B4. Radical Ecology

Take Action Here! For Immediate Release 27 August 2026 Response to USDA Deregulation of Failed GMO Chestnut New York–Global Justice Ecology Project released the following statement today regarding the announcement by the USDA of the decision to deregulate the genetically engineered (GE) Darling 54 American chestnut tree. “Given the current trend toward the disregard of science and concern for […]

The USDA just approved SilvaBio’s defective GMO chestnut! Take action NOW to keep our forests wild and free from these disastrous trees! On August 27, 2026, USDA-APHIS granted “nonregulated status” to the genetically engineered D54 American chestnut tree — clearing the way for its release into wild forests with no monitoring or oversight. This was […]

About the Photo: Bread & Puppet Theater takes to the streets of Vermont against the Iraq War. This figure is from Peter Schumann’s Grey Lady imagery—figures associated with war, grief, and mourning. Artist Peter Schumann is the founder and director of the Bread & Puppet Theater. Photo: Orin Langelle/GJEP (circa 2003)

In our latest, Scott and guest co-host Hep Ingham talk with sports writer and author Dave Zirin about his new biography of peoples’ historian Howard Zinn. Listen in: Guest Host//…

This week is the 73rd anniversary of the U.S. coup in Iran. In our latest, we give a background on the geopolitics of the Cold War, U.S.-Soviet tension in Iran…

This article Atlanta offers a model for building sanctuary was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Atlanta community organizer Bassey Etuk opened a community defense workshop in June with a stark observation, and heads nodded around the crowded room. “Atlanta was a sanctuary city until the governor of Georgia made it illegal in 2009. Now Atlanta is Cop City,” he said. 

From California to Kenya, whenever I say I’m based in Atlanta, people immediately bring up Cop City, the police training facility that sparked years of protest and major campaigns to prevent it from being built on public land. The training facility was ultimately built and is now in operation. But the Stop Cop City movement reduced the size and scale of the compound and, importantly, captured the imagination of people fighting on the frontlines against policing and state violence around the world.

In 2026, organizers in Atlanta have shifted from protests and mass mobilizations to applying the lessons they learned from the campaign and building the infrastructure needed to practice real community safety every day.

I am a longtime organizer and senior strategist with Project South, where I work alongside Bassey, an Atlanta-native who organizes in the 10 historically Black neighborhoods of Brownsville in southeast Atlanta. For the past two months, Bassey, I and the ATL Get Ready Team — a coalition of community organizers and organizations from across the city — launched a community preparedness plan to respond to escalating ICE enforcement, policing and National Guard deployments in cities across the United States. Together, we have been recruiting businesses, churches, bars and community centers to become “Sanctuary Zones” — sites that commit to preventing ICE and other law enforcement from entering. 

Building sanctuary and protection for all people is critical in this period. It keeps us alive through moments of immediate crisis while positioning our communities to build the power needed for deeper, fundamental change. We share the lessons we are learning on the ground so that we are moving in coordination and solidarity with other communities all over the country who are similarly experiencing the trauma of this moment — the murders, detentions, intimidation and indictments — as fascist forces attempt to consolidate power at every level of society.

Atlanta gets ready

After witnessing ICE operations in Minnesota and National Guard deployments in Memphis and Washington, D.C., 15 Atlanta-based organizations came together in February 2026 and asked each other some hard questions. If federal agents surge into, deploy across, or occupy Atlanta, are we ready? Are we ready to resist, to protect our communities and to prevent killings and kidnappings? Are we ready to put aside old tensions and disagreements? Are we ready to see ourselves as connected and act together, applying unified pressure in pursuit of our shared goals of community protection and collective defense?

#newsletter-block_7c5408c76d70ed5c9fc95b84520ff63b { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_7c5408c76d70ed5c9fc95b84520ff63b #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our Newsletter

We’ll send you a weekly email with the latest articles.

At our first coalition meeting, Adelina Nicholls of the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights said it clearly: “We can no longer afford to mobilize in reaction to what is happening. We have to determine a political direction and alignment towards a real vision.”

Large-scale anti-ICE protests have been powerful demonstrations of collective dissent and people power. But we understood that without greater unity across race, class, gender and geography, we could not win.

It was a vital moment for those of us who have organized in Atlanta for a long time. Organizations that did not always work together and that openly acknowledged long-standing tensions and disagreements, decided that, given the rise in state repression and violence, we need each other differently in this moment.

In the face of ICE raids in Latino, Caribbean and African immigrant neighborhoods, ongoing police violence against Black youth, sweeps of homeless encampments ahead of the World Cup in Atlanta, and the targeting of youth and trans people at the federal and state levels, we named criminalization as a shared reality and a political baseline for our alignment and collective action.

We agreed on a single commitment: to prevent and disrupt the growing criminalization of all our people. We called ourselves the ATL Get Ready Team, and we began by sharing trainings and building our collective skills with one another and with communities across Atlanta. In all, 15 Black-led, migrant-led and queer-led organizations made the decision to work together, combining our strengths instead of continuing to work alone.

Over the past six months, that commitment has become a practice. We meet weekly to check in and coordinate on the work happening on the ground. We have facilitated community trainings, hosted educational forums, organized canvassing days and launched a shared campaign to protect our people.

The assembly affirms the vision

In the aftermath of the Stop Cop City movement in 2025, organizations across Atlanta joined forces to organize People’s Movement Assemblies to define and build real community safety — despite the mayor’s assurances that training police forces in advanced urban warfare techniques would do that for us. Assemblies are community gatherings where people come together to assess the problems they face, develop shared solutions and create plans of action.

Drawing on the lessons we learned during the Stop Cop City struggle, we shifted from resisting the city’s vision of public safety to building our own. The assembly process became a form of community governance to define that vision together. It also became a space to strengthen relationships and build the movement infrastructure needed for long-term transformation.

Previous Coverage

ICE will be at the World Cup, but organizers are ready

The ATL Get Ready Team participated in the Atlanta Citywide People’s Movement Assembly in March. It was the third assembly held since early 2025 and led by the People’s Campaign. More than 500 people poured into Project South’s historic building in South Atlanta looking for connection, skills and a plan to act. Together, our organizations facilitated a large-scale, real-life scenario exercise to prepare for the upcoming World Cup season. We walked participants through the anticipated influx of federal law enforcement, drones and surveillance expected over five weeks during the summer. The gym was full of so many people — young and old, seasoned organizers and those just coming into the movement space. Naming the heightened military presence in our communities was scary, especially as we witnessed ICE murders and violence, but there was also relief that we were naming our power to prepare and act. We told the room, “Prepared people don’t panic.”  

We then moved into a full day of practical, hands-on trainings in community first response, mutual aid organizing, ICE tracking, school protection, Know Your Rights (and the risks), and porch-sit community engagement.

By the end of the assembly, participants committed to continuing to organize together, building toward May 1, International Workers’ Day, and developing community safety plans for the World Cup season. We also began to design a campaign that invited more people to participate in protections that would reduce and eliminate law enforcement entanglements.

Recruiting Sanctuary Zones

Sanctuary Zones are spaces that commit to keeping communities safe by refusing to cooperate with ICE or other law enforcement agencies that criminalize, detain and separate people from their families.

They are also a way for businesses, faith institutions, community centers and other public spaces to demonstrate a commitment to caring for their staff, patrons and neighbors. Sanctuary Zones are a practical response to the violence, hostility and fear created by the Trump administration’s escalation of ICE raids, National Guard deployments and the criminalization of protest over the past year.

The more our organizing team learned about the preparations for the World Cup — including hundreds of millions of dollars allocated for security, expanded police deployments, street closures, surveillance technology and drones — the more convinced we became that we needed a campaign with accessible entry points for more public engagement around keeping our communities safe. 

Project South organizers participate in a canvassing day to build the Sanctuary Zone network across Atlanta to protect people from ICE and police violence. (WNV/Stephanie Guilloud)

We designed a plan to invite bars, restaurants and community centers to commit to declaring themselves as a Sanctuary Zone and to become part of a network of protection. We used the word “sanctuary” on purpose to signal that even if Georgia passes legislation to make it illegal for cities to pass sanctuary protections for migrants, independent businesses, faith centers and community spaces can declare sanctuary as autonomous spaces.

The real shift came when we named a deeper truth. We built the campaign in response to the public outrage over ICE, but we also knew we had a responsibility, and an opportunity, to make clear that ICE and the police are two arms of the same apparatus. Both function as agents of the state to control, contain, surveil and criminalize our communities. From the beginning, the ATL Get Ready Team aligned around an abolitionist position not to reinforce any part of the prison-industrial complex.

Bassey opened a Sanctuary Zone workshop at Project South’s Juneteenth gathering by naming his own experience with the police in Atlanta. “I can’t count the number of times I’ve been harassed, searched, had guns put in my face,” he said. “But in 2006 when the police shot and killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston, it shifted something in this city. Police had a no-knock warrant using false information and it was the wrong house. Kathryn was old-school, she reminded me of my grandma. My grandma kept a .22 and shot it every 4th of July. When police battle rammed Kathryn’s house, she let off a single warning shot, and in return the officers fired 39 shots killing her dead. There are many battles we’ve lost, but we can’t afford to lose more battles like that if we want to win in the long-term.”

So far, some 70 sites across Atlanta have publicly declared themselves Sanctuary Zones. Barbershops, bookstores, independent businesses, bars, restaurants, retailers, churches and community spaces have all joined the network. We canvassed neighborhoods, inviting sites to display Sanctuary Zone posters in their windows and commit to the campaign. We also coordinated Know Your Rights and Risks trainings and other community preparedness workshops for participating sites, while connecting them with local policing alternatives and diversion programs that offer practical ways to respond to conflict and crisis without calling 911.

Multiple grassroots organizations canvassed over 500 sites across Atlanta as part of the ATL Get Ready Team. (WNV/Stephanie Guilloud)

The campaign engaged more than 500 sites across the city. We began by concentrating on the two-mile radius surrounding the stadium as a visible show of solidarity to the thousands of visitors expected during the World Cup. As we learned that ICE was shifting its tactics and increasingly targeting people in surrounding counties, we expanded our outreach beyond the stadium corridor to neighborhoods where watch parties and community gatherings would take place, so that vulnerable people could feel safer being in public and enjoying the matches.

Many bar owners and restaurant operators expressed their commitment to refusing ICE entry but were hesitant to display a Sanctuary Zone poster or publicly join the network out of fear of retaliation. Many Black-owned businesses appreciated that we named the connection between ICE violence and police violence. As one owner told us, “We already don’t call the cops, we can sign on to this, easy.”

In a time of economic hardship, the government’s extraordinary spending on police, ICE and surveillance feels like a slap in the face, and the people we spoke with responded with outrage at this unjust siphoning of public funds. The Federal Emergency Response Agency, or FEMA, spent more than $846 million on security and policing for the FIFA spectacle instead of responding to climate disasters. During hurricane season. During the hottest summer on record. During floods and wildfires affecting hundreds of thousands of people. 

At the same time, as many of us feared, ICE kidnappings and detentions escalated, reaching 43,000 in the month of June alone. Over the previous two months, four Black men were killed by federal troops and agents deployed in Memphis, while the military occupation of Washington, D.C., doubled from 2,500 to 5,000 troops. For comparison, the massive ICE operation in Minneapolis deployed 3,000 federal agents, creating immense harm. Faced with this reality, we refuse to give in to fear. To protect our people, we prepare and we build.

Sharing the vision

A local coffeehouse owner said, “Of course, we will sign on. I’m an immigrant, and when we are in solidarity with each other, we are stronger. What do we have to lose?”

She immediately offered the coffeehouse as a meeting space. We are now talking to business owners and church leaders about holding sessions that allow folks to share policies and practices that support protections for workers, patrons and community members.

The invitation to Sanctuary Zones is to join a larger vision: a coordinated network of sites that can be proactive and generative in times of crisis rather than reactive. These spaces are one step toward reducing our reliance on policing, which so often produces harm instead of safety. They create a concrete invitation for people beyond the usual movement circles to resist this regime through collective noncooperation. Sanctuary Zones prioritize safety over surveillance and solidarity over fear.

#support-block_6643f12e3c329ca5f1bd5df513ed5847 { background: #000000; color: #ffffff; } Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

As we move out of the heat of summer and into the fall, the ATL Get Ready Team intends to keep building. Project South will facilitate Community Responder Trainings to strengthen the capacity of community members to assess emergencies, intervene and address medical situations without calling the police. The Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights will continue offering ICE tracker and legal trainings so businesses and faith institutions understand their rights and know how to prevent ICE raids.

Together, we will invite Sanctuary Zone partners to run drills and continue practicing preparedness plans that can be adapted to many kinds of crises — whether climate disasters, economic instability or state violence. Preparation is infrastructure, and in times of disaster or crisis, infrastructure is power.

Sharing the lessons

Below are a few lessons to share with groups working on similar projects: 

1. Differences are not deterrents: We can acknowledge differences and tensions but still work together towards a common vision of preventing criminalization and protecting our communities. Differences can be a strength because sharing knowledge from divergent perspectives gives us a fuller picture of the threats and opportunities to respond. 

2. Connections make our strategies stronger: We can connect ICE, policing and surveillance — an important political intervention that ensures movements to protect our immigrant neighbors are inseparable from movements to protect our Black neighbors from deadly policing. Both are connected to the growing struggles against data centers, surveillance technologies and cameras in our public spaces. We can connect daily, local police harassment to federal agents roaming our streets and to the executive orders and legislation that is targeting trans people and anyone who dissents.

3. Focused strategies are winning strategies: Collaborating around a shared strategy to name and resist the criminalization of people, poverty and protest is an important path forward. Bars, independent businesses and other community spaces want to participate in this moment, they simply need accessible ways to do so. One commitment, one poster, one campaign gives them a concrete way to say yes to noncooperation with institutions of harm, and yes to the work of creating proactive protections and solutions.

4. Local knowledge and national ripples: Rooting in local knowledge, relationships and histories is critical to building long-lasting infrastructure that engages people from diverse backgrounds. Careful reconnaissance to identify canvassing targets, direct follow-up with people with trusted relationships at neighborhood barbershops or churches, elders working with young people to engage sites from different angles, and clear recognition of local cultures and tensions make campaigns like this stronger and allow more people to participate. 

Each of our locations requires different tactics, but if we can coordinate across places and learn from one another as we have learned from Ferguson to Los Angeles, Chicago to Minneapolis, Washington, D.C. to Memphis to Atlanta, we can confront this daunting machine with greater strength, deeper solidarity and more collective power.

As Rehana Lerandeau of Critical Resistance said, “We have to make our practices and our stories fresh, radical and irresistible.” In a time of so much danger and despair, sanctuary is a practice and a vision for how we want to be together in community. This campaign invited people across a diverse range of communities in Atlanta into their own courage, and they have overwhelmingly said yes. 

This article Atlanta offers a model for building sanctuary was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

hambachforest.org – Welcome to the world of Togel123 Login, where excitement meets opportunity! If you’re looking for an online gambling site that not only offers a thrilling gaming experience but also showers players with abundant bonuses, you’ve come to the right place. With its growing popularity in Indonesia, Togel123 has become a go-to platform for both seasoned gamblers and newcomers alike. As you explore this vibrant realm of chance and strategy, it’s crucial to understand how to navigate it safely while reaping all the rewards. Dive into our comprehensive guide on what makes Togel123 Login stand out from the crowd!

Potential Risks and How to Stay Safe on Togel123 Login

Engaging with online gambling comes with certain risks. Togel123 Login, while reputable, is not exempt from potential pitfalls. Players must remain vigilant against issues like fraud and account hacking.

Always prioritize strong passwords. Create unique combinations that mix letters, numbers, and symbols. This simple step significantly reduces the risk of unauthorized access to your account.

Another essential practice is to verify the site’s licensing and security measures. Ensure they use encryption technology to protect your data.

Stay informed about any promotions or changes in terms and conditions on Togel123 Login as well. Scams often target players through misleading offers.

Set limits for yourself when it comes to time and money spent on gambling activities. Responsible gaming ensures you enjoy the thrill without falling into harmful habits that can arise from unchecked playtime or overspending.

The Popularity of Togel123 Login Online Gambling in Indonesia

Togel123 Login has become a household name in Indonesia, captivating the attention of many players. It combines traditional lottery elements with modern online features, creating an engaging experience.

The convenience of accessing Togel123 from anywhere makes it especially appealing. Mobile compatibility allows users to play on the go, enhancing its popularity among younger audiences.

Social connections also play a role. Players often share tips and experiences through various platforms, fostering a community that thrives on excitement and camaraderie.

Moreover, Togel123 offers enticing bonuses and promotions that attract both new and seasoned players alike. These incentives provide added motivation for individuals to join and explore what the site has to offer.

Cultural factors contribute as well; gambling activities have deep roots in Indonesian society. As such, blending tradition with innovation through platforms like Togel123 resonates strongly with local enthusiasts seeking thrills in their gaming adventures.

Why Togel123 Login is the Best Online Gambling Site for Players

togel123 login stands out as an exceptional choice for online gambling enthusiasts. Its user-friendly interface ensures that players can navigate the site with ease, making it accessible for both beginners and seasoned veterans alike. The platform is designed to provide a smooth experience, from logging in to placing bets.

One of the key advantages of Togel123 Login is its commitment to player satisfaction through generous bonuses and promotions. This not only enhances the gaming experience but also increases potential winnings, allowing players to maximize their enjoyment while minimizing risks.

Moreover, Togel123 prioritizes security and fairness. With advanced encryption technology in place, players can rest assured that their data is protected. Fair play is ensured through regular audits and transparent operations, fostering trust within the community.

The broad range of games available further cements Togel123’s reputation as a top-tier site. From classic lottery-style games to modern slots and table games, there’s something for everyone. Coupled with competitive odds and an active support team ready to assist at any hour, it’s clear why many consider Togel123 Login the best option in Indonesian online gambling.

For anyone seeking a reliable and entertaining platform for online betting, Togel123 proves itself time after time as the premier destination worth exploring.

The post Togel123 Login Online Gambling Site with Abundant Bonuses appeared first on HAMBACHFOREST.

This article What we learned from a US bus tour of judges was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Over four days in July, roughly 30 judges, sitting and retired, state and federal, climbed on and off a bus at courthouses, coffee shops, a Cracker Barrel, and community centers and libraries from Greensburg, Pennsylvania, to Grosse Pointe, Michigan. The goal was straightforward — to visit with people in their communities to talk about why the rule of law matters in their everyday lives. They engaged one on one, in small groups and in front of large audiences. 

The tour was called Justice in Motion, and was created and run by our organization, Democracy Rising Collaborative, together with Keep Our Republic. We borrowed the model from judges in Poland, who figured out, the hard way, how to defend an independent judiciary when the traditional tools weren’t enough.

We think that borrowed playbook is worth explaining, because we’re planning to use it again, and we encourage you to take similar bold action during this perilous time.

Where the idea came from

Last October, The Carter Center’s Rule of Law Program brought a delegation of U.S. lawyers to Warsaw for a study tour, to sit down directly with the Polish judges and lawyers who had spent the better part of a decade defending their courts. They were joined by democracy leaders from Georgia, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary, as well as the Hungarian Helsinki Committee. 

Participating in that trip was where we first heard in detail how the judges in Poland decided to come out of their courtrooms to march through the streets of Warsaw in support of their judicial independence. They then organized themselves to visit citizens in villages and towns across the country to talk about why the rule of law and an independent judiciary mattered to everyone.

#newsletter-block_7296598997129cb46e395810d9919018 { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_7296598997129cb46e395810d9919018 #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our Newsletter

We’ll send you a weekly email with the latest articles.

The tour’s lessons were later written up by two of its organizers — Leanne Webster of the Carter Center’s Rule of Law Program and Melissa Hooper of the German Marshall Fund — in a Harvard Social Impact Review essay, “Turning Back the Tide of Authoritarianism.”

Starting in 2015, Poland’s governing party moved methodically to bring the judiciary under its control: it took over the Constitutional Tribunal, restructured the body that selects judges so that the ruling party effectively chose its members, and created a disciplinary chamber that could punish judges for rulings the government disliked. These tools were used against judges the Carter team met with, to fire them for speaking up for the judiciary or raising questions about judicial appointments, and to replace them with loyalists. All of these actions were framed as democratic accountability rather than capture.

What we found instructive wasn’t the attack — that pattern is familiar by now — it was the response. Polish judges organized through relationship-building, proactive media relations and organizations like Iustitia, a Polish independent judges association, and Themis, another group of judges supporting an independent judiciary. Both were instrumental in mobilizing judges in Poland. 

That work built toward the iconic March of a Thousand Robes on Jan. 11, 2020. Judges, prosecutors and lawyers from roughly 20 countries walked in silence from Poland’s Supreme Court to its parliament building, even passing by the President’s office. Most of them wore their judicial robes, and they were joined by thousands of ordinary Poles lining the route. City officials estimated the crowd at 30,000. They were joined by their judicial brethren from across Europe — a judicial tour de force, judges standing and walking together in a tremendous demonstration of the power of collective action. 

About a year later, judges got into vans, traveling from town to town into places where a sitting judge was someone you might never see. Judges set up in town squares and school auditoriums to hand out pocket copies of the Polish constitution and walk residents through what it actually said. 

Judges who had been forced off the bench did some of the heaviest lifting, since they had nothing left to lose professionally by talking to reporters and shopkeepers. They spoke about what due process meant and why courts weren’t supposed to answer to whichever party held power that year. One of them, suspended from his own courtroom, relentlessly toured the country.

Poland’s governing party lost power in 2023, and most analysts who study the period believe the judiciary’s years-long campaign, including both the vans and the march, was a meaningful part of why.

Why we borrowed this model

Until the last few years, the idea that federal judges in the United States would need to speak to the public beyond the walls of their courtrooms or the words of their opinions was frowned upon, other than periodic school civics classes or university lecture halls. State judges have had more latitude, given that in many states they are elected to office.

But it has become increasingly clear in the U.S. that the role of the independent judiciary — to fairly resolve disputes and act as a check on the other branches of government — is unclear to many Americans. According to Gallup, trust in the judiciary has fallen to 48 percent — down from more than 60 percent before 2022. The Supreme Court’s 33 percent approval rating in July was the lowest since the early 2000s. 

Previous Coverage

How movements can make courts play their role in defending democracy

Furthermore, threats to judges, their families and their staff have risen sharply in recent years. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett recently testified on Capitol Hill about the surge — the U.S. Marshals Service recorded 564 threats against federal judges in the last fiscal year, up from 509 the year before.

We knew from our own experience the power of visiting communities to listen, learn and engage in dialogue. This same instinct was behind Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s bus trips across the country in 1992. (Steve, one of the co-authors of this article, traveled on each of the 10 bus trips as Al Gore’s deputy press secretary.) Ross Perot’s cross-country “United We Stand” tour drew on the same instinct, as did, decades later, the Tea Party Express. Whatever the cause, the impulse was the same: get off the stage, get on the road and meet people where they live, in their communities and neighborhoods. Engage in dialogue. Listen carefully. Answer questions.

As we launched our organization, Democracy Rising Collaborative, to educate, organize and mobilize lawyers, retired judges and civic leaders for collective action, the idea of a bus trip as a kind of listening tour began to take hold. We drafted a concept paper and shared it with a few trusted colleagues in the pro-democracy space, including colleagues who had been on the Warsaw trip. The feedback was universally positive. Before long, we were talking about actually doing a judges’ bus tour with our tremendous partner Keep Our Republic, a nonpartisan civic education organization committed to the vitality of U.S. democracy by promoting trust in elections, the rule of law and constitutional checks and balances.

Lessons from Poland, brought to the Great Lakes

1. Organizing matters. One judge speaking out is easy to dismiss as an outlier. Some 30 judges from different states, different courts and both parties, appearing together under one banner, are much harder to write off. That’s when the message stops sounding like an opinion and starts sounding like the profession itself telling you something.

2. Creativity is essential. We owe this one first to Romania’s Funky Citizens, whose team told the delegation that civic engagement has to be joyful and shareable, or it never leaves the room it happened in. Earnestness alone doesn’t travel. We built Justice in Motion as a way to connect with ordinary Americans in their own communities, while keeping in mind that we needed the story of the trip to travel far and wide. 

Communications was key — but getting the experience right for the participants themselves mattered just as much. The judges did this by stopping at a donut shop in Wheeling, West Virginia instead of a podium, and holding purple roses — an international symbol of judicial independence — outside courthouses. These clips spread on social media well past the reporters who were actually there. None of that was decoration. That was the point.

Judges meeting with people in front of the Louis Stokes Federal Courthouse in Cleveland on July 9. (Democracy Rising Collaborative/Keep Our Republic)

We also borrowed from an organizer’s account of the Tour de Konstytucja, Poland’s own cross-country Constitution Tour, and its four rules: citizens at the center, no party politics, no party funds, no politicians on stage. Their judges showed up in jeans and T-shirts, with cake, rock music and a reading of the constitutional preamble at every stop. They wore white T-shirts emblazoned with “Konstytucja,” or “Constitution” in Polish — a clear and simple statement of what they stood for.

As the delegation heard, authoritarian power feeds on alienation and division, and so the project was about rebuilding that connection. We didn’t replicate every element, but the instinct showed up in our events — meant to feel like conversations rather than hearings — and in the purple roses our own judges carried instead of pins, a small visual signature of their own.

3. Locality makes the difference. We didn’t want one press conference in a state capital. We wanted a bus tour through big cities and small towns: a coffee shop and courthouse in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, the LeMoyne Community Center in Washington, Pennsylvania, a barbecue in Cleveland, a nearly 100-year-old bakery in Toledo, Ohio and the Grosse Pointe Public Library in Michigan.

That’s where the Polish campaign actually did its work — not in Warsaw, but in the towns national reporters usually didn’t visit. The delegation came back with the same warning we kept in mind while building our route: democracy defense that stays in a handful of big cities never reaches the people who most need to hear the case for independent courts, because they’re the ones least likely to encounter it otherwise. 

Our Wooster, Ohio meet-and-greet drew about 150 residents to a town square on a very hot Wednesday afternoon. Judicial independence stays an abstraction until someone explains it to you, in a room you’re already in, and patiently answers your questions.

4. Solidarity, solidarity, solidarity. In Poland, solidarity wasn’t just a slogan, it involved taking action. It meant having each other’s backs and showing up, over and over. Lawyers sitting in the gallery at hearings for judges under attack, bar associations funding judges whose salaries had been suspended, campaigns telling the public that people were watching and that no judge stood alone. Judges gathered outside their courthouses on the 18th of every month; supporters mailed postcards that read, in effect, I’ve got your back. 

Justice in Motion tried to build that same solidarity in reverse: Rather than waiting for a judge to come under attack and then rallying to defend them, we sent retired and sitting judges out first to build the civic relationships and public trust that make solidarity possible before it’s ever tested. 

Judges meeting with people at the Third Space Action Lab in Cleveland on July 9. (Democracy Rising Collaborative/Keep Our Republic)

That meant making sure judges weren’t the only ones standing at the front of the room. We mobilized local bar associations at many of our stops — including the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association — so the message came from the legal community as a whole and not just the bench. Attorneys Rachel Cohen and Brenna Trout Frey joined the tour for the same reason: so that judges weren’t out there on their own, but stood with allies who had been through their own reckoning. The business community showed up too, including Leadership Now’s Richard Stoff in Columbus, Ohio, because an independent judiciary isn’t a legal abstraction to employers and local economies; it’s part of what makes a place stable enough to invest in. 

None of this was incidental. It was the same lesson from Poland: no one advocating for courts should stand alone.

5. Remember history. One of the delegation’s hosts pressed a question built for this moment: what freedom-fighting story does America already have on hand and why aren’t we using it? He pointed to the country’s own revolutionary founding, Black civil rights leaders, disability rights advocates and union organizers, who made the case for fairness to people who started off unconvinced. 

Our judges took that instruction literally. At every stop, they didn’t talk about constitutional doctrine; they talked about a longer American habit of ordinary people insisting that the rules apply to everyone — and they did it in a year built for exactly that story, the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding.

6. Documentation is power. In Warsaw, we heard how much a short, well-made film can do that a press release can’t. Free Courts (“Wolne Sady” in Polish) was formed by Polish lawyers focused on providing information about the importance of a free and independent judiciary. It had learned it the hard way: their first video of lawyers earnestly explaining the constitution went nowhere. Then they reshot the idea as a soccer match where one team simply stops following the rules and starts attacking the referees. That one traveled. 

A good film gets shared person to person and gives people something to sit with after the news cycle has moved on. We took the lesson seriously enough to put a documentary team on the bus for the entire tour, and we’re now producing a 10-minute film of the trip: the stops, the conversations, the judges themselves explaining, in their own words, why they got on the bus. It’s meant to do after the fact what the tour did in person — reach people who never had the chance to see us live.

What the tour actually did

On the ground, we reached several thousand people directly, meeting them where they already were to talk about why the rule of law matters to their own lives: how your money is there when you go to the bank, how the medicine you buy at the pharmacy is safe — or will be recalled if it isn’t. Turnout exceeded even our best expectations, which told us there’s real appetite for this conversation and that it resonates more coming from someone standing in front of you than from a headline. 

#support-block_5926fd0584128842d11b649eda2fb342 { background: #000000; color: #ffffff; } Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

Pairing sitting judges with retired ones, and keeping every stop strictly nonpartisan, also created a permission structure: judges still bound by codes of conduct could show up and participate without crossing an ethical line.

That local work ultimately translated into a much larger reach. Sarah Wire of USA Today asked if she could join us for the whole trip. Putting a reporter on the bus for four days carried some risk, but it paid off — with a strong story online and then the front page, above the fold, a few days later. 

Justice in Motion also drew coverage from NPR, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and local outlets in every state we visited — along with footage of judges in their robes, holding purple roses outside courthouses that went viral on social media. Altogether we reached millions of Americans, including plenty who don’t follow politics closely, and mobilized local bar associations and legal communities in each location to help carry the message forward.

We can’t yet claim that those four days changed public opinion about the judiciary — no more than the March of a Thousand Robes did on its own in 2020. What that campaign did was compound, over years, into a public that understood enough to act when it mattered. That’s the model we’re building toward. Justice in Motion was our first stop, not our last, and we’re already planning the next route.

This article What we learned from a US bus tour of judges was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

After decades organizing from within the labor establishment, Joe Uehlein realized that winning real climate and economic justice meant moving beyond the limits of traditional labor and environmentalism. As former…

We talk with investigative journalist and filmmaker Zara Moloo about how conservation in Southeast Cameroon has meant the eviction of the Baka people from their ancestral forests, while logging, trophy hunting, and fortress conservation-style "protected areas" expand side by side. We trace the colonial and capitalist roots of fortress conservation, what violence associated with fortress conservation has done to the Baka people community over time, and what justice might require if conservation is going to include human rights.

This article It’s time for movements to rethink social media was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Last September I made a short video that was by far the most viral piece of content I’ve ever put out.

I can’t trace all the views, but at least a million people watched it across Instagram and TikTok, and possibly elsewhere. Neighbors in Athens, Greece told me they’d come across my face in their feed; Chinese accounts captioned the video and reposted it. I felt like I’d made a dent in the universe and — I’m not going to lie — a little bit special.

The video wasn’t pop wisdom or a dance routine. It had a job to do: get people to sign a petition, created by DiEM25 and Progressive International, to block Germany’s genocide-enabling former foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, from becoming president of the U.N. General Assembly. 

And on that, it failed. By the end of my week of internet mini-fame, the number of signatures had barely shifted. It had 49,000 signatures that July, two months before I posted. I watched it closely that week, and it barely moved.  Baerbock got the job – the petition now asks her to resign. 

I know a few things about digital communication. For two decades it’s been a key part of what I do — I’ve written about it, researched it, advised movements on it. The petition wasn’t mine, but the video was. And I couldn’t make it work. 

Maybe the video could have been packaged better, or the petition link made easier to find. Maybe my pitch was entertaining but not compelling. Maybe a petition was never the right vehicle for stopping Baerbock in the first place.

My organizer friends thought it went great. They congratulated me on the numbers. Nobody asked about the petition.

#newsletter-block_eb09786253b8c459b693f5bd0cbf6077 { background: #ececec; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_eb09786253b8c459b693f5bd0cbf6077 #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our Newsletter

We’ll send you a weekly email with the latest articles.

That last part is what’s bothered me since. Because if a million views and no signatures is considered a success, we’re measuring the wrong thing.

And that opens up a bigger question, one I don’t think we ask often enough: When we use social media in our organizing, what are we actually doing? Is it worth the time we put into it? And is there a way of doing it that actually builds something?

Why we’re all on there anyway

Social media is now a given for organizers, and for good reason. We’ve been using it to fill public squares for well over a decade, from Occupy to Black Lives Matter to last year’s Gen Z protests across the Global South. To get around media blackouts and show the world what power does when it thinks no one’s filming, from Ferguson to Gaza. To make and sink political careers. To tank the stock prices of corporations that deserve it. 

Social media has changed how we communicate. It’s forced us to be quicker, sharper and more entertaining. Because attention is scarce — and we’re competing for it against everything else.

But beneath all of this, most of us are working from the same assumption: that platforms are where the work happens. That the posting is the organizing. That if we get the reach, the rest will follow.

What changed

That assumption has a history. Those of us who were around in 2011 will remember that social media held a different kind of promise. We thought we could topple governments and kings, if only we could get enough people onto the streets. And social media was very good at getting people onto the streets, as long as the anger was already there.

Sometimes that was enough. Tunisian dictator Ben Ali went. Egyptian dictator Mubarak went. But when it didn’t hold — when Occupy dissolved, when Tahrir Square gave way to a military government, when the squares emptied — we told ourselves it wasn’t the right moment, or that the repression was too heavy.

My sense is that a lot of us still carry that same idealism about social media’s power. But two things have changed since then.

The first is that governments got very good at pushing us back. They stifle protest at the source now, with monitoring, arrests and social media operations of their own. Movements can still get around censorship, and often do. But the state has learned to work on the same terrain. Amnesty International has documented how last year Kenyan authorities used the same platforms as the Gen Z movement to threaten and discredit organizers.  And where that isn’t enough, the state can reach for the platform itself — banning it, as Nepal did in 2025, or changing who owns it, as happened with TikTok in the U.S.

The second is that the platforms themselves changed shape. We went from follower feeds to recommendation feeds. What you post no longer goes to the people who chose to hear from you — it goes wherever the algorithm sends it, if it goes anywhere at all. Attention is concentrated on a handful of corporate platforms whose incentive is to keep you scrolling, not to help you organize.

That second shift is the one we’ve underrated in terms of its impact on our ability to organize. In 2011 we posted, our followers saw it and we organized in the replies — as I did during the Athens riots. Distribution and coordination happened in the same place, at the same time.

Comments still exist, of course. But when a post reaches few of your followers, and reaches strangers instead, the reply thread stops being a place where a group can form. It becomes a place where individuals arrive one at a time and leave the same way.

And yet we still use these platforms like it’s 2011. We shoot things off into the ether and hope something will stick — that people will hear our calls to rise up and somehow self-organize. Or that if we point at a problem often enough, everyone will arrive at the same solutions we did. And each time something or someone does break through, it feels like luck.

That doesn’t mean a post can’t start something. In India, after the chief justice called unemployed young people cockroaches, a student in Boston asked on social media what would happen if all the cockroaches came together. Within weeks the Cockroach Party had formed, with millions of followers and protests in several states, and almost no organizing in between. That was three months ago. They have since won a major victory, but nobody yet knows what it will become.

A spontaneous movement can still form from social media. You just can’t plan for it, and you can’t repeat it. And yet a lot of what we do is built on waiting for it.

The tools changed. Our habits didn’t.

Why we didn’t change with them

In some ways this is understandable. Social media is the shiniest and most responsive part of our toolkit. It’s free. We all know how to use it. We understand the algorithms, the buzzwords, the memes, how to play the game. And above all, it answers immediately.

Nothing else in organizing does that. A meeting doesn’t tell you how it went. A training doesn’t report back for six months. And a list doesn’t tell you anything at all until you ask it to do something.

Embed from Getty Imageswindow.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'VihHDItYQXpOg98tD90OxA',sig:'VeEoanFnvoUPHKTEzUjvkRVcMfxO6Onyv-M4HvKCISg=',w:'594px',h:'396px',items:'1216479715',caption: true ,tld:'com',is360: false })});

So we borrow like crazy from the people for whom social media genuinely is the whole job: activist influencers. They build an audience out of perceived closeness — a parasocial relationship, the illusion of intimacy and reciprocity. That’s a real skill, and it has its uses. But an audience is only enough if attention is the goal. It isn’t a base. Nobody shows up on a Tuesday night because they feel close to someone on a screen. 

Meanwhile, the dull part of the work gets skipped — the meetings, the follow-up calls, the trainings, the arguments about what we’re actually demanding and from whom. And that’s the part that turns attention into power. As Zeynep Tufekci argues, social media allows networked movements to reach scale without building the capacity that scale used to require.

You can see what that costs. In Bangladesh, Nepal and Madagascar, protests driven by social media brought governments down — but in each case, what filled the space was something that already existed. An established party in Dhaka, a party formed three years earlier in Kathmandu, the army in Antananarivo. Not the movements themselves.

Worse, I think our use of these platforms has begun to shape our strategy. We optimize for what the platform rewards, because that’s the number that gets sent straight back to us. The silent but vital parts of the organizing work get subtly deprioritized — or stop happening at all.

What it looks like when someone gets it right

In February 2025, Americans angry about Elon Musk’s growing political influence started posting about his company, Tesla. Selling their cars, filming these sales and complaining online. It could have stayed there.

What moved it off the feed was small and specific. A Boston University professor saw a showroom protest in New York City run by the group Rise and Resist, held the same action in her own city and posted about it on Bluesky. Others copied her. A few people built a website and a map, and the whole thing ran under one hashtag: #TeslaTakedown. 

Tesla’s weak spot was its showrooms: physical places, with addresses and opening hours, belonging to a company whose value rested heavily on its founder’s reputation. Organizers picked a time and stuck to it — they protested at the same place, every week. By March there were protests at Tesla showrooms in more than 250 cities across the globe.

Previous Coverage

The real reason Musk retreated

The organizers’ own account of why it worked comes down to two things: Presence beats planning, and regularity builds community. That isn‘t an argument against strategy — choosing the showrooms was a strategy, and a good one. It’s an argument against making people wait while you perfect it. In a moment of anger, people didn’t need a planning document. They needed to be told where to go and what to do.

And the sign-ups ran through Action Network, the organizing platform. Not through the comments of the movement’s social media posts. So when those posts stopped performing, the movement still had its list.

Morocco’s Gen Z protests are another example of how to do it right. Last year brought a wave of protests in Morocco, against corruption, inequality and the state of public services. The movement called itself GenZ 212, after Morocco’s country code.

It got the word out on Instagram and TikTok, but it used the communications platform Discord as its backbone. People were sorted into regional channels, reflecting where they actually lived, and decisions were taken in nightly discussions that ended in votes. One estimate put the number of people on the channels at 250,000 last October.

It was untidy; it was sometimes chaotic. But Discord, which has no recommendation feed, did something for Morocco’s protesters that a feed couldn’t: It enabled them to make decisions under pressure, as a group, and to adapt. When the first days brought arrests, the movement moved its protests into working-class neighborhoods. When deaths followed police intervention, members reconvened to establish what had actually happened and to argue for peaceful protest, countering attempts to paint them as reckless.

Like most of the major Gen Z movements we’ve seen, GenZ 212 was leaderless and decentralized. The distinction here isn’t leaders versus no leaders. It’s whether there’s a room where a question can be settled and a decision can be made.

What these movements have in common

One word: a handoff.

In both cases organizers recruited on social media, just as in 2011. But they didn’t stay there. They moved people quickly into spaces they controlled. Here it happened to be Action Network and Discord; it could as easily have been a mailing list, a forum, a group chat or a room with chairs in it. What matters is that it wasn’t an algorithmic feed.

This reframes the arguments we keep having about which social media platforms to be on and which to quit. Platforms rise and fall, and whichever one holds the attention next, it will still only be the top of the funnel. The better question is: What does a movement need to own so that an algorithm change, or a ban, can’t decapitate it?

Case in point: The Gen Z movement in Nepal, operating on Discord, was able to simply route around the sweeping government ban of social media platforms last year. And the movement brought the government down. 

The handoff has to be engineered

But there’s a catch to the handoff: The architecture of the platforms works against you.

Platforms downrate anything that makes people leave the app — that’s the one behavior the whole system is built to prevent.  Their architecture says it plainly: Instagram doesn’t let you put a link in a caption. TikTok confines them to your bio. And on Facebook, posts containing a link have gone from about one in seven to one in 66 — by Meta’s own count.

So the handoff can’t be an afterthought. It has to be designed as carefully and deliberately as the hook.

That means putting your ask wherever the platform allows it — the profile link, the first reply — and telling people where it is, because they won’t hunt for it. It means ideally making the destination a date (“we’re on a call Thursday at 7 p.m.”) rather than a page. It means writing the follow-up before you post, because most sign-ups go cold in the first few days if nothing lands in their inbox. And it means one named person owning what happens next — one person who responds to the people who signed up, who runs the call, who they can reply to and get an answer.

Be clear about what you’re counting

The other half is measurement, and it’s the half we get wrong most often. The platforms hand us a pile of data for free, and we take it, because it’s there. But going viral is not a win. It was never the goal.

#support-block_3fb073a4e3843acf76510e5a89b19a14 { background: #000000; color: #ffffff; } Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

So decide what you’re counting before you publish, and make it something on the other side of the handoff: click-through from the clip to the sign-ups, attendance or completed actions. Set a target. And when the numbers that come back are poor, fix the handoff rather than the hook. 

If your video gets 200,000 views and 40 signups, the problem probably wasn’t the video. Look at what you asked people to do, whether they could find it and what arrived once they’d done it. Every piece of content needs somewhere to go.

Back to the video

My petition problem may not have been the hook. It may have been the thinness of what was behind it.

A form is fine. Tesla Takedown used one. But that form led to a protest at a named showroom at a named time, run by a host with people behind them. Mine led to a signature. If even a fraction of the people who saw that video had been given something more to do  — a call the following week, run by someone with a name, with one clear task at the end of it  — there would have been something left when the attention moved on.

Work out the handoff before you work out the hook. That‘s the whole lesson, and it took me a million views to learn it.

This article It’s time for movements to rethink social media was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

This article Why bravery and heartbreak are essential to organizing was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

I could tell that Yotam Marom’s debut book, “For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness,” might shift how movement workers think — about telling the truth, and about the personal and political transformation actually required to win and wield power — as I compared notes with two field organizers fighting data centers around the country. 

We had been knocking on hundreds of doors in every kind of neighborhood: Black and brown homeowners in big cities, Latino farmworkers and white farmers in rural towns, parents and students and elders in watersheds across the West and exurbs in the South, all disgusted with data centers. Everyday people are blocking big tech expansion in real time, out of love for their communities and each other, and the ride feels full of possibility. 

Could we move people who’ve never been in motion before — but are now packing zoning meetings, turning each other out in the hundreds, and stopping billion-dollar data centers — into durable political realignment? Could we make the potential crash of the inflated, overextended tech economy into something that could remake politics and the economy — in time to stop the consolidation of authoritarianism?

Those possibilities are real, and that’s why we’re working as hard as we are. But as we compared notes, I felt that familiar tug of dread. All three of us on the phone were veterans of movement moments, big and small. We had all seen coalitions we’d built simmer in misalignment and anger, eventually turning inward or breaking. We had been in room after room where we kept pushing towards an urgent goal, papering over real contradictions in order to get to the next action, the next march, the next move. But we didn’t have a plan to fundamentally shift power, and even when we won, more often than not, our opponents would adjust as we waned or broke, and our people would be worse off than when we started.  

#newsletter-block_3e61ee95945100c46ce4b2525366b414 { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_3e61ee95945100c46ce4b2525366b414 #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our Newsletter

We’ll send you a weekly email with the latest articles.

The three of us talked through how the anti-data center movement might avoid these traps. How could this exploding resistance shift the balance of power at a pivotal time? But when one of the organizers on the line said, “have you read this book, ‘Powerlessness and You,’ or something?” I laughed and let out a breath. I knew what book she meant, and I was thrilled she had found it, too. 

“For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness” should be in every organizer’s backpack, dog-eared and a little mangled, because it is a primer for exactly the kind of practice we must take on to meet the challenges we are facing now. 

Marom got his start as a leading organizer at the heart of Occupy Wall Street, and went on to support the leaders building some of the most impactful movement organizations of the last decades, like Dream Defenders, the Sunrise Movement and Uncommitted. He’s also supported us at my own organization, People’s Tech Project, and multiple other tech justice groups as we’ve engaged in the sleeves-up hard work of crafting strategy to take down the ascendant tech oligarchy. 

In “For Louder Days,” he takes the story of his life — from the hopes and heartbreaks of Occupy, to the growth, setbacks and contradictions of the movement to end the Israeli occupation — and spells out his lucid diagnoses of the most critical stumbling blocks of the American left in its fight for hearts, minds and actual power. 

At the core of his assessment: Our movements are woefully underdeveloped in the practice of generative conflict for the sake of good strategy — and that underdevelopment warps and buries the steady love that drove us to come together in this work in the first place.  

Millions in the streets

“For Louder Days” opens in the middle of Occupy at its height, October 2011, when the occupation of Zuccotti Park was spreading nationally and getting buttressed by veteran organizers as it built a realignment of American politics in real time. With generosity, Marom crisply relates how he responded to a call from Spanish comrades for a global day of action, and helped lead the expansion of Occupy into an international project. He and his comrades had a clear hypothesis — that this action would capture the energy boiling over after an attempted eviction from the park and grow the movement far larger — and they worked, heads down, to test it. 

He walks us through the meetings, coalitions, struggles and planning that made it possible. (I’ve never before read a book about meetings that I couldn’t put down.)

He captures the joy and dizzying hope that we’ve all felt at the denouement of those sweaty 20-hour days for weeks on end. He describes what it felt like on Oct. 15, 2011, with 80,000 in the street at Times Square and millions joining globally, to be in the center of the universe as Occupy went worldwide. 

Occupy Wall Street demonstrators converge in Times Square, New York City on Oct. 15, 2011. (Getty/Mario Tama)

“I have been sobered by the history of revolutions that came before and my own small defeats at the hands of this opponent we’re squaring off against,” he writes. “But now — despite all of this good sense, despite my cynicism, despite the layers of armor I have put around my heart along the way — I can’t help but be swept away by this moment. I am completely under its spell.”

The global day of action was powerful and effective. Eighty countries saw supporting protests. Forty-five new occupations were launched around the United States, from big cities to suburbs to small, bright-red communities. 

The group that came together to plan Oct. 15 was ready to plan the next escalation for Nov. 17.  But when challenged by another faction inside Occupy’s leadership — because of course, there is leadership, even (especially!) in an ostensibly leaderless project and movement — Marom was pressured to shut down the ad hoc group inside Occupy that pulled off the day of action. He tells the all-too-familiar story of falling apart: how they lost time as they struggled with each other and with themselves, and lost momentum and membership, eventually leading to the end of the occupation after 57 days. He lays bare the battles whirling inside him as he made the choice to shut down that ad hoc group — a choice that contributed to the end of Occupy. 

This account begins an incredible progression of chapters showing us what Marom learned in the next decade-plus as he advised, facilitated, flanked and organized with the leaders of many other movements. What he saw was a crucial common thread that he calls the “politics of powerlessness.” 

The politics of powerlessness

Marom describes the politics of powerlessness as a deep ambivalence towards actually winning and holding power. When we attack or destroy leadership, weaponize hurt and identity, keep ourselves “enclosed and safe and comfortable,” and refuse risks, we are choosing powerlessness. When we avoid conflict, hide from the grief and loss inherent in making hard choices, or follow instinct and habit, we neither win nor grow. “[The politics of powerlessness are] reinforced by ideas that are easy to reach for, even if they are thin and by habit, and routine,” Marom writes. “It goes hand in hand with an instinct to turn away from the brokenness in each other rather than a commitment to turn toward each other whenever at all possible.” 

Marom goes on to break down, with real compassion for all of us and for himself, the totally understandable and human reasons why organizers choose the politics of powerlessness, while making plain, story after story, the choices movements and their leaders have to make to actually get and keep power. That includes strategy that forces us to say no to almost everything so we can say yes to what we truly need to do to win. A reckoning with the rank that exists in all groups and what it means to hold leadership. Balancing an attention to organizational belonging with an uncompromising focus on purpose. A rekindling of our sense of deep love, for each other and for those we’ve hurt and who have hurt us, across all lines and borders, for the sake of the world we hunger to build.

Marom hasn’t written this book as a hectoring finger-wag at a movement that has lost its way and its right to lead. He wrote it because he has skin in the game, and he has earned a very grounded belief that we can feel, survive and get through that necessary grief in order to build the mature people, organizations and movements that we need.  

Previous Coverage

Movements cannot shy away from conflict

In the chapter called “Good Strategy and Telling the Truth,” Marom tells a story about CAAAV — a seminal working-class Asian organization working on housing across New York City. In 2021, CAAAV’s leaders decided to pull back from some beautiful, hopeful organizing in order to choose transformative campaigns that could make them truly powerful. 

The choice was heartbreaking. Instead of continuing to build committees of working-class Chinese, Bengali and Korean tenants in Queensbridge Houses, a public housing development in Queens, they made the choice to kill that project and throw their weight — and all their Chinese organizers — into an under-resourced but fast-growing campaign in Chinatown.  Marom tells the story with reverence and respect as CAAAV faced the loss and grief that would come, as they chose to abandon some potential members and lose staff to chase real strategy and power. 

Marom tells us why taking on those losses and grief were worth it for CAAAV, and what became possible because of their bravery. Because CAAAV leaders were wise and human enough to close a chapter and invest their resources elsewhere, they won big victories, and learned that winning and moving to offense would transform conditions for every working-class person in the city. This was a fundamental shift in their strategy. By choosing to focus, CAAAV and its sibling group CAAAV Voice were in a strong position to win giant campaigns and organize major new bases. It also enabled them to work with other brilliant immigrant organizations like DRUM Beats and the Democratic Socialists of America to back a long-shot socialist mayoral candidate — Zohran Mandani — who could make the vision of the people real. 

Accompanied through hard choices

I carried the book with me all spring across the country, as I organized with tech workers in the Southwest, data center fighters in Philadelphia and Memphis, and comrades across the tech justice movement. Because Marom knits together the hard-won lessons of failure with how making hard choices can transform our ability to win, they felt practical and applicable in real time. This was particularly true for me, since I’d had practice making those choices myself. Marom and another extraordinarily skilled facilitator, BJ Star of the Wildfire Project, have worked with my group and others fighting an ascendant and brutally damaging tech industry in this wild moment. 

I worked with a small group of organizers to break one organization into three, build and sunset teams, and try a wildly ambitious alignment process with leaders of 15 tech justice organizations. As some of the bravest and most beautiful tech justice organizations struggled together over years, there were many days when I felt that we could win if we had the accompaniment and hope of BJ Star and Yotam Marom. 

#support-block_2a4469b0bcb35e0d58851cbce5309c31 { background: #000000; color: #ffffff; } Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

While we can’t have that, at least not yet, the DNA of what they do and the lineages that shaped them is knit through many of the organizers and organizations I love best. In the meantime, this book is a ridiculously good start. When I see young organizers in Missouri and seasoned elders in Oakland and friends on a mountaintop in Peru all saying that this book stirred them, made them cry, it gives me a lot of confidence that we can change in the ways we need to.  

There are many ways I remain uncourageous in this revolutionary life. There is honesty I need to bring to old comrades even if it causes us pain. I could bring necessary conflicts to the surface in tech justice organizing, even if it risks a rupture, or disquieting and unbalancing something that we all deeply want to work. I could offer and receive love from unlikely people, that I’m holding myself back from giving, from getting.

“For Louder Days” gets into those contradictions in a way that will stay with you for a long time, and maybe change you. I hope this book can accompany you as you make your way, fight, love, and above all, make the hard choices necessary for good, clear strategy, and for your own transformation. 

This article Why bravery and heartbreak are essential to organizing was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

hambachforest.org – Registering on Togel123 Link Alternatif is a breeze. The process is designed to be user-friendly, ensuring that even beginners can navigate it with ease.

To get started, simply visit the official site and click on the registration button. You’ll need to provide some basic information like your username, email address, and password. The entire setup takes just a few minutes.

Once registered, placing bets is equally straightforward. Choose your preferred game from an extensive list of options. Select your numbers or other betting criteria based on your strategy or intuition.

Payment methods are varied too, catering to different preferences for deposits and withdrawals. This flexibility enhances the overall experience while making it convenient for users at any level of expertise in togel gaming.

With everything streamlined for efficiency, you can focus more on enjoying the game rather than getting bogged down by complicated processes.

How to Improve Your Chances of Winning with Skill-Based Togel123

Improving your chances of winning at Togel123 involves a blend of skill and smart strategies. Start by familiarizing yourself with the game rules inside out. Knowing every detail can give you an edge.

Next, analyze previous results to identify patterns or trends. While luck plays a role, being aware of historical data can inform your choices.

Consider joining online forums or communities where experienced players share tips and techniques. Learning from others’ experiences can be invaluable.

Practice regularly with smaller bets before going all in. This approach helps build confidence without risking significant losses initially.

Manage your bankroll wisely. Set limits on how much you’re willing to spend per session. Sticking to these boundaries keeps the game enjoyable while minimizing potential setbacks in your journey toward success at Togel123.

Introduction to Togel123 Link Alternatif

Togel123 Link Alternatif serves as a vital resource for players seeking an accessible entry point into the exciting world of togel. This alternative link ensures seamless access to Togel123, even in regions where restrictions might apply.

Using this link is straightforward and user-friendly. It allows you to navigate effortlessly through the platform’s various offerings without worrying about potential barriers.

Players can enjoy a diverse range of games, from traditional number draws to modern variations that keep things fresh and engaging. With each game comes a unique thrill and different strategies to explore.

Moreover, togel123 link alternatif enhances your gaming experience by providing reliable connections and stable performance. This means fewer interruptions during gameplay, allowing you to focus on what matters most: having fun while trying your luck at winning big rewards.

The Benefits of Using Link Alternatif for Togel123

Using a Link Alternatif for Togel123 offers players enhanced access and flexibility. It provides an alternative pathway to the main site, ensuring smoother navigation even during peak hours or maintenance.

These links often bypass geographical restrictions, allowing users from various regions to participate easily. This opens up opportunities for more diverse gameplay and interaction with fellow players globally.

Additionally, using a Link Alternatif can enhance security. Players may find that these links offer extra layers of protection against phishing attacks or unauthorized access.

With quick updates on promotions and bonuses available exclusively through these links, users can stay informed about the latest offerings in real-time. Embracing this option not only improves accessibility but also enriches the overall gaming experience at Togel123.

The post Ease of Registering and Betting Togel123 Link Alternatif appeared first on HAMBACHFOREST.

In our latest, we talk with Prof. Valena Beety, Professor of Law at Indiana University, about her new book “Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer…

This article The inside-outside strategy behind New York’s rent freeze was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This June, tenants in New York City notched a major victory: The city’s Rent Guidelines Board, or RGB, voted to freeze rents for all one- and two-year leases in rent-stabilized units. Quickly, local and national media trumpeted the decision as a victory, a proof of concept even, for NYC’s democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who had pledged to ensure such a freeze on the first day of his campaign. Because the mayor appoints RGB members, the story became one of Mamdani conjuring the victory through sheer force of will.

But the freeze also comes as a result of decades of targeted tenant organizing across the city as longstanding communities are priced out of their homes. One of the groups that has led the charge is CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, an organization of working-class Asian immigrants that launched the Chinatown Tenants Union, or CTU, in 2005. The group’s members have been showing up to RGB hearings for 20 years, testifying for freezes and staging actions to prevent expected hikes.

CAAAV Voice, CAAAV’s electoral arm, also holds the distinction of being one of the few groups that endorsed Mamdani on the first day of his campaign, thanks to his history of action — he was arrested at a June 2024 CAAAV protest — and his pledge to adopt the movement’s emerging demand that the next mayor freeze rents for the entire four-year mayoral term.

#newsletter-block_6b57a2c420023653f30aefae9f190b01 { background: #ececec; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_6b57a2c420023653f30aefae9f190b01 #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our Newsletter

We’ll send you a weekly email with the latest articles.

On the heels of the rent freeze victory, I sat down with Julie Xu, a longtime organizer with CAAAV and chapter lead of CTU, to discuss how initiatives to combine base building with electoral politics helped create the conditions for the freeze, and how having a democratic socialist in the mayor’s office  allows the tenant movement to “revisit the strategies of the past.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Tell us about the origins of the rent freeze demand and how it is rooted in your organizing work.

So New York City’s rent stabilization system is the biggest in the United States, and one of the most important in the world when you’re talking about forms of rent control. 

As you zoom in on a neighborhood like Chinatown, it’s almost 50 percent of the housing stock and an incredibly important source of housing, especially for low-income immigrants. A lot of our members can only stay in a neighborhood like Chinatown that is in Manhattan because of rent stabilization. 

Previous Coverage

Abolish rent. Yes, for real.

From the beginning, our work has always been about organizing tenants. One of our founders, Ms. Liang, who is a teacher in the neighborhood, talks about doorknocking [early in CAAAV’s history] and seeing conditions of neglect: a student wearing a full puffer jacket indoors in the winter because there was no heat, or children being bitten by rats and pests because of the neglect of the apartments in Chinatown. So at our core it’s been about how we correct that and make the neighborhood a dignified landing place for folks and also prevent the violence of eviction, the violence of gentrification. 

CAAAV tenant leaders began testifying [for a rent freeze] and showing up to the RGB in 2006, just a year after the founding of the Chinatown Tenants Union. The core demand has always been about who has say over our neighborhoods: real estate or the tenant majority. 

CAAAV members rally at the preliminary vote of the Rent Guidelines Board on May 7, 2026. (Cal Hsiao/courtesy of CAAAV)

We understand rent hikes as part of a wheelhouse of tactics that organized real estate wields to maintain housing as a system of profit. This is why our tenant leaders have called for a rent freeze and rent rollbacks over the decades.

Our tactics have shifted over time, but the Rent Guidelines Board fights have been a critical vehicle for politicizing newer members around shared conditions of rent hikes and disrepair, and creating a ladder for leadership development through testimony and actions.

Did a lot of the work from the beginning center around establishing consciousness about the conditions and giving people ways to talk about the things that they were experiencing?

It’s really central to how we understand our work as an organization. I think having a base and having that orientation toward outreach is a large part of what makes the organization so strategically sharp. 

In the moment when Trump was elected, everybody was saying Asian and Latino voters were moving to the right. The reason that was perceived as a rightward shift was because the Democratic establishment was not making a case to our people. A lot of the movements of the right are far better resourced than those of the left, so it was like a vacuum. So what we were experiencing and seeing was that it’s not just that our people are moving to the right, it’s actually that we’re not giving them a vision. We’re not giving them something that they can actually see themselves in. 

What was CAAAV’s relationship to electoral politics prior to Mamdani’s mayoral campaign? Is that something that’s only recently become more of a strategic focus?

CAAAV Voice was founded in 2021, and the electoral work it did really came as a result of some of the changing strategies we had for organizing. 

[Before that, CAAAV] went through many different phases. There was experimentation around community land trusts. There was a vision of having a building tenant association on every block in Chinatown. We experimented with community-led rezoning plans as places to try to impact the logic of real estate and the logic of capital that’s shaping all of housing. We undertook all these different types of organizational experiments, and the lesson for us was that it always felt like it got stopped at the mayoral level. 

Especially in Chinatown, trying to pass the Two Bridges Community Plan [a 2016 proposal intended to stop the development of a series of luxury apartment towers in the neighborhood] under [former Mayor Eric] Adams became the chokepoint in realizing we actually didn’t have enough power to have a say. Our long-term strategy is about breaking the bonds between real estate and the state, and in this fight against these four luxury towers, we were correctly identifying that these were some of the worst speculative actors. But then in trying to pass the Community Plan, we were getting stopped at the Department of Buildings and getting stopped at the mayoral level. 

That was a big lesson for us. Additionally, there have been existing coalitions that show up to the Rent Guidelines Board every year, and under Adams it did feel like theater because it was very clear that the folks that were on the RGB were not really listening. They were looking at their phones. Everybody was very frustrated, and then the results would come out, and it was just not clear what type of power we had on this institution or in the process at all.

Embed from Getty Imageswindow.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'2gdnIH13SiVNCdtnP6p2Vw',sig:'dQ6EV41dlhf_42aGLmGjVIRV0BWLnJs03fP_a5vTJKQ=',w:'594px',h:'396px',items:'1394257087',caption: true ,tld:'com',is360: false })});

I think so often organizations actually separate base building and electoral politics completely, right? Or run them on separate tracks. What we have been trying to experiment with [since forming CAAAV Voice], and have made some advancements towards, is how do we not separate those so much? 

This election was an amazing opportunity to talk to people about something with real stakes. We canvassed in new neighborhoods in Brooklyn, like Sunset Park, to reach our base. Now, after the election, we’re going back to those neighborhoods to do deep outreach and build off of the election conversations to do long-term, neighborhood-centered base building. 

CAAAV Voice was one of only a handful of groups to endorse Mamdani on the first day he announced his campaign. What were some of the discussions that went into that decision, and was there any precedent within the organization for such an early endorsement?

This is where having a base and developed leaders was really essential to making an assessment of the moment. Our elders were very clear that we needed to have some demand during this election, especially because the mayor [appoints] the RGB. It was our youth who were hesitant about electoral politics. They don’t see how the government works well. They have a lot of doubts about elected officials making a lot of promises that they don’t keep or they won’t keep. So there was push and pull. 

It was at our annual CAAAV leadership assembly in 2024 that we were hashing these struggles out and getting clear on our annual goals for the organization. There, we made the decision to make the four-year rent freeze demand [for mayoral candidates] and committed to grow our organization to be able to actually have the power to enact that demand. 

We had also worked with Zohran in the past. We had worked with him in our Innovation QNS campaign [a successful 2022 effort to push for significantly more affordable housing within a proposal to build over 3,000 units in Astoria]. We had a trusting working relationship with him from that. He had also come to RGB and in 2024, Zohran was actually arrested at our action. So leaders had that memory of seeing him show up and seeing him being willing to put his body on the line for tenants. And internally our members were saying, “This is a moment for us to act.” All of those pieces coming together made our endorsement process very clear.

Embed from Getty Imageswindow.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'TWvIwiRuQMtQW54nuCbMTw',sig:'NEmpifx5aJcLW9Pxc929o96vJfh539r6xBgMJXHHYC0=',w:'594px',h:'396px',items:'2238635027',caption: true ,tld:'com',is360: false })});

At that leadership assembly, did it feel like the demand had reached a fever pitch in the aftermath of winning a version of a rent freeze repeatedly under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, and then having the Eric Adams administration so aggressively strip that away? Did it feel like that was part of the higher intensity of this demand?

[The Adams administration’s] 12 percent raise over four years was callous. Our members talk all the time about how shocking an experience it was when we actually went to where Adams was supposedly living in Brooklyn and were met by 30 to 40 police officers. This is just normal coordinated tenant action, and the amount of police repression was I think very impactful on them and how they experienced the Adams administration.

New York City has had a democratic socialist mayor for the last seven months, and the mayor got elected thanks in part to this promise for a four-year rent freeze. But until June, he hadn’t actually delivered on it yet. After Mamdani’s inauguration, how did CAAAV orient as an organization around making sure that this was a promise that was actually carried out?

One of the clearest pieces we could see from our study of history is that there needed to be a strong community labor coalition to make sure that this project is successful. 

We were one of the founding members of People’s Majority Alliance [a coalition to get out the vote for Mamdani in the November 2025 election that included organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America and unions like United Auto Workers]. All the organizations in People’s Majority have membership bases and were willing to take the risk and organize and act.

Embed from Getty Imageswindow.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'TngyP--fS3d3bznl8wydVQ',sig:'gFIkOftH2vafSQUsS5QzAMIUBLETS8vcLwV_26v1HZY=',w:'594px',h:'396px',items:'2283354063',caption: true ,tld:'com',is360: false })});

And so through building that coalition, and seeing that the rent freeze [vote] is coming up, we worked really hard to bring in labor siblings that weren’t always a part of the Rent Guidelines Board campaign. We chose to bring in two organizations where renters made up a majority of the membership — New York Taxi Workers Alliance, [or NYTWSA], and PSC-CUNY [or the Professional Staff Congress at City University of New York]. So much of organizing is siloed in different sectors. There’s immigration, there’s housing, there’s labor. But the reality is that our youth members are going to CUNY, whose professors are also union members. They are also paying high rent and are trying to fight for a contract that can give them more wages and benefits, so they can pay this rent. 

In practice, there’s so much more overlap, and so we were able to bring in labor siblings to this fight. Members from both NYTWA and PSC-CUNY spoke at the preliminary vote and publicly amplified our rent freeze demand in press interviews and on social media. Because the rent board’s hearings are held on CUNY campuses, PSC-CUNY also led a number of town halls and participated in testifying in borough-based hearings. These alliances carry forward and we want to keep figuring out how we organize together. 

Now that a rent freeze has been won again, including the first-ever two-year rent freeze, what are the conversations like among your members and within the organization as a whole? On the heels of such a massive victory, where does the focus turn now and what kind of work needs to happen in order to keep your members, especially those who have been showing up to the RGB for so many years, activated and engaged in the fights to come?

That’s the big one. We’re seeing this as a real opportunity, this moment, and we want the campaign that we eventually take on to be one that is structurally reforming the systems, so that whoever the next mayor is, tenants have more power. I think there’s a lot of ideas for what it could look like. 

But we’re really willing to revisit strategies of the past. Building organizing was [historically] really difficult and individualized, but how can that look different in this new period? What needs to happen for it to look different? How does government need to relate differently, or how does even the housing movement need to change our practices to be more effective? 

#support-block_f4a263de34e508cb5d7220e9e2406555 { background: #000000; color: #ffffff; } Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

We’re really wanting to assess where we’re strong and where we’re weak, and build closely with aligned working class organizations. It’s also not useful to divide, so how are we creating new systems so that the cogovernance project that we’re all undertaking — making working class people the leaders of the city — is more possible?

We see our role very clearly as trying to build a tenant movement ecosystem, but how do we actually define what tenant unionism is in the city? There are real, interesting questions of structure that are coming up. What does a democratic union in a tenant structure look like, and how do we have that citywide? It’s always been a little bit of a wilderness, where there has been really great organizing that’s happening in this wilderness, but so much of it has been pockets where there are good organizers and the right conditions for it. 

Now it feels like the moment for us to actually be talking to each other or struggling with each other way more closely, because it’s such a golden opportunity.

This article The inside-outside strategy behind New York’s rent freeze was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article What D.C.’s election defense under occupation can teach us was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

As we approach the one-year anniversary of the National Guard’s occupation of Washington, D.C., it’s worth pausing to learn what D.C. resistance has to teach us — especially heading into the midterms.

Many of us are carrying real fear about how far Trump might go to interfere with this election. Our fear isn’t unwarranted. But it doesn’t have to be ungrounded, either. Yes, he will say outrageous things. Yes, the heads of the Department of Justice and FBI are trying to keep power for their boss and intimidate voter rights groups. Yes, if Trump could stop elections he would. 

But an authoritarian who has to sabotage an election is doing it from a place of weakness. Trump is not Narendra Modi, who steadily gained popularity (until a grassroots “cockroach” movement turned the tables). Trump is in political freefall with cratering poll numbers and is lashing out; his only path to retain power is undermining the will of voters.

Much of his weakness now has to do with how our movements have harnessed backfire. Trump’s use of ICE is limited by the fierce national resistance to his paramilitary. Backlash against the voter suppression of Callais brought Black voters in Alabama and other states to the polls in force. Trump’s power of controlling narrative isn’t as strong as it used to be. Even Fox News avoided re-airing his recent rant about the 2020 election. Admittedly we have more to do, but he is overreaching — his seizure of ballots in Fulton County in January to boost his Big Lie only woke up more people in the election protection space to the threat he posed. 

#newsletter-block_d8c687347d79a9372019a397973704fd { background: #ececec; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_d8c687347d79a9372019a397973704fd #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our Newsletter

We’ll send you a weekly email with the latest articles.

So rather than let our fears run wild, we can ground them in what’s already happened and how people responded. That’s the idea behind my “Election Defense Scenarios” book. It’s an attempt to lay out the scenarios of election sabotage — from National Guard at the polls to disinformation, Department of Justice threats and last-minute rule changes. In many cases, we don’t have to imagine what might happen — we can look to very recent history.

D.C. is one of the clearest examples we have. The city faced a wide array of threats and prepared for the June 16 primary without letting fear set the terms. Here’s what they did.

D.C.’s challenges

Some of the challenges were the ordinary kind that come with any election reform. D.C.’s primary was the first election in the city’s history to use ranked-choice voting, after voters approved Initiative 83 in 2024. That meant there had to be a real voter education lift — organizers needed to teach people how ranking works. And there were the usual worries about longer lines as poll workers and voters adjusted to a new system. 

But bigger issues loomed. By election time, D.C. had been living with a federalized National Guard presence for nearly a year, including a month-long federal takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department the previous summer. Ahead of the July 4 “America 250” celebrations, federal officials announced a “summer surge” that added roughly 2,500 more troops, bringing the total in the city to over 5,000.

The threat of the National Guard loomed large. At an estimated cost of over $1 billion per year for Trump’s domestic deployments, the National Guard has harassed citizens and decreased trust in the military. During the 2020 election, organizers say, National Guard troops had been deployed following Black Lives Matter protests and reportedly told people in line they had to get out of line to enforce the city’s curfew — an incident that went undocumented because no one had thought to film it in the moment.

Surprisingly, National Guards were deployed from Democratic-led states, including Michigan (and immediately after the election, Minnesota and Hawaii). At least Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has since removed its troops. 

Previous Coverage

Here is a proven formula for protecting the vote while keeping the peace

Using National Guards to interfere with elections was repeatedly threatened. As the Brennan Center reported, “It is illegal to deploy federal troops or armed federal law enforcement to any polling place.” Yet, Trump said, “We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement” at polling locations.

Alongside the troops came fears of political interference — a worry sharpened by D.C.’s unusual constitutional position. Congress controls D.C.’s budget and has repeatedly attempted to gut the city’s local governance. When President Trump was asked what he’d do if Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George — a self-described democratic socialist whose campaign was frequently compared to Zohran Mamdani’s — won the mayoral primary, he answered, “I wouldn’t like it — and maybe we take back Washington, run it on the federal basis. We won’t put up with it.” Organizers couldn’t dismiss the threat as bluster. It had legal teeth: Congress and the president hold unique levers over the city.

Each location has different conditions and scenarios. But no matter where you are, we can still learn a lot from what D.C. did to make their election a success.

The GOTV machine kept running

Groups with get-out-the-vote chops, like grassroots movement Free DC, ran the playbook for turning out voters. They did things like matching voter files to canvassing tools, texting unregistered residents and working precinct by precinct to make the case for coming out to vote. Free DC in particular leaned into its base-building structure. It gave volunteers the tools to text out surveys asking people when they planned to vote, then follow up with 20 people closest to them whom they’d personally commit to reaching. 

It’s classic deep-organizing infrastructure, repurposed for a high-fear election environment. Because the threats loomed so large, many organizers wondered if turnout would sink. In the end, good organizing plus frustration over being occupied for nearly a year drove the highest primary turnout since 1994.

But turnout operations don’t answer the question: What do you do about troops near the polls?

Build a coalition where none existed

D.C. needed more robust election protection infrastructure than it had before. The DC Election Protection Coalition came together under the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Advancement Project, alongside Free DC, Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, the Washington Interfaith Network and more than 100 other partner organizations.

They trained hundreds of nonpartisan volunteers, who were divided into two tracks: election protection field attorneys (for people with legal backgrounds) and grassroots poll monitors (for everyone else). Both were stationed outside voting locations across all eight wards to answer questions and help resolve problems as they came up.

Long before Election Day, National Guard troops became one of those problems. The official election protection hotline fielded a report that the National Guard was outside a drop off box in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood. Keya Chatterjee, co-founder of Free DC, decided to go check out the situation. When she arrived, she immediately whipped out her phone, capturing a video of armed Florida National Guards members right outside one of D.C.’s 450-pound, six-foot, double-locked ballot boxes. The Guard members said they had not been told to stay away and showed no knowledge they were apparently infringing on the law.

Keya’s documentation forced a response. After footage was shared with the D.C. Attorney General and Board of Elections, they opened a direct line to the Joint Task Force overseeing Guard operations in the city — and got a written commitment that troops would keep a 50-foot distance from polling locations on Election Day (an affirmation, at least, of what the law says).

This move did several things. Yes, it smoothed the way for a cleaner election. But the video confrontation went viral and helped model handling fear in productive ways. Seeing Keya talk directly to the National Guard showed residents how to stick up for their rights — a behavior a few folks would end up having to do on Election Day. 

Train monitors

Everyone in the coalition wanted to reduce people’s fear. They didn’t always agree on how.

The traditional election protection approach for communicating with the public tends to minimize threats. The instinct is to keep messaging that elections are being run freely and fairly. But D.C. residents are already living the violence of Trump’s occupation.

Federal marshals shot and killed Julian Bailey in northeast D.C. in February. Car pursuits by the U.S. Park Police resulted in at least two deaths, including bystander Nolberto Meza, after the agency loosened restrictions on high-speed chases. And a damning report from Brookings Institution shows that nearly 7 in 1,000 children in D.C. have had a parent snatched away by ICE or other federal agents. In such a context, speaking to people’s lived experience is more reassuring than disguising the ugly truth.

The advice to name the threats maps onto recent messaging research. Following extensive qualitative and quantitative testing, ASO Communications and others found, “speaking about the anti-voter agenda increases self-reported desire among pro-voter Americans to feel concern over this agenda (+5-10 [percent] over the course of the survey), to engage in politics (70 percent are more motivated), and to motivate friends to vote (+5 [percent] over survey). We can frame voting as an act of resistance.” They noted that concrete descriptors about how the regime is keeping people from voting created the greatest engagement.

The DC Election Protection Coalition took up that approach as they trained their monitors.

Free D.C. organizers host a “vote-in” on June 3, casting ballots during early voting ahead of the primary election. (Free DC)

The two approaches weren’t always perfectly in sync. Some election protection trainers taught volunteers to document, document, document if they saw Guard troops acting illegally — take horizontal videos for the widest capturing of information and file a formal incident report. By contrast (even sometimes in the same training!) grassroots groups’ guidance put the emphasis on making sure the voter in front of you got to vote right now — heckle, press, advocate directly for the Guard to leave, rather than only documenting for later.

Those need not be contradictory instincts so much as complementary ones — document for accountability (and video tape!), intervene for the person standing in line. And coalitions built for a genuine crisis rarely resolve every tactical disagreement in advance. What made the coalition work wasn’t perfect unanimity — it was offering space for each group to share its approach knowing we’re moving in the same direction.

Expand the circle

Election protection efforts are too often narrowly built around technical expertise in election work. By building the coalition with grassroots mobilizers at the table, it brought in the expertise of those who knew how to rapidly mobilize. To combat the often fractured disconnect between grassroots election work and traditional election protection, Freedom Trainers and All Voting is Local, as one example, have teamed up to host cross-silo sessions between these groups to strengthen ties.

One of the D.C. coalition’s sharper moves was pulling in local rapid response and mutual aid networks so they were feeding into the same control room as the election protection operation. That meant in addition to information like “which polling place has a printer problem,” groups like Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid fed into a citywide picture, including neighborhood locations of ICE activity and checkpoints. That meant volunteers had better information about what was going on across the neighborhood that day.

The day of the election 

June 16 brought the ordinary hiccups of any election — printers breaking, standard supply issues — but D.C.’s neighborhood-level organizing infrastructure meant problems got solved fast. In the summer heat, one neighborhood network located a leftover cooler of water and got it to a polling site to help overheated voters and volunteers. In Columbia Heights and the other seven sites approved to stay open past the normal closing time because of long lines, volunteers swarmed with snacks and drinks to help people stay in line as long as it took.

There were also multiple National Guard interactions that went unreported. According to Keya Chatterjee, West End Library did have National Guards come into the poll site. Monitors were already at the site and immediately began telling them to leave and filming the confrontation with armed troops. Monitors repeatedly insisted the military had no legal basis to be there, and after forceful haranguing, the troops left without further incident. 

A decision then had to be made: Do we release this or not? I can’t speak to the exact decision-making, but the reports of the National Guard at polling sites appeared sporadic (not a coordinated threat) and had limited impact because monitors moved fast. It seems voters still voted. 

All this affirms the mantra of “record, record, record.” Even if it ends up not being released to the public, getting the facts on record is critical.

The plans that didn’t happen

Because ranked-choice tabulation can take days if no candidate wins a first-choice majority, organizers built a “patience campaign” in advance — a plan to spend up to a week reminding people that a delayed result is not a stolen one, and that counting ballots correctly takes time.

They also built a second, sharper contingency in case results were seriously contested or tampered with: a template borrowed from their experience organizing on May Day 2026. People were told if things went seriously wrong, to recreate the May Day activity — morning intersection blockades, a midday march to the Capitol, evening gatherings — all under a “no work, no school, no shopping” banner.

It did not have to be activated. But having a real plan for nonviolent noncooperation ready was itself part of what let residents and organizers approach Election Day with confidence instead of dread.

The threat isn’t over — and neither is the lesson

Trump’s “take back Washington” threat hasn’t gone away just because the primary is over. Bills to weaken D.C. home rule continue through Congress, and the National Guard’s presence has been extended through the end of Trump’s current term — to the next presidential inauguration in January 2029. 

D.C. has to take the takeover threat seriously, knowing not all threats will materialize.

As D.C. is marking one year of occupation, Free DC is inviting organizations and elected officials to sign on in opposition to the troops’ presence. The ask uses simple messaging like, “Publicly oppose any effort to prevent the seating of duly elected officials representing D.C. or any other jurisdiction.” And from individuals, Free DC is seeking support asking governors to get their troops out of D.C..

But D.C.’s story matters well beyond D.C. What happens in D.C. affects us all. And heading into the midterms, what happened during the primary is some of the clearest evidence we have for how to prepare for what’s coming.

#support-block_0aa79214b7de6f517bc7b09d58637bb8 { background: #000000; color: #ffffff; } Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

Folks working on election protection need to get more comfortable with confrontation. A recent guide on responding to National Guard at polling places somehow left out D.C.’s lessons entirely. They said, yes, document — but there was no mention of confronting the National Guard as D.C. monitors did, telling troops they aren’t legally allowed to be here and insisting that they leave.

On the other hand, those of us coming out of organizing need to learn and respect the rules that already govern election work, and recognize we’re not the first people to think seriously about defending an election. There’s a deep well of experience to draw on, from movements across the U.S. and around the world — which is a lot of why I wrote the “Election Defense Scenarios” booklet with stories from each scenario.

What’s clear throughout is that we can defend our elections. Don’t get bogged down by the noise and while you can take every threat seriously, it doesn’t mean they’re all going to happen — and they may be calculated just to slow you down. So keep on the work, building with people across silos and teaching people to stand up for their rights.

This article What D.C.’s election defense under occupation can teach us was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The spectre of socialism is haunting America . . . Bizarrely enough in 2026, a new Red Scare has taken over American politics, with the GOP, the Democratic Establishment, plenty…

This article How creativity — and children — have kept Albania’s revolution alive was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

It was on the third day of the revolution that the mood changed. Once again, many thousands of Albanians had descended on Tirana’s central square after work. Once again, the speeches and banners were focused on stopping a wild and legally protected coastline from being razed for a luxury resort. But this time the vibe was tense. Some people had entered the crowd who were angry, screaming abuses and trying to set fire to the placards. 

Ilir Kaso, an artist and lecturer at Tirana University of Arts, stood nearby with his two daughters, aged 11 and seven. “My daughters were very frightened. My youngest asked to leave the protest, and so we did,” recalled Kaso. But as they emerged from the crowd, they found themselves facing what Kaso describes as “the flamingo group,” a collection of a hundred or so protesters wielding pink flamingo banners and a few pink polystyrene flamingos on poles. “‘Papa look, flamingos, let’s go there,’ said my youngest, and immediately I understood what we had to do.”

The flamingo group was a loose coalition of artists and environmental activists based in Tirana. The partnership had first formed more than a decade earlier under the banner of “Friends of Vjosa,” a movement to stop one of Europe’s last wild rivers from being splintered by 45 hydroelectric dams. Kaso became a part of what proved to be a very successful campaign. It birthed Europe’s first Wild River National Park, and on a personal level, it transformed Kaso’s art, pulling him away from abstraction and towards nature. He and his wife named their first daughter after the river.

When trucks and bulldozers suddenly rolled into a protected part of the river’s delta in late April, and started fencing off a large section of the coastline, the coalition quickly remobilized, meeting in person and via WhatsApp groups to work out how to stop the destruction. Kaso attended the first small protests along the fence line, photographing the flattening of ancient sand dunes where turtles nested, and the laying of concrete over wetlands that host hundreds of migratory bird species, many of them endangered.

#newsletter-block_f857e62356ffd457a6015432cfe58f3b { background: #ececec; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_f857e62356ffd457a6015432cfe58f3b #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our Newsletter

We’ll send you a weekly email with the latest articles.

Kaso had followed but not posted in the WhatsApp debate over which bird should be the symbol of their campaign. The environmental activists wanted one of the more threatened species to be made prominent — the Dalmatian pelican, the Northern lapwing — but the artists had decided on the flamingo, an easily recognizable bird with an iconic color and shape. After seeing how the bird had become a refuge for his frightened children, Kaso quickly started tapping out a message in the chat.

“I wrote about what happened and how we could create somewhere stationary, a shelter where we flamingos can stay all together and bring in the children, to protect them but also to expand the good vibes,” he said. “Because children have such good energy, they don’t have doubts or traumas like us. And we cannot wait for this protest to be damaged and become violent. This bad energy is going to destroy everything. We have to fight this with good energy, but by going out of the crowd.”

Kaso had experience setting up a shelter like this. During the pandemic he had helped to open and run a community school for his daughters and other young children in his area. The experience had a profound effect on how he taught his art students. After the pandemic, he rejected rigid lesson plans and formulas to be more curious and open to their ideas. “The children taught me a lot,” he said with a smile.

The artists and activists in the WhatsApp chat immediately embraced Kaso’s idea. Not only was there a shared fear of violence derailing this uprising, but the surging size of the crowds was clearly straining families. Every evening, between the speeches on the square, messages were going out over the microphone about lost children who needed to be found. On the chat, artists started offering to bring coloring pens and run drawing sessions. The next day, 20 feet of paper was laid out beside the Pyramid of Tirana, a tree-lined landmark between the square where protesters gathered and the prime minister’s office that they marched to. It was instantly flooded with grateful parents and curious children.

The Children’s Corner during an evening of protest, Tirana, July 2026. (Trivet)

The Children’s Corner, as it is now called, has become an established feature of the revolution, entertaining children for approximately three hours every evening. On busy days, more than a hundred children will sit on the ground drawing their favorite birds, singing into megaphones, or playing with flamingo placards, while a dozen adults strive to monitor activities. It has become a hub not just for families but the flamingo group itself, who use the space to synchronize their chants, strategize about their movements, and pass out their pink foam placards to fellow revolutionaries.

Kaso describes the Children’s Corner as the sun of the protest, always radiating with light, fun and good vibes. And the flamingo group has taken on the role of dispersing those vibes to the rest of the protest. When a speech has been particularly aggressive or divisive, a flamingo parade will take flight, weaving into the crowd, and then chanting, drumming and dancing to relieve the tension. Then they will return to the Children’s Corner to recharge.

“The Children’s Corner is very important for keeping this protest peaceful,” Kaso said. “I think it is our most important weapon, like a Trojan horse, against the people who want to end this protest and make it a mess. It means the police cannot throw their gas and create aggressive situations. Also for the people — we are telling them we are here with our children and our families, so we have to be careful.” 

The space has triggered an outpouring of generous donations, though much has had to be turned away. Food from strangers was considered too risky, while taking money might give the impression this was a commercial childcare service. But offers of more coloring pens and art materials have always been readily accepted.

Not everyone has welcomed the corner though. Some have accused it of diluting the revolution, of reducing it to a kind of theater, while nationalist groups have taken exception to anything connected to the flamingos, screaming “we are eagles!” (Albania is literally called “land of the eagles” in Albanian, and its flag features a double-headed black eagle.) On particularly busy days, Kaso and other volunteers have had to form human chains to stop the surging crowds from accidentally trampling the children. But each time there has been a confrontation or danger, the corner community of flamingos and parents have collectively stepped in to diffuse it.

After some 60 days of continuous protest, featuring many hundreds of thousands of Albanians packed within a few square blocks, there has been remarkably little violence. Some eggs were thrown at the cars of politicians as they entered the nearby parliament building, and some windows were broken at a local police station after six egg-throwers were pepper-sprayed, arrested and held there before being released. 

With the help of art materials and studio space from NGOs and private donors, many hundreds of pink foam flamingo banners have been produced and handed out. In the city, they’ve started to function like a pride flag, a marker stuck outside bars and cafés to show solidarity with the revolution. “Most of the time we connect revolution to war and destruction and going back,” Kaso said, “but this is a big lesson for us about how we can think about a revolution. And the children are the most important part to teach us this.”

Corporate aggression backfires

Besjana Guri is tired. She started our interview by getting a date wrong by a decade and then laughing. The environmental activist has attended every day of the revolution so far, using a projector to screen rousing flamingo-themed videos on the wall of the prime minister’s office. “If you ever think of not going once, you feel you are betraying the protest. You have to go,” she said.

Guri co-led the award-winning campaign that turned the river Vjosa into a national park, and a year ago she founded Lumi (which means river in Albanian), a small organization focused on empowering women and children to protect their local environment. Two days before the Vjosa’s delta was turned into a construction site, Guri had been meeting with women in the nearby village of Zvërnec to discuss the threat to the region and organize a response.

The real flamingos, enjoying the shallow lagoons of Vjosa-Narta. (PPNEA)

The delta region where the Vjosa River meets the Adriatic Sea is mesmerizingly beautiful — a delicate tapestry of salt marshes, lagoons and forests. Known as Vjosa-Narta, the government awarded the coastal area full protection status in 2017. But over the last decade, as Prime Minister Edi Rama has cemented his grip over Albania’s politics, that protection has been stripped back and caveated to the point of being meaningless. 

In 2018, Vjosa-Narta’s protected status was downgraded to allow an old military base within it to become a (still unfinished) airport. “The airport was the tip of the iceberg,” said Xhemal Xherri, a project manager at Protection and Preservation of Natural Environment in Albania, or PPNEA. “We always knew that somehow this airport would bring resorts to the area.”

Then in 2024, the law enforcing the protection was amended to allow the government to essentially overrule it if an opportunity was lucrative enough. A month later, Jared Kushner, son-in-law of the U.S. president, shared designs on Instagram for a huge luxury development along the coastline. Then in January of this year, the villagers in Zvërnec found themselves under virtual house arrest while Ivanka Trump, Kushner’s wife, toured the area with a troupe of architects, business associates and security guards.

But when the trucks rolled into Vjosa-Narta in late April, it was still a shock. Albanian law required public consultations, an environmental assessment and various government permits to be awarded before construction could begin. The law no longer appeared to matter. Within a week, a coalition of environmental organizations had sent representatives to document the damage as access roads were crudely carved into the pristine coastline. A week after that came the first protest. 

By the time Guri and a hundred other activists and villagers had converged on the vast construction site, it had been enclosed by a fence which ran right into the sea. Watching them from the other side of the fence was one elderly security guard, and a few bored police officers. The men eventually agreed to open a gate and let the protesters inspect some of the damage. “They thought we were just ecoactivists, we were harmless,” Guri remembered.

Before the protest finished, some villagers insisted on toppling over a small section of the fence — a symbol of their disgust. For them, this was not just about land destruction but land ownership. Their community had lived on this coast for generations, yet the land had been sold to Kushner by a Florida-based real estate mogul with links to cocaine-trafficking and document forgery. Some families had spent 20 years in court battling over the ownership of the land, and despite there being no legal resolution, they were suddenly being denied access to it. For now though, the fence was flimsy. It could be pushed over using body weight alone. 

When the protesters returned the next Saturday, the fence and the whole mood was different. Now the barrier was concrete-based, and topped with thick curls of barbed wire. Looking through it were dozens of muscular private security guards, dressed all in black, faces obscured by sunglasses, baseball caps and masks. As the protesters marched along the fence they were shadowed by a column of police officers. “The feeling was not good,” Guri said. “It felt like there were terrorists here, people who wanted to scare and intimidate us.”

The first protest by the fenced-off construction site at Vjosa-Narta in May. (PPNEA)

It was during the protest on the third Saturday that the intimidation turned to violence. The protesters had marched along the barrier to the beach, and with the tide low, an area of sand had been exposed that was blocked only by barbed wire. A lone villager ignored the warnings of the guards and carefully stepped over it. He was instantly pounced upon by the men in black, who wrestled him to the ground, punched him in the face and dragged him away by his arms across the beach. Another masked guard then fired pepper spray into the angry crowd, blinding both the protesters and the strangely passive line of police officers between them.

Guri was not able to attend the protest that day, but like hundreds of thousands of others, she watched a video of the assault on social media a few hours later. “Everyone that saw that moment, it was really a feeling that they were the ones being dragged,” she said, her eyes closed. Online, the video was being paired with rallying songs and nationalist poetry, and it was spreading like wildfire, well beyond the networks of activists, artists and villagers who were attending the protests. By the next day, a poster was circulating alongside it, headlined “Albania is not for sale!” It called for a protest in Tirana’s central square at 6 p.m. that evening.

Kaso arrived at the protest early so he could take photographs as people arrived. “I was physically trembling when I saw this huge group of people approaching,” he recalled. “It was amazing. A mix of responsibility and euphoria. A feeling that another chapter is coming. I never imagined all these years of fighting for nature and the river could be so helpful.” Guri was late, after spending her Sunday in a village outside Tirana, then hitting heavy traffic. “When I got there, I saw — I cannot count how many people. But for sure 600 people and more. I haven’t seen a bigger protest in the last 10 years for an environmental issue,” she said.

Guri was so inspired she later spoke to the crowd: “I said it took us 10 years to protect the Vjosa river and finalize the national park, but if we continue like this, we will only need 10 days to cancel this project and save the Narta.” With the speeches wrapped up, and the protest coming to an end, a chant built up among the crowd: “See you tomorrow, tomorrow more.” The template for a revolution had been set. 

The flamingo group brings the prime minister a concrete birthday cake in Tirana in July. The sign on the top: “Long Prison Sentence For You!” (Trivet)

“The protest kept growing every day. For the first few weeks it was only growing. Not only ecoactivists but all types of people. And the majority was young people,” Guri said. “They came with banners and funny memes and interesting quotes. Then we added the element of the flamingos. That’s when the creativity began, and the creativity has really kept this protest alive.”

Building an anti-corruption revolution

Xhemal Xherri of PPNEA, along with all the activists I’ve spoken to, is adamant that the Flamingo Revolution has no leaders, that it is a spontaneous and amorphous movement featuring a patchwork of groups unified by a love of nature. The closest it comes to forming an agenda is when the crowd cheers or jeers after a speech. But PPNEA has been quietly instrumental in preparing the soil from which this revolution has bloomed, and building the relationships that could lead to its eventual success.

#support-block_5bd179c8ecab9ec8470564b86842d971 { background: #000000; color: #ffffff; } Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

PPNEA was the country’s first environmental organization, established as it was transitioning away from communist dictatorship in 1991. The group took the government to court over irregularities in the airport construction contracts (the case is ongoing), and has been organizing protests against the exploitation of Vjosa-Narta for years. As Albania’s politicians were voting in the law change that meant Kushner’s luxury resorts could turn from CGI dream to reality, a hundred PPNEA activists were protesting outside parliament to condemn them.

The day before the first protest outside the construction site, for which PPNEA brought in bus-loads of Tirana-based activists, the organization invited a delegation of EU diplomats to witness the destruction firsthand. A month later, a PPNEA representative was in Strasbourg, France as the European Parliament voted in a resolution condemning the change to Albania’s law on protected areas, and making its repeal a non-negotiable condition of Albania’s accession to the EU. 

Six Green members of the European Parliament then attended the protests in Tirana at the end of June, making stridently pro-revolution speeches that were adored by the crowds. Just days earlier, Prime Minister Rama had explained to a Euronews journalist how officials in his government were “fanatics of the EU faith” who would do “whatever it takes” to gain membership. The country has been seeking candidature and tirelessly negotiating its way into the bloc since 2009. 

Despite this powerful endorsement from the EU, the fanatical Rama has not softened his stance on the protesters. From the beginning he has dismissed their concerns as delusional, the product of a coordinated online disinformation campaign by Iran, which he claims has simultaneously targeted both Albania and Israel as the two countries deepen their diplomatic ties.

But for Xherri, the reason social media algorithms have been promoting the Flamingo Revolution is not because of foreign interference, but simply because everybody in the capital is going to the square and posting about it. This includes many Albanian social media influencers, who have been privately requesting briefings from PPNEA on Vjosa-Narta, and amplifying the organization’s posts to new audiences.

A flamingo parade moves through the crowd dispensing positive vibes in Tirana in July. (Trivet)

Construction of the resort has been quietly paused, and the barbed wire fence has been removed, but so far the government has conceded nothing. Even if Rama were to repeal the law change that triggered this revolt, and consign Kushner’s project to the dustbin of history, it is unlikely to be enough to placate the people now surging through the city every evening. As the crowds have grown, so too have their demands. Today the protesters are just as likely to chant for both Rama and the leader of the opposition to be put in jail for corruption, as they are to call for nature to be protected. 

Over the last few weeks, the numbers out protesting have stabilized, with a few thousand marching each week night, and the crowds ballooning again at the weekends, especially now that Albania’s sizable diaspora is returning to be a part of the revolution. The activists I talk to are all confident that the government will eventually yield, and the law will be repealed. 

But when it comes to winning wider political changes, Kaso references a so far isolated incident, early in the revolution, where a group of protesters spontaneously marched out of the city and blocked a highway leading to the country’s main airport for several hours. 

“The people have shown the prime minister how this protest can be escalated. Maybe one or two hundred people, which is nothing for this protest, could block the entrance of the highway which connects the city to the airport, and stay there for 24 hours, which is going to be a big loss for travel companies,” he said. “​​I don’t want to see everything escalate in a dangerous way, but if necessary we don’t only have to be creative in aesthetic ways — with posters and colors and children. We can do it in other ways.”

For now though, the flamingo group are continuing to power this protest with pink placards, good vibes and children drawing their favorite birds. And no matter what happens next, Kaso is happy. “For me the revolution has already been successful,” he said. “It’s already changed a lot. If tomorrow we are not going in the road anymore, I know very well that life in Albania is not going to be the same.”

This article How creativity — and children — have kept Albania’s revolution alive was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

In our latest, Scott and guest co-host Laurel Sutherlin (@laurelsutherlin) talk with author and environmentalist Jason Mark (@jasondovemark) about his new book “The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive…