These are extraordinary people, and their stories are worth telling. But there is a problem with asking an extraordinary person to carry an argument about an entire population: audiences don’t necessarily generalize from the individual. Sometimes they do exactly the opposite. They decide the person is exceptional.

The story changes what they believe about the hero without changing what they believe about everyone else.

When proof becomes exception

Organizations understandably gravitate toward their biggest success stories. Narratively, they have everything we want: enormous obstacles, clear transformation and a satisfying ending. They make abstract issues human and give audiences someone to root for.

But consider what happens when that story meets an existing belief.

Someone believes that students from a particular neighborhood aren’t academically competitive. Then they meet the student from that neighborhood who made it to Harvard. They can reconsider their belief about the students—or they can conclude that this student is unusually gifted.

Someone believes immigrants are a drain on the economy. Then they hear about an immigrant who built a company employing hundreds of people. They can reconsider their assumptions about immigrants—or admire an exceptional entrepreneur while leaving the broader assumption untouched.

Someone believes people with criminal records are risky employees. Then they encounter someone who served a lengthy prison sentence and went on to become a highly successful executive. They can reconsider what a criminal record actually tells us about someone’s potential as an employee—or decide they have just met a remarkable exception.

The story has provided contradictory evidence. But people don’t have to abandon the rule to accommodate it. They can simply create an exception to the rule.

And the more extraordinary the person is, the easier that can be.

A story about one person is still a story about one person

This is where storytelling and narrative strategy begin to diverge.

A compelling individual story can establish that something happened. It can create empathy, surprise an audience and disrupt an assumption about the person at its center. But an organization advancing a broader social or policy argument usually needs the audience to make another leap: this person’s experience tells us something about the rule.

That leap isn’t automatic.

Take second-chance hiring. The story of an extraordinarily successful formerly incarcerated person demonstrates, at minimum, that this particular person was capable of enormous success after incarceration. But that isn’t the same as demonstrating that employers systematically underestimate people with criminal records, that a criminal record is an inadequate proxy for someone’s potential as an employee, or that second-chance hiring produces good outcomes across a broader population.

Those are claims about the rule. The individual story is evidence about one person.

Without a narrative that explicitly connects the two, an audience can admire the person, celebrate their redemption and walk away with exactly the same assumptions about hiring everyone else with a record.

The bootstrap trap

This is also why some success stories can produce an interpretation almost opposite from the one an organization intended.

Consider the student who grows up surrounded by inadequate schools, limited resources and economic instability and eventually graduates from an elite university. An organization might tell that story to demonstrate what young people from under-resourced communities are capable of when given an opportunity.

But the story can also become a bootstrap story. If this student made it, perhaps the barriers aren’t really determinative. Perhaps other students simply need the same determination. The exceptional outcome hasn’t indicted the system. It has demonstrated that an exceptional person can overcome it.

The same narrative reversal can happen with poverty, housing, immigration, disability, incarceration and countless other issues. The hero’s success is supposed to show us that our assumptions about a population are wrong. Instead, their success becomes the reason we don’t have to reconsider those assumptions at all.

They aren’t evidence that the rule is wrong.

They’re the exception that proves it.

From story to argument

This doesn’t mean organizations should stop telling extraordinary stories. Individual stories do something data often cannot: they make possibilities visible. They give abstract issues human stakes and allow audiences to encounter people they may otherwise understand only as categories.

The point isn’t to make the hero less extraordinary. It’s to make clear that the argument doesn’t depend on his being extraordinary.

Before choosing the most impressive person available to represent an issue, organizations should ask a more difficult question: What does this story actually require the audience to reconsider?

Narrative strategy is the work of closing that gap. It connects individual experience to the larger pattern, supplies the context necessary to interpret it and makes clear why one person’s story should change how we understand something beyond that person.

Because an exceptional person can change our minds about an individual while leaving the rule completely intact.

And sometimes the most important work of the narrative is making sure the audience understands that the rule—not the exception—is the point.

COJA helps organizations examine not only the stories they tell, but the conclusions those stories make available to an audience. If your communications are meant to change how people understand an issue, institution or population, we help make sure the larger argument survives the story. Learn more at cojaservices.com.

This is becoming a big problem for a lot of companies. Look at the footer, the design, or sometimes the source code, and a surprising number of corporate websites seem to trace back to roughly the same period: 2015, 2016, and 2017.

There’s a reason for this. In 2015, Google changed its search algorithm to favor mobile-friendly pages. Smartphone ownership had exploded. By late 2016, mobile and tablet traffic surpassed desktop internet usage worldwide for the first time.

Organizations weren’t redesigning their websites because everybody suddenly got tired of their fonts. The were adapting to new was in which people were finding them.

A decade later, companies are faced with a similar evolution in consumer behavior, but now instead of device expansion it’s platform.

People aren’t just finding companies through Google and clicking through to a homepage. They’re encountering them in social feeds, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube videos, media coverage, Reddit threads and increasingly through AI-generated answers that may summarize a company without sending the user to its website at all.

That creates a very different communications problem than the one companies were solving ten years ago.

Back then, the challenge was accessibility: Can people find us and use our website on the device in their hand?

Now the challenge is coherence: When people encounter us in a dozen different places, will all of those encounters add up to a clear idea of who we are?

The woman I spoke to last week really did have a nice website. It had easy navigation, updated SEO, nice visuals. After spending some time with it, I found some great data storytelling based on a report the organization had released.

But when I got on the phone, I asked her a number of questions that weren’t about the website at all.

Who are you trying to speak to with this website?

What makes you meaningfully different from the alternatives?

What do you want people to do when they encounter your organization?

At one point she said, essentially, “Well, shit. My developers didn’t ask me any of that.”

It’s not the first time I’ve heard some version of this. And that doesn’t mean the developers did anything wrong. Developers build websites. Designers create visual systems. SEO experts help search engines understand and surface information.

But a beautiful website, a strong visual identity and technically perfect SEO still can’t answer the more fundamental question:

What should all of this make someone understand about you?

That is a narrative question.

the next website update needs to start before the website

None of this means companies shouldn’t redesign websites.

Many absolutely should.

A decade is a long time in digital life. Technology changes. Accessibility standards change. Search behavior changes. Design conventions change. Companies themselves change.

But if you are rebuilding a website because the way people find and evaluate companies has changed, the first conversation probably shouldn’t be about fonts, menus or page layouts.

It should be about the story, the journey you want someone to take from their first encounter with your organization to your call to action.

That path should lay the foundational architecture underneath the website. And unlike a layout or a search algorithm, that architecture can travel.

It can shape the website, but also the sales deck, executive messaging, social media, content strategy, press interviews and every other place someone encounters the company.

Ten years ago, companies rebuilt their websites because the internet had moved from the desktop into our pockets.

Now the internet has moved everywhere.

The next update isn’t just making sure people can find you wherever they are. It’s making sure that, wherever they find you, they know it’s you.

Before your next redesign, make sure you know the story it needs to tell.

COJA helps organizations build the narrative architecture underneath their communications—so the website, social content, leadership messaging, sales materials and everything else your audience encounters add up to one clear, credible, recognizable idea.

If you’re thinking about a website redesign—or recently finished one and still feel like something isn’t connecting—let’s talk.

The problem is that most people will not encounter the story that way. They will encounter the homepage first, and in those first few moments they will not know everything you know. They will not necessarily understand the history of the issue, how your organization fits into the broader movement, or the terminology people inside the field use every day. They are simply trying to answer a few basic questions: What is happening? Why does it matter? What does this organization do about it? And what am I supposed to do next?

That makes the first 30 seconds on a justice organization’s homepage incredibly revealing.

Start with the problem

Justice organizations understandably want to tell people what they do. They advocate. They conduct research. They litigate. They organize. They provide services. But those activities only make sense in relation to the problem they exist to address.

Imagine arriving at a homepage that tells you an organization works to advance a fairer and more equitable criminal legal system. That sounds admirable, but it does not necessarily tell a first-time visitor what is unfair about the existing system, who is experiencing the consequences, or what happens if nothing changes. Someone deeply familiar with criminal justice may fill those gaps automatically. A new visitor cannot be expected to do the same.

When the problem remains implicit, the organization is asking its audience to arrive with context that may not actually be there. That matters because people do not spend long trying to figure out what an organization means. If the problem is difficult to identify, the visitor may understand the individual words on the page without understanding the larger story.

What role do you play?

Once I understand the problem, I need to understand why your organization is in the story. This is where justice organizations can become surprisingly difficult to distinguish from one another.

Many organizations advocate for fairness, equity, safety, dignity, or reform. Many conduct research, advance policy, build coalitions, educate the public, or provide direct services. Those descriptions may all be accurate, but accuracy alone does not necessarily establish a recognizable organizational identity.

A more useful question is this: After 30 seconds, what could I say about this organization that I could not say about five others working on the same issue?

The answer is often already somewhere on the website. It might be a distinctive methodology, a particular constituency, a specific role in policy change, a combination of research and direct service, a geographic footprint, or decades of expertise in one corner of the system. The problem is that those details are often buried in program pages, reports, or the “About” section rather than used to help establish what makes the organization distinctive from the beginning.

The result is a strange communication problem. An organization can explain its work accurately while still leaving a first-time visitor with only a vague understanding of who it is.

Can I understand the stakes?

Justice organizations face another challenge that many other sectors do not. The language has to be accurate. Legal and policy terminology exists for a reason, and simplifying something too aggressively can distort the issue or erase important nuance. But complexity and clarity are not opposites.

There is a meaningful difference between naming a policy and explaining its consequence. One tells me what the subject is; the other tells me why I should care. A homepage does not need to teach me everything about sentencing policy, pretrial detention, parole, or prosecutorial discretion in 30 seconds. It does need to give me enough context to understand what is at stake.

That context might come through a person, a number, a consequence, a tension, or one surprisingly simple sentence. The goal is not to flatten a complicated issue. It is to give someone a door into it.

Now what?

Calls to action are often treated as a piece of website architecture: Donate. Read the report. Learn more. Take action. Subscribe. Explore our research. But from a narrative perspective, the CTA tells us something much bigger. It tells the visitor what role they are supposed to play in the story the organization just told them.

If your homepage builds urgency around a major injustice and then primarily directs someone toward your latest publication, that may be exactly right. It may also reveal a disconnect. The same is true if the dominant action is donating, subscribing, signing a petition, contacting a policymaker, or simply clicking “learn more.”

There is no universally correct CTA. The important question is whether there is a clear relationship between the story the homepage tells and the action it invites someone to take. If I understand the problem and understand your role in addressing it, the next step should make sense within that same narrative.

A polished website can still leave the story fragmented

None of this means a website is bad. A justice organization can have sophisticated communications staff, excellent writing, strong research, thoughtful campaigns, and a professional digital presence and still make a first-time visitor work too hard to understand the larger story.

The question is whether someone encountering the organization for the first time can see that story without having to assemble it themselves.

That is what makes the first 30 seconds so useful. They strip away everything the organization already knows about itself and force us to look at the experience from the outside. Can I identify the problem? Can I understand the stakes? Can I tell what role this organization plays? Can I see what makes it distinct? And once I understand all of that, do I know what I am being invited to do next?

Those are simple questions. The answers reveal a lot.

What story are you telling?

COJA is developing tools to help organizations quickly identify the gaps in their messaging. If you are curious what your homepage communicates in its first 30 seconds, email the URL to info@cojaservices.com with the subject “SCORE”. We will run it through our scoring tool and show you what comes through clearly—and what may still be asking the audience to connect the dots.

If your organization is seeking comprehensive messaging analysis, let’s talk.

As much as the thought made me want to gag, I had to admit generative-AI had become an essential part of the workflow. Even mine. I used it as a brainstorming partner. I know I’m somewhere in between Pre-K and 3rd Grade when it comes to the coloring books in my house, so I use AI to generate illustrations or design templates.

But I reached a point a lot of ChatGPTers and Claudettes reach: Elliot (the name I gave my first AI assistant) and I started to have some real falling outs. I was spending more time explaining why it was wrong or missing the point than I was getting anything out of it. It got so bad, Elliot and I broke up.

So when I started with Felicia, I took a different approach. I onboarded her.

Before I wrote any prompt, I uploaded a database of source material: a message house that details my company’s unique value proposition, core messaging pillars, product promises and primary soundbites; my brand guidelines that explain COJA’s color palette, logo, typography and tone. I sent her examples of my ICPs and high-level pain points that COJA has solutions for, and proof points that show we have.

Felicia still gets things wrong. She still makes assumptions I have to correct, and I still push back when she misses the nuance. But because she understands how COJA thinks, those conversations have become refinements instead of rewrites. She's no longer guessing who we are. She's working from a foundation we've already built.

AI can only communicate what you’ve already taught it.

If your organization’s voice lives inside the executive director’s head, AI can’t access it. If your messaging changes depending on who’s writing the email, AI has no consistent pattern to follow. If your story is spread across grant proposals, annual reports, websites, strategy decks, and years of institutional memory, AI cannot assemble those fragments into a coherent narrative.

Humans eventually learn those unwritten rules because they ask questions, observe conversations, and absorb context over time.

AI can’t do that.

A lot of organizations just go with it, hoping that in all the volume they can create with generative-AI, something will stick. The risk in doing that is they’re speaking to a consumer base that grew up online, and those consumers aren’t buying it—literally or figuratively.

Recent research has found that when people believe content was generated by AI, they often perceive it as less authentic and less trustworthy. Other studies suggest the problem is particularly pronounced when communication depends on human connection rather than simply conveying information. In other words, AI may be perfectly capable of explaining what your organization does. Convincing people why it matters is another challenge entirely.

Organizations have spent the last two decades trying to solve the problem of visibility. The internet rewarded frequency. Social media rewarded consistency. Now AI rewards volume.

None of those things guarantee recognition.

In today’s attention economy, your audience isn’t evaluating your communication one piece at a time. They’re assembling an understanding of your organization from dozens of encounters across websites, social feeds, news coverage, podcasts, emails, videos, and conversations. Every interaction either reinforces a recognizable narrative or adds another disconnected fragment.

AI cannot decide which of those fragments deserve repetition. It can’t determine which story best represents your organization. It can’t choose the evidence that builds credibility or the language that creates trust. It can only amplify the decisions you’ve already made.

The challenge isn’t keeping up with the attention economy. AI has largely solved that problem.

The challenge is giving people a reason to stop paying attention to everyone else.

Can Your Story Scale?

At COJA, we help organizations build the narrative infrastructure behind every piece of communication. That means clarifying the story, documenting the voice, aligning the message, and creating a narrative that remains recognizable whether it’s delivered by your executive director, your communications team, or AI.

Technology can scale communication. Only a clear narrative can scale recognition.

If your organization is using AI to produce more content but still struggling to break through the noise, let’s talk.

That contradiction is often treated as a communications failure: the public has not seen the numbers, journalists have not explained them clearly enough, or researchers need better ways to make the data accessible.

But the problem is larger than public awareness.

Crime is not simply a set of measurable events. It is also one of the most durable narratives in American public life—a flexible story through which politicians define disorder, identify threats, assign blame, and justify power.

The numbers can move. The story often stays in place.

The Council on Criminal Justice found that reported homicides in the cities it studied fell 21% in 2025 and 44% from their recent 2021 peak. Other violent offenses also declined. Yet Americans have routinely believed crime was increasing during periods when official data showed the opposite.

In 23 of 27 Gallup surveys conducted since 1993, at least 60% of adults said national crime had risen from the previous year, despite crime declining through much of that period.

That gap is not created by data alone.

“Crime” is an unusually ambiguous political category. It can mean homicide, car theft, public drug use, shoplifting, homelessness, immigration, protest, neighborhood disorder, or simply the feeling that social rules are no longer being enforced. Different offenses can move in opposite directions, while all of them are compressed into a single claim: crime is up.

Once that claim becomes culturally legible, almost any visible incident can confirm it.

That is how a crime emergency can be declared while crime is already falling. Before President Trump ordered a federal intervention in Washington, D.C., in August 2025, the city had reported a 35% decline in violent crime in 2024 and further reductions in homicide, robbery, and assaults during 2025. The intervention did not require the public to resolve that contradiction because it operated within a stronger narrative: cities are dangerous, local institutions have lost control, and force is the clearest evidence of leadership.

The deployment itself then became proof that an emergency must have existed.

This is part of what makes crime such a reliable source of political power. Republicans have frequently used it to promise punishment, enforcement, and restored order. Democrats have also relied on crime narratives to establish toughness, distance themselves from reform movements, or reassure voters that public safety remains under institutional control.

Even periods of historically low crime do not settle the argument over which policies produced them. Crime fell dramatically from its early-1990s peak, then remained comparatively low through years that included changes to sentencing, prosecution, youth justice, and some of the most punitive features of the war-on-crime era. Those overlapping shifts make simple causal claims difficult. A falling crime rate can be used to defend aggressive policing, argue for reform, or support both at once.

The data tells us what was reported.

It cannot, by itself, decide which political story the public will attach to it.

That does not make crime research less important. It makes the narrative work surrounding it more consequential. Research organizations must communicate what rose, what fell, over what period, in which places, and according to which definition. But they must also account for the story the evidence is entering.

What does the audience already understand “crime” to mean?

Which fears will remain untouched by a declining homicide rate?

Who benefits when distinct problems are bundled together as disorder?

And what conclusion will people draw if researchers provide the number but leave its meaning uncontested?

Better data can correct a factual claim. It cannot automatically displace a narrative that has spent decades teaching the public what danger looks like, who represents it, and which forms of power are supposed to make it disappear.

Crime rates rise and fall.

The political usefulness of “crime” is far more stable.

COJA helps mission-driven organizations communicate complex, contested work without flattening the truth. If your team is struggling to make evidence, uncertainty, and public meaning hold together across audiences, book a conversation with COJA Services.

The last major one came after October 7, 2023. My personal Instagram account, which I use mostly to share pictures of my kids with distant family, became a relentless scroll of terrorists, hostages, mourning families, and devastation across Israel.

At the same time, my author account looked almost celebratory. That feed, shaped by the Black liberation movements explored in Reimagining the Revolution and beyond, filled with marches, raised fists, solidarity, and #FreePalestine.

Sometimes the same image appeared on both accounts. On one, it represented resistance and liberation. On the other, it appeared beneath a red filter and an ominous warning about antisemitism.

The two feeds were not simply offering different opinions. They were constructing different realities.

That is not entirely new. May 14, 1948, is celebrated by Israelis as Independence Day and remembered by Palestinians as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” The same event can signify freedom to one people and dispossession to another.

What has changed is the machinery.

Algorithmic feeds do more than influence how we interpret facts. They determine which facts reach us, whose suffering becomes visible, who appears credible, and which threat feels most urgent. They shape the reality from which our opinions are formed.

That matters because disagreement can be debated. An existential threat demands action.

Which brings me to my most recent collision.

All morning, I had been seeing alerts about renewed U.S. bombing of Iran. My Instagram feeds mostly aligned: Trump was putting lives, regional stability, and the economy at risk because of ego, bravado, and an inept understanding of world affairs.

Then I went to get a haircut.

My stylist usually has Fox News playing in the salon. She often mutes it when I arrive, so I spent the next two hours watching the captions.

The programming followed a remarkably consistent sequence: Trump’s show of strength in Iran, assurances that rising prices would eventually ease, and then the real danger facing the country:

The Socialist Revolution.

Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani were framed through ominous graphics and warnings of national collapse. Field reporters pushed microphones toward unhoused New Yorkers, some visibly experiencing psychiatric crises and others sleeping beneath blankets on benches and in alleyways.

Their suffering was not presented as evidence of systems that had failed them. Their bodies became evidence of what socialism would supposedly do to the rest of the country.

That was the narrative maneuver.

A president had resumed bombing another nation while households were already feeling economic pressure. But within this media reality, the bombing became strength, the rising costs became temporary, and the true danger was relocated onto socialists, immigrants, and people sleeping outside.

War became protection.

Economic pain became patience.

Homelessness became ideology.

This is narrative threat displacement: fear generated by one source is reassigned to another in order to preserve the hero, protect the worldview, and keep the audience looking in the wrong direction.

The facts themselves do not have to disappear. The audience can still see the bombing, the prices, and the poverty. The narrative only has to determine what those facts mean, who caused them, and which one deserves fear.

That is why “just give people the facts” is rarely enough. By the time the disagreement begins, the deeper narrative work has already happened. People have been given different protagonists, different villains, and different chains of cause and effect.

The collision does not happen because two people interpreted the same danger differently.

It happens because they were never shown the same danger in the first place.

For organizations working in complex or high-stakes environments, this is the real communications challenge. You are not introducing your message into an empty space. You are entering a field where audiences may already have incompatible explanations for what is happening, who is responsible, and what is at stake.

COJA helps organizations identify those competing narratives, clarify the truth they need to hold, and build public-facing language that can travel across fragmented realities without flattening the complexity. Learn more at cojaservices.com.

Hundreds of masked members of Patriot Front marched through Washington, D.C., during July 4 festivities, wearing uniforms, carrying flags, chanting “Reclaim America,” moving near Union Station and the Capitol, and later riding Metro trains out of the city. Police said there were no arrests, complaints, or calls for assistance associated with the march, while describing the group’s activity through the language of First Amendment rights and public safety monitoring.

The First Amendment question is not the same as the narrative question. A group can have a protected right to assemble and still be staging public intimidation. A police department can be constitutionally constrained from stopping speech and still choose language that either names the nature of the threat or quietly reduces it to a civic inconvenience.

This is where the story gets smaller than the event.

The coverage was not absent. The march was reported. The images circulated. The route, the uniforms, the chants, and the lack of arrests were documented. But coverage can exist and still fail to explain meaning. A story can be visible and still be misframed.

The Anti-Defamation League describes Patriot Front’s flash demonstrations as deliberately choreographed propaganda operations built around secrecy, speed, intimidating spectacle, and content production. The goal is not dialogue. The goal is the image, the recording, the proof of presence, the shareable evidence that they can enter public space in formation and attach themselves to patriotic symbols.

That is what happened in D.C.

The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Patriot Front as a white nationalist hate group that broke from Vanguard America after the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and notes that the organization is “image-obsessed,” using patriotic aesthetics to repackage an explicitly fascist agenda. George Washington University’s Program on Extremism similarly describes the group as white nationalist and fascist, promoting a white ethnostate and rejecting multiculturalism and diversity.

So the question is not simply whether the march was legal.

The question is what their presence made possible.

It made possible a public performance in which masked white nationalists moved through the capital during the 250th anniversary of American independence. It made possible a visual merger of national celebration and extremist theater. It made possible a news cycle in which the most emotionally legible image became a Black woman surrounded by men who were never supposed to need her image in order to be understood as a threat.

That is the media failure underneath the media moment.

White nationalism is often treated as an abstraction until it produces a perfect victim frame. A march becomes “First Amendment activity.” A formation becomes a “demonstration.” A coordinated public display becomes a thing to monitor, not necessarily a thing to interpret. Then one image breaks through, and suddenly the country has something it knows how to feel about.

Permission is not always a permit. It is not always an endorsement. Sometimes permission is the soft language that follows a hard image. Sometimes it is the refusal to distinguish between a right to speak and a strategy of intimidation. Sometimes it is the way institutions describe the legality of a moment more clearly than the power dynamics inside it.

When Interior Secretary Doug Burgum was asked about white nationalists marching in Washington, he emphasized free speech as one of the principles that makes democracy “messy,” while saying he did not agree with what the group stood for. That kind of answer may be legally careful. It is also narratively revealing.

Because “messy democracy” is doing a lot of work there.

It makes the march sound like an unpleasant but ordinary expression of civic life. It moves attention away from organized racial intimidation and toward the abstract virtue of tolerance. It gives the public a way to process the presence of masked white nationalists without naming the fear their presence is designed to produce.

That is not neutrality. That is a narrative choice.

The danger is not only that Patriot Front marched. The danger is that the country has developed such polished language for absorbing their presence. We know how to say “rights.” We know how to say “peaceful.” We know how to say “no arrests.” We know how to say “public safety.” We are less fluent in saying: this was an organized white nationalist propaganda action designed to make some people feel ownership and others feel exposure.

And when public language cannot say what people can plainly see, mistrust grows.

People notice when institutions can find precise language for process and vague language for harm. They notice when public safety expands quickly in response to some forms of protest and narrows into constitutional abstraction in response to others. They notice when the people performing intimidation benefit from procedural restraint while the people targeted by that intimidation are left to prove that the atmosphere changed.

This is not a call for rhetorical excess. It is a call for narrative accuracy.

A stronger public frame would not ignore constitutional protections. It would simply refuse to let those protections become the whole story. It would say: yes, the state has legal limits. Yes, speech rights matter. And also, this was a coordinated white nationalist action using patriotic symbolism, public infrastructure, and Independence Day itself to normalize an exclusionary vision of America.

That is the story.

For organizations, institutions, and leaders, this is the lesson: contextless neutrality does not build trust. When your audience sees the threat and your official language sees only the procedure, your message does not sound balanced. It sounds absent.

At 250 years, America does not need more symbolic innocence. It needs public language that can tell the truth before someone has to become the evidence.

At COJA, we help organizations name the narrative beneath the event. Because what you call a moment shapes what your audience believes you understand — and whose reality they believe you are willing to see. Learn more at cojaservices.com.

This isn’t a piece about whether the Court got those decisions right. It’s about why so many reactions still sound surprised.

Every June, the same ritual unfolds. The Court releases its most consequential opinions. Headlines describe the rulings as stunning. Politicians express outrage. Commentators ask what this means for the future of the Court, as though each decision marks a dramatic departure from everything that came before it.

But at some point, continuing to act surprised becomes its own narrative.

I remember listening to Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing. I didn’t leave believing Roe v. Wade was untouchable. Whether one supported his confirmation or opposed it, the hearings themselves revolved around the expectation that this Court would reshape constitutional law. The same was true of the confirmations that followed. Americans weren’t simply evaluating nominees. They were trying to predict the future direction of the institution.

Much of what happened today fits the trajectory that has been visible for years. That doesn’t make today’s decisions insignificant. Quite the opposite. It makes them significant in a different way.

The real shift isn’t inside the Court. It’s outside of it.

For generations, many Americans carried an implicit story about the Supreme Court. The justices might disagree. Their philosophies might evolve. Individual rulings might prove controversial. But beneath all of that was an assumption that the institution itself occupied a space above ordinary politics. The Court was imagined less as another political actor than as the country’s final legal referee.

Whether that story was ever fully accurate is a debate for historians.

What matters is that it no longer describes how millions of Americans understand the institution.

The Court’s decisions weren’t just interpreted through legal arguments. They were immediately filtered through political identities. Supporters celebrated ideological victories. Opponents mourned ideological defeats. Few people seemed surprised by which justices voted which way. The lines were already drawn long before the opinions were published.

Narratives rarely collapse in a single moment. They erode gradually until one day people realize they’re still using language that no longer matches their experience.

Organizations make this mistake all the time.

Leadership continues describing the company as collaborative after employees have stopped experiencing collaboration. A nonprofit insists it’s community-driven after decisions have become increasingly centralized. A university keeps talking about open inquiry while faculty and students describe something different.

The problem is that the story stayed frozen while public understanding moved on. Eventually, the gap between narrative and lived experience becomes impossible to ignore. That’s where the Supreme Court finds itself today.

The conversation has shifted from What does the law require? to Which vision of the country will prevail? Whether that shift is healthy or dangerous depends largely on your politics. But pretending it hasn’t happened doesn’t help anyone understand the institution we’re actually watching.

Narrative change often arrives quietly. Not because events are subtle, but because we keep describing new realities with old stories.

The larger story for me is that the Supremes confirmed something many Americans had already concluded: the Supreme Court is no longer widely understood as an institution operating outside politics. Rightly or wrongly, it is increasingly seen as one of the central arenas in which politics itself is contested.

That story didn’t begin with Tuesday’s decisions.

This may simply be the moment we stopped pretending otherwise.

COJA Takeaway

Organizations don’t lose trust simply because they change. They lose trust when the story they tell about themselves no longer matches the experience people are having.

The sooner you recognize that your audience has adopted a new narrative, the sooner you can begin communicating from reality instead of nostalgia. And if you need help doing that, book an intro call with COJA Services. It’s what we do!

Most organizations facing internal conflict assume disagreement is rooted in values. Marketing blames operations. Researchers blame communications. Leadership blames frontline staff. Everyone concludes that progress depends on convincing everyone else to adopt the “right” perspective.

In reality, durable alignment rarely begins with shared beliefs.

It begins with a shared understanding of the problem.

A Shared Condition Is Stronger Than Shared Ideology

For a brief moment, lawmakers stopped trying to persuade one another about ideology and instead organized around a shared reality: Housing has become too expensive for too many Americans.

That framing created room for very different solutions to coexist.

Republicans could emphasize reducing regulations, accelerating permitting, and encouraging private development. Democrats could highlight protections for renters, limits on institutional investors, and expanded affordability initiatives. Each side could explain its support through its own worldview without asking the other side to abandon theirs.

The legislation wasn’t built because everyone suddenly agreed on why the housing market reached this point. It was built because they agreed that the condition itself demanded action.

This is one of the most overlooked principles of narrative strategy: Coalitions are not formed when everyone shares the same philosophy. They are formed when enough people recognize the same reality.

Identity Didn’t Have to Be Sacrificed

Organizations often believe alignment requires compromise. They assume departments, partners, or coalition members must soften their positions before meaningful collaboration becomes possible.

The opposite is often true.

Strong coalitions allow participants to preserve their identities while contributing toward a common outcome.

Researchers and practitioners may disagree about methodology. Funders and program staff may prioritize different metrics. Communications teams may value clarity while subject matter experts worry about nuance. None of those differences disappear simply because people gather in the same room.

The question is whether everyone believes they’re working to solve the same problem. When they do, disagreement becomes productive instead of paralyzing.

Concrete Language Lowers Defenses

Another reason the legislation attracted broad support is that much of its public language remained remarkably concrete.

The conversation focused on zoning, permits, construction, mortgages, investors, and supply.

Notice what wasn’t carrying the weight of the conversation: sweeping ideological slogans; attempts to define the legislation as a referendum on competing visions of America. The discussion remained rooted in practical conditions that people encounter in their everyday lives.

Specificity creates space for collaboration.

Abstraction often creates space for conflict.

Then the Narrative Changed

President Trump’s decision not to sign the bill did not erase the bipartisan vote. It replaced the story.

The dominant narrative shifted from housing affordability to election integrity. The legislative package became connected to a different political priority, and the shared narrative that had briefly united lawmakers no longer occupied the center of public attention.

Whether that decision was strategically wise or politically justified depends on your perspective. From a narrative standpoint, however, it illustrates an important principle: Political outcomes are often determined less by which argument wins than by which story becomes the organizing framework for everything else.

The Lesson for Every Organization

Most organizations experiencing internal friction suffer from competing narratives about what problem they’re trying to solve. One department believes growth is the priority. Another believes quality is at risk. Leadership believes the issue is execution. Staff believes it’s communication. Every meeting becomes an attempt to defend a different diagnosis.

No amount of messaging fixes that.

Before organizations amplify their message externally, they need internal alignment around the condition they’re addressing together. Only then can different expertise, different incentives, and even different worldviews become complementary rather than competitive.

That’s what made this vote unusual.

Not bipartisan goodwill.

Not political moderation.

For a brief moment, enough people agreed on what reality looked like to begin discussing what should be done about it.

That’s how durable coalitions are built. Not by convincing everyone to think alike, but by creating a narrative large enough for different perspectives to recognize themselves inside the same problem.

Is your team arguing about solutions before you’ve agreed on the problem?

Many organizations mistake disagreement for dysfunction when the real issue is competing narratives about what they’re trying to solve. COJA helps mission-driven organizations align internal narratives before they amplify them externally—so teams can communicate with greater clarity, credibility, and consistency.

Let’s find the story your organization is actually telling.

→ Visit cojaservices.com.

I longed for this kind of analysis today when the Court issued its unanimous ruling that will make it more difficult for the federal government to prohibit firearm ownership by people who occasionally use illegal drugs.

The case raised a series of legitimate legal questions. How broadly can the government define dangerousness? What constitutional protections remain available to people who fall into disfavored categories? How should courts reconcile federal marijuana laws with a reality in which millions of Americans legally consume cannabis under state law?

But in the mainstream media, those substantial questions, the ones involving constitutional rights, criminal law, federalism, and the government’s burden when restricting individual liberties, were afterthoughts. Instead, most outlets opted for the political angle: the law at issue was the same law used to prosecute Hunter Biden.

The observation is accurate. And, maybe, the political angle is more click-provoking. What struck me, however, was not the inclusion of the reference but the speed with which it became the organizing frame for understanding the story for multiple outlets.

A court ruling about constitutional law was rapidly translated into a story about contemporary politics. That transformation has become increasingly common across American institutions.

Most Americans have watched this happen in real time. During the pandemic, public health became a proxy fight for broader political identities. The result was confusion, mistrust, and a body count that cannot be separated from our inability to maintain a distinct public health conversation.

Education has followed a similar path. Debates over school curriculum routinely move past questions of history and pedagogy into battles over national identity. The controversy around Critical Race Theory is a useful example. In many communities, people argued fiercely about a concept that often was not even being taught in the schools at the center of the dispute. The institution was trying to have an educational conversation. The public was having a political one.

The problem is not that politics enters these conversations. Politics has always influenced public life. The problem is the speed at which politics becomes the only language through which public life is interpreted.

Historically, institutions developed distinct forms of discourse because they served distinct functions. Courts existed to answer legal questions through legal reasoning. Universities existed to generate and test knowledge. Journalists gathered information and attempted to explain events. Public health agencies evaluated evidence and translated it into guidance. Advocacy organizations organized constituencies around values and objectives.

These institutions frequently disagreed with one another, but they were at least operating within different and autonomous frameworks. Each institution possessed its own standards for determining what counted as a good argument, what constituted evidence, and what questions were worth asking.

Those distinctions mattered because they created multiple pathways for understanding complex issues.

A person could examine a court opinion as a legal document, a research paper as an academic contribution, or a news story as a reported account of events. Different institutions contributed different forms of knowledge.

Today, those boundaries are becoming increasingly porous. Political narratives flow across institutional lines that once acted as meaningful barriers, reshaping how courts, universities, journalists, and public agencies are understood by the people they serve.

As a result, institutions frequently lose the ability to communicate on their own terms.

This creates a challenge that many organizations misdiagnose. When a message fails to land, leaders often assume the problem is disagreement. They assume audiences encountered the argument and rejected it. Increasingly, the argument is never encountered in its original form. It is absorbed into a larger narrative before people engage with its actual substance.

The Supreme Court ruling offers a useful illustration. One can agree or disagree with the Court’s reasoning. One can support or oppose broader Second Amendment protections. Those debates are legitimate. What is notable is how quickly the conversation moved away from the legal reasoning itself and toward a familiar political storyline.

We are witnessing the erosion of distinctive discourse.

When every issue is filtered through the same framework, society loses some of its capacity to think in multiple dimensions at once. We become less capable of evaluating legal arguments as legal arguments, scientific claims as scientific claims, or institutional decisions as institutional decisions. Everything becomes evidence in support of a preexisting narrative.

For mission-driven organizations, this presents a profound communication challenge. The task is no longer simply developing a clear message. The task is preserving the integrity of that message long enough for audiences to encounter it before it is translated into a story you were never trying to tell.

That may be one of the defining narrative challenges of our time.

Every organization operates within larger narratives it does not control. COJA helps mission-driven organizations understand those narrative pressures, identify where their messages are being reinterpreted, and build communication strategies that preserve clarity, credibility, and meaning. Learn more at cojaservices.com.

Neither explanation gets at what makes the scene so striking.

A UFC fight could be held almost anywhere. Las Vegas has built an industry around spectacle. Stadiums exist for precisely this purpose. The White House serves a different function. It is one of the country’s most important symbolic spaces. Every event held there communicates something about what leadership looks like and how power should be understood.

The visual language of Sunday’s fight was instantly recognizable. A crowd gathered around combat. A powerful figure positioned above the action. The spectacle exists not simply for entertainment but to reinforce the centrality of the person presiding over it.

The comparison to ancient Rome is almost unavoidable.

Not because a UFC fight and the Colosseum are equivalent. They aren’t. But symbols matter because they activate stories we already know. The image of a ruler presiding over a public spectacle is one of the oldest political narratives in human history. The fighters are not the protagonists of that story.

The ruler is.

This is where many conversations about politics go wrong. We tend to focus on policy, messaging, and individual events. But narrative often operates at a different level. It shapes how people understand the relationship between leaders, institutions, and the public.

For generations, the White House has hosted rituals designed to communicate legitimacy through institutions. State dinners. Bill signings. Medal ceremonies. Memorial observances. These events reinforce the idea that authority comes from the office and the democratic system surrounding it.

A spectacle communicates something different.

It shifts attention away from the institution and toward the individual at its center.

The question isn’t whether a UFC fight belongs at the White House.

The question is what story the White House is being asked to tell.

Because institutions are not neutral stages. They teach. They model. They signal what deserves public attention and admiration. Over time, those signals shape how people understand power itself.

That is why symbolic decisions matter.

Most of us will forget the details of the event. Few people will remember who fought or what happened in the ring.

What endures is the image.

A crowd. A spectacle. A leader above it all.

And sometimes the image tells the story more clearly than the event ever could.

It’s an understandable mistake. Attention is visible. We can measure it. We can screenshot it. We can point to impressions, mentions, headlines, engagement rates, and trending topics. Attention creates the feeling that something is happening.

Sometimes it is.

Often, it isn’t.

Over the past few years, I’ve watched organizations become increasingly sophisticated at generating attention while becoming less certain about how to build power. The result is a cycle of reaction. A statement is released. A controversy emerges. A campaign launches. A response is drafted. Another response follows.

The work becomes organized around what is happening today. Power, however, is usually built around what needs to happen three years from now. That’s why organizations frequently mistake visibility for influence and influence for power.

They’re not the same thing.

Attention means people noticed you.

Influence means people considered what you said.

Power means people changed what they did.

The gap between those three things is where many organizations get stuck. A viral post can generate attention without influencing anyone. A respected thought leader can influence a conversation without creating any meaningful change. Even a successful campaign can shift public sentiment without creating the infrastructure necessary to sustain progress.

Power requires something more durable. It requires institutions. It requires relationships. It requires systems. It requires people who know what they’re building and how their work connects to a larger vision.

That’s why some of the most consequential work in public life happens far away from the spotlight. While everyone else is focused on the headline, someone is building leadership pipelines. Someone is cultivating partners. Someone is creating systems that can survive changes in personnel, funding, or public opinion.

None of that work is particularly exciting from a communications perspective. It doesn’t trend. It rarely goes viral. But it is often the difference between a moment and a movement.

This matters because many mission-driven organizations operate under constant pressure to demonstrate activity. Funders want updates. Stakeholders want visibility. Teams want evidence that their work is making an impact. Attention becomes an easy proxy for progress.

The problem is that attention can disappear as quickly as it arrives. Power tends to remain.

The organizations that endure understand this distinction. They use communications strategically, but they don’t mistake communications for the work itself. They understand that narratives are not an end goal. Narratives are a coordination tool. They help people understand where they’re going, why they’re going there, and what role they play in getting there.

For organizations operating in complex environments, the question isn’t simply, “How do we get more attention?”

The better question is: “What are we building that still exists after the attention moves on?”

Because eventually it will.

The organizations that continue to matter are usually the ones that spent less time chasing attention and more time building the structures capable of carrying their work forward.

Attention can open a door.

Power is what allows you to walk through it.

Many organizations don’t have an attention problem. They have a coordination problem.

COJA helps mission-driven organizations align internal narratives so their communications support long-term impact, not just short-term visibility. Learn more about our strategy and services at cojaservices.com.

The dominant political narrative of the past several months has been about Republican fracture. Dissidents. Holdouts. The slow erosion of Trump’s grip on his own party. It was a compelling story. It was also the wrong one — and the consequences of getting it wrong are not abstract.

When the press frames a political movement as fracturing, it creates an expectation. Audiences, advocates, and organizations calibrate their strategies around that expectation. They plan for chaos. They wait for collapse. They read every act of Republican dissent as evidence that the center is not holding.

Meanwhile, the center was holding just fine. It was doing something more deliberate than that.

This month, across four races in three states, Donald Trump demonstrated something the fracture narrative had actively obscured: he is not managing a fractured party. He is building a restructured one. The difference matters enormously.

In Indiana, Republican state senators defied Trump’s redistricting push in December 2025 — one of the first visible setbacks of his second term. The press covered it as a check on his power. It was a five-month delay. By May, six Trump-endorsed challengers had defeated incumbent senators who voted against him, with political groups aligned with Trump spending over $9 million to make it happen. The senators who said no are gone. Every Republican legislator in every other state watched it happen.

In Louisiana, Senator Bill Cassidy had voted to convict Trump after January 6. He didn't lose his primary narrowly. He finished third.

In Kentucky, the most expensive U.S. House primary in history ended with Trump-endorsed Navy veteran Ed Gallrein defeating Representative Thomas Massie — one of the most vocal Republican holdouts in Congress. Massie had told NBC News that his race would determine whether Republicans were willing to stand up to Trump. The answer arrived in the form of a landslide.

And yesterday in Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated Senator John Cornyn, ending over three decades of Cornyn's electoral dominance in what amounts to a watershed moment for GOP politics. Paxton won by more than 25 percentage points — carrying scandals, carrying controversy, carrying a MAGA base that sees persecution as proof of authenticity. After the race was called, Paxton credited Trump's endorsement as "the most powerful force in politics."

None of this is surprising if you were watching the right story. The fracture narrative was never tracking power. It was tracking noise — the loudest voices, the most dramatic breaks, the most quotable defections. Massie was loud. Cassidy was principled. Cornyn was experienced and well-funded and had three decades of Texas Republican dominance behind him. None of that mattered, because the fracture narrative confused visibility with leverage.

What Trump has been building is not a coalition. It is a personnel infrastructure — the systematic capacity to remove people who won’t comply and install people who will. That infrastructure doesn’t show up in approval ratings. It doesn’t generate the kind of dramatic dissent that makes for good political coverage. It shows up in primaries, quietly, until it doesn’t.

Redistricting is the throughline that reveals the full scope of what’s being constructed. Indiana’s results ratcheted up pressure on Republican lawmakers in other states to redraw congressional maps before November. Alabama and Tennessee have already begun special sessions that could limit Black voters’ strength in Democratic-leaning districts. The primaries weren’t loyalty tests. They were enforcement mechanisms for a map-redrawing strategy designed to shape electoral power for a generation. Gallrein and Paxton aren’t just wins. They are proof of concept.

The press kept asking whether Trump was losing his grip. That was the wrong question — and asking the wrong question is its own kind of failure. It shaped what got covered, what got ignored, and what organizations across the country built their assumptions around.

The question that actually needed asking was simpler and more consequential: what does the Republican Party look like when everyone who says no has been removed?

We’re not waiting on the answer anymore.

The political environment your organization is navigating may not match the story you’ve been told about it. COJA Services helps mission-driven organizations audit their messaging and communications frameworks against the landscape that actually exists — not the one the coverage described. Start at cojaservices.com.

That’s not an accident of politics. That’s architecture.

The document was never the point

Most people engaged with Project 2025 as a policy document — something to agree with, fact-check, or fight. That’s the wrong read.

The 900-page Mandate for Leadership is one piece of a four-part infrastructure: a shared argument, a pre-vetted pool of aligned messengers, a training academy so anyone could carry the message without breaking it, and a sequenced 180-day action plan built to be used starting day one. The policy was the content. The other three pillars were the delivery system.

This wasn’t improvised. The original Mandate for Leadership was published in January 1981, the same month Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. By the end of his first year, more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy. Not because Reagan was a visionary executor. Because the movement arrived ready. Values aligned, messengers trained, action sequenced. The infrastructure preceded the power.

Project 2025 was built on that same logic — and it worked the same way.

What the left did instead

At the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow carried a hardbound copy of the 900-page document to the lectern and told the crowd that over the next four nights, they were going to hear a lot about what was inside it. The DNC projected “Project 2025 HQ” onto the exterior of Trump Tower in Chicago. Harris made it a centerpiece of her stump speech. Walz was explicitly deployed, in the words of campaign sources, as a sledgehammer against it.

The intent was opposition. The effect was amplification.

Every one of those moves kept Project 2025 as the subject. The right named the agenda. The left named it louder. Democratic energy — considerable, passionate, well-resourced energy — organized itself around an opponent’s document instead of its own.

This is what it looks like to argue inside someone else’s frame. You’re not countering the narrative. You’re extending it. The left had smart messengers. It had no constellation of its own to point them toward.

That’s not a messaging problem. It’s an infrastructure problem.

What a playbook actually requires

Project 2025 worked because of four things the left currently lacks — not as individual organizations, but as a movement.

A shared values framework that any messenger can carry. Not a platform. Not a list of policy positions. A set of values stated simply enough that a school board candidate and a ballot initiative campaign and a national nonprofit are all, recognizably, pulling in the same direction. P2025 did this with four promises stated in plain language. The specifics varied by chapter. The values didn’t.

Research on what actually moves people. Not what’s true. Not what’s righteous. What shifts belief in an unconvinced audience. The right has been building and applying this research for decades — what frames produce a yes, what frames produce a no, what values voters reach for when they feel safe versus when they feel threatened. The left has plenty of data on its own base. It has less on the people it needs to persuade.

Alignment before the campaign launches. Not coordination after the crisis hits. The organizations, campaigns, and movement groups doing this work are often brilliant in isolation and incoherent in aggregate. The same issue gets framed six different ways across six different organizations, and none of those frames build on each other. P2025 solved this by doing the alignment work years in advance, so when the moment came, the movement moved as one.

Sequenced deployment. A values document that sits on a shelf is a shelf document. P2025 was built with a clock attached — 180 days, specific actions, specific owners. Vision without sequence is just inspiration. The left has no shortage of inspiration.

The work

You don’t beat a playbook by arguing with it. You beat it by building your own — one that aligns your values, arms your messengers, and sequences your actions before the moment demands it.

That’s not the website. It’s not the report. It’s not the social campaign. It’s the underlying architecture that makes all of those land in the same direction, toward the same horizon, recognizable as part of the same constellation no matter who’s carrying it.

That work exists. It has a name. It’s narrative consulting.

If your organization is still working from scattered talking points and hoping the right message finds the right moment, it’s time to talk. COJA Services builds the narrative infrastructure that movement organizations, campaigns, and nonprofits need to stop reacting and start leading.

This spring, several universities rewrote that statement. Not with a new policy on free expression. With a scheduling decision.

NYU will no longer allow live student speeches at school-level ceremonies, requiring remarks to be pre-recorded and approved in advance. CUNY Law eliminated live student speakers entirely — and cancelled its commencement livestream, cutting off diaspora families from watching their children graduate. Rutgers cancelled a CEO’s commencement address over his social media posts on Israel and Palestine. The University of Michigan’s president issued a public apology after a professor praised pro-Palestine students during his address.

None of these institutions said they were suppressing speech. They said they were managing disruption, maintaining order, ensuring ceremony. The language of institutional neutrality did what it always does: it made a choice look like an absence of one.

And then there’s the other move — the one that doesn’t make the news, but is just as instructive.

While some universities were canceling microphones, others were booking Tom Brady, Sarah Jessica Parker, Chris Paul, and Queen Latifah. Entertainers. Athletes. People with broad cultural goodwill and no political surface area. The “safe speaker” has become its own institutional statement: We will give you a celebrity whose presence no one can protest, whose remarks won’t require an apology, whose name generates excitement rather than scrutiny.

That’s not neutral either. It’s a preference. And it tells you exactly what these institutions are optimizing for.

the framework problem

Here’s what I keep coming back to: every institution that cancelled a speaker, pulled a mic, or booked a celeb in place of a student voice did so from within a framework that treats “pro-Palestine” and “anti-Israel” as interchangeable — and treats both as inherently disruptive to a neutral space.

That framework isn’t neutral. It was manufactured.

Supporting Palestinian self-determination and opposing Israeli government policy are not the same as opposing Jewish people, opposing Israel’s existence, or endorsing violence. Those distinctions are not difficult. They are, in fact, the distinctions that careful journalism, serious scholarship, and honest advocacy have been making for decades. The reason they collapse in institutional communication is not because they’re genuinely ambiguous. It’s because institutions adopted a framework in which any public expression of solidarity with Palestinians reads as a destabilizing act — and then governed from inside it.

Once you accept that framework, the only available moves are suppression or apology. Or Brady. You’ve already conceded the terrain.

what holding the line actually looks like

The CUNY Law students who are now suing over their First Amendment rights didn’t accept the framework. Their student government president described having their voice taken away “in what’s supposed to be our biggest moment.” The professor at Michigan who praised pro-Palestine students didn’t couch it. He said what he saw: that his students were being told their Palestinian families were expected to suffer and die, and to be fine with it.

Those are people operating from a clear internal narrative — one that doesn’t require the institution’s framework to hold.

The institutions that cancelled and apologized are not safer for having done so. They’ve traded one kind of exposure for another: the exposure of having demonstrated, publicly, that their stated commitment to free expression has conditions. That information is now part of their record.

why this is a narrative problem before anything else

The work I do with mission-driven organizations starts here — before the pressure arrives, before someone asks you to soften the language or hedge the framing or find words that offend no one.

The question I ask is simple: what do you actually believe, and can you say it clearly enough that your team, your funders, and your community would all give the same answer?

Most organizations can’t. Not because they lack values, but because they’ve never been asked to build a narrative that holds under scrutiny — one rooted in what they actually do and why, rather than language calibrated for the political climate of the moment.

The universities cancelling graduation speakers didn’t get here because they made a bad decision in May 2026. They got here because they never built the narrative architecture that would have made a different decision available to them. When the pressure arrived, they governed from within someone else’s framework because they’d never built their own.

That’s the work. And the window for it is always before anyone demands you change.

Paula Lehman-Ewing is the founder of COJA Services Inc., a narrative consulting agency working with justice organizations, academic institutions, and mission-driven brands. Ready to build a narrative that holds before anyone demands you change it? Start the conversation.

They were trying to survive. That instinct is understandable. The strategic logic is worth examining.

What the pressure looked like

The federal pressure was real. Executive orders, Department of Education guidance, and the threat of funding loss created a moment of genuine institutional uncertainty. For organizations dependent on federal dollars, the calculus felt existential. The question was: do we change what we say, or do we risk what we have?

Many institutions chose to change what they said.

Northeastern University renamed its DEI office the “Office of Belonging.” Students pushed back publicly. USC dissolved its Office of Inclusion and Diversity and scrubbed faculty titles. The University of Alaska’s board of regents ordered a full removal of DEI language from all websites and communications — a decision the faculty alliance called “rash and censorious” and warned could undermine the institution’s accreditation foundation. The University of Iowa closed its DEI offices and committees entirely, with the president confirming compliance to state lawmakers and going further than state law actually required.

These weren’t quiet administrative changes. They were public repositioning decisions — visible to faculty, students, donors, and the communities these institutions serve.

What the courts did

In April 2025, federal courts struck down the Department of Education’s anti-DEI guidance. The Trump administration later abandoned its appeal. The legal threat that had driven much of the institutional response was gone.

The language changes, office closures, and rebranding decisions largely remained.

Schools such as Oberlin and Swarthmore had not dismantled their DEI programs under the same pressure. Both are still operating. So are the institutions that did retreat. The difference isn’t survival — both sets of institutions made it through. The difference is what story they’re now telling about themselves, and how much of their own identity they spent to tell it.

The narrative diagnosis

Here’s what this looks like from a communications standpoint: these institutions didn’t lose a fight. Most of them didn’t wait to find out if there was a fight to lose. They surrendered a narrative in anticipation of a threat — and then the threat was substantially curtailed by the courts.

The cost isn’t financial. It’s not enrollment. It’s something harder to measure and harder to recover: the gap between what you said you stood for and what you did when standing for it became uncomfortable.

That gap doesn’t disappear when the legal threat does. It becomes part of the institutional record. It’s what faculty remember when they’re deciding whether leadership means what it says. It’s what donors reference when they’re deciding how much trust to extend. It’s what peer institutions see when they’re evaluating whether you held or folded.

A message system built on values can absorb pressure — not because values are invulnerable, but because they give you a coherent reason to hold a position. When the only reason to hold a position is “nothing bad has happened yet,” the position isn’t really a position. It’s a waiting room.

If the guidance had never been issued, would you have rewritten your own identity? If the answer is no, then what you rewrote wasn’t strategy. It was reflex.

Understanding the difference — and building communications infrastructure that can tell them apart — is the work COJA does.

This post is part of Audit in Public, an ongoing series examining narrative pivots as they happen — what drove them, what they cost, and what a more grounded approach might have looked like. If your organization is navigating a moment like this — or trying to build the kind of message system that holds up when pressure arrives — learn more about our work at cojaservices.com.

Read that again. The problem isn’t importance. The problem is alignment.

Walk into almost any university DEI office in 2025 and you’ll find people doing genuinely consequential work. Pipeline programs moving first-generation students through to graduation. Faculty recruitment initiatives quietly diversifying departments that haven’t changed in decades. Conflict resolution infrastructure keeping institutional tensions from becoming institutional crises.

None of that is in the headline.

The headline is the rollback. The renamed office. The carefully worded statement from the provost that says everything and commits to nothing. And because DEI offices spent the better part of a decade building their messaging around language that is now politically toxic, they find themselves holding real work they can no longer describe in public without triggering a fight they didn’t start and can’t win on those terms.

The work didn’t change. The message stopped matching it.

Then there are the examples where the message was never grounded in substance to begin with — the ones that relied wholly on the trendability of a moment to gain entry into the conversation.

In the summer of 2020, American institutions did something extraordinary: they talked about race. Corporations issued statements. Police departments convened listening sessions. Cities reallocated budget lines and called it transformation. For approximately 18 months, the narrative of reform was everywhere.

The substance was not.

Most of what got called “George Floyd reforms” was messaging performing as policy. Rebranded units. Revised use-of-force language that left the underlying culture intact. Diversity pledges that generated press releases and little else. The organizations doing real, unglamorous, structural work — the ones litigating cases, changing sentencing guidelines, building reentry infrastructure — were largely drowned out by the volume of performative response.

And when the political moment shifted, as it always does, the institutions that had built on narrative alone had nothing to stand on. The orgs with actual substance watched the attention economy move on without them.

Two different failures. Same root cause.

Here’s what both stories have in common: the organizations involved conflated visibility with impact, and message with mission. In the attention economy, that confusion is fatal — not immediately, but steadily. You can run on narrative momentum for a while. Eventually the gap between what you say and what you do becomes the story.

The organizations that survive this moment — and thrive in it — are the ones that have done the harder, slower work of making sure their message is actually load-bearing. Not a billboard for the work. The architecture of it.

That means knowing not just what you do but why it matters to the specific people you need to reach. It means building messaging that can hold up under pressure, under scrutiny, under a political environment that will shift again before you’ve finished reading this essay. It means treating narrative strategy not as a communications expense but as an organizational infrastructure investment.

The attention economy doesn’t care how important your work is. It never has. It rewards clarity, credibility, and consistency — which are not personality traits. They are skills. They are buildable.

The DEI office with real work and no language left. The reform org that built on performance instead of substance. Both are paying the same price: invisibility at the moment their work matters most.

That’s not inevitable. It’s a gap. And gaps can be closed.

Paula Lehman-Ewing is the founder of COJA Services Inc., a narrative consulting agency working with mission-driven organizations, academic institutions, and advocacy groups to make sure important work stands out and moves the needle.

What followed was a conversation about fatal police shootings, not around it: what accountability looks like inside a prosecutor’s office; where policy language breaks down in practice; what the community is owed and what the institution is actually delivering. The conversation went deeper instead of sideways. Nobody walked out. Nobody performed outrage for the room. We disagreed in places and kept going.

I’ve been thinking about why that’s remarkable — and why it shouldn’t be.

We have a diagnosis for what’s wrong with public discourse. It shows up in every op-ed, every podcast intro, every foundation grant about “bridging divides”: we are too polarized, too tribal, too online, too loud. The problem is volume. The problem is algorithms. The problem is that we’ve sorted ourselves into camps so sealed that genuine exchange is no longer possible.

I don’t buy it. Not entirely.

Volume is real. Algorithms are real. But I’ve spent two decades as an investigative journalist and the last several years building a narrative consulting practice, and what I’ve watched happen in rooms — actual rooms, with actual people — tells a different story. The problem isn’t that hard conversations are impossible. The problem is that almost nobody has built the skills to hold one.

Pushing without detonating is a skill. It is learnable. And its absence is costing us more than we’re accounting for.

Here’s what the skill actually requires.

First: you have to know what you’re actually asking and why. Not the surface question — the one underneath it. In the DA King conversation, the surface question was about deadly force policy. The real question was about the distance between institutional language and community trust. If I’d stayed on the surface, we’d have gotten talking points. Going underneath got us something true.

Second: you have to be genuinely prepared to hear the answer. This sounds obvious. It isn’t. Most hard conversations fail not because the questioner goes too hard but because they’ve already decided what the answer should be. The person across the table feels that. They close. What looks like polarization is often just two people performing positions at each other because neither one is actually listening.

Third: the framing has to hold space for complexity without collapsing into false balance. There’s a version of “both sides” that is intellectual cowardice dressed as fairness. That’s not what I mean. I mean framing that can hold a real contradiction — that a DA can be committed to accountability and still operating inside a system that resists it — without forcing a resolution that isn’t there yet.

These are narrative skills. They are also, I’d argue, civic skills. And we have systematically underinvested in both.

What we’ve invested in instead is performance. The sharp take. The ratio. The clapback that goes viral because it humiliates rather than illuminates. We’ve built an entire information architecture that rewards detonation and penalizes the slower, harder work of actually moving someone.

The result isn’t just bad discourse. It’s institutional paralysis. Organizations that can’t make their case to the people they need to reach. Leaders who’ve forgotten how to speak across disagreement. Communities that have stopped expecting public conversation to produce anything except heat.

That’s not inevitable. It’s a skills deficit. And skills deficits are fixable.

The DA King conversation was not a miracle of goodwill. It was a demonstration of what happens when two people come to a hard table having done the internal work first — knowing what they believe, knowing why it matters, knowing what they’re actually trying to accomplish in the room.

That preparation is available to anyone willing to do it.

The question is whether we decide it’s worth the effort — before the conversations we need to have become the ones we no longer know how to start.

The platform was meant to be a referral network, a digital version of the room where someone says you should talk to her — she’s exactly who you need. It wasn’t built to be a content platform or broadcast channel. But somewhere in the last decade, LinkedIn got overrun by content culture. The platform built the architecture — follower counts, engagement metrics, the dopamine loop of a post that performs — and content culture moved in and redecorated. Now everyone is posting. Everyone is performing. Everyone is announcing, sharing, explaining, and humbly declaring. It’s an environment optimized for broadcasting while calling itself thought leadership.

This matters because most people on LinkedIn are not there to build a following. They’re there because potential clients are there, investors are there, future employers and collaborators and strategic partners are there. The platform’s big draw is that it aggregates all the people who can open doors — and because when the right moment comes, you need them to be able to say something coherent about who you are and why you matter.

That’s a referral network. And referral networks run on something content culture actively erodes: trust.

Think about what ego-posting actually signals to your network. Every “thrilled to announce” and “humbled to share” and milestone carousel is a withdrawal from the relational account. Not a catastrophic one — one post won’t sink you. But over time, a presence that reads as self-promotional starts to register the way a contact who only reaches out when they need something does. You stop returning their calls. Not out of hostility. Out of quiet, accumulated exhaustion.

Your network doesn’t need more content from you. They need to know who you are, what you stand for, and whether they can stake their own credibility on referring you. Those are different things. And broadcasting your wins — however legitimate — doesn’t answer any of them.

LinkedIn didn’t set out to create this problem. But it has optimized relentlessly for engagement, and engagement turns out to be agnostic about trust. Outrage generates engagement. Self-congratulation generates engagement. Neither builds the thing that makes a referral network actually drive leads.

The platform became a performance stage. Most people are performing on it. And somewhere in the process, the people they actually needed to reach learned to keep scrolling.

Not because they don’t have an answer. They have several. They have the answer they gave at the last event, the one on their website that they’re not sure still fits, the one they rehearsed in the car on the way over, and the one they’re assembling in real time right now as the other person waits.

The problem isn’t the person. It’s the architecture — or rather, the absence of one.

The Gap Nobody Names

Accurate isn’t the same as useful

Most business owners are working from a pitch they assembled under pressure — at a networking event, in a sales conversation, on a form that asked for a two-sentence description. They punch their business into whatever AI assistant they use and run with it without ever really going back to test. The result is a message that is technically accurate and strategically useless.

What usually comes out instead of a pitch is one of three things: a job title dressed up as a sentence, a list of services with no through-line, or a resume regurgitation.

None of these are a failure of effort. They are a failure of structure. The person talking knows exactly what they do. They have just never been asked to make a single, clear decision about how to say it — and to make that decision based on what their most likely client actually needs to hear.

What the Work Looks Like

Positioning work gets confused with branding — with logo refreshes and tagline workshops and mood boards. Positioning is not about how something looks. It is about what you lead with, what you back it up with, and what you say when someone pushes back.

The core architecture is simpler than most people expect: one top-line message anchored to the specific problem you solve, three core promises each backed by proof from your own work, and a clear map of the objections your most likely client will raise and exactly what to say when they do. Everything else — the website copy, the trade show conversation, the elevator pitch — flows from that foundation.

The test is not whether the message sounds good. The test is whether a stranger could hear it once and know, with no additional context, whether they need what you are offering.

In Practice

Earlier this year, a food and beverage accounting firm went through a three-day positioning sprint* ahead of a major industry trade show. The work produced a message house built around the owner’s own story and client proof — not abstract promises, but specific outcomes that had happened in specific kitchens.

The owner took the framework and made it his own. That part matters. The best positioning work doesn’t produce a script. It produces clarity — and clarity sounds like the person, not like a consultant or a bot.

That is what repositioned clarity looks like in a room. Not a polished performance. A person who finally knows what they’re saying and why it lands — and delivers it with a magnetic confidence.

Bottom Line

Positioning is not a branding exercise. It is not a marketing project. It is a single strategic decision about what you lead with, made deliberately, tested against real objections, and built into every communication surface you have.

Most business owners have never actually made that decision. They have approximated it, revised it accidentally, and hoped that the right person would eventually connect the dots.

The right person rarely does. That work belongs to you — and it is far more tractable than it looks from the outside.

*COJA Services is now offering the Positioning Sprint as a standalone engagement — three days, six concrete deliverables, and a message you'll actually use. If you're ready to make the decision, reach out.