A week ago Saturday, while doing a day of deep canvassing with Canvassing Connectors in Peekskill, NY, my teammate and I finished our rounds having a long conversation with a progressive movement organizer who happened to be on our route. She knew a lot about the neighborhood nearby. “You should go to this group of houses around the corner,” she told us. “They all took their Trump flags down in the last few months.” And indeed none were on display.

Something similar is happening around the country. On the r/newjersey subreddit, a user named “G00G00Daddy” posted two days ago: “I was driving through Cranbury yesterday and a home that’s been flying a trump flag for at least the past 3 years has taken it down. It was still flying in December, so a recent update. Have others noticed the same?” “LaurAdorable” replied, “I know of a house in Clark who had several pro Trump flags and ‘go brandon’ ones a few years ago that suddenly were gone and are just showing American flags now. Interesting.” Another named “mcgeggy” wrote, “Same here in Howell. Multiple Trump flags in front yard for many years, now just American flags.” Someone replied that they also saw a house in Howell that first lowered its Trump flag to half-mast before removing it.

Longer range travelers are reporting the same thing. In r/SLO, which stands for San Luis Obispo County on the central coast of California, user named “Ok_Comfortable4138” wrote eight days ago, “I just spent a long weekend covering many miles around rural SLO and Monterey Counties via rural backroads and was astonished by the lack of MAGA banners on display in front of houses.” In the FoxBrain subreddit, a user named “LonkToTheFuture” reported a month ago, “Recently drove to a wedding in the Texas hill country from Houston. Typically out on the rural state highways I would see at least a handful of Trump flags and signs. Last weekend I saw none at all, except for a big 2024 campaign sign that had Trump’s name ripped off it.” Three days ago, a user named “NoZookeepergame6715” replied, “Same. I drive out to West Texas regularly. It used to be littered with Trump flags. I haven’t seen a single flag in Texas in several months. Means something...”

Indeed it does. Trump’s declining poll numbers have a real-world corollary: many of his most devoted supporters are quietly withdrawing. Some, like Ashley St. Clair, a 27-year-old TikTok influencer who is perhaps best known for mothering a child with Elon Musk, have decided to make a full break with MAGA and are telling tales from out of school. But as buyer’s remorse settles in, more are probably just going to take a break from politics. And some may switch to voting for Democrats, or for less far-out Republicans.

In both the short term and long run, this trend could be as important for the future of American politics as the trend you are probably hearing all about right now: how Republican legislatures are doing more mid-decade gerrymandering and have just given themselves a major advantage in the battle for control of the House of Representatives. Indeed, the trends are connected: there’s no question that Trump allies in Congress and many statehouses can see their declining popularity and therefore are pulling out the stops to tilt the playing field further to their advantage. This is making the path to retaking the House much steeper, as G. Elliott Morris points out. It’s also engendering a lot of despair about how the Rs are rigging the game.

But the question I have for you, dear reader, is which trend are you choosing to fixate on? Because believing that all hope is lost is dangerous, and even more so when so many people are doing all they can to turn the tide.

This is a pivotal year

According to K. Starling’s We the People Dissent newsletter, in the first three months of this year, there were roughly 22,000 demonstrations, rallies, protests, marches and vigils expressing opposition to the Trump regime. This, she says, is about 50% more than 55,000-60,000 protests she and her volunteer helpers tallied in 2025.

Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium, which uses a more stringent tallying method, has only released numbers through the first two months of this year, but the trendline is the same. In all of 2025, CCC counted 39,154 protests against Trump across America. Through the end of February 2026, it recorded another 9,447. That puts 2026 to be 45% more active, in terms of on-the-ground protest, than last year.

Neither of these tallies include the burst of activity around No Kings 3 on March 28, “Communities Not Cages” on April 25, and MayDay on May 1. Right now, based on my ongoing tracking of upcoming events on Mobilize.us, the progressive event platform, there’s a surge of attention on voting rights, with immigration and democracy being the other leading topics mentioned across the thousands of events Mobilize displays. The Court’s Callais ruling has prompted several urgent listings, most prominently the “All Roads Lead to the South” national day of action on May 16.

Also, in addition to the annual wave of PRIDE events happening in June, Mobilize is also showing a direct-action campaign targeting Citizens Bank protesting its financing of ICE detention centers. The De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition is building towards a national day of action on June 6, with 34 across New England, the company’s home territory.

However you slice the data, there will be a record amount of mass protest this year. All this effort, though, is setting us up for one of the classic challenges faced by many protest movements: It’s very rare for us to know in real time the effect of our actions.

Uncertainty about whether you are winning, treading water, or going backwards is a hallmark of mass movements. And when movements grind along for a long period without seeing much, if anything, change in response to their efforts, people often respond in one of two ways. Many give up, while a smaller group gets radicalized. Both moves are understandable. Neither are helpful.

This is one of the great lessons of the anti-Vietnam War movement of the mid-1960s to mid-1970s that is quite relevant to today. I’m in the middle of reading Tom Wells’ magisterial history of that period, The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam. Of the anti-war movement’s challenges, he writes:

“For many, the anti-war fight brought mounting and profound political frustration. Despite the movement’s steady expansion, they observed, the bloodletting in Vietnam only increased. The White House seemed heedless of public protest, its occupants amoral. There was apparently no telling how far the US government would go to impose its designs on the peasantry of Southeast Asia: even World War III was possible. Public support for US policies compounded activists’ distress. The building frustration in the movement bred feelings of desperation in many circles. Gor some protesters the desperation even begot self-sacrifice. ‘What more can we possibly do?’ was a common cry in the movement. The frustration was greatest among amongst youth. And it was particularly pronounced in periods following large national demonstrations, when, despite the dissent, little if anything seemed to change. Few activists fully appreciated the considerable political power they possessed...

One of my theses is that thwarted political hopes were the main (but by no means the only) impetus behind escalations in anti-war tactics. Frustrated hopes were the principal reason for the growing militancy in the movement, including the use of political violence. The only way to stop the war, many protesters concluded, was to make America ungovernable....

Activists’ failure to appreciate their actual political power hurt their cause. That failure spawned defections from the movement. It bred lethargy, stagnation, and despair in the movement’s ranks, impeding the organization of protests and the maintenance of anti-war groups. It fostered antipathy to traditional legal demonstrations, hindering the public display of anti-war sentiment. It hampered efforts to sustain outpourings of dissent, particularly in the early 1970s, when, amid Richard Nixon’s escalations of the war, cynicism about the efficacy of anti-war protest was especially widespread. Not least important, it aggravated dissension over strategies and tactics among activists, thereby depleting energies, hardening internal divisions, and reducing the movements capacity for coordinated action.”

If only movement activists had known the kind of impact they were having, in real-time. Writing twenty years after the fact, and with the benefit of many interviews with Administration officials as well as internal records of conversations, Wells asserts:

“The US government took the antiwar movement quite seriously. If many protesters fail to appreciate their political clout, officials in the Johnson and Nixon administrations did not. They considered the movement a nagging sign of domestic dissatisfaction with the war, a threat to their base of domestic support, a menace to American social stability, and a source of encouragement to the Vietnamese enemy. Officials recognized that protesters were, in fact the cutting edge of domestic anti-war sentiment as a whole. Washington consequently followed the movement’s activities closely, nervously, relentlessly. Officials at the highest levels paid keen attention to them. Presidents Johnson and Nixon both took an active interest in the movement’s doings. The intelligence reports they requested and received on protests exhibited market detail...

The movement played a major role in constraining, de-escalating, and ending the war. The movement inhibited both US air and ground activity in Indochina during the Johnson administration. It fed the mounting unease with the conflict of key administration officials in late 1967 and early 1968. The movement fueled Eugene McCarthy’s presidential bid, which shaped official perceptions in 1968 that the public had turned against the war period it had a significant effect from the influential private Johnson advisors known as the wise men. And it was the most important manifestation of the domestic antiwar mood that forced the Johnson administration to reverse course in Vietnam in 1968.

The peace movement also exerted a substantial impact on the Nixon administration’s policies in Vietnam. It fueled US troop withdrawals from Vietnam. It continued to inhibit both the US air and ground wars in Indochina. It exerted a critical influence on Nixon’s decision not to carry out his 1969 threat to Hanoi of a massive military blow. It shaped his determination to prematurely withdraw U.S. forces from Cambodia in 1970. The movement nourished the deterioration in US troop discipline and morale in Vietnam, which provided additional impetus to US troop withdrawals. It put pressure on the administration to negotiate a settlement of the war. And it gave impetus to congressional legislation that cut off US funds for the war.”

Now apply this insight to the first months of 2026. We already know that the massive nonviolent resistance to ICE in Minnesota, which was buttressed by more than one thousands “ICE Out for Good” protest rallies around the country the weekend of January 24, led to the cashiering of Greg Bovino and the firing of Kristy Noem—though we don’t have the internal records or testimony of administration officials revealing more. Either way, the cause and effect seem plain.

Why hasn’t Trump continued to escalate his war on Iran? Could it be that the reports of eight million people in the streets on March 28 spooked him? Again, we probably won’t know the full answer for years. Trump chickens out for lots of reasons, including stock market crashes and oil price jumps. But considering how much he seems to care about the size of his crowds, the continuing appearance of big crowds opposing him on America’s streets must also be having an impact.

The problem with catastrophism

I felt moved to make this point this week about mass movement confusion after reading Jonathan V. Last’s recent screed in The Bulwark titled “The Enshittified States of America.” Last is the editor of The Bulwark, the breakout publication of the #NeverTrump center-right, and one of its star performers. His work is often smart, even trenchant. On the Bulwark’s many podcasts, he is often one of its more acid commentators. With this piece, though, he was channeling the kind of cynicism that grows when you feel like nothing is changing despite your most passionate, best efforts.

Using tech writer Cory Doctorow’s powerful description of the process by which tech companies rise by being good for their users but then, once they’ve locked them in, “enshittify” by monetizing them in ever more exploitative ways, Last makes a similar claim about America itself:

“Let me tell you a highly stylized version of the American story,” he writes.

“In the beginning, there was a startup called the United States, which we’ll refer to by its stock-ticker symbol, USA. It was young, scrappy, and hungry and needed to figure out how to deliver value to its citizens users.

So it did a bunch of things: It created a central bank. It expanded its territory. It established mass communications (the postal service) and roads and public education. Eventually, it took the painful step of expunging slavery.

This startup grew in size and productivity and market cap. Its user base became enormous. After about 160 years, USA became the biggest company on the planet, at which point it achieved a bunch of important network effects. Because USA benefited from free trade, it developed a military that could enforce a globalized system of free trade. Capital—both human and financial—flowed into USA. People—both users and clients⁴—loved USA. And for another 70 years it delivered good results for both. Its stock couldn’t have been higher.

But then USA went down the road toward enshittification.”

Last goes on to argue that America has been “getting worse, on balance, for coming on a quarter of a century,” specifically listing hyper-partisanship, the Supreme Court’s rightwing turn, Congress giving in to executive power, the rise of the oligarch class, the decline of the rule of law and the hyperscaling of corruption.

Though Last doesn’t quite say so explicitly, I think the recent Court decision in the Callais case undoing the last vestige of sixty years of racial progress on voting rights is weighing heavily here. As he writes about how our “enshittified” system’s current failures:

Everyone knows that gerrymandering is a net negative. There are good (though not perfect) solutions to prevent it. But we’re actually moving backwards on gerrymandering because one party unilaterally disarmed, the Supreme Court has become a partisan entity, and the other party has become anti-democratic. So we know how to fix gerrymandering, most people want to fix gerrymandering, but not only can we not fix it, but it’s getting worse.

This is the kind of “doom and gloom” punditry that I tried to call out here a few weeks ago. Its only effect can be to increase despair and withdrawal, or a tilt towards more radical thinking and tactics. And Last is wrong in particular about solving the gerrymandering problem—we can eliminate it completely by adopting a different paradigm built around proportional representation and fusion voting, and that approach will appeal just as much to Republicans about to be shut out of seats in blue states as it appeals to Democrats worrying about protecting minority representation.

However, it’s harder to offer people realistic hope than it is to sell them unbridled cynicism. There is a path to PR and fusion that is at least as doable as the path to restoring the old status quo of the Voting Rights Act, and it doesn’t require packing the Supreme Court. But if we’re not careful, justified outrage about the ways MAGA Republicans are currently breaking the norms of American politics will have the effect of disabusing people of the value of any path to systemic change.

I asked Claude to read and summarize the hundreds of comments people posted on Last’s essay. Most readers agreed with him. While a few commenters got a lot of support for offering silver linings (Libraries in America are great! Costco is a shining example of “what capitalism could be”!), the overall tone was agreement with his premise. Comments using doom/collapse/hopeless/over/fucked language outnumbered comments using hope/optimism language by roughly 2.5 to 1 (90 vs. 36), and by reactions the gap is wider — about 4.5 to 1 (384 vs. 84). Last replied in-thread with “Hope? lol. Wrong newsletter,” and that captures the room.

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Beware the lure of the dark side

When you think what you’re doing isn’t working, either you give up, or you start pondering more radical ideas. This, for example, is the path writer Chris Armitage—best known for calling for “soft secession”—is taking his readers on. While Armitage still argues that conventional forms of civic political pressure affect the decisions of elected representatives, at a more systemic level he is urging that Blue states stop cooperating with the federal government and adopt what he “oppositional federalism” and “constitutional non-compliance.”

Oppositional federalism means the state using its “sovereign authority” to go on offense against federal officers who break state law, Armitage suggests. (Notice how this can work both ways, though—as segregationist governors once argued.) And constitutional non-compliance means states nullifying federal law within their borders and stopping federal action on state soil, though Armitage goes further, writing: “Think of this tier as, ‘there are literal concentration camps, whether it’s me, or me and my friends, or the mayor ordering the city police, or the governor activating the national guard, we are using every power we have to stop horrific things from happening’.”

We don’t have to go far back in American history to remember where this kind of thinking leads. Whether it was the Bundy ranch standoff in 2014, where Cliven Bundy, a rancher inspired by the so-called “sovereign citizen” movement refused to accept federal jurisdiction over his grazing privileges, or the Weather Underground, which led a bombing campaign targeting government buildings in the early 1970s aiming to overthrow the US “oppressor nation,” small groups of radicalized citizens have turned to violence against what they’ve believed to be illegitimate authorities. And instead of winning, they mainly succeeded in driving support toward the institutions they opposed.

Let’s hope that come this fall, no one repeats this pattern. But for that we need to sustain realistic hope, when nihilistic despair beckons.

End Times

As they say, shift happens.

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I’ve known and been friends with Chris since 2005, when we invited him to speak at Personal Democracy Forum. Six years earlier, in 1999, he had founded Afro-Netizen.com, one of the first hubs for African-Americans online. It started as an e-newsletter that grew from 100 to 10,000 subscribers in 18 months. By late 2003, Chris had entered the blogosphere and less than a year later, he became one of the 37 “credentialed” bloggers at the Democratic Convention — the only one of whom whose readership was majority people of color.

I don’t usually endorse candidates (most of the time politicians will break your heart) but I’m making an exception for Chris both out of friendship and because I think he’s the real deal. So along with some other friends of his from his past lives in the netroots world (and before that, improv comedy!), we’re throwing him an online fundraiser this Saturday from 2-3pm. RSVP here. (details below)

Here is his keynote from PDF 2017.

There’s a lot of wisdom shared in that talk about communing with one’s ancestors and hearing the call to join the fight for freedom, but there’s one line I want to lift up because it shows just how much Chris knew before many of us. In 2005, when he was on a panel at PDF, he noted how much the other speakers, some of whom had just seen their candidate John Kerry defeated, were claiming that “technology was the great equalizer.” Chris said, “I was pushing back as much as a could from the margins saying, no, ‘Justice is the great equalizer.’ The tools are only as good as the people who own those tools.”

Chris has served in the Pennsylvania state assembly with distinction since 2017, where he’s been a leader on climate, fighting corruption and taking on corporate power. As the local state assemblyman, he has very strong roots across much of the 3rd congressional district where he is vying for an open seat. With the primary coming up on May 19, he is currently tied for first, but there’s something like $2.5 million in outside money with AIPAC fingerprints flooding in to back his rivals. His is a classic grassroots campaign versus the machine.

So, this Saturday at 2pm, friends of Chris from across different parts of his life, netroots and comedy (yes, he did improv!), are coming together to help raise some last-minute money to help him over the line. They include:

• Greg Pak: Improv alum, Purple Crayon alum, and the comic book genius behind Planet Hulk will draw Chris as a superhero LIVE during the event.

• Phil LaMarr: The voice of Green Lantern, Static Shock, and Samurai Jack. MadTV legend. Pulp Fiction. He knows Chris from improv work, and he’s showing up for him.

• Not a Purple Crayon alum, but very funny, Kate Willett (Netflix, Colbert).

• Zephyr Teachout, Howard Dean’s national online organizer, 2014 NY gubernatorial candidate against Andrew Cuomo, and Fordham law professor.

• Andrew Boyd, co-founder Billionaires for Bush, Trillionaires for Trump and author of numerous books including Beautiful Trouble and I Want a Better Catastrophe.

• Deanna Zandt, author of Share This! and netroots website whisperer.

• Progressive powerhouse Mike Lux.

Again, the primary is May 19. Your help right now makes a real difference, and it will be an incredibly fun zoom event.

RSVP & chip in here: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/purplecrayon4rabb

See you Saturday!

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Last Wednesday, the Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana v Callais that the 1965 Voting Rights Act was effectively no longer the law of the land. From this point going forward, according to the court’s 6-3 right-wing majority, states may legally draw the lines for representative districts in ways that dilute the political power of minority voters if there is no evidence that they are doing so explicitly to discriminate based on race or ethnicity. Doing so in the name of partisan advantage, it said, was totally fine, as long as everyone has an equal right to vote.

For anyone who has been paying attention to this Supreme Court and its prior rulings on voting rights, the Callais decision was a foregone conclusion--the only question was whether the Court would throw out the whole Act or just leave it hanging by the narrowest of threads. Democrats, civil rights organizations and their allies have had plenty of time to prepare for it. Which is why the response from so many of them is a bit troubling. Call it a crisis of political imagination.

“Vote harder” is not a useful response, yet it is the one urged the most, though the prospect of winning a filibuster-proof majority of the Senate along with the House and the White House is a distant dream. Nor can Democrats somehow win majority control in the states now rushing to tilt elections further away from them. “Sue harder,” isn’t that much better, though lawyers may be able to stave off some state level changes for a little while by doing so.

“Counter-gerrymander harder“ to match all the seats Republicans are now going to gerrymander away is the only obvious move in the short run, but it not sufficient. There’s also a practical limit to how far Democrats can go to match Republicans with this tactic, because if they gerrymander the states they control to the absolute extreme, districts that currently elect minority Democratic representatives will also disappear. One suggested map that could turn all 52 of California’s districts blue would eliminate seven Hispanic majority seats along the way.

One group, United for Democracy, had an astonishing response to the Callais decision, pushing out an online petition titled “It’s time to take our power back.” How? By demanding “a plan” from Congress. I kid you not. It even made the top of Jess Craven’s “Orgs to support in light of Callais ruling” list.

Norman Eisen, one of the deans of the pro-democracy advocacy school, tapped three civil rights leaders from the Southern Poverty Law Center, Fair Fight, and LULAC for their thoughts and then offered “15 Ways to Fight Callais” in a post for The Contrarian, where he’s the publisher. If I may summarize them, they come down to:

• Build a bigger coalition for multiracial democracy;

• Find fresh ways to connect with not just current voters but also nonvoters;

• Protect the principle of one-person/one vote;

• Talk candidly about racism;

• Make it more painful for the GOP to redistrict now by making noise in the frontline states;

• Force votes on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act (even though they won’t make it into law as long as the filibuster stands);

• Pass state voting rights laws (even though this won’t affect federal elections or red states);

• Litigate harder;

• Coalition-build harder; and

• Get more people to vote in November (aka “vote harder”).

Oh, they also suggested we invoke the glories of the past, which for anyone steeped in the history of the civil rights movement are indeed inspiring, but which are as far away in time from today as the invention of the airplane was to someone living in 1965.

All this in service of maybe winning enough elections (Congress and then the White House) with a big enough majority to push through a renewed Voting Rights Act (which is embodied in the legislation cited above) plus an expanded Supreme Court packed with more liberal justices.

None of these esteemed advocates explained how they’d keep all of this in place in 2030, when there would be a likely GOP backlash in the midterms followed by yet more losses by blue states as population shifts move seats toward more red states. Beyond vote harder, again!

Time for a fresh approach

Like I said, we’re dealing with a crisis of political imagination. Though here and there, there are signs that some are inching towards a different paradigm that would free us from the gerrymandering wars and make good on the promise of fair representation for all. Thursday night, speaking in the lead slot on a rapid response mass call organized by No Kings, Janae Nelson of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who argued Callais before the Court, said that perhaps it was time to explore “alternative voting systems” like cumulative voting and proportional representation. She didn’t put any emphasis on those ideas, though.

So far, only one Member of Congress, Rep. Jamie Raskin, has shown that he’s thinking afresh about the problem. In his statement denouncing Callais as a “catastrophe for American democracy,” he declared: “I call for congressional establishment nationwide of nonpartisan independent redistricting commissions to permanently take map-drawing out of politicians’ hands, and for Congress to authorize multi-member congressional districts with proportional representation systems to prevent partisan shut-outs and drown-outs across the country. Congress must act, right now, to pull the country out of the abyss of constitutional double standards and partisan authoritarianism.”

Understand what Raskin is suggesting here: with multi-member districts, gerrymandering goes away as a problem, since each district elects members in proportion to their vote. According to my friend Lee Drutman, another important proponent of PR, “The larger the district, the more proportional the outcome. At three members you get modest proportionality. At five you get solid proportionality. States with at least five seats account for 89% of the House. States with at least three account for 96%.”

As Lee notes, shifting to proportional representation also has the merit of defusing the two-party zero-sum warfare that is now threatening to take us all into a black hole of “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time,” as Rep. Hakeem Jeffries has been saying. Since PR only works for multi-member districts, we would need a different mechanism for insuring minority interests get a seat at the table for single-member offices like Senator and Governor, and the best answer is to bring back fusion voting, which gave smaller parties a way to constructively participate in politics throughout the 1800s in America. Protect Democracy, the anti-authoritarian group that has led much of the legal and intellectual work behind the pro-democracy movement, has argued that if we want to ultimately get to proportional representation in American elections, reviving fusion voting – which would foster stronger minor parties than the fringe ones we have today – would build the political demand for PR most effectively.

So as we stand in the wreckage of the Voting Rights Act, we face a choice. Do more of the same in the hopes that banging our heads against the wall will yield a different result? Or try a new path to democracy instead?

—See also: Dan Cantor, “After the Voting Rights Act,” Center for Ballot Freedom, April 29, 2026, Michael Latner, Guy-Uriel E. Charles and Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, “The best response to the Supreme Court’s Callais ruling: proportional representation,” MSNOW, May 2, 2026, and David Callahan, “Toplines,” InsidePhilanthropy.com, May 2, 2026.

MayDay Post-Mortem

According to an email sent by May Day Strong late last Friday night, “millions of people took action in over 5,000 events across the country” on May 1. This is almost certainly an exaggeration.

Yes, there was some disruption of business as usual. Young activists with the Sunrise Movement held sit-ins in hotel lobbies where ICE agents were known to be staying, while others blocked roads near offices of major carbon polluters, interfered with access to the Oakland and San Francisco airports, got arrested chaining themselves to the entrances to the NY Stock Exchange, marched near Amazon warehouses, and tied local strikes and labor actions in places like New Orleans, Raleigh, Minneapolis, and Chicago to the larger national push.

But there is no way that millions took action, because if they did, we’d have pictures of big rallies in major cities showing such numbers. According to the Union of Social Service Workers, more than 10,000 people hit the streets in Raleigh. Thousands, but not tens of thousands, rallied at New York City’s Union Square where they heard speakers like Mayor Zohran Mamdani express their support for labor organizing. The same was true in places like Los Angeles and Washington, DC. This photo-montage of rallies in six major cities made by Indivisible is underwhelming.

Interest in MayDay was also a fraction of the attention seen a month earlier for No Kings, judging by this chart of Google search trends.

It’s also worth noting that of people who searched for MayDay, the second most likely follow-up after “Mayday parade” was “What is mayday,” a sign that most Americans have little fluency in the symbols of the old Left.

Dana Fisher, a professor at American University, worked with MayDay Strong to survey event hosts and participants, tapping the people who had signed up via Mobilize.us, and found that of all the day’s calls-to-action, “no shopping” was by far the one that survey respondents were most likely to say they were doing (see her chart below). If indeed people didn’t shop last Friday, we’ve seen no evidence that it had any impact on retailers.

Fisher also found that “Like participation in the big days of action against the Trump Administration and its policies (including the three No Kings Days), participants in May Day were majority female (76%), predominantly White (94%), older (the mean age of participants was 68), had voted for the democratic candidate in the previous presidential election (97%), and were highly educated (78% of participants reported having a university degree or more).” So, at least for the people who brought themselves to a MayDay action via MayDayStrong’s website and distributed organizing platform, this was not a rising of the working class.

As a “structure test” that the No Kings coalition endorsed as the first major call to action after “eight million” marched on March 28, what did MayDay Strong demonstrate? I think it showed that the movement against authoritarianism and oligarchy is a mile-wide and only a few inches deep in most of America. It also showed the limits of what unpaid volunteers can do compared to what unions with staff can do. How is that going to be addressed? No one is saying. There’s a “what’s next” zoom meeting tonight, but if it’s anything like all the other mass zoom meetings that organizers have led, it will focus on the lowest-common-denominator: keeping morale up with rabble-rousing speeches about all the things that outrage folks with few details about anything else.

I get that movement organizers want to play up the aspects of MayDay that were more courageous and disruptive and want to skate past the very modest numbers of physical participants. In an age where everything is spin, go ahead and claim big numbers. But count me among the people who find this whole approach deeply confusing. Leaders of the pro-democracy side stress that they want accountable government, but when it comes to how they make decisions, there isn’t even transparency, let alone accountability.

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Duly Noted

—Mark Engler and Matthew Miles Goodrich think that Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new “Organize NYC” initiative, the first major project to come out of the city’s new Office of Mass Engagement, is a big deal. Eric Blanc, who is closer to the NYC-DSA world, thinks it’s not enough. My two cents: Given all the challenges Mamdani is facing moving his agenda forward, he’s doing well so far. And community organizing is an ongoing process.

—If you’re working at the intersection of local community civic renewal and technology, then the Trust for Civic Life’s new report “Online for Offline” is a must-read. Connector readers already know this, but it’s great to see research reaffirm this core truth: “There is no silver bullet in digital form. Generative AI, the latest public good platform, and niche apps all risk irrelevance without the right community conditions in place…. The same principles that make community-led organizing work apply directly to how we should think about funding digital: relationships first, locally-led decisions over outside-imposed tools, and connections built through real participation that online platforms can rarely replicate on their own.” (h/t Matt Stempeck)

—The most interesting revelation in the Wall Street Journal’s May 2 story about changes at ActBlue since Regina Wallace-Jones became its CEO in 2023: “Wallace-Jones also has grown increasingly worried that Democratic presidential candidates will have their own fundraising platforms unaffiliated with ActBlue on their campaign websites, and has focused on acquiring other political tech startups to diversify ActBlue’s offerings, describing her vision as “campaign in a box. The CEO began discussions in mid-2024 to acquire Universe, a campaign-management platform, without bringing in top staffers until months into the discussions. Later, the organization abruptly decided not to move forward with the acquisition. ActBlue ended up having to pay $250,000 to walk away from the deal.”

—Kudos to Debilyn Molineaux, former CEO of the Bridge Alliance and a longtime leader in the cross-partisan field of political bridge building, for sharing how she is rethinking the value of such work. She writes: “I’m proud of this work of organizing, creating and inspiring coalition building. Yet the work itself was insufficient to strengthen democracy in the United States. We’ve seen the continued erosion of respect, trust and healthy engagement across differences. The theory of change that if we just understood each other better, healing would happen organically has been debunked. Thoroughly…. What we missed were the effects of toxic polarization that dialogue alone cannot fix. A workshop is not enough time to “correct” our misperceptions about others when we return to our in-group and social media feeds…. the heat we are feeling is not a glitch in the system; it is what mobilization for structural change looks like. Treating that heat as the problem—rather than the conditions that produced it—mistakes a symptom for a cause. Bridging often seeks to smooth over that conflict instead of addressing it.”

One Long Read

--Give yourself some time to read my friend Panthea Lee’s personal essay about her experience doing the nine-day, 300 kilometer Baishatun Mazu pilgrimage across Taiwan. At a time when we mostly live alone together, Panthea suggests that the pilgrimage showed “human beings living their fullest humanity.” On the pilgrimage, she writes, “eye contact had been constant.” Back in Taipei, “eyes stayed lowered—towards phones, to the ground, to somewhere I couldn’t reach. Nothing passed between us.” And yet another world is possible.

That winter day, perhaps as many as 75,000 people galvanized by ICE’s violent and murderous occupation of the Twin Cities turned out to march in sub-zero temperatures and hundreds of local businesses closed in solidarity. A subsequent poll by Blue Rose Research found that about one in four Minnesota voters either participated directly or had a family member who did.

That kind of participation didn’t simply coalesce out of thin air. Not only did major unions and labor federations, including the executive board of the state AFL-CIO, endorse the strike, a thick array of local community groups and power-building organizations were also integral to the call. Even before January 23, they were doing a lot of solidarity work focused on helping immigrants under siege, including grocery runs, rent support, and school carpools. Before the citywide strike, with far less visibility, many locals also did intensive work to insure that their members wouldn’t be punished for taking a day away from work.

At first glance, it doesn’t look like May Day will be anything like that across America, and this isn’t just because it’s taking place on a Friday rather than Saturday like all the No Kings protests. Most events listed on MayDay Strong’s national map do not describe work stoppages or school walkouts. But more, in fact, is going on than is readily visible. The problem, though, is if you aren’t in a trusted network, like ones set up by local activists, unions or Sunrise Movement chapters, you probably have no idea what’s on tap for this Friday beyond a local rally. As a result, there’s a weird disconnect at work: untold numbers of people who participated in the March 28 No Kings 3 rallies have been asked by movement leaders (like Indivisible) to organize or sign up for local MayDay actions, but on their own most of those folks have struggled to do more than set up rallies or visibility events. The power to stop work or close a school is being built elsewhere, out of sight.

For the last few days, I’ve been exploring the universe of events listed on Mobilize.us, one of the two main platforms* used by the whole Democratic/progressive ecosystem to schedule local activities like rallies, canvases, phone-banks, house-parties and the like. As of yesterday, April 27, there were 1,927 events mentioning MayDay, of which a little more than 1,359 were on May 1. (The rest are either pre-MayDay trainings, sign-making sessions and planning meetings, plus a handful of Saturday follow-on events.)

About 62% of the MayDay events (849) listed on Mobilize are tied to MayDay Strong. Five other organizational hubs account for another 22%, led by the National Education Association (120) which is sponsoring lots of “school walk-ins,” Indivisible locals (116), the AFL-CIO (30), Sunrise Movement (23) and RefuseFascism.org (14). Of all of these, only Sunrise is advertising any of its actions as “walkouts,” like a planned walkout across the New Haven, CT, school district, though NEA chapters are calling for support for school walkouts in a few other places (like Belmont, MA). The AFL-CIO’s listed events are solidarity rallies, not strikes. The words “no work”/”no school”/”no shopping” appear in the majority of Mobilize events listed, but rarely in their titles, mostly in the fine print.

When I asked representatives of MayDay Strong about this, they told me that perhaps only 20%-25% of all the actions that will take place on May 1 will make it onto their national Mobilize map. For example, they expect nearly 170 school actions across Minnesota and two likely strikes along with rolling picket lines, but none of that is findable online. (Some school districts in Minnesota and North Carolina have canceled all classes so teachers can join in.) Many anticipated union strike actions across the country do not appear on the map, though one is already starting in Chicago, where graduate student employees at the University of Illinois went on strike Monday. Overall, MayDay Strong says they are expecting at least 3,000 actions nationwide and expect to surpass the breadth of No Kings 3 by the time Friday rolls around.

Chicago, in fact, is one of the epicenters of labor militancy behind the MayDay Strong coalition, where the Chicago Teachers Union has been a key driver (and where May Day originated, in 1886). The union won the right to make May Day “a day of civic action” in the contract it ratified last year, and it has been quite assertive about that intention as the date has approached, coordinating with city agencies, parks, libraries and public school authorities to plan for the day. On April 9, the Chicago Board of Education voted to authorize making May 1 a professional development day to maximize district participation, though there’s still some confusion about whether the district superintendent has endorsed that plan. As of now, there is a full slate of activities planned, including neighborhood rallies, protests at Amazon, Target and an ICE detention center, high school hosted block parties and then a mass rally and march midday through downtown.

Many of those events are listed on Mobilize, though as a union with its own member infrastructure CTU doesn’t need a platform like Mobilize to turn out people. The same will likely be the case with other Rustbelt and Northeast cities that remain centers of union activity. (*Also, many unions use the AFL-CIO-backed platform ActionNetwork for their digital organizing; ActionNetwork events are not visible to the general public.)

In its online participation guide for May Day, Indivisible notes that “May Day offers us an opportunity to test our movement’s ability to do nonviolent, economic disruption. We need to gauge our strength, identify what power we still need to build, and implement a collective plan to get there. We can’t wait to figure this out after Trump has stolen an election–that work must happen now, before it’s too late.” It exhorts readers to do hard things like stay out of work or school but offers little real help in figuring out how to make that happen at any meaningful scale.

So, as a structure test, May Day is likely going to show something we should already know. The places where labor and community organizing are already thick are stepping up with meaningful actions affecting workplaces and schools, and in a handful of other places where the local conditions are also good, walkouts are going to happen. But the base of activism conjured up by online distributed organizing for #NoKings isn’t anywhere up to speed on how to get people to do that kind of work, and without a much bigger investment in local training and coaching, it has a long way to go.

California Scheming

As a New Yorker, I’m just an interloper when it comes to knowing much about the politics of the Golden State, so I’m not about to weigh in on who the many Connector readers who live there should support as they choose between candidates for Governor. That said, I do want to inject one new question into the discourse: Could someone please ask San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, the Democrat who is apparently the favorite candidate of Silicon Valley mega-donors, what exactly he did as CEO of Causes and co-founder of Brigade between 2008 and 2019—the years when surveillance capitalism expanded with few limits? Causes and Brigade are two failed civic tech start-ups that Mahan touts in his official campaign bio, claiming that Causes grew to 190 million users and helped individuals fundraise over $50 million for US nonprofits, and boasting that Brigade “built the world’s first voter network: a nonpartisan platform for voters to discuss issues, advocate to their elected officials, and vote for candidates who reflect their values.”

These claims are laughable to anyone who has followed this field (and indeed, back in 2014, when Brigade launched, I predicted on-the-record to the San Francisco Chronicle that it would fail like all previous attempts to build a online network for generic civic engagement). But that’s not all—he even asserts that “Brigade ultimately reached millions of voters and its innovative engagement solutions and early success led it to be acquired in 2019 by Pinterest and Countable, respectively.” Actually, it wasn’t any “early success” that led to those acquisitions; it was a fire sale forced by Brigade’s evident failure and its main funders’ unwillingness to keep propping it up. Back then Mahan didn’t try to spin Brigade’s failure as an “early success,” telling TechCrunch that the deal with Pinterest was an “acquhire” aimed at taking care of as many people on Brigade’s team as possible before it shut down. There were rumors that Brigade burned through as much as $55 million before folding — an amount that could have done a lot to support civic tech nonprofits doing valuable democracy work.

Given that Mahan is running to oversee a state government with a $321.1 billion operating budget, the eleven years he spent in the private sector building these two companies, more than half of which he spent at their head, far outweigh the three-and-a-half years he has served San Jose as mayor. But as best as I can tell, his time running these two civic tech start-ups has received almost no attention from the press. That may be because until the race was shaken up by frontrunner Eric Swalwell’s sudden implosion over credible allegations of sexual abuse, Mahan was not getting much attention in the first place and was languishing in the low single digits in polls. That may change now, and while he has far less money than billionaire Tom Steyer is spending on his own candidacy, Mahan has raised $13.4 million since joining the race in January and has many deep-pocketed backers who could give him a lot more if his campaign really takes off. (Also, Code for America founder Jen Pahlka has been saying nice things about Mahan on her Substack, so consider her point of view as well.)

There are many questions one could ask about Causes and Brigade, ranging from deep ones like the degree to which they depended on harvesting user data to make money, to more ephemeral ones like why in naming Brigade Mahan and his cofounders took no note of the existing civic tech Brigades being run by nearby nonprofit Code for America. But the question a good reporter should really ask would be this: As a for-profit in the civic arena, you pitched Brigade as a social network that would help connect people to the issues they cared about, but since you needed to make money from paying clients, how exactly did you monetize user data? In particular, why did your team brag about using Causes to help Fortune 500 companies? Brigade was very circumspect about its model, which appeared to invite users to state their positions on a range of issues up for debate and then served them information about groups involved with those issues. Behind the scenes, they were rumored to be selling that hyper-targetable information to others.

A clue: It was never clear why Brigade president James Windon said that at Causes he told Fortune 500 clients that “if you believed in minimum wage reform, we could put you in touch with Macy’s who passed minimum wage reform.” (At the time in question, Macy’s was trying to stop the popular Fight for $15 campaign, so whatever reform the retailer might have been for it wasn’t exactly very civic-minded.) We covered this story at techPresident back in 2014, and at the time the folks at Brigade insisted this was just a hypothetical example of what they could do. Well, if there’s nothing to hide, Mahan should have no problem sharing the whole story of what Causes and Brigade actually did.

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Last But Not Least

A very happy 10^th birthday to the Civic Tech Field Guide, a labor of love and global community that my friend Matt Stempeck has sustained and grown with a host of volunteer helpers. Ten years ago, he, Erin Simpson and I sat in a workroom at Civic Hall in Manhattan and put hundreds of post-its on a wall, beginning the bottom-up mapping of a field that we knew had only a rough working definition and fuzzy boundaries. Our idea was to start grouping projects by function and see where that took us, rather than begin with a top-down definition. We quickly saw that the approach worked to help lots of people find their way in and around the ecosystem. So, we built a Wordpress site and adopted one rule: the project had to be “too cheap too fail.” That’s because we had seen many fancier guides launched by a variety of well-meaning groups fall by the wayside and stop getting updated because they were too expensive to maintain!

When we launched the guide, we had about 4,000 projects listed and categorized; now there are more than 10,000. For anyone who is building, maintaining or even just dreaming about their own civic tech project, the guide is your essential entry point. And it doesn’t just list projects—some of its most popular sections list jobs, funding opportunities, conferences and reports that are also building the field. Check it out at civictech.guide, and while you’re at it, buy Matt a cupcake to express your thanks!

End Times

Only in New York!

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How did insurgent candidate Péter Magyar come from nowhere to defeat Hungarian strongman Victor Orbán, winning 53% of the vote and a supermajority in the country’s parliament in last week’s national elections? This despite Orbán having rewritten Hungary’s constitution to favor his ruling Fidesz party, stacked the courts, tilted the electoral system heavily in his favor, taken over nearly all the media, and shut down or bought off most other sources of opposition? What lessons can the pro-democracy movement here in the United States learn from his win?

While we can draw inspiration from Magyar’s defeat of Orbán, we should also recognize the limits of comparing Hungary’s experience to America’s. It’s a small, landlocked country of a bit less than 10 million people. After World War II, it was a repressed but also rebellious member of the Eastern Bloc until the revolutions of 1989. Orbán’s loss came after sixteen years of increasingly corrupt one-party rule and amidst a serious economic downturn. And the ins-and-outs of the election campaign were unique to Hungary and can’t be transposed elsewhere. These included a honey trap of Magyar by Orbán’s intelligence services, a potential fake assassination of Orbán by Russian allies hoping to boost his chances, dirty tricks meant to fool voters into thinking Ukraine was plotting against Orbán, allegations of vote-buying in Orbán strongholds, and lots of exposes of regime corruption by independent media. So take what follows with a big grain of salt.

At the same time, I think there are enough parallels between what we’re facing here and what Hungarians have been dealing with for us to ponder further. There’s been a rapid consolidation of authoritarian power here (albeit with some rising pushback); very troubling trends in both legacy and digital media; and a hyper-polarized electorate that has made it hard for opposition forces here to pry Trump fans away from him. Yes, Trump’s approval ratings have dropped significantly, but the Democratic Party is also quite unpopular – which doesn’t bode well for getting out of the doom loop we’re stuck in. A blue wave in 2026 that gives Democrats control of the House and maybe the Senate could also tee up a very unhappy electorate in 2028, or 2030, when the stakes will be even higher (as my friend Lee Drutman cogently argues). And Magyar’s meteoric rise may offer some clues about how much can change in volatile times.

So, with all that said, here are nine lessons that I’ve gleaned from mulling the news and listening to experts on Hungary.

One: Magyar, who was a top diplomat married to a Fidesz Justice Minister, left the ruling party just two years ago, after its president pardoned a felon who had covered up child abuse at a state-run children’s home. This is when he went public, going after his own side and breaking with his own social cohort, including his then ex-wife. This made his crusade for change all the more authentic. His first, breakout interview with the independent YouTube news site Partizan about this decision garnered more than 2.4 million views. In an instant, he transformed Hungary’s political landscape.

LESSON: Insiders who run on their experience or credentials won’t excite voters; when the status quo is intensely unpopular you want leaders who will genuinely break with the past.

Two: Coming from inside the belly of the ruling party gave Magyar a reach that no other opposition politician before him had. He could appeal to other disillusioned Fidesz voters, who could see in his break permission to make their own. Plus, his new, adopted party, Tisza, didn’t carry the baggage of the other opposition parties, whose leaders and adherents could make such former Orbán supporters feel judged for their past votes for the regime. And by all accounts, Magyar didn’t make his own switch into a big deal that could also have scared off potential supporters. On top of that, he shamelessly appealed to the same patriotic symbols that Orbán had used to consolidate his reign. The flag was up for grabs and he grabbed it.

LESSON: The pro-democracy side must make it easy for former Trump voters to join the opposition and not judge them for past mistakes or incomplete conversions. It also can’t be afraid to speak in patriotic language.

Three: At the same time, Magyar was well positioned to also draw progressive and other anti-Orbán voters who had lost enthusiasm for the old opposition parties after their failure to make headway in Hungary’s 2022 national election. He didn’t promise them all the things they wanted, instead acknowledging that as a conservative himself, some voters didn’t share all his values. But they could still support him because he alone represented change and wanted to restore the rule of law. And while he isn’t about to turn Hungary to the left, he has promised to reorient it back towards the European Union and away from Russia. Plus, his singular focus on corruption and how it has hurt public services suggests he will bring many Orbán cronies to account and try to rebuild the public sector. And parts of his platform sound pretty progressive to me, like a call for wealth tax, home energy modernization, and big subsidies for public health.

LESSON: If we want to really crush Trumpism and MAGA, we may have to lower some of our expectations for what comes next. This is not because goals like universal health care are unrealistic; it’s because aggressive ideological agendas generate strong responses both from supporters and opponents. That said, I have a feeling a lot of hard-core anti-Trumpers would rather win 51-49 than 67-33 in 2028—or maybe they just haven’t thought this whole thing through. Maybe we will feel differently after sixteen years of this shit, the way Hungarians must have felt.

Four: Orbán, who had been quite a wily politician until now, couldn’t run the playbook he had successfully used against all of Hungary’s other opposition parties to stave off Magyar’s rise. In past elections, Orbán always demonized former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány, the one-time leader of the Socialist Party who had the misfortune of being in office for the 2008 global financial crisis and who then pushed harsh austerity measures—leading Orbán’s Fidesz party to take power in 2010. As late as Hungary’s 2022 elections, Orbán relentlessly tied his opponent back to Gyurcsány (who also faced personal corruption allegations). Since Magyar came out of Fidesz itself (and also since Gyurcsány had been recently pushed out of politics by a small party he later joined), Orbán couldn’t play this card. He tried to pin Magyar to other potentially unpopular actors, claiming that Ukraine’s Volodymir Zelensky was planning to invade Hungary, but his inability to find a convincing boogeyman to scare voters about was a big factor in his loss.

LESSON FOR 2028: Don’t let Democrats nominate anyone close to former Presidents Biden or Obama or Clinton—unless they run as truth-tellers exposing their side’s failings too. On the other hand, if Democrats consolidate around a party retread, that may open a bigger lane for a Magyar-style independent running as a pox on both houses.

Five: Simply being the opposite of Orbán was not enough to beat him, as more than a decade of past failures by Hungary’s liberal-left parties showed. As Hungarian political theorist and podcaster Nóra Schultz wrote Saturday in The Guardian, “If Orbán took a stand on something, they took a directly opposing view. They tried to win people over by moral superiority, but with little regard for the viability or popularity, for instance, of opposition demands such as the dismantling of the anti-migration border fence.” By contrast, she argued, Magyar avoided emphasizing the core causes of people who were already anti-Orbán. He, she writes, “was never in the business of convincing those who were already politically active and who voted for the opposition throughout the Orbán era. He campaigned almost exclusively in rural areas and talked about issues relevant to the majority of Hungarian people. This meant a rigorous focus on a narrow list of topics: the cost-of-living crisis, the collapse of state-run services such as education, healthcare and transport, and the enrichment of a few Orbán-friendly families while everyone else experienced a decline in their prospects.”

LESSON: Don’t be distracted by rightwing bait. Or left-wing litmus tests.

Six: Some commentators have suggested that Magyar won by “dodging divisive policy questions and preferring to speak about the most universal issues in the broadest possible terms: rooting out corruption, restoring power to the people,” as Andrew Marantz wrote in The New Yorker. “This was,” Marantz added, “of course, an astute political strategy. It also makes him something of a cipher. He has the square jaw and coiffed blond hair of an action figure.” Magyar means Hungarian, after all, leading Marantz to suggest that the US equivalent would be “a strapping guy named Joe America, running as the nominee of the Freedom and Grilled-Meat Party.”

Well, yes, Magyar is the perfect candidate for the moment, straight from central casting. Robert Redford in The Candidate, if you will. But this leaves out another key differentiator that mattered to Magyar’s victory: how he campaigned. Instead of sitting in a TV studio trying to beat Orbán inside a media system he dominated, Magyar spent the last two years campaigning across Hungary, making as many seven or eight campaign stops a day in hundreds of rural settlements.

This past Monday, I tuned into a webinar organized by D-HUB, an international network of anti-authoritarian activists, whose speakers had been in the thick of the fight, to hear their insights. According to Mate Vargo, the founder and executive director of aHang, a leading civic action platform in Hungary, Magyar and Tisza built a huge grassroots network of some 50,000 volunteers centered on small “islands” of citizen activists rather than large organizations. (In a country Hungary’s size, that’s an Obama- or Mamdani-level of grassroots organizing). To become one of Tisza’s parliamentary candidates, contenders had to prove that they had the phone numbers of at least one thousand local constituents, Vargo also noted.

In the face of a biased media system, Magyar himself used social media astutely, growing his Facebook page to half a million followers in the first three months after joined Tisza and led its 2024 campaign in the European Union elections, and ultimately to a million by this month’s election, according to Anita Seprenyi, a local political strategist who spoke on the D-HUB call. Taking a page from Elizabeth Warren and others, he took hundreds of thousands of selfies with fans while out campaigning. And he livestreamed all his local events on Facebook, sometimes to tens of thousands of watchers, Seprenyi related. Circumventing the country’s existing newspapers, Tisza circulated its own broadsheets, getting them into many hands with a “print it yourself” campaign that encouraged people to give copes to their neighbors.

LESSON: Show up everywhere and build up a hyper-local civic army, and especially not just in blue dots.

Seven: While Magyar ran a professionally organized digital and field campaign, there were two big differences to what he did compared to the system here in the US: microtargeting isn’t allowed in Europe thanks to strong privacy laws. And after 2022, when the EU banned political advertising on the big social media platforms, it became harder for Orbán to spread disinformation there. So, unlike in the US, where billions of dollars go to test and deploy a panoply of finely targeted messages, in Hungary Magyar had to stick with a broadly appealing message.

As a fresh, youthful face, Magyar also ignited hopes among Hungary’s young people, who were frustrated by the country’s stagnation but also cynical about the chances of any of the old opposition parties managing to beat Orbán. There was a TikTok trend of young people lip-syncing along to his speeches, for example, which was by all signs organic – not something you can make happen via a paid influencer program.

Finally, though Magyar was a former Fidesz insider, the people Tisza chose to run for the assembly were almost all newcomers to politics. They had to build up a base from afresh. From some accounts I’ve heard, Magyar was quite critical of the legacy opposition parties and even people who had bravely gotten involved in fighting Orban starting in 2010 were shunted aside by Tisza.

LESSON: Hope someone not cobbled together by and overmanaged by consultants catches fire; don’t settle for fake passion. To attract less likely voters and young people, be demonstrably from outside the whole political establishment.

Eight: Hungary’s electoral system chooses about half the members of the national assembly from single-member districts and the other half from nationwide party lists, producing a flexible multiparty system that made it harder for the several competing parties in the anti-Orbán opposition to unify in prior elections. Two things helped Magyar avoid this problem. First, by launching with his bombshell break from Fidesz in early 2024 and then steering his followers into his new party, Tisza, in time for the upcoming European Parliament elections, he was able to steal oxygen from the legacy parties. Then, when Tisza scored 30% of the vote in those elections in June 2024, it proved that it was not a marginal new player but a real phenomenon. And then, by refusing to cut deals with those older parties, Magyar cemented his standing as an independent force. By the time Hungary’s parliamentary elections rolled around, the legacy parties had decided to either dissolve or stand aside—creating a clear path for the center-right Magyar to tackle the fascist Orban head on.

LESSON: Well, that would be a nice dream, right? Our rigid two-party system makes the possibility of a Magyar-type breakout unlikely. There are too many ambitious Democrats who think 2028 is going to be “their” year to stand aside in the interests of completely clobbering MAGA. Unlike Hungary’s legacy opposition parties, in most if not all the states, the Democratic Party isn’t going to wither away even if a popular independent somehow emerges and captures the public’s attention.

Nine: When it came to election protection, the opposition movement was ready in Hungary. A consortium of independent journalists put out a documentary called The Price of a Vote a few weeks before the election to focus attention on allegations of vote-buying and voter intimidation in rural areas, and they reportedly built a 2,400-person strong observer network in more than 100 locations prepared to document fraud. Tisza and Fidesz both made their own preparations, both for bottom-up reporting and to call foul, and in one case a top Fidesz official warned darkly about the opposition planning to storm the prime minister’s residence if the results were unfavorable to it. But Magyar’s huge win meant that Hungary avoided the kind of post-election chaos that other countries have gone through when a crucial election is hotly contested.

LESSON: A huge opposition turnout is the best guarantee of a democratic resurgence. Magyar’s win was too big to rig against, and Orban conceded quickly. If there’s any single reason to push for a Magyar-style candidate and campaign in 2028 against whomever succeeds Trump, this is the best one.

Further reading:

—Justin Florence at Protect Democracy’s If You Can Keep It Substack explains why it’s so important to prepare for threats to voting in the midterms, in the context of Hungary.

—Daniel Hunter in Waging Nonviolence also sets Magyar’s victory in the context of democracy defense.

—Laszlo Gendler writes in The UnPopulist about how Hungarians drew on their own history of fighting Soviet oppression and identification with Europe to overcome fear of challenging the Orban regime.

—Kim Lane Scheppele’s conversation with Paul Krugman is the single best discussion I’ve seen so far about the many contingencies and curlicues that made Magyar’s run so singularly successful.

—Democracy scholar Rachel Kleinfeld writes that Stacey Abrams has a new plan for unleashing the energy and ability of millions of Americans who want to advocate for democracy. Learn more here.

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End Times

Can RFK Jr. dance like this?

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Stuck With VANxiety

A month ago, Ezra Levin, the co-founder and co-director of Indivisible, told grassroots Indivisible group leaders some important news about the tools they use to organize with. After a careful review of its options, Indivisible was going to be sticking with Bonterra—the foreign conglomerate that runs NGPVAN, EveryAction, Mobilize and ActionKit—for the 2026 cycle. Despite many concerns about these legacy systems, which the entire Democratic and progressive ecosystem has been dependent on for more than a decade, the challenge of transitioning off them to better ones was too costly and time-consuming to consider.

A glance at the latest reports in the Federal Election Commission database shows that Indivisible is not alone. Dozens of House and Senate campaigns and a plethora of blue-leaning PACs and advocacy organizations are cutting regular checks to Bonterra or one of its subsidiaries. And the biggest Democratic committees, the DNC, the DCCC and the DSCC are at the head of the pack, paying NGP VAN more than $500,000 in just the first two months of 2026 (and that’s a partial count since the quarterly reports aren’t complete). Like it or not, we are going to go through another election cycle relying on outdated tech.

This is a crying shame, a collective “own goal” if you will. The case for a new suite of tech tools for engaging with voters has been evident to many Democratic operatives and activists for a very long time, years before I documented how everyone was “Living with VANxiety” in a long report I published in April 2023. Indeed, it was nine years ago this May that a collection of tech upstarts called UnlockTheVan launched an effort to get the Democratic National Committee to open up access to the voter data then managed, with the party’s full agreement, by just one de facto monopoly, NGPVAN. That monopoly was indeed loosened in time for the 2024 cycle, and there are now a bevy of impressive startups whose offerings run circles around Bonterra.

But the overwhelming odds are that the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who are going to do the grunt work of contacting and engaging with voters this cycle, along with the campaign teams that manage them, will be stuck using lousy tools that make them less good at their work and using lists that are missing the correct information (or any information) on millions of likely or registered Democratic voters. To just give a few examples:

• Canvassers that use Open Field instead of Minivan to guide their door-knocking are ten to twenty percent more productive, because the former allows them to work more easily in teams and to add new names to the voter files as they encounter voters.

• Campaigns relying solely on the current Democratic voter file (which is what VAN works with for everything from cutting turf to logging voter contacts) actively miss millions of potential supporters. A 2021 study found that these “politically invisible” voters are far more likely to be Black or Hispanic, younger and less wealthy than the ones in the file.

• VAN and EveryAction, its nonprofit twin, do not make it easy to track and measure the impact of friend-to-friend and online relational outreach, do nothing to capture rich conversational data that volunteers may collect from voters, and reward the tracking of contact attempts rather than the nurturing of relationships over time.

• Problems with high-volume access to VAN during last months of the 2024 election forced Democrats to scramble to keep the system functioning, as the New York Times reported.

All of these are solvable problems--but for the fact that almost no one cares enough to cough up the money to solve them. And we’re not talking about a lot of money—perhaps $10 million, though it is almost clearly too late to change course for 2026.

When you consider how much attention the entire Democratic arena pays to the problem of Republican voter suppression, as well as the new threat of the SAVE Act, which would potentially disenfranchise or at least severely inconvenience millions of currently registered voters, you would think that fixing the Democratic tech gap would rank even higher up on everyone’s priority list. But I suppose it’s much more on brand for Dems and their allied groups to complain about the horrible things Republicans do. And indeed, some of the worst “scam PACs” do great work extracting contributions from gullible seniors and others by bombarding them with sky-is-falling warnings about what the other side is up to.

Still, as Linda Loman says of her husband Willy in the new revival of the ever-current play Death of a Salesman, “Attention must be paid.”

Winning NASCAR in a Crank-Engine Studebaker?

Listen to Julia Barnes, the CEO of The Movement Cooperative, a centralized data infrastructure and technology hub for the movement made up of about one hundred progressive groups that share costs for software tools and data (plus hundreds of smaller groups that benefit from the lowered costs and services it makes available). She told me last week:

“If you care about winning elections and social change, you don’t need to understand tech, you don’t need to understand data, but you do need to understand that we’re racing the tech investment of the Right, essentially trying to win a NASCAR race in a crank engine Studebaker while they’re driving a top-of-the-line stock car built by and cheered on by GOP billionaires. From TMC’s perspective, what’s so frustrating is that we have organizing groups who are ready to adopt new, innovative tech or who are trying to build it with next to no resources. Just this year, if there were a funder willing to part with at least $10 million, we could have organizations - at scale - testing and using new tech, with money dedicated to that tech’s development. And everyone is having a damned hard time finding it.”

Which, to circle back, is why organizations like Indivisible, which support thousands of local groups, have little choice about what tools they can use at scale. And Dem tech - including NGPVAN - is at a comparable disadvantage in speed of innovation, development of new platforms, and technical agility when stacked up to the hundreds of millions of dollars the Right is throwing at their AI-based technology.

This is not for a lack of trying on the part of both independent outfits like The Movement Cooperative or by decision-makers at the Democratic National Committee. Last year, in the wake of Trump’s re-election, they both put out detailed RFPs (requests for proposals) to kickstart the next generation of Democratic tech, with an emphasis on driving authentic engagement. Dozens of companies responded. In October 2025, the DNC announced its support for four new tools: Winnable, an events platform that could replace Bonterra’s Mobilize and which enables volunteers to easily sign up for multiple events at once; Matchbook, a tool/database for tracking support and finding voters and volunteers more easily; OpenField, a canvassing app that enables the easy capture of qualitative data from conversations along with other improvements over VAN; and OutOrganize, which centralizes volunteer outreach information and provides organizers with valuable insights on past interactions to foster more personalized relationships with volunteers.

The DNC is also not being shy about highlighting the new for a whole new organizing playbook, which after all is what tech tools either enable or hinder. While I wouldn’t be surprised, dear reader, if you’ve heard about the controversy over the as-yet-unreleased DNC post-mortem on the 2024 election, or the fact that the DNC recently rejected a resolution condemning AIPAC’s influence on elections, since a lot of people are focused on the Palestine issue, I bet that you didn’t know that two weeks ago, the committee issued a 208-page organizing playbook. Designed for coordinated campaigns and state parties, this playbook explicitly embraces a critique that many of us have been making for a while about fundamental problems with how Democrats connect with voters.

As the playbook’s introduction states, “Over the past decade, the Democratic campaign industry and its funders have become obsessed with massive, shiny output numbers from traditional tactics: Millions of calls made and hundreds of thousands of doors knocked. Yet this fixation with output has created an illusion of progress that fails to answer the questions that determine electoral success: how many voters were meaningfully contacted? What was the impact of those conversations, and what was the follow up? Which voters did we not reach through these traditional tactics and how are we effectively engaging those voters in other ways to ensure they turn out?”

It goes on, offering a glimpse at some of the data that is probably still locked up in that unreleased post-mortem:

“At scale, this organizing model rewards transactional voter contact: call the voter, repeat the script, log a result, and move on. This model provides no incentive for organizers and volunteers to actually build relationships with the voter, follow up, and feel ownership to move them closer towards turnout over the course of the cycle. The problem goes a step further: varying contact rates across different demographics using ‘traditional’ tactics has limited who the campaign can actually reach. In 2024, the Harris campaign contacted 28% of Black women registered to vote over the age of 65; meanwhile, they contacted only 7.5% of Latino men registered under the age of 25.

In this model, the role of an organizer has become significantly more narrow. When success for an organizer is defined by quantity over quality, they spend most of their day tethered to their laptop inside a field office, disconnected from their turf, focused on making hundreds of cold calls rather than showing up and building connections face-to-face with voters.”

Instead of sending canvassers out to identify likely supporters for a candidate and move quickly to a “can we count on your vote” closer, the playbook envision a new conversation model that might go something like this: “Hey there! I’m your neighbor, Brittany. I live/work just around the corner in [COMMUNITY] and I’m out listening to voters today with [CANDIDATE] campaign. How’s your Saturday?”…“I’m out here in the neighborhood today because costs are out of control - it’s really been a struggle for me and some of our other neighbors. How have things been for you and your family lately?”…“I really appreciate you sharing that with me. What things might you like to see a politician do to solve that/these problems?”/ “What makes you hopeful/ doubtful things will get better?”…“It sounds like a lot of politicians haven’t delivered on their promises and I know how frustrating that can be. I’m out knocking doors because l’ve been waiting for a candidate I can count on to actually deliver. I have gone long stretches without any medical insurance and it always left me feeling so vulnerable. I am so filled with hope because [CANDIDATE] has followed through on [X tangible plan] to make life better for people like us.”…“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you sharing your thoughts with me - I know how personal these issues can be. Are you open to voting for someone like [CANDIDATE]?”…“I’m so glad we connected today, it’s been great getting to know you better. We get together every Thursday at [X Office] for dinner - we’d love to have you and your family sometime. Here’s an invite! I’Il swing by again down the road to check in, have a great day!”

If state parties and coordinated campaigns start doing this kind of sustained outreach, well, I’m tempted to say, I’ll eat my hat. But none of this is rocket science, and the fact that the DNC is putting this kind of playbook out can only be seen as encouraging. Imagine neighbors talking to neighbors, engaging in an empathetic conversation centered on listening to their struggles, and then not just seeking a vote but inviting them to dinner as a follow up. Amanda Litman, are you tracking this?

Of course, engineering this shift also requires a change in the infrastructure campaigns use to plan and manage their voter outreach. So it’s quite notable that the DNC’s new organizing playbook makes absolutely no mention of NGPVAN or any of the other Bonterra tools that everyone still relies on. Instead, it lays out lots of reasons why the status quo isn’t working: organizers spend too much time on manual and repetitive data entry and list-pulling rather than relationship-building, the tech they use customizes poorly to state-specific rules about voter registration, they waste too much time on unanswered phone-calls and door-knocks, campaign managers ignore feedback collected by volunteers, and existing tech requires multiple tools for different types of outreach. All of these, the DNC says, are solved by Winnable, OpenField, Matchbook and OutOrganize, though each of these platforms need more investment to improve further.

But that money is nowhere in sight.

As Julia Barnes told me, the problem is bigger than just an infusion of $10 million that would help these new platforms grow to the scale needed. “The other reason the left’s tech stagnation is so immovable is that we don’t have the resources to underwrite the change management required for these groups to try something else,” she said.

“Huge organizing groups that provide hundreds of millions of successful voter contacts or registrations are starving for resources. [Emphasis added.] It makes it even harder to pay inflated prices for tech and tools, to try new things, and to build new tactics that work on tech that will grow with them. It’s April of 2026. We can’t just take our midterm success for granted, and we certainly cannot pretend that winning the midterms is enough to turn the tide against the cultural rejection of our values and our candidates that we’ve experienced. Tech is tied to every single piece of work we do in political organizing. If the tech is struggling, we will not win. If the tech doesn’t evolve, we’ll never have long-term wins again. The Right will run away with the tech and data game.”

If you’re thinking, why worry – Democrats are going to have another Blue Wave in 2026 and these tech problems can be sorted out in 2027 – consider this argument about the realities of software development and deployment, which was made to me by a source in the thick of trying to fix this mess. Ideally, to get through the change management needed so that Democrats are all comfortable with these next-generation platforms by the beginning of the presidential primaries in early 2028, these new tools would be getting a major workout now, and some forward-leaning organizations would be getting the support they need to migrate off their existing constituent-relationship management systems to these new ones. Fixing bugs, adding improvements and learning how to manage usage at national scales (when several hundred thousand people might be simultaneously using these systems) takes time. That’s what $10 million could pay for now. Without it, none of these new tools are going to be ready to replace the Bonterra suite in 2027—they won’t be anywhere close to ready for prime time. But that’s where we are, in a field where if you just tread water, you fall behind.

Contact The Movement Cooperative here if you want to help do something about this challenge.

Related:

—Last week, Higher Ground Labs announced its latest funding round, seeking proposals for systems, platforms and tools that aim to support sustained engagement, surface authentic insights for “community-led messaging,” reach beyond traditional channels or use LLMs and agentic AI to make campaign systems more efficient. They are also looking to invest in tools that improve the relationship between institutions and the public, help people navigate how government works, or that strengthen connection, reduce polarization and support sustained community-building over time.

Notably, HGL, which has marshaled more than $50 million into several waves of tech-enabled start-ups since its founding in 2017, prefaces its call by stating that “The 2024 election exposed a hard truth: more spending and more outreach no longer guarantee meaningful impact. Rather than a failure of effort, the cycle suggested a failure of fit between existing infrastructure and the realities of today’s media and technology landscape: fragmented attention across hard-to-reach channels, messaging disconnected from community sentiment, and slow or incomplete feedback on what actually shifts voters. That gap is not just tactical, but structural. The progressive ecosystem needs new ways to adapt in real time, operate with better intelligence, and build capacity that persists beyond election cycles.”

—For more on how NGPVAN tools hinder organizing, read this recent piece by Susan Labandibar in The Grassroots Connector.

—And to learn more about many alternative options available, check out Higher Ground Labs’ Progressive CRM Guide.

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Also Noted

—In the parallel universe that is focused on improving how government works using tech and design thinking, a fascinating debate is playing out over how much to push for the use of AI. Here’s Erie Meyer, a co-founder of the U.S. Digital Service, warning in FedScoop that “well-meaning civic tech reformers are getting quietly pushed by philanthropic funding with strings attached toward a single answer regardless of the question: AI.” Here’s Code for America founder Jen Pahlka responding that the question isn’t whether to use AI, but whether “we let it entrench the status quo or use it to finally put government in control of its own destiny.” And here’s Mikey Dickerson, who helped rescue Healthcare.gov and then becaome the first administrator of the USDS, standing in the middle parsing their arguments. And also sharing that he’s “running a project called Tech Viaduct, where we are trying to prepare for a bolder, more muscular progressive-ish presidency, should we ever get that chance.” Stay tuned!

—The anti-Trump group 50501 used Pol.is to crowdsource ideas on how to respond to President Trump’s threats to destroy Iran’s civilization. More than 900 people participated casting nearly 21,500 votes. No breakthroughs were made, but it’s still cool to see a big protest group trying new tools for mass participation.

End Times

More political ads like this one, please!

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It was another typical day across the most popular pro-democracy Substacks: gloom, doom, outrage, and restating the obvious, with a smattering of fresh reporting of more bad news. Nothing about how we are organizing to resist all this madness. Just a week earlier, millions of Americans had just marched in opposition, but you wouldn’t know it from these sites.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a post here titled “The Bad News Echo-Chamber of Pro-Democracy Substack.” It got a decent amount of attention, including a generous endorsement from Robert Hubbell, whose Today’s Edition newsletter (55,000+) I had noted was one of the leading sites offering readers lots of hope and practical ways to resist. Clearly, I struck a chord, but to be honest, I wasn’t very happy with that post. I centered a small group of authors who I happen to regularly follow, rather than scan the whole ecosystem. And I chose a metric—co-appearances on Substack Live—that was bound to overstate the clubbiness of this group.

So, with the help of Claude Cowork AI, I did a much deeper dive. I started with a seed list of about 140 sites helpfully provided by Deepak Puri of DemocracyLabs. Then I culled out sites that weren’t text-focused (some just share cartoons or videos) or appeared to be dormant. I also took out sites that operate and look like traditional news magazines, not because they don’t do good work, but because I wanted to zero in on the Substack ecosystem and a key sign of attention-sharing that nearly everyone on that platform uses and benefits from: recommendations. After a first pass collecting recommendation data from those initial sites using Substack’s API, I built out a larger list of 236 in all and asked Claude to map and cluster them based on who recommends who from within that defined set.

The result is now a live, interactive network map located at ProDemStack.netlify.app.

The map does a few additional things:

-It sorts sites by tone into those that focus on alarming readers, those that are neutral, and those that focus on action. Visually, those on the red/orange/yellow spectrum are more alarmist while those on the green/blue spectrum are more activist.[1]

-It clusters sites that recommend each other near each other.

-It shows sites’ subscription data (where available) or follower data (as a fallback) and visualizes that by the size of each site’s bubble on the map. The median number of subscribers across the roughly two hundred that make this data public is 37,000.

-It also offers an alternate view of the network sizing sites by how many other sites recommend them.

-It shows more specific data for each site, which you can find by searching by its name or clicking on a particular node.

This is a snapshot of an ecosystem as it has evolved to the current moment in time. It no doubt contains errors of omission and commission, which I’ll gladly try to correct as I hear about them. It’s using a blunt signal--who recommends whom—which can mean different things to different users. A newsletter might recommend another publication for many reasons—ideological alignment, personal friendship, audience overlap—but the map treats all recommendations as equivalent. Recommendations also change. Audience counts are approximate and may lag actuals. And tone scores are inherently subjective.

What Does All This Show?

The pro-democracy media network on Substack is dominated by alarmism. You can see this if you compare the size and density of the alarm group to the action group. Fifty-seven percent of the sites mapped scored in the 1-4 range as somewhat to highly alarmist. Just thirty percent scored in the 6-9 range as somewhat to highly action-oriented. You might argue that this is appropriate to the times, after all, the world is on fire and arsonists are in charge. But there’s no evidence that feeding people a steady diet of fear, loathing, outrage and terror convinces them to get more engaged in defending what’s important and fighting back. Rather, the pro-democracy ecosystem on Substack becomes another mirror of the algorithm-driven worlds of social media, which drives attention towards emotional spectacles and heightened fear of people not from our in-group.

The data also shows that the way sites share attention across the whole network tilts toward alarm over action. Action-oriented sites make nearly twice as many recommendations of alarm-oriented sites, despite being a much smaller group overall. Action-oriented sites also tend to be more generous with their recommendations, while many alarm-oriented sites are stingier. Sites with bigger followings also tend to be less willing to recommend others, reinforcing the “winners take all” dynamic I noted two weeks ago.

As I argued in my earlier post, I believe this tilt isn’t helpful. It builds and reinforces a public that is dumbed and/or beaten down by an overwhelming flow of bad news, rather than one that is informed and/or uplifted by all the concrete actions people are taking to push back and save our democracy. It also tends to reinforce a star-system centered on a chattering class of cable-news-famous talking heads rather than organizing leaders. And it incentivizes behavior that gets clicks and sells books rather than behavior that moves resources to power-building. At its worst, it becomes a self-licking ice-cream cone, the more a small group of skilled doom-talkers feature each other on their daily shows while ignoring the compelling work of lesser-known but incredibly valuable community leaders.

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But Wait, There’s More

After doing this analysis, I asked Claude to help me figure out one more thing: the main topics that top alarm sites focus on compared to top action sites. I did this partially to see if the coding decisions that I had made about editorial tone would be corroborated by the words that got the most usage in site headlines. So Claude scraped about 1200 headlines from the top 25 sites in each category, working backwards from now, looking for the 50 most recent titles per site (max). Then it produced the following word-cloud graphic. Stopwords like “and” and “the” were excluded as well as dates and brand names. And since Trump landed at the center of both sites by frequency alone, we removed him from both clouds to make other topics more visible.

As you can see, there are important overlaps and differences. The Iran War and ICE are both prominent, but alarm sites are more focused on the former while action sites are paying greater attention to ICE. This may be in part because there’s more we can do about ICE right now. Alarm sites pay more attention to the more outrageous members of the Trump regime, and they use scary words like fascism, treason, death, treason, illegal and chaos more often. Action sites appear more attentive to the need to engage fellow Americas, using words like conversation, media, rights, voting, school and elections more often. And finally, no surprise, action sites are far more likely to reference kings (as in No Kings) compared to alarm sites.

As I concluded two weeks ago, this picture is not locked in stone. The people who helm these sites can adjust their coverage. Their many subscribers can also push their favorite authors to shift their horizons, or they can vote with their cursors and wallets to support other sites. Cut back on the money you give to Substack stars who dwell too much on the cheap production of gloom and doom and shift your dollars to sites that really cover what’s happening on the ground.

Footnote: This is my first experiment vibe-coding and it won’t be my last. Claude initially impressed me with how quickly it figured out how to execute on my ideas for this map. But over time, the quality of its work got worse, making mistakes that I needed to correct and charging me multiple times for extra usage as a result. This could just be my bad luck, timing-wise, as Anthropic, Claude’s owner, is in the middle of a very heated battle for mindshare with platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and my little project may have been buffeted by shifts in which clients Anthropic wants to favor. That is, it may have been giving individual users a souped-up experience in recent months to get them to get their bosses to pay for much more expensive corporate accounts, and now, seeing lots of those bigger users signing up, shifting compute power towards them and away from the little guys. Either way, despite the hiccups, I’m still intrigued by the power of these tools.

—Related: Nate Silver’s take on the political media ecosystems of Twitter/X (“extremely right-leaning” and “incredibly low quality”), Substack (“dominated by Resistance Lib publications”) and Bluesky (“fairly predictable” “mostly reasonably prominent left-progressives”) is worth looking at, if you want another intelligent point of view on all of this.

Duly Noted

—Great stuff here from Deborah Asberry of Hoosiers For Democracy in Indiana on how they have developed a conceptual model for building a resilient statewide volunteer network and dealing with the otherwise endemic problem of “too few people doing too many things.” Read the whole thing.

—Is the political industry “about to die”? So predicts Daniel Barkhuff, who is behind a start-up called Civly that he believes is going to undermine most of the business of oppo research, communications, debate prep and rapid response. No question that the industry is being disrupted by AI, but I suspect rather than dying, it’s going to just get reshuffled.

—Shame on the NY Times for front-paging a fluff story about a one-man billion-dollar business start-up built with the help of AI. The Times piece left out the fact that Medvi, the GLP-1 sales platform in question, received an FDA warning letter in February for misbranding violations, is facing a class action lawsuit, and exposed months ago for using deep-faked photos of patients and creating hundreds of fake doctor accounts on Facebook to promote its wares.

—Am I the only person who wonders if Defiance.org is a grift?

End Times

This is diabolic.

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[1] This was done by Claude computationally reviewing the language used in post titles and then assigning a score from 1 (most alarmist/doom-and-gloomy) to 9 (most action-oriented), followed by my own manual review of those scores based on my own knowledge and experience of those sites. High-alarm sites (1-2) are those that focus primarily on warnings, crisis and threats while offering minimal actionable content. Alarm-leaning (3-4) focus significantly on threats and accountability, with some action content. Neutral sites (5) tend to provide traditional journalistic reporting and showed no strong lean. Action-leaning (6-7) sites have a regular emphasis on organizing, strategy and democratic participation. Highly-action oriented sites (8-9) primarily focus on mobilization, civic power-building and concrete solutions.

Saturday, millions of Americans marched and rallied at more than 3,300 locations across the country to declare their opposition to Trump, ICE, the Iran War and a host of related concerns. According to the national No Kings coalition, the movement has grown substantially since the first No Kings protests of June 2025, with about 40% more events in non-urban locations than then. Also, two-thirds of the people who RSVPed for a specific local protest this time were from non-urban centers (indicating either better manners or less fear of giving their information out).

Local organizers are reporting that this massive turnout is injecting plenty of fresh faces into their groups. Bridget Powers of Central New Hampshire Indivisible told me that roughly 29,000 people, or 2% of the state’s population, turned out at one of more than three dozen protests. “Our own group, in a rural area, found approximately 100 new people who were new, increasing our total mailing list to about 435,” she shared. Jamie Carter of Salt Lake City Indivisible said that while just 2,500 people RSVPed in advance, more than 20,000 people showed up at their rally by the State Capitol. A coalition of twenty organizations partnered to put on the event, ranging from Indivisible, the ACLU, the NAACP, Mormons With Hope, the Sierra Club the League of Women Voters, and the state Democratic Party to DSA and the Party for Socialism and Liberation. She said, it was an “amazing experience to see groups from center to far left working together,” adding, “I know each org got at least 500 new signups.”

In Minneapolis, the epicenter of the strongest Defiance, a crowd of 200,000 came out to cheer Bruce Springsteen, Senator Bernie Sanders, Joan Baez, and a slate of state elected officials and movement organization leaders. But it wasn’t just a day for preaching to the choir. As Joan Walsh reported for The Nation, the event MC Lizz Winstead “did more than make jokes. She asked the crowd to text ‘Vote’ to the Minnesota Election Protection Network, which trains election observers and monitors voter suppression reports. The group got 14,000 texts in the next hours, a strong retort to critics who question the value of these protests.”

Indivisible National’s co-directors Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg, who also spoke at the Minneapolis rally, used their time on stage to make news, announcing a major escalation in the movement’s tactics. Here’s how Levin put it:

“If you know anything about indivisible, we have a real bias towards action. So we’re going to give you some actions…There are millions of people watching now, and for the millions of people around the country, around the globe, we’ve got to work in concert with the Minnesotans when Trump tries to sabotage the midterms. We need to match the depth of the organizing that we’ve seen here in Minnesota with the breadth of the organizing we’re seeing all over the world for No Kings 3. So what? What does that mean? Let’s get specific.

I want everybody, everybody here to put this on your calendar. The next major national action of this movement is not just going to be another protest. It is a tactical escalation, an escalation. It is an economic show of force inspired by Minnesota’s own Day of Truth and Action. We all saw thousands of teachers and nurses, community leaders, faith leaders, showing up in subzero temperatures, showing this state that they were not going to put up with business as usual, while a secret police goon aquad was murdering Americans in the streets.

We need to do that nationally, y’all. We need to do that all over the country. So on May 1st on May Day across the country, we are saying no business as usual, no work, no school, no shopping, we’re going to show up and say we’re putting workers over billionaires and kings. Minnesota, we cannot thank you enough for the courage you’ve displayed, for the instruction you have given. We are going to build on that courage, on that sacrifice, on that dedication, on that organizing, we are going to demonstrate that regular people are the single greatest threat to fascism in this country.”

Can organizers and activists across America “match the depth of the organizing that we’ve seen here in Minnesota with the breadth of the organizing we’re seeing all over the world for No Kings 3”?

Perhaps. Keep in mind, roughly one in four Minnesota voters either joined in the January 23^rd Day of Truth and Action social strike, or said they had a loved one who did. Nearly 40% of those stayed off the job that day, according to a Blue Rose Research survey. As my friend David Donnelly of the ProDemocracy Campaign writes, powerful organizing has been going on in Minnesota for well more than a decade. What happened there in January wasn’t the result of the best messaging via random-controlled trials or great TV ads that brought people together in solidarity, he notes. “By betting on organizing and leadership development over years, Minnesota-based organizations provided the scaffolding for this mobilization moment,” Donnelly writes. “They protected their neighbors, deployed ICE observers in every neighborhood, and shaped the story in every gut-wrenching, awful viral moment emerging from the occupation.”

So let’s try to take stock, get serious and be honest with ourselves. The No Kings movement faces some hard challenges ahead if it’s going to get anywhere as deep, broad and powerful as its peers in Minnesota.

No Kings is Overwhelmingly Older and Highly Educated

Every Thursday at 3:00pm ET, Levin and Greenberg of Indivisible hold an hour-long mass Zoom called “What’s the Plan?” They start out by welcoming a smattering of new Indivisible groups (new ones keep forming at a steady pace), offer some remarks (Leah) and rants (Ezra) about their current strategy priorities, and then field questions that highest number of upvotes from the live audience. Usually, somewhere around five to six thousand people attend.

This past Thursday, I decided to post a simple demographic survey in the chat, doing so multiple times (until some commenters got annoyed with me). I asked people for their age and education level. The median age was 70; the average was 68.8. The youngest was 38.

More than three-quarters of my respondent group are also very well educated, with at least a bachelors degree from college. None reported having stopped at high school or not completing it.

Of course, this isn’t a sample of all Indivisible activists. People with the free time to attend a Zoom meeting in the middle of the workday are far more likely to be retired. But just scan through any random assortment of photos and video posted from around the country this weekend. The No Kings movement’s foot soldiers are predominantly seniors. And with 2736 groups in 431 of America’s 435 congressional districts, Indivisible is by far the biggest local vehicle for our movement.

Last Thursday morning, the No Kings coalition held a press call by Zoom. I posted a question and it got asked. “Many observers have noted that the majority of No Kings participants are over the age of 50. How many No Kings demonstrations are happening at college campuses?” The host directed it to Sarah Parker, the national director of 50501. She replied:

“As a 33-year-old leader in this movement, I take high offense to that. This is a wildly overblown statement that I’m hearing often. And I want to be clear, we have students in college campuses and universities participating in every state at 50501. The average organizer is in their 30s, and whether you’re 17 or 70 or 85 we are all sharing the same concern. We are pissed about our government. We are upset at the administration. We are upset our neighbors are being executed. We are upset we cannot afford groceries, and they are said that we’re spending billions of dollars on an illegal war, and we are pissed that ICE agents are infiltrating our community. We are trying to save our democracy. As a 33-year-old, when I said the Pledge of Allegiance, and I’ve said this multiple times, I was told about the American dream. So there are other 33-year-olds that are fighting for that American dream that was promised to us.”

Afterwards, I wrote the No Kings media account, politely asking if they could tell me how many No Kings demonstrations were scheduled on college campuses. They promised to follow up. Despite a reminder yesterday, I’ve still not gotten an answer. And this doesn’t require hard work—all the event data is in Indivisible’s Mobilize account. When I searched Friday for events with the word “college” or “university” in them, I found just seven out of 3,300: American University, George Washington University, Rutgers, Notre Dame, Clemson, UC Berkeley and Amherst. News reports and social media posts from these schools show little so far about actual turnout.

It’s important to remember that there were hundreds of organizations involved in putting together the No Kings protests, with the ACLU, American Federation of Teachers, Common Defense, 50501, Human Rights Campaign, Indivisible, League of Conservation Voters, MoveOn, National Nurses United, Public Citizen, SEIU, and United We Dream all out in front. Maybe 50501, the newest and most amorphous of all these entities, is the movement’s youth wing. On March 20, eight days prior to No Kings 3, they put on a livestream on Twitch, a platform very popular with young people. It got barely a thousand views. 50501’s spreadsheet of its hundreds of local affiliates turns up none with college or university in its name.

In a fair number of places, the local coalition that put together their No Kings event was age diverse. For example, in very blue Northampton, Massachusetts, nine groups partnered on an event that drew close to 7,000, including Indivisible, a high school group (Feminist Generation), a college group (Smith College Sunrise), Freedom Road Socialist Org., Veterans for Peace, Western MA Climate Action Now, Democratic Socialists of America, and some local groups.

But the god-honest truth is still that Minnesota is one of the few states in America where serious, structured, professionally-led base-building has been going on for years. By contrast, Indivisible has just a handful of state-focused organizers, and many of them are supposed to build and sustain relationships with dozens and dozens of local groups. Some of those groups are experienced and competent enough to manage the logistics of a mid-sized city rally, but many are tiny and do limited amounts of local organizing. Half of Indivisible’s 2736 local groups are barely a year old.

So what? (You might be thinking.) Eight million Americans were in motion on Saturday, an increase from seven million last October, and nearly triple the number that came out for the first mass protests against Trump, the Hands Off rallies of April 2025. It’s true that this looks like growth, and at least there’s hard data showing that these anti-Trump protests are spreading to more places.

But just to be rigorous for a second, let’s remember that as of today, no one has published any basis for the claim that eight million people turned out—and that was a number Indivisible announced even before protests were done on the West Coast! Back in October, independent journalist G. Elliot Morris heroically managed to crowd-source reports from around the country and offered a median estimate of 5 million, with “an upper bound of 6.5 million.” That upper bound got transmogrified into seven million by the No Kings coalition organizers, or simply referred to as “the single largest day of nonviolent protest in American history.”™ I get why political organizers need to spin things, especially when most of the media underplays protest movements (except when they’re led by conservative rural people). Having claimed seven million in October, of course we must claim a bigger number now. Please don’t look at news reports like this one from the San Jose Mercury News, which found that 136,000 protestors took to roughly 50 Bay Area protests on Saturday, down from 220,000 in October.

For argument’s sake, let’s stipulate that indeed eight million people marched Saturday. Let’s be generous and assume that 25% of them were under the age of 50, meaning six million were older than that. In 2024, 75 million Americans over the age of 50 voted, with a little more than half going for Trump. So, if 36 million of those voters pulled for Harris, the No Kings movement has already mobilized a whopping one-in-six of its most available base. Sure, there’s still room for growth – but I hope you agree that if the broad stop-fascism movement is going to grow to the scale suggested by the Minnesota uprising against ICE, it’s got to a lot more growing in the demographics currently underrepresented in its ranks. We may well be leveling off on how many more old people will turn out next time. And sadly, despite their great service to us, they won’t be here forever.

So, Are the Kids Alright?

Where are young people in the movement against rising authoritarianism? One answer came in January and February, when – as I noted here – students at hundreds if not thousands of high schools staged midday walkouts to protest ICE. As of now, those leading these walkouts have no common identity or political home. To some extent the Sunrise Movement, which was built from its very start to be a vehicle led by and for young people, has taken on the role of tending to these new shoots by hosting trainings and reaching out. But its new platform of “End ICE, End Billionaires,” while politically timely, clashes with Sunrise’s brand as the youth organization fighting for a green economy and green jobs.

I asked some current youth organizers as well as veterans of campus organizing what they thought explained the relative absence of young people in the No Kings movement. One reason, they all said, was obvious. No one likes being invited to a dinner party after the first course has been served. No Kings has a dominant demographic and vibe. A twenty-something walking into a room of gray hairs may be welcomed, but they’re also going to wonder why they should invest time with a bunch of people twice or three times their age. (Never underestimate the importance of dating opportunities to movement scenes.) And older progressives sometimes exude an off-putting superiority. As a twenty-something woman who came to my Indivisible group’s meeting in February said when asked about the challenge of getting more of her peers involved, “A lot of younger people feel that older generations are telling them that their problems don’t matter.”

Another barrier to anti-Trump activism on campus is more visceral. Many student radicals are both burned out and terrified, having gone through the last few years of pro-Palestine protests and seeing many of their peers severely punished. One youth organizer told me they saw a big gap between juniors and seniors, who might typically be leading campus political groups at this stage in their academic lives but are instead holding back, while frosh and sophomores are much more open to action and wondering why no one was leading anything. At its best, healthy campus organizing is a pipeline, where strong organizations keep themselves going over time by cultivating incoming students and grooming to become leaders by their later years – but that pipeline has been badly damaged with the crackdown since October 7.

Last but certainly not least, young people who have grown up with Trump as the dominant political figure of our time and turmoil as a constant are not feeling hopeful or grounded. “They feel overwhelming insecurity,” said one longtime campus organizer who has been invited to speak at more than a half dozen colleges in recent months. “They worry about being saddled with debt for their lifetimes with worthless degrees. They doubt that they’ll ever own a house. They are petrified that they’ll be thrown out of school. They are all acutely aware of fellow students being deported.” On top of that, “They’re completely bitter about the Democratic party leadership. They feel like they’re old and out of touch and have lied to them consistently.”

These are not great breeding grounds for activism, especially the kind that is calling for a big tent/popular front approach like No Kings, which in many places put Democratic party leaders on its rally stages and is, quite pragmatically, urging a big turnout for Democrats this fall.

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Signs of Hope and Change

None of this is meant to suggest that the broad anti-authoritarian movement can’t evolve and grow past these challenges.

For one thing, there are some green shoots sprouting up. We the Students, for example, is a fledgling network of high school-based organizers who are making civic activism in defense of the Constitution and the rule of law their north star. It was started last year by students across a few dozen mostly elite high schools in New York City, and now has branches in California and Ohio with hopes to spread to more states including Texas, Oregon, Illinois, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Here are some of them demonstrating last Saturday.

At a more strategic level, there are signs that the burgeoning resistance to ICE, which is generating a lot of hyper-local neighborhood-watch style organizing and which is often deeply rooted in immigrant communities, could supplant or deepen the No Kings/Indivisible model. And given what is shaping up to be a highly contested election, people who have built local neighborhood ICE watch groups could very easily turn themselves into polling place protection groups.

Four days before No Kings 3, Defend & Recruit, the organizing arm of Siembra NC, published an updated playbook for new and established groups taking on the immigrant defense fight. It’s full of practical guidance on everything from how to build a local ICE Watch group or Fourth Amendment Workplace, to how to work with faith communities, local sheriffs and DAs and elected officials when a federal ICE occupation comes to your town. I won’t try to summarize it all here.

But I do want to highlight a few things that Defend & Recruit says in its vision statement. They are after a full-blown cultural shift, one that makes Trumpian anti-immigrant appeals to voters toxic by 2028. How can we win this? They write that this change is possible if…:

“…every time the heartless policies of the MAGA alliance were felt by someone’s niece, their favorite restaurant, their cousin’s construction company, the transgender teenager at their church, or hit their wallet, local organizers were there to help them make meaning of the moment, and learn through practice a truth that TikTok influencers can’t undermine: “We look out for each other. El pueblo salva al pueblo.” Our economy and our politics are rigged, and rich guys aren’t the answer.

And instead of doubling down with the people we already know and trust, we spent countless hours listening to and building with people who sat out the 2024 election or voted for Trump. [Emphasis added]

Communities in every corner of the US created committees not just to protect each other but to recruit our primos, tías, parceros away from the false ideology of everything-bagel-populism, with a scapegoat and a reality-defying, magic-wand solution for every harm unleashed by rich-guy capitalism (and a federal government run by rich-guy capitalists). We broke the spell cast via social media and WhatsApp that we heard repeated back to us throughout 2024 – “he’ll stop inflation”, “we’ll make more money,” “rent will go down,” “he’ll only go after the criminals”.

The spell was broken by face-to-face organizing. It was broken by people showing up for each other. By meeting confusion and frustration with the status quo with compassion and curiosity – not with condescension or “I-told-you-so”. The spell was broken by organizing that could “show, not tell” the truth that rich people aren’t there to lend a hand in a moment of crisis – by community mutual aid projects, by offering 1:1 support for employers that wanted help thinking through how to protect their workers, and for school administrators that needed thought-partners in figuring out how to avoid breaking state laws while still getting parents crucial community defense information, for a local pickup basketball team that felt confused and angry after one of their members was detained.

We didn’t revive the anti-Trump playbook – which, let’s be honest, was written primarily to engage die-hard, anti-Trump middle class white people – Latinos wrote a new one, with a different sazón para cada rincón. But it was a sancocho of the same basic ingredients: earning trust in moments our gente were interested in new answers, new interpretations for why they felt the way they did and who was responsible – not when they had already made up their minds two months before an election. And with organizing that changed the material conditions for millions.

Learn more and get Defend & Recruit’s new playbook here.

And learn more about the plans for May Day here.

Give to power-building organizing here.

—Also, new from Protect Democracy: “Executive Override: How the Trump administration plans to interfere with the 2026 elections, and what you can do about it.”

One Thing to Read about AI

--Catherine Bracy: “The Critics are Right: The Left Risks Losing the Political Battle on AI.”

End Times

How long can Fox & Friends keep saying that going broke is patriotic?

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All your programs, podcasts, livestreams, and Substack content feed the public a steady diet of all the evils of MAGA and Trump. The message is relentless: Democracy is collapsing. Institutions are failing. Our opponents are ruthless. You rarely, if ever, feature grassroots stories or host activists from organizations that are part of the solution. Excluding such voices is more than an annoying oversight.

There is only one goal for 2026 – to win every possible election and loosen the MAGA hold on this country. Winning requires all-hands-on-deck which requires a convincing narrative. As an example, sports fans need to believe their team can win in order to show up at stadiums. And sportscasters are masters of talking up their team’s chances, focusing on strengths, not detailing the dangers ahead. Your readers and listeners, like sports fans, need the hope that today’s activists bring. This is precisely the attitude needed to stage a decisive win for democracy.

…All of us, you included, need to be informed of concrete actions being taken to save our democracy. Grassroots activists recounting small and large examples of organized resistance across the country are missing from your coverage. The resistance did not start in Minneapolis; we have been organizing and growing since 2016. The decision to ignore this significant volunteer effort contributes to the narrative that individuals are helpless, that few care, and that no one can do much to change the inevitable seizing of rights and power. Absolutely nothing of the sort is true or inevitable, but without your help, that may well be the prevailing status.

Unfortunately, you have created an echo chamber. Every week the same experts make the rounds with the same anxiety-provoking messages. This leaves listeners with an incomplete picture of the political landscape.

Wagner’s words struck a chord for me, but I wondered if empirically, it really was true. I don’t watch cable news because I find it mostly vapid, performative, repetitive and anxiety-provoking, but I do read a lot of newsletters, and particularly those by authors focused on democracy. So, with a little AI help I decided to take a closer look. Have our leading pro-democracy writers formed an echo chamber? And are they failing to cover pro-democracy organizing?

To make this a manageable project (meaning, something I could do in a day given what this Substack generates income-wise!), I decided to focus on two things. First, taking note of how often of late pro-democracy authors have been using Substack Live to attract and drive attention, I built a network analysis of “who is talking to whom.” I seeded the network with a list of some the most prominent sites and authors I’m familiar with: The Contrarian (which is led by Jennifer Rubin, formerly of the Washington Post), The Bulwark, historians Timothy Snyder, Heather Cox Richardson, and Ruth Ben-Ghiat; economist Paul Krugman, political strategists Simon Rosenberg, Rick Wilson, and Michael Podhorzer; and author Anand Giridharadas, And then I went back a year, scraping each of their Substack sites to identify Substack Live guests, and then build a graph showing multiple co-appearances as stronger ties and individual appearances as weaker ones.

The second thing I did was much simpler: Focusing just on that core group of ten sites/authors, I looked for mentions by them of “No Kings” – the name of the biggest pro-democracy push in the country – since the end of January, when the No Kings coalition announced that March 28 (this Saturday), would be the next day of mass national protest. What I found surprised me.

Since the beginning of February through last Friday, many of the leading lights of the pro-democracy punditocracy have all but completely ignored No Kings 3. Timothy Snyder, Rick Wilson, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Paul Krugman and The Bulwark never mentioned it (though Bulwark editor-at-large William Kristol did manage to write a post on February 11 that looked backwards at “the massive turnout at the No Kings demonstrations in June and October”). Anand Giridharadas made passing mention of the “no kings” message. Heather Cox Richardson gave it a plug on a Facebook “politics chat” on March 3. Only Simon Rosenberg, Michael Podhorzer and Jennifer Rubin gave No Kings 3 anything close to real attention.

This has shifted, slightly, in recent days. This past Saturday, Snyder devoted his whole “Thinking about…” newsletter, which has 437,000 subscribers, to “No Kings, Freedom!” Likewise, also on Saturday, Ruth Ben-Ghiat noted briefly to her 210,000 subscribers that she would be doing a Substack Live with preacher Diana Butler Bass “to get ready” for the No Kings protests. But a week beforehand is late!

Why haven’t so many of the most prominent pro-democracy writers active today said so little about No Kings 3? Do they think it’s passé? Do they think something other than mass, highly visible, public protest is going to stop and reverse America’s slide into authoritarianism? Obviously not, which leaves me to wonder if they think organizing and mobilizing is beneath them, something better left to lesser “names.”

Because of course there are plenty of other Substack authors who do an excellent job of centering organizing in their writing. I’m thinking of Robert Hubbell, whose “Today’s Edition” newsletter regularly features photos from protests all over the country; Jess Craven’s “Chop Wood, Carry Water” which is also daily and chock-a-block with calls to action (and also includes a family of state-focused newsletters); and We The People Dissent by K. Starling, which is basically all protest info, all the time.

But it’s still concerning that No Kings 3 hasn’t gotten more attention from some of our best attention-mongers. Do not assume that people know something big is coming this weekend—most Americans are too busy and pay little attention to most of the news. And if they don’t know about it, they won’t come.

Of Logrolling and Backscratching

So who do the leading pro-democracy writers feature in their attention streaming machines? Here’s the network graph. The thicker the gray line, the more often someone has made a co-appearance with someone else.

I should say right from the start that this is, of course, an incomplete picture. There are easily several dozen more sites and writers that one could include in mapping this whole ecosystem. But I’m not a professional data scientist; perhaps the good people who wrote the book Network Propaganda and produced amazingly data-rich charts showing the entire political news ecosystem in 2016 could train some of their tools on the Substack politics landscape. Certainly there’s plenty of relationship data to be mined simply from looking at who recommends whom!

But here’s what I found, as rough and dirty as it is. Nine of those ten sites/authors are closely linked to each other, appearing on each other’s Substack Live shows often in the last year. Only Richardson, whose “Letters from an American” Substack has 2.8 million subscribers, isn’t in the center circle – most likely because she already has a gigantic audience and doesn’t need to hustle more to build it. A few of folks in the center have close collaborators who show up in a middle ring. And then there’s a wide array of other guests who have been on the core group’s Live shows once or twice.

Notably, very few of the people on this visualization of “Who’s Talking to Whom” are political organizers. Most work in media as talkers, or in politics as commentators. A handful, like Norman Eisen and Marc Elias, are deeply involved in pro-democracy work in the courts, so they’re closer to the organizing trenches. Someone like Jeremy Ben-Ami, who runs J Street, is clearly a political organizer, and if you squint you can spot David Hogg, Stacey Abrams and Corbin Trent out on the periphery. But even after the spectacular amount of grassroots pushback from places like Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis, and the massive No Kings protests of April and October 2025, the pro-democracy chattering class hasn’t put the leaders of those efforts anywhere on their collective radar.

People like Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg of Indivisible, Doran Schrantz of Faith in Minnesota, Cristina Jimenez of United We Dream, Maurice Mitchell of the Working Families Party, Ian Bassin of Protect Democracy, Lisa Gilbert of Public Citizen, Chris Dols of the Federal Unionists Network, and Alex Winter of #TeslaTakedown somehow don’t get called much by these folks’ bookers. And it’s not like these organizers are press-shy or afraid to go on a live show.

What Explains This?

I get why hosts of cable TV news shows might not invite organizers onto their nightly programs. They are in a continuous ratings war against their competition, their revenues are based on audience share, and they can’t risk losing their audience’s attention. But Substack’s pro-democracy authors aren’t subject to the same corporate market pressures. So why are they acting like a pack? Why do they tend to talk to many of the same people, including each other? And why do they give organizing short shrift? I have a few theories.

• One: If you are trying to build a large audience of Substack subscribers, of whom only a fraction will pay to subscribe or donate, quantity and speed beats quality. Going live is a fast way to reinforce a connection with your subscribers, be they free or paying. And going live with someone who also has a big following is probably one of the most efficient ways to gain new subscribers. This produces a version of the Winners Take All effect, where people already rich in audience attention choose to hang out with and amplify other people also rich in attention.

• Second: If you are an author with any following whatsoever, Substack is an endorphin machine. You are treated to a constant stream of feedback in the form of likes, comments and shares. (Notably, Substack doesn’t give readers a way to dislike a post.) Positive feedback makes everyone feel good; but it can be addicting. Going Live on Substack adds in more positive feedback, in the form of a live audience chat thread. And some of these authors now get live adoring audiences in the thousands; who wouldn’t want to bath in that kind of attention? This past weekend, I saw a friend turn on Substack Live (you get an email notifying you, if you’re a subscriber) and he didn’t even have a guest or a plan to talk – he just needed to do some work on the computer and wanted to offer his fans the opportunity to hang out and watch!

• Third: Pontificating about the latest outrage of the day is easy to do from your desk. It’s fast and cheap (see my first point). Reporting on the ins and outs of organizing or producing a new insight from the complex mix of news that flows around us constantly, that’s hard and often expensive. In the best of both worlds, sites/authors with the kinds of big audiences some of these pro-democracy authors have built would use the money they’re making to hire more actual journalists. Some are doing that, like The Bulwark, which has people like Jonathan Cohn and Adrian Carrasquillo dedicated to beats like health care and immigration, respectively. But what does Heather Cox Richardson with the millions of dollars she must be making from her massive and devoted subscriber base? I have no idea.

• Fourth and last: Political writers and commentators are just responding to what political news consumers want, though that consumer mindset is something these writers and commentators helped build and reinforce every day. They don’t try to produce in-depth coverage of movements because those stories, when they do appear, tend to get fewer views and clicks than another rant about Jeffrey Epstein or the Orange Cheeto. Or both.

Unfortunately, these tendencies combine to produce a star-system of high-quality talking heads and a dumbed-down audience that never quite figures out why the news and commentary on offer just makes it feel worse. Last fall, I saw this on display when I caught the Bulwark’s live show at New York City’s Symphony Space. This was a recording of their lead podcast, featuring Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell, editor Jonathan V. Last, and writer-at-large Tim Miller. The upper west side audience gave them a hero’s welcome and roared mightily at their jokes, but most of the conversation was incredibly self-referential and ultimately not very interesting. (Watch here if you think I’m wrong.) Longwell, Last and Miller spend so much time doing live shows with each other by Zoom or Substack Live that they didn’t feel like they had to change a thing for an in-the-flesh live audience. After a while, I stopped laughing at the puerility of their jokes and walked out early.

Is this fixable? Yes, from both the top and the bottom. The people who manage these big Substacks are their own bosses; there’s no network honcho telling them how to run their sites. And people like Susan Wagner have already offered them a great list of potential guests to feature who are more involved in the everyday fight to defeat authoritarianism; they don’t have to start from scratch in considering who to highlight. From the other end, readers and subscribers can vote with their feet and their checkbooks. Cut back on the money you give to Substack stars who dwell too much on the cheap production of gloom and doom, and shift your dollars to sites that really cover what’s happening on the ground.

Oh, and don’t forget to show up somewhere this Saturday for No Kings 3!

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Duly Noted

—I missed this post when it came out two months ago, but it’s just as current now. Haley Bash nails what’s wrong with all the giant webinars progressive organizations keep having. While they allow small numbers of staff to reach large numbers of people, they turn the audience into consumers rather than active participants, and as she writes, “thus they begin to act like critics,” adding, “We’ve trained people to observe and judge, not to co-create.” Read the whole thing.

—If you’ve been looking for a simple way to turn your concerns into ongoing action - and bring others along - check out 2-10.org. The idea is simple: contact 2-10 elected officials on issues that matter to you, then ask 2-10 people you trust to do the same and follow up with them. That’s it. No app, no membership. Just a lightweight accountability chain that multiplies real civic action through personal networks. It started in Athens, GA and has been spreading organically ever since. It’s a tool, not a movement - use it however fits your context.

End Times

At least they know they’re free!

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Such are the dangers of punditry. At least she didn’t write the single dumbest prediction of 2025, that of political writer Ross Barkan, who, the week of Trump’s second inauguration, wrote in the New York Times Magazine that the resistance era was over and now “accommodation and acceptance are the new watchwords.”

Still, the notion remains that protesting is futile. Perhaps even more today, as much of corporate and civic America has either embraced the Trump agenda, bent their knees, or maintained a careful silence, it’s understandable that ordinary people might feel that there’s no point in bothering to raise their voices.

Well, here’s a stab at showing how we know that mass protest does matter, in one unwieldy chart that I made with a bit of help from AI.

Here’s how to read this. The horizontal axis is the months since the Orange Cheeto started his second term. The vertical axis is for the number of locations reported for each of the major protest days of the last year. The size of each circle corresponds to the estimated number of participants. And the yellow and blue boxes describe particular governmental or civic actions that took place, often in reaction to public protest, with dotted lines connecting them to the calendar. Finally, the light blue bars shading each of the three big protest days are meant to indicate that these events took time to build up to.

Obviously, I’m leaving a lot of stuff out of the picture. There has been a lot of pushback on Trump in the courts. Some of his biggest or most outrageous attacks on federal workers or programs have been blocked or reversed. Same with some of his anti-immigrant actions. His tariff policies have met stiff resistance from foreign countries, the stock market, and most recently the Supreme Court, often leading to reversals.

But the basic message, I think, is clear. Harvard didn’t make its decision to hold firm and sue the administration until after the first big Hands Off rallies of April 5, 2025, and there’s clear reporting showing that university administrators stiffened their spines in response to the rallies, which buttressed intensive organizing by alumni, faculty and students. Elon Musk’s standing in the Trump White House didn’t collapse on its own, it was accelerated by highly visible public protests at Tesla showrooms across the country, which drove down Tesla stock prices as well as the billionaire’s popularity. Republican senators didn’t complain about the Department of Education suspending billions in local school aid in a vacuum; those complaints came after the massive No Kings protests of June 14, 2025—which the Nonviolent Action Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School found spread much further into “Trump country” than anti-Trump protests in his first term. While the courts operate on their own timeline, it’s fair to say that judges also pay attention to the news and to public trends as well, and the rulings blocking Trump from deploying the National Guard wherever he wanted do take note of the significant public protests that took place against those deployments. Finally, Congress voted near unanimously to force the release of the Epstein files only after seven million of us turned out for No Kings 2 in mid-October.

Two additional points. Mass protests like Hands Off and No Kings are just the most visible parts of public action against Trump. There have been several successful corporate pressure campaigns, from the fight over Disney’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel to the boycotts against Spotify and Avelo Airlines for collaborating with ICE. All three led to reversals by those corporate actors. (See Boycott Central for more info.)

And the intensity of protest is rising. While the three biggest days of protest were each organized over several weeks in advance, the “Ice Out for Good” rallies of the weekend of January 23-25 came together in just a few days. Notably, they took place in more locations than the first No Kings protests—another sign that the Defiance movement has grown local muscles across the country. I don’t think it’s a coincidence either that two of the most visible and awful people in the administration, ICE Barbie Kristi Noem and Gruppenfuhrer Greg Bovino, have been given the boot.

Now, as No Kings 3 approaches on March 28, it looks like it is on track to be substantially bigger than all the previous national days of anti-Trump protest. I’ve been watching the raw number of No Kings events listed on Mobilize go up each day since last Wednesday, and based on that trend expect the mobilization will reach somewhere between 3,300 and 3,600 locations. (This morning, the No Kings coalition put out a press release saying that it had surpassed 3,000 local events.) If attendance trends track the same way, that means there could be nine million of us in motion a week from this Saturday. That’s still not 3.5% of the population, nor does that indicate that the Defiance has pulled that many people into continuous organized action.

But the capacity to pull together roughly 3,500 simultaneous local rallies of varying size is a sign of growing strength. In many cases, the group or groups organizing a local No Kings 3 rally are onto their third time handling the logistics, as I discovered from querying members of the Indivisible Action Center Slack. On the other hand, Francesca Wander, a longtime Indivisible organizer who started with Indivisible San Francisco and is now with Indivisible Sacramento, told me she saw “Lots of smaller events popping up in smaller communities and towns, rather than necessarily joining the nearest large event.” She added, “Bigger isn’t necessarily better (although it’s definitely good) but even small groups of people coming out in communities and towns all across the country speaks volumes. Good things definitely come in small packages. Plus you don’t need a lot of experience or infrastructure to host a small event. Just a few bodies with some signs can have an impact.”

—Related: Historian and movement organizer Van Gosse offers some valuable thoughts on the differences between a mass movement and a protest wave. He writes, “My basic premises are that a mass movement exhibits both visibility and tenacity. A movement reaches “mass” when it becomes a visible presence, with which anyone can affiliate, in the daily life of a city, region, or nation. That kind of movement generates symbols that are instantly recognizable as personal branding—the peace sign in the late 1960s, for instance, later on Pride and Confederate flags, MAGA hats now. Beyond instant recognition, a true mass movement possesses staying power over time. Sweeping waves of protest, when crowds suddenly converge and surge into action, are a different, although undeniably powerful, phenomenon—think of the Occupy take-overs of urban space in 2011, or the nationwide explosion of outrage after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020.” But before celebrating, Gosse says to remember: “Trump’s enduring popularity should force us to confront that he has been leading a mass movement, and we are playing catch-up.”

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Odds and Ends

--A new report from Oath.vote finds a quiet but significant generational shift is underway among Congressional House Democrats. While 85% of the 74 House Dems over the retirement age of 65 have announced that they are running for re-election, a “massive wave” of more than 210 challengers are primarying them. Collectively, those challengers have raised more than $20 million, a sign that this is serious (though if you dig into the data, most of the incumbents have bigger warchests than their challengers). More than half those challengers are under the age of 50, Oath found. The group, which helps campaign donors target their money where it can be most useful, says the divide inside the Democratic party is less about left vs center than how to fight. It adds, “Younger generations are delivering more combative and more populist messages, and Democratic donors are rewarding them for it like never before. We could see a wave of longtime incumbents lose their seats in upsets reminiscent of the AOC shock-win in 2018.”

--Emily Amick, a former Senate counsel to Chuck Schumer, makes the case for more investment in “the influencer economy,” noting that in 2024 one such person (with a big following but unclear political leaning) was offered $36,000 by a rightwing group to post a sponsored video and a leftwing group offered just $2.000. The person declined the bigger offer because she leans left, but in Amick’s view this tells “the story of the modern political social media economy in one anecdote.” Personally, I’m not convinced that the answer is to try to match the right in bribing people with big social media followings, and that isn’t quite what Amick is arguing for, to be clear.

End Times

This is genius.

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So, No Kings 3 is going to involve millions of us. Great. But the vast and growing pro-democracy movement in America has two key tasks to focus on as that day approaches and arrives.

Task One: Inviting New People to Join In

Back in the fall, I saw an internal movement survey that found that among the slightly more than half the public who said they disapproved of Trump’s policies, more than 7 in 10 said they had not been asked to participate in any action to make that feeling public.

Odds are, as a Connector reader, you either already knew this, or you’re currently trying to digest this new fact. But the dirty little secret about public participation in politics is how few people do it on their own. It helps enormously if someone asks! Indeed, that same survey also found that 55% of Trump disapprovers said they would attend a protest only with people they know.

Many progressive activists, who have developed their political views and commitments through a process of intellectual discovery, make the mistake of believing that that is how everyone becomes politically active. Sociologists who have closely examined the process by which people get active in political movements have found that social connections matter much more. Most people do not start out being politically active because of their commitment to a cause; they start out because a friend or acquaintance invites them to join in on something, they have fun and make friends, and then they get politicized into supporting the cause. To repeat something I wrote about this here four years ago:

Many people may care about an issue, but only a few get involved. Why is that? Ziad Munson, in his excellent book The Making of Pro-Life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works, makes the following argument. People get involved in a movement when three things happen. First, they have to experience a direct, personal contact, through their social networks, to a movement organization. Second, they need to be at a moment in their lives where they are open to a personal change. This is what sociologist Douglas McAdam called “biographical availability.” And third, they have to actually participate in some form of initial activism—a rally, protest, meeting, counseling session or the like—which they enjoy and decide to continue doing.

Two things thus constrain who will get involved. First, the availability of sites of mobilization. These are often social settings like churches or other regular gathering places where a friend or acquaintance may invite you to participate in something political. If you live in an activist desert, those contacts won’t happen. This is one reason I constantly harp on our need for more places where progressives may serendipitously collide and rub shoulders with non-activists, and why the presence of thousands of local gun clubs, Bible study groups and home-schooling circles are such a boon to right-wing movements. The second factor affecting who may get involved is whether they are at a stage in life where they may be open to or need to find new connections. Being at a transition moment in life, like starting college, losing one’s job, having a first child, or retiring, is often when people are most open to getting involved in a movement. Munson interviewed dozens of pro-life activists alongside people with similar philosophical leanings who were not activists, and his key finding is that non-activists were neither invited into movement gatherings nor at a stage in life where they might have been responsive.

Right now, as you are reading this, make a list of the people who you know who didn’t march in No Kings 1 or 2, and commit to contacting each one before March 28. If you are into writing postcards, take a break from postcarding for candidates and instead write to your own people. You may think that emailing or texting people is enough, but a personal phone call or door-knock will be far more effective.

Task Two: Welcoming and Absorbing the Newcomers

Mobilizing people to get them to show up at a rally is important, and on its face, that’s what No Kings 3 is all about. However, organizing to keep them involved is crucial. So, while it takes a lot of energy in advance to produce a strong turnout at an event, you haven’t built much power until you’ve integrated newcomers into your group or organization and can involve them in ongoing action. Far too often, I hear people say things like “I went to the rally, but nothing changed” without any awareness that power doesn’t shift because X number of people stood together for a few hours to chant demands, it shifts because those people get organized to keep raising awareness and pressure on an ongoing basis.

This isn’t rocket science. But it does require a mental shift and some practical advance planning.

The mental shift is to recognize that a mass rally is an opportunity to welcome new people to the movement. Not to judge them for being insufficiently “woke” or scare them away by advertising your own self-righteousness. I’ve been to far too many rallies where the cause was compelling, but then some (or all) of the speakers or chant-leaders turned me and other attendees off with hyper-ideological language and sloganeering. Groups like ANSWER and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), which are often in the vanguard of protest waves, are very good at jumping out in response to breaking news to organize rallies aimed at grabbing attention and recruiting newbies; the tipoff that you are dealing with committed sectarians is always in their language and handouts, which are not designed to welcome “normies” but to pull people into their alternative world. This may especially be a problem in urban hothouses like New York City, where every flavor of sectarian group can find enough people to fill a basement, but my anecdotal impression is that groups like the PSL are active in lots of smaller cities as well.

With No Kings 3 rallies taking place in thousands of locations, many of them at human scale rather than in the tens or hundreds of thousands, local groups have a huge opportunity to grow their ranks on March 28, but only if they plan for it.

Smart organizers know that a big rally is a great place to connect with lots of potential supporters. I have a fond memory of literally bumping into Billy Wimsatt, the founder of the Movement Voter Project, at the Women’s March in New York City in early 2017. He was standing on a divider on 42^nd St near Park Avenue as marchers streamed past, handing out simple leaflets about MVP (which was then just a baby, not the $100 million juggernaut it became by 2020).

Even if you don’t have a big organization like MVP that you’re hoping to pull people towards, you can do a lot to draw newcomers into your ongoing organizing work. Plus, don’t forget to reach out to people who may be on your group’s list but haven’t shown up for anything in a while.

Here’s an illustrative story courtesy of Saul Austerlitz, one of the founders and long-running organizers of Brooklyn Resisters, a group with several hundred members that has been in existence since 2017. He told me, “For No Kings 2, we reached out to about 150 members who regularly participate/write in.” With the help of Megan Piontkowski, a member of the group who is an illustrator, they produced 4,000 copies of a simple “zine” titled “We Marched, Now What?” that members brought to the big Manhattan march on October 18 to hand out at the march’s end-point. As you can see, it was chock-a-block with useful follow-up information and designed to fit in anyone’s back pocket. “They went extremely quickly,” Austerlitz recalled. “One member of our group brought out some friends and they handed out 500. My 13-year-old son handed out 40 in under 10 minutes.”

I had heard about this zine in advance from an organizer friend, Joelle Asaro Berman, but also was handed one completely randomly by someone on the street. (These foldable mini-zines that can be made from a single 8x11 sheet of paper are quite the genre; here’s a whole collection made for ICE Watch efforts that Piontkowski has curated.)

For No Kings 3, Austerlitz relates, Brooklyn Resisters has done more intensive in-reach in advance of more outreach. “For this go-round, we started with the 300 or so new members that have joined us since Nov 2024, and are now going to round it out by reaching out to our longer-term members.” He said they heard from a lot of people that they hadn’t connected with “and learned more about what interests them, how they’re getting involved, or what’s keeping them from participating more.” He added that “the personal touch makes a huge difference, especially as people feel much more of a need to respond to an email/text that is clearly being sent to them specifically.” His group is currently in the process of revising and updating its No Kings 3 zine in time for March 28.

If you don’t want to make a zine to hand out, it’s simpler but equally useful to task some of your members to be greeters at your rally, with clipboards to collect people’s names and contact information, or offering them a QR code that they can scan to sign up for more information. I put a query out to Indivisible group leaders on the Indivisible Action Center Slack, asking for examples of how people were working to recruit and absorb new members. Bridget Powers, one of the leaders of Central New Hampshire Indivisible, told me, “We collect names on clipboards, hand out business cards, display QR codes and talk with people to absorb more members. Our event is promoted in our newsletter, with flyers and on social media,” adding, “You’ve made me think that we need to get members to reach out personally to friends and family.” Louise Pathe, a member of the steering committee of Indivisible Eastside in Kirkland, Washington said her group has built absorption into its monthly meetings, inviting new members to come 30 minutes early to attend a welcome/orientation session.

Leaders with Indivisible San Francisco are taking a variety of actions leading up to No Kings 3, including street-chalking (see below) and promoting a countdown site – NoKingsCountdown.org – that nudges visitors with small daily actions they can do throughout the month of March. (Ah, those tech-savvy San Franciscans!) Kathy Lass, one of their members, told me that their approach to absorbing new people will be focused on “giving them a concrete plan on what to do,” which will start with spreading the word in their own neighborhoods and urging them to “Participate in the May 1 shutdown, with no work, no school, no shopping.” Already, thinking ahead.

Why is the US bombing Iran (cont’d)?

I got some constructive feedback from an old friend and longtime reader who took issue with what I wrote last week about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu being “the tail that wagged the dog” and part of a power-nexus including Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff “guiding Trump’s hand.” In particular, my friend objected to my citing Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s remarks about a pending Israeli attack on Iran triggering American action, because it suggested that Israel was somehow the stronger party. So let me take another whack at the question “Why is America bombing Iran?”

The answer is not simply because Israel has wanted it. You can find that argument popping up all over the political map now, from leftist conspiracists like Sarah Kendzior to sane progressives like Ryan Cooper in the American Prospect to self-described independents like Andrew Sullivan, not to mention the far-right fever swamps. They make compelling arguments about the power of the pro-Israel lobby over Congress and the mainstream media and the role of Christian Zionist evangelicals, as well as the increasing power of expansionist, messianic and racist forces in Israeli Jewish politics. Yet none of these explain how a country of 10 million forced a much more powerful country of 330 million to throw caution to the wind and attack Iran.

What’s missing from the picture? You can’t explain how America behaves in the Middle East without remembering the deal that FDR made with Saudi King Ibn Saud in early 1945. In exchange for the Saudis guaranteeing a reliable supply of oil to the US, America pledged to protect the House of Saud and its kingdom from any and all adversaries. And it was none other than US President Jimmy Carter who reinforced this alliance with his eponymous “Carter doctrine,” which declared that the US would be prepared to use force to protect its interests in the Gulf. Which it did during the Iran-Iraq War by keeping the strategic Straits of Hormuz open for oil shipping, and then again during the 1991 Gulf War, when American troops protected oil fields while the kingdom provided money and fuel for the US side of the war.

Saudi oil plays a key role in the global economy because it’s the only major oil power that has the ability, due to its enormous reserves, to increase or decrease production at will, allowing it to have tremendous influence over global supplies and prices. (Plus Saudi oil is very cheap to extract, compared to other sources.) And even though America is now an oil exporter, its role as guarantor of the Saudi kingdom and its oil matters a lot to countries that are heavily dependent on Gulf oil, like Japan, South Korea, India and China. Though the US-Saudi alliance faced some bumps near the end of Trump’s first term and after President Biden’s criticism of the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, with the Saudis normalizing relations with Iran (thanks to help from China), the current war must be seen as a recementing of that 80-year-old relationship.

In addition, all the attention on AIPAC’s influence in Congress must be judged against the efforts of another powerful interest group that benefits greatly from America’s military adventures: the defense industry. According to OpenSecrets, which has been tracking the role of money in politics since 1990, direct contributions from defense industry PACs and executives have totaled $440 million over the last 36 years. By contrast pro-Israel groups and individuals have given $298 million. The same is true for lobbying expenditures--$3.4 billion since 1990 on behalf of defense interests compared to just $89 million by pro-Israel groups. Indeed, the 2024 election cycle is the only one where campaign contributions from pro-Israel groups ($78.1 million) has outpaced money from military contractors ($43.5 million).

America’s bloated defense sector functions as a kind of warped form of national industrial policy since slices of the Pentagon’s enormous budget fall in every congressional district, along with pay and benefits for servicemembers, retirees and veterans. This beast, which President Dwight Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex,” needs a constant supply of global threats and adversaries to justify its existence. As Eisenhower said in his farewell speech in 1961, “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government…. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

My point: American bombers don’t appear over Tehran simply because it is in Israel’s interest to decimate a regime that – we should remember – has been dedicated from its start to its destruction. America’s gigantic military sector makes American leaders tilt towards making war. Its longstanding alliance with Saudi Arabia and other associated Sunni oil monarchies has made it tilt against Shia Iran (and that country’s decade-old attempt to control its own oil resources to achieve some degree of independence). And last but definitely not least, we are currently ruled by a Mad King who thinks that war is a TV show. David Rothkopf says it better than I can: “”Not since Adolf Hitler blew his brains out in a bunker beneath the garden of the German Reich Chancellery on April 30, 1945, have the lives of so many people around the world been so buffeted by the psychosis of a single man.”

If you scan Kendzior, Cooper and Sullivan’s pieces, you won’t find the words “oil” or “defense sector” or “military industrial complex,” but you will find a lot of heated rhetoric pinning the Iran war on Israel. I found Kendzior’s essay especially troubling for how it misuses investigative work by my dear departed friend Robbie Friedman, whose books and articles on American-Israeli fascist Meir Kahane and the encroachment of the Russia Mafia in America get turned, by Kendzior, into proof of not only Israel’s drive to take over the land from the Nile to the Euphrates but also of Trump’s alleged ties to Russia organized crime. I posted a comment on Kendzior’s site pointing out some of her errors and exaggerations, but to date she hasn’t replied. Seeing scholars like Jason Stanley praise her article shocked me.

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Worth Chewing On

—Eric Blanc, “Why is there no anti-war movement in the US?” Labor Politics, March 9, 2026. The whole piece is very good but this paragraph stands out: “Rather than build the broadest and deepest possible opposition to US military aid and interventions abroad, too much anti-war activity in recent years has leaned into alienating, excessively radical rhetoric and slogans, while tying widely supported demands against war to unjustified and unhelpful romanticization of any and all “anti-imperialist” forces. Consistently opposing imperialism does not require justifying Hamas’s killing of civilians or the Islamic Republic’s repression of pro-democracy activists.”

—In the same vein, see Mehran Khalili, “Iran: Where’s the resistance,” Subvrt Newsletter, March 10, 2026.

—Susan Wagner, “Dear pundits: We need your assistance,” The Grassroots Connector, March 9, 2026. Her message to the daisy chain of TV talking heads like Nicole Wallace, Tim Miller, Jen Rubin, Jon Favreau, Chris Hayes, and Katie Phang: “You have created an echo chamber. Every week the same experts make the rounds with the same anxiety-provoking messages. This leaves listeners with an incomplete picture of the political landscape.”

—Put the phrase “escalation trap” on your radar, and listen to what military expert Robert Pape has to say about how air power has never toppled a regime by itself, and how the result of a foreign power bombing an unpopular regime is to change domestic politics, make everyone more nationalistic, and “fuse the society and regime closer together.” See “Iran and the escalation trap,” CBC radio transcript, March 5, 2026.

End Times

If you remember this mind-blowing video by Michael Wesch from 19 years ago about how the Internet was going to change everything, watch what Claude Opus 4.6 made after researcher asked it to “express what it’s like to be a LLM.”

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In launching an unprovoked attack on Iran along with Israel, President Trump claimed that “Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” Most specifically, he claimed that Iran’s leaders were intent on building nuclear weapons, and that in recent weeks they dithered in negotiations over whether they would give up that goal: ”We tried. They wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. Again they wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it.” Finally, he said, his patience had run out. “They’ve rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore.”

This is a gigantic lie. Last Friday, speaking to Face the Nation, Omani foreign minister Badr bin Hamad Albusaidi, who has been the lead mediator across several rounds of U.S.-Iran nuclear talks, said Iran had agreed to “never, ever have … nuclear material that will create a bomb” and to dilute their enriched uranium into ordinary nuclear fuel. “Iran is willing to grant inspectors from the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency “full access” to its nuclear sites to verify the terms of the deal, said Albusaidi. “There would be zero accumulation, zero stockpiling, and full verification,” he said. Given the risks inherent to war, it certainly was worth testing that proposition. Over the weekend, the Pentagon officials also told congressional staff that there was no intelligence suggesting that Iran was about to attack US forces. So Trump chose to go to war when he clearly didn’t have to.

Whatever happens as this war unfolds, we must not forget that it’s based on pure lies. People talking about the need to free the Iranian people from the reign of the ayatollahs, or the need to get Iran to stop supporting Islamic fundamentalist groups abroad, or the need to dismantle Iran’s nuclear capabilities, are offering dangerous post-facto justifications for a war of choice. They help Trump, our Mad King, in making it appear there are good reasons for him starting this war without authorization from Congress or the UN Security Council and without any clear end-goal or plan. And boy, does he have the best people in charge of running the war, right Pete?

Saturday afternoon, after Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamanei had been killed, Trump wrote on his poorly-named TruthSocial platform: “The heavy and pinpoint bombing, however, will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” Last week, I wrote about the eerie parallels between George Orwell’s “Two Minutes of Hate” and Trump’s State of the Union speech. My only regret about that piece is that I didn’t include a reference to Big Brother’s slogan WAR IS PEACE.

Two: There Will Be Blood, and Blowback

There’s long been a good reason that states generally don’t target the leaders of foreign countries: Doing so legitimizes similar attacks on their own leaders. By killing Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war, Israel and the United States have told the world they don’t care about that norm.

The United Nations Charter also prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, while empowering the Security Council to act against aggressors and to empower individual and collective defense against armed attacks. Unlike America’s wars with Iraq in 1991 and 2003, which were sanctioned by Security Council resolutions and had a “coalition of the willing” array of other states involved, this war has no such legal patina. It is simply “might makes right.”

The Iranian regime is striking back. It has already hit ten countries within range of its missiles and drones. Here in the US we should expect retaliation as well. If and when it comes, we must remember how this started.

Three: Killing a Country’s Leader is not “Regime Change.”

The Iranian regime is a hydra, built to withstand the loss of any one or group of leaders. It’s main source of power is the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which numbers more than 200,000 active forces plus another 300,000 reservists. It controls the country’s armed forces. Whether or not the Islamic Republic of Iran continues to rule through its Supreme National Security Council, the IRGC is what holds the Islamic Republic together. It may well continue to govern the country in the same way that Egypt’s army tightened its grip on power after the Tahrir Square revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak. As we have seen, while there are millions of Iranians who hate the mullahs, dying by the thousands in recent protests, Iran’s street opposition is not coherently organized enough to take power. More likely, Iran is going to start to break apart internally as ethnic and religious minorities assert themselves from regional strongholds. God help us if Trump decides that the US should occupy the country in order to truly achieve “regime change.”

Four: The Trump Presidency Also has Many Heads

Prior to Trump’s reckless decision to attack Iran, the White House was facing severe headwinds blowing from places like the Supreme Court (rejecting his tariffs), Minnesota (repelling the ICE Gestapo led by Greg Bovino), Congress (rejecting most of his budget cuts), and the media (feasting on the Epstein files). Trump was dropping in national polls. Stephen Miller, the architect of the anti-immigrant ethnic cleansing campaign as well as the assault on DEI and the campaign against “drug-traffickers” in Latin and South America, was on his back foot – notably, Miller hasn’t been seen on national cable TV in weeks.

Now there is a different power-nexus guiding Trump’s hand: Son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump crony Steve Witkoff, who have been managing US foreign affairs in the Middle East and Russia and who are deeply (and richly) enmeshed with various Gulf Arab monarchies. To them add Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the tail who wagged the dog. As US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Monday, “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action” and that that would “precipitate an attack against American forces” by Iran. “And we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties … And then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and didn’t act,” Rubio said. House Speaker Mike Johnson said something similar, claiming that the US attack was a “defensive operation” because Israel was going to act on its own “with or without American support.” In other words, the US—which is Israel’s main protector in the world—couldn’t stop its ally from moving on Iran, so it decided to go all in alongside it. What’s one thing that Kushner, Witkoff and Netanyahu all have in common? They’re Jewish. So if and when things start going sour for the US in Iran, watch as the knives come out blaming Israel and the Jews for it.

Five: The Iran War Splits MAGA

Like the metastasizing Epstein scandal, the Trump-Netanyahu war on Iran drives a wedge deep through the populist right. Personally, I’m for anything that makes Trump voters question their love for him and makes them less motivated to vote this fall, so if Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Marjorie Taylor Greene want to criticize his rush to war or call the thing “Operation Epstein Fury” or talk about how he is squandering billions helping Israel blow up the Middle East rather than fund needs at home, I say, “Welcome to the resistance!” But we must be careful what we wish for—if the Iran War leads to terror attacks on American soil, the Tucker Carlsons of the world will become even more explicitly antisemitic than they are now. As the contest to replace Trump in 2028 starts to open inside the GOP, a backlash to the Trump-Netanyahu-Kushner-Witkoff War could make America’s populist right even more dangerous than it already is.

Six: The Iran War Also Divides Democrats

Once again, instead of presenting a united front against Trump’s reckless, illegal and unnecessary war, Democrats are divided. As Corbin Trent wrote this morning on his Substack America’s Undoing in an excellent post titled, “Why is the resistance failing to resist?”:

“When [Reps.] Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna put forward a war powers resolution to stop Trump’s war with Iran, Democratic leadership didn’t whip votes for it. [Minority Leader] Hakeem Jeffries didn’t rally the caucus. Instead, Democrats like [Reps.] Josh Gottheimer and Jared Moskowitz came out against it. Moskowitz called it the ‘Ayatollah Protection Act.’ Gottheimer said it would ‘restrict the flexibility needed’ to respond to threats. These are Democrats. Arguing that the president should have a free hand to bomb whoever he wants whenever he wants.”

Many Democrat electeds are hawks on Iran, but don’t want to say so. And now they’re quietly and cynically enjoying Trump taking on the job of “regime change” there. Trent notes that after Trump announced the attack, Jeffries declared, that Iran “must be aggressively confronted for its human rights violations, nuclear ambitions, support of terrorism and the threat it poses to our allies.” It is not a coincidence that AIPAC, the so-called pro-Israel lobby, is Jeffries’ top contributor over his career in Congress.

Meanwhile, voters who identify as Democrats strongly opposed attacking Iran in polls taken prior to last Friday as well as afterwards. In a CNN poll taken February 28-March 1, 82% percent of Democrats said they disapproved of the decision to take military action. The same split-screen between elites and base undoubtedly exists among Jewish Americans, with all the major leadership organizations, including generally liberal ones, coming out with statements supporting the attack and “praying for its success.”

Seven: Our Job Remains the Same

The broad pro-democracy movement in America has to navigate these shifting winds without losing its focus: Holding free and fair elections this November, getting the votes properly tabulated and the winners certified and seated. We don’t need an antiwar movement as much as we need an antifascism movement. We need representatives who will fight Trump, not appease him.

Certainly, it still matters that Congress vote to invoke the War Powers Act, which would put a 60-day time limit on Trump’s use of American forces without affirmative congressional authorization. That vote is not likely to pass, but it’s still important to get every Member on the record.

Last weekend, Singing Resistance events took place in more than 75 locations around the country. According to a running tally maintained by the group’s organizers, there are now more than 125 Singing Resistance groups across the county. (There will be a national debrief call about this first push on Sunday March 8, sign up here.)

According to the Crowd Counting Consortium, January 2026 saw the greatest number of local protests for any month since the beginning of Trump’s second term. Erica Chenoweth, one of CCC’s lead researchers, said that the 5900 protests tallied for January was only eclipsed by the numbers seen in June 2020 when Black Lives Matter protests exploded after George Floyd’s murder, and in March 2018, when the March for our Lives protests spread across the country.

Chenoweth also noted that, “The movement is extraordinarily disciplined, despite escalatory rhetoric, threats, & violence against the movement, immigrants, and observers. Over 99% of reported protests featured no arrests, 99.8% had no participant injuries or property damage, and 99.9% reported no injuries to law enforcement.”

You want regime change? This is what will bring it.

One Long Read

--Take some time and sit with Lee Drutman’s latest piece for Vox: “US democracy has repaired itself before. Here’s how we can do it again.”

Duly Noted

--Law firms that rejected Trump’s demands for fealty win their fight in court. Shame on the others.

--Fake ICE tip line ensnares kindergarten teacher.

--How high school students are organizing their own massive wave of ICE walkouts.

--The Civic Tech Field Guide is looking to hire a manager. Apply here.

End Times

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“The next moment a hideous, grinding screech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started.”

“The Somali pirates who ransacked Minnesota remind us that there are large parts of the world where bribery, corruption and lawlessness are the norm, not the exception.

Importing these cultures through unrestricted immigration and open borders brings those problems right here to the U.S.A. And it is the American people who pay the price in higher medical bills, car insurance rates, rent, taxes and, perhaps most importantly, crime.

We will take care of this problem. We’re going to take care of this problem. We are not playing games.

….In 2023, a 16-year-old high school cheerleader named Lizbeth Medina was supposed to perform in her town’s Christmas parade. But she never arrived. Her mother, Jacqueline, went home to look for her and she found her lying dead in a bathtub bleeding profusely after being stabbed 25 time.

Lizbeth’s killer was a previously arrested illegal alien who had broken in and bruta — just brutally extinguished the brightest light in her family’s life. Violently and viciously. Her heartbroken mother is in the gallery to remind everyone in this chamber exactly why we are deporting illegal alien criminals from our country at record numbers and we’re getting them the hell out of here fast. We don’t want ‘em.”

“One of the great things about the State of the Union is how it gives Americans the chance to see clearly what their representatives really believe. So tonight I’m inviting every legislator to join with my administration in reaffirming a fundamental principle. If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support. The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens. Not illegal aliens.

Isn’t that a shame? You should be ashamed of yourself, not standing up. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room.”

“Comrades!” cried an eager youthful voice. “Attention, comrades! We have glorious news for you. We have won the battle for production! Returns now completed of the output of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen by no less than twenty percent over the past year. All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us.”

“The stock market is at 53 — all-time record highs since the election. Think of that. One year. Boosting pensions, 401(k)s and retirement accounts with millions and millions of Americans. They’re all gaining. Everybody’s up, way up. In four long years, the last administration got less than $1 trillion in new investment in the United States. And when I say less, substantially less.

In 12 months, I secured commitments for more than $18 trillion, pouring in from all over the globe.

Think of it. Much less than $1 trillion for four years versus much more than $18 trillion for one year. What a difference a president makes.

A short time ago, we were a dead country. Now we are the hottest country anywhere in the world. The hottest.”

“The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters more books, more babies—more of everything except disease, crime and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards.”

“As thousands of new businesses are forming, and factories, plants and laboratories are being built, we’ve added 70,000 new construction jobs in just a very short period of time.

It’s getting bigger and bigger and stronger. Nobody can believe what they’re watching. American oil production is up by more than 600,000 barrels a day, and we just received from our new friend and partner Venezuela more than 80 million barrels of oil.

American natural gas production is at an all-time high because I kept my promise to drill, baby, drill.

More Americans are working today than at any time in the history of our country. Think about that: any time in the history of our country, more working today. And 100 percent of all jobs created under my administration have been in the private sector.”

“In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in the their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen….A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.”

“Moving forward, factories, jobs, investment and trillions and trillions of dollars will continue pouring into the United States of America. Because we finally have a president who puts America first. I put America first. I love America.

For decades, before I came along, we had the exact opposite. From trade to health care, from energy to immigration, everything was stolen and rigged in order to drain the wealth out of the productive and hard-working people who make our country great, who make our country run.

Under Biden and his corrupt partners in Congress and beyond, it reached a breaking point with the “Green New Scam,” open borders for everyone. They poured in by the millions and millions from prisons, from mental institutions. There were murderers, 11,888 murders. They came into our country. You allowed that to happen. And record-setting inflation that cost the typical family $34,000 in just a speck of time.

Now the same people in this chamber who voted for those disasters suddenly use the word “affordability.” A word, they just used it. Somebody gave it to them, knowing full well that they caused and created the increased prices that all of our citizens had to endure. You caused that problem. You caused that problem.

They knew their statements were a lie. They knew it. They knew their statements were a dirty, rotten lie. Their policies created the high prices. Our policies are rapidly ending them.”

“The Hate rose to its climax.”

“That is why I’m also asking you to end deadly sanctuary cities that protect the criminals and enact serious penalties for public officials who block the removal of criminal aliens, in many cases drug lords, murderers all over our country. They’re blocking the removal of these people out of our country and you should be ashamed of yourselves.

And perhaps most importantly, I’m asking you to approve the Save America Act. To stop illegal aliens and others, who are unpermitted persons, from voting in our sacred American elections. The cheating is rampant in our elections. It’s rampant. It’s very simple. All voters must show voter ID.

And the reason they don’t want to do it — why would anybody not want voter ID? One reason: because they want to cheat. There’s only one reason. They make up all excuses. They say it’s racist, they come up with things — you almost say, “What imagination they have.” They want to cheat. They have cheated.

And their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat and we’re going to stop it. We have to stop it, John. We have to stop it.

And here is one more opportunity to show common sense in government. In the gallery tonight are Sage Blair and her mother, Michelle. In 2021, Sage was 14 when school officials in Virginia sought to socially transition her to a new gender, treating her as a boy and hiding it from her parents. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Before long, a confused Sage ran away from home.

After she was found in a horrific situation in Maryland, a left-wing judge refused to return Sage to her parents because they did not immediately state that their daughter was their son. Sage was thrown into an all-boys state home and suffered terribly for a long time. But today all of that is behind them because Sage is a proud and wonderful young woman with a full-ride scholarship to Liberty University. Sage and Michelle, please stand up.

And thank you for your great bravery, and who can believe we’re even speaking about things like this? Fifteen years ago, if someone was up here and said that, they’d say: “What’s wrong with him?” But now we have to say it, because it’s going on all over, numerous states, without even telling the parents.

But surely we can all agree no state can be allowed to rip children from their parents’ arms and transition them to a new gender against the parents’ will. Who would believe that we’re even talking about that? We must ban it, and we must ban it immediately.

Look, nobody stands up. These people are crazy, I’m telling you. They’re crazy.

Amazing. Terrible. Boy, oh boy. We’re lucky we have a country. With people like this — Democrats are destroying our country, but we’ve stopped it just in the nick of time, didn’t we, huh?

“At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmical chant of ‘B-B! [Big Brother]…B-B! …B-B!’ over and over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first “B” and the second—a heavy, murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the backgrou of which one seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. For as much as thirty seconds they kept it up.”

“The reporting of Big Brother’s Order for the Day in the Times of December 3^rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes references to nonexistent persons. Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to higher authority before filing.”

“Epstein Files are Missing Records About Woman Who Made Claim About Trump,” February 26, 2026. “Documents released by the Justice Department briefly mention a woman’s unverified accusation that Donald J. Trump assaulted her in the 1980s, when she was a minor. But several memos related to her account are not in the files.”

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Last week, over the course of two nights, about six thousand people logged into a Zoom seminar to learn how to join Singing Resistance, a grassroots network of local groups showing up in the streets, at faith centers, and outside ICE buildings to sing out against rising authoritarianism. On the weekend of February 28/March 1, we will see the first fruit of their efforts. My gut tells me this could be big.

Why? First, because singing together is something many people already like to do. And it’s self-reinforcing. As musician Brian Eno, who has participated in a weekly a capella group for more than twenty years, has said, singing aloud isn’t just good for your lungs. “There are psychological benefits, too: Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness.”

But even better, Eno told NPR, “…then there are what I would call ‘civilizational benefits.’ When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.”

The second reason why Singing Resistance is going to take off is because its lead organizers are choosing to spread new and simple songs that anyone can learn quickly. At first, as I listened to their trainers sing a few of these songs, I thought – why aren’t they doing to old movement standards, like “We Shall Overcome” or “This Little Light of Mine.” But then the answer was obvious—when older folks who grew up with those songs start with them, younger people feel like they’re at someone else’s nostalgia party. Building a new songbook—one that doesn’t reject the old songs but also doesn’t lead with them—makes it easier for everyone to join as equals.

And you can see that this approach is working, judging from the videos of Singing Resistance events in and around Minneapolis, where the nascent movement first took wing (after an earlier incarnation organizing “Ceasefire Choirs” in response to the carnage in Gaza). Young, middle and old are marching together.

The third reason this is going to spread is because a crowd of a few hundred or thousand people singing together is a vastly more contagious activity than a crowd chanting angry protest slogans and cliches, or a crowd straining to hear what one speaker up front is saying. Beyond turning a crowd into a choir, singing also taps and releases deep emotions, be they grief or love, and builds bonds among strangers.

Group singing also reaches passive listeners at a different register than shouting or jeering. So far, there’s no evidence that any ICE agents have decided to turn in their face masks and quit after being serenaded by a group of Resistance Singers, but it stands to reason that a gentle song promising them that it’s OK to change their minds is going to linger, even if just as an ear-worm, far longer than raucous rants.

Lastly, I think Resistance Singers is going to spread because of how well its organizers set up their training Zooms. In advance of these mass calls, they circulated a well-written toolkit and songbook, and urged expected attendees to not only do the reading in advance, but to make sure they created Signal accounts so they’d be ready by the end. At the end of the meeting, they posted a link to a list of Signal groups, one for each state. In just a few minutes, thousands of people self-sorted. Being from New York, I joined that Signal group, and then watched as a couple hundred people signed in. But then something even more useful happened—after declaring their locations, people started sharing links for more local Signal groups. I saw groups for Brooklyn, Buffalo, Central NY, the Capital District around Albany, Delaware County, Great Neck, Long Island, Mid-Hudson, NYC, and Westchester. Now, instead of being an anonymous mass, people are in small groups who live near each other: the perfect building block for effective action.

The real test will be the weekend after next, which Resistance Singers has called a “nation-wide day of singing actions.” On Instagram, I counted 40 local groups, including Albuquerque, Atlanta, Austin, Bucks County, Charlotte, Chattanooga, Chicago, Chi_NWBurbs, Cincinnati, Corvallis, Decorah, DC, Denver, Evansville, Fort Worth, Grand Rapids, Greensboro, Indianapolis, Ithaca, Knoxville, Madison, Marin, Missoula, Northfield, North NJ, Oklahoma City, Orlando, Olympia, Philadelphia, Portland, Raleigh-Durham, Salt Lake City, Savannah, Seattle, Sioux Falls, Sonoma County, St. Louis, Tacoma, West Michigan Lakeshore, Ypsilanti, and Yuma. Some of them have already held their first public actions, including Chicago and Indianapolis.

And the mashups are coming.

If there’s anything that could stunt the spread of Singing Resistance, it’s the linguistic tics that some of its organizers seem wedded to. Some people love land acknowledgements and the academic verbiage that many college educated radicals use. Others (like me) cringe. But honestly, I don’t think this is likely to matter much, because the songs Singing Resistance is spreading speak louder and better, and because people need a way to channel rage into loving action.

Assuming the February 28/March 1 weekend of action goes well, there’s a lesson here for all the groups currently holding mass Zoom calls. If you are gathering thousands or tens of thousands of people on a call and then NOT offering them a way to find their nearby neighbors by the end of the meeting, you’re leaving power on the table untapped. (You know who you are; I’m being kind not pointing fingers.)

Related Reading

—Paul Engler, “Why Movements Need to Start Singing Again,” In These Times, January 4, 2023.

—Garrett Bucks, “Seven reasons why hosting a silly little potluck (or game night, or porch hang, or book club, or group hike) is essential to defeating fascism,” The White Pages, February 3, 2026.

—Dakota Hall, “The Fun Deficit: Why the left keeps losing young people before they even show up,” The Ground Game, February 4, 2026.

End Times

Now, imagine if this guy joins in.

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About 500 seniors live at Sinai Residences in Boca Raton, Florida, including many Holocaust survivors. Recently, some of them asked if they could hide the building’s Haitian staff in their apartments.

“That reminds me of Anne Frank,” Rachel Blumberg, president and CEO of the center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “There’s a kindred bond between our residents being Jewish and seeing the place that the Haitians have gone through.”

Residents of Sinai have mounted a letter-writing campaign on behalf of their Haitian caregivers; nearly ten percent of the facility’s 450 staffers are Haitians on the verge of losing their temporary protected status. Some residents were also attending a weekend protest against ICE at a local Home Depot.

I read that article and I immediately thought of a statement made by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from last week, which it put out after Minnesota Governor Tim Walz stated that children in his state were “hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside,” Walz said. “Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.”

In response, the Museum posted on X:

“Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges.”

Walz, to his credit, has not backed down one inch. When NPR’s Juana Summers asked Walz Friday about his describing ICE as “Trump’s modern-day Gestapo” (something, she noted, that Attorney General Pam Bondi has criticized him personally for), Walz said, “I have to use the English language to describe what I’m seeing. And in America, there are very little analogous descriptions I can give to what we’re seeing. So, I’m using what I have in my vocabulary to describe what I see, and I think everybody who woke up Saturday morning and witnessed that probably would come up to the same conclusion.”

Walz’s whole interview with NPR is quite something to listen to or read. You can hear, just beneath the surface, both his fury and his fear that we are now deep in dangerous territory. As he says in his concluding remarks, “It’s much each to hold a democracy than to try and get one back.” I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the past week is when Americans en masse finally started to recognize that we’re on Earth Two, battling a fascist takeover.

The seniors at the Sinai Residences in Boca Raton understand that, which is why the CEO of the facility is citing Anne Frank. Good for her. But is she trivializing the Holocaust or making a false equivalency? Until late this Monday, 350,000 Haitians living in the US because it is too dangerous back home were on the verge of losing their protected refugee status for no other reason than the White House hates Haitians. Only a last-minute court order stopped that from happening.

The Uses of Memory

Back to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. I used to think of the museum as one of the most honest places in Washington, mainly because its permanent exhibit includes a searing section examining how Americans responded to the rise of Naziism and how FDR failed, with clear knowledge of Hitler’s Final Solution, to do more to save the Jews of Europe.

My view of the Museum’s honesty started to falter nine years ago. I was in Washington for a meeting of the Civic Collaboratory, a long running network curated by Eric Liu of Citizen University. It was January 27, Holocaust Memorial Day, a week after Trump’s first inauguration, and the gathering—which was by invitation-only and not open to the public—was being hosted by the Holocaust Museum. In addition to a private tour of the museum, attendees also got an advance look at a new exhibit that museum staff were finalizing on “Americans and the Holocaust.”

As they walked us through a Powerpoint presentation of the planned exhibit, one slide jumped out at me. I quickly took a picture and posted it to Twitter with a note mentioning the forthcoming exhibit. It was Holocaust Memorial Day, after all.

Not long afterward during the meeting, I was approached by a museum staffer who politely but rather firmly demanded that I delete the tweet because we were in a private meeting and the slides weren’t meant to be public. I don’t remember the details of our conversation, but I believe we compromised – I offered to remove any reference to the Museum (though I really did want to give it credit for having surfaced that quote with its eerie echoes of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric). They relented and the tweet stayed up, sans credit. I figured the quote would eventually get attention when the exhibit opened a year later.

But here’s the thing. It didn’t. The quote had disappeared down Orwell’s memory hole.

The Museum’s exhibit on Americans and the Holocaust (which is still online here) didn’t shy away from reminding visitors that in November 1938, after the news of the SS’s Kristallnacht attacks had reached most Americans, public opinion in the US was not very sympathetic. While 94% of Americans disapproved of “the Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany,” only 21% said agreed we should allow “a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany” into the US. Seventy-one percent said no. The rise of the “America First” committee, which elevated antisemite Charles Lindbergh to national prominence, also gets noted by the Museum’s exhibit. But Senator Robert Reynolds’ bold and disgusting racism, expressed three years later in words strikingly similar to Trump’s was nowhere to be found.

Back in 2017, Sarah Wildman wrote a wonderful article in Vox about Reynolds, cataloging his racism and isolationism in greater detail. She noted that in the same Senate speech where he vowed to build a wall to keep aliens and refugees out, he also declared that:

“I believe we must rid our country of the alien enemies who are now here, and put up the bars so that from now on no alien of any nationality upon the face of the earth will be permitted to enter the United States...

I say we should stop — and stop now — the refugees who are seeping into this country by the thousands every single month to take the jobs which rightly belong to the native-born and naturalized citizens of the United States.”

What do they say about history repeating, and how we have to learn from the past?

In 2017, the Holocaust Museum still seemed to have a moral spine. After the Trump White House managed to mark the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day without mentioning the six million Jews murdered, drawing strong criticism (including from Republican Jewish groups and the Anti-Defamation League), the Museum deliberately put out a statement reminding everyone of the obvious fact that “The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. Nazi ideology cast the world as a racial struggle, and the singular focus on the total destruction of every Jewish person was at its racist core. Millions of other innocent civilians were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis, but the elimination of Jews was central to Nazi policy.”

Back then, I remember Mike Godwin, the first staff counsel at EFF and the author of Godwin’s Law – which states that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1” – opining that for the years of Trump he was suspending his admonition against making Nazi analogies for current events. “If you’re thoughtful and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler or Nazis when you talk about Trump. Or any other politician,” he wrote.

But to heap irony on outrage, get this.

Last week, Godwin shared on his public Facebook page that the Holocaust Museum had removed an interview with him from its website. It was, he wrote, “an interview I gave to USHMM in 2011. It had been public on their website for far more than a decade as part of their Voices on Anti-Semitism series--I was interviewed about Godwin’s Law, of course.”

What did he say that could be so controversial? Notably, Godwin’s Law is about trying to avoid making spurious comparisons to the Hitler or the Nazis. As Godwin explained in his now-disappeared interview (which, thanks to the Internet Archive, is still available), as he observed the early days of Internet culture back in 1990, he saw that “heated debates tended to proceed in predictable ways, with escalating rhetoric, so that, when you wanted to call someone the worst thing you could call them, you said, ‘They’re like Hitler’ or ‘They’re like Nazis’ or ‘This is like the Holocaust.’”

He wanted to “make people more thoughtful” without simply yelling back at them to stop. “Here in the modern era, we fancy that we have civilized ourselves to a pretty high degree,” he noted, in words that now the Holocaust Museum doesn’t want you to hear or read. “And yet, within living memory, we have this historical period where people acted even worse. And I wanted to not necessarily promote Holocaust exceptionalism, but I really want make people aware of the gravity of the comparisons that they were making.”

Now all that remains is a link to Godwin’s name.[1] And the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has become another debased player in Donald Trump’s Washington.

All Trump Touches Turns to Shit

Last spring, the White House removed five newly-named board members who had been appointed by Joe Biden, including Douglas Emhoff, the Jewish husband of Kamala Harris. At the time, Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, criticized the move, saying that removing them before the end of their terms and without any apparent explanation “risks politicizing a vital institution” and urged that “it remain[] nonpartisan.”

Weeks later, Trump named replacement members, including Siggy Flicker, a star of the Real Housewives of New Jersey, whose stepson was charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Another nominee was talk radio host Sid Rosenberg, who declared at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in the fall of 2024 that Hillary Clinton was “some sick bastard [and] a sick son of a bitch. The whole fucking party [are] a bunch of degenerates…Jew-haters and lowlifes, every one of them.” A year ago, another one of Trump’s nominees, Martin Oliner, endorsed the president’s plan to rid Gaza of all its Palestinians, writing in the Jerusalem Post that the Gazan people “are fundamentally evil, and they must pay a price for their actions.” Other Trump appointees to the museum board include Robert Garson, a lawyer representing Trump in his suit against Bob Woodward for using recordings of interviews the journalist made with the president; Tila Falic Levi, the daughter of billionaire Simon Falic, a close friend and benefactor of Benjamin Netanyahu; Barbara S. Feingold, a close ally of Rep. Randy Fine, who is perhaps Congress’ most racist member. I have not seen a post from Jonathan Greenblatt complaining about the board’s politicization.

And last week, on International Holocaust Memorial Day, Vice President J.D. Vance, whose heated and false rhetoric about Haitians in Ohio was cheered by neo-Nazi groups, and which, as Timothy Snyder noted Sunday, helped set the stage for the regime’s push to deny their protected refugee status, issued a statement marking the day with, as in 2017, no mention was made of Jews or Nazis, just to “millions of lives lost.” As the Jerusalem Post editorialized, “…The minimum standard on January 27 is uncomplicated: Name the victims and name the perpetrators.”

This time the US Holocaust Memorial Museum did not complain about Vance’s omission. Nor did the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt say a word.

The View From Afar

For those of us who pay attention to the ongoing debate about tactics and strategy, mobilizing and organizing, Charles Duhigg’s 6,000 word essay in the January 26 edition of The New Yorker titled “What MAGA Can Teach Democrats About Organizing—And Infighting” is a must-read. Duhigg, who is not a political journalist but more of a Malcolm Gladwell-style student of human behavior, offers some fresh insights about how different models of issue-based activism can emerge and take hold across the great American berserk. His comparison of DARE, a top-down anti-drug effort invented and popularized by the Los Angeles police department and school district, and MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), a bottom-up civic push for tougher drunk-driving laws, nicely illustrates some of the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches. Most important, he credits MADD’s more chaotic approach of enabling lots of local chapters to form with its much greater level of success and longevity.

But when Duhigg’s turns that same lens on today’s largescale political movements, his article starts to suffer severely from what one of my intellectual godfathers, Lawrence Goodwyn, called “the view from afar.” Take this sentence, which somehow passed muster with The New Yorker’s vaunted factcheckers: “Today’s Democratic Party is great at mobilizing: it can propel people into the streets with big marches, raise billions of dollars for national candidates, and get liberals to bombard congressional offices with letters and phone calls,” Duhigg writes. In fact, today’s Democratic party only does one of these three things. It does not organize big marches or get liberals to call their congressional representatives. Hello?

That said, Duhigg is right to emphasize how much Barack Obama’s 2008 emphasized recruiting and empowering local supporters to organize their own precincts, and it’s useful as well to learn from his reporting how rightwing organizers like Ralph Reed understood the danger of that model and responded in kind. It’s not a new discovery, but he notes, “When a conservative activist on a college campus volunteers to create a chapter of Turning Point USA, a youth-oriented group founded by a Tea Party crusader, Bill Montgomery, and the Christian activist Charlie Kirk, they are often told to read a book called ‘Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America,’ to learn how to organize (but nothing else). These volunteers are then mostly left to find their own way.”

By comparison, Duhigg claims that instead of building similar local infrastructure, “The left has turned to a “to a different strategy. It’s become largely focused on creating spectacles, such as the No Kings protests, that can mobilize large numbers of people at breakneck speed to march, sign petitions, and contribute money. But much of the energy fizzles away once the protest or the election is over.” This is where he loses the thread.

Citing Theda Skocpol’s 2021 study of Indivisible, he claims that the group essentially followed the DARE model, raising millions in its early days, which he then suggests resulted in “thousands of Indivisible chapters.” Actually, that was because Indivisible was a hybrid, and the local chapters all appeared because they were free to adopt the “franchise” offered by the Indivisible Guide and, like MADD activists, set up their own shops.

Longtime readers of The Connector know that I, like Skocpol, was critical of Indivisible National in its early years for soaking up too much of the money that flowed its way and building up too much of a DC-centric structure and staff. But this is old news, and shame on Skocpol for continuing to repeat to Duhigg her now out-of-date conclusion that Indivisible represents “a tragic lost opportunity.” She and he are both wrong.

The truth is more complicated and far less gloomy. Unlike other organizations that have suffered from rapid leadership turnover, Indivisible National is still steered by its co-founders Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg. But they are learners and they have learned from their early missteps. The Indivisible movement did shrink somewhat after its first few years as some chapters chafed against National’s bureaucracy, and it shrank further after COVID hit and then Biden won the 2020 election. Liberal-leaning movements always lose active support when they think a “good guy” is in the White House.

But since 2024, Indivisible is on a major rebound, back up to around 2,600 local chapters with about 1,500 of them newly founded as a result of Trump’s re-election. This time around, Levin and Greenberg aren’t bulking up on a DC staff—I’ve heard that while they raised somewhere in the range of $25 million in 2025 to their mix of c3, c4 and PAC organizations, millions has flowed back to local groups through a sharing program that funds all kinds of useful local needs. Levin and Greenberg hold weekly open Zoom calls that anyone can attend where they discuss current strategy and field top-voted questions from the audience, which is usually around 5,000-6,000 and sometimes double that or more. And along with other partner organizations like MoveOn and the Working Families Party, Levin and Greenberg have played a key role in movement strategizing, filling a critical gap. It was their initiative in February of 2025 that gave grassroots activists their first focus, on Senate Democrats caving in to Trump’s initial budget moves, and their initiative that galvanized the giant Hands Off and No Kings rallies of April, June and October. Those record-breaking events have been critical to breaking the narrative of Trump’s overwhelming dominance, showing lots of bystanders that they don’t have to bend the knee even as many elites cave to him.

But none of this appears to be of interest to Duhigg, who wants to make a different and less arguable point: that some leftists are too purist and rejecting of newcomers, unlike the MAGA and evangelical right. It’s true, but it’s also not a fair description of today’s Indivisibles, who are generally quite pragmatic and non-purist. But his failure to do any visible reporting on what today’s anti-Trump movements are like leads him to another round of out-of-date discoveries. Yes, as the very smart sociologist Liz McKenna of Harvard tells him, “Trump rallies are fun. The Turning Point campus debates are fun.” He adds, “For a long time, [McKenna] said, the left was less fun and more angry, ‘and so the right was out-organizing them at every turn.’” But what about now? If Duhigg had bothered to venture out to a #TeslaTakedown protest or a Visibility Brigade overpass action, he’d discover that progressives are having a blast, cranking up music and dancing while making sure their neighbors know democracy has a constituency.

Duhigg ends his New Yorker piece offering miniprofiles of power-building groups like Down Home North Carolina, ISAIAH in Minnesota, and Hoosier Action in Indiana, and he’s right to lift up their models as examples of the kind of year-round, community-centered organizing based in working class areas that we desperately need more of. If Indivisible could do anything better, I’d say it would be to offer its grassroots organizers spread across the country more robust ways of learning how to do that kind of work as well as more support for knitting their local chapters into state-based tables. But it’s a work in progress—something Duhigg didn’t bother to report.

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Notes on the Defiance

--Young people are now showing up in rapidly increasing numbers among the ranks of the Defiance. Dozens of high schools had walkouts last Friday, from Ashland, Oregon to Waco, Texas. And it isn’t just the “political” kids. We were watching a nephew who is in college play at an Ultimate Frisbee tournament in Florida on Sunday; the team he was playing against was from Carleton College in Minnesota. Every player was wearing an “ICE OUT” shirt over his jersey. Or worse!

--According to Mike Elk’s Payday Report, businesses and schools shut down in more than 120 cities last Friday.

--Local protests against planned ICE concentration camps have spread to more locations, Sophie Alexander and Fola Akinnibi report for Bloomberg. While ICE pushes ahead to purchase warehouses it plans to turn into detention centers, they report that “As the political pressure intensifies, some deals are collapsing.”

--A group of women at the giant Camp East Montana in West Texas have told Newsweek of “unsanitary, overcrowded and restrictive conditions inside a tent complex with no natural light, limited medical care, and frequent confrontations with guards.” “

--A new tactic gaining momentum: Putting pressure on local hotels to stop housing ICE. Learn more at NoHousingForIce.com.

--The rightwing claim that Minneapolis’s anti-ICE organizing is all professionally driven and “not organic” has now surfaced in City Journal, a conservative policy magazine. Investigative reporter Christina Buttons joined a local ICE Watch Signal group and now writes that the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti was due to “a model that places untrained civilians in the middle of high-stakes federal operations.”

In Other News

--Continuing the debate about whether Democratic candidates win if they are more moderate, Brian Beutler argues (gift link) that the reason Taylor Rehmet won the special election in a red state senate district in Texas over the weekend is not because he focused on kitchen-table issues that reached middle-of-the-road voters, but because he’s riding “a wave of backlash to Republican over-reach.”

--The Israel Defense Forces have now accepted the estimate of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry that approximately 71,000 Palestinians were killed during the Israel-Gaza war, noting that the number does not include missing residents who are potentially buried under rubble,” Ha’aretz reported on January 29. I am now waiting for the “pro-Israel” chorus to condemn the IDF as anti-semitic for saying that the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s numbers are credible.

[1] Well, actually, you can still find a links to his interview in Spanish, Arabic, and Farsi buried on the USHMM website, leading him to note, “It’s one thing that they tried to erase me. It’s another that they’re so dumb about it.”

End Times

This kind of sums everything up.

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Back in mid-December, Greg Sargent of The New Republic offered the best analysis I’ve seen of what Stephen Miller, our de-facto domestic commander-in-chief, is doing to America with his deranged anti-immigration crusade. Because Miller sees non-white immigrants as the central threat to American civilization, he not only wants to stop all such people from coming to the US, he wants to push out as many as possible. “If you import the Third World, you become the Third World,” Miller has said. (White South Africans and rightwingers from East Europe are instead, most welcome.) Sargent wrote:

Miller’s obsession with sheer numbers—the amounts of various categories of immigrants who are either in the United States or trying to get here—borders on pathological. Take his handling of undocumented immigrants. Miller has repeatedly raged at Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials for arrest numbers he deems too low. Since the summer, arrests have hovered at around 1,000 daily. But he’s demanding 3,000 arrests per day, a pace of about one million people per year. To that end, The New York Times reports, the administration has already shifted thousands of federal law enforcement personnel into deportations, hampering critical efforts to combat serious crimes like child and drug trafficking. What’s more, ICE itself is arresting a lot of undocumented immigrants who are not dangerous criminals, diverting resources away from arresting the latter.

Here’s the thing: Miller’s mission of boosting deportation numbers of necessity requires arresting people who are not criminals or gang members—people who have jobs and have become integrated into U.S. communities—because there’s no other way to get the removals up. But it makes us less safe. Miller plainly places more importance on reducing the totals of people here—or trying to get here—than on removing people who pose any actual danger. He appears to be actively prioritizing shifting the ethnic mix of the country over public safety.

There’s a cleaner phrase to describe this policy: ethnic cleansing. But what Miller wants is also forcing another horror to materialize. Again quoting Sargent:

He has set in motion a vicious math problem: His deportation machinery is arresting people faster than they are being removed. To hold them, he’s now looking to build out a network of vast warehouses. We’re going to end up with a massively expanded immigrant carceral state at an enormous cost to all of us, both in taxpayer dollars and in the searing social conflict that Miller’s masked storm troopers have unleashed on the streets of U.S. cities.

As I wrote two weeks ago, this massively expanded immigrant carceral state also can be described by a cleaner phrase: concentration camps. And the $75 billion that Congress appropriated last year as part of the “Big Ugly Bill” to vastly increase ICE’s annual budget over the next four years is intended to be spent on this demented, awful scheme.

Fortunately, for a lot of us, if not our so-called leaders in Congress and elite institutions, this is not OK.

What Happens When People Get Organized

Monday, I heard a Minnesota labor leader on a private call explain why what has been happening there is so much worse than prior ICE assaults on Los Angeles, Washington DC, or Chicago. It isn’t just ICE agents on the prowl—almost half the DEA, Border Patrol and the Bureau of Federal Prisons are also on the ground; together they vastly outnumber the local Minneapolis police. The volume of calls to 911 from residents reporting brutality by these agents are overwhelming operators. And the level of violence being inflicted on this relatively small city can be summed up with one simple fact: two-thirds of the homicides in Minneapolis so far this year have been committed by ICE.

This is producing tremendous strains in the state’s social fabric. Even “normal” parts of the carceral state in Minnesota are publicly distancing themselves from the whole federal attack. Sunday, Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara went on Face the Nation to declare “people have had enough” after Alex Pretti’s killing. He added, “The Minneapolis Police Department went the entire year last year, recovering about 900 guns from the street, arresting hundreds and hundreds of violent offenders, and we didn’t shoot anyone. And now this is the second American citizen that’s been killed, it’s the third shooting within three weeks.” And after weeks of being disparaged by federal officials, the Minnesota Department of Corrections launched a new website to combat what it called “ongoing misinformation” from the Department of Homeland Security about its operations.

After a year where Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” strategy seemed to be working, since there were too many outrages to keep track of and respond to, the revved-up federal assault on Minnesota has backfired, with 82% of Americans saying they had seen a video of Renee Good’s shooting. And many are getting off their couches to protest. Of course, that was already happening, as the millions who marched across more than 2,700 locations in October for No Kings II showed. But here’s what’s new and encouraging -- beyond the heart of the fightback in Minnesota – more young people are showing up in the streets alongside the Boomers and Gen Xers who’ve been the backbone of the Defiance to date.

High schoolers have started daytime walkouts again, a tactic that became quite widespread after the mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida eight years ago. On January 20, as part of the “Free America Walkout” promoted by the Women’s March, kids in San Diego, Carmel and Bakersfield (CA), Sioux City (IA), Topeka (KS), San Antonio and Tyler (TX), Decatur (GA), Oak Park (IL), and across Loudon County (VA)—not to mention many schools in Minnesota—walked out to protest ICE. The next day, students at eight high schools across Las Vegas (NV) walked out (see below), as did kids at three schools in Merced (CA). And this trend is spreading. On January 22, highschoolers in Cleveland held a district-wide walkout despite the frigid weather. On January 23, there was a huge walkout at Meadowcreek High School in Norcross (GA) while students across Decatur County in a different corner of the Peach State also walked out. Yesterday, kids in Chandler (AZ) walked out.

A speech by one student at Oak Park River Forest High School, a suburb of Chicago, caught my attention. Senior Grace Zoloto didn’t just focus on ICE; she also went after how Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has talked about autism.

“Hello. My name is Grace, and I’m autistic,” Zoloto began her nearly seven-minute typed out speech. “I’m also a lot of other things. I’m an artist, a writer, a poet, an activist, and a big sister. I like dystopian fiction, long car rides and cookie dough ice cream. I don’t like horror movies, loud noises or fascist imperial governments taking aim at our most precious rights and liberties.”

Zoloto pushed back on RFK’s describing autism as a dire condition that prevents children with the condition from having a meaningful future or the ability to participate in society.

“Autism looks different in all of us and affects all of us differently,” Zoloto said. “Some cannot speak, some speak more than necessary. Some cannot move through their lives without constant support, and others blend fairly well into the general public. We are your next door neighbors, your classmates, and your teachers. We are all different, all incredible, and none of us are broken, diseased, or a burden to be eliminated.”

Take note: There’s an intersectional response to the Trump-Miller-Kennedy program of stigmatizing, marginalizing and terrorizing groups that they deem lesser—and it will resonate.

On the General Strike

From an organizing perspective, the most important development of the past week was the general strike in Minneapolis on Friday (which was itself backed by smaller sister rallies in 300 cities around the US). About one thousand businesses participated, and more than 50,000 people marched in sub-zero temperatures, a massive rebuke to ICE and the Trump administration. This kind of mass coordinated regional action could not have happened if thousands of Minnesotans hadn’t already spent the last ten years in deep and thick relationship-building across a network of faith organizations, labor unions and community groups. As Sarah Jaffe, one of the best reporters we have on movement organizing, wrote for The New Republic, while the strike call came from the grassroots, it was “endorsed by dozens of labor and community organizations, including the Minneapolis and St. Paul Regional Labor Federations; the North East Area Labor Council; the Minneapolis Federation of Educators; the St. Paul Federation of Educators; the Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha, or CTUL; Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1005; SEIU Local 26; Inquilinxs Unidxs por Justicia, or United Renters for Justice (IX); the New Justice Project, or NJP; Unidos MN; and UNITE HERE Local 17.”

Just as important, Jaffe notes, “Some 80 different groups, according to Todd Dahlstrom, the director of organizing and growth at the Minnesota AFL-CIO, ‘have come together under the banner of the Democracy Defense Table.’ They’ve been coordinating rapid-response teams and recruiting new people to the struggle, watching as those people deliver food to their neighbors or drive them to work or volunteer to track ICE vehicles throughout the city to raise the alarm. Dahlstrom admits that he was afraid the movement would stall after Good was killed; if anything, it added fuel to the fire: “Four times as many people signed up for these nonviolent direct action trainings here in the Twin Cities, in St. Cloud, up in Duluth. We’ve trained over 1,200 people over the past six weeks.”

This is what happens when you invest time and money in year-round organizing.

The effects of all that hard work in Minnesota are now spreading back out nationally. For example, the arrival of several hundred faith leaders from around the country last Thursday to bolster the local ICE watch efforts is likely to produce spillover effects not unlike what people who went south for Mississippi Summer did when they went back home. As Jack Jenkins reports for Religion News, for many participants it was a deeply eye-opening experience. He writes, “For the Rev. James Galasinski, who leads a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Canton, New York, it was only a few minutes after he arrived at his designated neighborhood before he and two of his clergy colleagues encountered ICE agents [as they harassed some women outside a shopping mall]. ‘I’m becoming radicalized,’ Galasinski said, his voice rising. “I’m seeing our nation become more and more fascist before my eyes — I saw it. I saw it. I mean, demanding papers? I never thought I would live in a country like this.’”

This is all deeply unsettling to hard-core MAGA, because they’ve been told that Trump and his whole project is more popular than it is, and that whatever opposition they have been seeing is only coming from people paid by the likes of George Soros to demonstrate. As I write, this reaction is manifesting not just in the behavior and statements of ICE agents on the ground in Minnesota and the claims of people like Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem. It’s also spreading as something a few rightwing activists are calling “SignalGate.” That is, they’ve discovered that community activists and volunteers in the Twin Cities have been using Signal to build their neighborhood watches, which they claim are actually coordinated by higher-ups in the state Democratic establishment. MAGA diehards have also decided that the hundreds of thousands of dollars flowing into “Stand With Minnesota” offer a secret path to understanding how devious and unrepresentative the anti-ICE left is.

In this mirror universe, it’s the left who is gaslighting the public with claims that Renee Good and Alex Pretti were just innocent bystanders, while the right asserts that they were “trained anti-ICE agitators.” Their evidence? A lot of it comes from Cam Higby, a former social media manager for BarStool Sports, who is now one of the White House’s pool of “independent journalists” honored with press passes. PJ Media’s Matt Margolis writes, “Cam Higby from Newsmax spent days undercover inside the Signal messaging groups these activists use to coordinate their efforts. What he found was stunning in its sophistication. These aren’t just angry citizens showing up to protest. This is a well-oiled machine running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” Among his discoveries, Higby has found that “the protestors use a ‘mutual aid’ system” built on big Signal chat groups. The horror, the horror!

But wait, there’s more! As Margolis summarizes, “The groups use emojis next to members’ names to denote specific roles. You’ve got mobile patrols driving around searching for federal vehicles. Foot patrols are working the streets. Dispatchers are running constant calls directing people where ICE has been spotted and how best to interfere with their operations. License plate checkers maintain databases of known federal vehicles. Even medics are standing by. They’re running shift changes, clocking in and out, just like any organized operation. All to stop the enforcement of federal immigration laws. Each area of Minneapolis has its own group chat, with the city carved up into patrol zones that tell activists exactly where to operate. The chats max out at 1,000 members by midday and get deleted and recreated daily to avoid detection.” Higby’s X thread about all this had gotten more than 21 million views, as of Monday night.

Someone going by the X handle of “DataRepublican (small r)” has gone further, claiming to have discovered, via Higby’s research, a file that lists all the donors to Stand with Minnesota, a grassroots directory that has been steering money to an array of worthy local organizations. The list of donors, in fact, isn’t a secret, because Stand with Minnesota uses a donation platform called Chuffed (similar to GoFundMe) which lists donors and the amounts they gave. But DataRepublican wants their readers to join in a digital witchhunt to figure out who all these donors are, convinced that they’ve found the motherlode that would prove the anti-ICE movement is all astro-turf. This would all be funny, except for the fact that FBI director Kash Patel announced Monday that he had opened an investigation into the Signal group texts that Minnesotans have been using.

The Politics of Stopping ICE

What has been organized in Minnesota in response to ICE’s ethnic cleansing campaign also presents a major challenge to self-styled centrist Democrats. It was just two weeks ago, after the murder of Renee Good, that the Searchlight Institute rushed out a memo written by Blas Nunez-Neto, a senior policy fellow, urging Democrats to avoid calling to “Abolish ICE” and instead seek to “rebuild ICE based on two concepts: Reform and Retrain.”

From the standpoint of political messaging alone, Nunez-Neto had a point. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, “defund the police” was understood by too many people to mean starving police departments of all resources, not reforming them and reallocating funds to community safety. If Democrats aren’t careful now, “Abolish ICE” could backfire in a similar way, he argued. “Unless you truly believe that the United States should not have an agency that enforces immigration and customs laws within our borders, and you want to increase illegal immigration, you should not say you want to abolish ICE,” Nunez-Neto wrote. ICE, he says, should be “rightsized,” with the agency refocused on its core mission and “remaining One Big Beautiful Act funding…spent on core law enforcement functions, not immigration theater,” he concluded. There was no mention in Nunez-Neto’s memo of demanding that the architects of the ICE Gestapo be fired, or that the giant increase in ICE’s annual budget be rolled back. Adam Jentleson, Searchlight’s founder, doubled-down on this approach with a Substack post a few days ago, titled “Play hardball on ICE.”

That Searchlight memo has clearly been read in the offices of Senate Democrats, who are dealing with intense demands from grassroots activists that they block any new funding for ICE and impeach and remove DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, for starters. Today, as the uproar over Pretti’s murder crests, there are signs that they are instead going for a package that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called “restrain, reform and restrict ICE.” (I’m not sure why Grandpa Chuck needed to use both restrain and restrict, so maybe he meant to say, retrain.) The Department of Homeland Security would be required to cooperate with state investigations (like the ones it’s currently obstructing in Minnesota), the Customs and Border Patrol force would be required to stay at the border, ICE agents would be required to get judicial warrants for arrests, show IDs and wear bodycams, and ICE would stay out of churches and schools.

“That package unites a lot of Dems,” Senator Chris Murphy told Greg Sargent on his podcast today. “Of course, it requires Republicans to agree with us, but I think when people see what we’re asking for, they’ll see that it’s reasonable. It really is simply about getting ICE back to obeying the law.” But here’s the problem with adopting this approach: it fundamentally misunderstands and lets stand Stephen Miller’s project of ethnic cleansing, which the entire Republican party has been backing since day one.

If Senate Democrats use this package to justify voting for more DHS funding, there will be no clawback of the whopping $75 billion in extra funding ICE was granted through 2029 in the Big Bad Bill. People like Noem and Miller, who both called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” immediately after his murder, will face no accountability. Gregory Bovino will still lead Customs and Border Patrol, even if he has been reassigned away from Minnesota. There will be no transparency into what is going on inside ICE’s teeming camps, which keep refusing Members of Congress any right of entry to inspect them. Nor will we find out if DHS is building a database of “domestic terrorists” made up of civilians who have done nothing more than hold up a camera or blow a whistle when ICE visited their neighborhood, or why the DHS social media arm keeps posting the modern equivalent of Nazi propaganda. (If you’re an activist, you should be calling your Senators demanding they reject this compromise.)

The larger reality is that most Democrats in Congress are still operating as if we are on Earth One, a place where the government follows the rules and checks and balances hold, and where the smart move in politics is to chase “the median voter” and aim to “look reasonable” and stick to “kitchen table” issues rather than engage in a fight over an issue like immigration. Earth Two, the place where we are, where the government defends state agents who murder innocent civilians in broad daylight and prosecutes their family members and friends under suspicion of being “domestic terrorists,” is too hard a reality for them to face. (Another useful way of thinking about this is Ernst Fraenkel’s concept of the “dual state,” which is ably described by David French here and here.)

But getting the only opposition party we have to behave like one means doubling down on the kind of organizing that has made the Minnesota Defiance so strong, and abandoning the conventional wisdom so prevalent among Democrats that the reason we are facing the rise of fascism in America is because the left got too strong and “too woke.” Just last week, at a DC conference put together by the Democracy Journal that sought to find common ground between centrist and progressive Dems, I heard Jentleson, the founder of the Searchlight Institute, still bashing “the groups” for supposedly causing Democrats to lose elections. “Instead of just working on policy,” he declared, “we’ve got advocacy groups that sort of taken on this role as political actors, and it’s led us to very bad places. It’s caused Democrats to take positions that are far outside the mainstream of the American people, and has contributed to them losing elections and feeding the reactionary backlash that has helped Trump get back into power and the rise of fascism.”

So, faced with the rise of fascism and ethnic cleansing, what centrists like Jentleson want is for groups committed to fighting it to settle for reforming it—a recipe for yet another collapse of support for Democrats among their fired-up base when November’s crucial elections occur. I don’t think so.

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Related:

—My friend Lee Drutman has written a smart post on how Minneapolis may represent a turning point that could set off a real collapse in Republican support for Trump; or not. Worth a read.

—See also this thread collected by Charlie Warzel showing how various influencer accounts and sub-Reddits devoted to “normie” topics like golfing, catbongos, gravestones of New England, quilting, rock-climbing, duck painting, and bourbon are all posting condemnations of ICE and receiving massive votes of support. This kind of thing is only going to get more important as TikTok’s new owners crackdown on posts critical of Trump.

--More signs that ICE’s plans to build more concentration camps is running into a buzzsaw of local opposition: In Dallas, clergy and supports of the Clergy League for Emergency Action and Response gathered January 23 to speak out against a proposed detention center in nearby Hutchins, Texas.

Unrelated:

The good folks at The All American have posted my essay called “Time for a New Synthesis” from their Out of Many, One anthology. Though I wrote it last summer, I think it still holds up pretty well. Yikes!

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Why do so many Democratic officeholders, candidates and political operatives keep following the same playbook, the one that says that if they want to win elections they have to raise tons of money, spend nearly all of it on targeted media, and appeal to middle-of-the-road voters by distancing themselves from liberal or left-wing positions, while saying nothing about the danger of rising fascism or elections in 2026 that may be neither free nor fair?

Why, for example, in this moment of deepening national crisis, with a major American city under violent attack by federal agents who have been told by their masters that they have absolute immunity from prosecution, and that city crying out for support as it prepares to stage a General Strike on Friday, are many Democrats saying little or, worse, pre-emptively advising their colleagues to reject the slogan “Abolish ICE” in favor of softer phrasing like “reform and retrain ICE”?

I don’t have the whole answer, and some part of it undoubtedly is explained by some combination of the age-old adage of “where you sit determines where you stand,” along with Upton Sinclair’s quip that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” If you’re a campaign manager or an elected representative, or someone who those people hire to help win elections, of course you’re going to keep applying expertise earned from past experience to the next election—even if we are no longer living in a normal, functional democracy. And if you’ve come up to your level of prominence by being good at writing, testing, producing and placing paid political ads, why wouldn’t you keep telling people that paid media is the most important tool in a candidate’s toolbox?

Still, it’s a bit startling to discover that there really is an actual written playbook that expresses the sum knowledge of today’s top Democratic political operatives, and that a new generation of campaign managers and candidates is being trained on it. I’m referring to something called the W.A.R. Room book, a 212-page manual that was recently leaked to me by a trustworthy source. It is primarily written by Aaron Strauss, Future Forward’s program director[1], in collaboration with a coterie of experts[2] drawn largely from the upper ranks of the top Democratic political committees and independent PACs (plus one political blogger named Matt Yglesias).[3]

“W.A.R.” stands for “wins above replacement,” a baseball term that Strauss and his colleagues have adopted as their way of describing someone who performs above their position’s baseline, which in electoral terms means getting a vote share above expectations. The existence of something called the “W.A.R. Room” itself is not a secret – it started as a post-2024 eight-week Zoom night school for mid-career campaign and political staff held in the spring of 2025, followed by a two-day in-person gathering in Washington, DC in early June. You can read about its core curriculum and see its list of trainers at War-Room.us. What you can’t see is the W.A.R. Room book, which is made available to campaign managers free of charge. I’m only going to quote from salient sections today, because a lot of people put serious work into this thing and it comes with strenuous requests about not sharing it publicly.

The copy I have is dated June 26, 2025, but this is meant to be a living document. Just last week, on January 14, the W.A.R. Room team convened several dozen people at the AFL-CIO building in Washington to tackle some fresh topics with the goal of adding new chapters to the book. Judging from a PowerPoint deck summarizing the meeting that I’ve seen, attendees at that meeting focused on four questions: “Popular economic ideas,” the impact of candidate quality and “authenticity,” how to inoculate candidates from Republican attacks on cultural issues, and an audience choice determined at the meeting, which turned out to be dealing with anti-system and less engaged voters. According to the real-time discussion notes recorded in that PowerPoint deck, the word fascism never came up. ICE was mentioned just once—this, a week after Renee Good was killed as part of “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis, something that the vast majority of Americans have been paying close attention to. But I digress.

A decent chunk of the W.A.R. Room Book is innocuous. The bottom hundred pages or so is an almanac of national and state level political data aimed at giving readers a rough guide to baseline demographics for recent elections as well as how each congressional district voted in the last two presidential elections. Careful readers might quibble with relying on data that is skewed by US census undercounts of minority groups and that gives the false impression that each election occurs with the same, static electorate[4], but everyone relies on these numbers to get a ballpark view of the playing field. A short opening section on candidate recruitment and preparation starts by offering common sense advice about knowing one’s district and looking for potential candidates among people with real roots in the places they want to represent. A section on John Zaller’s model of public opinion and how to understand how campaign communications get incorporated by people into their voting behavior says nothing controversial about how people develop a world view and how hard it is to get a voter to pay attention to politics.

But the heart of the book is built around two flawed key assumptions and one gigantic omission.

The first assumption, one of the book’s “four strategic pillars” is that “Moderates over-perform.” Strauss writes, “Compared to extremists, candidates who are perceived as moderate and/or take moderate stances over-perform average expectations. This is true for both Democrats and Republicans. The explanation is straightforward: the median voter is a moderate.”

The second assumption is that today’s political war is entirely being fought inside an “attention economy” where the “media landscape is fractured” and “low-information voters are key” but where paid, targeted media is the most essential way of getting to them and the smartest thing to do is find out what these people say they like and then say it back to them. (Some call this “popularism”; Anat Shenker-Osorio more critically calls it “pollingism” and argues it traps Democrats into simply responding to revealed public opinion instead of trying to shape it.)

That leads into the gigantic omission. The book says almost nothing about having a field operation other than to mostly downplay its value, touts successes in places that have benefited from years of intensive community organizing without any recognition of its importance, and is completely silent on the dirty little secret of Democratic campaigning, which is that overreliance on the Democratic voter file causes campaigns to miss nearly ¼ of their potential voters and about 40% of potential Black, Brown and younger voters. (And then we wonder about post-election polls where those same voters disproportionately report that they never were contacted by a campaign.)

But let’s go ahead and see what in this wannabe bible for today’s Democratic campaign managers.

The Problem with Claiming Moderates Over-Perform

Before we can look at this claim, we have to see how the W.A.R. Room Book defines who is a moderate. It offers three definitions but only embraces one. Along the way, it goes through so many twists and turns that you’d be well within your rights to question if “moderate” is being used in a way that no longer means what you think it means.

A politician who tries to take the middle road on all issues—a “squishy, centrist”—is not the kind of moderate the playbook endorses, because, Strauss writes, “moderate voters usually have a mix of liberal and conservative views.” In that case, why not recognize that such voters are confused or volatile or multidimensional instead of sticking to a one-dimensional view of people’s political leanings? Strauss also rejects the notion that being a moderate means “siding with the establishment, status quo, corporations, or government systems.” He notes that confidence in America’s institutions is at an all-time low and many less-engaged voters have even less trust and tend to be conspiracy theorists. That indeed seems to be true, but how then are these people “moderates”?

It might be far more useful to talk about the many voters who do not fall neatly into the D or R boxes as “cross-pressured” rather than moderate, because they hold a mix of positions (think of Bernie Sanders voters who hate big corporations AND love their guns, or devout Catholics who oppose abortion AND the death penalty AND want increased social spending). Same with the many, especially younger people, who are self-identifying as “independents” and believe both parties are too subservient to their wealthy donors. Appealing to these sorts of voters may well be critical to the future of American politics, but trying to stuff all these people under the “moderate” label completely and uselessly flattens the picture. (However, if you’re trying to win an ideological war of intense interest to big Democratic donors, or give junior campaign managers the ability to project more confidence than they should…but I digress.)

Finally, we get to the kind of moderate the playbook wants candidates to emulate: someone who takes popular AND heterodox positions. Strauss writes, “The best path to moderation and over-performance is taking popular stances that are at odds with either the focus or substance of Democratic party orthodoxy. The research clearly shows that politicians who vote against the party (especially from the center) benefit electorally.”

Who are the Democrats who have done this well? Strauss points to Rep. Jared Golden of Maine who was the sole vote against a version of President Biden’s Build Back Better bill because it gave wealthy homeowners a big tax break, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez for attacking onerous day care food prep regulations, Sen. Ruben Gallego for being tough on border security, and failed Missouri Senate candidate Jason Kander for his ad showing off how he could assemble his army rifle blindfolded while touting his support for the 2^nd Amendment and background checks.

These are all indeed examples of Clintonesque triangulation. But do you notice what aren’t examples of questioning the party orthodoxy? Voting against massive increases in the Pentagon’s budget to better fund domestic needs. Voting to suspend aid to Israel. Challenging Trump’s vicious attacks on immigrants and people of color. Opposing the crypto lobby. Etc.

It turns out that Strauss’ advice for candidates to distinguish themselves from the Democratic “orthodoxy” runs mainly in one direction. If the orthodox position is to only talk about “kitchen-table” issues—as the conventional wisdom ran last spring—and you’re Senator Chris Van Hollen and you go to El Salvador to highlight how the human rights of one of your constituents, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, have been violated, that’s not being what Strauss thinks of as a moderate. Which is too bad, because it turns out that such principled action not only had the effect of moving public opinion but it helped distinguish Van Hollen as a fighter rather than an appeaser. (Words that also do not appear in the playbook.)

To be charitable, one could say that the good thing about Strauss’ repositioning of the word “moderate” is that it rescues it from meaning things like “squishy, centrist, corporate Democrat” and replaces that with some anti-elite populism and cultural flexibility. But the case it reinforces for punching hippies (“extremists” is Strauss’ word) as THE way for Democratic politicians to appeal to cross-pressured swing voters is not helpful. Nowhere does the book examine how that affects traditional Democratic voters—many of whom are sick of being asked to back candidates who won’t fight for core Democratic values.

Do These Kind of “Moderates” Over-Perform?

I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds here, as people far more expert than me like G. Elliott Morris and Adam Bonica have already done solid work on this front. A few main points to make. First, Strauss points to this study (gift link) by Lakshya Jain and Harrison Lavelle of Split Ticket, an election data analysis firm, as the “most useful depiction” of data from the 2024 election proving that moderates do better.

This suggests that House incumbents in the Blue Dog Caucus did better than expected in 2024 while Justice Democrats did worse. But are Blue Dogs NOT corporate Democrats or squishy centrists? Strauss doesn’t say. And are they benefiting from advantages that come from incumbency and/or not having mega-millions spent trying to damage their brand, as has been the case with “The Squad”? Strauss also doesn’t say. Bonica (with colleague Jake Grumbach) makes a more devastating critique of the Split Ticket analysis, arguing that the whole way it defines “wins above replacement” is broken. By his analysis, when you look at how Democrats performed compared to Kamala Harris in 2024, “moderates and progressives did essentially the same.”

The W.A.R. Room Playbook doesn’t address a different problem, which is how many “moderate” Democrats have lost in recent years while MAGA Republicans have won while pushing tax cuts for the rich and attacking Obamacare. As Bonica notes, “The Republican Party’s electoral success despite having one of the least popular policy agendas ever recorded suggests that traditional left-right policy and ideology aren’t driving election results.”

No matter, Strauss is convinced that, “The science is incredibly clear: moderates over-perform. Literally each of those links is to a different study that supports this basic finding.”

I’ve included the links from the playbook for those of you who really want to dig into the weeds growing in that sentence. Have fun. But do note: one study supposedly proving the value of being a moderate that Strauss links to is based on “a series of tests of the 1956-1996” elections. Not very relevant to today. Another finds that how well an incumbent fares in their election is only “modestly correlated” with their roll call votes. A third says that in general elections party labels do most of the work of helping voters decide who to vote for, while in primaries that lack such cues other information (such as group endorsements) matter more. A fourth says that the penalty congressional candidates pay for ideological extremism has declined since 1994. No kidding. A fifth says that Democrats who voted for health care reform paid a penalty in the 2010 elections. So Democratic moderates should back away from Obamacare? A sixth finds that “contested general elections [in state legislatures] have favored more-moderate candidates, on average. … However, this advantage is relatively modest in magnitude and appears to have declined noticeably in recent years.” The last link is to a study by Strauss of the 2022 elections and argues that Democrats who criticized teachers unions and “defund the police” did better than expected.

What does any of this have to do with the 2026 election, when the salient issues for voters will likely be some combination of: ICE killing American citizens with impunity, the implosion of NATO and trade war with Europe, measles outbreaks, a stock market crash caused by the AI boom or cryptocurrency shenanigans, and the list goes on. Your guess is as good as mine, but don’t worry: THE SCIENCE IS INCREDIBLY CLEAR. Just find a way to punch the left and you’ll do great!

The Problem with Chasing Low-Information Voters

The W.A.R. Room Book is not wrong to point out that today’s media environment is highly fragmented and voters, particularly those who are less interested in politics, can tune out and almost become unreachable (a number of platforms, including Netflix and Amazon, don’t allow political ads). It’s also not wrong to recognize that over time, people tend to forget political messages. But instead of getting curious about the places where Democrats have overperformed and exploring how years of concerted organizing created those environments, the book just stays under the lamppost where the light is brightest and urges readers to figure out how to “target its communication to the lowest-information voters who will still cast a ballot” since “paid media ads do persuade voters.”

What follows is page after page of advice on how to get earned media, how to cultivate reporters, the value of building a brand or slogan, plus lots of detail on all the different venues for paid advertising (linear television, streaming, YouTube, Meta, radio, podcasts, apps, direct mail, paid canvassing, and paid influencers). The best time to run ads, Strauss writes, is in the last week before an election, but he also suggests doing so earlier if an ad will “prove viability for fundraising” or “to fundraise from voters.” If you’re doing the former, he says, “it might be a good idea to both (a) run advertising for a short period of time, and (b) commission a poll to be run at the tail end of the buy. Put the poll in the field while the advertisements are still running so that ad effects can’t decay at all. Take the ads down right after the poll is complete.”

And to think that last week at the W.A.R. Room meeting I mentioned above, a top focus was figuring out how to help candidates with their “authenticity.” Maybe, just maybe, the way to win more tough elections is by addressing the conditions in those districts that make them “tough” in the first place?

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Why So Silent About Organizing?

That gets to the last major problem I have with the W.A.R. Room Book: how diligently it ignores the effect of power-building on electoral outcomes. This is especially curious given that it opens with a glowing introduction from Rebecca Lambe, who built Senator Harry Reid’s formidable political machine in Nevada. As she writes, “My mentor, the late Senator Harry Reid, a former boxer, taught us how to fight—and how to win... Reid also believed in building power from the ground up. His legacy in Nevada proves what’s possible when smart campaigns are powered by real people and real purpose.” Lambe also talks about working with “Senate candidates who started out unknown, outspent, or underestimated—and watched them defy the odds. Their victories weren’t accidents. They were the result of grit, smart strategy, and relentless organizing.”

These candidates must include people like Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Mark Kelly of Arizona, places where “relentless organizing” set the table for game-changing wins, in part by enabling big voter registration drives and in part by shaping the issue environment in those states. But Strauss & crew say nothing further about the importance of this work, instead taking as a given that we somehow must go from zero to 100 in each election cycle solely using political marketing tactics. The fact that top party operatives make this assumption every two years compounds the problem of the Democrats’ shrinking organized base.

Harry Reid’s political machine was built on a year-round community presence (not campaign-season contact), strong partnership with the state’s power Culinary Workers Union (providing deep integration with its working-class Latino community); trusted validators developed over years (not weeks or by purchasing “influencer” attention); service provision (help with immigration paperwork, job applications) and old-fashioned relational organizing (friends talking to friends within trust networks). Reid made the word Democrat in Nevada mean something like “the people who show up for us.” It’s not rocket science, but it is hard work.

Given how much the playbook dwells on the importance of low-information voters and how hard it is to reach them with targeted ads, one would think that developing non-advertising-based pipelines to such voters would be a higher priority. That would include investing in developing trusted messengers (friends, family, coworkers, community figures), building relationships in non-political contexts (churches, union halls, barbershops, child care centers, youth sports), repeated contact over years (not just a last-minute blitz), material aid, and cultural presence. Gosh, it might even include fighting for some big-picture things that could dramatically improve people’s lives (or save them from corporate predators and rightwing thugs) enough that such voters would feel a bigger stake in politics rather than being alienated by political moneyball.

But what do I know? I’m just a guy living at the tail end of what these top Democratic political operatives push through the body politic. It keeps repeating and what comes out ain’t pretty.

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[1] In case you’ve forgotten, Future Forward is the giant super-PAC that raised and spent $700 million on paid media meant to support the Biden and then Harris presidential tickets, saving most of that money for the last weeks of the election because it believed that was when it would be most effective, and which is now apparently advising many Democratic big donors to hold their gunpowder and not run attacks aimed at driving down Trump’s popularity over his chaotic presidency and to stick to kitchen-table issues. Though Strauss works for Future Forward, the introduction to the W.A.R. Room book notes that it is “not a Future Forward product.”

[2] The full list of contributors to the W.A.R. Room book:

Abby Curran Horrell: Executive director of the House Majority PAC, 2019-present

Jon Fromowitz: Cofounder, Future Forward (previously, senior adviser for paid media for Biden 2020)

Todd Harris: Managing director, Blue Rose Research

Adam Jentleson: President, Searchlight Institute

Brad Komar: Senior advisor, House Majority PAC, 2019-present

Rebecca Lambe: Founder/senior adviser Senate Majority PAC, Senior adviser, Cassidy & Associates lobbying firm

Ty Matsdorf, Partner, The Messina Group; former director of the DCCC’s independent expenditure program, former campaign director of Senate Majority PAC

Matt Morrison, Executive director, Working America

Kristen Orthman, Democratic communications strategist; Former director of communications, DNC

Ishanee Parikh, Creative director, Future Forward USA (2020-present)

Jim Pugh, CEO ShareProgress 2013-present and Director, AI Progress Hub

Ausaf Qarni: Director of research and analytics, Working America

Meg Schwenzfeier: Chief Analytics Officer, Harris for President

Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman: Founder, AI Impact Lab

Matthew Yglesias: Writer, Slow Boring

Jesse Ferguson: General consultant and Democratic Strategist, Dover Street Strategies

Kelly Ward Burton, Founder & CEO, Both/And Leadership; Former executive director, DCCC.

Megan Clasen, Partner, Gambit Strategies

Patrick Bonsignore, Director of paid media, Biden for President, 2019-2024

[3] Simon Bazelon, Kelly Ward Burton, Christina Coloroso, Kevin Collins, Kass DeVorsey, Andrew Grunwald, Daisy Hernandez-Barguiarena, Josh Kalla, Leo Liu, Jonathan Robinson, Anat Shenker-Osorio, Gaurav Shirole, David Shor, Madeline Twomey, Margit Westerman, and Miya Woolfalk are also thanked for reviewing the book in advance, and David Plouffe, Ben LaBolt and Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez are thanked for providing supplemental videos.

[4] Former AFL-CIO political director Mike Podhorzer says, “The Electorate Is Never the Same River Twice. The ‘median voter’ image wrongly suggests that both parties have a certain percentage of base voters baked in, and that the contest is about which party can persuade more middle-of-the-road swing voters to join them and secure a majority. This image presumes what I call a “Flatland” mental model, in which the pool of voters stays basically the same from year to year. In the reality of “3-D Land,” however, we know that churn in the electorate is what matters most – which kinds of voters decide to stay home instead of turn out to vote, or vice versa.

Three weeks ago, the Washington Post was the first to report (gift link) on the details of a draft solicitation from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to drastically expand the immigrant detention system by taking over and renovating existing industrial warehouses to channel newly-arrested detainees into processing sites that would feed into seven large-scale centers holding 5,000 to 10,000 people each located near major logistics hubs. Sixteen smaller sites would hold up to 1,500 people each. Last April, ICE acting director Todd Lyons told a border security conference that “We need to get better at treating this like a business….Like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”

Now Lyons’ crude vision is coming into focus. As the Post noted a bit too drily, “concentrating detainees in warehouses would create its own logistical problems. Such structures are designed for storage and shipping, not human habitation. They tend to be poorly ventilated and lack precise temperature controls — and, because they are typically located far from residential areas, they may not have access to the plumbing and sanitation systems needed to support thousands of full-time residents.”

So, let’s use clearer language. While ICE’s plan refers to warehouses, these are better described as “concentration camps.” And no, I’m not being hysterical. As journalist Andrea Pitzer writes in her essential history, One Long Night, “a concentration camp exists wherever a government holds groups of civilians outside the normal legal process—sometimes to segregate people considered foreigners or outsiders, sometime to punish. If prisons are meant for suspects convicted of crimes after a trial, a concentration camp holds those who, most often, had no real trial at all.”

Why do we associate the term “concentration camp” with mass death? Because whenever governments have coercively removed people from their homes and concentrated them in confined areas where they could be easily controlled, stress, neglect, hunger, disease and death have followed. The Germans got their ideas for concentration camps from similar programs run by Spain in Cuba during the Cuban war of independence from 1895-1898, Britain in South Africa from 1899-1902, and by America in its creation of “reconcentration” camps in the Philippines in 1901, Pitzer notes.

Will local officials and residents let ICE build these new concentration camps? NIMBYism, rather than moral outrage, may well be the force that stops some of them from going forward. For example, a few days after the Post article appeared, the City of Social Circle, Georgia, a Republican-dominated town 45 miles east of Atlanta, posted a notice on Facebook saying that its mayor and city council were “unequivocally” against siting one of ICE’s mega detention facilities in its environs, noting how it would strain local water and sewer facilities and possibly endanger public safety. A few days after that, “One Circle Community Coalition,” a local civic group formed last year to improve communication between city officials and residents as concerns about data centers has risen, pulled together a town hall attended by 120-150 people. Residents argued that the facility would have an unsustainable impact on its infrastructure, that it would attract outside protestors (on both sides) and that it would be only 4,000 feet from a new elementary school. Many also said they had no problem with ICE building these facilities, but just not in their backyard.

But that was before Renee Nicole Good was shot by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis last week. Now most of America is paying attention. We’re in a whirlwind moment.

ICE isn’t just a NIMBY problem

In Chester, NY, a small town in in rural Orange County, about an hour northwest of New York City, the news that a local 400,000 square-foot warehouse formerly occupied by a Pep Boys was going to be one of the few ICE processing centers located in the Northeast set off a firestorm of public protest as soon as it became public. Back on January 5, the local town supervisor, Democrat Brandon Holdridge, told Daily Voice Chester that town officials had received no advanced communication from the federal government before learning about the plan in the Washington Post. He said he was strongly opposed to it, given “well-documented abuses and illegal actions” by the Department of Homeland Security. He also expressed worry about the increased traffic, infrastructure and safety challenges an ICE facility would impose on Chester. Rep. Pat Ryan, a Democrat who represents the area, also expressed his opposition. Even the county executive Steve Neuhaus, a Republican, who recently won re-election 60-40%, told News 12 that he had concerns. “The federal government is hunting people down,” Neuhaus said back on January 2. “They say they’re mostly bad people, but if there are families with children, that’s a problem. We owe it to ourselves to come up with a better solution than to round them up as cattle in a temporary center in a warehouse.”

Monday night, I drove up to Chester to attend the monthly village board meeting, joining roughly 400 people who responded to a call from local faith, immigrant and civic groups to protest the planned center. Anticipating a big crowd, village officials moved the meeting from its regular location at city hall to the Chester senior center, and indeed, an hour before its scheduled start a long line of people stood outside in the freezing cold waiting patiently to get in. About 200 people were allowed into the meeting before it reached capacity, while a similar number demonstrated outside and waited for seats to open up.

Chatting with attendees before and during the hearing, it was clear that a variety of group organizing in the area had pulled their members to the event. In addition to a large number of Chester residents, there were people connected to Indivisible groups in nearby Warwick, Greenwood Lake and Goshen; members of Lower Hudson Valley DSA; For the Many (a power-building group focused on tenant organizing, affordable housing advocacy, climate justice, and organizing Amazon workers in the Hudson River cities of Poughkeepsie, Newburgh, Kingston and Beacon), and hipsters from Cold Spring. One middle-aged woman told me that she and a few friends had gathered up the remnants of several grassroots “postcarding circles” and turned them into their own micro-organizing group.

The meeting started with the village’s mayor, Tom Bell, reading a statement he had earlier released explaining that while he understood there was much interest in ICE’s purported plans, to date they had received no official communications and therefore the topic wouldn’t be on the official agenda for that night’s meeting. But then he and his councilmates made quick business of their usual reports on town management, and within just a half hour the floor had be opened for short statements from a long list of Chester residents and nearby neighbors, all deeply opposed to letting ICE in.

Judging from those statements, as well as the response of the audience, something has shifted in how people are thinking about ICE and the whole apparatus of government coercion that the Justice Department, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security has been building and deploying. People didn’t just talk about not wanting an ICE detention hub in their town because it would burden their roads, sewers and water systems, or turn their town into a center of national attention. Repeatedly, they spoke out against allowing a “concentration camp” to be built, about the “Gestapo” tactics of ICE, and about how an ICE center would turn Chester from a community that prides itself on being welcoming to all (and once a stop on the Underground Railroad) into a place of surveillance, fear and hiding. People old enough to remember WWII as well as young parents were making the same point. “We are not Germany, when other people looked away when concentration camps were being built in their towns,” one older woman said. (Sorry, but those links all go shaky handheld iPhone videos I captured; sound quality is meh.)

Not only that, in the wake of Minneapolis, more people are making the connection between ICE’s violations of the civil rights of immigrants and how this paramilitary force could easily be turned against anyone. Michael Sussman, a local civil rights lawyer who ran for county executive on the Democratic and WFP lines, getting 40% of the vote, told the Chester audience, “We cannot extend in any way, shape or form President Trump’s ability to entrap, imprison his enemies, whoever they may be today or tomorrow. Today they may be immigrants. Tomorrow they may be people in this room….I was here when the industrial park was constructed. It was not constructed for a concentration camp.” He sat to huge cheers.

New Polling Bears This Out

A new YouGov poll conducted from January 9-11 shows that ICE is now in serious trouble—with two-thirds of those surveyed saying that they’ve heard “a lot” about Good’s killing. Here are some key findings:

• By a margin of 68% to 17%, the public supports creating stricter recruitment requirements for ICE agents.

• By 64% to 20%, the public opposes ICE agents entering K-12 school campuses.

• By 58% to 29%, people support criminally prosecuting any ICE agent who kills someone, with 53% specifically agreeing “the ICE agent should face criminal charges for shooting the woman in Minneapolis.”

• A near majority, 48%, favors reducing ICE’s size and funding, while 37% oppose that. Sixty-one percent think ICE often or sometimes uses “unnecessary physical force against immigrants who are not authorized to live in the U.S,” while just 26% disagreed.

• Sixty percent said they think ICE often or sometimes “uses unnecessary physical force against U.S. citizens who have not committed immigration or customs violations.”

• Fifty-three percent say it is “too forceful” while 24% think its tactics are “about right” and 12% want it to be more forceful.

• And by 55%-31%, people think ICE officers should not be allowed to wear masks that hide their identities while making arrests.

The bottom line: for the first time, a plurality of Americans favor abolishing ICE (46%-43%).

Of course, party identity explains a lot of these positions, but even 14% of Republicans favored criminal charges for the agent who shot Good, 36% of Republicans thought ICE should not be allowed on K-12 campuses, and 35% of Rs said they thought it often or sometimes used unnecessary force against immigrants who are not authorized to be in the US.(The poll’s margin of error was =/- 3.9%.) The Searchlight Institute, a new think-tank of self-styled Democratic moderates, is already warning that Democrats should shy away from talking about abolishing ICE in favor of “reforming” and “retraining" it, but IMHO it’s far too soon to adopt such conciliatory language when the agency is clearly out of control and probably unreformable. Most of the people saying “Abolish ICE” clearly mean getting rid of something that’s been turned into the American Gestapo. You don’t reform a Gestapo, you eliminate it and replace it with something that abides by the law.

—Also, take note; Trump has lost Joe Rogan on this. Tuesday, he said, “You don’t want militarized people in the streets just roaming around, snatching up people — many of which turn out to be U.S. citizens that just don’t have their papers on them.” He added, “Are we really gonna be the Gestapo, ‘Where’s your papers?’ Is that what we’ve come to?”

—A coalition of Minneapolis labor, faith and community groups are now calling for a general strike on Friday, January 23^rd across the city. They are demanding that ICE leave the state, justice for Renee Good, and an end to all ICE terror.

In Other News

—Don’t miss Gideon Lichfield’s Futurepolis post on “Mamdani’s bold experiment in participatory democracy.”

—Writing at The Great Progression, California tech veteran Peter Leyden thinks that despite the evident rise of “Right Tech” (as seen by all the oligarchs riding the Trump gravy train), the majority of the tech world still leans left and is due for a resurgence. His reasoning is tempting; essentially, he argues Trump is screwing up the country and wrecking the Republican brand even worse that Herbert Hoover did 100 years ago, clearing the path for a new way forward. Maybe? Perhaps I should write a whole post about Leyden’s theory. In the meantime, give it a read.

End Times

When you really need to get away.

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No, we still haven’t found a unifying symbol, despite efforts to get people to “wear yellow” and the like. Nor have we figured out how duplicate the success of the “Boycott Disney” campaign in the wake of their short-term firing of comedy host Jimmy Kimmel. If anything, the academic research on stopping and toppling wannabe autocrats, which informed much of last summer’s “Million Rising” push to get activists focused on undermining the various “pillars of power” that typically buttress authoritarian regimes, hasn’t quite congealed in the way that many had hoped. But I’d rather view that glass as half-full rather than half-empty.

Yes, we still have an opposition party whose titular leaders largely don’t what they’re up against, and a campaign-industrial complex that is still far more obsessed with raising money for paid media and polls aimed at winning an election a year away than with raising hell and organizing now. But there are also signs that serious people in the professional political world do understand the mess we’re in and are developing new strategies and tactics for dealing with it. Today I want to feature one such example: Ground Truth, a new project from Swing Left that is attempting to get their arms around a hard problem: why are so many ordinary people alienated from the Democratic party and how to fix that.

If you are on Swing Left’s mailing list, you may already be familiar with the basic contours of Ground Truth, which they started rolling out last September in a handful of swing House districts and are taking national starting the weekend of January 24-25. In a nutshell, it aims to be “a new approach to canvassing where we listen to voters (instead of lecturing!), understand what’s motivating them, and use those insights to strengthen House campaigns across the country.” By starting early (you mean not waiting until the last two months before the election?), knocking every door (wait, seriously?) and investing in better data and technology, Swing Left is aiming to give Democrats the strategic edge needed to win back the majority this fall.

As Yasmin Radjy, Swing Left’s executive director, explained in an announcement about the program, her own experience knocking on doors with a team of volunteers in NY’s 17^th district, currently held by Republican Mike Lawler, was that “Democrats need to get better at listening to voters. And people are hungry to be heard.” But, she adds, “Before we persuade, we have to listen.” The early gleanings from their pilot efforts should be a wake-up call:

• Traditional targeting misses many persuadable voters: About one in four voters coded as Republican (either through registration or modeled partisanship) expressed explicit concern about Trump, openness to voting for Democrats, or alignment with progressive priorities—indicating that conventional voter contact efforts are overlooking potentially persuadable voters.

• Voters are open to these conversations. Two-thirds of the people who answered their doors held a meaningful 10-15 minute conversation with a volunteer.

• There’s a lot of frustration to tap: In nearly half of conversations, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike expressed disillusionment with both political parties, distrust of institutions, disappointment in leaders, and a sense that “no one is looking out for people like me”—a theme not systematically tracked by federal or state party entities in their canvassing and voter files.

• People are cross-pressured: In more than 80% of conversations, voters brought up at least two motivating issues, suggesting traditional single-issue categorization is insufficient for understanding what drives voter engagement.

• And most encouraging: Swing Left says that 93% of the volunteers who participated in a Ground Truth canvass would recommend that a friend do it too.

One more note about Swing Left and its affiliate Vote Forward. From their start, they have always been focused on experimentation, testing, analysis and sharing those results with their members and the public. Last year, Vote Forward put out a report on its 2024 campaign to get tens of thousands of volunteers to write handwritten letters to nearly 10 million voters. After seeing significant results from this in 2020, Vote Forward admitted that letter-writing was now seeing “diminishing returns.” Among surge voters, the people who had skipped 2016 voted in at least one major election since then, “the impact was negligible.” Among low-propensity voters, handwritten letters boosted turnout by a very modest 0.2 percentage points. “While handwritten letters still drive voter turnout, the landscape has clearly shifted. Voters are inundated with outreach, and the same tactics don’t have the same impact they once did,” Radjy, who is executive director of both groups, said at the time. “If we want to win, we need to become more targeted and innovative in how we engage voters, especially in major elections.”

Going Deeper

My guide into the Ground Truth work has been Zack Malitz, managing director at Swing Left and Vote Forward. He joined them last April, after stints with Credo Mobile, Bernie 2016 (working with the national distributed organizing team that Becky Bond and Zack Exley built), NextGen Climate, Beto O’Rourke for Texas (field director) and The Social Practice, a consulting shop. Just before the December holiday break we had a long chat.

“We don’t think we know what the barriers to voting for Democrats are,” Malitz says. Everyone has their theories. So instead, Swing Left decided to “go spend a couple of months having conversations with people where we basically just ask them, like, what are your barriers to voting for Democrats?” Then, drawing on the experiences of hundreds of canvassers having thousands of conversations, they’ll develop a deep canvassing persuasion conversation.

He told me that Swing Left is trying to respond to several, deeply ingrained problems with how Democrats engage voters. First, he said, “Democratic campaigns start talking to voters way, way, way, too late.” Second, “They rely heavily on brief, transactional interactions between voters and volunteers” that are heavily scripted—something he admitted he personally had trained “thousands” of volunteers to do.

Third, he noted that “We rely on archaic tech and data infrastructure which doesn’t just suck, but also stymies tactical innovation, because it’s very opinionated about how we use it.” Instead of being forced to score people so their answers can be quickly loaded into a preformatted database, Malitz wants tech that is “agnostic and flexible, such that campaigns could come up with new ways of using it, not envisioned by the people who build it.”

So instead of relying on NGPVAN’s Minivan tool, they’re working with Everybody Techworks, a startup cofounded by Becky Bond and Jin Ding, to pilot their People canvassing app. The app allows users to collect data on any person they talk to, whether or not that person is matchable to a voter file record. Swing Left is also piloting a new CRM, developed by long-time veterans of the progressive tech ecosystem, that can ingest and analyze any data that canvassers collect.

Fourth, unlike traditional campaigns that focus on highly likely voters (the so-called “triple primes” who have voted in every recent election), Ground Truth volunteers knock every door in a neighborhood and talk to whomever is home. Afterwards, volunteers record their observations about the conversation into a voice-to-text program for further analysis by a mix of AI and human reviewers.

Swing Left is working the New Conversation Initiative, which came out of the LA Leadership Lab and which has worked with academics David Broockman and Josh Kalla on their studies of the effectiveness of deep canvassing. The core of the conversation at the doors, which can take 10 to 15 minutes, is listening.

Malitz says Swing Left is looking for hard data on things that “polls can’t capture, which is stuff we wouldn’t think to write into a question, things that voters are thinking about, but that they we actually might not think to ask them about in the first place, but they only bring up when we ask open-ended questions. As well as the flavor of how they talk about things.” He adds:

“Everybody knows affordability is important, but when somebody says affordability, what does that mean? Are they talking in a really nuts and bolts way of ‘I want these three policies to make my bills go down,’ or is it ‘What I mean when I say affordability is that the people in power don’t care about me,’…? A lot of what we’re finding is that, for both Republicans and Democrats, it’s ‘the people in power don’t care about me.’ It’s a really anti-system thing that is not like reducible to issue preferences, but a deep sense that the people in power just do not care.”

What they’re after is something very hard to nail down, Malitz argues. “Right now, we talk to a really narrow subset of voters, and we make a lot of assumptions about who’s persuadable. I think we sort of infamously have never come up with a good persuasion model. Like, it’s actually really hard to figure out who in the electorate is going to be persuadable. And I think in part that’s because the tools we have are not that good. After A/B testing and rigorous measurement, what you see between the best and the worst messages is tiny, tiny, tiny differences in a country where we have to fundamentally change how politics works, or we’re going to be stuck in the same doom loop that we’re in.”

One more thing that Swing Left hopes to build with Ground Truth: an infrastructure for institutionalizing volunteer organization between elections. A recent FEC ruling may make that easier. Historically Swing Left didn’t run its own in-house voter contact program because it was expensive to sustain, and instead recruited volunteers that it funneled into candidate campaigns and into state party coordinated campaigns. Some campaigns run pretty good voter contact programs, Malitz noted, “and in others, there’s a disastrous experience with the volunteers.” But last year, Texas Majority PAC asked the FEC to consider if canvassing a public communication regulated by campaign finance rules. It said no, so now anyone can spend unlimited amounts of money on canvassing, specifically in coordination with campaigns.

Malitz offers an expansive vision of what this will make possible: “That opens the door to us taking a really challenging road, which is to change a whole bunch of stuff, but in a way that doesn’t just mean we end up with our own walled garden of amazing, innovative programs, but actually can change how things work for everybody.” Data that Ground Truth volunteers collect will be shared with state parties and with candidate campaigns. This means, Malitz says, “we can push on the whole infrastructure, in big ways, by trying to persuade people that there’s a different way to do things, by having an exemplary model that people can look to for inspiration next cycle. But also by generating a whole bunch of canvassing data and sharing it out to the ecosystem to improve the voter file for everybody.”

For 2026, Swing Left is focused on taking back the House using a distributed model to reach scale. “We rely on Swing Left groups and unaffiliated volunteers who raise their hand say, ‘I’d like to run a canvas where I live,’” Malitz says. The organization says it currently has a million members and about 450 active chapters. “And then we provide training and support for those people based on the assumption that we will never have a staff structure large enough for an in-person staffer to be able to train every volunteer that we need to. So we rely on a layer of highly-trained, well-supported volunteers who are essentially like part-time, or in some cases, full-time organizers in their community, and who have the skills to train other volunteers because they’ve done so much door-knocking.”

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Ending the Poverty of Democratic Organizing?

If you’ve been reading The Connector for a while, or if you’ve been a volunteer canvasser for any amount of time, hopefully this is all music to your ears. For too long, Democratic campaigns have run cookie-cutter field programs and ignored the possibility that there were many more potential voters to be reached than just the most active ones in the Democratic voter file. They’ve also treated volunteers as anonymous interchangeable inputs to be handed walk-lists and pushed out the door rather than human beings passionate to do whatever they can to elect better representatives.

Malitz notes that, “The voter file is a valuable input for campaigns, but the way that we use it right now actually forces us not to talk to people, which is insane.” Or it sends volunteers to doors where someone hasn’t lived in years. Malitz says, “Instead we should start with the places that people live, talk to the people who live there, and then figure out what data to use to represent the results of that conversation.” He also notes that Swing Left has been heavily influenced by a 2021 study of the three main voter file used by partisan groups (Catalist, Targetsmart and the GOP Data Trust) that found that in 2012 about 23% of potential voters weren’t even in them, “an incredible number of people to not talk to.” Eleven percent are unlisted while 12% are mislisted (not living at their recorded address). The “politically invisible” are far more likely to be Black or Hispanic (40% unreachable via traditional voter lists compared to just 18% for whites), younger, and less wealthy. Astounding.

Like any good strategist, Malitz is eating his own dog food. He told me, “I ran the first canvas here in Oregon’s Fifth District, and I knocked on this woman’s door, and first she said, ‘You don’t want to talk to me, I’m a Republican.’ I said, ‘No, I definitely want to talk to you.’ And I managed to muddle through several minutes of conversation about Oregon sports, which I don’t really follow, so I did my best. And, then she said what bothered her is that the Republicans are so old, the Democrats are so old. And I said, I’ agree, it’s terrible. I find it embarrassing, too.’ And then, ten minutes into this conversation, she’s said ‘I sometimes vote for Democrats.’ Oh, do you now? It was amazing.”

He noted that these kinds of listening conversations can be transformative for both participants. “The raw, unfiltered experience of the voters is pretty eye-opening. The caricatures of people that you get, especially in Beltway commentary, just do not match the on the ground reality of what people are like, what their lives are like.” According to Malitz, Ground Truth volunteers also find the experience more fun because their conversations at the doors are more natural.

Malitz told me he was enjoying the freedom that came with this less-scripted approach to voter engagement. “I think having a more human, less stilted conversation, is way easier for people. I think once we get to storytelling and persuasion, that’s where it’s going to get really difficult. But part of what we’re doing is institutionalizing as standard practice things that volunteers have done against the wishes of campaigns for a long time, like talking to people who open the door and want to talk to you, even if they’re not on your list. Every volunteer does that, no matter how many times you tell them not to, like knocking on a door because there’s a yard sign outside that makes it clear that there’s a supporter who lives there who we should talk to. All of this stuff is so human and intuitive that people do it no matter how many times you tell them not to. It feels really good to me to finally just say you have permission. And that’s the point--the thing that you do that is intuitive and human, that’s the thing that we should be doing.”

Swing Left is deep in a learning mode, tweaking its approach to Ground Truth as it continues to send volunteers out on canvasses. One approach they’re considering is to have volunteers go back to the same neighborhood several times, to ideally have multiple conversations with the same voters. Or they may try to follow up with phone calls. And then at some point later in the cycle they’ll shift from primarily listening to persuasion. Like the Mamdani field operation, they’re investing in building social capital with their canvas volunteers, bringing them together after each canvas to talk together about what they experienced and learned. Malitz is also wondering whether local Ground Truth teams should also be inviting voters to monthly get-togethers or town halls, to make their effort more visible and engaging, but it’s not clear if they have the capacity to scale that up this year. (Any big donors out there reading this?)

One of the things that is most important about Ground Truth’s effort to figure out how to persuade more voters to back Democrats is the plain fact that the national electoral map is badly skewed against today’s Democratic electorate. By 2032, something like 14 electoral votes will move from Blue states that Biden won to red states, because of how population centers are shifting. So if Democrats don’t figure out how to win over people who are in those red-shifting states, they’re doomed.

Right now Swing Left’s volunteers are supported by about two dozen staff. They’re hoping to double their budget in the current cycle. For a relatively small piece of the post-2016 resistance, they’ve carved out an important role at the intersection of volunteer energy and electoral campaign needs. If you’re not already part of their network, go check them out, sign up to volunteer with Ground Truth, and give them some of your time and money. It will be, I believe, well spent.

—To learn more about Ground Truth, watch this national strategy call from December 9.

On The Venezuela Morass

Political scientist Alexander Downes studied 120 examples of foreign-imposed regime change from 1816-2011 for his book Catastrophic Success and here are his main conclusions:

“Before the September 11 terrorist attacks, the United States was already the most frequent perpetrator of regime change, having upended (alone or with allies) thirty-one leaders in countries as diverse as Nicaragua, Honduras, the Dominican Republica, Mexico, Haiti, Germany, Japan, Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, Chile, Grenada and Panama. After 9/11, the George W. Bush administration dispatched US forces to take down two governments in a span of eighteen months….The Iraq debacle and the election of Barack Obama temporarily put talk of regime change on the back burner, but civil wars in Libya and Syria resulting from the Arab Spring brought it back with a vengeance…

The current structure of the international system dictates that the question of regime change will remain on the table. The United States spends nearly as much on its military as the rest of the world combined, fields highly trained military personnel armed with the latest technology, and is able to project force virtually anywhere on the globe in a manner of hours. The dearth of restraints on US power makes it tempting for US policymakers to use that power. The enormous capabilities at Washington’s disposal, however, are not matched by corresponding knowledge about the consequences of employing those capability for various ends. Upending the governments of weaker states is actually quite easy for a country as powerful as the United States; it is the aftermath that case pose seious problems….Policymakers need to be aware that what may follow regime change can be worse that the costs of inflicting it.”

“The problem lies in the fact that two states rarely if ever have isomorphic interests. By placing a new leader in power in a foreign country, interveners create a double principal-agent problem…Foreign interveners—the external principals—expect their agents to share their preferences and pursue policies congruent with those preferences. Yet once a leader is placed in power, she desires to remain in power and avoid suffering a sometimes violent and untimely demise. To maintain office, imposed leaders must consider the preferences not only of their external patrons but also those of an internal principal: the domestic constituency….Whatever choice an imposed leader makes, she faces a corresponding danger. For this reason, foreign-imposed regime change heightens the chances of both internal conflict in the target state – such as civil war and irregular leader removal – and external conflict between the intervener and target.”

End Times

Repeat after me, “2+2=5.” And then take this, to counteract it.

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Dear readers (or at least those of you who are sufficiently addicted to politics to be opening emails on a holiday week): Instead of sending you another “Best of 2025” post, I’m dredging up something I wrote exactly five years ago to share. I had about 2,500 subscribers then compared to the nearly 11,000 I have now, so for most of you this will be fresh stuff. Cast your mind back to those halycon days: Joe Biden had just beaten the Orange Cheeto and we all thought that he was heading into history’s dustbin. The January 6 insurrection was on no one’s radar. And the Democratic political-industrial complex was riding high….

My good friend Marc Cooper writes a newsletter called The Coop Scoop with a very iconoclastic, “party of one” voice from what might be called the angry populist left. Informed by his early experience working in Chile as one of Salvador Allende’s personal translators, and then later experience reporting on politics for places like The Village Voice and The Nation (where I had the pleasure of editing him), Marc is as strong a critic of the Democratic party as he is of the Republicans. His latest edition, which he titled “The Black Xmas Edition,” is very dark. Instead of whistling past the horror of a Republican party that is still trying to undo the results of the election while the country experiences a 9-11 level of new deaths from COVID-19 every day, Marc is furious.

But in addition to asking why there isn’t more outrage, he goes further, warning that “millions of Democrats just want to go back to sleep, … clinging to this fairy tale of a coming ‘normalcy’” under Joe Biden. As his first example of Democratic cave-in, he points to the weak hand being played by their House and Senate leaders in the negotiations still underway over a new COVID relief package. And as his second example, he points to “Democratic interest group pleadings over the racial composure of [Biden’s] cabinet” as an “appalling” way to ensure that progressive goals at seated at the Biden Administration table. If we want a cabinet that “looks like America,” he writes, “Instead of the current ragtag collection of lobbyists, generals, long-time members of the permanent national security ‘blob’ like Tony Blinken, and career Democratic apparatchiks like the horrific Neera Tanden, a truly all-American cabinet in 2021 would include two or three unemployed, maybe some COVID survivors or surviving spouses, a union official or two and maybe somebody who recently experienced a bout of hunger – something I doubt will ever happen even remotely.”

Marc’s screed may be a bit hard-edged and unpleasant to digest. But why after an election that saw a massive grassroots mobilization to defeat Trump and block the rise of fascism in America, are we seeing so little change, either to the way Congressional Democrats behave or to the choices Biden is making? Or for that matter, why isn’t there a massive call for progressive taxation when the collective wealth of America’s 651 billionaires has risen more than $1 trillion since the start of the pandemic? I think part of the answer is the opaque way that Democrats in power exercise their power, and who they feel they must answer to first. (I found it amusing this past year how many personal phone calls I got from Democratic candidates running for Congress after I happened to max out for one old friend, Allison Fine, in her primary bid. If you are a big donor or could be, Democrats want to talk to you.)

But as the dust settles on the election of 2020, something else is jumping out at me: a big disconnect between how the Democratic ecosystem organizes to win elections and how grassroots Democrats experience politics.

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The New Big Disconnect

First, a little story that was recently shared with me by Antonia Scatton, a long-time Democratic strategist who engages volunteers to reduce the costs of running for office. [Heads up: Antonia now writes a fantastic newsletter of her own called Reframing America that you should all subscribe to!] In 2018, she ran a pilot program with the Arizona Democratic Party to evaluate the potential of giving volunteers a wider range of roles in the campaign process. When incumbent Republican congressman Trent Franks resigned his seat early, a special election was called to fill his seat. Scatton recalls that hundreds of grassroots Democrats volunteered to work on behalf of their candidate Hiral Tipirneni, an emergency room doctor. Though she was running in a very red district, she also was an early rider on the great anti-Trump wave of 2018, and came just a few points short of winning the race (doing 20 points better than previous candidates in that district). Tipirneni’s campaign became a rallying point for many local Democrats, who previously thought they were alone, Scatton recalls. The campaign office became a hub of community connections. That is, until a young organizer sent by the Democratic National Committee to run the final push of canvassing arrived. “The first thing she did was put tape down on the floor to set up a path for how people would come in to get their walk packets,” Scatton told me. The goal was to get volunteers in and out the door in three minutes or less. “Standing around the office talking isn’t an efficient use of their time,” Scatton recalls the DNC staffer saying. The volunteers ignored her.

Keep that story in your mind as we pull back to the big picture of 2020, which by the numbers alone looks amazing. A data-driven Democratic organizing infrastructure mobilized and channeled literally millions of people into useful electoral action in 2019-20. Here are some of the key data points that various organizations have shared in recent days:

• Number of unique donors in 2019-2020 on ActBlue: 14.8 million

• Number of those donors who were new donors: 10.6 million

• Percentage of donors to Democratic presidential primary candidates who then gave to other candidates or campaign organization: 51.7%

• Number of phone calls made by Biden campaign supporters to voters: 332 million

• Number of volunteers who signed up for shifts on the Mobilize event organizing platform since 2017: 4.2 million

• Number of shifts signed up for since 2017: More than 15 million

• Number of shifts focused on the Biden campaign from April to November alone: 5.5 million

• Number of shifts in the final week of the 2020 election alone across all campaigns: 5.3 million

(Sources: report.actblue.com, online presentations this week by Vishal Disawar of the Biden campaign, Liz Mullen of Mobilize, and Daniel Souewine of GetThru during yesterday’s DNC Digital Debrief online)

Liz Mullen, head of client success at Mobilize, also shared some impressive details about how volunteers used the platform to take agency. (You can watch the whole Mobilize presentation here.) In the 2020 cycle, there were 35,000 volunteer hosts who used Mobilize, and organizations that enabled their folks to use that feature vastly expanded their reach. “In early 2020, huge swaths of the United States only had volunteer-hosted events,” she noted, including the whole states of Alaska and Hawaii. For the Biden campaign, there were 1.5 million RSVPs to 11,000 volunteer hosted events. Not only that, people who first attended a volunteer-hosted event were at least twice as likely to come back the next month than people who first attended a staff-run event.

And this is just some of the data Mobilize collects on volunteers. It also knows who donated after volunteering to host or join a shift, who signed up for an event because a volunteer shared it via social media, what kinds of events people went to, what kinds of nudges work best when, and a whole host of demographic information shared by volunteers. Plus, it has a rich repository of in-depth qualitative feedback from millions of volunteers responding to one of those post-event texts or emails it sends to participants. “As the best frontend for your supporter events and actions, Mobilize automatically drives desired behaviors and offers a massive network for growth,” a slide that ended the Mobilize presentation boasted. And guess what, now that EveryAction has acquired Mobilize, all of that data on user actions is now going to be stored in a “unified CRM [constituent relationship management system], creating the ultimate source of truth for your supporter engagement” on the Democratic side, the slide added. [Sadly, we don’t get this kind of transparency from Mobilize any more—ever since EveryAction was acquired by Bonterra, along with NGP VAN, the Mobilize blog has done dormant. The most recent post there is two years old.]

If you are in the business, and I mean business, of engaging voters in the political arena, 2020 wasn’t just a boom year. Those numbers—more than 10 million new donors, especially, and millions of new volunteers—are very good news if your organization or consultancy focuses on harvesting money and time from the grassroots. Who wouldn’t want to be able to tap “the ultimate source of truth” about the political proclivities of millions of potential supporters? But what I fear that what this bountiful harvest may reinforce is an approach to organizing that does not bode well for creating yet more power for those grassroots. Or, fully embrace the agricultural metaphor implied by the word “grassroots,” the dominant form of political organizing now maturing in the form of “data-driven” campaigning is the equivalent of industrial, chemical-intensive cultivation of crops rather than organic permaculture.

In other words, I worry that more young professional campaign staffers will be taught like that young woman from the DNC in Arizona, who thought the metric of “time spent” picking up a canvassing packet was more important than the long-term social capital created when local organizing draws a critical mass of participation. When local people “waste” their time talking to each other, they build bonds of friendship and trust. Those bonds, if nourished, tend to keep them more involved for longer periods of time.

Because data about voter and volunteer behavior is so bountiful, cheap and relatively easy to work with, 2020 saw a lot of innovation in tactics that amount to squeezing a bit more output from existing inputs. So, for example, take “relational organizing.” This has become a catch-all descriptor for a variety of tactics involving asking supporters to tap their own social networks to take a prescribed action. The Biden campaign worked hard to get its supporters to use its Vote Joe app, which was designed to make it easier to prompt them to send messages about voting to their peers and family. Vote “tripling,” another tactic in this toolbox, sought to get early voters to ask three friends to also get their votes in. Backed by behavioral science that showed such asks tended to “cut through the clutter” of campaign noise that most voters tune out, lots of Democratic organizations pushed tripling this cycle. The thing is, asking a voter as they leave a polling place to take a minute to call three friends is not “relational organizing.” It’s relational exploitation, however benign. The organizer or volunteer taking the time to ask someone to vote triple hasn’t built a relationship with that person, no more than a farmer injecting expensive chemical fertilizer into their soil to boost the yield of their crop has actually made their fields more fertile.

What does this have to do with the disconnect between massive grassroots participation and limited national power? If you volunteered to help Joe Biden or any number of Democratic candidates win in 2020, the odds are you did it alone. And it wasn’t just because of COVID. The tools for organizing built by companies like Mobilize, EveryAction and GetThru are brilliantly designed to make it easy for you engage on your own time and terms. Which is great for a short-term harvest, but it also means that you didn’t really build up much political capacity or capital that you could use now to make demands on your elected representatives. The Biden campaign harvested your volunteer work in exchange for a good feeling, but not much power. If you’re frustrated now by decisions being made by Biden or the Democratic leadership, ask yourself—what levers did you build that you could pull on now that might be anywhere near as muscular as the ones built by the campaigns in 2020 to get their candidates elected?

There are important exceptions to this pattern: a lot of people got mobilized through independent organizations like the Sunrise Movement or the Working Families Party or People’s Action, which do invest in long-term community organizing and which have local chapters. And here’s a great case study from Mobilize on how Persist Brooklyn, a local organizing group, used Mobilize’s suite of tools over the last year to grow a vibrant community base. We can shift this trend. But to do so, people have to stop behaving like activists taking isolated actions and instead insist on long-term community-organizing as the only way to build real power.

The Lesson Remains the Same

And highly related, this article by Lara Putnam in The Forge titled On Postcards and Superpowers looks at the rush by grassroots groups to get their hands on vetted lists of addressable Democratic voters in Georgia to mail to, arguing that while the hustle to help in the Georgia senate runoffs embodies a lot of the best of the post-2016 grassroots ecosystem, “the feeding frenzy over address lists also suggests a progressive volunteer universe that may misjudge the levers of political change and is at risk of misallocating its efforts as a result.” Here’s a little more from Lara:

“The effort to support campaigns far away when everything feels urgent and precarious is an understandable response to the absence of more enduring local infrastructure on the Democratic/progressive side. But it’s not a response that solves that absence. And, when it diverts attention and energy that could be doing the work of local building, it becomes part of the problem itself. The basic point is a truism among organizers: messages conveyed in the context of pre-existing relationships are far more impactful than anything anonymous ever could be. Your relationships are your superpower. And using them intentionally — alongside other people doing the same — can transform the political landscape around you.

In contrast, when you focus on distant battlegrounds, you are resigning yourself to only the most attenuated tools of political impact and missing the opportunity to address emerging needs closer to home, where your ability to shape outcomes, and to do so in enduring ways, is far greater.”

Use your superpower.

Bonus links:

—We now know that the massive effort around postcarding in 2024 had a minuscule impact on voter behavior.

—Keep your eyes on the new round of anti-government protests breaking out in Iran; it could be the first big surprise of 2026.

—The good folks at New Jewish Narrative had me on their podcast Peacecast last week to talk about my book, When Doves Try, on the Israeli Peace Now movement and its relevance today. Check it out here or wherever you get your podcasts.

End Times

While I did not have “Outgoing NYC Mayor Eric Adams Next Move to Fight Antisemitism Using Cryptocurrency” on my bingo card, this will have to do. And this. Happy New Year!

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