Image Credit: @songsuffragetteslondon

Greetings Resisters!

We lost a legend this week in Dolly Parton. The day after her passing, I used her words as my quote of the day in the GED class I teach, and everybody had a Dolly Parton connection to share. It’s hard not to admire the way she brought people together. And she was not only kind–she was righteous. As Rebecca Solnit wrote, “She had a way of treating social justice like down-home common sense.” If only we could all do that more often.

This week we honor Dolly by bringing you a more action-oriented roundup. Specifically, we’ll be talking about election protection and ways we can all step up just a little more to safeguard our democracy.

[A quick housekeeping note: We will be taking next week off for Labor Day weekend. In the meantime, don’t forget to submit your “Dear Minty” activism advice questions via this form.]

The Why and the What of Election Protection

Shenanigans. Overstepping. Foul play. Bullshit. Fuckery. No matter what you call it, we know Trump is going to try to pull it in the next election. While he is most certainly erratic, he is not unpredictable. Trump does not like to lose, and he does not care about the rules.

Though unlikely to impact the midterms, the Supreme Court’s decision this week about absentee voting highlighted how little the judicial branch will do to check Trump. For more on why we don’t need to panic about this decision, see this post from Robert Hubbell. But even if this particular case of interference will not play out, there will likely be more to come.

Decisions like these may be dispiriting, but we are not without tools in our arsenal. Right here in New York, organizers are coming together to focus on election protection through the Hands Off NYC coalition. They are gaming out multiple scenarios to leverage the power we do have here to protect democracy this fall.

What then must we do?

Before offering some concrete actions we can take to protect our votes, it’s worth naming specifically what sort of “fuckery” (our term of choice) we are worried about. This is not a comprehensive list, but gives you a sense of what we may be up against.

Shake voter confidence with disinformation: Ever since 2020, Trump has propagated the notion that our elections can be, and have been, stolen (“The Big Lie”), and that our voter rolls are filled with ineligible voters. Heading into the midterms, he has warned his followers that the Democrats will cheat to win, and we can anticipate that this message will only get louder as he gets more desperate.

Image Credit: @shinanov on Instagram

Restrict access: Through the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, and subsequent gerrymandering of Democratic and especially Black majority districts, the Trump administration has sought to suppress the Democratic vote. They have also purged voter rolls in blue areas, leaving voters to discover on Election Day that they are no longer registered. Then, of course, there are their ongoing attempts to restrict mail-in voting, and their attempts to get their hands on states’ voter data in order to enact further purges and inject chaos into the voting process.

Intimidate voters: On Election Day (and in early voting), Trump has threatened to dispatch ICE agents or the National Guard, and is deploying 1,000 “election monitors”, all in the service of making eligible voters fearful of voting if doing so requires facing off with, say, armed, emboldened White Nationalist types.

Challenge results: Remember when Trump made a phone call to the Georgia secretary of state and urged him to “find 11,780 votes”? Remember when he and Republican Party officials in seven battleground states tried to submit fraudulent electoral votes? Remember when he sent a violent squad of rioters to the Capitol to block Congress from finalizing the results of the election? Yeah, that was all really bad. And we’re worried he’ll try to pull off something similar (with far fewer guardrails in place), or, less dramatically, challenge results in court in order to drag out the results.

So…. yeah. YIKES!

Image Credit: Indivisibleteam on Instagram

The good news is, there are people out there who have been thinking about this and devising strategies to protect our vote ever since Trump started his shenanigans the first time around. They are teaming up with Indivisible, Hands Off NYC, and other organizations to spread the word and mobilize as many people as possible to make sure he doesn’t get away with it. But protecting the vote is going to require all of us doing our part. Below are some of the actions they are recommending that we take. (And rest assured, Resisters, you will be hearing lots more about each of these from us in the days ahead!)

Messaging: We need to counter the disinformation and fear-mongering around voting. We can do this by loudly and publicly declaring our plans to vote, by having conversations with people about what’s at stake, and by sharing resources like this Hands Off Our Vote zine. (BKR will be hosting a community event on Sept. 20 precisely for this purpose. Stay tuned for details on how to pitch in!)

Get Out the Vote: Here in NYC, our vote may not feel super high stakes (though, to be clear, we need to vote for Kathy Hochul and keep Trump superfan Bruce Blakeman out of the governor’s seat). But high voter turnout is always a good thing. Plan to vote EARLY (early voting here starts October 24). Invite friends to vote with you; make a party out of it. Reach out to friends and family in parts of the country where voter suppression is most likely to occur (check out this Election Risk Heat Map for info on that) and start a conversation with them—share some of the concerns listed above, tell them to check their registration on a weekly basis, and invite them to mobilize their (Democratic) friends and neighbors to commit to voting early.

Get trained in election defense: Hands Off, Indivisible and others are offering trainings in election defense. This could mean accompanying fearful voters to the polls, acting as a poll monitor, disseminating messaging around voter rights, and crucially, preparing to join mass actions (protests, civil disobedience, strikes) if/when Trump and his enablers attempt to disrupt the election process. You can attend a training as soon as tomorrow or Tuesday, Aug. 29, with Hands Off NYC!

There is so much we can do before, during, and after the elections to protect our vote. But we need to do it in numbers too big to be ignored. So buckle up, find your lane, talk to everyone you know about this crucial test of our democracy, and let’s do this work together!

Image Credit: @InnovationOhio

Amplify this

• Dolly Parton on being true to yourself, and a tribute to Dolly the writer from Tressie Mcmillan Cottom

• Join the Organizing Revival and connect with organizers around the country.

• The author of “The Nerd Reich” discusses Big Tech Fascism on Democracy Now. On a related noted, here’s this from last year: DARK GOTHIC MAGA: How Tech Billionaires Plan to Destroy America

• Why I hate the news, from Antonia Scatton

• This Sunday at the Angelika, attend a Q&A with the director of American Doctor, a powerful film that chronicles three doctors in Gaza

• Looking for another new documentary? Check out You Got to Move: Stories of Change in the South

• How Trump’s War on the Left Will Come for the Center, Jack Crosbie for Rolling Stone

• Here are some tiny analog collages just because

• Support Palestinians in the West Bank with a night of musical performances in Brooklyn

  Subscribe now

• Reminder to American voters

• You can’t win if you don’t fight

And as always,

‘Til Next Time,

Julie, Kate, & the Messaging Team

This week’s question was submitted along with a photograph by Struck Withoutwords

Q: Dear Minty, can you please help me put words to this moment that captures so much and yet I have no words?

Dear Struck,

This is, of course, a trick question. Although I am duly empowered to put names to inchoate emotions (I’m a novelist and a parent), I cannot possibly know how this image makes you in particular feel. But I’d like to take a crack at it!

Statistically, it’s likely that at least one of your parents or grandparents came to this country in search of something better and fleeing something worse. It’s likely they had some reverence for this flag and all it represented to them as a preferable set of promises to whatever they had fled. Some of those things were probably freedom of speech, due process, and the idea that all men are created equal. Whatever they fled was likely traumatizing, and some degree of intergenerational trauma likely runs deep in you as well. You probably grew up with some reverence for the flag of the United States of America; likely felt proud of soft power initiatives like USAID, and likely, as you matured into adulthood, had to grapple seriously with the fact that the American flag is a symbol of terror, colonialism, and domination for many people throughout the world. You may have come to have some doubts in general about whether nation-states make sense at all. You may have come to see that under the cover of that flag, people with power have done some really heinous shit. But there would be no denying that equal rights and due process and freedom of speech are good ideas; no completely straightforward way for you to unwire your association between those ideas and that flag.

Now, if your direct ancestors are among the 9.7 million people who are aboriginal to this landmass, or if you are among the 39ish million people whose ancestors were brought to this landmass in chains, you probably also have an intergenerationally complicated emotional response to this symbol, only, like, much more so.

This brings me to the flag flown upside-down. We learn culturally – by osmosis – in childhood – who knows how? – that the inverted flag is a universal sign of maritime distress. This is a shorthand we can see in cartoons, movies, pictionary games. It is a “truth” that exists in our culture indelibly. You will recall that this symbol was used by the Jan 6 rioters who believed that the 2020 presidential election was stolen; and that Samuel Alito got in trouble for flying his flag union- down as a symbol of national distress and then threw his wife Martha Ann under the bus.

“My wife is fond of flying flags,” he said. “I am not.” (This is irrelevant to your question, except insofar as it feels important to underscore that this is a cultural sign for both left- and right-leaning Americans. I am only including it because I think it’s a really funny thing to say, and I now always associate it with the inverted ensign.)

The exact wording of the flag code states:

§8. Respect for flag

No disrespect should be shown to the flag of the United States of America; the flag should not be dipped to any person or thing. Regimental colors, State flags, and organization or institutional flags are to be dipped as a mark of honor.

(a) The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.

All that said, an inverted national flag is not actually used to signal distress at sea. As you might imagine, the flags of many nations look the same in either orientation. Also, it’s pretty easy to accidentally hoist a flag upside-down. When we imagine international waters, imagine the flag in the context of an international community, it becomes clear that this is not an effective way to signal distress. For the record, the U.S. Coast Guard recommends nineteen ways to signal distress. Flares. Smoke. S.O.S. & cetera. None of them are flying a national ensign upside-down. The actual symbol for distress from the International Code of Signals, and the Merchant Ship Search and Rescue Manual, Volume III, is this:

Hoist that baby high!

So much for flag lore! To get back to your question, we have seen, during this decade+ of trumpism, a steady erosion of equal rights, freedom of speech, and due process. These principles were never universally applied in this country, but they were largely agreed upon by all to be the bedrock – and I think we can all feel that slipping away, and the ol’ stars ‘n’ bars (as we imagine them) receding too. There are babies in cages; thugs shooting citizens on the streets; Haitians in Ohio wearing actual balls and chains; illegal wars of aggression in Venezuela and Iran, and some United Fruit company bullshit happening with Greenland. It’s really fucking scary. In 74 days, there will be an election. It will not be a free and fair election. We know this because of Louisiana v. Callais. We know the regime will pull all kinds of shit to stay in power. But we don’t know what, exactly, they will do. We know that even if we retake both houses of Congress, we won’t have a Trump-proof-majority. (We’d need 20 of the 22 GOP Senate seats for that.) We know that whatever that flag once stood for, it doesn’t stand for that anymore. The global community cannot trust us. Our allies cannot trust us. The country, under Trump, by design, is not one anyone might see as a beacon of hope and freedom. The American hegemony is indeed in distress. On balance, that’s probably a good thing. But it’s going to be a lifetime’s fuckton of heartache and wobble as we readjust.

You are maybe feeling a crazy mix of terror for your neighbors, heartbreak for all the people all over the world who have died and will continue to die because of the regime’s policies, fear of the unknown, anger at the amount of ancestral trauma you carry around, resentment at losing more than a decade of your one wild and precious life to this fight, an atavistic desire to both fight and and flee –if your adrenal system were inclined toward complicity, you’d likely not be among my readers – and a goodly dose of nostalgia for a thing that probably never existed. I think Americans in general have a predisposition to longing for a prelapsarian simpler, kinder past. That’s the national Kool-Aid. But I’ll leave you with this: we don’t have to drink it. We can instead take this tsunami of a wobble as a moment to long for an achievable thing: a simpler, kinder future.

Got a question for me? Submit it here!

We sit down to write this after another string of primary elections, which included the victory of Indivisible backed candidate Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota. Flanagan was greatly outspent and still managed to come out on top, proving that the “many crushed the money.” If she wins in November, she will be the first Native American woman in the Senate, which would be a major milestone.

And of course the elections have continued to spark a flurry of conversations about what the primary wins do and do not mean for Democrats’ chances come November. Today, Julie takes a look at this electability conversation in the context of the candidacy of Abdul El-Sayed.

Image Credit: @fabfeministart on Instagram

Who’s Afraid of the Progressives?

By Julie Subrin

The New York Times has a lot of advice for Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic nominee for senate. One columnist wants him to be less “cocky,” in general but especially in his belief that a majority of voters will like and vote for progressive policies if given the chance. Another warns him to be more measured in how he speaks about Israel and Palestine, suggesting that he (drumroll, please) continue to say what he’s already saying. If the paper of record’s opinion pages serve as a barometer, it seems clear that this candidate is making standard-bearing liberals quite uncomfortable.

In a recent conversation with my parents, whom I’m visiting right now, I mentioned that I’d made a small donation to El-Sayed’s campaign. (In a high-stakes race like that, I know my small donation won’t make a difference, but I like what I’ve heard from him, and wanted to celebrate what, months ago, had looked to me anyway like a very long shot victory.) My mom, an avid NYT reader, told me she has some concerns about him. When I asked her what they were, she said (and I’m paraphrasing here) that he seems too radical, and she worries that if a cohort of Democratic Socialist candidates like him win, they won’t work with other Democrats to form a consensus so that we can reign in Donald Trump and restore some semblance of normalcy to our government.

Her response raised my hackles for a few reasons. I think a lot of us here have come to realize, if we didn’t know it before, that this country is, and has been for some time, institutionally broken. A return to normalcy is neither possible nor desirable. Something much deeper, and more transforming, is required. But aside from that, I’m bothered by how easy it is for mainstream media to render someone like El-Sayed (as well as other progressives) somehow scary, dangerous, or at the very least, concerning.

I know part of this characterization by MSM has to do with El-Sayed being Muslim (he didn’t even change his name!), and a critic of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Inseparable as that may be from the whole picture, what I’m interested in here is something else—namely, how progressive ideas and candidates are so often cast as “radical” and unelectable.

Image Credit: @olly.costello.art

I first encountered El-Sayed back in May, when I watched an interview with him on The Ink, with Anand Giridharadas. Up to that point, I’d never heard of him. As I learned, El-Sayed is Michigan born and bred, and was captain of his wrestling, football and lacrosse teams in high school. He’s an epidemiologist. And he’s got rizz, as the kids say. I was immediately impressed by how smart and sensible he seemed. He talked about his training as a doctor, which taught him to ask two questions: what is wrong, and how can I help? In the conversation, and throughout his campaign, he advocated for getting money and corporate interests out of politics, and for expanding access to health care, education, food, and clean air and water. And he asserted his belief (shared by many) that right now voters are hungry for leaders who will fight for them, who are open and honest about what they believe, and who are invested in solving people’s problems rather than in protecting the interests of their corporate donors.

None of that is particularly radical. Certainly, some of it may be easier said than done. But is it dangerous? Scary? Alarming? Is it worse than the paralysis Congress is displaying now, and, in fact, has been displaying for years? Whatever “normal” was, it somehow gave rise to ever widening income inequality, rising white Christian nationalism, extraordinary corruption, and authoritarianism. How can we not believe we need to try something different?

Often, anxiety about someone like Abdul El-Sayed is couched in discussions of “electability.” He can have the best values and policy ideas in the world, but if he can’t get elected, what good does that do, they ask? And maybe those fears are founded. But when you hear a candidate like him, or, say, Zohran Mamdani, speak passionately and compellingly and with hope and vision, and what they’re saying gets at the heart of very real, pressing, everyday anxieties of a majority of Americans, it’s hard to see why they wouldn’t be electable. Unless, of course, corporate-driven media and special interest groups are able to cast a dark enough pall over them to scare voters away.

I made my parents watch El-Sayed’s hour-long interview on The Ink. (Love you, mom and dad!) For much of it, they nodded along approvingly. Later, my mom said she agrees that he’s appealing, and makes a compelling argument. More importantly, she acknowledged that she hasn’t really thought about the oversized role of corporate interests in politics, beyond a sort of vague awareness that that role has become too big. In my mind, that is not a reflection of a lack of thoughtfulness or intelligence on her part. She is both. She knows that a few hold extraordinary and excessive wealth in this country, while many Americans’ lives are devastated by our healthcare crisis, housing crisis, public education crisis, hunger and poverty. But the connection between the two? We aren’t often incentivized to connect the dots.

Image Credit: @devthepineapple on Instagram

When you spell it out as El-Sayed has, it’s much easier to grasp how moneyed interests are poisoning our politics and our lives. At some level, understanding this reality is threatening to those who benefit from this system—even those among us who benefit in relatively modest ways. That includes me and my parents. It includes a lot of well-educated, well- meaning folks. And it definitely includes the powers that be at The New York Times.

Of course the biggest beneficiaries, by far, of this broken system are the corporations, industries, and billionaires profiting off other people’s suffering. It’s worth asking what exactly the rest of us are gaining from this system, and what we’re giving up, whether that’s our shared humanity or our planet. We would also do well to ask ourselves what’s really radical: progressive policies or a system that exhibits such a careless disregard for the many for the sake of a few.

Amplify this

• Swing voters in Nevada tell NPR they are open to Democratic Socialists

• Some community wins against ICE and data centers this year, plus a song about data centers (h/t Eliana)

• Israel is revoking entry permits for U.S. activists involved in West Bank, reporting from The Forward

• “The Musicians Taking the Fight for Trans Lives to Church” from The Nation

• The only AI we should support is Abolish ICE

• Because liberation can mean more than nervous system regulation

• Why bravery and heartbreak are essential to organizing, a Waging Nonviolence review of Yotam Marom’s book For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness

• When the logic perfected in Gaza shows up in Minneapolis (h/t Cheryl)

• A reminder about the power of your voice

And as always,

‘Til Next Time,

Julie, Kate, & the Messaging Team

We’re back!

We want to begin by thanking Mandy Keifetz aka Minty Chaffeuse for her inaugural Crucible Questions column last week. We love how Mandy combines her unique style with her activism savvy in the form of practical advice for our readers. Send her your burning questions for Minty using this form!

Today, as we witness the beginnings of an anticipated and feared ICE surge in our beautiful, immigrant-filled city, we explore two vital responses to this moment: grief and action.

Sign in Minneapolis not far from the Renee Good memorial. Photo credit: Kate Dalton

Remembering Who and What We’ve Lost

By Kate Dalton

Dear Renee,

We miss you <3

-Minneapolis

This was what was written on one of the many handwritten notes left on the side of a street in South Minneapolis, the site where Renee Good was murdered. I was in town for a family visit, and hadn’t expected I’d have time to visit the memorial, but just a few hours after landing, there I was, surrounded by love, grief and anger. One printed sign read, “MN>ICE” and another said, “We Fall/We Break/We Fail/We Overcome” next to a list of names of those murdered in the city, including George Floyd. In the middle of a large arrangement of flowers and Pride flags was a poster that read “Good people bring out the good in people.” Another handwritten sign said, “We will carry on your fight against the fascist regime,” the tassel of a keffiyeh draping slightly over it. On the fence of the adjacent yard were pictures of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and other individuals killed by ICE. At the far end in a space all by itself were two simple black and white signs with the quotes “I’m not mad at you” and “Are you OK?”—the last words of Renee Good and Alex Pretti respectively.

There were also words and illustrations from a local Native American tribe, reminding me of how Ojibwe jingle dress dancers visited the death sites of Good and Pretti to perform healing rituals. The poignancy of that community response came back to me, and I was again struck by the gesture of a people who have known sorrow, loss, and injustice on a scale that’s difficult to comprehend.

Image Credit: @punkrockfleamarkethamilton

Like much of the memorial, there were layers to the grief. It wasn’t a carefully designed space like many of the monuments we’re accustomed to seeing. The site had clearly been created with intention, and there were signs to guide, like the one requesting that people not post images of the memorial on social media. But there were no neat borders between the various causes and victims represented there. In that way it felt more authentic and reflective of the interconnectedness of our various struggles and grief itself, which has little respect for our lines no matter how hard we may try to draw them.

Twenty minutes later, as we drove away, I felt this messiness of grief as I found myself breaking down in tears. I was overwhelmed by the loss captured by the memorial, as well as the kindness. Here was a space for people to gather and pay tribute to Renee Good and the values she stood for. It was also a place to acknowledge and honor the many victims of state violence, especially nonwhite people. Overall, I found it to be both devastating and beautiful. But I wasn’t just grieving these victims. I was also grieving the loss we have all been experiencing as we see the erosion of democracy, the disappearance of our neighbors and due process, and an overall absence of humanity on the national and international stage. I couldn’t help but remember when I went out on an ICE watch the day after Renee’s death and how Julie and I faced off against an ICE van carrying a detainee at Delaney Hall. My involvement pales in comparison to others involved in rapid response, but I sat there crying, thinking that it’s all been just too much—for me, for anyone. The site visit had jolted a flood of memories and emotions that ended up putting the last year in perspective. It wasn’t the kind of perspective that downplays events but rather it was the kind that puts a spotlight on them. It is all indeed too much, but the memorial reminded me that we can carve out spaces for our grief and for our indomitable spirits. Like the sign said, “We fall/We Break/We Fail/We Overcome.”

Image Credit @kusi.art and @art.anaraquel

Finding Purpose and Power in a Targeted Action

By Julie Subrin

Last weekend, Edwin Lopez-Cornejo, a 39-year-old man, died while in detention in Delaney Hall, leaving behind a 12-year-old daughter, and many others who loved him. His death seems to be a clear case of medical neglect. When he was abducted in June, he had been on medication for diabetes, high blood pressure and seizures. The day before he died, he had complained that he wasn’t feeling well and that part of his face and his right hand had gone numb. Medical staff did not take immediate action, and by the time he arrived at the hospital, his heart had stopped.

Unfortunately, Lopez-Cornejo’s death is part of a larger pattern. According to CNN, over 50 people have died in ICE detention since Trump returned to office. What’s more, “more detainees died in custody in 2025 than in any year in at least two decades, and 2026 is on track to be even higher.”

No one deserves to die for crossing a border in the hope of making a better life for themselves and their families. As Lopez-Cornejo’s young daughter put it at a press conference on Tuesday, “No one here is illegal. [...] Everyone here should feel welcomed, not seen as criminals.”

You know who should be seen as criminals? The architects and enforcers of Trump’s mass deportation project, and the people profiting from it. Monday evening, a few of us called out these ICE-enabling profiteers by joining an action organized by Hands Off NYC, Rise and Resist, and other groups.

I’ll be honest: I don’t really like going to protests. I’m prone to sensory overload, and something in my DNA revolts against shouting things in unison. Maybe it’s a fear of mobs. (My Pale of Settlement Russian-Jewish ancestors definitely had reason to fear mobs, in the form of marauding Cossacks, and I suppose that flight/freeze response lives on in me.)

Still, like many of you, I go to protests somewhat regularly these days, if only to be an additional body added to the count. The experience can range from moving and powerful to meh, or, at worst, dispiriting.

The protest Léa, Cheryl and I joined in Tribeca felt genuinely satisfying. This one had a clearly defined purpose: to call out enablers right here in our city making a profit off of ICE operations. Specifically, we were gathered down the block from an ICON parking garage on Harrison Street that contracts with the federal government. Recently, activists learned that a fleet of brand new, unlicensed SUVs—precisely the type of vehicle used for ICE operations—had taken up residence there. Given all the signs we’re getting that ICE is about to launch, or is already slow-launching, a surge of abductions here in NYC, exposing and hopefully undermining this kind of collaboration is absolutely essential.

And so we held up signs with clear, targeted messages: “ICON collaborates with ICE.” “NO PARKING for ICE anytime anywhere!” The crowd was not huge, maybe 100 of us in total, but it felt energized and purposeful. There were only a few short speeches, during which speakers laid out clearly why we were there, who we were targeting, and what the ask was: that the owners of this parking facility stop giving cover to ICE. Organizers gave out handouts with phone numbers and instructions on how to deliver that message.

And then there were the chants, meant to loudly shame ICON and to catch the attention of local residents: “ICE out of Tribeca!” and “Hey ICON, you can’t hide, we know you have ICE inside!” A chant like “Hey hey, ho ho, fascism has got to go” always feels a little empty to me. But I genuinely wanted to shout at ICON, and to wake up the neighborhood to the fact that an ICE staging ground was right here at their doorstep.

ICE out protest, Tribeca, Aug. 3. Photo credit: Julie Subrin

Maybe a dozen cops were there, but they didn’t interfere. City councilmember Christopher Marte spoke eloquently about this local, pressing need for us to protect our neighbors. At the end, we all marched to the garage entrance where the fleet is said to be parked. (A few days after the fleet was first identified, the entrance was covered up so the public could no longer see inside, but not before activists documented the line of cars.) We chanted some more, and there was a banner drop. And then we called it a day, and went and got some lemonade. The whole thing was decently covered by NY1 and social media, which we took to be a mark of success.

This protest was organized by Hands Off NYC, Rise and Resist, and other local Hands Off neighborhood satellites. Similar local coalitions have successfully campaigned to get other entities to cancel contracts with ICE. I think we can all learn from their spirited, targeted, call-to-action driven approach. I will gladly go back and help them make some noise, in Tribeca and wherever else this inhumane deportation machine attempts to set up their operations.

Image Credit: @mainanddevine

Amplify this:

• A great conversation between Abdul El-Sayed and Anand Giridharadas, along with Anand’s thoughts on what makes El-Sayed such a good, interesting candidate

• New York Can Do Anything, Including Single-Payer Universal Healthcare, from the Indypendent

• Tuesday was a good day for those who believe in protecting and expanding abortion rights in the US.

• Historian Erin Maglaque discusses her new book ‘Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body’ from The LA Review of Books podcast.

• Signs for Troubled Times (h/t Isabel)

• Ta-Nehisi Coates on how “we overrate intellect and we underrate wisdom” and how the fight against genocide is connected to the fight against fascism

• Did you see Trump’s trophy? (h/t Léa)

• Robby Hoffman is repping for the MTA

• A short history of tenant organizing in NYC, from the Mayor’s office (h/t Eliana)

• Climate change isn’t a tragedy. It’s a crime. And to Rebecca Solnit, it’s a war zone.

• Check out this deportation calculator. How much is your county spending? (h/t Amy S)

And as always,

‘Til Next Time,

Kate, Julie, & the Messaging Team

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Hello and welcome to the inaugural edition of Crucible Questions.

This week’s question comes to us from Delia D’Afficher (not their real name).

Q I would love to have a little demo on making and applying wheat paste. Also, any tips and tricks you may have for making the process quicker... as I know it’s frowned upon in some circles. Is it best to play dumb if caught in the act by some concerned citizen? Or a member of the NYPD?

I have a lot to say, but the first request is for a recipe, and when I’m looking for a recipe, I do not want to have to scroll through an entire disquisition on the social history of the food and the writer’s relationship to that food. I want the recipe, so let’s start there.

Here is a recipe from Bengali multimedia artist Shurjo Mukhi’s excellent zine Wheatpasting as Resistance:

Wheatpasting is something I learned to do as a teenager in the 80s. At that time, you’d get a call on your landline phone asking if you wanted to go help a band flyer for their next gig. It was a fun thing to do, at night, with friends, to help other friends. Gradually, we started also to do this with messages for ACT-UP, but mostly, to begin with, it was a guerilla marketing technique.

The relevant city ordinance was the same then, but the stakes were very different. If you went out at night flyering for a band or for ACT UP, there was no way for you to be caught. There were no surveillance cameras at all, let alone on every building, and there was no instantaneous communication. A person wishing to report you would need to go to a phone booth, insert a dime, dial the local precinct, and file a report. The desk sergeant would need to decide if there was any point in sending a beat cop after you, when actual crimes were being committed, to issue a fine, knowing that you’d be gone before they got there.

Now is not then. Wheat is the same, and resistance is the same. Calvin Ball enforcement by the NYPD is the same – which is to say – is always different depending on the mood of the officer in the moment – but the panopticon and cell phones change the calculus. You are more likely to be caught, and while, yes, it is only a fining offense, and yes, the plain language of the ordinance obviously intends to address “permanently affixed” banners, rather than banners which will melt off with the next rain, cops will cop, and on the street, in the moment, your rights aren’t guaranteed.

So, before you go out wheatpasting, have “the talk” with yourself. Free expression is important; creative use of third spaces is important; a public square not owned by an oligarch is important – but your safety is also important. If you are stopped, be polite to a fault, make no sudden movements, and obey the officer’s instructions even if they are irrational, or stupid, or based on a direct misunderstanding of the statutes.

How do I personally square this circle? I don’t have a rational answer. I have been putting up the new ICE hotline info, when I happen to be stopped at a corner waiting for a light, but I haven’t gone out flyering, stopping at every pole, since NO Kings 3. I likely will go out with election protection messages, at some point between now and the midterms.

I definitely wouldn’t do it for a friend’s band. But that’s okay. My band friends all have Instagram pages now. Alas.

“May post no bills” 1989 calendar page, by MK

What a time to be alive! We hope you’re holding up okay, and also finding time for some R&R, hanging out in a hammock, or at the beach, or in your favorite section of an air conditioned bookstore or library. (To that end, we will be taking a break next week.)

Two weeks ago, Kate wrote about Trump attempting to smear Democrats and leftists by branding them “Communists” (bringing to mind My Undesirable Friends, the documentary that followed young independent Russian journalists blacklisted as “undesirables” and foreign agents). Then, this week, the administration went further, claiming that people (mostly not white) as wide-ranging as Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass, DSA members like Mamdani, and the late, murdered George Floyd are essentially Cuban assets. Cuba, by Trump’s account, is the greatest threat our democracy faces—an outlandish claim, but also one with serious implications when used to further intimidate and punish activists and perceived “political enemies.” It’s mind-bending, infuriating, and a bit ominous.

“Ecologies of Mutual Care” from Olly Costello Art

The good news is, it seems unlikely most Americans will take these claims seriously. And for now we have a more robust justice system than Russia and other authoritarian regimes do to offer some degree of protection against these charges (though not as robust as we’d like).

Some other good news: this week, Indivisible, Hands Off NYC, and experienced election protection organizations unveiled a solid plan (including lots of messaging advice) to protect our elections so that, come November, our voices are heard loud and clear when we say we have had enough of GOP corruption, cruelty and chaos. There will be many opportunities for our group to plug in to these efforts, with community education days of action, trainings, and more. Stay tuned for details on that.

We also have some good news related to the Messaging Roundup (aka Like We Mean It). We’ve got some new additions in Léa Zimmerman and Mikki Adamson. They are helping us stay on top of current events, plying us with thought-provoking, relevant ideas and writing, and curating social media posts that are timely and message-smart. Thank you, Mikki and Léa, for joining our ranks.

And, finally, we are also excited to introduce our very own “Resistance Agony Advice Column,” by Brooklyn Resister Mandy Keifetz, whose nom de guerre is Minty Chauffeuse. Got questions? She has answers! Submit them here.

And now on to this week’s ruminations related to our weekly reminder: “Another world is possible.” Today, we try to understand what that could look like with a simple image, a photograph from the World Cup Finals. Kate leads us down that path.

Image Credit: USA Today

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

By Kate Dalton

A national team gathers on the podium after an electrifying World Cup final win in overtime. They are all facing each other and the camera just to the left. The photo of this team and their coaches will populate the front pages of newspapers and circulate around the world. But as with any shot, there are other images, including ones that are zoomed out to feature the whole stage. If you look at these photos, you’ll see a man in a suit to the side, facing away from the team. No one is looking at him, though he is smiling and raising his fist as if it were all for him. That man is the president of the United States, and thanks to a nudging escort from the FIFA president and selective photography, he has been rendered irrelevant, just out of frame (and now, a laughingstock).

I often think of Trump as the wizard in the Wizard of Oz yelling to “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” In the movie, the wizard is trying to project an all-powerful presence unleashing thunder and lightning, but as Dorothy and her friends come to see, his might is merely an illusion. Behind the curtain, he is just a small man sweating and flipping switches. There’s a similar bluster and fake bravado with Trump. He’s building large monuments and ballrooms, attempting to reach the great heights his weak character will never reach. Though for a moment on Sunday afternoon on the international stage, the curtain was pulled back revealing a petty, small man for who he is.

Message from Nico Williams’s older brother Iñaki, Credit Barcelona News Update

It wasn’t just the World Cup final that highlighted Trump’s smallness–there were a number of moments throughout the tournament that did something similar. An international celebration of culture and sport by its very nature pushes back on the Trumpian blood and soil aspirations. Players choose teams flexibly based on sometimes loose ties to nations, and stars like Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams have compelling immigration stories. Here in New York, the city lived up to its international reputation, as a cornucopia of glossy national team soccer jerseys peppered the city streets for weeks. When Trump attempted to insert himself on behalf of the U.S. team, by persuading FIFA to overturn a red card to their advantage, it only served to turn World Cup fans against the team, which would suffer a humiliating loss against the more talented Belgians.

One could argue that Trump has recently failed in his attempts to garner attention domestically as well. Last week, he delivered remarks on the 2020 election and was ignored by most of the major networks for its misinformation and overall lack of newsworthiness (it’s 2026 after all). Meanwhile, many of us are continuing to organize around election protection and put forth our own positive vision for democracy. This includes the Good Trouble Weekend of Action, for which Resisters enthusiastically mobilized last Friday through Sunday.

Image Credit: @devthepineapple on Instagram

Any and all attempts at counterprogramming to offset Trump’s impact remain deeply urgent and necessary. But we would be disingenuous if we didn’t acknowledge that Trump still remains very much in frame with the amount of power he wields. Amidst all of the international good will of the World Cup, we knew that the United States was continuing its war on Iran and working to dismantle bastions of international order like the International Criminal Court And we cheer on immigrant players as an unregulated militia kills people in American streets, or disappears them to countries where they have zero ties.

No, as much as we’d like, and as much as a lot of Americans try, we can’t ignore Trump. But that image of him scuttled to the periphery during the World Cup celebrations does offer a vision of what the coming years could be like if (and it’s a big if) we win the midterms. With a Democratic House, and dare we dream a Democratic Senate, we could be that smiling Spain team taking in the moment, a small man off to the side who will never stop thinking it should be all about him, but with less and less ability to make it so.

Image Credit: @wecareourselves on Instagram

Amplify this:

• What the World Cup shows us about who belongs, from TIME Africa

• Happy Disability Pride Month! Check out these disability book recommendations from NYPL and these reminders

• Citizens Bank says it has ended lending to private prison companies used by ICE (h/t Amy S)

• Hands Off NYC Election Protection Guidance

• Why book clubs are antifascist

• Worth fighting for

• If your voice held no power…

• ICE shouldn’t be killing anyone, regardless of status

• “I’m a Scholar of Genocide. We’re Entering a Terrifying New Era.” by Omer Bartov

And as always,

‘Til Next Time,

Kate, Julie, & the Messaging Team

We sit down to write this week amidst literal and figurative fires. In the literal sense, our air quality is suffering as a result of the wildfires in Canada. This once again reminds us that our climate emergency is no longer something impacting our children and grandchildren in the distant future but something we’re all facing in the here and now. According to Emily Fischer, an atmospheric chemist and professor at Colorado State University, wildfires represent “a direct connection to climate change. This is the climate change that people breathe.” As messengers, we need to keep making that climate connection for others and hold media outlets accountable for putting seemingly isolated weather events into context.

Image Credit: @greenmatters on Instagram

Then there’s the five-alarm fire for democracy that continues for our country. On Monday, ICE murdered Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine and just last week, they shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas. We have yet to see any semblance of accountability for these actions. In addition to these actions of a rogue paramilitary force, we see Trump telegraphing efforts to undermine the midterms by resurfacing misinformation about the 2020 election and attempting to sow doubt in our voting system. It is becoming clearer and clearer that election protection will be on our agenda in the coming months, so stay tuned for more information on that.

Today we address democracy of the lowercase D variety with a dispatch from Julie about how her co-op has come together in new and somewhat surprising ways. It’s this type of small-scale success that we need to both invigorate and inform our work in this fight against fascism.

How we protect each other

By Julie Subrin

I left town just ahead of the last heat wave two weeks ago. The next morning, I saw that my neighborhood WhatsApp chat had blown up overnight. (The chat is for residents of the three buildings that form our co-op—some 375 units in total.) Evidently, around 11 p.m. the night before, there had been an electrical fire on the street between the buildings. People shared videos of flames leaping out of a manhole, and of lights flickering on and off in apartments. The FDNY arrived, followed by Con Ed. Then, around midnight, an explosion was heard (“Omg I just heard a big boom. What just happened?”) and then the power went out for two of the three buildings. The two buildings would go without power for the next 24 hours, while outdoor temperatures soared to a “real feel” of 110 degrees.

How the community responded to this crisis could be traced through the WhatsApp thread, as it unfolded in real time. The first wave of messages reflected a lot of confusion and anxiety. Our new super had just moved in that day. The new management company was not picking up calls for information and assistance. Who was in charge? When would the power be back? No one seemed to know.

And then, an amazing thing happened—community members stepped in to fill the void. A few made regular visits to the street throughout the night, to get and share periodic updates from Con Ed workers. People initiated wellness checks and assistance for those who might need help taking the stairs since the elevators and hall lights were out. Neighbors in the one building that still had power offered their refrigerators for the storage of insulin and other medications, and their couches for those who couldn’t sleep in the heat. Others organized a cooling station in the lobby, with water and power strips for phone charging.

Protest against ICE, Foley Square, July 14 (Photo credit: Julie Subrin)

People searched for and passed along information on how long food lasts in the fridge or freezer without power. They shared jokes, and nearby hotel recommendations. They offered to pick up iced coffee and essentials for those who couldn’t risk venturing out into the heat.

We have seen, time and again, that neighbors have the capacity to come together in a crisis. There are stories from post-Katrina in New Orleans, and after Hurricane Sandy right here at home. That said, I also think it’s fair to say that this hyper-local rapid mobilization of community care was at least partly the product (as has been the case elsewhere) of intentional organizing that came before, and will continue after.

This co-op was not always so community minded—at least not in my experience. There was, or so it seemed to me, a subsection of people with shared backgrounds who helped one another, but that didn’t seem to extend to the steady influx of newcomers who’d moved in over the past few years.

As I’ve written here before, after Trump’s re-election in 2024, devastated and scared that a majority of the people living in our Midwood neighborhood had chosen a racist, misogynist con man to lead the country, a few of us met up, and agreed that we would feel safer and could help others feel safer if we knew more of our neighbors. We understood that our co-op was home to a diverse population in just about every sense, politically, socioeconomically, ethnically, and otherwise. But we had a shared investment in making our collective home feel welcoming to all, our building staff feel supported, and our Board and management company feel accountable.

And so we took action, albeit in fits and starts. We hosted a cookie swap, where many of us chatted with one another for the first time. We started the WhatsApp group. We raised funds for a doorman recovering from back surgery. We met in a smaller, more vetted group to talk about ways that the jacked-up 2.0 Trump administration was making us feel vulnerable, and what we could do to help each other. And, most recently, we recruited candidates to run against co-op Board members who seemed utterly disinterested in cultivating transparency and supporting community engagement. Those candidates won just a few weeks before the calamitous heat wave, and played an essential role in helping everyone navigate the crisis.

“I am because you are.” (Image credit: werdmvmnt on Instagram)

In the immediate aftermath of these recent events, the power of that organizing could be felt through testimonies like this:

I hope everyone is having a cooler, more settled and better day than the past few days! I just wanted to say thanks for all the info/ humor/offers of practical support we shared as a community in this chat. It really helped us navigate the events with more ease and less anxiety. Thanks everyone! Grateful for our coop community!”

What does all this have to do with our resistance work, and with fighting fascism? I think that explosion (no pun intended) of neighborliness matters in two vital ways. First, when ordinary people step in to fill a void in leadership, to information-share, to build community and support one another—all of that helps us unlearn the political helplessness that manifests as apathy and hopelessness and is so common these days. And second, as we remind each other all the time here, we know that authoritarianism thrives where people are distrustful, fearful, isolated, lonely. Every time we show our neighbors that they are not alone, that we have each other’s backs, we weaken authoritarian power just a little bit more.

So keep baking cookies for your neighbors. Keep asking them how they’re doing. Ask for help when you need it, and offer help when you can. In doing so, you are laying the groundwork to respond to the literal and figurative, local and global, fires we know we’ll be facing in the days, weeks and months ahead.

Image Credit: @courtneyahndesign on Instagram

Amplify this:

• Tips on Neighbor Maxxing

• Antonia Scatton offers clear, effective messaging on bad lettuce, Mitch McConnell, the war in Iran, and more

• The Dig Podcast episode presenting a theory of power and organization

• Comic relief: speaking of bad lettuce…

• What can prevent societal collapse, in the face of overwhelming greed and corruption? History and data show it’s “the nobodies,” like you and me. (h/t Michael)

• A Very Hungry Data Center (h/t Leah C)

• Watch this powerful 3-minute documentary—the first in a series called “Fractured: The Stories of Those Left Behind,” about lives disrupted by ICE abductions. (h/t Julie W)

• “Ni De Aquí, Ni De Allá” — Neither from Here Nor from There, an anti-ICE art exhibit

• An artistic tribute to Palestinian doctor Dr. Abu Safiya

• Join us for our Good Trouble Weekend of Action Friday, Saturday on the bridge, Saturday at Old Stone House, or Sunday in Prospect Park, and for some inspiration, check out these evergreen words from John Lewis

• Reminder: “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.” (h/t Léa)

And as always,

‘Til Next Time,

Julie, Kate, & the Messaging Team

Summer can be a strange time for doing this work. Our group’s composition shrinks and shifts as people leave town and come back. Everything slows down a bit. Meanwhile, though, the Trump regime’s depredations have not slowed, and in some cases have ramped up. We still seem to be at war with Iran. ICE activity has intensified across the country, most recently including the murder, in Houston, of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a beloved 52-year old father of three who has been living in the U.S. for 35 years. And the administration continues to attack voting access and election security on all fronts, from eliminating the independent Election Assistance Commission to persevering in efforts to eliminate mail-in voting, and to force through the SAVE Act.

There is, as always, lots we can do to fight back. Next week, we’ve got a bunch of Good Trouble Lives On activities to choose from (see the weekly Resisters Review for details). Ground Truth is sending folks out to canvas on Long Island. Indivisible is offering a series of trainings for community defense. And, as Saul shared, there are postcards to be written.

Today we discuss how the above actions of the Trump regime add up to a form of extremism that gets overlooked when our discourse becomes preoccupied with democratic socialism and the so-called radical left.

A socialist by any other name

By Kate Dalton

In the past two weeks, we’ve seen Trump try to revive the Red Scare by calling Democrats “communists.” We could write this off as the grasping efforts of an addled narcissist who remains deeply unpopular due to the failing economy and foreign wars, but we are seeing echoes of Trump’s red scare tactics from some pearl-clutching moderate Democrats who signed a centrist pledge to uphold capitalism and other vaguely American ideas. You can also hear it in the words of moderates like Josh Shapiro who derisively characterized the recent push to the left as “performative,” and those of David Brooks, who just this week posited that Democrats become great by fighting the left.

Image Credit: zzil6 on Reddit

Now, critics of the socialist ascendancy in the party might be expressing good faith concerns about electability, including a recognition that many of the districts we will need to swing the House in the fall are purple and not deep blue. Certainly, everyone will have to run the race they need to win and act according to their values. But they cast off democratic socialists as extreme at their own peril. For one thing, as Jamelle Bouie and others have pointed out, the presence of more progressive factions in the party often has a positive impact, leading to transformative policies like the New Deal. Bouie writes, “The most fruitful eras of the modern Democratic Party coincided with periods where the walls separating political radicals from the mainstream were way less solid.”

Behind the name calling, we see an attempt to label progressives as radical. This frame invites further consideration, asking us to again question what we consider “normal” and what we write off as “extreme.” For instance, in other societies, like many in Europe, democratic socialism is quite normal.

Also, one could argue that what is extreme is not the policies themselves but the world in which we live. Diminishing democratic socialists therefore picks the wrong fight, and perhaps glosses over the very real extreme circumstances they are responding to. This ignoring of the deeply troubled state of the world and our system denies people’s reality, which is a form of enablement and even performativity that we can’t afford to countenance.

Image Credit: Sunrise Movement on Instagram

If we take a look at our society right now, it is not hard to see the many things that are actually extreme–the extraordinary accumulation of wealth for a tiny elite while the majority can’t afford food, housing or health care; the despoliation of the earth and the exploitation of humans for profit, among other things. Then there is the Trump presidency itself and all of its denial of due process, gold-plated corruption and glorified cruelty.

And lest we forget, just last month, we had to face an uncomfortable truth: Elon Musk is now a trillionaire. It’s hard to stomach that from someone who posits white supremacist views and is an overall horrible person. Certainly, we are left with questions: What does it say about our society that we allowed someone like him to amass so much wealth and power? That is, how can we not question the order of things that elevates and rewards such a person? And why do some people get to use the power of government for their own personal wealth? Reporting indicates that Musk built his empire on some $38 billion in government funding, and he’s not the only one to make it big with government help. A recent Jacobin article summed it up well: “Having become the world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk is wealthy at a level that the human mind can scarcely comprehend. But one idea is simple to grasp: no functioning and humane society would produce inequality of this magnitude.”

Fox News tries to convince its viewers that socialism is bad.

Image Credit: benford333 on Reddit

In this context, democratic socialists are offering real structural solutions. Even Fox News ended up making them look good by laying out their policies plainly. Democratic socialists want medicare for all, a green new deal, a free Palestine, to tax the wealthy, and other safety net measures. When you strip away the attempt to stir up Cold War resentments, the actual policies are things people want. Maybe that’s why the name calling by Trump doesn’t seem to be sticking. Perhaps people don’t care what we call it–socialism, communism, or something else–as long as they can see tangible improvements in their own lives.

And in this battle over what we consider normal and what we label extreme linger some fundamental questions about which values we prioritize as a society. The current criticisms of democratic socialism and defense of “capitalism” assume we can’t have any other values apart from profit seeking that govern our way of operating with one another in the world. These capitalism enthusiasts try to shoehorn a narrow definition of self-interest and freedom onto the rest of us, as if interdependence does not or has not ever existed. We can see this in the fact that our wealthiest individual claims that empathy is a weakness and not core to a strong society. But, the thing is, people perform acts of care all the time. There’s no reason we can’t expect our government to reflect more of that ordinary humanity.

I don’t necessarily expect everyone to adopt democratic socialism in the near future, but we certainly need to work toward bringing more cooperative values to our calculus and not write off attempts to do so. Ad hominem critiques of democratic socialism ignore (or perhaps seek to obscure) an important fact: this system isn’t working right now. Things are deeply broken, and we need our leaders to focus on fixing them, not picking fights with the progressives that are actually trying to do something about it.

Image Credit: @NotControversial on Instagram

Amplify this

• Join the call to release Dr. Abu Saifya from an Israeli prison with an hour of solidarity next Wednesday at noon. And read more about Dr. Safiya from Amnesty International (h/t Cheryl)

• It’s not polarization, it’s the radicalization of the right (and for a TLDR version, see this Bluesky thread from the paper author)

• “I am a centrist Democrat,” a comedic imagining from USA Today

• Hey! The ICE hotline Number is back! And our very own Megan Piontkowski has updated the NYC ICE zine

• Know Your Rights Day of Action: Join Councilmember Alex Avilas in Sunset Park to hand out World Cup themed KYR materials July 15

• New vent diagrams from Third Wave Fund on Instagram

• A primer on NYC buses for the mayor and all of us (h/t Eliana)

• Punching Left by Kevin Kruse

• Check out the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Block Party July 30

• Liz Plank on Graham Platner and the extremely low bar for progressive men.

• Writer Hanif Abdurraqib’s Instagram tribute to poet June Jordan on what would have been her 90th birthday

• Mamdani: “There is nothing fiscally responsible about balancing the budget on the backs of working people”

And as always,

‘Til Next Time,

Kate, Julie, & the Messaging Team

The week has seen some terrible actions from the Trump regime. There were the 50-year prison sentences for 8 people who protested outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Texas—this, while Jan. 6 rioters are granted pardons and living freely. And then were the terrible SCOTUS rulings of the past few days, which include granting Trump permission to eliminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for immigrants from Haiti and Syria. This will have devastating consequences for our neighbors in Flatbush. NYC has the highest population of Haitians of any city in the US.

But today, we are going to take a moment to reflect on Tuesday’s good news. We are proud of our collective work, and recognize the need to savor these wins when they come.

Kate and Julie getting some hugs in before election night. Photo credit: Nice guy at the table next to ours.

Our future Congressman

By Kate Dalton

We talk a fair amount about joy in this newsletter. Just last week, we delved into the meaning of the city’s exuberance over a Knicks win, and this week we have joy of a different sort with Brad Lander’s win in the NY-10 Congressional primary.

A lot is being made of Mamdani’s role in endorsing three NYC primary winners on Tuesday night. Certainly, he embodies many of the values we were celebrating, but the focus on him as Kingmaker has obscured the values themselves and the merits of a candidate like Brad.

In his case, I got to see first hand the strength of his values and his merits, through my work on the campaign, and the hundreds of conversations I had with the people whose homes I canvassed. In a race where he had a lot of similarities with his opponent Dan Goldman, Brad’s position on Palestine proved to be compelling to many of the people I spoke with. He has supported the Block the Bombs Act, cutting off military aid to Israel, and called what’s happening in Gaza a genocide. After years of witnessing atrocities funded by our tax dollars and feeling powerless to stop it, Tuesday night we sent a message around the world that there are many of us who are done with such harm and cruelty. There are also many of us who believe Brad when he says our safety and wellbeing are interconnected, whether that’s in Gaza or 26 Federal Plaza, and that we don’t have to sacrifice anybody’s humanity in our city.

Image credit: werdmvmnt on Instagram

Tuesday a lot of us felt more wholly ourselves, knowing we could reject the false choices of a tired old politics. We recognized that we need “more human humans” as our friend Joelle Berman often reminds us in a nod to the words of Grace Lee Boggs. And we have a very human human in Brad Lander. It’s a bit of a cliche at this point to call Brad a mensch, but it’s true. He has modeled that behavior throughout his career, whether it was being one of the founding members of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) or leading people like me in Get Organized Brooklyn in the wake of the devastation of the 2016 election.

That menschness has made volunteering for Brad like a nice steady drip of endorphins. Voter after voter had a Brad story to share. Whether it was “Brad worked with us to improve our middle school” or “Brad supported us as we were getting the paperwork ready for our small business,” it was clear that Brad provided tangible benefits to the community. I’ve been canvasing off and on for over 20 years, and I’ve never experienced anything like this where both I and the people at the doors felt such a personal, positive connection to a candidate. It’s not something a candidate can turn on just in one campaign–it takes years of showing up, and we would do well to find more candidates who do the same.

I would be remiss if I didn’t say that there was also a lot of joy Tuesday night because in Brad I also see so much of what I love about the Brooklyn Resisters. Like Brad, we’re a scrappy group that punches above our weight, and also like Brad we prioritize care and integrity. We believe in showing up for our neighbors and doing the work, whether we’re feeding day laborers, showing up at Delaney Hall, doing court accompaniment, or folding and distributing zines. It was rewarding that Brad’s team appreciated this work and emphasis on community, inviting us to bring our zines and whistles to events and joining us at everything from our Kensington Community Day of Action to our May Day picnic and Shabbat dinner. And we couldn’t help but be thrilled to hear the shout out to the Brooklyn Resisters in his victory speech.

Brooklyn Resisters with Brad before a canvass in April

Finally, I want to acknowledge the way this Brooklyn Resister community has shown up and supported one another throughout this primary. I really believed in Brad and what this campaign represents, but I never had to do any of this alone. People like Saul gave just the right amount of nudge at the right time to encourage me to step up in new and somewhat surprising (to me) ways. At every turn, there was somebody else who would sign up, show up, help out, and have my back. In particular, I want to thank Lea, Cheryl, Eliana, Isabel, Kat, Julie P, and Michal but also everyone else who chipped in in one way or another, including Kate F, Tania, Dana, Joelle, Julie S, Samantha, Julia H, Judy, Sue, Michelle, Constance, Katherine, Lora, Emily, Naomi, and Caren. It has been a joy to be in this with all of you, and to see our strength in numbers, as well as our dedication. Now we turn our eyes to the midterms and steel ourselves for whatever this regime tries to throw our way these next few months. But we do this a little more battle-tested and I believe even more committed to fighting for the world we want together.

Image Credit: @dr.michellechung on Instagram

Amplify this

• The Warrior-Witches of Ukraine’s Resistance from The Atlantic

• The Machine Breaks Down in New York from The American Prospect

• The Infrastructure of Solidarity by Laurel Maclaren in Hope is a Verb

• Jennifer Lewis: “Stand up where you can….wherever you are.” (h/t Eliana)

• Celebrate anti-Prime Day—support bookstores, not billionaires

• Cool artists and neighbors collaboration in southeast London

• And check out works by our very own Julie Peppito and Megan Piontkowski in a protest art exhibit at the Old Stone House, curated by BKR Katherine Gressel, up thru Aug 2.

• While the Reflecting Pool’s condition gets worse and worse, the satire around it gets better and better.

• 39 years after its founding, ACT UP is still fighting boldly and creatively for people with AIDS. Today, they shut down traffic outside Grand Central. (h/t Eliana)

And as always,

‘Til Next Time,

Kate, Julie, & the Messaging Team

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Wishing you a happy and meaningful Juneteenth!

As proud New Yorkers, we’re of course still on a high from the Knicks championship win Saturday and the ensuing jubilation throughout the city that followed. We’ve seen others around the country taking note, from the continuing proliferation of the Knicks in Five memes to expressions of jealousy, including references to the “United States of New York City.” Today we take a look at how all this relates to fighting fascism as we consider the notion of ungovernability.

Art credit: ritualsofjoy on IG

The politics of ungovernability

By Julie Subrin

On Tuesday, the federal government announced criminal charges against 15 people accused of “conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer” during this past winter’s ICE surge in Minneapolis. In his announcement, Minnesota’s top federal prosecutor, Daniel Rosen, stated:

Today’s charges and arrests reflect a broad federal effort to address organized lawless behavior, which seeks to disrupt the execution of federal law, endanger law enforcement, and importantly endanger the very communities that these defendants falsely claim to be protecting.

If reading those cynical claims makes your blood boil, join the club—especially that last part about endangering communities, given the terrorizing, warehousing, trafficking and abuse of immigrants that is part and parcel of Trump’s and Stephen Miller’s mass deportation program. We all know who is actually endangering our communities.

As an activist (or simply someone who cares about your neighbors), hearing these charges may also send a chill up your spine, just as they are intended to do. According to the New York Times, one defendant appearing before a judge noted, “I looked through the indictment at all the things that include my name, and I seem to be indicted for holding meetings.” Another defendant, Natasha Rakotz, said in an interview, “I am not a violent person. I’ve never been violent. I’ve never had trouble with the law. The only thing I did was care about my community, and my neighbors.”

The reality is, these people are not so different from you and me.

Art credit: @illuminationsofthewild on IG

While I haven’t read the full indictment, I understand that much of the “evidence” was drawn from emails and Signal chats. And within those chats, one of the evidently damning findings was activists’ use of the phrase “become ungovernable.” Commonly invoked in anarchist circles, its usage has expanded into popular culture, and become a cri de coeur for groups like Free DC and Free America under Trump 2.0. (We featured it in a picture in our newsletter a while back.) I find the term evocative, and thought-provoking.

In its most literal sense, “ungovernable” means exactly what it says: unable to be governed. More loosely, it means “impossible to govern, rule or constrain.” One thing that comes to mind when I think of being “ungovernable” is actually our current government. Trump and his cronies refuse, over and over, to accept the terms of our laws and our constitution. They start unjustified wars without Congressional approval. They assassinate unidentified people on boats in international waters, break down doors without a warrant, deport asylum seekers to war torn far-away countries before they’ve been given a fair hearing. They injure and even murder protesters. They engage in insider trading, and profit from holding (or being related to the person holding) the highest office in the land. The list goes on. In all of this, they act as though no law applies to them. In that sense, they are (or aspire to be) ungovernable.

Image credit: fabfeministart on IG

In the face of all that rampant cruelty, crime and corruption, what is a justice-seeking person to do? It seems we too need to be ungovernable in our own way. Synonyms for “ungovernable” include “rebellious,” “stubborn,” “defiant,” and “uncontrollable.” (The common expression “Don’t tread on me” comes to mind, as Kate reminds me.) In our version of ungovernable, we can rebel by relentlessly exercising and protecting our rights—to protest, to freedom of speech, to vote, to bear witness. And we can engage in non-violent civil disobedience.

If our current government is trying to govern by fear, to control with hate, divisiveness, over-surveillance, and an ethos of greed and self-preservation, we must defiantly reject their abject tactics and values. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: get to know your neighbors. Earn trust, and demonstrate empathy. Fascism wants us disconnected, and we are stronger and freer together. Be less online. Be smart about your digital security. Know your rights. Help others learn about their rights. And last but not least, choose collective joy over fearful isolation. To adapt a phrase from Free DC’s list of principles, we need to “grow our power through joyful celebrations of the culture and people of New York City.” From a fascist government’s standpoint, all of these actions render us ungovernable.

Which brings me to one last point. You want to see “impossible to constrain”? Look no further than the unfettered outpouring of collective joy after the Knicks’ clinched the championship on Saturday. I couldn’t get to sleep that night, because I was too busy scrolling through Instagram, watching all the videos of New Yorkers celebrating across the city.

Textile artist embroidering jerseys for Knicks fans Saturday night. Photo credit: @thrasherxy.bsky.social on Bluesky

What I saw, over and over, were throngs of people united in collective joy. Millions of fans rejoiced in the streets, hugging, crying, dancing and singing New York anthems at the top of their lungs. There were the standouts—the city bus driver putting on a show while a crowd cheered him on. The textile artist who set up his sewing machine on Fulton St. in Fort Greene to embroider memories on people’s caps and jerseys. All of this good feeling among strangers was thrilling, and surprisingly moving, to see.

Now I get that this raucous celebration of a sports team’s victory was not, strictly speaking, an act of defiance against the Trump regime. Pouring into the streets, breaking the rules of social convention and a few laws as well, fall within the permission structure we’ve built around major sporting events in this country. Yes, there were 63 arrests Saturday night, but by and large, millions of people, including those who are ordinarily disproportionately punished for this kind of activity, were allowed to take over the streets and make a lot of noise into the early morning hours.

But permission structure aside, I believe all those neighborhood Knicks celebrations across every borough served and will continue to serve the resistance. For a little while, anyway, that collective NYC-proud state of mind has given the city an air of untouchability, by Tom Homan or anyone else who wants to come after us for our diversity or NYC values. And now that we have a feel for it, we can harness that energy and unity to other ends.

Our mayor recognizes the power of this joyful New York pride. It’s why he shows up at all the games, (almost) every parade, every celebration of cultural and religious heritage. He knows that lifting up every part of this city provides a path to stronger community, and ultimately to broader, more effective and, in his case, progressive political engagement.

Early voting, June 18. Photo credit: Julie Subrin

Case in point: on Thursday, the city offered Knicks-branded “I voted” stickers to the first 300 people to show up at early voting sites across the city. (Hey, it got me to the polls early.) The mayor is also using NY/NJ World Cup games as an opportunity to speak out against Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-worker policies, to disseminate Know Your Rights information, and to lift up all the different immigrant communities that live here.

We, too, can get joyful and creative in how we celebrate this city we love, while also asserting our rights, our beliefs, and our moral imperatives. We do it every week at Freedom Friday, when we dance together and wave our signs in (or alongside) our streets. We do it when we hand out anti-fascist valentines to strangers on the subway and when we sing songs outside an urban detention camp in Sunset Park. Our insistence on joy, on community-building and community protection, and on exercising our Constitutional rights, will always make us stronger, and yes, less governable by fascists and fascist wannabes.

Amplify this

• The spirit of Juneteenth can lead us out of this perilous political moment by Nicholas Mitchell

• Election day is Tuesday! Get out there and vote for Brad Lander in NY 10 and sign up to volunteer for poll site visibility.

• “Everyone has a role to play in supporting the strike at Delaney Hall” from Kelly M. Hayes

• What Elon Musk has cost us as a society

• Zohran Mamdani when asked “Is it worth it?”

• Knick star Jose Alvarado at the Puerto Rican Day Parade

• The Nine-Figure Silicon Valley Funded Abundance Movement from The American Prospect

• Love being a citizen of the United States of NYC

• Jon Stewart on coverage of the Knicks celebrations

• Pigeons have no chill and we love them for that

• 53 years in the making

• So much for local governance: Trump administration tries to halt nation’s first reparations program

• More guerilla street art

• How many times have you watched the OG last-second tip in?

And as always,

‘Til Next Time,

Julie, Kate, & the Messaging Team

Maybe it’s those late night Knicks games, but it felt hard to get in a groove this week. There’s so much energy and excitement, while at the same time, we know actual life and death battles are being fought, over budgets, elections, oil, and power. This week, Kate tries to make sense of the good, and the bad–the hope and hopelessness of it all.

Image Credit: @garisedelweiss on Instagram

Flowers Growing through Concrete

By Kate Dalton

We have no shortage of flowers depicted in our newsletter, but the ones I keep returning to are those growing through concrete or amidst rubble. They’re simple but compelling. In circumstances that are not conducive to life, these lone flowers are finding a way. They bring beauty and the symbolic weight of life itself.

As people living through these cruel times, we find ourselves searching for bits of hope in a dystopian landscape. That is not to say we don’t focus on making the systemic change that is necessary. We indeed need to alter the landscape itself. But seeking out hope and joy wherever we can find it can sustain us in doing the often slow and boring work that Julie has noted is needed for systemic change. Plus, the juxtaposition of the good with the bad mirrors the conflicting feelings we often feel as we navigate this terrain.

The world of sport has given us no shortage of complicated feelings this week. We’ve watched this diverse, legendary city come alive with joy over the Knicks, even as we know the owner is awful and surveils his own fans. Then there is the World Cup, an invigorating occasion for international bonhomie, which is run by the corrupt FIFA organization and hosted by a corrupt United States, detaining or barring entry to beloved referees and players and relegating Iran to second-class status over the ongoing war. The Iran team for their part arrived in Mexico with pins with the number 168 on them to honor the victims, mostly children, of a United States strike on a school, a poignant gesture of memory amidst the vindictiveness of war.

Image Credit: Cindy Ord via Getty Images

Also this past week, a flower grew in the form of Qween Jean winning the Tony for best costume design. Amidst a backdrop of increasing attacks on trans rights, including the denial of gender-affirming care to youth, Qween Jean made history as the first openly trans Tony recipient. A regular on the New York City activism scene and fierce advocate for Palestine, she spoke of honoring legendary trans leaders like Marsha P. Johnson that came before. Seeing her up on stage, it was hard not to feel that her win wasn’t just symbolic–it felt like progress, even as it reminded us of all the work left to do.

In more dispiriting news, the battle against ICE cruelty is bleak. Congress authorized 70 billion dollars in funding for ICE and Tom Holman doubled down on his threats of an ICE surge in New York City. Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth butchered decency and the basics of metaphor when he compared the troops landing in Normandy to migrants arriving in boats. And an ex Trump administration official, Greg Bovino, has been meeting with some of the worst fascists and neo-Nazis on the planet. The weight of all this is almost paralyzing. Yet the people most impacted by ICE, the detainees themselves, are continuing to organize and fight, as are many activists throughout the country. Plus not one Democrat voted for the ICE funding, which is actually progress.

Image Credit: @not_controversial_ on Instagram

When it comes to Palestine, I fear that I’m letting the flowers distract me from the rubble. Seeing the genuine enthusiasm for Brad Lander, a candidate planning to hold Israel accountable for war crimes by blocking military funding, buoys my spirits, as does the growing public support for Palestine throughout the United States. These things are promising, but the continued death in Gaza is gutting, as is the settler violence in the West Bank. Last week, the IDF shot and killed an infant in a car with their family. And Congress has been moving ahead with Section 224 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which further intertwines the US and Israeli military. Meanwhile, Dr. Abu Safiya has been imprisoned for over 500 days, and is currently in solitary confinement, for daring to do the job of caring for his patients. Some hope can be found in those fighting for his release, including fellow Resister Cheryl, her Jewish Elders group, as well as an international campaign. Like those struggling in the anti-ICE movement, we can see the efforts for peace and justice continue here and around the world.

And so we are left to remind ourselves once again that we must continue creating good to counteract the bad, even when, and perhaps especially when, the cards seem stacked against us. And we will have to dig deep to honor this commitment as we face the most consequential midterms of our lives. It will require that we give our money, our attention, and our time. We have to grow the flowers through the rubble, and we have to do it over and over again. We owe it to ourselves, and to each other.

Amplify this

• Hold the dots and swipe right Trust us, it’s worth it

• Which female archetype are you? We’re a cross between an empath, warrior, healer, and overthinker

• Delaney Hall: the strike is a relay

• As Capitalism Gasps for Breath, I Watch the Knicks Game, a poem by Yesenia Montilla

• Miss Rachel visits children of detained hunger strikers at Delaney Hall

• No ICE in the Cup

• No One Gets Out of Here Alive, a powerful meditation on two federal jails in NYC from Sarah Kunstler

• Fake tech ads on a subway platform near you

• Some feminist Knicks in five messaging. Then there’s this updated chant from The Bard of New York, We also like: Protect trans lives. Knicks in five!

And as always,

‘Til Next Time,

Kate, Julie, & the Messaging Team

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Image Credit: @fabfeministart on Instagram

Doing the work

By Julie Subrin

Last week, Kate and I received an overwhelming response to our account of joining others to block an ICE van from leaving Delaney Hall. The van, which was transporting Martin Soto, one of the organizers of the ongoing labor and hunger strike inside, was forced to retreat. It was a short-lived victory (Soto was transferred to another detention camp that same night, under cover of darkness), and not one that we’d expected to be a part of. But we understand (and appreciate) the impulse to lift up that moment. Many of us, I think, are hungry to do something bold in the service of an immediate, tangible win—one that proves that, at least sometimes, people power is capable of prevailing over the violent and corrupt forces that seem to overwhelm most of our days.

But here’s the thing which bears repeating: That exercising of people power was only possible because of a web of care that had been painstakingly built long before we ever showed up, a coalition of on-the-ground community members and organizations centered on helping detained people and their families, day after day, for a year now.

I was reminded of that while listening to activist Kelly Hayes’ excellent interview with John Washington. Washington discussed his forthcoming book, called How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigration Detention, which details the ways that people have successfully shut down detention camps, or prevented them from being built in the first place. Unsurprisingly, it involves a lot more than a single direct action.

Image Credit: @sweatermuppets on Instagram

For one thing, it often requires painstaking research. As he puts it, “camp infrastructure and even immigration enforcement itself really depends on local infrastructure. There are local city, municipal, county, and state pieces […] that can be sites of pushback.” Successful resistance, then, requires that we figure out which public figures have to sign off, what government contracts put in place, which vendors and service providers enlisted, in order for a detention camp to operate. All of those people and companies, he notes, are points of vulnerability, to be exposed and pressured to withdraw their support.

And then, or maybe even before, large-scale pushback requires organizing—door knocking, showing up to town hall meetings, and building relationships with neighbors who might not agree with you on everything, but, after many conversations, might agree that they don’t want hundreds, possibly thousands, of people locked up in a warehouse down the road.

The good news is, communities have successfully blocked or shut down detention camps. The hard news is that, even if we do manage to shut one down, changing our society so that another one doesn’t take its place requires deep, sustained effort over a prolonged period of time. As many are learning, through their actions right outside Delaney Hall, these camps, and the carceral system undergirding them, are driven by a culture of petty cruelty that will not easily be dismantled. Washington says, “If you’re just doing this emergency response stuff and you’re not then also committing to the long haul, and committing to getting to know, to being there for, and relying as well on, your neighbors, you’re not going to be able to build this grassroots, more transformative concept or vision that’s going to draw in more people and is going to actually, ultimately and permanently replace something like the camp.”

Pin courtesy of Resister Maddie

The Painstaking, Necessary, Sometimes Thankless and Definitely Not Sexy Work of Small Local Change

I got to thinking about the slow and often tedious work necessary for lasting change a few weeks ago, when my sister called to tell me about what had gone down at the latest annual meeting in her small New England town.

On the agenda was a consequential vote on a 250-unit proposed housing development, to address the town’s severe housing shortage. A site had already been purchased for it back in 2022, and a volunteer committee had worked tirelessly over the past several years to come up with a plan, teaming up with a panel of environmental, water, building and other expert consultants. If the town voted to move forward with the proposal, the project was all but guaranteed to receive significant investment from the state—but only if they submitted it soon.

As of a year ago, the town seemed to be fully on board. But in the intervening months, opponents (some of whom lived outside the town) started sending out mailers and flooding FB groups with their objections. Views became more entrenched. There were even death threats against some of the planners.

The day of the vote, about 600 people turned out, which is a lot by local standards. Tensions were high, and the meeting lasted hours. There were pages and pages of technical information to review, and any resident who wanted to could share their views (three minutes per speaker). While the deliberations sometimes got contentious, for the most part, according to my sister, the debate remained remarkably civil. Good points were made for and against. And there was one point that nearly everyone seemed to agree on: their town is experiencing a housing crisis that poses an existential threat to the community. Young families and people with low-paying jobs, teachers and restaurant workers, can no longer afford to live there. Something needs to be done. In the end, though, the proposal failed by 24 votes. Evidently, for those who voted against it, this plan just felt like too much, too fast.

Image Credit: @tinybuddhaofficial on Instagram

For the committee members who had worked so hard on the proposal, this was a devastating blow. It’s not clear where they go from here. The next day, my sister ran into one of them at the supermarket. She thanked him for his service, and he seemed almost moved to tears by her gratitude. Since then, my sister has resolved to join the group dedicated to easing the town’s housing crisis. In many ways, that’s a terrible idea; coming up with feasible solutions, and getting others on board, is a slow-moving process, and, like many of us, she doesn’t have the bandwidth to take something like that on right now. When I asked her why she’s decided to do it, she said it’s because she’s seen the same people, year after year, showing up to do this thankless work. She’s not sure what she has to offer, but in the wake of the latest major setback, she hopes that by joining them, they will see that their work is not invisible. That, in inspiring others like her to step into the fray, they have succeeded in some way.

I’m not trying to make a hero out of my sister (though she is, committee or no committee, a hero to me!). Or trying to take the wind out of the sails of anyone fighting for big, bold, fast-moving transformation. We don’t all have to do the same thing. But I think it is useful and necessary to sit with the fact that the change we are seeking, in our neighborhoods and towns and cities and country, will sometimes require getting into the weeds, and pushing for what may look like miniscule advances. There may be sudden unexpected bursts of progress. (Exhibit A: Zohran Mamdani’s first term.) But change happens at many levels, some of them granular. I guess, at the end of the day, what I’m offering here is simply a nod of gratitude and admiration to the people among us who are doing this other, often unrecognized, certainly not sexy work.

Art credit: transpainter on Instagram

Amplify this

• Brooklyn has book deserts. The Brooklyn Book Bodega wants to change that.

• Pride is never just a celebration. It has always been a practice of resistance and survival And to the ones who paved the way for us.

• Trump Squeezes Immigrants by Cutting Them Off From Jobs, Health Care and Housing

• Support families impacted by detention at Delaney Hall

• ‘To call it a ceasefire is a joke’: Israeli soldiers share rare accounts from Gaza with AP

• Yup, freest country in the world.

• Is America worth fighting for? On Eddie S. Glaude’s new book, from The Ink

• Tracking U.S. Military Killings in Boat Attacks from the New York Times

• Zohran says bedtime is canceled - go Knicks! Somebody tell Elmo. (And as always, Abolish ICE)

• If you aren’t boycotting Target already, it might be a good time to start.

And as always,

‘Til Next Time,

Julie, Kate, & the Messaging Team

This week, we found ourselves swept up in some news and potential history-making. It centers around the brave hunger and labor strikers in Delaney Hall (link to demands below). Here is our account.

Mural by Tori Shao. Photo credit: vfatvbutch on Instagram.

Stepping into a radical hospitality zone

By Julie Subrin

As you probably know, for days now, there have been massive protests outside the Delaney Hall ICE detention center in Newark, NJ—people coming out to show their solidarity with the hundreds of detainees inside who began a hunger and labor strike last Friday.

Maybe you’ve read about the awful conditions inside—the worms in the food, lack of air conditioning or proper ventilation, denial of necessary medical care, poor sanitation, mistreatment by guards, and retaliation against those who dare to speak out.

Located on an ugly truck route flanked by waste water management and utility plants, Delaney Hall is the largest ICE detention center on the East Coast. It has a 1,000-person capacity, and is run by the GEO Group, a private, for-profit corporation. You can read about their grotesque profit model here (h/t Debby). As for who’s being held there, the population includes many of the people snatched from NYC immigration courts when they appeared for routine, required check-ins; high school seniors missing prom; a woman who miscarried and was denied care; people in need of treatment for cancer and other illnesses; mothers, fathers, daughters and sons; primary breadwinners and elderly folks.

Kate and I knew some, but by no means all, of the above when we headed to Delaney Hall on Sunday. We were going there at the urging of Ann Heppermann, my friend and fellow BKR member, who had put out a call for folks to join a 24-hour, multiday vigil in support of the striking detainees.

Ann has been talking about Delaney Hall for months now—not about the detention center, per se, but about the incredible community of care that has bloomed right outside its gates. This mutual aid effort was established pretty much as soon as the detention center opened last May, to provide support to family members of detainees during weekly visiting hours. Over time, the effort has expanded, as volunteers and visitors identified needs—for some sort of minimal shelter from the heat or freezing wind while they waited, sometimes hours, to go in; for groceries and clothes for those who have lost jobs and sources of income; for access to legal counsel; or for a pair of pants to borrow when a guard turns them away at the gate, saying their leggings are not “appropriate” for visiting hours. This mutual aid site also offers something less tangible but just as important, as Kate and I would see—somewhere to sit with others, drink a cup of coffee, and to give and receive care, despite conditions structured to alienate and dehumanize rather than provide connection.

So that’s where we were headed on this drizzly Sunday. Ann was out of town, but she relayed a request from the on-the-ground Signal chat: some hot food would be appreciated. And so, around 2pm, we pulled up with two large pizzas.

The first thing we saw was a big white tent with a banner on the side that reads, “Welcome to a Radical Hospitality Zone.” The inside was bustling, and packed to the gills with bins of donated clothing, diapers, and other necessities. Visitors can also pick up prepaid grocery cards, or speak to a volunteer about legal and other services. While we were there, we saw one woman drop off a big pot of soup, and another, a homemade cake roll filled with dulce de leche. People greeted each other with a friendly “hola!,” and the line between visitor and volunteer was often hazy or nonexistent. Many of the people there have been coming week after week, and friendships have formed.

“Oye, mi gente”: Passing protest song lyrics from one phone to another. Photo credit: Julie Subrin.

Over the next three hours, we would spend a little time in that community tent, but were mostly outside as part of the vigil, made up of a handful of first-timers like us and volunteers in orange safety vests who were part of the mutual aid effort. We met an awesome 23-year-old originally from Ecuador in overalls with green braids, a mom and teen daughter who had driven northern New Jersey. Together, we chanted, chatted, and sang songs of solidarity, led by an old timer with a long white beard, and a feisty woman reading handwritten lyrics off a crumpled piece of paper. And then we became somewhat unwitting actors in an unfolding drama.

It began when vigil organizer Gabriela Soto, four months pregnant and a U.S. citizen, learned that her husband Martin, one of the organizers of the hunger strike inside, had been told he was going to be released. She became panicked, sobbing, convinced that it was a trick and that he would instead be transferred to another undisclosed site as an act of retaliation.

As a group of community volunteers surrounded her, held her and comforted her, another volunteer approached and asked us, the small group of protesters, if we would be willing to block the driveway, should ICE try to take anyone away. Everyone nodded, sure. Then we went back to our singing, chatting, and chanting.

Perhaps a half hour later, Kate spotted a white van with dark tinted windows (the type of vehicle ICE uses to transport detainees) approaching the Delaney Hall exit. Immediately, a dozen of us took our places. Behind us, folks had dragged heavy traffic barriers as a second line of defense. The van pulled out, came to a stop in front of us, and honked. We stayed put. The driver honked more. We stayed put, shouting, chanting, and blowing whistles as a crowd gathered. When Gabi learned what was happening, she rushed to the van, peered into the tinted windows, and saw Martin in the back. With that, she began screaming, and the standoff became much more heated. At one point, the van inched forward, but there was nowhere for it to go. Finally, after perhaps 10 minutes, the driver gave up, and the van retreated back into the parking lot, the gate closing behind it. It felt like a miracle. How did they not have a plan for this? Why didn’t they use force? A huge victory.

Julie, Kate, and other Protesters in the Standoff at Delaney Hall. Photo credit: Unknown.

Next, we watched as GEO Group staff in blue t-shirts and masks gathered inside the gates. On our side, people had their phones out, putting out calls for reinforcements, for electeds to come out. There was talk of tear gas and rubber bullets. It was now well past the time Kate and I had planned on leaving, and realizing we had reached our limit for the day, we headed for home around 5:30pm.

Later that night, and into the morning, things would get much more chaotic outside Delaney Hall. Perhaps 300 protesters would turn out to block exits and keep the prison administration from transferring detainees without giving them a chance to alert family or lawyers. ICE-operated military vehicles would be deployed, along with pepper spray and batons. (At some point overnight, Martin Soto was removed. He is now being held in the Elizabeth Detention Center.) House Representative Robert Menendez would spend the night in the parking lot, waiting to be granted entry for a site visit. Senator Kim would come the next morning, and be pepper sprayed as he tried to broker some sort of truce between protesters and armed, masked ICE agents.

Now, the area (and my social media feed) is flooded with activists, journalists, elected officials and influencers, not to mention scores of ICE thugs. The tense standoff has gained national attention. Some of the detainees have been released. At the same time, it sometimes seems as though their urgent demands—not simply for better conditions, but for the immediate release of the sick, children, and the elderly, and beyond that, the complete shut down of this inhumane human warehouse—are getting drowned out. What’s more, visitations have been suspended. And many family members are afraid to return to the “radical hospitality zone,” that community of essential care, which now finds itself trapped in something like a war zone.

I hope, as this struggle continues, that there is a way to integrate the kindness, trust and care that the mutual aid group has stitched together over so many months into the activist and advocacy work aimed at shutting down this godawful prison camp once and for all.

Image Credit: @seednewworlds

A Different Kind of Ordinary

By Kate Dalton

There’s a compelling clip on Instagram where a woman gets up at a town hall to express solidarity with the Delaney Hall protests. She says, “I’m not getting paid to protest. I’m doing this because I fundamentally believe this is the right thing to do. And you know I think that reveals a lot more about the ICE agents than it does about us, because they don’t believe that anyone can believe in anything so strongly that they would get out of bed in the middle of the night, drive 45 minutes, and stand there to provide support to people who need their help. I just don’t know at this point how to explain that you’re supposed to care about other people.”

The fact that we’re supposed to care about other people, that our interconnectedness is both right and rational, has guided much of our work during this regime and in this newsletter. Whether we’re talking about how to avoid normalizing cruel behavior, creating communities of care, or even affirming (over and over) that another world is possible, we recognize that collectively we have the power to shape our sense of just what is and what is not “ordinary.”

And Sunday, Julie and I got to experience a different sort of ordinary, one centered on care, in our visit to Delaney Hall. I was struck by the radical hospitality and clothing tent, all stocked by volunteers and families, with materials carefully packed up and placed in storage each night and then re-set up in the morning. Then there was the reassurance offered to Gabriela, the distraught pregnant wife of lead striker Martin Soto. It was hard to watch someone so visibly upset in a public setting, but the response of organizers and volunteers showed a sensitivity to her pain and a respect for her agency.

Image Credit: @anotherworldpress on Instagram

Gabriela and her husband Martin reflected another part of the culture of Delaney Hall: the strength, determination, and righteousness of the detainees and their families in the fight for their lives. The detainees continue to affirm their own humanity through what they have–their refusal. In participating in the hunger and labor strike, they are employing a time-honored tactic of the disenfranchised, making grueling sacrifices for justice.

As part of the larger vigil effort, our actions were guided by solidarity. We sang quite a few songs because we were told that the detainees could hear us. And everywhere we looked there were signs of care, from the deliberate counting of people that went in and out of the facility to the tour and introductions a volunteer gave us when we arrived. We also bonded with our fellow protesters, a mom from North Jersey, and an earnest twentysomething woman from Ecuador with a beautiful handmade sign.

I really believe it was this context that made our successful standoff with the ICE van possible. So often we talk about individual acts of courage but overlook the collective efforts behind them. Julie and I were able to step in on Sunday because our fellow volunteers so quickly and cooly said yes to blocking the van, and because we were held in a sense by the larger community of Delaney, created and cultivated over time by people giving their all in the face of unspeakable odds. So much of our work is like that, often thankless and seemingly futile, but in fighting to make the good more ordinary, every once in a while we get a little closer to accomplishing something extraordinary together.

Image Credit: @layqanunayawar

In addition to bearing witness, in person, to what is happening at Delaney Hall, there are other vital ways to support the hunger and work strikers and their families. You can amplify their demands. You can call your reps, and ask that they demand oversight as long as our neighbors are being held inside. You can also contribute to mutual aid efforts here, here, and here.

Amplify this

• Some other accounts of Sunday: Gabriela Soto on Democracy Now, this from the Guardian, and this from the NJ Vindicator. And there’s this from yesterday.

• Did you know you can follow Brooklyn Resisters on Instagram? And Freedom Fridays too!

• Come canvass for Brad Lander with us this Sunday!

• When your friends want to hang out, but you’re trying to organize society (h/t Joelle)

• Israeli human right organization B’Tselem executive director Yuli Novak on the process of genocide

• Why Trump isn’t bothering to hide his corruption, by our very own Judith Levine

• Give me liberty or give me death, reflections on the Delaney hunger and labor strike

• Clean protest graffiti in Westminster, UK (h/t Léa)

• Vote on your favorite jingle for the NYC 2-K program! (We’re thinking Amanda’s and Allegra’s are pretty good.)

And as always,

‘Til Next Time,

Kate, Julie, & the Messaging Team

Greetings Resisters!

We write to you at the end of yet another topsy-turvy, upside-down week. Just when we thought the corruption couldn’t get any worse (okay, we did think it could get worse, but not quite like this), Trump’s DOJ has proposed allocating 1.776 billion dollars for Trump cronies, including the white supremacists who stormed the capitol and killed law enforcement members. The saying “for my friends, everything, for my enemies the law” while accurate, doesn’t begin to get at the grotesqueness of the move.

Image Credit:@misterjesseduqette on Instagram

The primary elections held Tuesday offered a few glimmers of hope, with progressive wins like the election of Chris Rabb in PA-3, along with some sobering realities as Trump picks overwhelmingly won on the Republican side. Meanwhile, we are left to wonder what all this means for the midterms, including what the flagrant disregard for the rule of law by the sitting president portends for their integrity. As we’ve been noting, it’s easy to get discouraged, but so many of us are finding strength and resilience in a variety of beautiful yet imperfect ways. Today we bring you a meditation from Joelle Berman, queen organizer and movement whisperer, on what’s getting her through these days.

Why I Stay In This Fight

By Joelle Asaro Berman

In our world’s constant storm of demoralization and collapse, it’s easy for me to get numb to the daily (nay, hourly) flow of bad news. When the news came about the Voting Rights Act and how quickly state legislatures across the South moved to further disempower Black voters – and all of us – as a result, it pierced my numbness, and forced a pause.

In the pause, I revisited a core question: What keeps me in this fight?

Whatever answers I can muster in moments like this are thanks to what I’ve learned along my political journey from movement elders, Black feminist futurists, Jewish Labor Bundists (more on them below), and Indigenous healers: that this work that we are doing together is about something so much bigger than the midterms, or fighting fascism, or even saving democracy. It’s a fight for our humanity and all life and the freedom that can only come from being in real relationship with one another.

Image Credit: @fabfeminstart

Another way of saying this is that we do all of this fighting and mobilizing and activism and keep-goingness not because we are guaranteed a win; indeed, the losses are coming and there will be so many more of them before we’re through. Instead, we show up because we are in a cross-generational struggle, building on the work of so many who came before us who had way fewer rights or reasons to believe they would win (let alone survive), but who kept at it anyway.

Maybe you know some of these fighters. Maybe they are your ancestors, your grandparents, your parents. Maybe they’re your teachers, people who have organized you, people you studied. Maybe you simply feel a kinship with them across time.

These days, I’m finding a particular comradeship with members of the Jewish Labor Bund – a secular, socialist, and deeply influential Jewish political force in eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century – and whose story is captured profoundly by Molly Crabapple in her new book, Here Where We Live is Our Country. In the introduction, she offers: “Despite vast differences in the worlds that we inhabited, Bundists seemed to me like kin. Like them, I knew the floor of a police cell, the boredom of a leftist meeting, the electric charge of passing a pamphlet to a stranger, the high of believing, rightly or wrongly, that you are about to change the world.”

My fellow Resisters, if we collectively know nothing else, is it not the electric charge of handing a zine that our very own members have crafted and folded with love to a stranger, in the hopes that they will find their way more deeply into this struggle?

So I will keep folding and handing out zines; I will keep meeting up with you for one-on-ones; I will keep gathering us to build this political home; I will keep raising money; I will keep turning us out for marches, and on, and on. Because I sure as hell am not letting down all these badasses who came before me, nor am I letting down the people who will surely continue this work after we are gone.

Image Credit: @fabfeministart

Here is what I know: I have come to trust and love and believe in the people I’ve met through Brooklyn Resisters in ways that patriarchy, capitalism, antisemitism, and any number of powerful forces never would have wanted me to or dreamed I could. For me, this means that in some sense, we’ve already won, because we’ve already built what we have – and this doesn’t mean we get to walk away. It means we keep organizing and keep building and keep deepening our connections with one another so that more of us can be in the struggle as wholly and humanly as we have been thus far, and could yet be.

There’s so much they can never take away from us. Our tethers to generations past and future– to loved ones and strangers–our connections and relationships and our love and our care between one another is the Whole. Damn. Point.

I leave you with this wisdom from organizer and writer Derecka Purnell:

This isn’t a popular thing to say, but I don’t know if we will win.

I also don’t think I care.

People who ran away from slave plantations didn’t know if they were going to get free,

But they ran anyway

I want people in my life who choose to run away,

I want to be surrounded by people who resist anyway.

Freedom is bound in struggle. And in running

Not winning and losing. Freedom happens in our souls.

Before we can speak it in a song, chant, or a hashtag.

Freedom is a decision,

Not just an outcome.

Select Bibliography:

• Loretta Ross: “Don’t Let the Chain of Freedom Break at Your Link”

• Everything for Everyone by M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi

• Here Where We Live is Our Country by Molly Crabapple

• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Volumes of Epstein file documents inside the Trump and Epstein Memorial Reading Room. Photo credit: Julie Subrin.

Notes from the Donald J Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room

By Julie Subrin

Earlier this week, a few of us took a field trip to The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room. Of course, there is no such reading room in the “real” world. This is an art installation created by the Institute for Primary Facts and housed in a gallery in lower Manhattan. (It will remain up through Sunday, May 24. Entry is free, but online reservations are recommended.)

The Reading Room spans two floors. On the upper level, the walls are lined with floor-to ceiling shelves containing printouts of the complete Epstein files—3.5 million pages, in 3,437 bound volumes. Towards the back, a timeline tracks Trump’s predations (gropings, violent assaults, etc), Epstein’s sexual and trafficking crimes, and the decades-spanning friendship between the two men. At the center of the room, in a curtained area, is a memorial with hundreds of candles to honor the survivors.

It’s a lot to take in, and honestly left me somewhat numb, in part because in this reading room you can’t actually read the files. They are off-limits out of respect for the survivors, because the DOJ, while assiduously redacting the names of most of the powerful men in the documents, left many of the victims’ names unredacted, along with other highly sensitive information and even photos. (For a full accounting of how our justice system has failed these women over and over, listen to this. Warning: It is utterly rage-inducing.)

Bulletin board, lower level, Memorial Reading Room. Photo credit: Léa Zimmerman.

More powerful, for me, was the display on the lower level. There, you’ll find bulletin boards crammed with handwritten notecards from visitors. The language people choose is often simple, but their grief and fury is palpable. (One, pictured below, reads: “For my 3 sons - - I’m sorry your generation inherits this. Please help burn it all down + build something better. [heart] Mom.” Clearly, the crimes contained within the files touch a nerve—not only in and of themselves, but also insofar as they reflect a society that so often protects abusers. The cumulative effect of these individual messages, this collective outcry, is a visceral reminder that we, the people, are not ok. We are trying to heal wounds so much bigger than any one of us. At the same time, this room full of pain and anger is a powerful reminder that we are not alone.

Below are a few snapshots we took from our visit.

Details of the bulletin board on the lower level. Photo credit: Léa Zimmerman, Jenny Wood and Julie Subrin.

Amplify this

• Trump “Anti-Weaponization” Slush Fund FAQ, care of The Daily Show

• Thank you Colbert, we needed this joy right now

• No but really, let’s talk reparations

• Trump’s Insurrectionist Payout Scheme Violates the 14th Amendment by Sherilyn Iffill

• The winner of the Kentucky GOP primary

• Use this form from Advocates for Trans Equality to urge your Senators to vote no on PSLF and protect public service employees, including those providing gender-affirming care. (h/t Eitan)

• Head to Bryant Park June 1 for a reading party (h/t Jenny)

• 1,000 World Cup tickets. $50 each. All for New Yorkers.

• Come canvass for Brad Lander with us next Sunday!

And as always,

‘Til Next Time,

Julie, Kate, & the Messaging Team

Image Credit: @winsorkincade

Good morning, Resisters.

The decimation of southern Black voting power over the past week has been devastating. It’s tempting to throw up one’s hands in the wake of the Virginia Supreme Court ruling and other gerrymandering moves throughout the country. The system, we can see, is ever more heavily rigged in the dying GOP’s favor.

This rigged system is of a piece with the vast array of corruption we’re seeing from this administration. It includes the billionaires and family members flying with Trump to China, presumably to gain some sort of deal for themselves. It also includes Donald Trump exploiting his position to build his extravagant ballroom and bunker, a project which is growing increasingly more unpopular by the day.

Of course the system is rigged. It has been for some time. But it is essential that we remember that we have something powerful on our side: people power. As Jess Craven points out, the net gain of all this gerrymandering is around 11 seats, and Democrats won the midterms in 2018 by over 40. Trump’s polling numbers are at record-breaking lows. If we can get all those angry and dissatisfied voters to the polls, we will win.

Image Credit: @fabfeministart

And we’re seeing civic wins throughout the country even now. Take data centers for example. Ordinary citizens have successfully blocked massive developments, despite tech billionaires doing everything they can to bypass public input.

And then there’s the pending closure of Alligator Alcatraz, the inhumane and ill-conceived detention center in the Everglades, after months of pressure by immigrant rights and environmental activists.

We’re also seeing Black leaders in the South showing us how to fight the good fight. This Saturday, there are plans for a massive Emergency Day of Action in Selma and Montgomery, to honor the legacy of civil rights leaders for their transformative work and to kick off a summer of voter advocacy.

So let’s not despair. Or, as Kate writes below, go ahead and despair. But then, let’s get back to the work.

Image Credit: @chiara.acu

Our grief is sacred

By Kate Dalton

Over the past several weeks, as we have faced a slew of devastating setbacks, we seemed to hear from one Resister after another about their horror at what has been happening, along with a sense of hopelessness and futility. Most recently, it was one of our most dedicated and badass members, Mandy. Mandy is the type of person who pulls solo ICE patrol shifts, stocks a food pantry, organizes a Visibility Brigade weekly over the BQE with Lisa, calls electeds, raises her three awesome kids, and empowers mostly first generation college students through the classes she teaches. And just this past week, I learned that Mandy hails from a line of badass activists–her mother marched on Selma. It was one of the reasons she was so upset by the Jim Crow reinforcing decisions of late.

Mandy is also incredibly thoughtful and insightful about all things justice, so when she talks, I listen. And so do a lot of our group members. When she shared on Signal the other day that she was feeling particularly low, response after response came with a mix of care, advice, and commiseration. We all want to help each other not give up, to follow the credo we mentioned last week of action being the antidote to despair, and it was heartening to see the community rally behind one of our most committed members.

While I certainly don’t want to lose Mandy or anybody else in this fight, I don’t want to paper over feelings of hopelessness either. Those feelings are a reflection of our grief, and I believe that grief is sacred. It comes from an engagement with the world as is, and attempts to honestly reckon with the overwhelming forces we face. We grieve because we see the injustices, the real human cost of fascists and fascist enablers. We mourn what we’ve lost and what feels like we’re continuing to lose.

Image Credit: @revloveproject

We certainly don’t have to live in our grief forever, but we can make a little more space for it. We can recognize its connection to our humanity. Even when grief comes in the form of wanting to give up, we can see that it’s a reflection of how much we really do care. And we can express it and not be silent about it. We can look to leaders like Justin Pearson and Justin Jones in Tennessee sharing their grief, rage, and determination for all to see.

And we may need to take a beat to tend to our feelings of hopelessness. This is indeed a long fight we’re in. But we’re much better prepared to engage in it when we’re in touch with our humanity, including our ability to feel loss so deeply that it seems like we can’t continue in this struggle. So often that is the well from which our strongest fight springs.

Amplify this

• A pep talk on VA from Jess Craven

• And here’s another, from Robert Hubbell

• Ms. Rachel on the ongoing genocide in Gaza

• Forget Broad City–it’s Brad City: Brad Lander talks to Ilana Glazer

• A little comic relief—because lord knows we need it: “Say Something Normal” - a game show.

• And this—Operation Epic Furious, the video game! (from the Secret Handshake group) (h/t Mandy)

• Visit the Donald J Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room. Book your reservation here.

• Celebrate Brooklyn schedule is out, and it’s got Sleater Kinney and Liz Phair, a generational sweet spot for these two feminists.

And as always,

‘Til Next Time,

Kate, Julie, & the Messaging Team

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For those of you who are new here, the Messaging Roundup is a weekly collection of ideas, images, and attempts at making sense of this moment, brought to you by Kate Dalton, Julie Subrin and the Messaging Team.

This week, we’re talking about the power of two springtime rituals—May Day, and Mother’s Day. Through them, we can grow our capacity to build communities of care and to reject the dominant culture of labor exploitation and social atomization, all things we need to be doing a little more of right now.

May Day Strike Picnic, with a pep talk from Brad Lander: Photo credit Kate Fermoile.

The Power of a Picnic

If you were to ask the Brooklyn Resisters what our theory of change is, you’d probably get a different answer from every single member. Many of us come to this work not as long-time activists, but as worriers. In fact, Joan Baez’s famous quote, “action is the antidote to despair” is perhaps the closest we get to a guiding principle. And while we certainly do our fair share of protesting, advocating, and organizing, sometimes the best move we can make is less about “doing” and more about “being.” In the face of capitalistic forces obsessed with productivity and extraction, it can be a bold act of resistance to just be in community with one another. That is what we did last Friday. On May Day, roughly a hundred Brooklyn neighbors set aside their work, their school, and their consumer habits, and chose instead to come to a big picnic with people they might or might not know.

Of course lots of hard work went into planning the event (for which we are grateful, and take no credit), but that groundwork having been laid, we were able to gather with a sense of playfulness and lightness. There was eating, dancing, singing (yes we had protest karaoke), flower wreath making, and even a makeshift maypole, courtesy of one of our new members, who brought rainbow streamers attached to rings. The whole afternoon left a very special glow.

Image credit: sophielucidojohnson on Instagram

Ahead of the event, there was no telling who would show up, or how they would feel about being there. When we asked some of the newcomers how they’d ended up there, many said they’d been looking for some place to go for May Day, and found us online, or on a neighborhood flyer. There was Maddie, who came with a bag full of homemade protest pins to give to anyone who wanted one. And Abbie, who’d decided to merge her May Day event with ours, and who we met for the first time as she helped us carry oversized flower signs and poles to the Peninsula. They, and so many others, stepped outside familiar bounds in order to be in community. And all of us, newcomers and existing Resisters alike, collectively created a welcoming space to be around each other on a sunny, slightly chilly afternoon in Prospect Park.

Of course, many of us already knew each other. But at this picnic, we got a chance to know each other a little more and in different ways. Have you ever heard Debbie N, our immigration expert, sing “This Land Is Your Land” with her husband Morten? Did you know what a set of antifascist pipes Joe has, or Rich W, of Freedom Friday fame? Have you ever seen Constance pull out her dance moves? Together, we weren’t planning, or being “productive.” We were just hanging out. We were having fun.

Pups for Picnic Strikes! Image Credit; @womensmarch

If we didn’t know it already, this picnic (and the Shabbat potluck later that evening) offered us an essential data point: People are hungry to be in community with others who share an urgent sense that something needs to change. There are so many of us, and together, we can do so much to disrupt this horrifyingly cruel and corrupt regime. But to do that effectively, we need to cultivate an ever-expanding circle of trust, and connection. Those elements will be especially important in moments when the fascist heat gets turned up, whether that’s through ICE raids, election interference, or whatever else may come our way.

Just as importantly, we need to remember that rejecting authoritarianism and “business as usual” doesn’t only look like worrying and work. It also looks like sitting on blankets, making flower crowns, and eating bean salad and cookies together. It may sound sappy, or simplistic. But after seeing all those new-to-each-other people talking and laughing together, exchanging recipes and Signal handles, it’s hard to deny that a strike picnic is a phenomenal tool for creating the change we want to see.

Image credit: fromayoungmatriarch on Instagram

Matriarchal Work

We want to wish a happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers and maternal figures in our group while holding space for all those who have complicated feelings about the day for whatever reason. We also wish to note the often un-acknowledged and unpaid labor of mothering that takes place both in our personal and activist lives. It has been said that much of the current resistance is matriarchal in nature, with decentralized communities of care that prioritize the most vulnerable. And while our activism work most certainly reflects matriarchal values, the majority of the world does not. So this Mother’s Day let us not only commit to thanking the moms in our lives, but also to honoring them with renewed investment in practices rooted in love and care.

Image Credit: @earthliberationstudio

To that end, we’d like to amplify the Black Mama’s Bailout, a project of National Bail Out, which helps pre-trial incarcerated mothers reunite with their families for Mother’s Day. According to their website, the project works to “bail out as many Black mamas and caregivers as possible so they can spend Mother’s Day with their families, where they belong” and “ensures that every Black mama and caregiver bailed out has access to short and long-term supportive services.” National Bail Out is a Black-led and Black-centered collective committed to disrupting the prison-industrical complex and abolishing pre-trial detention. You can donate to their work via this link.

Amplify this

• How to Convert Protesters into Real Political Power by Antonia Scatton

• “They Want You to Think Abortion Pills Are Illegal” by Jessica Valenti and Kylie Cheung

• Join the Yacht Rock pop-up choir, all singing abilities welcome

• Check out the Black Zine Fair this Saturday May 9th 11am-6pm at Powerhouse Arts (h/t Megan P)

• How Jeff Bezos’ Met Gala bet backfired

• Alok Vaid-Menon invites us to abolish the concept of strangers (h/t Joelle)

• An airline of, by and for the people? Make a pledge to Spirit 2.0. (h/t Lulu)

• Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Political Economy Reading List

• Who Will Stand Up to the Supreme Court Justices?, from the NYT

• Pussy Riot protests the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale

• Hey you guys, BKR is on Insta! Follow us here.

And as always,

‘Til Next Time,

Julie, Kate, & the Messaging Team

Art credit: wildcraftprintshop

Hello Resisters,

We are delivering this week’s roundup early, to offer what we hope will be some motivation as we head into May Day Strong, an opportunity for us to assert our collective power against corporate greed and government corruption and cruelty. Just yesterday, the Supreme Court dealt what looks to be a devastating blow to civil rights and voting rights in this country. It will take some time for us to make sense of the implications. (For a great first step, join tonight’s emergency call with Indivisible and the No Kings Coalition to learn about next steps.) But if ever we needed a compelling reason to break from our normal habits of work, school and material consumption, this certainly qualifies. We hope to see you out on the streets, in the park, or anywhere that gives you the courage and joy to continue this fight.

Manufacturing Ballroom Consent

By Kate Dalton

Last week, an attempted shooting interrupted the White House Correspondence Dinner. The immediate response from the president and numerous MAGA allies has not been to call for increased security measures and a moratorium on gun sales. No, the most pressing need of this nation in response to a near tragedy is to assert the need for a glitzy, bulletproof glass White House ballroom. The claim has been made in numerous social media posts and mainstream media outlets, and Lindsey Graham has led a group of Senate Republicans to push a bill allotting $400 million dollars for the architectural monstrosity.

It’s enough to make you question whether this is really happening. Unfortunately for us, it really is. Numerous sycophants and their media enablers are exploiting a dangerous incident for a vanity project that epitomizes the corruption, greed, and waste of this regime. In addition to our tax dollars, which should be used to benefit the American people, the ballroom is being funded by a handful of wealthy individuals and corporations, including Meta, Apple, Amazon, and Google. If a Democratic administration were engaging in such a pay-to-play scenario, we would be hearing about the elite cabal running the country, but instead we’re supposed to accept that this is just the way things are.

The rot runs deep, and one can easily get swept up in a feeling of inevitability, which is part of what makes May Day so important. It is a day to disentangle ourselves from the forces that seek to dominate and control. It’s a time dedicated to refusal, when we say “we want no part in this.” It’s also an opportunity for us to imagine different ways of being.

Image Credit: @fabfeministart

May Day reminds us that our collective power is one of the few tools in our arsenal and we should use every opportunity to take advantage of it. We participate in an economic blackout knowing that we should withhold our spending power beyond one day, and that we will have to get others to do the same. We’ll need more events like Indivisible Brooklyn’s Cancel Party, where we can opt out of harmful systems together and make it fun. It’s definitely not easy, but participating in targeted boycotts sends a message to corporations like Amazon and Meta that we’re not okay with them funding the stupid ballroom and cozying up to this administration in the myriad other ways that they are doing.

May Day is also powerful on an individual level. In a world that says the answer is more, more more, May Day is a time to focus on being with one another and getting creative with what you have. James Baldwin wrote, “There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as before an ancient friend.” There are plenty of moon colonizers around us today, but through our refusal, our withholding, and our playful resistance, we affirm a way of being and worth that can’t be measured in a tawdry ballroom or other machinations of a mad king and his complicit empire. With all that in mind, we invite you to join us tomorrow in Prospect Park to share food, learn new skills, make music, and dance before the moon in our own Brooklyn way.

The May Day Tradition of dancing around the Maypole symbolizes the blossoming of new life.

Art by Autumn Hollow Studio

Be like Amy

By Julie Subrin

A new documentary about Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman opens with a chase scene. Goodman is at the 2018 Global Climate Summit in Katowice, Poland, and is trying to get some answers from Preston Wells Griffith III, Trump’s then-Special Assistant for International Energy and Environment. She approaches him in a crowded corridor, and asks what he makes of Trump’s statement that climate change is a hoax. He ignores her. She asks him why he’s there, since Trump has said he’s planning on pulling out of the Paris Agreement. He ignores her some more. She keeps at it, and she’s doing this on the run, as Wells Griffith attempts to get away from her, accelerating his pace, weaving between attendees, and tackling staircases two steps at a time.

Goodman is quick and nimble, but still, she’s breathing heavily to keep up. Somehow, all the while, her voice remains calm, and she never stops with the questions. When he accuses her of harassing him, she replies, “A reporter asking you questions, sir, is not harassment.” (Sing it, sister!)

Amy Goodman reporting from the Standing Rock protests; Still from

“Steal This Story, Please”

There is much to admire about Goodman—her intelligence, her determination to tell stories that mainstream media refuses to cover, her dedication to centering the voices of those on the margins rather than the powerful. (In the film, she offers a scathing critique of major news networks that embedded their reporters with the U.S. army during the war in Iraq, or with IDF soldiers in the war on Gaza, in effect erasing the stories of those under attack.) What I found especially powerful was her doggedness, and her refusal to conform to the norms set by aspiring (and actual) dictators. She is unafraid to abandon decorum in the pursuit of truth.

In sharp contrast to Goodman’s relentless truth-seeking is the equally relentless lying, obfuscating and gaslighting coming out of the White House. This week, that involved advancing patently false narratives about who and what poses a threat to our democracy. We learned, for instance, that the Department of Justice is going after former FBI director James Comey for sharing an Instagram post that showed seashells arranged on a beach to form the letters “86 47.” The DOJ is making the claim that this amounted to a “threat to the president,” punishable by up to 10 years in prison—this despite the fact, as we know, that the president regularly shares far more violent and disturbing images on social media than Comey did.

Art credit: Panhandle Slim

Meanwhile, corporate media continues to practice sane-washing and both-siderism. In the aftermath of the shooting that took place outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, CNN’s Dana Bash asked Rep. Jamie Raskin if Democrats bore some blame for that violent act, considering their “heated rhetoric” about Trump. When Raskin asked her to specify what she meant by “heated rhetoric,” she pointed to statements “that he’s terrible for the country, and so on and so forth.”

In his response, Raskin noted that he had spoken against Trump’s policies, not against him as a person. He could have gone on to point out the many “heated” and dangerous statements Trump and his surrogates have made against immigrants, protesters, and anyone who dares to challenge their authority. Instead, he pointed to Trump’s attacks on the media, saying, “I certainly have never called the press ‘the enemy of the people.’ I think the press are the people’s best friend, and that’s why it’s written right there into the First Amendment. We need the press to be a vigilant watchdog against every level of government—federal, state, local, all of it.”

Trump and co. will continue their war on the truth, which goes hand in hand with attacks on the media. (We haven’t even gotten into the FCC’s announcement, on Tuesday, that they are ordering a full review of ABC’s broadcast licenses, supposedly over violations of DEI regulations, but clearly as a way to punish them for allowing Jimmy Kimmel to make jokes on his show that bother the president and his wife.)

And that brings us back to Amy Goodman, and the absolute necessity, in this fight we’re in, of exercising our right to ask questions of those in power. I don’t know that she was ever going to get any answers from Preston Wells Griffith III on the climate. If she did, they would most likely be little more than denials and deflections. But there is a power in refusing to shut up, or to comply with social manners, in the pursuit of truth. Let’s channel some of that always-be-questioning-authority energy as we head into May Day. We might also honor Goodman’s work in independent media by withholding our attention, along with our labor, and our money. For one day, let’s steer clear of corporate media and social media. And then, when we’re spending again, do yourself a favor and go see the excellent “Steal This Story, Please,” now showing at the IFC in Manhattan.

Amplify this

• May Day motivation from the Sunrise Movement

• You remember Schoolhouse Rock? Now there’s Know Your Rights University, an animated video series brought to you by the ACLU.

• ICE abductions are still happening in NYC. Documented shares this report on how its impacting communities in Queens. (h/t Debbie)

• The War You Can Scroll on By, one Iranian American’s reflection on the Iran War

• TONIGHT: Virtual May Day Eve Cancel Party! Cancel unneeded services and software from billionaire companies.

• Jimmy Kimmel responds to Melania and Donald Trump

• Keep fucking going

• To change big things, start small. Lessons from a climate activist. (The Ink)

• On being a traitor to a patriarchal system c/o adrienne maree brown

And as always,

‘Til Next Time,

Kate, Julie, & the Messaging Team

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Thank you to all of you who came out last weekend for our Resistance Street Fair! And a big welcome to our newest BKR members. This week, like every week these days, has been a whirlwind of overwhelm. But we keep on doing what we know how to do: trying to make sense of where we are, connecting with our neighbors, and plotting a path forward, taking the next best step.

Today, our favorite lapsed Catholic traces some of the Church’s radically empathetic threads and how they relate to our ethical lives more broadly. Then Julie offers up some takeaways from recent victories big and small. As always, thank you for being here with us!

Image Credit: @fabfeministart

Competing Moral Traditions

By Kate Dalton

Over the past few weeks, we have witnessed a stunning series of exchanges between the leader of the Catholic Church and the president of the United States, and eventually his Catholic vice president. Pope Leo spoke plainly about the need to avoid war. In response to Trump’s deranged threat to wipe out an entire civilization, he said, “Today, as we all know, there was this threat against the entire people of Iran, and this is truly unacceptable. . . . There are certainly issues here of international law, but even more than that, it is a moral question for the good of the (world’s) people.” Trump responded by calling the pope “weak on crime” among other things. JD Vance then had the gall to lecture the pope on theology, saying he should be more careful before he speaks, a level of disrespect for papal authority that in one sense couldn’t be any more anti-Catholic. The pope, for his part, stood his ground, saying “To put my message on the same plane as what the president has attempted to do here, I think is not understanding what the message of the Gospel is.”

Image Credit: @justseeds on Instagram

The pope continued to call out greed, corruption, and bloodthirstiness throughout the week, saying “Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth” and “Today, ⁠this is more urgent than ever ​in the face ​of ⁠continuous violations of international law and neocolonial ⁠tendencies.” The moral clarity was a welcome reprieve, especially considering how few people with any degree of power dare to express it these days.

For those following the Catholic Church in American politics over the past fifty years or so, the pope’s words signaled a refreshing change. The Catholicism that has dominated American public life during this period has been a traditionalist, top-down version focused on a narrow personal morality with a large emphasis on limiting abortion access. We can see it in Catholic Supreme Court justices like Antonin Scalia, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, and in MAGA acolytes like Steve Bannon and, yes, JD Vance. Compared to these factions, the pope’s remarks are indeed radical, but that does not mean they are without precedent in Catholicism. Rather, Pope Leo reflects a long-standing, if at times obscured, Catholic tradition focused on liberation and justice.

I found these themes in my own Catholic upbringing. They were in hymns like “Gather Us In,” a song about different types of people meeting in one place to build a better world. We sang “Not in the dark of buildings confining, not in some heaven light years away, but here in this place, new light is shining, now is the kingdom, now is the day.” The song spoke to me because of its emphasis on people collectively making the world better in the here and now. And it reminded me of what my mother used to say, that it was the people that made up the church more than any one place or institution.

This communal spirit also permeated much of the Catholic teaching I received, whether that was the reminder that “Catholic” meant universal, or in St. Augustine’s notion of agape as the selfless type of love that should inform our ethics. There were also the Gospels themselves, which consistently emphasized looking out for one another. They told parables of care, called on us to “love thy neighbor” and featured a main protagonist who famously cast his lot with society’s outcasts and did in fact say, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

Image Credit; @seednewworlds

The Catholic Church itself has a history of radical social movements. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement embodied their faith with acts of solidarity. They practiced a form of Christian anarchism through houses of hospitality across the United States. These spaces provided housing, food, and clothing without requiring religious practice or observance. Then there is Catholic liberation theology, along with similar frameworks, which has been especially popular in Latin America–it’s said Pope Leo would likely be likely familiar with this paradigm due to his time in Peru in the 1980s. Catholic liberation theology views the scripture through the lens of the oppressed. It emphasizes understanding people’s social context and focuses on liberating people from oppressive regimes. One of its most famous pracitioners, Salvadorean archbishop Oscar Romero, spoke out against state violence, human rights abuses, and other forms of injustice and was eventually executed for his beliefs. His work inspires solidarity with migrants and ICE detainees to this day.

When I hear Pope Leo, I recognize a rich Catholic tradition of social justice reflected back, but I also see an ethical choice present to all of us regardless of faith. We can choose a provincial type of moral practice, focusing on our families and giving to charity when the spirit moves us, or we can choose something more expansive by living up to the call to love our neighbor and by dismantling the systems of oppression that hold us all back. And to truly do that, we have to bring others along and get them to let go of the illusion of individual freedom that our current society sells. It won’t be easy, but there are traditions of liberation and justice in our national story that us everyday people, and not just a pontiff, can draw upon to make us all a little more actually free.

Art credit: Just Seeds artist collective on Instagram

What works?

By Julie Subrin

Sometimes, the uphillness of this fight we’re in feels completely overwhelming. I think about the unfathomable amount of money this regime is spending every day on its reckless and unnecessary war on Iran, money that could and should be spent on making people’s lives better. While I am no economist, I can guess that this spending has economic consequences that will weigh on us for decades. This war, like so many other big, bold destructive actions Trump and co. have taken, serves only to enrich him and his inner circle, while distracting, enraging and exhausting the rest of us. Of course, we have no intention of giving up. But the question I find myself constantly circling around is this: In the face of such powerful forces, how do we ordinary citizens meaningfully fight back?

There is no one answer; we have to try everything and anything. But the good news is, we have people power, and when we use that power strategically, we see, over and over again, that we can meaningfully disrupt this authoritarian regime.

Take, for example, community efforts to block data centers. Every day, it seems, we hear about another success story. The news site L.A. TACO offers an incredible account of how that went down in San Gabriel Valley, CA. It began with one community member, who happened to attend a city council meeting where he noticed an agenda item to give final approval for the construction of a data center right there in his community. This was news to him. He alerted a group not unlike ours, an “existing network of volunteers” that had formed during the Black Lives Matter movement and later mobilized around anti-ICE rapid response.

The group sprung into action, first digging into council records and uncovering all the deceptive actions developers and city planners had taken to quietly push the project through in this majority minority (65% Asian, 27% Latino) community. They reached out to activists in other communities impacted by data centers, to educate themselves on the dangers the centers pose. Then they began a massive public education campaign, going door to door, holding meetings, creating art and other materials to raise awareness. They were inclusive (enlisting the help of translators and interpreters). And they deployed joy, too, setting up mahjong games and traditional Chinese dance performances for those waiting for council meetings to begin.

According to the article, thanks to all this organizing, hundreds showed up at the next three council meetings. An overflow crowd spilled beyond the chambers and into hallways. And as a result, the attendees won, in the first meeting, a 45-day ban on data centers, and in the second, a permanent ban on the centers.

Similar emergency community mobilization has worked elsewhere, to block not only data centers but also the construction of I.C.E. concentration camps.

Art Credit: Layqa Nuna Yawar (@layqanunayawar)

And we resisters are gaining more and more experience jumping to action. Just this past week, we flexed our collective muscle in response to a national call to disrupt implementation of a proposed H.U.D. rule to evict “mixed-status” families from public housing. The rule, we learned, would lead to a surge in family separations and homelessness. And so within days, by my calculation, this group alone submitted 40 public comments opposing the rule. Will our collective action be enough to stop this terrible proposal from moving forward? Only time will tell. But even if it buys families just a few more days to be together, and to plan for their future, that is meaningful. And it demonstrated that when presented with a clear, and clearly urgent, call to action, people will rise to the occasion. This kind of rapid response, fueled by widespread civic engagement, is proving to be remarkably effective.

Next week, we’ll have another opportunity to flex our collective muscle, with the May Day Strong day of no work, no school, and no shopping. Even if you have to work, we hope you will commit to leaving your wallet at home, or at the very least, steering clear of all major corporations, chain stores, and the like: No Amazon, no Starbucks, no Walgreens! Instead, join us in Prospect Park for a picnic, go to a march, make art, make music, and build community, so that when the next urgent call comes, we are even bigger and stronger and better prepared to meet the moment.

Image credit: lauraendy on Instagram

Amplify this

• 87 million lives could have been saved with the money going to the Iran War.

• Now are we ready to take renewable energy seriously? (messaging from Antonia Scatton)

• After the May Day strike picnic, join us for a Shabbat dinner in Prospect Park.

• Earth goes live on Earth Day

• The untold story of the Jewish Bund labor movement (Molly Crabapple on NPR)

• A May Day Zine from Greg Pak. See adapted version with May Day picnic from Mandy below

• Brad Lander on the I’ve Had It Podcast

• Jon Ossoff with the anti-corruption messaging

• His first name is Mayor: Mamdani and Obama meet with a pre-K class

And as always,

‘Til Next Time,

Julie, Kate & the Messaging Team

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We started this week with a big, big win—albeit one that we can’t take particular credit for. On Sunday, Hungarians voted resoundingly to kick MAGA-favorite and model authoritarian Viktor Orban to the curb. Many of us looked on with glee, and not a little envy, as people flooded the streets of Budapest to celebrate. This victory was hard-won. Peter Magyar, the winning candidate, had been doing the hard work of persuasion, with a consistent anti-corruption message, for a solid two years. But it was unclear whether even the most strategic and diligent of efforts would be enough to offset Orban’s years of authoritarian consolidation, or whether Orban himself would accept the results of the election.

Sunday Celebrations in Budapest, Hungary. Image Credit: @claracsilla

Sound familiar? We certainly have our work cut out for us if we want to truly check those forces here. But we are no strangers to hard work. So let’s take a page from Hungary’s anti-authoritarian playbook and continue our efforts so we have our own wave of victories to celebrate seven months from now.

Less thrilling was April 15, when many of us had to turn our hard earned dollars over to the federal government—that same government that is building a police state at home and bombing children abroad, all while eliminating essential services and life-saving research. While a growing number of Americans joined the time-honored tradition of withholding tax dollars in protest, many of us begrudgingly paid up, resolving to continue to find other ways to resist. Today, we take a look around the globe to glean insights and inspiration from others’ brave and persistent resistance.

Thinking Globally, Acting Locally

Preface, from Julie

Back in January, in the immediate aftermath of the murder of Alex Pretti by I.C.E. agents in Minneapolis, a few of us BKR leaders reached out to fellow resisters to see how they were holding up, and to express our gratitude for the solace we take from this group. One of the people I wrote to was Samantha Cocco-Klein, who sometimes shares her keen grasp of legislative developments with the group, which I always appreciate. In response to my note, she wrote back:

I am doing as well as can be expected. Having lived and worked in 14 countries, many of them fragile or conflict-affected, I am almost always worried or grieving for people and places I love. But it is especially heart-breaking that many of the things I learned about staying safe in those places now apply here.

Samantha, I now know, worked for many years at UNICEF, and is an expert in the area of climate and children’s wellbeing. I was curious to know more about her perspective, so Kate and I invited her to write something about the insights she’s gained from her experiences abroad. Today, she shares some of the lessons she’s learned in her work that could help all of us in this fight.

Image credit: Mama Dragons on Instagram

Lessons from resisters in far away places

by Samantha Cocco-Klein

I hope this month is a turning point.

April marks one year since I lost my position with UNICEF due to the Trump Administration’s foreign aid cuts. I am far from alone. Sixty-eight percent of the people who worked with USAID or an affiliated organization are still unemployed or underemployed. The human cost for us has been devastating, from lives upended to depression and suicide.

However, our hardships pale in comparison with the people we served. An estimated 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children, have died from preventable causes since Elon Musk stood on a stage brandishing a chain saw. They are dying from malaria, malnutrition, diarrhea – conditions we promised to treat and prevent – until we didn’t anymore. Meanwhile, Trump and Netayahu continue to spread war and destruction.

However, as always, hope shines through. Recently, John Oliver turned the spotlight on the destruction of USAID, eviscerating the lies and racism behind the barbarism. And last month at the United Nations, countries stood up to the US to protect progress on women’s rights, voting 37 to 1 to protect long-standing commitments to gender equality. When the US efforts to rewrite these commitments failed, the room erupted into applause and cheering.

Meanwhile, the tiny country of Vanuatu is spearheading global efforts to accelerate climate justice by moving forward a UN General Assembly resolution to phase out fossil fuels and address the loss and damages experienced by vulnerable communities. This and other victories were the culmination of years of campaigning by a small group of Pacific Island students, in the face of fierce opposition from the US and its allied fossil fuel regimes.

And in Hungary, after 16 years of democratic backsliding, electors chose to oust Victor Orban and recommit to democracy and closer ties with the EU.

Which brings me to Brooklyn Resisters, and the essential organizing we do. The work I’ve done abroad has taught me many lessons that I believe apply here - and can help us make this spring a turning point.

Art credit: Sophie Lucido Johnson on Instagram

1. Connections matter. In times of darkness, the bonds we make see us through. Time and time again, I have seen that people will go out of their way to protect their neighbors, whether it was helping those who were the “wrong” ethnicity or religion in the Balkans, or keeping watch on my home in deeply insecure places when I was away.

Abroad, the US has abandoned any notion of being a friend and is openly the neighborhood bully. So, now, more than ever, it is time for each of us to be good neighbors, at home and abroad. There are thousands of organizations, large and small, doing extraordinary work to fill the breach left by the US.

I would like to give a shout out to two exceptional groups. The first, HIAS supports refugees and displaced people abroad and in the US. And they were the first NGO to step up and publicly challenge the Trump Administration over its foreign aid cuts and anti-immigrant agenda. The second group is Mutual Aid Sudan, a community-led volunteer network that is providing emergency assistance in the places too dangerous for international aid agencies to go.

Image credit: @_strangegang on Instagram

2. Never give up. Years ago, while working in Kosovo, I asked Serb friends why they hadn’t fought harder and longer to stop Milosevic and the Balkan wars. “We did and still are,” he replied, and in 2000, OTPOR finally brought Milosevic down. But Serbia’s struggle to consolidate democracy did not end then; two decades on, the protests continue against corruption and rising authoritarianism.

Before Kosovo, I was in Liberia, where a horrific civil war ground on for 16 years. I worked there briefly, during a short, unjust peace, and was evacuated as the country was dragged back into war. It would take four more years and a movement of ordinary women who united to “pray the devil back to hell” and finally end two decades of unimaginable chaos and suffering.

And over a decade ago, I was with a group of young Pacific Islander climate activists who declared, “We are not drowning. We are fighting.” Their call spread, inspiring their countries’ leadership, and sparking the seven-year campaign that would lead to a landmark ICJ advisory opinion favoring climate justice. Their fight is far from over, and neither will ours be, come the midterms or 2028, whenever we pray the orange devil back to hell.

3. Corruption is corrosive. My career in international development started in Mali, as a Peace Corps volunteer. It was an optimistic time. Malians had peacefully shown an entrenched dictator the door, and democracy promised a fresh start for growth and prosperity. But warning signs were there. Corruption was endemic, the government ineffective, and Islamic fundamentalists were organizing. Since 2012, a country so safe that I used to hitchhike alone, has been convulsed by war, inter-communal conflict and military coups.

Meanwhile, corruption has been festering here at home, facilitated by massive inequality and a political system hijacked by the ultra-wealthy. While the Trump Administration engages in the flagrant corruption we associate more with African dictators (down to the same decorating style), a less obvious form of structural corruption has taken hold across the political system, driven by Citizens United and dark money. Few of our elected officials, Democrat or Republican, seem to answer to us anymore.

As the Hungarian elections showed us, fighting corruption and cronyism is what it takes to build the mass coalition needed to stop autocracy. And we have been here before. It was progressive and women-led organizing that ended the mass corruption of the Gilded Age and helped restore public trust. When women gained the vote, anti-corruption was encoded as federal law and spending on equitable public services increased.

American women – and men – have organized to clean house before. We can do it again. With Brooklyn Resisters, we have already started.

Image Credit: @scarlet_soleil

Amplify this

• Don’t forget to join us this Sunday May 19 for our Resistance Street Fair, in Kensington Plaza from 3-5pm! To help out, email Kate Fermoile, Saul, or one of us.

• These little Trump sculptures have us wanting to take a field trip to DC.

• Paging Dr. Jesus: the web reacts to Trump’s AI fever dream

• Francesca Albanese on the price, and necessity, of speaking out, from the Guardian (h/t Cheryl)

• How much did you spend on war this year? From Code Pink

May Day, Friday, May 1, organizers are calling for a national strike: No work, no school, no shopping. Go to a march. Join us for a picnic in Prospect Park. Stay tuned for details.

• There is growing disquiet among those serving in the military. Report from NPR.

• Save the US Forest Service —don’t let major outdoor brands stay silent as this administration decimates the USFS. (h/t Cory)

• Fight evil! Read books! Or just join the Brooklyn Book Crawl, part of a global happening this week.

• Remember how they warned us that Big Finance will flee NYC if Mamdani were elected mayor? Yeah, that’s not happening.

And as always,

‘Til Next Time,

Kate, Julie, & the Messaging Team

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Visit our newsletter archive.

Once again, it feels all too apt to say, “what a year this week has been.” Both of us were away for a few days, and while the break was welcome, re-entry is always challenging. (Hats off to the Artemis II crew who will be doing it under much more extreme conditions tonight.) Today, we share some thoughts on the urge (and sometimes necessity) to check out, and on how we find our way back to this work.

On keeping up the fight when it all feels futile

By Julie Subrin

In the anxious hours leading up to the potential death of a whole civilization on Tuesday, my daughter and I were on a long drive back from a family visit. (Punchy from hours in the car, we kept quoting Trump’s line, so casual in its cruelty: “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”) We weren’t going to make it back in time to join any emergency protests, but even if we could, I had a familiar sinking feeling: What, really, can any of us do that will put an end to this madness? How can we possibly make a chink in the thick armor of greed, delusion, and pathological lack of concern for others that protects our president (aided and abetted by all the sycophants that surround him).

Maybe, I think to myself in these moments, the best thing we can do is to just step aside, and pray that this regime will implode under the weight of its own stupidity. After all, no thanks to actions we’ve taken, Marjorie Taylor Greene has defected, Tucker Carlson seems to be jumping ship, even Laura Loomer is criticizing the war, and Ron Johnson has taken a stand against Trump’s genocidal threats. All that, along with plummeting poll numbers and a jittery market, may prove to be the real forces for change when it comes to taking down this regime, or at least bringing an end to this catastrophic war.

Image Credit: @garisedelweiss on Instagram

While we don’t usually express them here, I think it’s normal to have doubts about the efficacy of our resistance. In these moments, it’s worth reminding ourselves that there is a strong case to be made for doing what we do—for taking action, pulling people off the sidelines, and putting up a fight, even if the fight doesn’t immediately render the results we want.

First of all, we do it for the future. We are forging connections and developing skills that will serve us for the long haul. We know our politics, and many of our institutions, are broken. Even if Trump 2.0 implodes tomorrow, it will take years to build a society where people’s basic needs are met, where fundamental rights are upheld, where the wealthiest among us are not given special privileges and protections, and the people we elect feel duty bound to serve all their constituents. And to get there, we have to keep growing our capacity to make change. So we take part in community-building, we put pressure on our elected officials to do what’s right, and we continue to speak often and loudly about our rights, our values, and about the future we believe in.

Also, we fight out of moral necessity. Rep. Ro Khanna put this well when he spoke the other day to the question of whether or not House Democrats should call for Trump’s impeachment, or for removal under the 25th Amendment, when they are not in a position to achieve either. Rep. Khanna objected to viewing these acts purely through a tactical lens, saying:

How about moral principle? How about that when a president threatens to blow up other nations, that we have to see some response…. that there’s something called “conviction” in politics, that the lives of the Iranian people matter, that the lives of people in Gaza matter, that the lives of people in Cuba matter… that we will be a Democratic party who says that that is morally wrong. And when we don’t say that, and when we hide behind proceduralism, and we hide behind tactics, and we hide behind the fact that we don’t have votes, then what we say to most Americans is we’re not willing to fight for our vision for America, for our moral vision.

Image Credit: @olly.ostello.art on Instagram

Finally, we stay in this fight for each other. This was beautifully articulated in a piece by Micah Herskind, from a new collection of essays titled Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis, edited by Kelly Hayes. In the essay “Read This If You’re Losing and Discouraged,” Herskind writes about the many setbacks faced by Atlanta activists who tried to block the destruction of forestland and construction of Cop City between 2021 and 2025. I confess that this is not a history I was familiar with, and I was astonished by these activists’ resilience. They took so many hits, from defeats at city council meetings to the death of one of their members in a forest encampment at the hands of Georgia State Troopers. But each time, he writes, they managed to regroup, take away some hard-earned wisdom, and see their movement grow. There’s no happy ending to that story, but Herskind persuasively argues that engaging in the fight for what’s right has value in and of itself. As he puts it, in his letter,

… [E]ven as you take in the horror around you, I hope you will be able to remember—and to remind me, and to remind others—that we are all we have. That we are reason enough to keep fighting, even or especially when things are unimaginably awful. That fighting doesn’t guarantee that we’ll win, but that it gives us a chance of winning. That it’s worth it to keep fighting in the face of massive loss. And that even when we lose, we can turn moments of defeat into new opportunities to fight.

This doesn’t mean that we just fight for the sake of fighting. We can and should take stock. At different points, different strategies and different messages will make more sense, or feel more meaningful, and we don’t all have to choose the same path at the same time. Sometimes we’ll need to take breaks. But I hope each of us will keep finding our way back to doing this work together, with the conviction, creativity and resilience we’ve shown ourselves capable of time and time again.

Plugging In vs. Tuning Out

By Kate Dalton

I was away with family this past weekend and wasn’t really all that plugged in. I saw Trump’s Easter post and found it shocking but was sufficiently distracted to not let it fully sink in. As I started to catch up on my messages, I noticed one from Julie in a thread saying that she was worried about Trump and Hegseth’s warpath. And when Julie is worried, I am worried too. I started to backtrack. What did I miss? Am I, like many of us, too inured to the ravings of this president?

I am aware that my individual attention will not move mountains or meaningfully shape our current trajectory. I’m also cognizant of the fact that our headspace is a resource that we all need to conserve at times for our own survival. At the same time, I’m not able to shake that our collective inattention, indifference, and passivity grease the wheels of fascism, and that’s a type of complicity of which I want no part.

Image Credit: Kate Dalton

The tension over checking in versus checking out came into full focus Tuesday as I woke to the president of the United States threatening to annihilate a whole civilization. Confronting the possibility of nuclear destruction, no matter how remote one might view that to be, proved to be so overwhelming that I could barely wrap my mind around it. I noticed Mariame Kaba post that it was natural to want to dissociate and to give ourselves grace, and was struck by how even she was saying that it was okay to check out a bit. And I did in a way by approaching the day with a sort of hazy disposition.

Beyond the distance I tried to place between myself and the news, there was grief, a sense of loss and disappointment that this was where we were at as a country, and as a world. I couldn’t even, as some did, find reprieve in the faraway wonder and discovery of the Artemis II mission. Though I admit I’m pretty alone in this view, I was even a little mad at it. Didn’t we have problems we had to take care of here? A space mission, like the vanity projects of billionaires, felt like a distraction.

What I wasn’t alone in was my sadness and horror. People were genuinely freaking out. Many weighed in on us crossing a red line with the president openly considering genocide. I was partially relieved by this description but a little concerned. I had lost faith in us as a society taking genocide seriously, and it was hard not to wonder if our tolerance and fiscal support for the killing of civilians in Gaza brought us to this moment. It was also disturbing to think about where we are headed to next.

Even with this so-called ceasefire, it’s hard to escape the “What’s next” question. Already, we are seeing calls for impeachment and the 25th amendment begin to fade. I acknowledge that we all have to reckon with our limited attention and resources as we continue this fight, and that there is just some getting used to this hideousness that inevitably comes with the territory of electing an addled sociopathic narcissist. I think I just ask that we do what we can to not get too used to it, that we retain our ability to be shocked, and to demand more from anyone with any degree of power, political or otherwise.

That doesn’t mean we have to be plugged in all the time. Retaining our humanity and perspective in this warped world should remain a focus, and sometimes stepping away is what’s needed. At other times, it’s necessary to engage with the world as thoughtfully as you can. No matter your choice, being in community with others who share your values and the heartbreak that comes along with them is usually the next best step.

Image Credit: @windsorkincade on Instagram

Amplify this

• Over the moon, h/t Mikki

• On learning to live with heartbreak in these times

• Knock doors with us for Brad Lander tomorrow in Windsor Terrace!

• Hear Saul Austerllitz and Megan Piontkowski in conversation with Alexa Aviles and Molly Sandley April 15 at the Center for Brooklyn History

• Mamdani walks the walk.

• Same, buddy, same.

• Fannie Lou Hamer poster from Learning for Justice

• Stephen Colbert on the ceasefire

And as always,

‘Til Next Time,

Julie, Kate, & the Messaging Team

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