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    Americans disagree on much – but this week, we have been coming together | Robert Reich

    We are relearning the meaning of “solidarity”. This week, across the US, people have been coming together.We may disagree on immigration policy, but we don’t want a president deploying federal troops in our cities when governors and mayors say they’re not needed.We may disagree on how laws should be enforced, but we don’t want federal agents to arbitrarily abduct people off our streets or at places of business or in courthouses and detain them without any process to determine if such detention is justified.Or target hardworking members of our community. Or arrest judges. Or ship people off to brutal prisons in foreign lands.We may disagree on questions of freedom of speech, but we don’t think people should be penalized for peacefully expressing their views.We may disagree on the federal budget, but we don’t believe a president should spend tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on a giant military parade designed in part to celebrate himself.As we resist Donald Trump’s tyranny, America gains in solidarity. As we gain solidarity, we feel more courageous. As we feel courageous and stand up to the president, we weaken him and his regime. As we weaken Trump and his regime, we have less to fear.In downtown Kansas City, Missouri, this week, protesters holding signs reading “solidarity” marched peacefully. “I felt it was my right and my duty to come here – as what I had to go through to come here, and yell, and say I went through the system,” one of them told the local channel KSHB.In Denver, a crowd gathered outside the Colorado state capitol peacefully marched in solidarity with Los Angeles protesters, carrying flags and signs with slogans such as “Abolish ICE,” “No human is illegal” and “Keep the immigrants. Deport the fascists!”In downtown Tucson, people gathered at the Garcés Footbridge to show their solidarity. Reminders of the protest were written in chalk on sidewalks: “No one is illegal on stolen land,” “Love over Hate” and “Free Our Families.”In Boston, they gathered outside of the Massachusetts state house to express solidarity, citing two local students who they said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) abducted and detained for no reason, Rümeysa Öztürk and Marcelo Gomes da Silva.In Sioux City, Iowa, they marched along Singing Hills Boulevard, outside the Ice office, to peacefully protest. One of them, Zayden Reffitt, said: “We’re showing people that we’re not going to be silent and we’re not just going to let all this go through without us saying something about it.”In Chicago, thousands marched through the Loop, creating a standstill on DuSable Lake Shore Drive near Grant Park. As one explained: “I’m a first-generation citizen – my parents were born in Mexico. It’s something I’m super passionate about. My family is safe, but there are many who aren’t. This is impacting our community, and we need to stand up for those who can’t speak up for themselves.”In Des Moines, they rallied peacefully at Cowles Commons in solidarity with others. “We’re here to stand up for members of our community. For immigrants. For migrants. For refugees. For people with disabilities. For people on Medicaid. For seniors. For all the working class, because we are all under attack right now,” said one. “And Trump is trying to scapegoat immigrants and make them the enemy, calling them criminals.”In Austin, Texas, they gathered in front of the Texas capitol, holding flags and signs while chanting: “Whose streets? Our streets.” Authorities used pepper spray and teargas against the protesters and arrested more than a dozen of them, the governor, Greg Abbott, said.In San Antonio, hundreds gathered outside city hall, chanting, “People united will never be divided!” and holding signs that read, “No human is illegal” and “I’m speaking for those who can’t.”It was much the same in Sacramento; Raleigh, North Carolina; St Louis and in hundreds of other cities.All across the US, people who have never before participated in a demonstration are feeling compelled to show their solidarity – with immigrants who are being targeted by Trump, with people who are determined to preserve due process and the rule of law, with Americans who don’t want to live in a dictatorship.Peaceful protests don’t get covered by the national media. Most of the people who come together in places such as Des Moines and Kansas City to express their outrage at what Trump is doing aren’t heard or seen by the rest of us.Yet such solidarity is the foundation of the common good. And although the number of people expressing it is still relatively small, it is growing across the land.This is the silver lining on the dark Trumpian cloud.

    Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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    ‘No Kings’ protests across US loom over Trump’s military parade

    As tanks and soldiers parade through the streets of Washington on Saturday, millions of people around the country are expected to turn out in their communities to speak out against the excesses of Donald Trump’s administration in what’s expected to be the biggest day of protest since his second term began.The protests, dubbed “No Kings”, are set to take place throughout Saturday in about 2,000 sites nationwide, from big cities to small towns. A coalition of more than 100 groups have joined to plan the protests, which are committed to a principle of nonviolence.This week, Trump has deployed national guard and US marine troops to Los Angeles to crack down on protesters who have demonstrated against his ramped-up deportations, defying state and local authorities in a show of military force that hasn’t been seen in the US since the civil rights era. Interest in the Saturday protests has risen as a result, organizers said.Texas governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, deployed his state’s national guard to manage protests ahead of No Kings and amid ongoing demonstrations against Trump’s immigration agenda. In Florida, Republican governor Ron DeSantis said that people could legally run over protesters with their cars if they were surrounded. “You don’t have to sit there and just be a sitting duck and let the mob grab you out of your car and drag you through the streets. You have a right to defend yourself in Florida,” he said.A website for the protest cites Trump’s defying of the courts, mass deportations, attacks on civil rights and slashing of services as reasons for the protests, saying: “The corruption has gone too far. No thrones. No crowns. No kings.”The coalition will not hold a protest in Washington DC – an intentional choice to draw contrast with the military parade and to not give the president an excuse to crack down on peaceful protest. Philadelphia will host a flagship march instead, and a DC-based organization is hosting a “DC Joy Day” in the district that will “celebrate DC’s people, culture, and our connections to one another”.Trump initially said people who protested the parade would be met with “very big force”, though the White House then attempted to clarify he was fine with peaceful protest. Asked about the No Kings protests during a White House event on Thursday, Trump said: “I don’t feel like a king. I have to go through hell to get things approved.”Since the start of his second term, opposition to Trump has grown, manifesting in protests and demonstrations including against Elon Musk at his car company, against deportations, around his retribution agenda and government cuts.Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium, which tracks political crowds, found that there had been three times as many protests by the end of March 2025 compared to 2017, during Trump’s first term, and that was before major protests in April and May. The biggest day of protest so far came on April 5, with “Hands Off”, which the consortium estimated drew as many as 1.5 million people, a lower figure than organizers cited.“Overall, 2017’s numbers pale in comparison to the scale and scope of mobilization in 2025 – a fact often unnoticed in the public discourse about the response to Trump’s actions,” a new analysis from the consortium said. More

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    Protesters have a right to wear masks – despite Trump’s double standard | Jan-Werner Müller

    Do protesters have a right to hide their faces? Donald Trump, who likes to show and see his own face as often as possible, clearly does not think so. One demand to universities has been that they outlaw masking at demonstrations; in response to protests in California, the US president demanded on social media that anyone wearing a mask be arrested immediately.Never mind the apparent double standard, as Ice agents refuse to take off face coverings and hide their name tags, defying any accountability; there is a widespread sense that standing by one’s identity is a crucial part of standing up to unjust power. In fact, that intuition is at the core of civil disobedience. But it is not plausible in our present moment; what’s more, there is a long countervailing tradition of validating citizens’ right to anonymity. As recently as the mid-1990s, it was affirmed by none other than the supreme court.Lawful protest is categorically different from civil disobedience, though much current commentary conflates them. In civil disobedience, citizens openly – or even, as Martin Luther King Jr put it, “lovingly” – break the law; they make themselves identifiable to the authorities and are willing to accept punishment (but hope that they will not be treated like ordinary criminals). This strategy serves multiple purposes: it demonstrates moral seriousness, it flags “highest respect for the law” in general (MLK again) and it counts on a majority coming to see the injustice these loving lawbreakers are flagging – and then change things.To be sure, the requirement to reveal one’s identity has not been accepted by all philosophers of civil disobedience: for some, what matters is that whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning were doing the right thing. Their identity was not crucial for the public to comprehend scandalous facts they revealed (in the end, at great personal cost).Past lawful protests, meanwhile, occurred in a different media context. The civil rights movement assumed that its messages about injustice would reach a majority of US citizens – as well as people of good will in Washington DC. After all, activists appealed above the heads of racist governors such as Alabama’s George Wallace to the federal government. Today, such assumptions are doubtful. As everyone knows, we no longer live in an age of three large TV networks, which, despite various failings, could be expected faithfully to transmit images of civil rights protesters being brutally treated by southern police. In our deeply distorted, often outright dysfunctional, media landscape, messages are either not transmitted at all (just watch Fox at moments that could be embarrassing for Trump); or they are reframed such that the original message is turned on its head (those peacefully protesting against lawlessness become the law-breakers).Beyond these risks, there is the by now clear and present danger of the Trump administration engaging in personal retribution and making examples of individuals – think of student detentions and deportations. Under such conditions, hiding one’s identity is an understandable act of caution, and such caution should not be criminalized. While democracies such as Canada also have anti-masking laws, these aim at rioters and those assembled unlawfully, not people exercising their right to free expression. We are clearly at a moment where protest is beginning to take courage – a point driven home to me when I politely asked some older women holding up posters outside the main gate at Princeton University whether I could take their picture. Several said that I should not show their faces.As in debates about privacy, someone sooner or later will say that anyone who has nothing to hide should not hide their face. But in an age of ubiquitous surveillance, now supplemented with rapidly advancing facial recognition technology, you do not know what will be done with evidence of your presence at a protest. We have a secret ballot because we do not want people to be intimidated, but also because we don’t want powerful people – not necessarily always the state; it could be the boss who does not like your vote for democratic socialism – to know about our stances.The supreme court saw this logic three decades ago. It defended the right to stay anonymous of an elderly lady handing out leaflets opposing a school tax levy in Ohio. The court reminded Americans that the authors of the Federalist papers had used pseudonyms; the justices declared anonymity a means “to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation”, going so far as to ennoble it as a “shield from the tyranny of the majority” (of course, today’s protesters are not standing against a real majority – what Trump and Miller are doing is precisely not popular).To be sure, when protest is meant directly to engage others, there is something not right about an asymmetry of the masked speaking to the unmasked: freedom of assembly, among other things, ensures that we can get into each other’s faces. Already in the 19th century, revolutionaries hoped that those manning barricades and soldiers would end up talking and fraternizing. Teargas – first used against barricades, even before deployment in war – renders that vision impossible. Today, what risks they take, and, specifically, how much they want to reveal to authorities and fellow citizens, should be up to individuals engaged in lawful protest.

    Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University More

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    ‘Saying Trump is dangerous is not enough’: Bernie Sanders on Biden, billionaires – and why the Democrats failed

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    ‘I think what Trumpism is about, is an understanding that the system in America is not working for working-class people,” says Bernie Sanders, sitting in the Guardian’s offices in London. “In a phoney, hypocritical way, Trump has tapped into that. His quote-unquote ‘solutions’ will only make a bad situation worse.”View image in fullscreenIn person, Sanders’ 83 years read differently than in photograph, perhaps because of how conversational he is. His voice is magnetic – a Brooklyn accent that feels both warm and tough. “But what I have been aware of, and I’ve talked about it for years, is that in America, the very richest people are doing phenomenally well, while 60% of our people live paycheck to paycheck.”Later, he will say the same thing to an audience in London – only with more emphasis and passion. “Sixty per cent. Six-zero. Do you know what paycheck to paycheck means?” It’s exhilarating to hear Sanders speak to a crowd: his zeal is reflected back in their faces, his moral clarity is such a relief, set against the cynicism and resignation of most of the Democratic party’s opposition to Trump and his administration. Class war is as old as time, but it’s a peculiarity of this age that you rarely hear a politician name it. “I do,” he tells me. “There is a class war going on. The people on top are waging that war.”It’s a look at what could have been. Sanders ran, of course, to be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, and again in 2020. The first time, there was a real sense, in the US and abroad, that something incredible might happen: that someone with “almost no name recognition,” he says, a senator from the small state of Vermont, might successfully challenge Hillary Clinton, whom the party had already anointed. We all know how that worked out. Was it the greatest disappointment of his political life? “Well, you’re too busy to feel things,” he says. “You’re just working very hard.”What is absolutely unequivocal is his criticism of the Democrats. The party, he thinks, lacks any real progressive promise. “What they say is, ‘The status quo is working pretty good, and we will tinker around the edges’, and that is not a message that resonates with working people”. He refuses to indulge in any personal ill-will towards Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. The most he’ll voice is a weary resignation about 2020, when his campaign “won the first three states, primary states, in terms of popular votes. Then the Democratic establishment made sure the other candidates dropped out, and they rallied around Joe Biden. You know, that’s the world that we live in. We are taking on not just the Republican leadership, we are taking on a Democratic establishment which is tied to elements of corporate America.”During the 2024 election, he “worked very hard to see that Kamala Harris was elected. I was all over the country and was one of her major surrogates. We begged our campaign to start talking about the needs of working people. But their consultants and the money people behind them thought of another strategy, showing that she was more conservative, that she worked with people like Liz Cheney, worked with Republicans, had billionaires going out and saying that she’s wonderful. They thought that was the right approach. I did not think that was the approach, and I was public about that.” He pauses, and not for effect: it’s hard to relive November 2024. “But my voice did not carry,” he says.Sanders started his political life in 1981, when he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont. His brother, Larry, is 90 and lives in Oxfordshire. He stood as a Green candidate in David Cameron’s old parliamentary seat in 2016. In a speech that year, supporting Sanders as the Democratic nominee, Larry gave a brief portrait of their parents. “Eli Sanders and Dorothy Wexford Sanders. They did not have easy lives, and they died young,” he said. Dorothy was born in New York, to Jewish immigrant parents fleeing Russian pogroms. Eli arrived in the US in 1921, most of his family remaining in what is now Poland and what was then Austrian Galicia, to be “wiped out by Hitler,” Sanders has said in the past. Eli worried constantly about providing for his family and both he and Dorothy were political, Larry said in the speech: “They loved the New Deal of Franklin D Roosevelt, and would be especially proud that Bernard is renewing that vision.”View image in fullscreenSanders’ charge to the Democrats now is twofold. “Their weakness is, I think, that their credibility is now quite low. And they don’t have much of a message for working people, other than to say Trump is dangerous. I think that’s just not enough.” He point blank refuses to get into Trump’s administration – its excesses, surprises, non-surprises, without first walking through everything that was already wrong with the US. “What the Democrats have to absolutely make clear is this: we’re going to take on the billionaire class. They’re going to start paying their fair share of taxes. We’re going to have healthcare for all people as a human right. We’re going to have a strong childcare system that every American can afford. We’re going to make public colleges and universities tuition-free. We’re going to create millions of jobs transforming our energy system away from fossil fuel. We’re going to build housing – boy, housing is like it is here, just a huge crisis. We’re going to build millions of units of low-income and affordable housing. Do Democrats say that? No.”That Sanders will not be drawn on every new Trump calumny, instead focusing on an economic reality that’s been worsening for decades, does help him keep on course. And it definitely doesn’t stop him giving Trump both barrels. “We don’t usually have presidents suing the media, threatening the media if they write bad stories about them. We don’t usually have presidents threatening to impeach judges. We don’t have presidents suing law firms. You add all that together, it is a movement for authoritarianism.” Is it worse than he predicted? I was thinking specifically about the extrajudicial detentions and deportations, students dragged off campus and held for weeks, perfectly legal migrants sent to El Salvador, when they weren’t even from there. “First time around, Trump was not as well organised. They’ve had four years to get their act together, so to speak. And that’s what this Project 2025 document was about.”Project 2025 was a document published by rightwing thinktank the Heritage Foundation in 2024, offering a terrifying vision for a second Trump term. An outright proposal to dismantle the US government, it was a roadmap to crackdown on immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, abortion rights – as well as being against action on the climate crisis and against vaccines. If it looked like a blueprint for The Handmaid’s Tale and The Road combined, none of the alarm last year could ever have encompassed the reality that would come. Among many other things, the Trump administration would go on to deport people without due process, and then ignore a supreme court ruling that an 18th-century wartime declaration about “alien enemies” was not a proper legal instrument.I ask a question about who funds the Heritage Foundation – as it keeps all donations secret, which raises questions about whose interests Project 2025 is really serving. His reply is impatient: “It doesn’t matter who it is they have. There’s no lack of well-paid, right-wing consultants and intellectuals who can move this country to an oligarchic authoritarian society.” His tone is clear – stop getting lost in detail, stop looking for hidden connections, stop messing around and start fighting.“One of the frightening aspects of what’s going on is the degree to which the establishment-type folks have caved in, and so quickly,” he says. “That was much less the case, during Trump’s first term.” He mentions Jeff Bezos, “who one had assumed was kind of a moderate Democrat”, losing his editorial board because they were going to endorse Kamala Harris. “Same thing in the Los Angeles Times. When you have ABC agreeing to a settlement with Trump; the bogus lawsuit against CBS that Paramount are negotiating right now. When you have major, billion-dollar law firms saying, ‘OK, we plead guilty to having clients who went to court against you and your friends, that was a terrible crime, we’re going to give you millions of dollars.’ Harvard has buckled up a little bit and appears not to be caving in, but a lot of universities have. None of this was the case eight years ago. They are creating the overall mentality that it will be dangerous to be strongly critical of Donald Trump.”View image in fullscreenIn other areas, money is talking so loudly in politics that it’s all you can hear. Sanders has used Gaza as an example when he says that politicians are afraid to speak out on Israel’s actions in case Super Pacs – which can put forward unlimited amounts of money for a candidate – will penalise them at the next election. Today, he says it’s not just Gaza, but a host of other issues. “If you say, ‘Do you really think it’s a good idea to cut Medicaid and give tax breaks to billionaires? Do you really think that climate change is a hoax?” there will be a number, not a majority, but a number of Republicans who would say: ‘No. But if I stand up and vote ‘no’, the next day, Elon Musk would say, “All right, you are going to be primaried [a candidate will be fielded against you], and Trump will support your opponent. I will put unlimited sums of money to elect your opponent.”’ Good luck to you.’”While that pattern is undoubtedly visible across many issues, the example of Gaza is particularly stark – with groups such as Aipac, funded by pro-Israel billionaires, putting tens of millions of dollars against congressional candidates, mainly Democrats, that it did not deem to be sufficiently supportive of Israel in the run-up to 2024. As the atrocities in Gaza leave many in civil society dumbfounded, what is the long game here, I ask. “That’s a difficult question, and I don’t know the answer. I will tell you that the United States has had a long-term relationship with Israel, and there are many people who have intellectually chosen not to understand that Netanyahu does not represent the Israel of 20 years ago. The moderate democratic society is now controlled by right-wing racist extremists who have done, and are doing today, absolutely horrific things to the Palestinian people in violation of American law and international law. They refuse to recognise that.” In Dublin, he was heckled for not using the word genocide, and some US progressives were dismayed, two years ago, when he didn’t call for an immediate ceasefire. He speaks out now, choosing his words carefully; he’s not on the fence.Since the end of March, Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (he always calls her that, never AOC), have been holding campaign rallies all over the US from Arizona to Utah. They are deliberately not skipping the diehard Democratic states – but have been more surprised by the numbers they’ve been getting in red states. “This is not a campaign. This is a political rally, and I think the numbers are almost unprecedented. Large numbers of people, including in conservative areas, do not want to see oligarchy in America, do not want to see authoritarianism, do not want to see massive tax breaks for the rich and cuts to the programmes that working-class people desperately need.” Sure, he and AOC sometimes disagree, “my wife and I disagree on issues! But Alexandria, I think, comes pretty much from where I come from.”View image in fullscreenHe has hope for the future, too. There are a couple of dozen people in the house Progressive Caucus – a 98-strong group of the more left-wing members of the Democratic party in Congress – that are “strong progressives”, he says. “Alexandria is maybe one of the most articulate and charismatic, but there are others there as well.” Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib to name a few.Sanders is clear that he and Ocasio-Cortez are not trying to start a third political party. Instead, they’re “trying to build a grassroots movement of working-class people and young people … If you’re seeing candidates now arising who are progressive, that’s down to a lot of the work that we are doing for the 2026 midterms.”Sanders in person is very much as he is in his book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, in which he lays out some principles, among them, “wars and excessive military budgets are not good”; “carbon emissions are not good”; “racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia are not good”; “exploiting workers is not good”. It’s really the sight of him igniting a crowd that’s so hopeful, which holds for him, too – he keeps his optimism because he has the “fortune of being able to go around the country and speak to large numbers of wonderful people”. The message doesn’t change, though – it doesn’t have to be new: it just has to be true.As he leaves to make his way upstairs to the photography studio, he strides on ahead, his wife Jane O’Meara Sanders, an activist herself, making small talk with me in his wake. It’s not that he’s performing vigour in an era where politicians’ ages are relentlessly analysed. It’s just his manner – all this urgent change should have happened yesterday. More

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    How to fight back against Trump? Look to poor people’s movements | Rev Dr Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back

    For tens of millions of people, Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is a grotesque nightmare. The proposed legislative cuts, including historic attacks on Medicaid and Snap, come at a time when 60% of Americans already cannot make ends meet. As justification, Maga Republicans are once again invoking the shibboleth of work requirements to demean and discredit the poor, even as they funnel billions of dollars into the war economy and lavish the wealthy with tax cuts.As anti-poverty organizers, we’ve often used the slogan: “They say cut back, we say fight back.” It’s a catchy turn of phrase, but it reveals that for too long we’ve been on the back foot. In the world’s richest country, in which mass poverty exists beside unprecedented plenty, we’re tired of just fending off the worst attacks. Too much ground is lost when our biggest wins are simply not losing past gains. Amid Trump’s cruelty and avarice, it’s time to fight for a new social contract – one that lifts from the bottom of society so that everybody rises.There are no shortcuts to building the kind of popular power necessary for us to shift from defense to offense. The task is a generational one, requiring even greater discipline, sacrifice, perseverance and patience. But as we consider the best way forward, the past offers clues.In our new book, You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons From the Movement to End Poverty, we document insights from some of this country’s most significant poor people’s movements. As nascent fascism continues to metastasize, these largely untold stories contain some of the very solutions we need to prevent democratic decline and overcome bigotry, political violence, Christian nationalism and economic immiseration. Today, the historic demands of the poor – for safety, belonging, peace, equality, and justice – are rapidly becoming the demands of humanity. The hard-fought wisdom of the organized poor has much to teach all of us.We’re reminded of the welfare rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, especially the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). Largely forgotten to history, NWRO was once the biggest poor people’s organization in the country. The organization, led by poor Black women, regularly staged mass marches and demonstrations and held picket lines and sit-ins at welfare offices, at a time when the poor were subject to racist, exclusionary and moralizing policies. At its height, the organization had over 100 local chapters, a sophisticated operation that offered a political and spiritual home to over 20,000 dues-paying members.In 1971 in Nevada, where the governor was cutting the social safety net, the local NWRO chapter organized 1,000 women to storm Caesars Palace, the luxury hotel and casino, and shut down the main drag in Las Vegas. The protest turned into a multi-year campaign of civil disobedience and a federal judge eventually reinstated the benefits. These women were unapologetically militant and willing to take big risks. They were also clear that forging power required the less visible spadework of movement-building – including looking after one another through networks of solidarity and collective care.At the same time as the Black Panthers were feeding tens of thousands of children through the Free Breakfast Program (and provocatively asking why the government couldn’t do the same, even as it spent billions of dollars slaughtering the poor of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos), NWRO created its own innovative “projects of survival”. The historian Annelise Orleck writes that in Las Vegas, the “welfare moms applied for and won federal grants to open and run … the first health clinic in the largely Black, and thoroughly poor Westside of Las Vegas. Then came the neighborhood’s first library, public swimming pool, senior citizen housing project, solarization program, crime prevention program, and community newspaper, all organized and staffed by poor mothers and later their young adult children.”As the experience in Las Vegas revealed, the women of NWRO were organizers, caretakers and strategists of the highest order. They were also anti-racists and feminists of an entirely new mold. At a time when many women were fighting for equality within the workplace, NWRO championed “welfare as a right”, challenging the notion that the value of a human is tied to their ability to work within the marketplace and raising fundamental questions about how a society cares for its people. This idea coalesced into their demand for a “guaranteed adequate income”, an early precursor to the expanded child tax credit in 2021. Before this pandemic-era program was abandoned by both reactionary Republicans and recalcitrant Democrats, it lifted four million children above the poverty line, the single largest decrease in official child poverty in American history.In a legendary article for the 1972 spring issue of Ms Magazine, Johnnie Tillmon, the first chairperson of NWRO and later its executive director, wrote: “For a lot of middle-class women in this country, Women’s Liberation is a matter of concern. For women on welfare, it’s a matter of survival … As far as I’m concerned, the ladies of NWRO are the frontline troops of women’s freedom. Both because we have so few illusions and because our issues are so important to all women–the right to a living wage for women’s work, the right to life itself.”Veterans of the welfare rights movement named their model of grassroots organizing after Tillmon. In “the Johnnie Tillmon model”, poor women, and poor people more broadly, are not simply an oppressed identity group but a latent social force with potentially vast power. Because they have the least invested in the status quo and the most to gain from big change, they are strategically positioned to rise up and rally not just their own communities, but the millions more who are one paycheck, healthcare crisis, job loss, debt collection or eviction away from poverty.In order to harness this transformational power, the Johnnie Tillmon model proposes four strategic principles, as relevant today as they were in the 1960s and 1970s:

    The poor must unite across their differences and assume strong leadership within grassroots movements.

    These movements must operate as a politically and financially independent force in our public life.

    The leaders of these movements must attend to the daily needs and aspirations of their communities by building visionary projects of survival.

    These projects of survival must serve as bases of operation for broader organizing, political education, and leadership development.
    The women of NWRO believed there was unrecognized ingenuity and untapped brilliance within their communities. Even before the organization existed, the tens of thousands of women who made up its membership were already leaders in countless ways: they knew how to pool their meager resources, feed one another, navigate treacherous government bureaucracy and protect themselves from brutal state-sanctioned violence. When such survival skills were collectivized, networked, and politicized, these women became a force to be reckoned with.The same could be true today. As the Trump administration intensifies its attacks on life-saving programs like Medicaid and Snap, poor and dispossessed people will not passively swallow their suffering. Already, in states as far flung as Vermont and Alaska, Michigan and North Carolina, we’re seeing an upsurge of resistance among Medicaid recipients. But we cannot be satisfied simply with righteous acts of protest and mass mobilization. The question is how to transform our growing indignation into lasting and visionary power. The Johnnie Tillmon model is a good place to start.

    The Rev Dr Liz Theoharis is the director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and co-founder of the Freedom Church of the Poor. Noam Sandweiss-Back is the director of partnerships at the Kairos Center. They are co-authors of You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty (Beacon, 2025) More

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    Now is the time for scientists to stand up against Trump’s repressive agenda | Daniel Malinsky

    There is a stereotype that the natural political activists in academia are the humanities professors: literary scholars, social theorists and critics of culture are the ones who speak truth to power and fight back against oppression.Yet scientists also ought to stand up and organize against the Trump administration’s attacks – not only the attacks on scientific research and integrity, but also the attacks on immigrants, on political speech and on democracy. Scientists cannot see themselves as above the fray but rather in coalition with other workers resisting authoritarianism.History is replete with examples of scientists that have taken on great risks to resist authoritarianism. The Dutch neurologist GGJ Rademaker reorganized his laboratory into a base of resistance (complete with printing press, radio equipment and hidden weapons) against fascist forces in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Some German scientists, including the psychoanalyst John Rittmeister and biochemist Heinrich Wieland, opposed the Nazi regime by hiding Jews and distributing banned anti-fascist literature. Brave German scientists even aided the Allied forces during the second world war.At this year’s meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, the CEO of this research society, Margaret Foti, encouraged cancer scientists to take part in demonstrations and meetings with elected representatives. Professors from all corners of campus are already fighting back against funding cuts, the attempted deportations of our international students and usurpations of democratic governance. At Columbia, where I work, faculty have been organizing to urge our university leadership to provide real protections to students at risk of deportation and sue the Trump administration, among other demands. Contrary to the stereotype, much of the organizing work is being spearheaded by science faculty – psychiatrists, epidemiologists, astronomers, mathematicians, economists, statisticians, oceanographers – hand in hand with our colleagues in the humanities.Despite the notion that scientists are and should be cautious or apolitical, professors in the sciences are well-suited to political activism. The work of political organizing is not so different from the work of managing a research lab: skills in divvying up tasks, managing people with sensitivity and foresight, and creating clear, compelling narratives to communicate accomplishments (eg to peer reviewers reading our manuscripts) are all clearly transferrable to activism. All science professors were once science students, doing the typically monotonous labor of scientific work, spending hours carefully tinkering in the laboratory, debugging computer code, or meticulously collecting information on the human or natural world. Often political activity involves straightforward but time-consuming tasks such as printing leaflets or making phone calls to representatives. Sometimes there are simple logistics that need taking care of in organizing a protest march. Some activism involves strategizing in coalitions to distribute needed resources or build supportive institutions. None of this is as difficult as “rocket science” and it is in fact remarkably similar to the more banal parts of everyday science.Many recent actions taken by the Trump administration impinge quite obviously on the expertise of scientists: the attacks on federal research funding, the rollback of decades-long protections of our environment and human health, the excising of research specifically related to climate change or vaccine development. Robert F Kennedy Jr has recently promised to dedicate scientific resources to studying the alleged relationship between autism and vaccination – a question that has been addressed by dozens of studies and on which the scientific consensus to the contrary is clear – and thrown the weight of the government behind stigmatizing and dangerous initiatives related to autism, contested by experts and advocates. Donald Trump has also taken steps to sabotage congressionally mandated research on the climate crisis by dismissing expert authors of the National Climate Assessment. Opposing these moves and organizing against them as scientists is a no-brainer. Yet also scientists must fight tooth and nail against the secretive and seemingly baseless incarceration of immigrants, the usurpation of democratic checks and balances, and the reorganization of society along ever more hateful lines. These things affect all of us regardless of our job descriptions. It should go without saying that scientific inquiry cannot flourish in a society dominated by fear, censorship and hate.Scientists are drawn to the work we do for many different reasons, but I would venture that for most of us there is an underlying goal of advancing humanity – whether that is by finding cures to disease, new technology or more abstractly by pushing the boundaries of human knowledge so that future generations are better off. All of that is at risk if we remain “neutral” or “apolitical” at the wrong moment in history. Though there is a plausible argument for erring on the side of “apolitical” in normal times, to ensure trust and guard against undue politicization of scientific work, the argument stretches thin and breaks down given our current political environment and apparent slide toward fascism. Our scientific research itself must remain free from prejudice and aimed wherever the truth may lead, but the work before us is not only scientific research. We must also work to preserve the conditions of life that make both science and society flourish. In these times that means that scientists have a duty to dissent.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

    Daniel Malinsky is an assistant professor of biostatistics in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University More

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    Systems are crumbling – but daily life continues. The dissonance is real

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    View image in fullscreenIn January, the comedian Ashley Bez posted an Instagram video of herself, trying to describe a heavy mood in the air. “How come everything feels all …?” she says, trailing off and grimacing exaggeratedly into the camera.Digital anthropologist Rahaf Harfoush saw the video, and got it immediately.“Welcome to the hypernormalization club,” Harfoush said in a response video. “I’m so sorry that you’re here.”“Hypernormalization” is a heady, $10 word, but it captures the weird, dire atmosphere of the US in 2025.First articulated in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia, hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening.The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.“What you are feeling is the disconnect between seeing that systems are failing, that things aren’t working … and yet the institutions and the people in power just are, like, ignoring it and pretending everything is going to go on the way that it has,” Harfoush says in her video.Within 48 hours, Harfoush’s video accrued millions of views. (It currently has slightly fewer than 9m.) It spread in “mom groups, friend chat circles, political subreddits, coupon communities, and even dog-walking groups”, Harfoush tells me, along with variations of: “Oh, so that’s what I’ve been feeling!” and “people tagging their friends with notes like: ‘We were just talking about this!’”View image in fullscreenWhy hypernormalization is relevant in the USThe increasing instability of the US’s democratic norms has prompted these references to hypernormalization.Donald Trump is dismantling government checks and balances in an apparent advance toward a “unitary executive” doctrine that would grant him near-unlimited authority, driving the US toward autocracy. Billionaire tech moguls like Elon Musk are helping the government consolidate power and aggressively reduce the federal workforce. Institutions like the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, which help keep Americans healthy and informed, are being haphazardly diminished.Globally, once-in-a-lifetime climate disasters, war and the lingering trauma of Covid continue to unfold, while an explosion of generative AI threatens to destabilize how people think, make a living and relate to each other.For many in the US, Trump 2.0 is having a devastating effect on daily life. For others, the routines of life continue, albeit threaded with mind-altering horrors: scrolling past an AI-generated cartoon of Ice officers arresting immigrants before dinner, or hearing about starving Palestinian families while on a school run.Hypernormalization captures this juxtaposition of the dysfunctional and mundane.It’s “the visceral sense of waking up in an alternate timeline with a deep, bodily knowing that something isn’t right – but having no clear idea how to fix it”, Harfoush tells me. “It’s reading an article about childhood hunger and genocide, only to scroll down to a carefree listicle highlighting the best-dressed celebrities or a whimsical quiz about: ‘What Pop-Tart are you?’”In his 2016 documentary HyperNormalisation, the British film-maker Adam Curtis argued that Yurchak’s critique of late-Soviet life applies neatly to the west’s decades-long slide into authoritarianism, something more Americans are now confronting head-on.“Donald Trump is not something new,” Curtis tells me, calling him “the final pantomime product” of the US government, where the powerful are abandoning any pretense of common, inclusive ideals and instead using their positions to settle scores, reward loyalty and hollow out institutions for personal or political gains.Trump’s US is “just like Yeltsin in Russia in the 1990s – promising a new kind of democracy, but in reality allowing the oligarchs to loot and distort the society”, says Curtis.Why the concept of hypernormalization is usefulWitnessing large-scale systems slowly unravel in real time can be profoundly surreal and frightening. The hypernormalization framework offers a way to understand what we’re feeling and why.Harfoush created her video “to reassure others that they’re not alone” and that “they aren’t misinterpreting the situation or imagining things”. Understanding hypernormalization “made me feel less isolated”, she says. “It’s difficult to act when you’re uncertain if you’re perceiving reality clearly, but once you know the truth, you can channel that clarity into meaningful action and, ideally, drive positive change.”Naming an experience can be a form of psychological relief. “The worst thing in the world is to feel that you’re the only one who feels this way and that you are going quietly mad and everyone else is in denial,” says Caroline Hickman, a psychotherapist and instructor at the University of Bath specializing in climate anxiety. “That terrifies people. It traumatizes people.”People who feel the “wrongness” of current conditions acutely may be experiencing some depression and anxiety, but those feelings can be quite rational – not a symptom of poor mental health, alarmism or a lack of proper perspective, Hickman says.“What we’re really scared of is that the people in power have not got our back and they don’t give a shit about whether we survive or not,” she says.View image in fullscreenMarielle Greguski, 32, a New York City-based retail worker and content creator, posted about everyday life feeling “inconsequential” in the face of political crisis. Greguski says the outcome of the 2024 election reminded her that she lives in a “bubble” of progressive values, and that “there’s the other half of people that are not feeling the same energy and frustration and fear”.To Greguski, the US’s failings are not only partisan but moral – like the racism and bigotry that Trump’s second term has brought out of the shadows and into policy.Greguski is currently planning a wedding. It’s hard to compartmentalize “constant cruelty, things that don’t make sense”, she says. “Sometimes I’ll be like: ‘I have to put aside X amount of money for the wedding next year,’ and then I’m like: ‘Will this country exist as we know it next year?’ It really is crazy.”The effects of hypernormalizationConfronting systemic collapse can be so disorienting, overwhelming and even humiliating, that many tune it out or find themselves in a state of freeze.Greguski likens this feeling to sleep paralysis: “basically a waking nightmare where you’re like: ‘I’m here, I’m aware, but I’m so scared and I can’t move.’”In his 1955 book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45, journalist Milton Mayer described a similar state of freeze in German citizens during the rise of the Nazi party: “You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? – Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.”“People don’t shut down because they don’t feel anything,” says Hickman. “They shut down because they feel too much.” Understanding this overwhelm is an important first step in resisting inaction – it helps us see fear as a trap.Curtis points out that governments may intentionally keep their citizens in a vulnerable state of dread and confusion as “a brilliant way of managing a highly febrile and anxious society”, he says.When we feel powerless in the face of bigger problems, we “turn to the only thing that we do have the power over, to try and change for the better”, says Curtis – meaning, typically, ourselves. Anxiety and fear can trap us, leading us to spend more time trying to feel better in small, personal ways, like entertainment and self-care, and less time on activism and community engagement.View image in fullscreenHow to overcome hypernormalizationProgressive commentators have urgently called for moral clarity and mobilization in response to changes like the cuts to USAID funding, which has resulted in an estimated 103 deaths per hour across the globe; the dismantling of the CDC; and Robert F Kennedy’s campaign against vaccine science.“Where is the outrage?” asks the Nation’s Gregg Gonsalves. “Too many lives are at stake to rest in this bizarre moment of frozen agitation.”“I don’t know if there’s a massive shift toward racism as much as an expanded indifference toward it,” the historian Robin DG Kelley said in a February interview with New York Magazine. “People are just kind of like: ‘Well, what can we do?’”Experts say action can break the spell. “Being active politically, in whatever way, I think helps reduce apocalyptic gloom,” says Betsy Hartmann, an activist, scholar and author of The America Syndrome, which explores the importance of resisting apocalyptic thinking.Greguski and a co-worker have been helping distribute multilingual information about legal rights and helpline numbers, to be used in the event of Ice raids.“It’s easy to feel like: ‘Oh, I’m in community because I’m on TikTok,’” she says. But genuine community is about “getting outside and talking to your neighbor and knowing that there’s someone out there that can help you if something really bad goes down,” she says.“You’re actually out there talking to people, working with people and realizing there are so many good people in the world, too, and maybe feeling less isolated than before,” says Hartmann.“But I also think we need a broader vision,” Hartmann notes. She suggests looking to resistance efforts against authoritarianism in countries like Turkey, Hungary and India. “How might we be in international solidarity? What lessons can we learn in terms of rebuilding sophisticated, complex government infrastructure that’s been hacked away at by people like Elon Musk and his minions in a more socially just and sustainable way?”“We are in a period now when it’s absolutely essential to protest,” says Hartmann, citing the Harvard professor Erica Chenoweth, who argues that just 3.5% of a population engaging in peaceful protest can hold back authoritarian movements.What makes dysfunction so dangerous is that we might simply learn to live with it. But understanding hypernormalization gives us language – and permission – to recognize when systems are failing, and clarifies the risk of not taking action when we can.In 2014, Ursula Le Guin accepted the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, saying: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”Harfoush reflects on this quote often. It underscores the fact that “this world we’ve created is ultimately a choice”, she says. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”We have the research, technologies and wisdom to create better, more sustainable systems.“But meaningful change requires collective awakening and decisive action,” says Harfoush. “And we need to start now.” More

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    We can’t just be against Trump. It’s time for a bold, progressive populism | Robert Reich

    Demonstrations against Donald Trump Trump are getting larger and louder. Good. This is absolutely essential.But at some point we’ll need to demonstrate not just against the president but also for the United States we want.Trump’s regressive populism – cruel, bigoted, tyrannical – must be met by a bold progressive populism that strengthens democracy and shares the wealth.We can’t simply return to the path we were on before Trump. Even then, big money was taking over our democracy and siphoning off most of the economy’s gains.Two of the country’s most respected political scientists – professors Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University – analyzed 1,799 policy issues decided between 1981 and 2002. They found that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”Instead, lawmakers responded to the demands of wealthy individuals (typically corporate executives and Wall Street moguls) and big corporations – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns. And “when a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose.”Notably, Gilens and Page’s research data was gathered before the supreme court opened the floodgates to big money in Citizens United. After that, the voices of typical Americans were entirely drowned.In the election cycle of 2016, which first delivered the White House to Trump, the richest 100th of 1% of Americans accounted for a record-breaking 40% of all campaign donations. (By contrast, in 1980, the top 0.01% accounted for only 15% of all contributions.)The direction we were heading was unsustainable. Even before Trump’s first regime, trust in every major institution of society was plummeting – including Congress, the courts, corporations, Wall Street, universities, the legal establishment and the media.The entire system seemed rigged for the benefit of the establishment – and in many ways it was.The typical family’s inflation-adjusted income had barely risen for decades. Most of the economy’s gains had gone to the top.Wall Street got bailed out when its gambling addiction caused it humongous losses but homeowners who were underwater did not. Nor did people who lost their jobs and savings. And not a single top Wall Street executive went to jail.A populist – anti-establishment – revolution was inevitable. But it didn’t have to be a tyrannical one. It didn’t have to be regressive populism.Instead of putting the blame where it belonged – on big corporations, Wall Street and the billionaire class – Trump has blamed immigrants, the “deep state”, socialists, “coastal elites”, transgender people, “DEI” and “woke”.How has Trump gotten away with this while giving the super-rich large tax benefits and regulatory relief and surrounding himself (especially in his second term) with a record number of billionaires, including the richest person in the world?Largely because Democratic leaders – with the notable exceptions of Bernie Sanders (who is actually an independent), AOC and a handful of others – could not, and still cannot, bring themselves to enunciate a progressive version of populism that puts the blame squarely where it belongs.Too many have been eating from the same campaign buffet as the Republicans and dare not criticize the hands that feed them.This has left Trump’s regressive populism as the only version of anti-establishment politics available to Americans. It’s a tragedy. Anti-establishment fury remains at the heart of our politics, and for good reason.What would progressive populism entail?Strengthening democracy by busting up big corporations. Stopping Wall Street’s gambling (eg replicating the Glass-Steagall Act). Getting big money out of politics, even if this requires amending the constitution. Requiring big corporations to share their profits with their average workers. Strengthening unions. And raising taxes on the super-wealthy to finance a universal basic income, Medicare for all, and paid family leave.Hopefully, demonstrations against Trump’s regressive, tyrannical populism will continue to grow.But we must also be demonstrating for a better future beyond Trump – one that strengthens democracy and works on behalf of all Americans rather than a privileged few.

    Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More