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    Tens of thousands in US set to join ‘Good Trouble’ anti-Trump protests honoring John Lewis

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    Tens of thousands of people are joining marches and rallies at more than 1,500 sites across all 50 US states on Thursday to protest against the Trump administration and honor the legacy of the late congressman John Lewis, an advocate for voting rights and civil disobedience.The “Good Trouble Lives On” day of action coincides with the fifth anniversary of Lewis’s death. Lewis was a longtime congressman from Georgia who participated in iconic civil rights actions, including the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 when police attacked Lewis and other protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.Lewis implored people to participate in “good trouble, necessary trouble” to advance their causes, and this call serves as the underpinning for the 17 July actions. Dozens of advocacy and civil rights organizations are signed on as partners for the event.“The civil rights leaders of the past have shown us the power of collective action,” the protest’s website says. “That’s why on July 17, five years since the passing of congressman John Lewis, communities across the country will take to the streets, courthouses, and community spaces to carry forward his fight for justice, voting rights, and dignity for all.”Organizers said before Thursday’s events that they expect tens of thousands of people to turn out in small towns, suburbs and cities, the latest exercise of street protests distributed across the country to show opposition to Trump in all corners of the US. The last mass day of protest, No Kings, in June drew several million people in one of the biggest single days of protest in US history. Thursday’s events will probably be smaller as it is a weekday.Chicago will host the day’s flagship event Thursday evening, with additional main sites in Atlanta, St Louis, Annapolis and Oakland. Events include rallies, marches, candlelight vigils, food drives, direct action trainings, teach-ins and voter registration drives.The protest’s demands include an end to the Trump administration’s crackdown on civil rights, including the right to protest and voting rights; targeting of Black and brown Americans, immigrants and trans people; and the slashing of social programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), known colloquially as “food stamps”.“One of the things that John Lewis would always say is that if you see something that’s wrong, you have an obligation to speak up, to say something, to do something,” Daryl Jones, co-leader of the Transformative Justice Coalition, told reporters on Thursday. “That’s what July 17 is about – seeing things across this nation, seeing things that are being impacted, that are just not right. We’ve got to stand up and say something.” More

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      The Rev William Barber’s ‘moral movement’ confronts Trump’s America. Can it work?

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      On 2 June, at St Mark’s Episcopal church in Washington DC, people packed the sanctuary – elders in denim jackets, seminarians in collars, organizers clutching clipboards. Some had come in from North Carolina; others walked from their homes just a few blocks away. The seats were full, so the crowd lined the aisles and leaned against the red-brick walls beneath stained-glass windows that cast streaks of light across the floor.It was the first Moral Monday of the summer – a tradition of weekly, nonviolent protest that began in North Carolina in 2013 and now serves as the beating heart of the Rev William Barber’s national movement to end poverty and systemic injustice. “I am not afraid,” the congregation sang. They clapped in rhythm. They swayed in place. Their voices, layered and lived in, reverberated through the rafters: “I would die for liberation, because I know why I was made.” It was part worship, part invocation, part warning. They folded into the center of the sanctuary as they sang covenants of nonviolence – pledges to neither resist arrest nor retaliate, to remain disciplined and dignified in the face of confrontation. One organizer stepped forward and asked them to consider the gravity of what they were saying. “In every cell of your body,” he said, “do you believe that?”Barber, the co-chair of the revived Poor People’s campaign, a national movement to challenge inequality in all its forms through moral protest and policy change, has spent years preparing people for moments like this. Barber draws on a tradition that views justice as a covenant rather than charity, as a sacred demand to confront moral rot. Right now, that means challenging the Trump administration’s second-term agenda – and the Republican-controlled Congress advancing legislation that would slash Medicaid, food assistance and public education, while simultaneously giving tax breaks to some of the wealthiest Americans – or what Barber has simply called “policy murder”, a wholesale dismantling of services for the poor and vulnerable.But Barber’s battle is both a moral rebellion against Trump’s America and against the deeper architecture of inequality that has survived every administration. His movement doesn’t simply resist a president. It challenges a political theology that weds nationalism to capitalism and cloaks exploitation in scripture. In Barber’s view, Trump isn’t the disease – he’s the symptom of a nation that never fully confronted its sins. “Jesus was not crucified because he was just talking about private sin,” he told me. “He was crucified because he turned over the money tables. That’s where government and religion had come into an unholy relationship, and were robbing from the poor.”View image in fullscreenIn a sermon the day before, Barber had turned to 2 Kings – to four lepers outside a besieged city, caught between certain death and uncertain deliverance. “Why sit we here until we die?” they ask, before rising to move toward the enemy camp. That movement, Barber reminded his audience, is what made the miracle possible. The lepers rose to risk the unknown and found the enemy had already left, leaving behind food, shelter and silver. Deliverance had already come; it just took the marginalized to move first. The US is in its own such moment, Barber said. “This is murder by policy,” he preached, pointing to the $1.1tn in proposed cuts to healthcare, food aid and climate infrastructure. “We cannot stay here and die.”Organizers passed protest signs around the sanctuary like communion: Fund Life, Not Death. Our Faith Demands Justice, Not Policy Murder. Handouts followed: 13.7 million people are at risk of losing health insurance. Eleven million at risk of losing food assistance. Billions redirected from public programs to tax breaks for corporations, defense contractors and deportation forces. Congress was deliberating over what Barber calls a “big, bad, ugly, disgusting, deadly budget”, and they wanted to take a moral stand.The room was intentionally diverse – it’s what Barber calls a fusion movement, rooted in the idea that poor and working people across race, religion and region have a moral force capable of reshaping the nation. They prayed. They assigned roles. Some would march. Some would risk arrest. All would bear witness. Slowly, deliberately, the congregation began to move. First, those in wheelchairs; then the people along the walls peeled off. Then, one section at a time, released with care – no rush, no clamor. They lined up two by two, like they were boarding an ark. It was a practiced procession, not chaos. The organizers had been clear: move like the black-and-white footage you’ve seen, like those who marched before you – with order, with discipline, with conviction.“When politicians and priests bless policies that hurt the poor,” Barber said, “that’s when the prophets have to rise.” For Barber, this is the prophet’s role: to expose, to indict and to force a moral reckoning in the public square. The structure of his movement’s actions, the insistence on grounding resistance in both scripture and strategy, is shaped by a long religious protest tradition in the US. Now, under a second Trump term, with safety nets unraveling and rights under siege, that witness feels urgent again. As the movement experiments with decentralized leadership, more youth recruitment and a sharper digital presence, it will have to decide: is it a movement to awaken the conscience, or to seize the wheel? Can this movement still meet the scale of today’s coordinated assault on democracy, rights and the poor?‘Silence is not an option’Barber met the demonstrators at the corner of East Capitol Street NE and 1st Street SE, where the procession paused before the slow walk towards the steps of the supreme court. He stood with his cane in hand, a white stole slung over his shoulders that read: “Jesus was a poor man.” He joined the group like a hinge between past and present. No microphone. No grand announcement. Just a nod, a steadying breath, and then a turn toward the supreme court.Passersby smiled and posed for selfies, unaware or unbothered by the stakes. The procession kept moving, members singing as they went. The air filled with hymns and the weight of memory. At the court steps, the crowd swelled; marshals implored folks to move closer. They sang battle hymns through the speaker system, a thread of the sacred pulled taut across the concrete. The day was structured to echo the civil rights movement, orderly, solemn and visually potent.When Barber took the mic, he drew on the movement’s rhetorical authority as well. “We gather here not in protest alone,” Barber said, “but in prophetic power. We stand not just as people of faith, but as stewards of moral memory. Injustice has written itself into the budget lines, and silence is not an option when lives hang in the balance of a ledger.” Barber reminded the crowd that the country’s wounds were not just policy failures; they were moral abscesses. “There can be no healing of the soul of America without healing the body,” he said. Not while people are starving. Not while they’re uninsured. Not while injustice is passed off as fiscal responsibility.View image in fullscreenHe said something similar in 2020, in the days after Biden was elected president and many people across the nation released what felt like four years of held breath. Biden called for unity; Barber pushed back. “There has to be division before there can be healing,” he said. In Barber’s theology, peace doesn’t mean calm. It means justice. False unity, he warned, is not reconciliation – it’s complicity. And that is the deeper challenge beneath Barber’s movement: not just to resist one budget, or even one party, but to confront the country’s underlying sickness: its habit of mistaking cruelty for order, and order for peace.‘What will you do with the breath you have left?’“They say they’re cutting waste, fraud and abuse. But what they’re saying is it’s wasteful to lift people, fraudulent to help them live and abusive to make sure they have healthcare,” he said. For a moment, it felt like the church services I’d grown up in. Come on, Barber! a clergyman shouted. Yessuh! a resonant voice rang from the other side of the crowd. By the time Barber started whooping – stretching his syllables as his voice reached a thunderous crescendo – the crowd had been whipped into a passionate holler.Barber told stories of movement members who died without care – Pam in Alabama, Jade in North Carolina – who called him not for comfort, but for commitment. Don’t quit, they said. “They had the courage to fight even while they were dying,” he said. “We ought to have the courage to fight while we’re living.”Then he slowed and asked a simple question to those gathered: “What will you do with the breath you have left?” The question hung in the air. He didn’t wait for an answer. A few days later, he told me why it sticks with him. “That was George Floyd’s cry. That was my brother’s cry – he died in his 60s, waiting on healthcare. That was the cry of people during Covid: ‘I can’t breathe.’ That’s what I hear when I say that,” he told me. “The breath you have left – that’s what you’ve been given. That’s what you owe.”Breath is a gift and a responsibility. “We’re not gonna sit here and let healthcare die,” he said. “We’re not gonna sit here and let living wages die. We’re not gonna sit here and let democracy die. It’s time to live. It’s time to stand. It’s time to speak. To protest. To live justice.” The line echoed down 1st Street. Whether it reached the halls of power was another question.Fusion organizingBarber has always insisted this movement isn’t built for the news cycle. “Movements are not driven by whether the media covers it,” he told me. “They’re driven by whether it’s right. You don’t build fusion coalitions because it’s sexy, you build it because it’s necessary.”The spotlight matters, though. And as the glare has dimmed since 2020, so too has the movement’s leverage in elite policy spaces. For Obery Hendricks, a professor in the department of religion at Columbia University, the tension is theological and tactical. Barber speaks from the Black prophetic tradition, a tradition that calls out injustice with moral clarity. But clarity alone isn’t always enough. “Too often, prophetic rhetoric is co-opted as performance,” Hendricks told me. “It becomes poetry without praxis.”But even when the national spotlight is not focused on the organization, that hasn’t stopped the Poor People’s campaign from lining up in moral opposition to what it sees as destructive policy across the country. “People say, where’s the movement?” Barber told me. “We say, where are you? The movement is here. Maybe you’re just not paying attention.” Fusion organizing in 2025 isn’t theory – it’s practice. Amazon workers marching with choirs in Alabama. Climate activists linking arms with veterans on Capitol Hill. Disability advocates and union reps shaping policy in North Carolina. Barber’s once-local campaign is now connected with movements across the country, from Georgia’s voting rights drives to Los Angeles’s housing struggles.Sometimes, the actions pay off. Inside of St Mark’s, I met Emma Biggs, a childcare advocate from North Carolina who had made the trip to DC for the rally. She had joined similar protests before. In June of last year, she was among those who were arrested inside the state legislature while protesting a looming childcare shortfall. The state legislature had passed a stopgap funding bill by the time protesters were released.To Vaughn A Booker, a scholar of religion and African American history at the University of Pennsylvania, though, the power of Barber’s model lies more in its moral insurgency than the results it produces. “He has this style that’s like a preacher reading out the names on judgment day. He’s not just naming problems. He’s naming people, policies and outcomes,” Booker said. “It lands differently when it comes from the pulpit.” And maybe that’s the point. In an era of institutional drift, moral confrontation remains a kind of clarity. “Moral discourse may not be a dominant mobilizer anymore,” he said. “But that was always the case. The prophets didn’t expect to win. They expected to witness.”View image in fullscreenBarber echoed the sentiment. Bearing moral witness matters even when it doesn’t automatically produce results, because failing to show up at all cedes ground unnecessarily. “A moral fight is one that you have to engage, because not to engage is to risk damage that might not be reversible,” he said. “If a group of politicians were going to crucify voting rights and crucify healthcare, then every crucifixion needs a witness.”Not everyone will be reachable through scripture, though. Whereas nearly half of Americans attended weekly religious services at the height of the civil rights movement, only about 30% of Americans do so now, according to a recent Gallup poll. Barber sees the rising suspicion of moral language, and the growing distance from the church, but he doesn’t see it as an obstacle; rather, he sees an opportunity. “Young people are not leaving the faith because they don’t want justice,” he told me. “They’re leaving because we’ve too often offered them religion without justice, and theology without truth.” So he remains committed to preaching in public, to claiming a tradition that doesn’t just soothe, but disrupts with the intent of building a kind of moral pressure. Barber believes the system has rotted at its core. It’s why he often refers to a sickness in the country’s body, a deterioration of its heart – but he also believes it has the capacity to be reformed, and is drawing on a prophetic tradition to push it towards change. “He’s operating within the system,” Booker told me. “He’s not outside of it burning it down. He’s trying to get the system to live up to its stated values.”Barber’s strategy mirrors that of Martin Luther King Jr a generation before: not to write legislation personally, but to focus enough attention on a moral crisis that the system has to respond. The marches weren’t meant to replace lawmaking, but to expose it – to show where justice had failed, and to make action unavoidable.The campaign’s futureBarber began a labored walk to the Capitol. A woman caught up to him quietly and asked if he had a moment to speak. His eyes were forward, fixed on the entrance. “If you don’t mind,” he said gently, “I’m trying to focus on what I’m doing.” She apologized and nodded, but had to say her piece.She walked beside him and told him that the A was missing from DEI – the A for accessibility. So many movements, she said, leave out people with disabilities. People who walk with a limp. Barber smirked. “Oh, people like me?” he said. The procession stopped and Barber, alongside a small group, descended down the elevator.View image in fullscreenThis is where conviction met cost. At the Capitol rotunda, the group prayed with the purpose of arrest. Suvya Carroll, a disability rights advocate born with cerebral palsy, clutched a Bible. Carroll told Barber she and her friend were there because “people like us always get left out. But we believe this movement sees us.” As Capitol police moved in, she was arrested along with Barber and five others. Barber later reflected on Carroll’s arrest in particular: “That child looked the Capitol police in the eye and said: ‘I’m ready.’ And we all prayed. Right there, in the middle of that dome. And I thought, Lord, if this doesn’t matter, what does?”The arrest was symbolic – the third time Moral Monday activists had been detained since April – but it also surfaced a deeper truth. The witness came from many, but the weight still fell on one. When Barber turned toward the elevator, others followed. And once inside the rotunda, all eyes returned to him. As questions swirl around the future of his organization, a harder one remains: how long can a movement built on moral clarity lean on a single voice? Barber’s voice remains central, but the campaign’s future may depend on how well it distributes that moral authority across a broader base. If the theology is prophetic, the structure has to be plural.Barber’s protest is grounded not in outcome, but in obligation. He’s asked: what will you do with the breath you have left? For Barber, that’s not just a question. It’s a way to keep moving. “This country gets amnesia,” he told me. “We forget. That’s why prophetic work is not about a moment. It’s about building a memory that resists the lie.” Even though he’s become a brand, he’s trying to build a witness. “I don’t want people to follow me, I want them to follow the truth,” he said.“Prayer,” he likes to say, “is never the end of protest. It’s the beginning of a demand.” That day in the rotunda, his prayer echoed through marble. Maybe it reached no one. Maybe it moved someone. But it was heard.That’s the point of prophecy. Not certainty. Witness. More

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      in US Politics

      Throwing their bodies on the gears: the Democratic lawmakers showing up to resist Trump

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      A flock of Ice agents, some masked, some sporting military-operator fashion for show, smooshed the New York City comptroller, Brad Lander, up against a wall and handcuffed him in the hallway of a federal courthouse in early June, shuffling the mild-mannered politician into an elevator like the Sandman hustling an act off the stage 10 miles north at Harlem’s Apollo Theater.Like at the Apollo, Lander’s arrest was a show. News reporters and cellphone camera-wielding bystanders crowded the hall to watch the burly federal officers rumple a 55-year-old auditor asking for a warrant.“I’m not obstructing. I’m standing here in this hallway asking for a judicial warrant,” Lander said. “You don’t have the authority to arrest US citizens.”“This is an urgent moment for the rule of law in the United States of America and it is important to step up,” Lander told the Guardian after the arrest. “And I think the dividing line for Democrats right now is not between progressives and moderates. It’s between fighters and folders. We have to find nonviolent but insistent ways of standing up for democracy and the rule of law.”The act of showing up is resonating with voters who have seen the limits of social media activism. Be it Senator Cory Booker’s speech in April or the arrest of lawmakers trying to inspect an Ice detention facility, the images of administration opponents physically interposing themselves as a disruption hearken back to an earlier era in American politics, of sit-ins and full jails, where opponents meant to grind the apparatus of government to a halt as a means of resistance.“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part,” Mario Savio, a student leader in the free speech movement, a campaign of civil disobedience against restrictive policies on student political activity, said 60 years ago during a campus protest. “You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.”That can look like Booker’s 25-hour record-breaking stand at the dais from 31 March through 1 April this year, presenting a litany of protest against the actions of the first 71 days of the Trump administration in the longest speech in Senate history. Technically, it was not a filibuster, unlike the previous record-holder, the South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond’s speech delaying passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1957.As an act of political protest, it required presence. The rules of a Senate floor speech are exacting. No sitting. No breaks. Continuous, corporeal effort. As the spectacle grew, Booker acknowledged that Democratic voters had been demanding more of their leaders.“I confess that I have been imperfect,” Booker said. “I confess that I’ve been inadequate to the moment. I confess that the Democratic party has made terrible mistakes that gave a lane to this demagogue. I confess we all must look in the mirror and say: ‘We will do better.’”Activists had been in the street from the day of Trump’s inauguration. But Booker’s speech was a demarcation point after which Democratic leaders started confronting the right more directly. It also marked them being confronted in return.Hannah Dugan, a Wisconsin judge, allowed a man to leave through the back doors of her courtroom, allegedly in response to the presence of immigration officers waiting to arrest him. FBI agents subsequently arrested Dugan in her Milwaukee courtroom on 25 April, charging her with obstruction.The FBI director, Kash Patel, posted comments about her arrest on X almost immediately, and eventually posted a photograph of her arrest, handcuffed and walking toward a police cruiser, with the comment: “No one is above the law.” Digitally altered photographs of Dugan appearing to be in tears in a mugshot proliferated on social media. Trump himself reposted an image from the Libs of TikTok website of Dugan wearing a Covid-19 mask on the day of her arrest.Three days later, Trump issued an executive order to create “a mechanism to provide legal resources and indemnification”, including “private-sector pro bono assistance”, for cops it describes as “unjustly incur[ring] expenses and liabilities for actions taken during the performance of their official duties to enforce the law”.The order also seeks “enhanced sentences for crimes against law enforcement officers”, and calls for federal prosecution of state or local officials who the administration says obstruct law enforcement.View image in fullscreenTaken together, the order sent a clear signal to federal police agencies to take the gloves off – that accusations of misconduct would be defended against and that placing the bodies of public officials into handcuffs and squad cars was fair game.Three days after that, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, suggested more arrests were on the way. “Wait till you see what’s coming,” he said in response to a question about future arrests of officials.But the warnings have not stopped Democrats from showing up at Ice detention centers and other demonstrations.Four more elected or appointed Democratic officials and one Democratic senator’s staffer have been detained, arrested or charged by federal agents since Trump’s executive order. Each of the arrests has become a media spectacle.Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, visited Delaney Hall, a privately owned Ice detention facility he accuses of violating safety protocols, on 9 May. He was with three members of Congress at the time, who have the explicit right by law to inspect Ice facilities. Video captured by body-worn cameras shows a tangle of bodies as Ice agents arrest him, with beefy federal officers bending him over in handcuffs as they walk him through an outraged crowd.Amid the scrum is the freshman representative LaMonica McIver in her red coat, who stands out in videos as she walks through the gate. She appears to bump a masked law enforcement officer as she’s caught in the chaotic scene. Her intentions are far from clear, and witness video from other angles contradicts the government’s claim that members of Congress stormed the facility.Ten days later, the acting US attorney, Alina Habba, charged McIver with forcibly impeding and interfering with federal officers, even after dropping similar charges against Baraka. For the administration and its supporters, the high-visibility arrests play out as payback for what they see as the politically motivated prosecution of Trump and of January 6 rioters. The Republican representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina filed a House resolution to expel McIver. Baraka’s arrest and McIver’s charge became fodder for conservative media.But it also galvanized Newark. Protesters filled the streets awaiting Baraka’s release.“History will judge us in this moral moment,” he told the crowd. “These people are wrong. And it’s moments like this that will judge us all – as cowards or, you know, as heroes.”Three weeks later, a staffer for the representative Jerry Nadler – whose name has not been released – allegedly impeded homeland security agents searching for “rioters” at a protest about immigration enforcement abuses. The agents handcuffed and detained her. Video circulated widely on social media and cable television.View image in fullscreenOn 8 June, as protesters flooded downtown Los Angeles intent on gumming up the streets around the Metropolitan detention center, the Democratic representative Jimmy Gomez of California posted a video on Instagram describing how chemical irritants had been deployed around the detention building. “They’re spraying something to try to get us to leave,” he said. “This is just to prevent us from doing our jobs.”Homeland security briefly released guidance last week asking members of Congress to give Ice facilities 72 hours of prior notice before visiting a facility. The demand conflicts with federal law allowing members of Congress immediate access for inspections. The guidance is no longer posted on the DHS website.The Democratic senator Alex Padilla of California attempted to confront the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, about protests in Los Angeles on 12 June. Before he could get a word in, when he approached to ask a question, Secret Service and FBI agents dragged Padilla out of the room and handcuffed him. The DHS falsely claimed that Padilla had failed to identify himself, releasing a statement describing Padilla’s inquiry as “disrespectful political theatre”.“The only political theater happening in Los Angeles is Trump using thousands of troops in Los Angeles as political props in response to overwhelmingly peaceful protests,” Padilla said in response.It has only been half a year that Trump has been president, but Democrats and other critics are finding that it’s the balance of civil rights tactics with 2025 TikTok-era virality that is cutting through the noise. Paired with some of the biggest protests in American history, it seems they are only getting started.“Authoritarians are looking to stoke fear and conflict and send a signal [that] if they are going to do this to elected officials – if they’re going to do it to white male US citizens with passports or elected officials, I think their goal is to make everyone afraid,” Lander said.“There is a pattern here, you know, from Senator Padilla to Ras Baraka to me, and an on-the-record statement from the attorney general about … trying to quote-unquote ‘liberate’ cities from their elected officials,” he added. “So, I take them at their word.” More

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      in US Politics

      Will the public side with the protesters in LA? Here are some lessons from history | Musa al-Gharbi

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      On 6 June, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) conducted aggressive raids in Los Angeles, sweeping up gainfully employed workers with no criminal record. This led to demonstrations outside the Los Angeles federal building. During these protests, David Huerta, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) of California, was arrested alongside more than 100 others – leading to even larger demonstrations the next day.Donald Trump responded on 7 June by sending federal troops to Los Angeles to quell the protests without consulting Gavin Newsom, and, in fact, in defiance of the California governor’s wishes. This dramatic federal response, paired with increasingly aggressive tactics by local police, led to the protests growing larger and escalating in their intensity. They’ve begun spreading to other major cities, too.Cue the culture war.On the right, the response was predictable: the federal clampdown was largely praised. Hyperbolic narratives about the protests and the protesters were uncritically amplified and affirmed. On the left, the response was no less predictable. There is a constellation of academic and media personalities who breathlessly root for all protests to escalate into violent revolution while another faction claims to support all the causes in principle but somehow never encounters an actual protest movement that they outright support.For my part, as I watched Waymo cars burning as Mexican flags fluttered behind them, I couldn’t help but be reminded of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In the documentary Sociology Is a Martial Art, he emphasized: “I don’t think it’s a problem that young people are burning cars. I want them to be able to burn cars for a purpose.”It is, indeed, possible for burning cars to serve a purpose. However, it matters immensely who is perceived to have lit the fuse.It’s uncomfortable to talk about, but all major successful social movements realized their goals with and through direct conflict. There’s never been a case where people just held hands and sang Kumbaya, provoking those in power to nod and declare, “I never thought of it that way,” and then voluntarily make difficult concessions without any threats or coercion needed. Attempts at persuasion are typically necessary for a movement’s success, but they’re rarely sufficient. Actual or anticipated violence, destruction and chaos also have their role to play.Civil rights leaders in the 1950s, for instance, went out of their way to provoke high-profile, violent and disproportionate responses from those who supported segregation. Leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr had an intuitive understanding of what empirical social science now affirms: what matters isn’t the presence or absence of violence but, rather, who gets blamed for any escalations that occur.The current anti-Ice protests have included clashes with police and occasional property damage. Melees, looting and destruction are perennially unpopular. Then again, so were civil rights-era bus boycotts, diner sit-ins and marches. In truth, the public rarely supports any form of social protest.Something similar holds for elite opinion-makers. In the civil rights era, as now, many who claimed to support social justice causes also described virtually any disruptive action taken in the service of those causes as counterproductive, whether it was violent or not. As I describe in my book, civil rights leaders across the board described these “supporters” as the primary stumbling block for achieving equality.The simple truth is that most stakeholders in society – elites and normies alike, and across ideological lines – would prefer to stick with a suboptimal status quo than to embrace disruption in the service of an uncertain future state. Due to this widespread impulse, most successful social movements are deeply unpopular until after their victory is apparent. Insofar as they notch successes, it is often in defiance of public opinion.For instance, protests on US campuses against Israel’s campaign of destruction in Gaza were deeply unpopular. However, for all their flaws and limitations, the demonstrations, and the broader cultural discussion around the protests, did get more people paying attention to what was happening in the Middle East. And as more people looked into Israel’s disastrous campaign in Gaza, American support plummeted. Among Democrats, independents and Republicans alike, sympathy for Israelis over Palestinians is significantly lower today than before 7 October 2023. These patterns are not just evident in the US but also across western Europe and beyond.The Palestinian author Omar el-Akkad notes that when atrocities become widely recognized, everyone belatedly claims to have always been against them – even if they actively facilitated or denied the crimes while they were being carried out. Successful social movements function the opposite way: once they succeed, everyone paints themselves as having always been for them, even if the movements in question were deeply unpopular at the time.Martin Luther King Jr, for instance, was widely vilified towards the end of his life. Today, he has a federal holiday named after him. The lesson? Contemporaneous public polls about demonstrations tell us very little about the impact they’ll ultimately have.So, how can we predict the likely impact of social movements?The best picture we have from empirical social science research is that conflict can help shift public opinion in favor of political causes, but it can also lead to blowback against those causes. The rule seems to be that whoever is perceived to have initiated violence loses: if the protesters are seen as sparking violence, citizens sour on the cause and support state crackdowns. If the government is seen as having provoked chaos through inept or overly aggressive action, the public grows more sympathetic to the protesters’ cause (even if they continue to hold negative opinions about the protesters and the protests themselves).The 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles are an instructive example. They arose after King was unjustly beaten by law enforcement and the state failed to hold the perpetrators to account. In public opinion, the government was held liable for these legitimate grievances and outrage. As a result, the subsequent unrest seemed to generate further sympathy for police reform (even though most Americans frowned on the unrest itself).skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStonewall was a literal riot. However, it was also widely understood that the conflict was, itself, a response to law enforcement raids on gay bars. Gay and trans people were being aggressively surveilled and harassed by the state, and began pushing back more forcefully for respect, privacy and autonomy. The government was the perceived aggressor, and this worked to the benefit of the cause. Hence, today, the Stonewall uprising is celebrated as a pivotal moment in civil rights history despite being characterized in a uniformly negative fashion at the time.This is not the way social movements always play out. If the protests come to be seen as being motivated primarily by animus, resentment or revenge (rather than positive or noble ideals), the public tends to grow more supportive of a crackdown against the movement. Likewise, if demonstrators seem pre-committed to violence, destruction and chaos, people who might otherwise be sympathetic to the cause tend to rapidly disassociate with the protesters and their stated objectives.The 6 January 2021 raid on the Capitol building, for instance, led to lower levels of affiliation with the GOP. Politicians who subsequently justified the insurrection performed especially poorly in the 2022 midterms (with negative spillover effects to Republican peers).The protests that followed George Floyd’s murder were a mixed bag: in areas where demonstrations did not spiral into chaos or violence, the protests increased support for many police reforms and, incidentally, the Democratic party. In contexts where violence, looting, crime increases and extremist claims were more prevalent – where protesters seemed more focused on condemning, punishing or razing society rather than fixing it – trends moved in the opposite direction.Yet, although the Floyd-era protests themselves had an ambivalent effect on public support for criminal justice reform, the outcome of Trump’s clampdown on the demonstrations was unambiguous: it led to a rapid erosion in GOP support among white Americans – likely costing Trump the 2020 election. Why? Because the president came off as an aggressor.Trump did not push for a crackdown reluctantly, after all other options were exhausted. He appeared to be hungry for conflict and eager to see the situation escalate. He seemed to relish norm violations and inflicting harm on his opponents. These perceptions were politically disastrous for him in 2020. They appear to be just as disastrous today.Right now, the public is split on whether the ongoing demonstrations in support of immigrants’ rights are peaceful. Yet, broadly, Americans disapprove of these protests, just as they disapprove of most others. Critically, however, most also disapprove of Trump’s decisions to deploy the national guard and the marines to Los Angeles. The federal agency at the heart of these protests, Ice, is not popular either. Americans broadly reject the agency’s tactics of conducting arrests in plain clothes, stuffing people in unmarked vehicles and wearing masks to shield their identities. The public also disagrees with deporting undocumented immigrants who were brought over as children, alongside policies that separate families, or actions that deny due process.Employers, meanwhile, have lobbied the White House to revise its policies, which seem to primarily target longstanding and gainfully employed workers rather than criminals or people free-riding on government benefits – to the detriment of core US industries.Even before the protests began, there were signs that Americans were souring on Trump’s draconian approach to immigration, and public support has declined rapidly since the protests started on 6 June.Whether the demonstrations ultimately lead to still more erosion of public support for Trump or continued declines in public support for immigration will likely depend less on whether the demonstrations continue to escalate than on whom the public ultimately blames for any escalation that occurs.At present, it’s not looking good for the White House.

      Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. His book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, is out now with Princeton University Press. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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      View image in fullscreenMost of us are no longer free.People are aware of this condition to varying degrees. Some, nostalgic for the world that was, reject “unfreedom” as an exaggerated description of our situation. Others, seeing reality clearly, nevertheless hide from the unnerving implications.Some people, a minority, experience the changes that have come to America in 2025 as liberation. They are free to say and do what they want with impunity and without shame. On the other side of the spectrum, many who are not free now also were not before, and they suffered no illusion that they were. Now, they might raise an eyebrow to the rest of us, asking if we now see what this country has long been for some people, much of the time.But for most in this country, unfreedom is a novel experience. What makes this condition confounding is that our unfreedom doesn’t yet look like it does in Russia or China – it is still partial. Most in this country can still enjoy a dinner out with friends, loudly deploring the current state of affairs. For most, authoritarianism has not snuffed out the pleasures, private or communal, of a spring morning in the park. In fact, most of us can still read about horrors while lying on the grass, soaking up the sun.The newly unfree live with cognitive dissonance. You hear of people like doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk and labor leader David Huerta innocently walking down the street or protesting outside an immigration detention center, or even presiding in their courtroom – being arrested, detained or abducted. Institutions founded on principles of free expression or the rule of law have quickly abandoned them to avoid financial losses. People hesitate to travel abroad for fear of what will happen when they try to return to the country they’ve called home. And now, we have 2,000 national guard troops and 700 marines sent to a city to repress protest against the wishes of the governor and mayor. After Los Angeles, more Americans are conscious of our growing unfreedom.When – if – you wake up to our shared condition of unfreedom, you face an existential choice. Do you act on what you know to be true, or do you hide? Too many corporate titans, university presidents and heads of major law firms are behaving as though they are powerless. Members of Congress admit that they are afraid to speak up. Judges talk openly about the threats they face to their safety.Those leading powerful institutions still have leverage. They still have power. We must call on them to unite and exercise it. Silence and hiding will offer no lasting reprieve.But regular people, everyday people, face a different challenge. In order to act, they must first discover their power – and learn how to use it.What should using that power look like? A dilemma for those awake to our growing unfreedom is that the tools we know how to use to change things no longer seem to work. Protests are crucial in raising awareness, but often don’t compel those in power to change course. Representatives are less responsive to our advocacy. The rules have changed. Reason, evidence and expertise don’t carry the day. Norms we once took for granted are gone.There are ways we can oppose authoritarianism, using techniques that haven’t been used at a scale for decades. These tools are our inheritance. They have been passed down for centuries, by abolitionist campaigners, labor organizers and anti-colonial leaders. Gandhi famously revived them in the early 20th century, inspiring many leaders in the US civil rights movement. The Black freedom struggle, this country’s leading democracy movement, has in turn inspired nearly every peaceful, people-powered movement around the world since. This is the lineage of strategic nonviolence to which we must now return. These are the tools we must rediscover.View image in fullscreenSue. Protest. Vote. Then, rinse and repeat. In recent years, pro-democracy advocates have faithfully followed that formula. These strategies have prevented many abuses. But they did not prevent an authoritarian movement from gaining strength. And they won’t be enough to prevent what we now face: the prospect of years of authoritarian rule, or something far worse.So what is to be done?Much depends on how quickly civil society can remake itself for this new era. We can learn from previous generations of change-makers in the US, and from contemporaries around the world today, who have won by deploying a booster formula for times such as these. It is simple:Disrupt. De-legitimize. And draw defectors.To be clear, the formula of sue, protest and vote remains absolutely necessary – but is not sufficient.Lawsuits curbed the worst excesses of Trump’s first term and have been among the few speed bumps slowing the current administration’s much more aggressive rampage against civil liberties and the rule of law. But we are already seeing open defiance of court orders.When Trump was asked whether he was obligated as president to uphold the constitution in the case of Kilmar Ábrego García, who had been wrongly deported from the US, he replied: “I don’t know.” While Ábrego García is now back on US soil, preventing this particular collision course, other contempt trials continue to play out and legal experts fear many more opportunities for Trump to even more brazenly defy the courts.History also suggests reasons to avoid placing too much hope in the courts, because they cannot always be counted on to save us. Consider Dred Scott v Sandford in 1857, when the supreme court ruled that Black Americans were not citizens; Plessy v Ferguson in 1896, upholding racial segregation; Korematsu v United States in 1944, allowing Japanese citizens to be interned in camps; or Trump v United States just last year, in which the court needlessly expanded the doctrine of presidential immunity. Lawsuits buy us essential time, but by themselves are not a sufficient safeguard of our freedoms.In fact, history further suggests that the courts move in concert with public opinion – and are often pushed by people who take bold action. The supreme court only affirmed same-sex marriage rights, for instance, after public support had increased following years of organizing and advocacy.Protests also play a vital role in building the confidence of those opposed to an authoritarian government’s policies. They help people see they are not alone. And they help embolden those in power who may be sympathetic to the opposition.But while protest remains an effective means of focusing pressure and raising awareness, protest alone can’t force authoritarian coalitions to change. Authoritarians revel in their power to defy dissidents – and can become violent in doing so, as we have seen in Los Angeles this week. Authoritarians have also learned to disregard many types of dissent. Erica Chenoweth, a leading scholar of protest, found that protest movements have recently become less effective in unseating despots around the world, due in part to authoritarians’ growing savvy in repressing them or waiting them out.Meanwhile, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci and journalist Vincent Bevins have reported that mass protests facilitated by social media lack the power of protests of a previous era because they are not undergirded by organizations that can negotiate and adapt tactics as circumstances change. Mass protest is essential, but it is not a panacea.Voting is crucial. But rulings on everything from redistricting to campaign finance to voter suppression bills make clear that elements of the federal judiciary are all too happy to disenfranchise voters across the nation. And we cannot wait for communities to make their voices heard at the polls. What happens now will determine whether this country even has free and fair midterm elections.The situation is dire. But as we look to the other movements that have successfully defeated authoritarianism and achieved democratic breakthroughs, it’s useful to maintain perspective. Movements in places like South Africa, Brazil and the Jim Crow south succeeded under conditions far worse than those we face today – when the right to vote and to protest did not exist, when courts were uniformly hostile, when the media and other major institutions were captured. How can it be possible to prevail under such conditions?View image in fullscreenRev James Lawson came into the Los Angeles community center and greeted everyone personally. Some two decades later, I still remember how intently he listened to the two dozen immigrant-rights organizers who had come seeking advice on how we might achieve a federal path to citizenship for undocumented people living in the US. We described a strategy focused on mass mobilization, skillful advocacy with policymakers, and expert communications to frame the problem and solution.His response was kind but firm. Our strategy wouldn’t work, he said. We were playing by the rules of someone else’s game. This Black American leader had seen the full truth of this country – the horrors as well as the heroism – and from that experience learned some hard truths. He wanted to share them with this group of mostly first-generation immigrants, many of whom still believed what we read in textbooks about how change happens. If we wanted to succeed, he said, we would have to engage in nonviolent disruption at a scale big enough to force a moral and economic crisis that would bring about change.We weren’t ready or able to take Rev Lawson’s advice then. We pursued a strategy that achieved some important gains in policy, but were unsuccessful in our efforts to pass federal immigration reform.Maybe we are ready to listen to him now.Rev Lawson knew more about disruption than perhaps any living American. He was, as Dr Martin Luther King Jr called him, the “leading nonviolence theorist in the world”. In the 1950s and 60s, he trained thousands of civil rights leaders and marchers, including John Lewis, to meet violence with love and dignity. He worked closely with the Little Rock Nine, who led the desegregation of an Arkansas high school, helping them muster the courage to remain composed as they walked into school amid a barrage of violent hate. He prepared the brave participants in Nashville’s sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters. He was instrumental in organizing the freedom rides in protest of the defiance of the ruling ordering the desegregation of buses.I’d first met Rev Lawson over a decade before that meeting, as part of a small training on principles of nonviolence that he held for organizers in Los Angeles. I had studied Gandhi and the ideas he’d developed during the Indian independence struggle. I was part of the Aids movement, and I’d witnessed a lot of death and government-sponsored cruelty. I thought I knew the material, but what Rev Lawson taught me in our first meeting shook me to the core.I had expected a master class in tactics. How do you plan a sit-in? How do you get press attention? What police tactics can you anticipate? Where do you have lawyers waiting? Instead, Rev Lawson devoted the first few hours of the training inviting us into deep introspection. He opened a dialogue about love, and asked if we loved our opponents. My attitude was well-captured by Tina Turner: “what’s love got to do with it?”While I had viewed nonviolence as a strategy, Rev Lawson understood nonviolence as a way of life. He believed the principles and techniques he taught couldn’t work without this depth of commitment. You couldn’t win defectors to your side without taking the moral high ground, and you couldn’t convincingly fake love for any length of time.We spent the next few hours of the training on building discipline. How do you conduct yourself facing unimaginable pressure and violence? I remember him inches from my face, calling me names and threatening me, trying to provoke a reaction. At the end, he assessed our performance. Did we manifest love, even to our opponents? Did we maintain the composure under fire that he demanded? With a glance, he let me know that I had done much better with discipline than with love. I’d been resolutely nonviolent, but was obviously smoldering inside.Rev Lawson was teaching us the art and science of nonviolent disruption. This is the hidden electric current that has powered the great episodes of American progress. WEB Du Bois explained that it was enslaved people themselves, and not white northerners, who broke the back of the plantation economy and won their own freedom by engaging in a loosely coordinated “general strike” that fatally damaged the southern cause. In more recent decades, the United Farm Workers’ grape boycott of 1965 and strikes by teachers in 2018 and autoworkers in 2024 are iconic examples of nonviolent disruption that delivered results.Disruption differs from protest in a key sense. Where protests are designed to capture attention, Rev Lawson constantly reminded us that disruption is not always loud and noisy. Sometimes it involves sitting where you’re not supposed to, not buying what you usually do, or not showing up for work. The point is that disruption must exact real economic or political costs on authoritarians and their collaborators.During the early days of the administration, we have already seen such methods yield results. Take the ongoing boycott of Target over its diversity, equity and inclusion policy rollback, which has depressed the chain’s foot traffic and stock price, or the widespread disavowal of Tesla, resulting in a worldwide sales crisis for Elon Musk’s once-trendy automaker. Or look at the Los Angeles unified school district’s refusal to give federal immigration authorities access to the city’s schools.These acts of non-cooperation create friction, and friction slows the consolidation of authoritarianism. Each act of non-cooperation, of disruption, inspires others to use the power they have to throw sand in the gears.It’s an encouraging start. But there is more that must be done to revive the tools Rev Lawson, who died in 2024, left us for times such as these. I am inspired by an organization called Free DC, which is leading the way in revitalizing the lineage of nonviolence for this generation by training and organizing thousands of people across our nation’s capital to stand up for the capital city’s right to home rule, defend workers at federal agencies and protect immigrants. It is a fitting place to begin; Washington DC is still a colony and it is reeling from the firings of thousands of its residents, government workers, without cause.To meet the moment, it will be crucial to scale the work of organizations like FreeDC across the nation and train tens of thousands more in the proud nonviolent tradition that Rev Lawson and his fellow civil rights pioneers left us.View image in fullscreenThousands of people have descended on town hall meetings around the country opposing cuts to Medicaid, which provides essential healthcare and elder care to nearly 80 million people. Some of those showing up are members of unions, community groups and disability groups. Others are people who have never taken action before for whom Congress’s decision is a matter of life and death. Camilla Hudson came to Washington DC to defend Medicaid because she has an autoimmune disease that requires expensive treatments. She explained that without prescription drug coverage, “it’s terrifying … I would have to leave the US because I will die here.”These people may have voted for Trump, for Harris or not at all in 2024. Medicaid is even more important to people in red states than blue states. Most of them would not show up to a rally to defend the rule of law, but they are highly motivated by an issue that hits close to home. The activism is having a huge impact as some unlikely voices in Congress – who have been otherwise loath to break from the administration – openly declare their opposition to cuts.Meanwhile, thousands of people around the country have mobilized to protect their immigrant co-workers, co-parishioners and neighbors. The upswelling of support in Los Angeles, for example, includes union members, people of faith and relatives of immigrants who were not active before the recent raids.This is what it means to de-legitimize – and it goes hand in hand with disruption. De-legitimization, the process of driving down public support for authoritarian policies, recognizes that an administration with policies polling in the 20s or low 30s will be less able to execute its agenda or prevail in the courts than a government whose policies are supported broadly by the public.The goal is to win over everyday people through organizing, helping them understand the connections between the challenges they’re facing and the harmful actions of the administration. This process will ideally help people identify authoritarian strategies, allowing them to better resist propaganda. If done well, organizing can also serve to strengthen citizens’ commitment to democratic principles by offering them an experience of democracy in practice each day, rather than as a quadrennial abstraction.To this end, the administration’s “flood the zone” attacks on so many cornerstones of American life offer not only the biggest organizing imperative, but also the biggest organizing opportunity of our lifetimes. We must harness the power of the many millions of Americans who now feel under threat, including older Americans, veterans, the US-citizen children and spouses of immigrants, the parents of disabled and trans kids, and the large number of people who would be affected by cuts to Medicaid, including patients and medical workers. To name a few.Unexpected constituencies are raising their voices. Take scientists, who have long sought to protect their research by staying away from politics. Recognizing that the administration’s actions are not only undermining their own work but destroying the scientific enterprise for a generation, they are speaking out and even organizing marches of their own.Perhaps the greatest organizing challenge facing the pro-democracy coalition in the US will be bridging between the largely middle-class constituency that is fired up about attacks on the rule of law and the largely working-class base that is focused on kitchen table issues – not on a system that hasn’t been working for them. Without the latter group, the coalition will not be big enough to succeed.We must not be seen to be working to restore a broken system, but rather to transform it through a new vision, with accompanying policy goals. That may include, for example, campaigns for workers’ rights to help dissolve the unnatural bond between billionaires and some blue-collar voters that fuels the authoritarian coalition.We must develop and demonstrate alternatives that people will believe in.View image in fullscreenDisruption and de-legitimization lead to the third key objective: drawing defectors. These efforts must be targeted across the ideological spectrum and they must be achieved at two levels: that of institutions and individuals. Authoritarians rely on support, whether passive or active, from key pillars of society: corporations, churches, police and media outlets, among others. Under pressure, institutions like law firms and Columbia University shamefully moved from neutrality to active collaboration with authoritarianism.It does not have to be this way. Harvard’s recent decision to challenge the administration in court is an example of institutional defection, moving from the sidelines to active opposition. It did not happen by accident. Harvard’s action was the culmination of a massive behind-the-scenes organizing campaign of faculty, students, donors and alumni. Similar efforts are taking place across law firms, foundations and other universities.Employees have considerable leverage when it comes to winning defections at scale among businesses, faith institutions, tech companies, the military and law enforcement. They can push their institutions to not “obey in advance” and instead openly resist authoritarianism. Many individuals across the country who are concerned about the advance of authoritarianism forget the power they can wield over the institutions they are a part of. Now is the time to use it.It is also necessary to win defections at the level of everyday people. Consider the example of Women of Welcome, a group of evangelicals who educate and engage other Christians on issues related to immigrants and refugees. This group recently led a delegation of evangelical women to the southern US border to provide aid to asylum seekers and listen to their stories. They are not progressives – but they are taking a strong public stand for immigrants and recruiting their neighbors in communities that have been broadly receptive to the Trump administration’s xenophobic appeals.In seeking to build a pro-democracy coalition, members of the opposition must resist the impulse to write off, shame or expel those with whom they have disagreed in the past and may still disagree on many important issues. The imperative of defeating authoritarianism must supersede internecine fights or purity tests. It is essential to talk to everyone.Embodying the moral character taught by civil rights leaders like Rev Lawson – acting nonviolently and showing love to those on the other side – will be vital in creating the kind of attractive, welcoming gateway for defectors to join the movement. Doing so will help to create a pro-democracy majority that extends beyond our traditional allies in the progressive movement.I may finally grasp what Rev Lawson meant when he said that love is our secret weapon. When a mom and her three school-aged children were detained by Ice in the small upstate New York town of Sackets Harbor (ironically, the home of Tom Homan, the administration’s immigration enforcement “czar”), public school teachers and administrators swung into action, engaging in aggressive advocacy. These educators may or may not have been politically engaged before, but their care for their students moved them to take a stand, speak up and choose opposition over collaboration. They won – the mom and kids are free as a result of their courage.View image in fullscreenWe face considerable obstacles in trying to prevent the consolidation of authoritarianism in the United States. But the truth is that they are smaller than those encountered by prior generations. The freedom rides, orchestrated in part by Rev Lawson, are now iconic, but we forget the violence that riders encountered in the process. Following the successful Birmingham campaign to win desegregation in 1963, four little Black girls were killed in the 16th Street Baptist church bombing. The next year, civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were the victims of a deadly KKK conspiracy in Mississippi.Yes, the physical threats to judges, politicians, election officials and citizens in the United States are real. Yes, immigrants have been taken off the streets and held without due process. Fortunately, as worrying as this week’s troop deployment to California should be to all of us, we still have a precious window of time to organize and dissent openly. We can take hope from cases around the world when everyday people have made that choice in large numbers.U-turns happen. Scholars have found that 73% of episodes of authoritarian breakthrough around the world in the last 30 years have been followed by democratic revivals. Sometimes, those revivals bring about an even stronger democracy than what came before. But U-turns aren’t self-executing. And the time to act is limited – comparable cases like India and Hungary suggest that if authoritarianism is not effectively challenged in the first couple of years, it can deepen and become the new normal for a decade or more.Our aspiration cannot be to return to the before times. The rotten fruit of authoritarianism grew in the soil of obscene inequality and insufficiently democratic institutions. We must therefore not only oppose autocracy, but propose something better – democratic alternatives that are ready to go if we can awaken from this nightmare.Rev Lawson and his contemporaries did not promise an easy path. Millions of us will have to reckon honestly with our current reality. We will need to make the choice to act. We will need to contribute our time, talent and money strategically. We will have to tap deep reservoirs of courage and love we didn’t know we had. Rev Lawson’s key teaching was hopeful: if we do those things, we can get free.

      Deepak Bhargava has been an organizer and campaigner for 30 years and is the co-author of Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World. He currently serves as the president of the Freedom Together Foundation and the Movement Action Fund More

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

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      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

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      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

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      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