Between The Lines Books, and helped select the book for publication; it was released in September 2026.) 

After a few recent boom-and-bust cycles of uprisings — 2020’s Black liberation uprising, the Palestine solidarity protests that kicked off in 2023 — it’s a timely and thoughtful book about building movements with care and commitment.

Dixon (who unfortunately shares a name with a far more famous American crypto bro) is an anti-authoritarian activist and a scholar of social movements. “For the Long Haul: How to Stay in the Fight for a Better World” is the latest effort in his lifelong project to understand how social movements are built and sustained.

Dixon grew up in Alaska, and the book opens by describing his decades-long friendship with Ruth Sheridan, an anarchist who was in her 70s when she first came to talk to his eighth grade labor history class. That early curiosity — about how left-wing social movements are built and sustained and the unsung activists who make it happen — showed up in his 2014 book “Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movements,” in which he shared lessons from almost a decade spent interviewing organizers across the U.S. and Canada. 

Now, Dixon has reached back into this same conversational archive to write “For the Long Haul.” 

We meet Bill Stivers, an elder communist Dixon befriended as a teen; Rachel Herzing, the co-founder of prison abolitionist group Critical Resistance; the political prisoner David Gilbert with whom he exchanged letters from jail, and many more. 

These lifelong leftists share their observations about what leads to burnout, the many-headed monster that has long stalked social movements. During this time of totalizing neoliberalism and weakened movement infrastructure, it’s grown especially powerful. These movement veterans counsel us to be patient, open-minded and to “practice being nobody special.” 

Dixon tells the story of Stivers who, at the age of 76, travelled from Anchorage, Alaska to the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico to attend the Zapatistas’ Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism. It was just a couple years after the militant group’s armed uprising and a young Dixon, more swayed by a European left tradition at that time, looked on with skepticism. But Stivers ended up having the more clear-eyed assessment of this new approach to anti-capitalist struggle. Stivers had cultivated the long view, which helped him avoid cynicism and dogmatism, and encouraged him to keep learning and stay open to new developments.  

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What I found most helpful about the book was Dixon’s formulation of burnout: he sees it not just as a type of overwork or exhaustion, but as a feeling of defeat that becomes more common because of a lack of strategy. Dixon introduces this idea by sharing a conversation he had with Kim Marks, a direct-action environmentalist and Indigenous solidarity organizer in Oregon: “So much of burnout is about not being effective,” she said, “and so much ineffectiveness comes from not having a plan.” 

Dixon traces the ways that people often burn out of activist groups back to this underlying lack of strategy. When a group promises sweeping change but never decides how to take the first step; when a group gets mired in discussions about internal structure or politics and stops taking outward action; when a few veteran members shoulder a huge amount of work while new ones struggle to find meaningful ways to pitch in; when a group is hastily cobbled together to address a crisis then falls apart just as quickly after an unsuccessful campaign — all of these are instances in which a lack of strategy leaves people feeling defeated, ineffective and worn-out. 

A good plan can pull groups out of these exhausting spirals. This involves mapping the current political landscape, articulating our goals, making agreements about what to do and how to support each other in doing it, and then evaluating our success and learning from our mistakes.  

Dixon writes about the importance of imbuing this strategy-setting with care and intentionality, to “help people to talk frankly about workload, make reasonable estimates of what they can do, and look out for one another’s well-being.”

Previous Coverage

Why bravery and heartbreak are essential to organizing

You can find many of these same encouragements — for rest, care and intentionality — in the pages of any self-help book. But the goal of capitalist self-help literature is to create an individual who is independent, sane and productive enough to keep cranking the handle of profit-making machines. 

Dixon’s help is different: it’s not for the individual, but for the collective. At the end of the day, “sustained involvement in movements is fundamentally a collective activity, not an individual one,” he writes. No amount of advice given to or followed by the individual can stop the pattern of burnout and disengagement that’s become endemic in leftist spaces. 

As a result, Dixon focuses on collective care rather than self-care. This can look like preparing food for the picket line, planning for childcare and legal support at the direct action, or tending to hurt feelings after the meeting. He calls care work “a crucial — and too often overlooked — foundation for the long haul.”

For Dixon, care is not just a way to make organizing more pleasant for the people doing it, or a moral imperative if the left wants to keep claiming the high ground. Instead, he sees care as a strategic imperative. When we make our political commitments with care in mind, Dixon writes, it forces us to ask ourselves and each other if what we’re committing to is reasonable and tactical. And when it is, we become more likely to stick around for the long run, and also more likely to win.

Not one of Dixon’s ideas stands without a quote from an organizer, an example from a movement or a reference to a movement scholar’s work. One of the book’s main contributions is its vast bibliography — a full third of the pages are suggested reading and endnotes. 

Dixon’s form of activist research is highly attentive to insights that are gleaned from a person’s own experiences. Like this observation by anti-authoritarian activist Helen Hudson, who draws on decades of organizing with prisoners to form her analysis of how the state uses prison to weaken movements: “Prison isolates the prisoners from support,” she told Dixon, “but also deprives younger generations of radicals from the experience of revolutionaries who have much to teach us.”  

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Dixon encourages younger readers like me to find these people in our own lives — older activists like Stivers and Sheridan who show us that it is possible and lovely to live an ordinary life of unflagging commitment to the left. 

This is not an organizing manual (though Dixon does recommend a few of those in his suggested readings). Instead, what he gives us is a deep study of left-wing dynamics and some broad strokes toward sustainability. The people likely to get the most from this book are those of us who have already gone through many cycles of boom-and-bust social movement activity, and who are looking for fuel that burns longer and cleaner. 

And it’s by paying attention to Dixon’s rigorous practices of listening and sharing that readers will get the most out of this book — leaving not just with a handful of advice, but with an initiation into a practice. 

This article Beating burnout in social movements requires strategy was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article How Vermont shut down ICE was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

After Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration moved to rein in the Bovino-style spectacle with its made-for-TV arrests. In an attempt to avoid another public outcry, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has quietly settled into a new rhythm.

Arrests have still increased month after month, reaching a record high of roughly 51,000 people taken into ICE custody in August. This is part of a new surge — carried out in hospitals, courthouses and airports — with an intent to stay off the nightly news. As The New York Times reported, this phase is “captured mostly by grainy security camera footage, through cracked blinds and from behind closed doors.” 

This phase is also backed by a dragnet of data. At airports, ICE has been running name matches with TSA to detain people at check-in counters and gates. It has found a backdoor into the country’s license-plate cameras: Records show local and state police ran more than 4,000 immigration-related searches on Flock’s camera network in a single year. (Yet another reason Flock cameras should not exist.)

Perhaps surprisingly, much of the tech infrastructure driving ICE’s new surge is headquartered in … Vermont. The town of Williston, outside Burlington, is home to both ICE’s Law Enforcement Support Center, which houses the agency’s national tip line, and ICE’s National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center, or NCATC, its social-media surveillance hub. 

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As ICE tries a new approach, this new phase of resisting ICE requires moving to more offense — and the people of Vermont are offering us some clear lessons. 

Vermont resistance

Resistance started with the fight over flights. Early in Trump’s second term, activists documented ICE moving detainees onto commercial flights out of Burlington’s airport — more than 450 people as of mid-July 2025, by their count. They showed up in airports as witnesses and disruptors, sometimes aided by empowered flight attendants. They forced an ICE retreat: organizers say ICE hasn’t moved detainees through the airport in more than a year.

More recently they’ve gone after the hard infrastructure. Sit-ins at the White Cap Business Park in Williston, where the NCATC facility is located, have led to arrests for allegedly blocking the entrance to the ICE offices, including 11 people in February and 13 in July.

After those arrests came some unusual twists, which speak volumes about the courage it takes to refuse unjust orders and to continue protesting in the face of repression.

Complicity and noncooperation

Responses to authoritarianism are as old as a time — many of the same dynamics from Vermont show up in the ancient story of Pharaoh and Moses.

Undeniably the most powerful person in his land, Pharaoh was the ultimate authoritarian. His big trick was taking beautiful work and turning it evil. Take the work of midwives, whose job is to usher life into the world — he turned that work into ugliness by ordering the Hebrew midwives to kill every newborn boy. 

But we all have a choice. And famously, several of the midwives refused. Their act of noncooperation with an unjust order is the reason Moses lived.

We are living through a moment when institution after institution is being turned toward evil. Some, like the Department of Justice, were already a mixed bag. But now it is being turned against the very logic of due process it claims to serve, as we’ve seen recently with the criminal indictment of whistleblower Cassidy Hutchinson. Other institutions, like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are being perverted, with great resistance from insiders who cling to the key values that these agencies were founded on.

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In Vermont, the local prosecutor, Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George, faced her own choice. When asked to bring charges against the protesters who held the sit-ins, she repeatedly declined, citing limited resources. That makes sense: No one was harmed, and the protesters have a strong necessity defense — the argument that they were preventing an even greater harm. Every minute that ICE isn’t taking part in abducting people is good for the country.

Then came a bizarre turn of events. The state’s public safety commissioner directed state police to send the cases to Vermont’s Attorney General Charity Clark, bypassing normal procedure and upending the traditional role of the attorney general. Clark, a Democrat, decided to charge the protesters with trespassing.

In an op-ed, she said her hands were tied: “Justice must be blind or our system will fail.” Back to Pharaoh: This is a bit like a midwife in the next town over raising her hand to say, “I’d like to kill Moses, because that’s what the law dictates.”

Protesters recently unearthed relevant Vermont history — a model of state-level noncooperation. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which ordered cooperation with slave catchers, Vermont passed a state statute known as the Habeas Corpus Law. It effectively nullified the federal law, and went so far as to require state attorneys to defend anyone accused of being a slave, with full representation before a judge and a jury. The entire practice of nullification was deemed highly escalatory — so much so the federal government threatened military invasion — but due to the state’s resistance, throughout Vermont there was effectively no participation in the Fugitive Slave Act.

As in that case, the pressure from the federal government has continued. One week before a planned week of direct action, the federal government suddenly charged five people from the earlier protests with obstructing access to a federal facility (punishable by up to 30 days in prison or a $5,000 fine), likely hoping to deter further escalation.

We all have a choice: complicity with Pharoah or noncooperation. Despite the threats and new legal challenges, the protesters in Vermont chose the riskier, more liberatory path.

A funeral, a guerrilla garden and a sit-in

The week of direct action went on as planned, beginning with a funeral. On Oct. 5, more than 30 clergy led a procession of a hundred or so mourners who walked behind a hearse to the White Cap Business Park, singing “Amazing Grace.” They carried 95 paver stones, each representing a life taken by ICE — directly or from complications while detained — and placed them one by one in a handmade coffin of Vermont pine. The action echoed the Stolen Neighbors Quilt created in Minnesota, which remembers people who were deported. Here, names of those killed by ICE were read out. Then, in front of the doors of the spy center, the coffin was nailed shut. 

A crowd gathers in Williston, Vermont on Oct. 5, behind a coffin filled with paver stones representing lives lost to ICE. (Shut Down ICE VT)

Rev. Marybeth Redmond said at the vigil, “I have walked alongside Vermonters struggling to survive, and I have never seen our immigrant neighbors so hunted, so afraid and so alone.”

In the end, it was a symbolic act. Security scattered the stones, and the property manager and others were seen taking crowbars to the coffin. But it was only the beginning of the week.

The next action was a garden. Because what would you expect from Vermont? Rather than using just their bodies to get in the way, about 40 protesters arrived at sunrise with pots, planters and bags of soil. 

They affixed the boxes to the pavement with construction adhesive, painted and chalked them with flowers, insects and slogans, flew a rainbow kite, and by mid-morning, had gotten a full dance party going. The action blocked the road to 188 Harvest Lane, which houses ICE’s national tip line.

They were also highlighting the environmental violence of ICE’s data intensive operation. Gardener Isaac Petersen said, “ICE’s surveillance technology is extremely energy-intensive, much of it powered by AI and data centers. It harms our communities directly by targeting our neighbors.”

State and local police moved some barriers, but largely left the garden alone, which blocked the road for most of the day. ICE’s parking lots were nearly empty all day, and the rumor was that ICE was told to avoid coming into the office.

Protestors hang handwritten “tips” outside the ICE office housing the agency’s national tip line. (Shut Down ICE VT)

Each day escalated from the day before. By Thursday, protesters went right up to the front entrance of the Harvest Lane facility. Dozens had arrived before 8 a.m. to deliver handwritten note cards with “tips” encouraging ICE employees to find other jobs. The protesters started by taping those messages to the windows and doors. Then they hauled out a rug, a couch, a coffee table and a fold-up mattress — a makeshift living room — and sat down, singing and playing music, effectively shutting the place down. 

Much of this has been intergenerational. Vermont protesters have ranged from people in their early 20s to an 83-year-old from Bethel and 85-year-old from Sharon.

Some of those sitting at the entrance this week had taken part in earlier acts of civil disobedience, and several now face charges brought by Clark. 

Organizers say the ICE facility was effectively shut for much of that week, its parking lots empty. Police interference was minimal: At one point, officers came over only to remove the items protesters had used to block a surveillance camera, then returned to their cars. As the organizers said in their press release, “ICE employees went home rather than face Vermont’s week of bold, decisive action.”

What you can do 

The week of action was only one moment, and organizers hope others will organize their own — aimed at different pieces of ICE infrastructure. There are other flash points around the country this month, too, in Austin, Minneapolis and Arizona.

As for Shut Down ICE VT, the group behind the week of action, they plan to keep going. One simple way to support them: Call the tip line that ICE runs out of Williston to encourage neighbors to turn each other in. To disrupt its activity, the group is encouraging people to call 866-347-2423 and tell whoever picks up all the different ways ICE could be making a better world. According to organizers, this tactic has been so successful the lines are clogged — one person was on hold for 2 hours and 18 minutes until her phone died. (This tactic was used in the early DOGE days.) Instead of doing Pharaoh’s bidding: What are the beautiful things you could be doing with your life? It can be a bit of a daily ritual.

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Because here, in the end, is Pharaoh’s trick: He changed the meaning of what was legal. He didn’t simply say, “You must obey me.” He said that if you refused, you were the one breaking the law.

But we should remember whose side the law has so often taken. The law stood against enslaved people seeking freedom. It stood against women having control of their own bodies. It stood against trans people claiming full autonomy. The law, by itself, is no defense against injustice — and must not be turned into an instrument of oppression.

Sarah George declined to prosecute protesters for a reason. By stepping in to take up the case, Charity Clark has signaled a willingness to participate in the repression. The people shutting down ICE in Vermont are on the right side of history. Let’s find ways to join them.

This article How Vermont shut down ICE was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.