Against the Doomsayers
Fear-mongering gets clicks, but sharing worries about "martial law" won't help stop it. Instead, keep calm and carry on by celebrating the upstanders--there are more of us every day.
Nearly 33 years ago, on Wednesday, April 29, 1992, a mostly white jury acquitted four Los Angeles police officers in the vicious beating of Rodney King, a Black man who they had pulled over for speeding. This despite a widely circulated witness video showing them tasing, stomping and hogtying him. Within an hour or so, crowds of protestors formed and were confronted by police. By the evening, riots had broken out. The next day they spread from South Central Los Angeles to many other parts of the city, leading to 63 deaths, thousands of injuries and more than $1 billion in property damage.
Friday, May 1, much of the worst violence was over. King spoke on television, begging his fellow Angelenos, “Can we all just get along?” And at the request of California Governor Pete Wilson, President George H.W. Bush invoked the Insurrection Act, federalizing the state’s Army National Guard and authorizing federal troops to help maintain order. Bush also ordered the Justice Department to investigate the case, which led later to indictments of the four officers and two convictions for violating King’s civil rights. Ultimately about 13,500 federal troops joined local guard units and police in restoring calm (though in one incident, a unit of Marines helping a police unit in a domestic violence dispute fired 200 rounds into a house after being asked to provide the police with “cover.”)
I was working in Manhattan at the time and, like many other New Yorkers, following the news closely. I’ll never forget what happened that Friday. Starting in the late morning, people at work started getting phone calls and sharing rumors about protests breaking out across the city. By early afternoon, the buzz had escalated: Buses and cars were being set on fire in midtown. Local merchants were boarding up their shop windows. “Get out of the city before dark,” people were saying. As the Washington Post later reported, “Rumors of youths on the rampage, bomb threats and subway shutdowns spread like the arson fires in Los Angeles.” Some of my co-workers decided to head home early. I didn’t.
Around 6pm, I walked from Fifth Ave and 13th Street north to Grand Central Station. The normally bustling streets were quiet, empty. Manhattan’s white-collar workers had already rushed home. But there wasn’t a single burned or overturned vehicle anywhere. That evening, the local TV news reported that about 400 people had marched angrily across the Brooklyn Bridge. Another crowd, perhaps a thousand, went to Times Square to protest. No meaningful violence or property damage occurred. Despite that, the mid-afternoon commuter trains leaving Penn Station and Grand Central were mobbed by frantic suburbanites desperate to leave town. The news showed trains packed to the gills. Meanwhile, just a few hours later, I had no trouble getting a seat on what normally would be a crowded ride.
Fear is contagious. Especially when it feeds on pre-existing assumptions and prejudices. And particularly when fast-moving events destabilize our sense of normalcy. It’s easier to rush to imagine the worst is happening, or about to happen, when unusual events are already taking place. But, now, as we approach seeming Breaking points, Anxiety levels rise, events become more Nonlinear and Incomprehensible (I’m using futurist Jamais Cascio’s BANI framework), it’s imperative that we learn to be more resilient and careful about rushing to conclusions. And as tempting as it is to keep spreading warnings of doom, our job as organizers is to not just fuel fears but also buck up people’s courage.
Fear Not
A week ago on April 8, I suddenly started getting questions from activist friends asking about April 20 and Trump declaring martial law. I wasn’t the only one. Robert Hubbell, who writes the “Today’s Edition” newsletter, which is widely read by grassroots Democratic activists, devoted most of his April 9 edition to “reader concerns about the Insurrection Act.” As you can see from this Google Trends search chart, searches for “martial law,” “insurrection act” and “April 20” had started to rise a few days earlier and then spiked on the 8th.
Jordan Liles of the fact-checking site Snopes.com has done a great job figuring out how and why this rumor about April 20 started spreading. Apparently it began with a March 21 post on Medium by a pseudonymous writer using the name Aletheisthenes. Noting that one of Trump’s executive orders calls for a report within 90 days from the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security on whether he should invoke the Insurrection Act to tackle illegal immigration, Aletheisthenes predicted, in stark language, that on the 90th day from that order, April 20, the US would take its “final steps into authoritarian rule.” The rest of the post reads like a bad piece of apocalyptic porn, with references to “false flag” bombings and real or staged high-profile acts of violence used to justify a crackdown, calls on “good Americans” to grab their guns to help the police, mass arrests of opposition leaders, purges inside law enforcement and the military and the postponement of future elections. “Once martial law is imposed, there will be a tiny window — no more than three days — before resistance becomes nearly impossible,” the author claimed, citing no evidence. Some people have watched too many cheesy Hollywood movies.
In fact, the Insurrection Act does not give the president the power to declare martial law – he doesn’t have that power anywhere under current law. What it does do is permit the president to use the military to assist civilian authorities in law enforcement. Told this by Liles of Snopes, Aletheisthenes changed the headline of their Medium post from “On April 20th, 2025, the United States will Cross the Point of No Return” to “On April 20th, 2025, the United States may Cross the Point of No Return,” but lots of people had already started sharing the more incendiary version.
An article by Daniel Hunter, a leading anti-authoritarian organizer, in Waging Nonviolence, that appeared on April 4 and pondered “What to do if the Insurrection Act is invoked,” may have also stoked some additional fear—even though the article itself explains that any attempt by Trump to involve the military in door-to-door raids would likely be stymied by a mix of principled objections and bureaucratic molasses inside the Pentagon. A table-top exercise he participated in last year that gamed out scenarios where Trump tried to go further by deputizing civilian militias led to a massive public backlash, with the president quietly backing down.
Why did attention to the April 20th date suddenly spike on April 8th? It’s not clear, but I have a theory. By announcing his global imposition of tariffs on April 2nd, Trump kicked off a major stock market crash that hit bottom on the 8th. The next day, he flip-flopped and suspended most of the tariffs, causing the market to soar. In the middle of all this, on Saturday April 5th, millions of us protested in more than 1300 Hands Off rallies across the country.
So, two tremendous and contradictory forces were in motion in the days leading to April 8th’s spasm of paranoia. One was the real turmoil caused by Trump’s tariffs, which led to trillions in paper losses in the stock market and rising worries about a new economic recession. Trump hadn’t yet backed down, even if the face of public questions from some of his billionaire cronies and bond-market traders about the saneness of his actions. On the other hand, the Defiance shown by 3.5 million people marching in more than 1300 cities and towns on April 5th (more than triple the number of locations than the 2017 Women’s Marches) showed that people are waking up to the threat we face. We got a sense of our potential power. Which maybe made the prospect of a sudden and gigantic crackdown seem more plausible.
It's not crazy to worry about a possible Trump attack on dissent given all his authoritarian actions and tendencies. But catastrophizing is counter-productive. When people share posts like this one predicting the successful imposition of martial law on a date certain, with no possibility for resistance afterwards, they’re giving Trump power he doesn’t have. As Hubbell argued in his post, the US military and National Guard are made up of Americans of all stripes. Most, if not all, are professional and loyal to the Constitution (if you doubt that, just check out all the organizing happening among military veterans now who are pushing back on DOGE). They are not Trump’s private paramilitary. Moreover, imposing martial law on millions of peaceful protestors is not something Trump has the power or capacity to do.
That said, what can demobilize us is too much fear and fear-mongering, along with social media algorithms that reward doomsayers. You want to get everyone to rush home and cower? Tell them things are hopeless. Umair Haque has built a massive following on Medium by writing about doom and collapse for years. And I only know about him because Medium keeps serving his fear-mongering to me. Now TED is promoting a new talk by British journalist Carole Cadwalladr, titled “This is What a Digital Coup Looks Like.” I don’t recommend you watch her talk--it starts with the words panic and fear. “We now have to start living as if we live in East Germany, and Instagram is the Stasi,” she declares at one point. Her talk is also focused on attacking her former employers at The Guardian, which laid off a chunk of its staff recently—I hardly understand what her emphasizing that has to do with fighting Big Tech. But if you watch closely, she does seem to get a kick out of bashing The Guardian.
Yes, we are in challenging times, but there’s an accelerationist hysteria to these presentations that vastly overstates the moment we are in. I have tremendous respect for Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein, but their new piece in The Guardian about “end times fascism” is too dark, in my humble opinion. Not that their analysis of the blend of tech-bro libertarianism and theo-bro Christian fundamentalism that animates the Trump moment is off-base. It’s just that the way to combat this nonsense is not to come up with even scarier ways of describing it but to ridicule it more. More Jon Lovett! More Jeff Tiedrich! (And maybe a little less Timothy Snyder?)
Also, it’s not at all true that the sky is falling. Yesterday, Harvard joined Princeton in rejecting the administration’s bullying, and they and others are also suing the Energy Department for egregious cuts to their research budgets. Some 250 foundations have signed a joint statement initiated by the heads of the McKnight, Freedom Together and MacArthur Foundations affirming their commitment to upholding fundamental rights and liberties. And a lot of them are also pouring funds towards filling the gaps created by the destruction of the USAID. More than 500 law firms have signed onto an friend-of-the-court brief backing Perkins Coie in its suit to undo a Trump order blocking its ability to represent government contractors. Nearly 700 law professors have signed a brief backing Wilmer Hale in a similar case. Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez are out barnstorming again, drawing gigantic crowds—even 12,000 in Nampa, Idaho! Twenty thousand people signed up for Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s Sunday Resistance Lab training program (the next one is May 4th; RSVP here). And lots of local leaders, including my own county legislator, David Imamura, are speaking out on a daily basis.
If you are looking for something useful to do, take a moment and call or write any of these institutions or leaders and tell them you appreciate the stands they are taking. Because courage is also contagious.
—Related: I highly recommend this essay, also in The Guardian, by author and organizer Jonathan Smucker on how to protest most effectively “without falling into Trump’s playbook.” The dominant narrative in the US casts protesters, he writes:
“as a special type of person, with some combination of the following features: loud, shrill, naive, counter-cultural, speaking in jargon, Marxist, anti-American, violent and economically and/or educationally privileged (AKA ‘elitist’). The purpose of this dominant narrative is straightforward: inoculate millions of Americans against protest movements by otherizing ‘protesters’. In other words, there’s a well-worn caricature of a protester that holds many everyday working people back from aligning with protest movements.”
How can we best counter this? One answer Smucker offers is to lift up veterans and federal workers. (Now where else have I heard that?)
—Bonus link: Gabe Lerner’s weekly Democracy Notes newsletter has a new section called “Whose been courageous lately.”
Loose Ends
—While it’s great that Sanders and AOC are again drawing large crowds on their “Stop Oligarchy” tour, there’s still only the scantest evidence that they’re using it for anything more than list-building. Jonathan Tasini, a writer and labor organizer who worked as a national surrogate for Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, has written a scathing post applauding Sanders’ vision but describing how he and his colleagues have repeatedly failed to build anything beyond his own brand.
—Wondering how Trump’s tariff taxes will hit your pocketbook? Ben Resnick of Zinc Labs has built “Oh No Tariffs,” a simple financial planning tool that answers the question, Mint-style.
—Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer have written “a practical guide to courage in Trump’s age of fear,” for The New Yorker. It’s filled with lots of wisdom gleaned from anti-authoritarian activists around the world.
—Luke Fretwell, an OG of the world of civic tech in America, just shared a wonderful post taking stock on his career and offering gratitude to a great list of collaborators.
End Times
Someone has figured out how to hack the voice notification buttons at crosswalks in Palo Alto and the results are hilariously subversive.
I love this quote which is where I am at the moment... "Finally, if we are to make our protests as effective as possible, we should recognize protest for what it is: a tactic. Protest is not an end in itself. Tactics require larger long-term power-building strategies. Absent strategy, protest can sometimes still hold some short-term strategic value (eg, showing that dissent exists), but if we want to accomplish more than a flash in the pan – if we genuinely intend to shape history, as powerful movements before us have done – then we need to figure out what to do after the protest ends and everyone goes home."
I get it that you want to move us from doom and gloom, good for you. But, the notion of, it's not like we didn't warn you, still rings in my head for those who we thought knew better. Maybe I've read and watched too much on the Nazis and Stasis, but the image that keeps coming to mind for me is a billboard that has the sink running full force while two people are trying to have a conversation. I am not by nature an anxious person but, like you, I am not shy about to expressing my views, I would hate for us to have to do it with fear as our backdrop. So ho do we start to collect those who may be open to seeing the writing on the wall?