The Defiance is Spreading
Anti-Trump/Musk protests are expanding, with the next two weeks heading towards a crescendo.
This past Saturday, national park rangers led protests to protect public lands and reinstate fired workers at Abraham Lincoln’s Springfield home, Arches National Park, Biscayne National Park, the Blue Ridge Parkway, Bryce Canyon, Cabrillo National Monument, Camp David, the Cape Cod National Seashore, Catocin Mountain Park, Chuckwalla National Monument, Colorado National Monument, Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Death Valley, Devil’s Doorway, Devil’s Lake, the Golden Gate Bridge, Great Falls Park, the Harry Truman National Historic Site, the Idaho Panhandle National Forests, Indiana Dunes National Park, Kinnesaw Mountain National Battlefield, Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Mesa Verde National Park, the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, the Presidio, Port Angeles, Rocky Mountain National Park, Sagamore Hill, Saguaro National Park, Shenandoah National Park, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Seashore, the Stonewall National Monument, Valley Forge, the Roosevelt Arch and Gardiner entrances to Yellowstone and Zion National Park.
And those are just the events documented by Resistance Rangers, a group of more than a thousand off-duty park staff, on their Instagram account. A bigger spreadsheet tally counted 115 actions and teach-ins in 42 states. But you may have already heard about the rising defiance of park rangers, as they already did a wave of coordinated protests at parks a month ago.
A day later, on Sunday, letter carriers opposed to the dismantling of the US Postal Service held “Fight Like Hell” rallies in Houston, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Rockford IL, Denver, Kansas City, Silver Spring, Providence RI, Toledo, Santa Maria CA, Cape Girardeau MO, Springfield, San Juan PR, Olympia WA, Albuquerque, Salt Lake City, Anchorage, Waukesha WI, Cleveland, Raleigh and the list goes on. There are 640,000 postal workers in America, so kicking this group is like stirring a hornet’s nest. Did you know that the postal workers were in motion? I didn’t. They held more than 200 rallies Sunday.
Also over the weekend, the grassroots #TeslaTakedown movement drew big crowds to Tesla dealerships in Golden Valley MN, Brooklyn NY, Cherry Hill NJ, Columbus OH, Delray Beach, West Chester PA, Littleton CO, Kansas City, Portland OR, Newport Beach, Glendale, Burbank, Colorado Springs, Grand Rapids, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Bartlett TN, Franklin TN, Owing Mills, MD, Warminster PA. Notably many of these locations are in Trump territory, like Colorado Springs. And many of these protests were organized by local Indivisible groups. In Manhattan, where the movement started with just one person sitting on a stool outside the showroom on February 4, more than a thousand (many organized by Rise and Resist, a local direct action group) showed up.
As Erica Chenoweth, Jeremy Pressman and Soha Hammam of the Crowd Counting Consortium write in Waging Nonviolence, while anti-Trump protests are nowhere near as big as the mass marches of 2017, they are far more numerous, frequent and geographically dispersed. In this February alone, they tallied more than twice as many such protests than in the same month eight years ago. Bigger crowds are on the horizon, as evidenced by the tens of thousands who came out this past weekend to stand with Senator Bernie Sanders on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, where upstart Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined him for several events. According to Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ chief political adviser, more than 107,000 people have RSVPed to attend one of the ten rallies they’ve organized as part of this tour. “Sixty-five percent of those names are new to our list,” Shakir told me on Monday.
(For more on what the Sanders campaign is doing to organize locally and nationally via these rallies, read my report in The American Prospect, which was just published today. And if you’ve been passing around Jonathan V. Last’s Bulwark recent article about “How to Think (And Act) Like a Dissident Movement,” my piece offers a necessary corrective. Last imagines that AOC is the one drawing these huge crowds, when it’s actually Bernie they’re coming to see, and bases his hopes for a successful opposition on a cross-ideological alliance spanning everyone from her to Mark Cuban. That would be lovely, but the hard reality is Bernie Sanders’ stubborn and likely correct view that building a working-class movement to challenge America’s oligarchy means no billionaire-hugging.)
Why Not “The Resistance”?
I’ve started calling this emerging movement “The Defiance” rather than “The Resistance” for a few reasons. First, because we need a new term to describe something new. The opposition that is rising now is less about signaling cultural disapproval in polite society and then channeling voter fury into the mid-term elections and more about actually standing now in the way of the machinery that Trump, Musk, Miller and Vought have unleashed with DOGE and Project 2025. The “Resistance” of 2017-2020 was also built by and around the (mostly white) progressive women’s movement that was shocked into action by Hillary Clinton’s surprise defeat. It was also lifted by pillars of our once-confident cultural establishment; I can’t remember how many times the leaders of the Women’s March were put on the cover of a glossy magazine or feted at some high-toned event. Now most of those elites seem to be caving or in hiding. Where have you gone George Clooney? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you. (Not.)
Though it’s still early days, the ranks of The Defiance are being filled by a different kind of social stratum, especially federal workers who are disproportionately veterans, working-class, younger and people of color who are feeling the front-lash of the DOGE chainsaw. I spent a good chunk of the last week or so interviewing some of the emerging leaders amont federal workers who are out protesting their own firings as well as the disruptions to their workplaces and missions. These included people from the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the EPA, the National Institutes of Health, as well as various unions representing these workers, and they just sound different than progressive organizers of 2017-2020 “centering” the “intersectionality” of all their movements.
Did you know that every federal worker takes an oath to the Constitution? I didn’t. Many of them bring that up when they talk about why they’re organizing now. American flags don’t feel out of place at their rallies, and indeed if you scan the through the posts of the Resistance Rangers or letter carriers from last weekend, you’ll see a lot of flags (many of them upside down). Even the highly-trained scientists at the National Institutes of Health who are fighting against the destruction of their prestigious agency are closer to the political and economic middle of America than you might expect—Matt Brown, a neuroscientist who is an officer of the 5000-member NIH Fellows Union, told me he makes less than $70,000 a year as a post-doctoral researcher with 12 years of academic training behind him; many of his more junior colleagues live “paycheck to paycheck,” he said.
And here is his colleague Rosa Lafer-Sousa, another officer of the NIH Fellows Union, which fought to get recognition last year in part because its members anticipated the danger of Trump winning re-election. She’s a neuroscientist who’s worked at NIH for about five years on research that could potentially cure blindness. Like Brown, her reaction to the 2024 election has been different from 2016, when everything felt lost and aimless. “We have the labor movement,” she says, thinking about how hard they worked to win recognition last year in part because they anticipated a possible Trump re-election. She goes on, “I've been so let down by the Democrats, and I've been so let down by electoral politics in this whole game, and it's the labor movement that has buoyed me, realizing that there is this alternate path that is not inherently left-right political--it's about the working class, the vast majority of Americans.”
So maybe The Defiance is a fresh new word we can use to describe something grittier and braver than the polite “resistance” of eight years ago. I also was never a fan of us claiming the word “resistance” back then because my mother and her family were saved from the Nazis by the Belgian Resistance, whose leaders risked their lives to save others. Mailing postcards from the safety of one’s living room just never seemed to live up to the moniker. Perhaps I’m wrong, but The Defiance has more edge. On April 5, we will see it writ large; Hands Off — the coalition led by Indivisible, MoveOn, the Working Families Party, Public Citizen and many others — has called for large “all in” gatherings that day; as of now more than 700 are already in the works. And the federal workers unions are holding a national day on the theme of “Kill the Cuts” on April 8.
Self-Driving Anti-Tesla Protests
Speaking of edge, while much of the fight against co-presidents Trump and Musk is taking place in federal courtrooms, the proverbial tip of the spear that is poking back the hardest so far is the #TeslaTakedown movement. Last Thursday night, some of the organizers at the heart of TeslaTakedown held a mass Zoom call that impressed me in a number of ways:
First, Alex Winter, a filmmaker and actor who jumped on Joan Donovan’s initial suggestion on BlueSky that people picket Tesla showrooms, spoke beautifully about how the movement has grown and, most importantly, about how much fun people are having as they take Tesla down.
Second, in the first few minutes of the call, while the greatest number of people were listening (at least 2500), Alice Hu, a NYC-based organizer, made a clear call to action: TeslaTakedown is hoping to see protests at 500 Tesla sites worldwide on March 29, including all 277 showrooms in the US. Here’s a map showing all the dealerships nationwide, highlighting the ones that still need someone to host a protest; it’s updated twice daily.
Third, unlike the #50501 swarm, the TeslaTakedown network has seasoned organizers at its core. The meeting was MCed by Annie Wu Henry, who built and managed the Swifties for Harris effort last year, and who burst onto the public scene running candidate John Fetterman’s innovative messaging campaign on TikTok.
Fourth, TeslaTakedown organizers have made some smart choices to situate the fight against Musk as part of a larger pushback against Big Tech and technofascism. Thus the call featured Gil Duran, whose writes the NerdReich.com newsletter and who has been one of the leading journalists unearthing and connecting the dots tying the broligarchs like Musk to neo-reactionary libertarians like Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel.
Fifth, and related, the organizers also emphasized the need to break the power of all the major tech platforms, not just Musk and X. Thus it made sense that the call featured a pitch from privacy expert Micah Lee, who walked the audience through some basic steps they can take to protect their online privacy.
As I listened to the whole Zoom, it struck me that TeslaTakedown may be tapping into something more than just fury at the world’s richest man and his sidekick, the Orange Cheetoh. There’s a lot of disquiet in America about how much power big corporations have over our lives and how much they may be invading our privacy and manipulating our minds through their access to our data and control over the algorithms that shape what information we consume. To date, no one has figured out how to organize people with those feelings into something with political power—the Athena coalition that formed to try to challenge Amazon is the closest that I can think of.
At the moment the Tesla protests are growing in part because they are fun and effective; people danced at one Tesla protest last week. But more worrisome, at one March 22 in West Palm Beach, not far from Mar-a-Lago, a man drove his SUV into a crowd of protestors. Luckily no one was injured; the man claimed his brakes failed and the police arrested him. A pro-Trump counter-protestor waved a stun-gun at Tesla protestors in Berkeley. Clearly, the growing momentum of these actions is generating a counter-reaction that could lead to trouble. In Idaho, far-right groups are calling for people to defend a dealership in a suburb of Boise next Saturday in tandem with the March 29 push to protest at every showroom. Political violence is as American as apple pie, unfortunately. I think we’ve been lucky so far that the worst that has happened is some vandalism of Teslas; I hope that the TeslaTakedown movement has the discipline to denounce such behavior and stay nonviolent. With the Justice Department and FBI talking about going after Tesla protestors as “domestic terrorists,” and Trump endorsing Musk’s view that left-wing billionaires are behind it, the movement is going to be tested soon.
—Bonus link: Journalist/activist Andrea Pitzer’s closely observed report on how the movement is growing in Roanoke, Virginia is a hopeful depiction of how a few people can shift the tide in one place, over time.
Musk is the Money Muscle; Miller is the Brains
Monday, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg made news by revealing that a bare two weeks ago, he had been included in a secretive group-text on Signal by Michael Waltz, the Trump administration’s national security adviser, and that the group included many top principals, including Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine negotiator, as well as many other top officials. As he recounts, the group, which was named “Houthi PC small group,” apparently debated the timing of the White House’s attack on the Houthis in Yemen, with Vance suggesting a delay and Hegseth urging a go. Goldberg says he wondered if the group was real or some kind of sophisticated disinformation effort, even as the thread included actual details of the attack. That is, until the bombs started dropping.
But while questions are now swirling about operational security, one aspect of this episode stood out to me. What shut down the debate between Vance and Hegseth was message from one “S M,” presumably Stephen Miller, the immigration hardliner whose title is White House deputy chief of staff, but who appears to be the power behind the throne. He wrote, “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.” Hegseth repled, “Agree.” A day later the bombers were unleashed.
Over the last two months, Elon Musk has drawn an inordinate amount of attention for his DOGE assault on the federal government. He is a great and worthy target for opposition. But while Musk has seemingly glued himself to Trump’s hip, camping out at Mar-a-lago and shlepping his toddler on trips on the presidential helipcopter, I am more and more convinced that the real engine of Trump’s high-speed attacks on DEI, foreign aid, academia, the judiciary, and the legal profession—not to mention immigrants and transgender people—is Miller.
Why does a text from Miller close down a conversation among Trump’s top brass? The answer can be found in Hate Monger, Jean Guerrero’s excellent 2020 political biography of him. In Trump’s first term, Miller bonded with Trump over their shared hatred of dark-skinned immigrants. But in additional to documenting Miller’s ideological zeal, Guerrero shows he leveraged their close relationship to intimidate other staffers, even Cabinet members. Here are two illustrative excerpts:
“Trump enjoyed listening to Miller shout down ideological opponents. He was fond of his combative style and organized actual debates in the Oval Office to see it on display. Watching people beat each other up verbally was his favorite way to process information – and Miller could play both sides. He could verbally dominate men who outranked him, while remaining ever-obsequious to Trump.”
At one point, Miller was part of a meeting convened by Trump national security advisor H.R. McMaster in the Situation Room to discuss the global migration crisis and an international agreement that the US had joined under Obama called the Global Compact on Migration. Several cabinet secretaries were at the meeting along with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and UN Ambassador Nikki Halley. Guerrero recounts how Miller took charge:
“Isn’t it a fact—does anybody deny that it was the Obama Administration that signed onto this resolution?” Miller asked. One official asserted that it was the US that signed. Miller looked across the table and enunciated each word. “Is there seriously anyone sitting along this table who believes that the United States should participate in this process?” The cabinet secretaries were silent, shrinking in the face of his question. Miller was channeling Trump. He had learned to dominate meetings by personifying the president; few dared challenge him. One participant in the meeting recalls that Haley piped in. “Well, you know what, Stephen? This is the kind of thing we eat for breakfast every day at the United Nations. We participate in all kinds of things, and we’re big boys and girls and I think we should participate. But if that’s what you all think, then I’ve got things to do.” Haley stood up and left. They voted to disengage.
There’s plenty more you can learn about Miller from Hate Monger. I didn’t know that he was a protégé of David Horowitz, the former Ramparts editor who now crusades against the left. I also didn’t know about how he advanced his standing in the first Trump White House by telling Trump that top aide Steven Bannon was hurting his poll numbers, or how he ingratiated himself with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. And I had forgotten how much Miller drew intellectual inspiration from overtly racist far-right websites like VDare.com or American Renaissance. The book ends in 2019, but it’s well worth a fresh read today, considering how much we are now living the world that Stephen Miller wants to create.
Short Takes
—“What if we didn’t suck?” is now my new favorite slogan for upstart Democrats challenging entrenched incumbents who still behave like we’re in the before times. Twenty-six-year old TikTok activist Kat Abughazaleh may not succeed in her bid to replace thirteen-term incumbent Rep. Jan Schakowsky, in part because the latter is a solid progressive. But Abughazaleh is showing, right out of the gate, that there’s clearly a way for Democrats to talk and act differently than the current crowd. Also, this is the first time I’ve seen a challenger make a promise to avoid “scammy guilt trip texts” and “grifty consultants” and to also pledge to spend campaign funds on community services like book drives and clothing exchanges instead of expensive fundraisers. Amen sister!
—The smart people at The New Republic ran a not-so-smart piece recently titled “How to Fight ICE Raids With Your Smartphone.” In it, Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, a staff writer, touted a new tool from TurnLeft PAC called ResistMap that aims to protect immigrants and their communities. The site is logging reports of ICR raids from all over the country and gives users the option of signing up for text alerts. The hope is to create a “live nationwide registry of ICE activity” that would show “a single national picture of the administration’s overreach.” TurnLeft PAC has raised $100,000 to support the project. I asked my friend Jason Van Anden, the CEO of Quadrant2, who has built secure reporting apps for the ACLU, for his take and he was very skeptical. “My gut says this is dangerous on many fronts because they will inevitably get a subpoena and be forced to pony up phone numbers of people who are subscribing to their list, or the service provider will. It's not really anonymous if they are using phone numbers.” He added, “Another thing. Those ‘conservative coalitions’ can really mess with SMS via a very simple hack. Just have all of Trump's followers sign up! To put this in perspective, one million SMS messages cost at least $30,000 if sent via a service.” Caveat emptor.
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—Hamdan Ballal, the Palestinian co-director of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, was attacked by Jewish settlers two days ago, badly beaten, and then arrested by IDF soldiers who beat him and mocked him. More details here. He's now been released, along with two other Palestinians who endured similar treatment. If you would like to show support for him by making a donation, I'm told by my friend Libby Lenkinski of the New Israel Fund that the best donation page is this one by the Center for Jewish Nonviolence - it'll reach the activists including Hamdan and his family most directly.
Your slightly buried comment struck me "There’s a lot of disquiet in America about how much power big corporations have over our lives ............. To date, no one has figured out how to organize people with those feelings into something with political power. The efforts around fighting the critical Citizens United suit were SO badly organized....numerous men (I do mean men) each had their own "amendment" they were pushing so that there was not one movement illustrating the risk to our democracy in free cash to the political system. It was a tragic loss of opportunity that we can't get back over this underlying flaw.
Thank you for this excellent reporting Micah!