This is a grave mistake that betrays our collective strength as well as our moral and ethical responsibility to resist the coordinated attempt to reshape our social and political reality through further monopolized power and control by a global elite. 

The reality is that much of what the Trump administration is doing—executive orders, policy threats, pressuring agencies and non-government organizations—is not law. Many of these moves are challenged and even overturned. Yet across the country, too many institutions are falling in line without a fight. Cities and universities are . Medical facilities are pulling gender-affirming care. Businesses and organizations are scrubbing their websites of anything that might read as “DEI,” along with critical work to address climate change. It’s a preemptive surrender—a reflection of how fragile our so-called progress really is. It also shows how comfortable we have gotten with institutions that never fundamentally changed to effectively protect basic human rights.

For Indigenous Peoples, the consequences of this fear-driven obedience are devastating on many levels. DEI backlash and ICE crackdowns are impacting us heavily. This is despite the fact that we are not a racial or ethnic group but rather political entities with collective rights established by treaties. Our tribal sovereignty is defined by a nation-to-nation relationship with the federal government and international standards. 

There are in education, advocacy, art and culture programs, science and research, and even military spaces. We’re seeing a full-scale attack on community infrastructure such as health care and Head Start programs. This is a coordinated weakening of social and political services and agreements in order to accelerate access to natural resources found in and near Indigenous Peoples’ lands. 

We are witnessing that define the legal relationship between tribes and the U.S. government. This isn’t a fringe debate. It’s a constitutional crisis. Oligarchs are showing us in real time how far they are willing to go to unravel the “rule of law.” This is enabled by a systemic failure to understand who Indigenous People are and the legal and moral obligations the U.S. government has to us. 

If we continue to lack a shared understanding of what’s at stake in this new wave of colonization, we will keep losing ground——and enabling the full-scale attack against all people. 

This is part of a broader pattern. Too many Americans—even progressive ones, and even people working within the leftist movement—do not understand that Indigenous nations are not minorities seeking equality in an inherently unjust system. We are sovereign nations with a long history of resisting colonial governance structures. And that misunderstanding—which is the result of colonial governments relentlessly working to erase our history and invisibilize Indigenous People—is a critical liability in the broader fight for justice. 

We must not give ground to these tactics. Now is the time to honor the incredible strength and relationships we have built through decades of resistance, to hold the line together, and to to these inherently unjust systems. We, the global majority, are not in the same position we have been during previous waves of colonization. 

We call on our allies and accomplices to deepen their understanding of Indigenous Peoples’ rights, our resistance, and our solutions. By better understanding the entrenched power we’re all truly up against, we can collectively organize meaningful resistance. 

We must move past land acknowledgements. Indigenous Peoples have been fighting to protect our land, resources, culture, and people for hundreds of years. Indigenous Peoples have always known we are up against a global oligarchy that we must resist—not assimilate into. Now is the moment for everyone to recognize how much is at stake and decide how to move accordingly. 

The exhaustion in progressive circles is real. People are burned out. But maybe that burnout stems from a deeper problem: We keep trying to fix a system that was never designed to work for us. The U.S. government is structurally anti-democratic, which is why this administration can so easily dismantle decades of work with the stroke of a pen. That’s why, even as those who hold elected offices have become more diverse, we have descended further into authoritarianism. We’re not fixing the machine—we’re just changing the people operating it. 

Pouring billions of dollars, time, and talent into a political system that keeps betraying us is not working. It has normalized the stripping away of our humanity, disconnecting us from each other, and redirecting our faith into politicians and a political infrastructure that is more suited to protect private interests than our collective well-being. We have forgotten our own power.

What if we instead invest our precious energy and resources into Indigenous-led systems and models—governance rooted in relationality, balance, and deep care for the land and each other? Our ways have survived genocide, forced removal, and centuries of erasure. That endurance is not accidental—it’s instructive.

I’m not offering distant dreams of a future utopia. I’m speaking about acting on urgent, real-world solutions now. Grocery prices are too high? Worried about foodborne diseases? offer sustainability and abundance, and they are a striking counterpoint to the extractive, exploitative food industry that is failing our lands, farmers, and nutritional needs. 

Wildfires, flooding, desertification? Our knowledge can prevent and mitigate devastation. 

The daunting housing, education, and climate crises? Indigenous Peoples have been building effective, dynamic, diverse, place-based solutions, rooted in centuries of lived experience, intimate knowledge of local ecosystems, and steadfast resilience. 

We have knowledge of how to honor the specific land you’re on—traditional ways that vary across Tribes and ecosystems, from the desert South to the Pacific Northwest to the woodlands of the East and beyond. Protect the sacred and build with us. Believing in this system, or believing in and building something better, has always been a choice. 

We don’t just have ancestral memory; Indigenous people are actively practicing these solutions. We remember governance models that honor women, protect two-spirit relatives, and invest deeply in children. We still hold processes for resolving conflict that do not rely on punishment but on restorative justice. Our democracies are relational, human-centered, and alive.

Recently, I joined other Indigenous leaders for an . One of the topics we covered was how in movement spaces in which leaders imagine what real democracy looks like, Indigenous sovereignty was completely invisibilized and overlooked—even before the 2024 election. This is not surprising. There is a huge lack of political understanding of our unique positionality within the colonial borders of the United States. This is purposeful and has been used to keep people from understanding our—and, inadvertently, their own—power. 

This is the moment to root ourselves in a more critical analysis of , , and how we need to root ourselves in our collective power and strength. We need to honor the role of Indigenous Peoples in creating and informing an alternative vision for everybody and for Mother Earth. 

We need to stop feeding a system that was never meant to serve us. Let’s stop trying to just hold on long enough, as if the next election will save us. It won’t. 

But we can save ourselves—by turning toward Indigenous Peoples’ leadership, memory, and vision. We can remind you that you are sacred. That you have gifts that are needed for this moment. That you are medicine for a world out of balance. That you are part of a beautiful, interconnected, and sacred relationship with all that is. We can remind you that this has always been a fight for our shared humanity and that together we can build something better. 

All Peoples and all sacred life deserve liberation from all unjust systems rooted in principles of supremacy. Our power will never be taken by any executive order, so let’s not quietly give it up.

While navigating enormous contradictions in a world where power comes from violence and force, the DAANES was able to organize governance of the historically Kurdish region of what is now Syria. With the fall of the Assad regime and the Trump administration’s recent cuts to U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), change is again creating crises as well as possibilities for a range of futures.Ěý

Disorganization creates an opening to reorganize. While the MAGA right sows fear, anxiety, chaos, and overwhelm to try to reorganize us around an elevated level of fascism, what does the living world teach us about how to respond? Species that have adapted to change show that stressors can be a catalyst for change: For example, salmon populations have begun migrating earlier to align with temperatures warming up earlier in the year.

When we are comfortable, it can be hard to take big actions. And yet, in being complacent, we have become frogs in a pot of slowly boiling water. What we need is a from a “banks and tanks” economy to economies of sacredness and caring. So while those in the White House are disorganizing us to try to reorganize us around heightened fear, isolation, and competition, we must instead use the openings to reorganize around reconnection, rest, joy, and sharing.

When we’re alone, it is easy to feel immobilized. Rather than isolating, we need to come together and move together. Looking up at the sky, mesmerized by constantly transforming shapes of starlings murmurating, reminds me that we need to find our way from our hearts and our instincts as much as from our heads.

The ability to feel, read, and respond together is what will keep us safe. The ability to align our actions with our values and intentions together makes us safer. Organizing as collective units in which more and more of us have our antennae up, can contribute our analysis, and can offer ideas on how to respond is much safer than any one or two of us isolated and dissociated in our bubbles.

As Movement Generation always returns to, the root of the word economy is the Greek word “oikos,” or eco, meaning “home.” Economy is just the care of or management of home. Rather than letting MAGA forces reorganize us around authoritarianism and oligarchy, how can we reclaim our agency to govern and manage home?Ěý

If we understand that every being has a purpose, we see that governing our lives is not simply a right, but a responsibility in order to live that out as fully as we can. Here are five ways we can organize block-by-block toward in these times.

Organize Locally to Directly Meet Our Communities’ Needs

We absolutely need protest and dissent in order to reject fascism. But we also need to organize around what we want and need. Like pandemics, things like loss of employment, loss of health care, ICE raids, mental health crises, and housing insecurity will be felt in our homes, on our block, in our neighborhood schools, in the bodies that are all around us feeling fear or hunger or need for connection. In doing this organizing, we can normalize the values of honoring all life, cooperation, and people’s needs. 

Our program can include going door to door on our block to find out where the needs and offers are. Who needs their utilities shut off and on in case of a wildfire or tornado? Who can do it? Where are the households with elderly or disabled people or small children, and how can we organize to ensure everyone is cared for? How can we prepare to protect people threatened with deportation or violence? 

This will look different depending on where we are, who we are, and who our neighbors are. Who can risk going door to door, and who can play other roles? What are conversation openers that build common ground and reach out from a place of care? How do we listen to the needs and take small steps over time?

Build Collective Governance

This is a time to restore our own agency. While the strongmen want us to think they are all powerful, we can still learn from past movements, including the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The Black Panther Party created 65 survival programs that transformed material conditions as well as the culture.Ěý

When the Panthers realized children were going to school hungry and therefore unable to learn, they started a free breakfast program and established a simple set of guidelines members could use to set up similar programs in their own communities. How many volunteers are needed for each role—securing donations, preparing the meals, serving the children, welcoming and seating them? What spaces should they have—tables and chairs, a waiting area with seating?

Through block-by-block organizing, we can transform the material conditions as well as the culture—from “get mine” to “share ours.” From isolation and fear to care and cooperation. From slash and burn to . 

Get Permanently Organized

As we practice working together to meet basic needs, we can build our level of organization, which is political power without bosses. We move through different needs, ideas, opinions. We build skills to name what we need, listen to others, and find common ground. We learn about how to regulate our nervous systems. We ask for support.

While we are organizing to meet needs amid a crisis, we must use this organization to codify the material and cultural shifts we make in these moments. Through political education, we can unpack the extractive economic and political systems we live under and how they create trauma and poverty. In this process, we shift hearts and minds so that we can increasingly move together. We begin to cultivate the future rather than just react to oppressive systems.

Honor Care Work

This is a time to shift more of our labor to mutuality and care and push back on a devaluing of life that has escalated to a frenzied pitch. During the pandemic, my father moved in with my family and became part of the fabric of our community, while also teaching my kids how to see and appreciate their loved ones. 

What are the roles aging people can play that call them into their leadership and help them make meaningful contributions in these times? And, as this system continues to collapse around us, how can this care work be increasingly converted from “jobs” to life roles that feel meaningful and fulfilling for people? 

Rather than applying our labor to the systems that are harming us, how can we move more of our time, attention, and passion to taking care of each other and the places we depend on?

Look for the Openings

I regularly ask those around me: Where do you think we are in Octavia Butler’s Parables? This helps us all reorient to see ourselves as world builders. Our actions today are building the vehicles, the pathways, and the worlds we will inhabit in the future.Ěý

While we build forms of organization to meet our community needs, we must also look for the openings. These are the spaces created when a veil is lifted. After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, there were major shifts in the reckoning around racial injustice. Over the last 18 months, as there’s been an ongoing genocide in Gaza, the veil has lifted on Zionism, especially for young people.Ěý

We are seeing the backlash to the effectiveness of both of these movements. But these openings were seized to win shifts required to move us toward the future we need. Local groups everywhere began digging into how to defund the police and instead fund care and transformative justice for a future that will be safer.

We must harness the shocks and direct the slides to the shifts we need. Don’t burn out reacting. Look for the openings. It’s impossible to do this as individuals, but as we build up our squads, pods, and teams, we have more of a basis from which to make assessments and move. Together. Across blocks and neighborhoods. Across cities and bioregions.Ěý

And be ready to codify the shifts—culturally, in custom, and in policy. With the economic downturn, more people will be unable to pay rent not just for a couple of weeks but for months or longer. Can we organize rent/mortgage strikes across class lines? Across a number of places? Can we get some base of people to put land in the commons instead of more speculation? We must organize to win the shifts.

“What’s coming out of Washington—it’s whiplash-inducing and tragic,” says one California middle school and high school history teacher who spoke anonymously for fear of being targeted. “To me, the message [has been] that education is unimportant and the needs of students [are] unimportant.”

The Trump administration’s highest-profile attack on public education came on March 20, 2025, when the president directing Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to begin dismantling the Department of Education. While the president needs congressional approval to abolish the department, to his supporters, this executive order is the next best thing. 

Gutting the Department of Education has been a , as conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation, which penned Trump’s Project 2025 playbook, is a seedbed of liberal-left social and political action. Over the last several years, Republican administrators and politicians on the state and local levels have or legislation to censor teachers, ban books, and for marginalized students.Ěý

The adoption of this regressive agenda on the federal level will have even farther-reaching effects. Changes to funding will have an immediate impact on how students nationwide access education—or if they can access it at all. This is because the Department of Education provides crucial funding for public K–12 schools, focusing on districts with the greatest need for support and narrowing gaps between needed resources and state and local revenue.

The department also provides dedicated support to low-income children through and to disabled students under the (IDEA), which is meant to guarantee that disabled kids have equal access to public education.

Trump’s order to dismantle the Department of Education claims that state governments can take over federal responsibilities, but experts warn this could lead to no longer receiving the funding needed to serve students. “Absent the Department of Education to ensure fairness in funding allocation for programs like Title I, it’s unclear how states will handle the disbursement on their own, which could widen inequalities in education,” explains Hilary Wething, an economist at the . Advocates have also begun over protections and funding provided under IDEA being under threat.

The Trump administration’s anti-education agenda will not only strip students of vital resources; experts also warn that dismantling the Department of Education will undermine its ability to vital to addressing inequalities in education. Already, several of the department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) . The OCR is meant to enforce civil rights laws at public schools and all colleges and universities that receive federal financial assistance. It does so through investigations and compliance reviews.Ěý

However, as the Trump administration reduces staff and seeks to reorient the OCR, the office will no longer be able to perform these functions. related to disability access and sexual and racial harassment have already been placed on hold.Ěý

Rather than investigating allegations of discrimination, the OCR has begun issuing guidance meant to further the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and bring curricula and instructional materials in line with its agenda. One memo, issued on Feb. 14, 2025, gave schools two weeks to in all aspects of student, academic, and campus life under threat of .

The memo appears to forbid everything from teaching racism in schools to sponsored student groups, such as Black or Latinx student unions. While it is not itself a law, the memo reveals the Trump administration’s warped interpretation of and intention to undermine existing nondiscrimination legislation.Ěý

A Jan. 29, 2025, called for “ending radical indoctrination” in schools and promotion of “patriotic education,” reflecting the administration’s dangerous interpretation of nondiscrimination laws and its desire to whitewash schooling. “The executive order on ending radical indoctrination in K–12 schooling is asking schools to ignore a fulsome, truthful history and to only focus on what’s ‘inspiring,’” says Tricia Gallagher-Geurtsen, quoting the executive order. Gallagher-Geurtsen is a lecturer in critical race and ethnic studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and works with primary and secondary school teachers as co-chair of the San Diego Unified School District Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee.Ěý

“The main issue with all of these orders is that the thinking behind them ignores the statistics that show racism exists in every facet of American life,” Gallagher-Geurtsen continues. “If you don’t see race, you can’t see racism, and therefore, it will grow unabated, so the executive orders are woefully ignorant and also incredibly dangerous.”

The Trump administration’s demands are already having a chilling effect on educators. “Teachers have shared with me that they’re frightened of what’s to come,” says Gallagher-Geurtsen. “They’re also really angry that the executive branch is determining what should be taught in schools. Teachers are describing this as censorship and a reflection of white supremacy.”

“It’s a chilling effect to know that I have to look over my shoulder because of the political times we’re living in,” says the California teacher. They also worry that the Trump administration’s efforts to whitewash education could drive some students, particularly students of color, out of school. “When their history education is being curtailed or attempted to be curtailed, I think they’re going to lose a lot of interest in school in general.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Research on the shows that students who take such courses tend to engage more in school and are more likely to graduate and enroll in college. The classes have also been shown to and academic performance of students who are at risk of dropping out. “To me, the purpose [of Trump’s attacks] may be to continue the oppression of certain groups and make them not want to fulfill their potential [through] education,” concludes the California teacher.

Additionally, research shows that teaching about race and racism , while attempts to ignore race in the classroom have the opposite effect. The California teacher believes undermining the positive effects of learning about race and racism is core to the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle public education. “It’s a systemic approach by the Trump administration to return the country to a time when communities of color had their place, and their place was a lot lower down the academic ladder and the financial ladder, and a time where only a handful of chosen people could contribute [to the nation’s story].”

Many educators are unwilling to bend to the Trump administration in its pursuit of these regressive aims. The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers’ labor union, sued the Trump administration over the Feb. 14 memo from the OCR. The suit argues that the memo’s guidance .

On March 24, and labor unions sued over Trump’s order to shutter the Department of Education. “Working people are not going to stand idly by while this administration destroys public education,” said April Verrett, president of the Service Employees International Union, in a announcing the suit.

Plus, in classrooms nationwide, educators are making brave choices to continue recognizing and honoring the diverse needs and backgrounds of their students despite the Oval Office’s posturing. Gallagher-Geurtsen is among those who believe that “the way forward is not through a colorblind, whitewashed education.” Rather, she says, “The way forward is through a reckoning with the past and present of racism. When we understand and lift up our understanding of how racism works, we diminish it, and that happens through looking at race and racism in our origins and our present.”

The California educator says in their classroom, they will continue to uplift the diverse perspectives of their students because they believe “the country is a lot better when everybody has the opportunity to contribute to its story and to live up to [its] promise.”

My grandmother’s parents and younger sisters died on the deportation route. After that, my grandmother and her younger brother were among 8,000 Armenian orphans herded into a tent camp in the Syrian desert on the outskirts of Ras al Ain. It is estimated that 1.5 million Armenians lost their lives in this mass annihilation, and I have spent most of my career as a writer plumbing this terrible history.

Genocide is not an event, but a process. For Armenians, it is a process that never ends and one that takes on different forms, including the denial of historical reality. In 2020, a decades-long struggle with Azerbaijan over the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabagh, which Armenians call Artsakh, turned into a renewed war. Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, with the aid of Syrian mercenaries, and with drones and arms supplied by Israel, took over more than half of the territory, forcing Armenians to flee their towns and villages.

In early 2023, Azerbaijan enforced on the remaining area, and then in September of that year launched another military campaign to complete the job. On Sept. 19, 2023, of the more than 100,000 Armenians fleeing Artsakh in a snaking convoy of cars resembled the deportation caravans of my grandmother’s childhood more than a century earlier.

I watched the ethnic cleansing of Artsakh unfold on social media from afar, as I was on a trip to Greece at the time. I flew home to New York City on Oct. 7, 2023, and when I opened my smartphone upon landing, I saw the news of the Hamas incursion into southern Israel. Before being able to fully register that violence, I understood immediately that Israel’s response would be cataclysmic.

As the descendant of Armenian genocide survivors, I was sickened to witness the same despisal and dehumanization that my people have faced—this time being meted out to Palestinians in Gaza. Israeli officialdom boldly announced its genocidal intent, and we were told not to believe what they were saying or what we were witnessing in real time. All our institutions in the U.S. as well as in Europe—the government, the media, arts organizations, and the academy—with few exceptions, were colluding with and covering for what was recognizable as a genocide.

My spouse teaches at Columbia University, so we have been more than spectators to the drama that has been occurring there for the past year. On April 17, 2024, students set up a Gaza solidarity encampment in one of the fenced fields on the campus. On the same day, the university president, who is a literal , testified before Congressional inquisitors. She boasted of having to deal with student protesters for the first time in 50 years, and she touted the fact that she had suspended the Columbia chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.

The next night there was a phalanx of cops just outside the campus gates on Broadway, the university’s western bounds, who looked ready for battle. The mood was ugly. It reminded me of when I was a student at Columbia during the height of the anti-apartheid movement. In 1985 we padlocked the front entrance to Hamilton Hall and renamed it . At that time, we were able to negotiate an end to the blockade without police involvement, and Columbia divested from South Africa six months later. 

On April 18, the students at the encampment called for faculty and community members to come to the campus to forestall police action against them. I was on the quad with close to 1,000 others ringing the fenced field when the first round of arrests happened. The police bus drove off with the arrestees, and I watched as more students established a second encampment after just having seen their handcuffed comrades marched away.

During the night of April 30, hundreds of riot police, most of them from a unit notorious for its violence, wearing body armor, carrying nightsticks and zip ties, filed through Columbia’s gates. Hundreds of other cops flooded the streets surrounding the campus. The neighborhood was turned into a closed military zone. 

My spouse and I beheld a dystopian scene where hundreds of young people were brutalized and arrested because they refused to remain silent and complacent in the face of genocide. We watched from Amsterdam Avenue, the university’s eastern bounds, as police used a “tactical vehicle” to enter an upper-story window of —the same building we had once christened Mandela Hall, renamed by organizers in 2024 to honor Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl killed in Gaza by the Israeli military.

While media accounts of the encampment tended to focus on conflict and controversy, most of what I saw firsthand was a principled group of students who had come together to fight against their generation’s Vietnam War. In the process, these students had organized themselves to provide safety, food, and alternative education for their community. I witnessed a profound and moving demonstration of solidarity during the encampment that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

During the encampment there were nightly teach-ins, and I saw that Columbia Armenian Students for Palestine were on the roster to speak on the evening of April 24, Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. In the middle of the encampment, with an attentive audience encircling them, Armenian students talked about the connections between the Armenian genocide, the ethnic cleansing of Artsakh, and the slaughter in Gaza. They talked about the arms that Israel provides Azerbaijan, the natural gas that Azerbaijan provides Israel, and the pan-Turkic alliance that wants to erase Armenia from the map. 

These young Armenians provided a lesson in history and solidarity, and the other students listened intently to their words. This was the People’s University for Palestine, and for a brief moment one year ago, before the dragnet that is now many of those students, history was both being learned and made.

In more than a decade of dictatorship rule, the military had imprisoned, tortured, and killed scores of people they viewed as dissidents, and in 1979, a newly passed law gave amnesty to political prisoners and exiles whom the dictatorship persecuted. But the amnesty law also pardoned the murderers, torturers, and leaders of the military dictatorship, setting the stage for a 25-year struggle to get the Brazilian government to recognize the victims and perpetrators of human rights abuses of the regime.

With no institutional recognition of human rights abuses committed between 1964 to 1985, the door was open for denial and diminishment of that brutal period in Brazilian history. In right-wing circles, the dictatorship is often viewed as “not that bad,” or as a necessary evil to keep Brazil from opting into communism, a common Cold War talking point. 

It was only in 2011, more than 25 years after the end of the regime, that the Brazilian government instituted a to investigate the torture and murder that took place during that era. 

The success of I’m Still Here, this year’s Academy Award winner for , might give the appearance that Brazil is a country committed to remembering its past—but behind the film, there’s a multigenerational, ongoing struggle to keep remembering the victims and the perpetrators of harm during the dictatorship period. 

Families of Victims Insist on Remembering 

After Rubens Paiva was kidnapped and murdered by the regime in 1971, the lack of institutional recognition of his death left his wife, Eunice Paiva (portrayed by Fernanda Torres in I’m Still Here), without any access to his bank accounts or estate until until 1996, when the government finally admitted to his murder and issued a death certificate.

In the 25 years since, Eunice has given interviews to magazines, newspapers, and TV broadcasts, calling for the return of her husband’s remains, as well as financial reparations and institutional recognition of the Brazilian state’s human rights abuses.Ěý

In 1994, when Brazil’s democratic president Fernando Henrique Cardoso for investigations into the human right abuses committed by the regime, Eunice unearthed an old article from 1980, where where Cardoso, then a senator,Ěýpressured the federal government to find a solution to the hundreds of disappeared. Paiva’s son Marcelo, a journalist and writer, used the article to urge the president to take action on the matter.Ěý

Two years later, the Special Commission on the Dead and Disappeared was officially launched by Cardoso’s administration, with the objective to recognize the dead and disappeared from 1964 to 1985, attempt to find the bodies of the people identified, and determine recommendations for financial reparations for the victims’ families. The Commission helped identify 434 murdered and disappeared people during the regime.

Beyond this government commission, victims and families of victims have, for decades since the atrocities, been at the forefront of fighting to preserve the memory of the dictatorship as well as the memory of their loved ones. 

The family of metalworker and union organizer Santo Dias, who was shot dead by the military police in 1979 at a picket line in São Paulo, organized a committee for recognition of his murder in the years following his death. In 2023, Dias’ friends, family, and his widow, Ana Dias, honored his legacy of resistance and advocacy for workers’ rights.

This practice of memory keeping led by family and friends of the victims of fascism is a common practice across Latin American countries. “It is important to say that nobody chooses to fight this war,” says Lorrane Rodrigues, executive coordinator of memory, truth and justice at the Vladimir Herzog Institute. “This struggle is a kind of survival. We have so many Eunices. We have many women who never had the opportunity of telling their stories.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

The Vladimir Herzog Institute was created to maintain the memory of its namesake—journalist, teacher, and playwright Vladimir Herzog, who was imprisoned and murdered in 1975 by the regime. The institute was founded by his late wife, Clarice, 30 years after his death, to archive his work and promote conversations about him as well as the human rights abuses committed during the regime.

Creating a Methodology for Memory Work

The work of remembering those lost to fascism goes hand-in-hand with demanding investigations, punishment, and reparations for the victims. Rodrigues says the efforts of these families have become instructive for memory efforts in Latin America, citing the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, a movement led by the mothers and grandmothers of students who were disappeared during Argentina’s dictatorship. 

“They have a fundamental role in policies about memory in Latin America and, I think, internationally,” Rodrigues says. “The legacy that these women have left behind in Latin America allows us to think in a much broader context of policies of memory, truth, and justice. The Madres de la Plaza de Mayo movement that pressured the Argentine government so that investigations and forensics around the dictatorship are not carried out by state agents, for example.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

This movement, started in the 1980s and echoed by women in their respective countries struggling against fascism and its afterlife, created a “methodology for the search of the disappeared,” says Rodrigues. “The questions these women made in the ’80s generate methodological and social implications so we can think through what policies of memory and justice look like in Brazil. These questions lead us to ask: What does a reparation process look like for a victim?”

When Marcelo Paiva decided to write a book about his mother’s experience surviving and fighting the dictatorship, Eunice was suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s, a disease she lived with for 12 years. Marcelo’s book, which was eventually adapted into I’m Still Here, originated from his decision to write down his mother’s memories as she was losing them because of her illness.

“I would not have written this book if my mother didn’t have Alzheimer’s,” Marcelo said in a 2015 interview. “She was the spokesperson of the family, she knew the details, she had an emotional intelligence that was superior to all of us. I even told her about the book, and I think she knows about it… but today, her moments of lucidity are few.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

As he interviewed her during her spurs of lucidity, she would tell him: “I’m still here.” The phrase has traveled far since the first publication of the book in 2015, geographically and in meaning, making visible the presence of victims and families of victims of the regime as living, breathing, and still waiting for justice. 

In 2011, then President Dilma Rousseff created the Truth Commission, a government organization that specifically investigates human rights abuses of the military regime. The commission gathered testimonies, documents, and evidence that helped reconstruct instances of torture, forced disappearances, and murders carried out by the regime. 

While the commission did not have power to punish any of the perpetrators, the commission used the testimonies of victims to form a 976-page report published in 2014 that shed light on the gravity of what took place from 1964 to 1985, even naming 377 people involved in human rights violations. The report exposed the details of what and who had been pardoned by the Amnesty Law passed in 1979. 

One of the victims of these crimes was Rousseff herself, who was arrested and tortured in 1972 when she was only 22, for her role in armed resistance. Nearly 40 years later, as a democratically elected president, Rousseff’s launch of the Truth Commission has directly educated new generations about the impacts of the dictatorship. 

When writing the book about his family, Marcelo Paiva drew from the findings of the Truth Commission. “Because of the Truth Commission, I had the information necessary to write the book I’m Still Here, and now we have this stunning film,” . “And Dilma [Rousseff] paid a high price for the necessary recovery of memory.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

From Policy to Film

As multigenerational efforts have become an award-winning feature film, the question of continues to haunt Brazilian politics. Amnesty is a particularly loaded question in 2025; the right-wing rioters who invaded the country’s Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential palace a week after left-wing president Luiz InĂĄcio Lula da Silva was inaugurated in 2023 are currently being prosecuted and sentenced. 

As of March, 434 people have been found guilty and sentenced for their participation in the coup d’état. Much like the fascists Brazil has seen in the past, the rioters were led by former right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, to “save” Brazil from communism and socialism. In 2025, as I’m Still Here showcases the human impacts of the dictatorship and the impunity of its crimes, Bolsonaro and his allies are —even before several of them have gone to trial. 

According to Rodrigues, this is the legacy of Brazil never having an institutionalized process to recognize the crimes committed by the military regime. In Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, the people responsible for torturing and murdering political dissidents were held responsible through public trials, but Brazil never formally conducted any punitive processes. 

“We have barely understood the amnesty that was given in the ’80s, and in 2025 people understand that amnesty could be applied in the same way,” Rodrigues says. “So there’s a lack of an effective accountability process in the ’80s.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

In March, a panel of Brazilian Supreme Court judges for attempting to stage a coup d’état in 2023, marking the first time military members will ever be tried for anti-democratic activity. After decades of intergenerational struggle calling for consequences for the destruction of Brazilian democracy, the tide is finally turning. 

“I’m Still Here has created a unique moment for Brazil, a moment for us to look at this topic with more care and not to apply the same amnesty or the same norms that were applied in the ’80s,” says Rodrigues. “It’s an incredible moment.”

There are many dangerous parallels between the Islamic Republic’s repression and what’s currently happening in the U.S., though this is not a one-to-one comparison. The U.S. isn’t Iran, but for those of us who’ve lived through a shift from a somewhat repressive system to a full-blown authoritarian crackdown, the warning signs are flashing.

I have seen what happens when rights vanish overnight, when culture and community are weaponized, and when fear becomes a governing force. I am also amid a chorus of people who have been sounding the alarm for years about the impending return of the imperial boomerang—the same force that has wreaked havoc across the globe, including when , which ultimately forced me to flee. 

When I moved to the U.S. when I was 14, I never expected to encounter echoes of post-revolution Iran, but the echoes are loud and clear. Amid such political instability, it is time to mobilize, get creative, and resist.

Autocracy Is Here. What Now?

I was 6 when Islamic fundamentalists seized power in Iran in 1979, launching a reign of terror that began with many of the actions currently happening in the Trump administration. The revolution’s new leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, kept an ever-growing , systematically dismantled cultural institutions, and rapidly eroded personal freedoms to an extreme degree. Sound familiar?

Within months of Khomeini coming to power, my childhood was over. Women’s rights that had been painstakingly built for more than five decades were . As a girl, I could no longer move freely in public, play, or even ride my bicycle. The newly imposed morality laws forced me to cover my hair and body, and disappear into the background as my rights were systematically stripped away, one by one. The morality police also began raiding and kidnapping people off the streets without due process. 

Similarly, families in the U.S. are now canceling quinceaĂąeras out of fear of ICE raiding them, arresting their relatives, and deporting them without so much as a court hearing. Much like in Iran, plainclothes agents are now . Religious dogma is bleeding into public schools and lawmaking. Even education is under siege, just as it was in post-revolution Iran, where textbooks were rewritten and ideology replaced learning.

Shortly after the revolution, Iran’s government began mass-firing professionals deemed ideologically impure. My relatives, teachers, doctors, and civil servants lost their jobs. A declassified in 2003 confirms that anyone tied to the previous regime or the West was systematically pushed out. 

“The original purge after sought to rid the ministries of senior-level holdovers from the former regime and to provide the revolutionary faithful with jobs,” the memo notes. “This was accomplished rather quickly. The second wave of purges began… after a series of Khomeini speeches. Lower-level individuals who had been part of the Shah’s bureaucracy, those with Western training, or those who were deemed to lack full Revolutionary fervor have been retired or fired on an increasingly large scale since then.”

A similar purge is currently underway in the U.S., with a particularly focused assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the public and private sectors. The absurd fixation on DEI mirrors the Islamic regime’s relentless pursuit of oppressive homogeneity. I now personally know educators, , and experts who’ve lost their jobs. The has begun. Scientists are fleeing. The nightmare I escaped is unfolding again—this time in the country I chose as my refuge.

Despite stark ideological differences, Iran’s Islamic regime and the Trumpist movement share similar tactics: wielding fear, relying on , and eroding civil liberties. Both distort truth, punish dissent, and strive to remake the world in their image. Yet, amid repression, resistance flowers.

The Power and Creativity of Resistance

In Iran, once the shock wore off, defiance bloomed in large street protests as well as that friends and I took part in: flashing strands of hair, dancing quickly in public, and wearing colorful socks that sent the morality police scrambling after us. 

Within one year of Khomeini’s takeover, Saddam Hussein, the then leader of neighboring country Iraq, took advantage of the internal turmoil and started a bloody . At the same time, the regime grew more brutal, and soon, every schoolmate of mine knew someone who had been executed, imprisoned, or lost to war. My friend Roya, just a teenager, was among the thousands executed. 

Over the years, many more have been , imprisoned, and tortured. But despite the immense repression, the power of persistence and solidarity keeps transforming, adapting, and finding new ways to challenge the oppression.

Unlike the oppressors, people who resisted were never confined to a single ideology.ĚýIt was born from necessity and lived experience. For more than four decades, Iranians have resisted through mass protests, underground clubs, , and other everyday acts of defiance.

The , sparked by the killing of Jina Mahsa Amini, reignited women’s defiance. Many still refuse the hijab today, and despite the crackdowns, they have changed the look and feel of Iran’s public spaces. Iranians also engage in creative compliance: Women wear their hijabs in loose, fashionable ways. to mock the regime. Workers slow down to frustrate the regime. Some officials, including police officers, look the other way and refuse to enforce the regime’s rules when they can. 

Iranians create underground art, subversive poetry, and encrypted communication. Families teach banned history at home. VPNs and messaging apps bypass censorship. Having enjoyed a robust and mutual care, Iranians tend to be generous with their time and resources. Acts of solidarity—shared meals, safe houses, whispered encouragement—create webs of resilience. Every act matters.

The Fight Is Ours Now

Oppression in Iran didn’t begin with Khomeini—and it didn’t end with his death in 1989. Just like in Iran, the road to our current predicament in the U.S. was laid brick by brick by those in power long before this moment. 

After all, the Nazis took much of their inspiration straight from the United States, particularly from its laws on eugenics, racial segregation, and the systematic disenfranchisement of marginalized communities. Hitler and his inner circle studied , the displacement of Native Americans, and the treatment of non-citizens as models for implementing racial purity laws. 

Some of the groundwork was laid more recently: The gave wealthy interests outsized political influence, the overturning of Roe v. Wade erased five decades of protected reproductive rights, and campus crackdowns have helped restrict freedom of speech. Meanwhile, many communities, including Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and LGBTQ communities, have been experiencing systemic oppression in the U.S. for decades. Now, that oppression is spreading wider and becoming more normalized. It’s unsettling, but the reality is authoritarianism is here. 

The good news is that, unlike Iranians, Americans have a longstanding tradition of free speech, making it much harder to silence dissent. The sheer size of the U.S. population also presents logistical challenges for any regime seeking to control its people. And while Trump’s tactics have been brutal, they have not reached the draconian extremes of Iran’s ruling regime.

Still, resistance is not only born from freedoms we have; it’s forged in the fire of what we’ve survived. The Iranian resistance movement has deeply shaped my work with marginalized groups and frontline workers here in the U.S. We learn from each other—those who have long shouldered systematic oppression continue to defy it in creative ways, proving that and the fuel that sustains it.

I’ve learned not to think of resistance as a sprint or even a marathon. It’s a relay. We rest, we care for each other. We pass the baton, and we keep going. The shows we don’t need a majority—just a small, committed group to spark meaningful change.

So now we face the real question: Are we willing to act? Are we willing to build and expand our communities of resistance?

Because no one is coming to save us. We can’t put our faith in politicians or institutions that have already failed so many. Overwhelm helps no one; we’re not meant to do everything, and certainly not alone. But we do have to save ourselves—together—using vigilance, solidarity, and relentless imagination. This is our moment to rise or risk losing what remains of our freedoms.

After October 2023, the Purchase campus became a protest site for students like Paul who wanted to raise awareness about Palestinians’ struggle for liberation against Israeli occupation. But Paul says advocating for Palestine on campus was “dangerous.” “Students would put up [printouts of] Palestinian flags, and they would be taken down immediately,” he says. “There were students putting things up about Israel, and it was fine.”

But the double standards weren’t just relegated to the materials students hung on walls. Paul says the double standards included an institutional stance that Purchase’s leadership took with Israel. On Oct. 10, 2023, Purchase President Milagros Peña sent a university-wide email stating “New York stands with the people of Israel.” A few sentences following, Peña wrote, “We also recognize that this conflict is devastating to the residents of Gaza.” The word “Palestine” does not appear anywhere in the email.

“Why isn’t Purchase talking about Palestine?” Paul wondered. He was certain that Purchase, which “claims to be diverse” and “will always talk about what’s going on in the world” would eventually “do something for Palestine,” he says. But as weeks went by, and the , no email was sent to acknowledge the .

Then there was the hypocrisy, Paul says. The Purchase administration did not acknowledge that Palestinians have —the last 77 years of which Israel has been the primary occupying power. When PeĂąa released a university-wide email on Nov. 21, 2023, honoring “the Wappinger and Lenape people,” whose land Purchase’s campus occupies, Paul was “confident the school would advocate for Indigenous people [in Palestine], as they did for Indigenous people here.” But, he says, “I was wrong.”

Paul decided to advocate for Palestine himself—he draped his body in a large Palestine flag and wore it to school. But that, too, was met with resistance. “More than five times I was approached for wearing a Palestinian flag,” he says. The first interaction he remembers was with an elderly female student who yelled at him, “Palestinians are the bad people.” Another time, a female student followed him through a parking lot to ask him if he “condemns the actions of Hamas.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

“Every day felt like a fight,” Paul says. “I felt like I was just constantly protesting, even though I was simply wearing a flag.”

Yet the two “We Stand With Israel” banners hung for weeks in the office window of Paul Nicholson, the school’s , despite  prohibiting both banners and large materials on windows.

Paul’s decision to take them down was to “inspire the student body to not abide by these double standards,” he says. “To not be silent.”

Paul knew he would likely face consequences. He expected Nicholson to tell him to stop or maybe call security to have Paul removed from the office. But something else happened. “As I’m taking the banners down, he cursed at me and grabbed me. He was grabbing me so tightly that even though I was wearing a really puffy jacket … I could feel it,” Paul says. “He shook me back and forth and pushed me toward the floor.”

A video recorded by Paul and shows a scuffle between the two before Paul falls to the floor. Nicholson can be heard shouting in the background, “No you’re not. Get the fuck out of here!”

“I called for help immediately,” Paul explains. “I was in survival mode.”

A few hours after the incident, Paul received a call from Patricia Bice, vice president for student affairs and enrollment management. He had been placed on interim suspension amid a pending investigation. At 6:15 p.m. that same day, the New York State University Police, also known as UPD, released a university-wide email stating that it was notified of “an anti-Semitic incident” and investigating the circumstance “as a possible hate crime,” emails obtained by ĂŰĚŇĘÓĆľ Media show.

The following day, on Dec. 13, 2023, PeĂąa released her own university-wide email, asserting that Purchase College had “zero tolerance for antisemitic behavior or any other act of hate or bias.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Nicholson faced no repercussions. He did not respond to a request for comment.

At the time that these emails were sent, there had not yet been a student conduct hearing where Paul could explain his actions or clarify that he was not motivated by antisemitism. To the contrary, Paul says he wanted to remove banners that made him and other students feel unsafe. 

“[The banners] are advocating for the right of Israel to genocide Palestinians,” he says. “A Palestinian student told me they took different routes [to class] because they didn’t feel safe.” Yet, in describing the incident, UPD “immediately threw out these words—‘hate crime,’” while the university’s president indirectly suggested the incident was “antisemitic.” Days later, Paul was officially charged by the Office of Student Conduct with five violations, most of which he says were false.

“Then the media came in,” Paul adds. “I was thrown into this information war.”

In a series of articles published by local and national media outlets, including the and , Paul was painted as an aggressor. The New York Post In one article (a conservative magazine that is allied with Israel and even ran a story titled “”), the author relies on an anonymous source who claims Paul attacked Nicholson. Only Paul and Nicholson were present inside the office at the time of the incident.

Every day felt like a fight. I felt like I was just constantly protesting, even though I was simply wearing a flag.”

Paul, who is Afro-Latino, says he decided to record the incident to protect himself. “Taking my camera out was my defense mechanism,” he says. “Otherwise, people will perceive me as being aggressive.”

But the recording didn’t prevent those assumptions. Readers , calling Paul a “thug” and calling for him to be expelled or even jailed. Others “made fun of my hair,” he says. Months later, he received a message from an individual whom he did not know that read: “terrorist bitch.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

“It really devastated me,” Paul says of the university’s response and the backlash he faced as a result. “It took a big toll on my mental health.”

More than one year since the incident, Paul has still not been allowed to return to class. After being charged with five violations in December 2023, which ranged from removing property to inflicting harm, abuse, and injury, he says an advisor suggested he just accept the charges, even if it meant being expelled. But Paul was determined to fight. In June 2024, he sued the school, alleging that he was attacked by Nicholson and excessively punished because he criticized Israel and supported Palestine.

“They’ll say that I just wanted to destroy property, but what I did was a symbol of me saying, ‘Down with white supremacy, Zionism, and the oppression of Arab and African peoples,’” Paul says. “Israel is involved in the suffering of Black people in countries across the world, whether it’s , , , or .”

Paul entered Purchase’s disciplinary process in late December 2023, which included several administrative hearings that were conducted by a single staff member serving as a hearing officer. Paul requested a committee hearing, which is conducted by three people instead of one, and can involve a student who listens to the case. But Purchase beginning the Monday before the last two weeks of the semester through winter break, making an administrative hearing his only option at the time.

“The waters of due process were muddied the moment Cesar [Paul]’s actions were deemed an ‘anti semitic hate crime’ prior to any fair hearing,” Maryam Fatouh, Paul’s lawyer, wrote in an email. “From that point on, there were countless procedural missteps on the part of Purchase College, including its failure to produce Mr. Nicholson for questioning, despite my client’s requests. Given the seriousness of the allegations of physical assault, and Mr. Nicholson’s direct, first hand knowledge of the incident, Cesar [Paul] should have been afforded his legal right to directly question the individual making accusations against him.”

Ultimately, Paul’s fate was decided by that single staff member, who questioned the two UPD officers who wrote the incident reports as “witnesses” despite neither of the officers being present at the time of the incident. As Fatouh notes, Nicholson was not required to be a witness, and he was not questioned during the hearing process. Student-conduct records show Paul was declared responsible for two of the five charges, suspended for one semester, and placed on disciplinary probation for one academic year. The terms of his suspension declared him “persona non grata,” which banned him from campus. 

Paul appealed the suspension soon after, asserting that the punishment was excessive, but it was denied. Then in April 2024, Paul rode a bus to a , where student organizers from multiple colleges gathered to protest the school system’s investments in Israel. On his way there, the bus stopped at Purchase. Paul got off the bus briefly and stood on the edge of campus to record a video, where he spoke out against his ban from Purchase grounds while Nicholson was able to “walk on campus facing no repercussions.”

He was once again charged for violating the terms of his suspension. In February 2025, Purchase extended his suspension up until January 2026—effectively pushing his education back two years. “They’re trying to expel me, without labeling it as that,” he says. “They’re trying to put me to other students as an example—to be afraid to speak up.”

But Paul is still speaking up. He continues to fight to resume his education at Purchase while advocating for Palestinian liberation and his fellow student protesters. Since being suspended, he’s spoken during protests at several other campuses, often emphasizing his solidarity with Palestinians as “a Black, gay boy in America.”

“We’re living in times where we must put our morals to the test,” he says. “Nelson Mandela once said, ‘We know too well that our freedom is not complete without the freedom of the Palestinians.’”

Free Speech for Whom?

Paul’s story is just one in an ecosystem of college students who have been targeted for protesting Israel and advocating for Palestinian liberation. Students have been , , and while university administrations have (for the most part) looked the other way—or used pro-Israel outrage as fuel to dish out excessive disciplinary punishments such as suspensions and . 

Meanwhile, a collaborative crackdown between administrators and law enforcement has resulted in , , , and . Now, immigrant students are disappearing in a targeted campaign to capture, detain, and . , a Palestinian student who was a negotiator at Columbia University during the encampment, was abducted by ICE on Mar. 8, 2025, and has been detained since, despite not being charged with a crime. 

Ranjani Srinivasan, another Columbia student who attended protests for Palestine and posted on social media, on Mar. 11, 2025, after ICE . Yunseo Chung, another Columbia student who attended similar protests, is after ICE agents tried to arrest and deport her. Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student who in support of the student senate’s divestment resolution, was on Mar. 25, 2025. And Momodou Taal, a student activist at Cornell University who was also , was forced to leave the U.S. after his student visa was also revoked.

But as the general public’s focus rapidly shifts from fascism abroad to fascism in the United States, it must not forget the Palestinians still under siege in Gaza and the West Bank. Even after a “ceasefire” agreement was in January, and continued to starve and kill Palestinians. Israel officially ended the ceasefire agreement when it on Mar. 18, 2025, killing more than 400 people, many of whom were children.

“The United States is a huge player in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people,” says Tori Porell, a staff attorney with , a nonprofit legal advocacy organization that supports Palestine advocates. “The movement here is very important in the movement for Palestinian liberation—which is also why it has faced so much backlash.”

With Israel’s resumption of genocidal bombing and aid blocks, and the U.S. president touting the possibility of turning Gaza into a resort, student activism for Palestine is only gaining momentum. But by targeting the to Israeli and U.S. imperialism through and , the modern student divestment movement is showing us the lengths universities will go to in order to shield those ties. 

Universities rely on excessive disciplinary processes, , and allegations of antisemitism to silence, criminalize, and discredit students who dare to demand an education free of human rights abuses. 

Since the early 2010s, Palestine Legal has been supporting those who face this repression—providing legal advice, training, and litigation support to college students, grassroots activists, and communities involved in Palestine advocacy. From its extensive research and legal cases, the organization has gained a critical understanding of the forces encouraging repression of the movement for Palestinian liberation. 

“A lot of people are kind of aware of AIPAC and the wider Israel lobby that exerts so much influence on our government,” Porell says. “But there are also even more targeted organizations and operations working to suppress the pro-Palestine movement and the student movement, in particular.”

In 2015, Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights co-published a 124-page report titled “” that details how “a network of advocacy organizations, public relations firms, and think tanks” use a variety of tactics to “pressure universities, government actors, and other institutions to censor or punish advocacy in support of Palestinian rights.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Donald Trump and his administration are only joining this bandwagon, leveraging and the United States’ decades-old to and stop the divestment movement’s widespread influence on college campuses. Trump’s Day 1 who engage in protest for Palestine aims to further “weaponize universities as arms of the surveillance state and encourage universities to report their own students for free speech activity,” Porell says.

It from his previous term in office, which sought to have the Department of Education adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s , “a very politicized definition … that includes nearly all criticism of Israel,” Porell says. In March, the Trump administration revoked $400 million in federal funding from Columbia University for  The Guardian reported. Columbia agreed to a series of policy changes in order to restore the funding, meaning Trump successfully pressured a university to prioritize its cash flow over free speech rights.

The United States is a huge player in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. The movement here is very important in the movement for Palestinian liberation—which is also why it has faced so much backlash.”

But universities share blame for fostering campus climates hostile to free speech and immigrants. “Universities might assume the position of ‘this is not us, this is the [presidential] administration,’ but they very much created the environment for these things to be possible,” says Patrice, an international graduate student worker and labor union organizer at New York University (NYU), who is using a pseudonym to protect her identity. “For the last year, universities like NYU have engaged in mischaracterizing and slandering their own students—categorizing them as disruptive and giving into dangerous narratives about members of our community.”

Right-wing groups have also formulated plans to silence Palestine activism on individual college campuses and elsewhere. Kenneth Marcus, who worked as Trump’s during his first presidential term, is the founder of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a nonprofit organization that has against universities, including and the , claiming they are not doing enough to combat antisemitism on their campuses.

Alongside the Brandeis Center is the Heritage Foundation—the conservative think tank behind Project 2025—which also uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition in , a little-known but incredibly authoritarian initiative posited as a “national strategy to combat antisemitism.” Porell says Project Esther is a “companion to Project 2025” that offers a “blueprint for crushing the pro-Palestine movement in the U.S.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Project Esther hopes to mischaracterize the movement for Palestinian liberation so much that Americans view it similarly to how they view the Ku Klux Klan. The Heritage Foundation is attempting to achieve this by claiming that activists, nonprofit workers, government officials, and journalists who advocate for Palestine are all part of a global “Hamas Support Network” that must be dismantled. Because the U.S. government has designated Hamas, another government entity, as a , Porell warns that falsely linking those who are or perceived to be within the Palestinian liberation movement to Hamas unlocks a legal strategy for the government and legal organizations to target them. 

“Not only is that a messaging strategy to delegitimize the movement, but the U.S. has very harsh antiterrorism laws,” Porell explains. Accusing individuals of terrorism can lead to “government surveillance, a law-enforcement investigation, even criminal or civil prosecution.”

Elements of Project Esther are already being pursued. And if the wider plan is successful, it will reduce free speech in the U.S., leaving no corner of society untouched. That means the tactics being used on college campuses can eventually be weaponized across institutions, corporations, workplaces, and levels of government against anyone who criticizes Israel, advocates for Palestinians (or any oppressed people for that matter), or even critiques capitalism. would be ushered in, threatening the future of all leftist organizing and the people’s right to dissent. 

Though these forms of repression are not completely unprecedented, mimicking 1950s and other surveillance strategies used to , they “absolutely exploded after October 2023,” Porell adds. “Many universities across the country changed their policies around protest or speech on campus and made them much more restrictive than they were before, and that was directly a result of students speaking up for Palestine.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Once those policies are on the books, universities can use them against any students speaking out. “Palestine is the canary in the coal mine for our free speech rights,” she adds. “Today it is Palestine activists, but tomorrow it could be antiracist activists or pro-immigrant advocates.”

That makes learning to resist this repression and out organize the opposition even more dire. In the long fight ahead, students are reevaluating their strategies and developing new organizing defenses to secure a movement that will survive not only the Trump administration but also the rise of a coordinated right-wing movement.

Community Solidarity

Though he is isolated from campus and his peers, Paul is not completely alone. At the same time that a wave of backlash was making him feel distraught, his fellow students and comrades within the wider SUNY ecosystem came to his defense.

One peer helped Paul start a Change.org petition to demand fair disciplinary action. Nearly 20,000 people have signed the petition. A group of more than 30 Jewish students also sent a letter addressed to the Purchase administration, writing that “a student [who] pays tuition at your college has far more value than a piece of paper endorsing one of the most brutal apartheid regimes in recent history.” Paul sent the signatures to the administration, and though “they acted like it was nothing,” he says community support made him feel like “everything was gonna be OK.”

Closer to home, two unaffiliated student groups at Purchase known as and a newer initiative, the , continue to fight for Paul, to pressure administrators. “Words cannot explain my appreciation, how deeply grateful I am,” Paul says. “It felt so fulfilling because my original mission was to inspire other students.”

Raise the Consciousness has also planned a series of direct actions, which have included and , to hold Purchase accountable for its excessive punishments and . But student organizers with the group face their own surveillance threats. On Mar. 10, 2025, the Department of Education announced that it was investigating 60 universities, including Purchase. While the DOE claims these investigations are about combating antisemitism, students assert that the DOE’s actual goal is to silence support for Palestine. 

“We reject the dishonest conflation of anti zionism and antisemitism,” wrote Raise the Consciousness, the Purchase Solidarity Coalition, and Jewish Voice for Peace at Purchase in a released on Mar. 19. “The Department of Education’s so-called investigations are part of an ongoing smear campaign against students opposing our universities’ financial backing of U.S./Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people.”

One organizer, who asked to be called “Rin,” says that Raise the Consciousness has been “on the radar of the administration” since it staged a protest during Accepted Students Day in 2024. When the collective , “[the police] literally outnumbered the students,” Rin says. “Everyone was arrested,” including professors, despite eyewitnesses observing that until police showed up.

Though students were disciplined soon after, they managed to fight off suspensions. The administration was being “torn apart by critics on both sides,” says Rin; in addition to facing backlash over the violent arrests of students, PeĂąa was also to address antisemitism on campus. “So they entertained a ‘good-faith conversation’ in the hopes it would stop a resurgence in our encampment,” Rin says. 

On May 6, 2024, selected representatives from the Gaza solidarity encampment to negotiate. According to a document obtained by ĂŰĚŇĘÓĆľ Media that lists “verbal agreements” made during the meeting, university leadership agreed to “make public all investment records…in the interest of transparency,” grant amnesty to students facing disciplinary charges from the encampment, and for the president to release “a statement to the campus community regarding the ongoing events in Palestine, specifically addressing how her previous communication has caused harm.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Student organizers agreed to disperse all student encampments so long as the agreements were upheld. It is unclear how many of the resolution’s eight total agreements that the Purchase administration has followed through on. But on Oct. 2, 2024, students staged a sit-in over “the administration’s dismissal of our Encampment Resolution,” an Instagram post by Raise the Consciousness reads. The outcome is not unique; other universities have begun to .

For Rin, the resolution’s life cycle only underscores the need for students to organize more often and more directly. But university police wouldn’t forget the names of student organizers who had been charged for participating in the May encampment. 

After the action, Rin says students were heavily surveilled and targeted by UPD, including being stopped outside of their dorm rooms on the way to class, pressured into interrogations, egged on by officers while in the dining hall, or accused of being behind autonomous actions students performed on campus like banner drops and chalking. Rin adds that heavy police surveillance contributed to a culture where Raise the Consciousness was “blacklisted”; no student government club wanted to “get too close” to the group in fear of having their funding cut.

“Whenever they couldn’t bust you for something, they would make your life miserable and like looking over your shoulder,” Rin explains. 

The surveillance emphasized the need for a decentralized, collective network of student organizations and groups. “How can we turn every space into a political activism space?” Rin asks. “With [the Purchase Solidarity Coalition], this was the idea.”

Though in its initial phases, the Purchase Solidarity Coalition will work to “address the immediate material needs of the community” at Purchase while building a network with other student groups that are aware of the issues marginalized students face, Rin explains.

“There is untapped potential of these clubs to be hot spots for how we organize, especially in light of the threats that come with the Trump presidency,” he adds. “Palestine is still at the forefront of our minds, [as are] Congo, Sudan, and everywhere beyond Purchase, but we also have a bunch of immediate needs in the campus community.”

In addition to organizing for divestment, the Purchase Solidarity Coalition’s immediate functions include supporting Black, Brown, transgender, and undocumented students, especially as these students face increasing threats when they are involved in organizing. “If people are fearing for their safety, struggling to make ends meet, [or] experiencing repression in their daily lives, then they’re going to be less able to organize,” Rin explains.

The Purchase Solidarity Coalition has already served as a funnel to connect students with Westchester ICE Watch, a local immigrants rights group. Rin says 18 students have been connected with the group so far, while others have circulated “Know Your Rights” flyers around campus. As the coalition grows, Rin hopes to fundraise to support students who need legal counsel. Beyond that, he hopes to eventually to demand better housing conditions and protect student activists residing in dormitories.

“Where leftist organizing is today is, I think there’s a realization that is occurring for a lot of people, more so under Trump, that is how politicized everybody’s lives are. You cannot live an unpolitical life,” Rin says. “Everything from your student loans, to the color of your skin, your sexual orientation and gender identity—everything that we do, are, live, and like—is a political issue.”

Multiple staff and administrators at Purchase College—including Nicholson—were contacted for this article, but did not respond to requests for comment.

Student Union Power

Like many other campuses after October 2023, New York University’s became a hub for student organizing against Israeli occupation: NYU students waged multiple encampments pressuring their university to . And like many college administrations, NYU’s also in response to the encampments. In August 2024, NYU released an updated code of conduct that stated “Zionist” was now a protected class under its , erasing “the long , which has existed as long as Zionism itself,”  Natasha Lennard, a Jewish journalist, for The Intercept.

More recently, Patrice says the administration has “given leverage” to groups like Mothers Against Campus Antisemitism (MACA), a Facebook group of more than 62,000 parents whose founder has bragged about pressuring NYU to . Meanwhile, a far-right group, , is .

In a time where universities are allowing government overreach, and college administrators accept borderline harassment and online stalking of their students, unions can offer tangible legal protections against targeted punishments, sanctions, and criminalization. Patrice, who is an organizer with the (GSOC) at NYU, which represents more than 2,000 graduate student employees, says the union is fighting for the rights of students to protest for Palestine on their campus: “GSOC has been at the forefront of political organizing for students, even before the current protests.”

Drawing on its history as the first graduate student union to in 2016, GSOC is continuing to advocate for a holistic set of principles as a union that “includes protections for workers who are international and workers who want to exercise political speech,” Patrice says.

One strategy GSOC uses to invoke protections includes filing grievances that require the university to meet with union members. Filing grievances is one way the union can support students by fighting “in community and in solidarity” when members are targeted for campus organizing, she adds. 

After students staged a sit-in at Bobst Library last December, NYU , including a GSOC member, on “little evidence,” Patrice says. “If the new norm becomes that you can be suspended for quietly sitting in the library studying” then students are discouraged from “being present, near, or associated with campus organizing.”

The union filed a grievance in defense of the student, alleging that a suspension violated the “discipline and discharge” clause in their contract with the university, which requires just cause. The suspension was dropped, and the grievance later denied (a common occurrence over the past year, says Patrice), but the grievances, one-on-one support with sanctioned students, along with support from 100 union alumni who pledged to boycott donations to NYU, could have applied collective pressure. “For someone to help you through a student conduct meeting—like a union representative—that grassroots support is really essential,” she explains.

But the underlying goal is to form a stronger contract with NYU. For GSOC, a strong contract includes measures that prohibit NYPD and ICE from accessing campus buildings—a pressing need, as at other universities. Universities are showing their true colors when it comes to policing. They don’t just to surveil students, they act as collaborative partners to identify, investigate, and charge student protesters and activist groups. 

Victoria, another international graduate student worker and union steward who is also using a pseudonym, says that police presence at NYU has increased since the encampments, but that NYU has “no mechanisms” for recording NYPD activity in and throughout campus buildings, which will be the first step to solidify protections against them. “NYPD is now being allowed to arrest, brutalize, and collect information on students, which should never be allowed,” she says. 

Victoria says NYPD arrested students after the library sit-in but were also patrolling campus buildings for minor incidents, including after finding graffiti. “That’s a much lower standard for heavy police action,” she says. That’s why GSOC is working to make the language in its contract with NYU more specific and draw clear guidelines on how the university can interact with law enforcement. The union hopes to extend protections that will prohibit NYU from allowing law enforcement, including ICE, to target international graduate student workers. 

Beyond forming a new contract, GSOC is offering critical community spaces for students to express concerns, evaluate strategies, and plan collective courses of action. It has who are concerned about Trump’s executive order and begun . These are just initial steps to negotiating “with the main institution that has brought you to the U.S. and through that, other institutions,” Victoria says. 

From those negotiations, students can build preventative measures into their contracts and take necessary action when universities violate their rights. “As a first-generation international student, you can feel very lonely in your relationship with the university,” she adds. “The union is a community that can give collective power to a group that otherwise would not have much.”

The Movement Lives

Despite all of the repression students have faced from their colleges and the government, they are no less committed to the movement for Palestinian liberation than they were before. In fact, it continues to grow beyond the lines of major cities. 

Adam, an organizer with at Stony Brook University in Long Island who asked to be identified by first name only, says organizers with the group are committed to building a suburban mass movement, despite being suspended, , and evicted from their dorms for their activism. The group is in the process of building a stronger organizing network on Long Island by engaging with surrounding communities and addressing other pressing needs like attacks on immigrants.

To stay prepared for the next phase of organizing under Trump, Adam says organizers are looking to the and for inspiration, studying these movements to learn what they accomplished during their time, what impeded their success, and how to evolve in a heavily surveilled society.

“It was almost impossible for [the Panthers] to understand how big surveillance would become, what kind of technology would be developed, the programs the FBI would pursue to defeat this revolutionary attitude,” Adam says. “This repression will always be coming at us. Learning and growing from there, I truly believe that revolution is possible.”

Meanwhile, Paul is unsure if he will ever return to Purchase, noting how difficult it is to feel welcomed back by the institution that targeted you. Regardless, he says he will “continue to fight and tell my story.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

“There are many students like me who are facing severe punishments for their stances against genocide,” he adds. “I only hope my story inspires [them] to break through that fear and to fight for each other.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

And they already are. For example, Jewish students at Columbia recently to protest ICE’s capture of Khalil. Though the Trump administration is counting on inducing fear, students continue to protest, organize, and try new methods of direct action.

That’s because they believe in a future where their universities do not invest in war or genocide—and that belief holds firm, no matter who tries to silence them.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 4:50pm PT on April 9, 2025 to correct the year of Milagros PeĂąa’s Dec. 13, 2023 email, when Palestine Legal started, and the year the “Palestine Exception to Free Speech” report was published.ĚýRead our corrections policy here.

The women, both in their 40s, worry about the Trump administration’s ongoing funding cuts to a multitude of programs and services that they—like many other Americans across the country—depend on. “Trump is taking away everything,” says Lewis, a part-time cashier at a discount store who earns minimum wage. Siebold, also a part-time cashier, delivers air filters at a second job to make ends meet.Ěý

On Saturday, Mar. 22, Siebold and Lewis took a ride-sharing service to Arizona Republican Rep. Juan Ciscomani’s district to see Sanders speak at Catalina High School’s football stadium. The two women were among thousands of people who braved long lines in hot weather to hear what the self-described democratic socialist had to say. 

The independent senator launched his nationwide tour in February 2025, in the absence of a united Democratic Party against President Donald Trump’s dizzying dismantling of legally funded federal agencies and programs. Texas Democratic Rep. Greg Casar and New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined Sanders at the Tucson rally. Ocasio-Cortez has partnered with Sanders in several other cities including Denver and Las Vegas. 

Sanders, 83, has attracted large crowds at rallies in cities across the U.S. as he pushes against the ever-growing influence within the federal government of billionaires—part of the so-called 1% of the nation’s population. “At the end of the day, 99% is a hell of a bigger number than 1%,” Sanders said during his address, noting the huge crowds attending his rallies. 

“Brothers and sisters, don’t let them divide us up by the color of our skin or where we were born or our religion or sexual orientation,” the senator told an ebullient audience. “Let’s stand together as one people. Proud people. Let’s take on Trumpism and defeat it.”

A two-time presidential candidate, Sanders has long railed against billionaires in politics, often bringing attention to wealth inequality in the nation. These days, his message is soundly resonating with voters alarmed by the novel role of tech billionaire Elon Musk as the executor of Trump’s sweeping cost-cutting mandates.

In the Democratic stronghold that is Tucson’s Pima County, the progressive politicians found a friendly crowd. The mere mention of Trump and Musk elicited a chorus of boos, and when Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez denounced the men’s actions, chants and cheers reverberated throughout.Ěý

Sanders decried the Trump administration’s possible cuts to , and , as well as and . Americans, said Sanders, wouldn’t stand for losing those and other social-safety programs and benefits meant for “the working class of their country in order to give more tax breaks to billionaires.”

Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd that federal budget cuts are not just about reducing costs, but also a fight over the values that define the nation. “Trump handed the keys of government to Elon Musk and is selling the country for parts to the richest people on the planet for a kickback,” she said, in reference to Musk’s oversight of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The New York representative also spoke about her own financial struggles as a former waitress, saying she empathized with the challenges facing working-class people. “When the system is stacked against you, it’s hard to feel like anything you do matters, that we matter in a democracy.”

It’s common sense, not radicalism, says Ocasio-Cortez, that when someone gets sick in the world’s wealthiest nation, “They shouldn’t go bankrupt.”Ěý

She encouraged audience members to get involved in their community by joining block associations, neighborhood groups, and other local organizations. Building community “is the tissue and the infrastructure” paving the way to victory, she explained.

Meanwhile, Casar emphasized that it’s time to take on Trump and the ultra-rich. “They want you to feel powerless because they are afraid of the power on this field. They are afraid of the lines of people wrapping around this high school.”

That kind of people power, the Texas representative said, has Republicans running scared rather than holding town halls in their own districts. Around the country, constituents are demanding answers from their congressional representatives, and Tucsonans are no exception. Hundreds have , who represents southern Arizona’s Congressional District 6.

Casar encouraged the crowd to stay hopeful. “On our darkest days, I want you to remember there can be a world that is better after this. There has to be a better world after this.”

Siebold and Lewis walked out of the roughly three-hour rally a bit more optimistic that life could indeed get better. “It definitely gave me hope to fight for a possible future where we don’t have to have two jobs and where we can actually be able to afford groceries,” Siebold says. “It feels like we’re being heard.”

While Siebold rents an apartment that she pays for with wages from her two jobs, Lewis, who says she has asthma and a neck injury, sleeps on her parents’ couch because she can’t afford her own place with the $500 she earns every two weeks. The government food assistance she got helped, but it stopped recently. “They told me that I made too much money,” she says.

Lupe Mora, a grandmother who attended the rally with her daughter, Annie, and grandchildren Alex, 16, and Marc, 10, traveled to Tucson from the Arizona border town of Douglas to see Sanders. She and her family were excited to shake his hand after he spoke. 

“He’s been my hero since 2016,” Mora says, referring to the year Sanders ran his first presidential campaign. “I like his progressive views and everything he said here. We would be such a great nation if he had become president.”

Support for veterans undoubtedly would be stronger under Sanders’ brand of politics, Mora maintains, and seniors would not be panicking about the possibility of having their Social Security benefits cut. “I don’t feel very happy that Trump’s in control,” she says.

Neither does Steve Brown, a retired educator who was at the rally with his wife, Alice. “I just dread to pick up the papers or turn on the news,” he says. He thinks it is â€œinsane” that the Trump administration is cutting funds for public schools. He likes Sanders’ suggestion that public school teachers who dedicate their life to educating children should get paid what they’re worth. And although he says he supports the senator, Brown doesn’t fully espouse a democratic socialist society. 

“Democratic socialism is a complex ideological and political system that has pieces that I admire and other pieces that I think could be done differently,” he says. “But what’s really important is for all of us who believe in the truth, in honesty, authenticity, integrity and love, to stand together and elect people who will embrace those values.”

For Rousel Orozco, the rally served as a reaffirmation that democracy can prevail in challenging times. “After the last election, I completely lost hope,” he says. The microbiologist says he has a difficult time accepting Trump’s election to a second four-year term. But the Republican with other Latino voters, particularly men, in his race against Vice President Kamala Harris.

“I have a friend who’s gay, immigrant, and Latino,” Orozco says. “He voted for Trump because he thought that as soon as he took office, his wages were going to go up and the prices were going to go down. And it is unbelievable to me that people had that vision.”

Orozco agrees with much of what Sanders said at the rally, but he doesn’t see democratic socialism ever taking root in the United States. If it had, “It would have served to balance the current ideology that’s out there,” he says.Ěý

Seibold and Lewis figure that if the country had gone down the path Sanders favors, their quality of life would be better. They envisioned having basic necessities and peace of mind. 

“Can you imagine not having to worry about what’s for dinner, how much is the rent, how much you have to pay in utilities, or how much is my doctor bill?” Seibold asks. “So many people live in survival mode on how we’re going to get to the next day.”

Lewis nods in agreement. Then the friends head to a nearby city bus stop, strolling on a sidewalk running parallel to the school. Across the street, a house yard sign perched on a prickly pear cactus urges: Deport Elon.

As notedĚýnot long ago, Trump “had not appeared to be swayed by protests, petitions, hashtag campaigns or other tools of mass dissent.”ĚýĚýĚýthese days. But what if it’s wrong?

As , I study how our narratives about the past shape our actions in the present. In this case, it’s particularly important to get the history right. In fact, popular resistance in Trump’s first term accomplished more than many observers realize; it’s just that most wins happened outside the spotlight.

In my view, the most visible tactics—petitions, hashtags, occasional marches in Washington—had less impact than the quieter work of organizing in communities and workplaces. Understanding when movements succeeded during Trump’s first term is important for identifying how activists can effectively oppose Trump policy in his second administration.

Quiet Victories of the Sanctuary Movement

 has been a cornerstone of for more than a decade. Yet despite his early pledge to create a “” that would ,  only half as many people in his first term as Barack Obama did in his first term. Progressive activists were a key reason.

By combining decentralized organizing andĚýĚý, they successfully pushedĚýĚýand to adopt sanctuary laws that limited cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

WhenĚýĚýthousands of cities and dozens of states, he found that a specific type of sanctuary law that activists supported—barring local jails and prisons from active cooperation with ICE—successfully reduced ICE arrests. A Ěýconfirmed this finding. Notably, Hausman also found that sanctuary policies had “no detectable effect on crime rates,” contrary to what manyĚý.

Another important influence on state and local officials was employers’ resistance to mass deportation. The E-Verify system requiring employers to verify workers’ legal status went , since businesses quietly objected to it. As this example suggests, popular resistance to Trump’s agenda was most effective when it exploited tensions between the administration and capitalists.

The ‘Rising Tide’ Against Fossil Fuels

In his effort to prop up the fossil fuel industry, Trump in his first term withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, weakened or ,Ěýand pushed other measures to obstruct the transition to green energy. Researchers projected that these policies would killĚýĚýof people in just the United States by 2028, primarily from exposure to air pollutants. Other studies estimated that the increased carbon pollution would contribute toĚýĚýofĚý, and untold other suffering, by century’s end.

That’s not the whole story, though. was partly thwarted by a combination of environmental activism and market forces. His failure to was especially stark. faster during Trump’s first term than during any four-year period in any country, ever. Some of the same coal barons who  in 2016 soon .

The most obvious reasons for coal’s decline were the U.S. natural gas boom and the falling cost of renewable energy. But its decline was hastened by the  that protested coal projects, filed , and  to disinvest from the sector. The presence of strong local movements may help explain the  in coal’s fortunes.

Environmentalists also won some important battles against oil and gas pipelines, power plants, and drilling projects. In aĚý, organizers defeated polluters through a combination of litigation, civil disobedience, and other protests, and by pressuring banks, insurers, and big investors.

In 2018, one pipeline CEO lamented the “, litigation, and vandalism” facing his industry, saying “the level of intensity has ramped up,” with “more opponents” who are “better organized.”

Green energy also expanded much faster than Trump and his allies would have liked, albeit  to avert ecological collapse. The U.S.  more in Trump’s first term than under any other president, while  more than doubled. Research shows that this progress was due in part to  , particularly at the state and local levels.

As with immigration, Trump’s energy agenda divided both political and business elites. Some Ěýto keep their money in the sector, and some evenĚý.ĚýĚýandĚýĚýdidn’t always share Trump’s commitment to propping up fossil fuels. These tensions between the White House and business leaders created openings that climate activists could exploit.

Worker Victories in Unlikely Places

Despite  as a man of the people, his policies hurt workers in numerous ways—from his attack on  to his , which accelerated .

Nonetheless, workers’ direct action on the job won meaningful victories. For example, educators across the country organized dozens of major strikes forĚý,Ěý,Ěýand evenĚý. Workers in hotels, supermarkets, and otherĚýĚýalso walked out. Ultimately,Ěýmore in 2018 than in any year since 1986.

This happened not just in progressive strongholds butĚýĚýlike West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Kentucky. At leastĚýĚýdefied state laws denying workers the right to strike.

Ěýgains for workers, the strike wave apparently alsoĚý at election time by increasing political awareness and voter mobilization. The indirect impact on elections is aĚýĚýof labor militancy andĚý.

Quiet acts of worker defiance also constrained Trump. The early months of the COVID-19 pandemic featured widespread resistance to policies that raised the , particularly the lack of mask mandates. Safety-conscious workers frequently disobeyed their employers, in ways . Many customers steered clear of businesses where people were unmasked. These disruptions, and fears they might escalate,  for mask mandates.

This resistance surely . With more coordination, it might have  in how  responded to the virus. Labor momentum could continue into Trump’s second term. Low unemployment, strong , and  offer .

Beyond Marches

Progressive movements have no direct influence over Republicans in Washington. However, they have more potential influence over businesses, lower courts, regulators, and state and local politicians. Of these targets, business ultimately has the most power.

Business will usually be able to  if its profits are threatened. Trump and Elon Musk may be able to dismantle much of the federal government and , but it’s much harder for them to ignore major economic disruption.

While big marches can raise public consciousness and help activists connect, by themselves they will not block Trump and Musk. For that, the movement will need more disruptive forms of pressure. Building the capacity for that disruption will require sustained organizing in workplaces and communities.

This article was originally published by . It has been published here with permission. 

The film, which is co-directed by journalist Kei Pritsker and Michael T. Workman, and executive produced by Macklemore, has for having the highest per-screen-average opening for a documentary. On Apr. 4, 2025, The Encampments will be released nationwide, meaning theatergoers all over the United States will be able to watch one of the most crucial films of this decade—one that dissolves the widespread claims of antisemitism brought upon the Palestinian liberation movement and captures the unrelenting spirit of Palestine activism in the U.S.

The release of The Encampments was accelerated after Mahmoud Khalil—one of its main protagonists—was . We learn in the documentary that Khalil was a Palestinian scholar at Columbia University, known for his diplomatic character and handpicked by his fellow students to negotiate with the university administration on their behalf.

Since his capture, Khalil with what will ultimately be a bogus crime. In the meantime, the Trump administration, , and other government entities are actively trying to rewrite his story and tarnish his image. They claim that Khalil is a supporter of terrorism who slipped through the cracks rather than a brave and selfless Palestinian student committed to the liberation of his people.

But like all great works of journalism, The Encampments intervenes at a critical point to offer a powerful declaration: There’s the government’s story, and then there’s the real one. The documentary captures that true story in ways that are politically inspiring, emotionally demanding, and visually riveting all at once. 

The majority of the film is narrated by Khalil, co-negotiator Sueda Polat, and other students, all of whom impart their perspective on the exhausting work of trying to influence a collegiate administration. An interview with a whistleblower from the university’s communications department reveals the institutional bias administrators had against pro-Palestine campus protests from the start. And a Columbia alum provides a retrospective of the university’s own history of student activism during the 1960s anti-war movement, highlighting the hypocrisy of Columbia’s celebration of activists of the past while calling the police on those in the present.

All of this journalistic storytelling supports the camerawork of co-director Pritsker, who skillfully submerges us in the daily activities of the encampment. During a Q&A following the screening, Pritsker—who himself camped for several days at the encampment—said that many negative stories told about the encampments and broadcasted on television come from individuals “who never even set foot on Columbia’s campus.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

“It just so happened that we were sitting on this trove of film that disproved everything they’ve been saying,” he added. To make this point, The Encampments juxtaposes a montage of news broadcasts in which anchors utterly reject the protests, claiming they are disgusting and hateful, with the encampment footage recorded by Pritsker. In doing so, the film convincingly probes at these vilifying narratives by placing us as casual observers of the encampments so that we can come to know the true motives of their student dissenters. 

Viewers follow Columbia students as they embark on months of activism to demand investment transparency from the university administration, as well as divestment from weapons manufacturers and other companies complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. We see the outcomes (or lack thereof) of countless lengthy meetings with administrators until eventually—inevitably—students construct an encampment at the heart of Columbia’s campus. 

Once the tents are erected, large text (Day 1, Day 2, and so on) introduces subsequent scenes, establishing a chronological timeline of the encampment’s rapid growth and joyous celebrations that ultimately led to violent clashes initiated by counterprotesters armed with weapons and fireworks. 

The Encampments’ keenly observant recording of day-to-day interactions between students also helps viewers realize the layers of planning and organization that go into a , as well as the multicultural solidarity that undoubtedly kept it intact for several days, despite threats of disciplinary action and raids by the NYPD. The camera is often shoulder height, sitting beside students as one shows another how to play bongos during chants, or within the crowd, listening as Khalil and Polat give the latest news from their meetings with administrators.Ěý

At one point, we are shown a whiteboard schedule with dedicated time for studying, teach-ins, and nightly communal mourning to pay respects to the latest Palestinians killed in Gaza. Multiple times throughout the film, Jewish students are seen participating equally in the encampment—engaging in speeches, religious prayer, and song—and getting arrested by the NYPD. 

But the weaving of campus footage with footage filmed in Gaza, including exclusive interviews with Palestinian journalists who live there, is what makes The Encampments particularly painful and gripping. There are hard-to-watch clips of interactions between Palestinians, Israeli military, and Israeli settlers, and Khalil’s narration of his family’s story is interspersed with historical footage of refugee camps formed after the 1948 Nakba. “A big part of our political goal was to contextualize why the students were doing what they were doing,” co-director Workman said during the Q&A, before adding that it was critical to ground the documentary in Palestine. 

The result is a historically conscious film that testifies to generations of occupational violence with a narrative that is just as much in service of Palestinian freedom as the movement it so thoroughly depicts is. As the filmmakers intended, it becomes impossible to forget the connection between the bombs Israel drops in Gaza and the tuition dollars students spend at prestigious universities like Columbia. And just as this conclusion is reached, we are thrust into a compilation of video clips that show the widespread influence of the encampment movement at several universities across the U.S. 

“This isn’t a mentality you can just lock away in a prison,” Pritsker said, adding that students expressed a commitment to return to the encampment regardless of the consequences. Munir Atalla, one of the film’s producers who facilitated the Q&A, concurred: “This is a mass movement. It’s un-deportable.”

For anyone still awaiting an invitation to join the Palestinian liberation movement, The Encampments offers a compelling one. And for journalists with any moral or civic bone left in their bodies, this film is an example of how to not only report on the movements of our time, but how to also reclaim truth in a new era of escalating political repression.

I undertook the five-hour drive to Neah Bay from Tacoma, Washington, with fellow Indigenous allies and friends of the Makah Tribe to celebrate Makah Days, a yearly three-day festival celebrating the 1924 granting of U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans.

But this year, Makah Days held an additional significance. Not only was it the 100-year anniversary of the first festival, but it was also the first celebration after the Tribe’s victory in their decades-long struggle to legally resume hunting gray whales.

When night falls on my first evening here, fireworks explode in the sky over Neah Bay. A steady rain pats our faces as we look up at the display. Each explosion proclaims freedom to the darkness—the freedom of the Tribe to finally practice food sovereignty once again.

Physical and Spiritual Health

The Makah is a marine-based Tribe. Their history and identity are tied to the sea—as are their traditional foods. 

Archaeological evidence at the site of the ancient Makah village of Ozette indicates the Tribe’s whaling tradition goes back at least 1,500 years, probably earlier. It’s so important to their identity that the Tribe gave up vast areas of land when they signed the in exchange for keeping the right to hunt whales. They are the only tribe guaranteed this right by Congress.

But over the decades that followed, commercial whaling operations decimated whale populations. To protect the whales and honor their sacred connection with them, the Tribe voluntarily stopped hunting whales in 1928. 

With the loss of this practice went the health benefits. Sea mammal fats are high in n-3 fatty acids that are essential for fighting cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes, as well as having many other health benefits. 

“We’ve seen a growing epidemic of lifestyle disease among our communities such as Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disease, a rise in obesity in our communities—not just in adults, but in youth as well,” explains (Tseshaht/Nuu-chah-nulth), Ph.D., a professor in the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington. 

The Makah are hardly the only tribe to suffer this way; the destruction of traditional foods, most notably the buffalo, was part of a continent-wide effort to eradicate Indigenous peoples. Boarding and residential schools took traditional Native foods away from children and replaced them with highly processed foods. This weakened the cultural connections the people felt and opened the door to health problems.

Even when the Tribe wasn’t whaling, the spiritual connection between the Makah and the whale spirits was kept alive in the form of sacred whaling songs. â€œChiefs obtained their whaling songs through a connection with whale spirits that they encountered in dreams or during a whale hunt,” writes CotĂŠ in her book .

These songs reinforced the connection between the chiefs and the whales they hunted. The songs are sacred property that belong to the chiefs and their people. They are more than simple tunes or even prayers. They are an auditory manifestation of the sacred relationship between the Makah and the gray whales. 

And these songs were practiced for the decades when hunting itself was not. 

To Revive a Tradition

The Makah’s treaty-guaranteed right to whale was last officially invoked 25 years ago. It was prompted by the 1994 removal of the eastern North Pacific gray whale from the federal list of endangered wildlife.

Makah member Theron Parker and a whaling crew prepared for months, not just physically but spiritually, by praying and performing sacred rituals at secret locations on the reservation. Hunting a 30- to 33-foot giant of the sea, with eight men in a wooden canoe, requires spiritual as well as physical strength.

On May 17, 1999, Parker heaved a harpoon into the back of the first gray whale his Tribe had hunted in more than 70 years.

After a second harpoon strike, the whale’s suffering was ended with a shot from a high-powered rifle fired from a support boat. Without this, a whale’s death could last hours. Parker, who is a descendant of a great Makah whaling family, then led the eight-man crew of the whaling canoe Hummingbird in a song releasing the whale’s spirit back to the sea.

When they towed the whale to shore, they were met by hundreds of Makah and their supporters. Polly Debari, Parker’s partner at the time, joined the procession of whalers making its way through the jubilant crowd.

Debari was as much a part of the whaling crew as the rest of them. She and several other young women of the Tribe performed the vital task of observing a sacred ritual during the hunt. In 2019, Debari submitted a for Makah whaling to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in which she described the ritual: “Generally speaking,” she writes, “my role was to lay still while Theron was out whaling. In this way I was ‘becoming the whale’ according to our tradition.”

This blending of identities through ritual and prayer guided the whale to the whaling crew. Video from a news helicopter shows the magnificent giant gliding to the left just under the Makah canoe’s bow when Parker hurls the harpoon. The Makah believe the whale gave herself to the Tribe.

Debari was then free to move as the creature she had spiritually merged with was brought ashore. The community worked together, pulling the massive beast onto their land. The whale was butchered and its meat and blubber were served to the Tribe and its guests at a massive feast.

The Tribe’s most recent hunt was a celebrated revival of tradition for the Tribe.

“It reinvigorated the purpose of our culture,” Micah McCarty, a former chair of the Makah Tribe and speaker at a recent , which was co-founded by Coté, says. “In doing so, it’s inspired a lot of people to be involved in [our] culture.”

McCarty, who is the great grandson of Chief Hiškʷi·sa·na·kši·ł or Hishka, one of the last great hereditary chiefs of the Makah, notes how youth of the Tribe became inspired by the resurgence of interest in their people’s whaling tradition. The skeleton of the gray whale harvested in 1999 is now housed in the Tribe’s museum.

“We have younger generations now that are leading the Makah Days songs and dances,” he explains. “The last generation that once led that are now sitting back and watching the fruits of their success in grooming succession.”

A lot of that success relates to food sovereignty for the Makah. â€œFood sovereignty embodies that real, deep spiritual appreciation for food as a sacred gift,” CotĂŠ says. “At its most basic, it is really reinforcing those sacred relationships that we have to our world, including the plants and animals that give themselves to us as food. This is why the recent waiver for the Makah is very, very important, because it really is around food sovereignty that the Makah regain the right to access a very healthy food.”

The Harassment by Animal Rights Groups

Despite the health and cultural benefits garnered by the whale hunt in 1999, the practice was soon stifled once again. 

Members of animal rights groups, including Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, harassed the Makah community and the whaling crews and even made death threats to tribal officials.

“Save the whales, kill a Makah” read signs at an anti-Makah whaling rally on the day of the 1999 hunt. McCarty, who has become a prolific Makah artist, points out how this attitude is both racist and un-American.

“We don’t impose our spirituality on other people,” McCarty states. “We’re not evangelists. It’s an American value to have a freedom of religion and a freedom of who we are. It’s inherently un-American to be anti–Makah whaling.”

On the second day of my visit to Neah Bay, I stroll along Bayview Avenue perusing the stalls that sell Native artwork and baked salmon, another Native food whose right to harvest is guaranteed to all Washington tribes by treaty. People smile and say “Happy Makah Days” as they pass.

Before long, the Makah Days parade begins. Men in military uniforms at the head of the procession carry flagpoles with Makah and American flags waving. No anti-American sentiment is evident. Many of the Tribe’s elders served in the military and some fought in foreign wars. They are proud to be American and proud to be Makah. 

Still, in 2002, the bowed to pressure from animal rights groups and revoked the Tribe’s authorization to whale, demanding a new environmental impact study be performed. And so, despite the Tribe’s treaty-guaranteed right to hunt whales, they refrained while the studies were performed and decisions were made. 

Two and a half decades after the 1999 hunt, NOAA’s environmental impact study shows that Makah harvests would have no significant impact on the population of gray whales. And so in June 2024, after decades of Tribal advocacy, NOAA granted the Makah Tribe’s request for a waiver from the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The Tribe can now harvest, on average, two to three eastern North Pacific gray whales per year, up to 25 total, over the next 10 years. 

The Tribe Calls the Whales Back

On Saturday night, my friends and I go to the Makah Community Gym to witness sacred Makah dancing and the singing of sacred whaling songs. The bleachers are packed. The floor slowly fills with more than 200 Makah members in beautiful handmade regalia, many featuring images of the giant deity Thunderbird carrying a whale to the Makah people. 

According to oral tradition, Thunderbird saw the Makah people were starving one winter and captured a whale to feed them. Saved from death by a sacred gift from the deity and by the whale’s sacrifice, the Makah honor all gray whales. 

On the gym floor, each member holds a hand-painted canoe paddle that they use to mimic pulling a canoe through the sea that defines their people. When the song ends, the dancers all hold their paddles straight up. This is traditionally done when a canoe skipper calls “Paddles up!” to his or her canoe family as they approach a Native village. A Native canoe must wait until the leaders in the village call them to shore before they can land. 

In much the same way, the Makah waited more than 70 years before the conditions returned for them to resume whaling. Then they waited another 25 years after animal rights groups challenged that treaty-protected right. Finally, this past June, NOAA finally cleared the way.

The Makah wait now only for the migrating gray whales to return.

But at in September 2024, Molly, one of the organizers, reminded the crowd that the naked bike ride wasn’t just a spectacle: The event was originally started in the early 2000s as a protest against fossil fuel companies. 

Molly, who asked to use her first name only for privacy, spoke about how oil and gas companies aren’t just worsening climate change and polluting the air in . In 2024, after nearly a year of watching Israel drop U.S.-made bombs on civilians in Gaza, she highlighted that at least one oil and gas company is also fueling the genocide in Palestine. 

“The community had been quiet about issues like Palestine,” Molly says. “But it isn’t a faraway place. It ties back to everything you care about.”  

, including to prisons and military facilities that are crucial to Israeli occupation and in the West Bank. According to news reports, in the eastern Mediterranean Sea can be seen from the Gaza Strip. 

Yet the Israeli government decides if and when Palestinians can access any of that energy. That led the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement (BDS) to of Chevron’s products. The movement is calling for consumers around the world to stop buying the fuel Chevron sells at gas stations, as well as its automotive coolants and engine oil. In addition, they’re calling for banks, pension funds, local governments, and other institutions to divest from the company’s stocks. 

“I think for a lot of people, it was the first time they’d heard about this, and it felt like a really important moment of connecting the dots,” Molly says. 

In the six months since that event, Molly and other organizers have continued to mobilize dozens of Portland’s bike enthusiasts to protest—fully clothed, and usually in the pouring rain—at local Chevron stations. for local organizers focuses on educational components for customers. When it comes to gas stations themselves, many gas station owners are typically locked into 25- to 30-year contracts with Chevron. So the toolkit calls for organizers to ask gas station owners to display anti-occupation flyers in their stores, or to sign letters to Chevron demanding that the company end its Israeli operations. 

The Portland protests have allowed people to realize that their individual actions can create collective pressure, said Hami, another organizer of the bike protests, who is only using their first name due to safety concerns. “When we talk about mobility freedom, there’s nothing as stark as seeing how hindered Palestinians’ mobility has been since 1948.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

A Playbook From Apartheid

The BDS movement’s campaign against Chevron was inspired by a similar movement to pressure Royal Dutch Shell and BP to end their operations in apartheid South Africa, said Olivia Katbi, the co-chair of the U.S. BDS campaign. Shell and BP jointly owned the country’s largest oil refinery, much like Chevron currently operates . 

Under apartheid in South Africa, Black communities were denied access to electricity and running water. “They were relegated to impoverished homes far from urban centers,” says , a 20th-century historian and fellow at Yale. “Black South Africans accounted for 85 to 90% of the population on 13% of the land.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

The country’s main power company, Eskom, maintained as anti-apartheid activists sabotaged its power lines and stations. After South African workers went on strike following the death of a worker at the company’s coal mine—and were met with private security firing tear gas and rubber bullets—American labor unions supported . 

“When you’re looking at oil companies, and at the South African military and police, anti-apartheid activists were able to make those connections, and in my research, that is what made the case for divestment successful,” Webb says. “It was consistently showing Americans and concerned citizens globally that companies were not just profiting off of apartheid, but were allowing the regime to conduct its violent attacks on Black South Africans.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Today, the parallels to Palestine are stark. “Israel is pillaging these resources that belong to Palestinians—because it is Palestinian land that Israel is occupying,” Katbi says. “And then they are selling it back to them in a really unfair way.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

After its 1967 occupation, Israel took over the existing power infrastructure in Palestine. The Israel Electric Corporation (IEC), which purchases most of its power from Chevron, has banned some Palestinian villages in the West Bank from connecting to the grid for more than 70 years. Other villages are charged different, variable rates and receive substandard service compared to nearby Jewish settlements, according to the . 

In Palestinian villages that Israel has refused to connect to the grid, the Israeli military has even . In Gaza, where Israel has imposed a siege since 2007, the military destroyed the area’s only power plant—making the IEC its sole source of electricity. And in the ongoing war since Oct. 7, 2023, Israel completely . 

In December, Human Rights Watch said that this amounted to “,” particularly as the lack of power meant that there was virtually no clean water for millions of civilians once the Strip’s desalination plants were cut off from power. Gazans rely on treated seawater or brackish groundwater, or on water pipelines that Israel can shut off on a whim. In March, UNICEF estimated that 90% of Gazans—some —may not have access to clean water as Israel continues to cut power and from entering Gaza.

Climate organizations, like Oil Change International and some local chapters of Sunrise and 350, have supported the boycott and divestment campaigns, highlighting Chevron’s broader history of environmental catastrophes. “We’re not really inventing something new,” Katbi says. “BDS is most impactful when it’s taken as a collective action.”

And she said the campaign is winnable: There are plenty of alternative gas stations for consumers to fill their gas tanks. And perhaps more importantly, over the past year, making investments in the country . 

That means, in addition to the consumer boycott, the movement will continue to put pressure on institutions, governments, and other organizations to stop working with, investing in, or taking money from Chevron. 

So far, three U.S. cities have divested from Chevron and other companies profiting off of Israeli apartheid: ; ; and . In February, the City Council of Portland, Oregon, announced it would drop the company’s sponsorship from , a nonprofit civic organization. 

“These sponsorships reach the general public in ways that Palestine activism does not—state fairs, sports teams, community events,” Katbi says. Chevron’s name is featured on , for example. “We are mapping those out and trying to get campaigns around this to not only impact [Chevron’s] bottom line, but make them a pariah in our community spaces.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Hitting the Headquarters

In Houston, Chevron is something of a household name. The company has had a presence in the city for a century and has nearly there. In 2024, the company moved its headquarters to Houston. 

Last year, the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter started a campaign to get the Houston Marathon’s board to drop Chevron as its main sponsor—a title the company has held for 13 years. 

“The majority of the money the marathon makes is from the runners—the people who are making it happen,” said AJ Holmes, an organizer with the Houston DSA. “It’s really hypocritical to plaster Chevron’s image on this event. Personally, my family has run in the marathon before, and I grew up thinking this was totally normal. It’s like it’s in the air that we breathe, literally.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

The campaign has had conversations with local running clubs and the marathon’s staffers, educating people about the connections between Chevron and Israeli apartheid. They’re making clear what it means to be in the “belly of the beast of imperialism,” Holmes said, thinking more broadly about Houston’s role in the fossil fuel industry. 

Despite collaborating with groups like the Sunrise Movement and the Palestine Youth Movement, the campaign was ultimately unsuccessful: The Houston Marathon renewed Chevron’s sponsorship contract for five more years. 

Still, the work will continue: Activists will keep pressuring the Houston Marathon to cancel the new contract, Holmes said, and they will focus on Chevron’s other activities, like its sponsorship of the local . Organizers are gearing up for major ahead of CERAWeek, a that convenes the CEOs of the world’s largest oil and gas companies in Houston annually.

“They spend a lot of money on these events, trying to make themselves seem more progressive or palatable,” Holmes says. “Our goal is to make sure that doesn’t work, and that all their propaganda money isn’t useful.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Actions included “donating to a cause” or “calling your senator.” found comfort in texting photos of “someone floating in the ocean” to friends, or “twice-daily meditation.” suggested “Try to be everything that Trump is not: compassionate, honest, calm and decent,” and that such efforts might charm Trump “into doing the right thing.” This was not a joke. 

While this advice might reduce stress, it isn’t much help fighting a dictator. We can’t claim Trump is a fascist hell-bent on rolling back 20th-century progress and then respond to an enraged MAGA cultist by, as , placating them with empathetic sentiments like “I’ve felt that way sometimes, too.”

Playing nice ain’t going to cut it with people who want to kill you and your community. We need principles that build power now and for the long term. 

After Trump was elected in 2016, I helped found the . Our strategy was to build municipal power to fight Trump while shifting local politics to the left. We attracted a lot of interest because we were among the few independent multi-issue groups seeking to build grassroots power. Eight years later, the PMPC is still going strong.

Here are the organizing lessons I learned from the PMPC and from movements for worker organizing, immigrant rights, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, climate justice, Palestine solidarity, and abortion rights. These lessons may serve us well under Trump 2.0.

1. Tap people on the shoulder.

After years reporting on politics in Portland, I found the organizing scene to be rife with divisive social-media personalities who attack organizations around race, gender, and identity to gain attention, money, and clout. Because of this, the PMPC never opened our meetings to the public. Instead, we chose to “tap people on the shoulder” by recruiting organizers who were doing real work and had a solid reputation. This undercut outside attempts by provocateurs seeking to disrupt the work.

2. Play well together.

We also picked people who play well together. It’s not enough to have good politics or say the right things. Can they collaborate without being dominating or domineering? Are they self-centered, quick to anger, or prone to attack others? Do they seek compromise to advance our principles and vision? Do they do the grunt work or do they just want all the glory? Asking such questions helped keep us on track and get things done.

3. People with lots of time will waste your time. 

In my experience, an activist who has lots of time often lacks community, which may mean they alienate others or can’t work in a group. I have noticed such people often want to debate and discuss everything, including re-opening decisions that have already been made. Resist the temptation to organize everyone. If someone is a drain on your efforts, don’t let them guilt trip you into letting them in your group. 

They will sap energy, chase away existing members, and might be more effective as lone activists. Many effective activists who work alone are tenacious around issues like housing, police brutality, and climate change, and can make great allies but may not be cut out for group activism.

4. Build community.

People say this all the time, but what does it mean, in practice, to build community? We need to play together, create music and art together, cook and eat together, live and love together. Creating strong, layered bonds among individuals, groups, and communities helps us withstand state, corporate, and police repression. You are far likelier to have someone’s back who has been a close comrade for years than a stranger you met yesterday. 

A caveat: Be aware some people use group settings to act out issues about their upbringing, past trauma, or ex-lovers. They may be overly needy, try to turn meetings into therapy sessions, or demand constant emotional labor. We should take care of each other—but no one has a right to make you their caretaker. 

5. Build capital.

Activists are often told to “build sustainable structures.” Here’s an idea related to the previous suggestion, but is rarely spelled out: “Build capital.” Money is not a cure-all, but it can help tremendously. Many progressive public spaces are the result of an individual or group’s foresight to buy real estate years ago. One lefty magazine I know is funded largely out-of-pocket by the publisher. Another progressive news show received millions of dollars from a foundation bankrolled by Wall Street money. 

The left has unfortunately become puritanical about money. Groups like the Communist Party historically encouraged members to start businesses, make money, and give it to the party. 

This is a different strategy than starting worker-owned businesses or co-ops, which have their place in the organizing world. It is also not a form of charity. Instead, the strategy is to fund radical leftist organizing rather than delivering social services.

6. Don’t just mobilize. Organize.

Many activists confuse mobilizing with organizing. Mobilizing is turning out people who agree with you, such as Get Out the Vote efforts for a candidate or asking friends to join a protest. Organizing means changing minds. The latter is harder, but the impact is far more significant and long lasting. We need to win people over to our side, and that means changing their consciousness.

I have interviewed thousands of people across the country, and with rare exceptions, their politics were a mess of left- and right-wing ideas, conspiracies, and falsehoods. People want to be heard—so actively listen to them, don’t lecture or berate them. Find a genuine point of agreement, steer the conversation in that direction, and build on it. Make them feel good about themselves and the idea that together we can make positive change—and you might just win them to your cause.

7. Be ruthless.

The right understands minority movements can win if they are disciplined, single minded, and ruthless. Look at the anti-abortion movement, which never stopped trying to overturn Roe. v Wade and eventually succeeded in doing so. Despite extraordinarily low support, anti-abortion extremists are moving closer to a total ban on abortion in places such as Texas, where only . 

We don’t need everyone to agree with us if we build power and use it ruthlessly. Right now we have a president breaking the law to enact his thieving, white-nationalist, authoritarian agenda. Wouldn’t it be nice to see a president breaking norms instead to enact Medicare for all, oversee a just green transition, or protect immigrants?

8. If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.

The Democratic Party is a cautionary tale on what happens if you compromise your principles. Last year, many people, , warned that Kamala Harris’s would cost her the 2024 presidential election. showed Gaza dragged her support down. By not opposing genocide—the worst political act possible—liberals got the worst of both worlds: a genocide that went on for 15 months and Trump. Or, as explained: “If you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

As if on cue, Democrats exposed their ideological bankruptcy following Trump’s inauguration. has repeatedly lamented that Democrats have no leverage. In March, outright surrendered by endorsing a government spending bill that hands Trump and Musk a “blank check” for their “authoritarian agenda,” according to . 

In contrast, the movement opposing genocide was a master class in how to wield power. Muslim and Palestinian Americans led the campaign to until she agreed to end the genocide. Two days before the election Harris said she would “do everything in my power to ,” though it was too little too late. 

We build power by sticking to our principles and forcing Democrats to fulfill our demands instead of surrendering to a party that embraces war and Wall Street just as much as the GOP.

9. Democracy is overrated.

Many people who flock to dynamic movements are happy to do data entry, send emails, clean, and run errands—the small tasks that help organizing happen. Not everyone needs or wants to be a part of democratic decision-making within organizations. Horizontalism sounds nice, but over many years of reporting on protests, I have seen it repeatedly decay in the hands of the least competent and most intransigent individuals. 

I reported on Occupy Wall Street from New York City to Los Angeles, and I sat in on meetings that would meander for hours, debate pie-in-the-sky ideas like boycotting the internet for a month, or argue over where to place recycling bins. After such experiences, many activists never returned to the camps. There is nothing wrong with hierarchy or authority as long as it is earned, transparent, and accountable. Set the rules and practices for your organization, and people who don’t agree are welcome to start their own project. Not everything needs to be voted on. Not everyone needs to agree.

10. Act globally, think locally.

Knowing what to do often starts with knowing what not to do. For example, don’t give into suggestions to focus only on a single issue or local organizing. Trump is trying to deport pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil precisely to that can be used against all of us. 

Khalil’s case is at the intersection of multiple issues: brutal colonialism, free speech, Palestinian rights, campus activism, and immigration. Our struggles are inseparable. They also happen on a national and global terrain. If we focus only on local issues, then the right can pull the rug out from under us the way they have with “” to prevent progressive cities from passing rent control or higher minimum-wage laws in red states. It’s the same with single-issue movements. If we don’t have other people’s backs, then who will have ours when the fascists come for us?Ěý

“We saw, finally, after about a year and a half of genocide, a ceasefire was reached, which was a relief in many respects and a reflection of the might of the movement,” says Sumaya Awad, director of strategy at the (AJP). 

“Still,” adds Awad, “it’s not a sigh-of-relief-and-sit-down situation. This is when the work really begins, because what existed pre-ceasefire was oppression, occupation, and violence, and that’s not what we want to go back to. And certainly, we owe the people of Gaza so much more than that.”

Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire arrangement before President Joe Biden left office. The first of three phases of that agreement mandated a temporary ceasefire, which took effect on Jan. 19, 2025, and concluded on Mar. 1, 2025. As part of the second phase, Israel was supposed to accept a permanent ceasefire, but that did not take effect as the Israeli government sought to . 

Rather than abiding by the terms of the three-phase arrangement, Israel has and supplies into Gaza since Mar. 2, 2025, worsening the humanitarian crisis and and the in . 

Gaza’s population is in desperate need of food, , and other vital supplies. At least have been displaced since Israel invaded in October 2023. More than was at crisis level of acute food insecurity or worse in December 2024, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification. Even after aid increased following the ceasefire agreement in late January 2025, the United Nations Children’s Fund found in mid-February that 90 percent of children under the age of 2 and 95 percent of pregnant and breastfeeding people in Gaza continued to face “.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Since the ceasefire agreement, Israel has also on Palestinians in the West Bank. Israeli forces have and expelled an estimated from their homes in the West Bank since late January 2025, as Israeli lawmakers more territories in the area .

Meanwhile, since his inauguration, Trump has continued the U.S.’s long-standing policy of cozying up to Israel and funding its occupation and attacks on Palestinians. The new administration has already approved about $12 billion in major foreign military sales to Israel, including an emergency authorization that . This support adds to the more than 100 to Israel, amounting to tens of billions of dollars since October 2023. 

Trump has also set out to capitalize on the genocide in Gaza, aiming to extract profits from cleanup and reconstruction efforts, which are expected to cost over the next decade. At a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Feb. 4, 2025, Trump to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the enclave, assume U.S. ownership of the territory, and redevelop it as the “.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

While Trump and his allies attempt to shift the conversation about colonization and genocide in Gaza toward one about a profitable redevelopment, organizers in the U.S. remain committed to demands for Palestinian liberation and sovereignty. “Palestinians should be rebuilding Gaza and no one else—not outside contractors, certainly not the U.S., not foreign NGOs with their own agendas, and obviously not Israel,” says Awad.

For Stefanie Fox, executive director of , efforts by those in power to build a narrative obscuring violence against Palestinians are nothing new. Since Israel invaded Gaza in October 2023, American lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and much of the mainstream media have weaponized a dangerous conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism to obscure Israel’s atrocities and condemn anti-war protestors. JVP has been at the forefront of battling claims that criticism of Israel is antisemitic, including through organized campaigns to stop policymakers, news agencies, and schools from working with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a U.S.-based Zionist nonprofit organization. 

“The ADL uses this banner of so-called Jewish safety to protect Israeli apartheid and genocide and even right-wing antisemites in [the U.S.],” explains Fox. “[The organization] spent the last year lambasting students, including Jewish students, who are protesting genocide as antisemites, yet it has nothing to say about the coming from the inaugural stage or MAGA forces that are the source of actual antisemitism endangering Jewish safety right now.”

JVP also organizes against the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticisms of Israel or Zionism with antisemitism, in legislation and at public institutions, . This work includes a campaign against to use the IHRA definition to enforce federal anti-discrimination laws. Fox says these ongoing fights are crucial “to ensure that false accusations of antisemitism can’t be used to pit our communities against each other and defend war crimes.”

Referencing the narrative of ethnic cleansing as redevelopment coming from the Oval Office now, Fox says, “We will keep fighting, and we won’t be confused that just because the genocide is being rebranded, that it has stopped.”

The Trump administration also presents to those organizing in the U.S. against attacks on Palestine. On Jan. 29, 2025, Trump issued that the White House would use “ to marshall all Federal resources to combat the explosion of anti-Semitism on our campuses and in our streets since Oct. 7, 2023.”

Adam Michaels, a graduate student worker at City University of New York (CUNY) and an organizer with CUNY for Palestine, who requested a pseudonym to protect them from retaliation, says those in the student movement remain resolute. Student-led , including one on , helped bring attention to the genocide in Gaza last year, put significant pressure on lawmakers to take action on the issue, and won some concessions from the universities. Now, Michaels says, “There’s definitely a fear of the kind of chilling effect of Trump,” who has on the pro-Palestine movement and student protestors. Following the and , a Palestinian lawful permanent resident of the U.S., on Mar. 8, 2025, Trump took to social media to promise that Khalil’s eventual deportation would be “.” Khalil was unlawfully targeted by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement because he helped lead negotiations between the Columbia University student encampment and administrators last year.Ěý

“These kinds of threats have been hung over Palestine organizers for so long—the Biden administration —so I think people are like, ‘We’ll deal with it as it comes,’” says Michael. Khalil’s detention has already and drawn condemnation from rights groups, including the . On Mar. 11, 2025, a federal judge , allowing time to review a petition challenging Khalil’s arrest.

Fox emphasizes the need to persist, saying, “We’re clear on the fact that we’re not going to cede an inch before it’s taken and that we will remain in struggle, and that includes being in mobilization, in the streets, and in protest, and that defiance is going to be essential.”

Beyond campaigns to combat weaponized narratives and commitments to continue mass mobilization, those in the Palestine solidarity movement in the U.S. are also forging ahead with divestment campaigns, which began to gain steam last year. Nationwide, workers have begun . Many student groups are making the same demands of their universities, while other campaigns target municipal or state funds. 

As part of this work, JVP leads an initiative called , which seeds and supports local efforts to demand divestment from . “Economic pressure campaigns have shifted seemingly immovable political conditions time and again from apartheid South Africa to the Jim Crow South,” says Fox. “It has never been clearer that it’s time to escalate those campaigns for Palestine right now.”

Meanwhile, AJP also has a new tool for organizers to support economic and social pressure campaigns: . This research initiative offers a dataset with more than 500 entries, showing board members and executives at major weapons companies who also serve in administrative or advisory roles at educational and cultural institutions nationwide, including the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and . It gives organizers a roster of secondary targets who could be pressured to drop partnerships with weapons companies and their executives due to the threat of lost prestige or legitimacy, whereas putting social pressure on a weapons manufacturer is less likely to be effective. 

Going forward, organizers working toward Palestinian liberation agree that coalition building will be vital. Awad sees not only opportunities to build solidarity between the Palestinian liberation movement and the immigrant rights movement but also a duty to do so. “There is a deep connection between the Palestinian struggle and the immigrant rights struggle,” she says. “We [need to] show up for them in the way that they’ve shown up for us in a way that can tie our struggles together.” Indeed, Khalil’s case ties immigration to Palestine issues in a concrete way. 

Michaels sees similar opportunities to build solidarity within the labor movement. “Union work is crucial here,” says Michaels, who is also a member of the (PSC), a union representing faculty and professional staff at CUNY. “People are thinking about, ‘How do I bring the struggle to my institution?’ Well, taking back grassroots control of unions and using that to organize with Palestinians.”

The 10 national unions of the have made organizing for a permanent ceasefire and an arms embargo part of their day-to-day union work. Together, those labor organizations represent more than 10 million workers nationwide. Many more unions are also pursuing , including the PSC.

Fox says building solidarity is also key to defending democracy under the second Trump administration. “The right is going to attempt to really take down the movement for Palestinian rights and freedom, both because they want to go after this really powerful social movement that’s risen in the last year and a half and also because they’re trying to sharpen tools they’ll use on all of our movements and communities,” she says. “We need to see that our struggles for safety, freedom, and justice are all inextricably linked.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 2:02 p.m. PT on March 31, 2025, to anonymize a source. Read our corrections policy here.

Founders like KimberlĂŠ Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Stephanie Phillips, and Teri Miller also grappled with this question as they kicked around terms and concepts in 1989 discussing what exactly unified their nascent group. What is CRT?

When Derrick Bell was asked to define CRT, he had a few things to say:

Definition 1: Critical race theory . . . is a new approach to legal theory pioneered by minority scholars. Practitioners, often through the device of either true stories or personal anecdotes or fictional tales, discuss the many ways in which race and law affect each other. 

Definition 2: Practitioners, often through storytelling and a more subjective, personal voice, examine the ways in which the law has been shaped by and shapes issues of race.

Definition 3: I rather think that this writing is the response to a need for expressing views that cannot be communicated effectively through existing techniques. In my case, I prefer using stories as a means of communicating views to those who hold very different views on the emotionally charged subject of race. 

Woven throughout Bell’s discussions of CRT is his insistence on centering the experiences and unique voices of people of color and communicating these experiences through the method of story. He emphasized “story” to his fellow race-crits.

We are living in a momentous time. As the global order slips toward authoritarianism, racial retrenchment is on the rise. Global economic shifts and growing wealth disparities are combining with the climate crisis to create renewed conditions for the exploitation of labor and the unjust distribution of resources. Laws and policies are being altered, modified, and reinterpreted to benefit those classes long invested in building a world that suits their interests. The faces at the bottom of the well, those communities consigned to poverty and degradation, are at ever greater risk of racialized dehumanization and violence.

It is no mistake that CRT—one of the most incisive and forward-thinking tools for critical inquiry and societal interpretation developed in the United States—is now coming under attack. As Bell observed in 1995, “At a time of crisis, critics serve as reminders that we are being heard, if not always appreciated.”

The power of CRT is in stories—stories that humanize data, that communicate truths. Although CRT has recently again come under attack, even those of us committed to its tenets and frameworks should not forget that the call is not primarily to defend CRT. Good tools are worth defending because of the good they can do for the sake of the world. When it comes to the storytelling heart of CRT, the point is to effectively humanize data to promote justice, to promote the flourishing of human communities.

Bell said that the perspectives communicated through CRT “are shaped by having lived our whole lives thinking about and experiencing issues of race—perspectives that, until now, have been ignored by the legal establishment.” That establishment is an extension of society as a whole. Storytelling—as a critical method—has the power to make those perspectives heard so dominant classes can no longer avoid the responsibility of listening.

We see the power of storytelling as method in Patricia Williams’ longstanding cultivation of her narrative voice while providing critical legal commentary in . We see it in the work of and the in her recent book, . We see it in the continued work of and Charles Lawrence, producing art exhibits that recover the parallel life stories of women who have fought for Hawaiian sovereignty and reparations.

We see it in the ongoing critical writing of and , still producing cutting-edge work challenging the boundaries of CRT itself while generously mentoring the next generation of scholar-activists. We see it in the work of , who since Derrick Bell’s death in 2011 has been the primary torchbearer of his legacy while producing her own projects celebrating the voice and witness of African American women.

Stories, by their very nature, are more accessible than more traditional academic modes of writing. They also more effectively communicate, as Bell said, with “those who hold very different views on the emotionally charged subject of race.” Stories demonstrate the power of CRT because they illuminate the power of human connection and empathetic concern at the heart of CRT.

This excerpt, adapted from by Aja Y. Martinez and Robert O. Smith (NYU Press, 2025), appears by permission of the publisher.

No Other Land chronicles the efforts of Palestinian townspeople to combat an Israeli plan to demolish their villages in the West Bank and use the area as a military training ground. It was directed by four Palestinian and Israeli activists and journalists: , who is a resident of the area facing demolition, , Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor. While the filmmakers  in a number of U.S. cities, the lack of a national distributor makes a broader release unlikely.

Film distributors are a crucial but often unseen link in the chain that allows a film to reach cinemas and people’s living rooms. In recent years, it has become more common for controversial award-winning films . Palestinian films have encountered additional barriers.

 who has written about Palestinian cinema, I’m disheartened by the difficulties No Other Land has faced. But I’m not surprised.

The Role of Film Distributors

Distributors are often invisible to moviegoers. , it can be difficult for a film to find an audience. Distributors typically acquire rights to a film for a specific country or set of countries. They then , cinema chains, and streaming platforms. As compensation, distributors receive a percentage of the revenue generated by theatrical and home releases.

The film , another finalist for best documentary, shows how this process typically works. It premiered at the  in January 2024 and was acquired for distribution just a few months later by , a major U.S.-based distributor of independent films.

The inability to find a distributor is not itself noteworthy. No film is entitled to distribution, and most films by newer or unknown directors face long odds. However, it is unusual for a film like No Other Land,Ěýwhich has and has been recognizedĚýat various film festivals and award shows.ĚýNo Other LandĚý, where it’s easily accessible on multiple streaming platforms. So why can’t No Other Land find a distributor in the U.S.? There are a couple of factors at play.

Shying Away From Controversy

In recent years, film critics have noticed a trend: Documentaries on controversial topics . These include to unionize and , one of the few Republican congresspeople to vote to impeach Donald Trump in 2021.

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict, of course, has long stirred controversy. But the release of No Other Land comes at a time when the issue is particularly salient. The Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing Israeli bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip have become a polarizing issue in U.S. domestic politics, reflected in the campus protests and crackdowns in 2024. The filmmakers’ critical comments about the Israeli occupation of Palestine have also  in Germany.

Yet the fact that this conflict has been in the news since October 2023 should also heighten audience interest in a film such as No Other Land—and, therefore, lead to increased sales, the metric that distributors care about the most.

Indeed, an earlier film that also documents Palestinian protests against Israeli land expropriation, , was a finalist for best documentary at the 2013 Academy Awards. It was able to find a U.S. distributor. However, it had the support of a major European Union documentary development program . The support of an organization like Greenhouse, which had ties to numerous production and distribution companies in Europe and the U.S., can facilitate the process of finding a distributor.

By contrast, No Other Land, although it has  and received some funding from organizations in Europe and the U.S., was made primarily by a grassroots filmmaking collective.

Stages for Protest

While distribution challenges may be recent, controversies surrounding Palestinian films are nothing new. Many of them stem from the fact that the system of film festivals, awards, and distribution is primarily based on a movie’s nation of origin. Since there is no sovereign Palestinian state—and many countries and organizations â€”the question of how to categorize Palestinian films has been hard to resolve.

In 2002, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences  submitted to the best foreign language film category——because Palestine was not recognized as a country by the United Nations. The rules were changed for the following year’s awards ceremony.

In 2021, the cast of the film , which had an Israeli director but primarily Palestinian actors,  in protest of the film’s categorization as an Israeli film rather than a Palestinian one.

Film festivals and other cultural venues have also become places to  and . For example, at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017, the right-wing Israeli culture minister â€”a˛Ôťĺ&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;—dress that featured the Jerusalem skyline in support of Israeli claims of sovereignty over the holy city, despite under international law.

At theĚý, a number of attendees, including Billie Eilish, Mark Ruffalo, and Mahershala Ali, wore red pins in support of a ceasefire in Gaza, and pro-Palestine protesters delayed the start of the ceremonies. As he accepted his award at the 2025 Academy Awards, No Other Land Ěý“the foreign policy” of the U.S. for “helping to block” a path to peace. Even though a film like No Other Land addresses a topic of clear interest to many Americans, I wonder if the quest to find a U.S. distributor just got even harder.

This article is republished fromĚýĚýunder a Creative Commons license. .