Notes on Organizing During This Crazy Time
Visibility Brigades, ICE-Scraper Buy-Ins, Health Care Professionals in Revolt, Democracy Teams Trainings, Sierra Club Pushback and Cracks in the Orange Bully's Facade. A pre-Thanksgiving potpourri!
What do the Purple People Resistance of Huntsville, Alabama; NevCo Mad As Hell of Nevada City; the Good Trouble Gang of Sacramento; the Badass Feminists of Gainesville, Florida; the I Scream Social Club of Tampa; Sharp Objects 502 of Louisville, Kentucky; Coffee Compassion Action! Of Cincinnati; Be There York of York, Pennsylvania; and the Circle of Cheyenne Citizen Warriors & Friends of Cheyenne, Wyoming all have in common?
These are just some of the more colorful names of the more than 320 Visibility Brigades that are now active in 46 of the states (plus DC). Every week, they get together to stand on nearby highway overpasses holding custom letter boards spelling out a message of protest and defiance.
Two weeks ago, I heard Ellen Spirer, one of the co-leaders of the Hudson River Visibility Brigade, talk about how her group, which covers locations from Washington Heights in upper Manhattan to Yorktown in Northern Westchester, has grown from three members in late June to more than one hundred now.
The first time she participated, “I knew immediately I wanted to be doing this as often as possible.” What we’re doing, she said, is “joyful rush-hour resistance.”
“We have a captive audience,” she noted wrily. “We show up on someone’s commute and our message is right in front of them and hard to ignore.” She added, “We love that we’re reaching people who didn’t show up for a march or sign up for a Substack.”
When drivers honk in support, which she said happens often, “now those people have shown up at a protest that they didn’t know they’d be attending.” While occasionally a few drivers will flip them the bird, mostly they get a lot of positive feedback. “It’s so exhilarating,” Spirer declared, noting that she and other participants in her group “call it ‘happy hour’ on the bridge. We have a lot of fun up there. We play music. We dance. Sometimes we put humor in our messages, like once we had a message that said, ‘honk if you’re not in the Epstein files.’”
Because they use letter boards, they can be nimble with what messages they display. “One of the things we love about this approach to our messaging is that we can react to current events in as little as 24 hours.” And the more than 300 member groups in the Visibility Brigade network often coordinate nationally on specific messages, such as a recent push around Veterans Day to salute people for their service and remind service-members about their oaths to the Constitution.
“We have a lot of fun.” Those are the same words I heard from someone who started a #TeslaTakedown weekly protest group back in the spring. Note to whatever “new” left emerges from the current crisis: fun matters!
To learn more, go to VisibilityBrigade.com
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This past Saturday, activists organized by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network conducted a “buy-in” at the Home Depot in Monrovia, a small city in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains northeast of Los Angeles. Home Depots are hubs for day laborers; at Stephen Miller’s depraved insistence, ICE has been targeting the stores to hunt for people they can abduct. In August, Carlos Roberto Montoya, a day laborer from Guatemala, was killed as he fled a Home Depot raid when he ran onto the freeway and was hit by a car. Home Depot has not resisted or condemned these raids.
In protest, about one hundred people walked into the store Saturday and formed a long line to each buy one 99-cent ice-scraper. Then, after a half hour, they marched back into the store to return the scrapers and get their money back. This is a classic Saul Alinsky-style organizing tactic—he once organized neighborhood volunteers to make deposits at a local bank in pennies to pressure the bank to pay more attention to local economic development. The goal of the Home Depot ice-scraper action, as one of the participants, academic Peter Dreier, noted on his Facebook page, is to “get Home Depot to publicly criticize, and not cooperate with ICE.” The conglomerate is also one of three mega-corporations being targeted by a wide coalition of groups urging a consumer boycott from Black Friday through Cyber Monday.
To learn more about how to replicate this work, NDLON is holding a Zoom call tonight at 8pm EST. Register here https://www.mobilize.us/ndlon/event/873155/
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A Trump regime proposal to exclude nurses, nurse practitioners, social workers, physical therapists, physician assistant, audiologists from a list of professional degrees that qualify for federally subsidized education loans is setting off a firestorm of opposition. The New York Academy of Medicine said that “This proposal fails to acknowledge the current deep vulnerabilities across the healthcare ecosystem, where workforce gaps that affect nursing, public health practitioners, and clinical specialists are widening. Imposing new barriers, such as those recommended by the Department of Education, risks destabilizing the already stressed health system.” According to the Council on Social Work Education, “Excluding social work from professional degree eligibility…could make it more difficult for students to pursue graduate education in critical service professions. Preliminary data suggest that 370,000 students could be affected by the new definition and more than $8 billion in federal loans will no longer be available for student access (roughly 22 percent of annual federal loan disbursements).
The DOE issued the plan under Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (sic), which called for limits on federal student loans for graduate degrees, but it’s already backpedaling, putting out a defensive statement. But while the department claims it’s only trying to help students avoid taking on more debt than they can afford, a 2024 Heritage Foundation report suggests that the real agenda at work here is a push to get women out of the workforce and into starting families earlier. As it notes, “reducing federal higher education subsidies and loan cancellation that place the federal thumb on the scale in favor of spending years in postsecondary work of questionable value will help young Americans to start and expand their families.” Yeah, right!
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If you are inspired by the Mamdani model of grassroots community organizing, check out We Own It’s new Democracy Teams Initiative. It’s a collaboration of organizing trainers and coaches offering a version of the Camp Obama/Marshall Ganz/Leading Change Network 4-day intensive workshop, only to make it accessible they’ve split it into twelve, two-hour sessions held at multiple times of the day and week to make it easier for people to fit into busy schedules. As Jake Schlachter of We Own It explains, “We ran a one-week pilot of this new program in July with Federal Workers Against DOGE and a bunch of former USAID folks, and we got a strong signal that it could work. Now we want to know how it could be further developed into a useful resource for the pro-democracy movement, something like infrastructure for the democracy building work we’re all doing, so that every organization doesn’t have to figure out organizing training for themselves (or skip it.)” Their next pilot is running from December 1-20. Learn more here.
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One quick observation about the first big crack in President Orange Cheeto’s aura of power and dominance, i.e. the near unanimous vote by the House and Senate to force the release of the Epstein files. As many have been saying for a while, Trump’s falling popularity numbers show that he’s weaker than he appears. But it’s hard to challenge a bully when everyone is cowering before him—at least not until a few people find the courage to go after one of his weaknesses. Recall how this worked with former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who bullied everyone in Albany for a decade, dividing, conquering, manipulating and covering up corruption among his cronies. His aura of power was broken by a combination of brave women who spoke out publicly against his history of sexual harassment plus one brave legislator, Assemblyman Ron Kim, who went on television to defy Cuomo after receiving one of his typically nasty phone calls. The dam burst soon thereafter. Now that a few House Republicans defied Trump on Epstein, we’re seeing signs of other cracks (like a few signing onto a discharge petition to protect the rights of unionized federal workers—enough now to force a vote). More please!
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If you read The New York Times’ recent “expose” of problems at the Sierra Club, which had the incendiary headline of “The Sierra Club Embraced Social Justice; Then It Tore Itself Apart,” take a minute and read this response from Loren Blackford, the club’s executive director. She makes several important points: contrary to the Times’ narrative framing, the club is not in decline, either in terms of membership or revenue; it continues to be a player in elections; and it’s wrong to impose an either/or framework on whether the club should “only” focus on the environment and ignore equity and justice issues. On that latter point, she quite rightly points out that there’s no way a group focused on the environment can ignore related issues, writing: “Right now, parents are keeping children indoors, away from public parks where ICE agents may be present. As energy prices rise, we are engaging thousands of people to talk not just about any one power plant, but all the ways the system is rigged to favor corporations over customers.” Figuring out how to engage across connected issues is not always obvious when you’re managing a large organization with a big reach, but the Times story was more like a hit piece than fair-minded journalism.
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End Times
Politico got its hands on a compendium of documents that were presented last month at a symposium run by US Central Command and members of the Civil-Military Coordination Center that American forces are running in southern Israel as part of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, and one slide in particular stood out for me.
South Park got there first.
Thank you for this wonderful post. I’m a social worker and sociologist and I’m gonna circulate this widely to my colleagues. My own free Substack is now private, but any friends of your Substack are welcome to a free subscription. I will put information about your Substack and this post on my opportunities for Action page.
Good stuff, Micah, thank you. Just want to add that, as a non military person, I’m always comforted by the reminder that military personnel take an oath to defend and abide by the Constitution.