He talked about growing up between East Harlem and the Upper East Side, a dad who stopped showing up, failing every class except gym, and the version of himself that existed before anyone called him “Congressman.” He talked about becoming a South Bronx teacher, then a principal who broke every rule he could to build a school that actually served kids — and about the moment that changed everything: watching a wave of self-harm move through his students and realizing that a great education isn’t enough if the world outside the classroom is still failing them.

He talked about losing his seat. About depression, about gaining weight, about writing his way back to himself. And he talked about his new book, Unpolished — out November 17 — where every chapter is titled after a hip-hop track that shaped him, from Run-DMC to Nas to Dead Prez, because as he put it, hip-hop has always been “the rhythm of my life.”

This wasn’t a policy conversation. It was an hour of a man trying to explain, in his own words, how he became who he is — unpolished, unbossed, and still very much in the fight.

📖 Pre-order Unpolished: unpolishedbook.com

Get more from Megan Thuy in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Here’s where things stand, and why I still think the answer isn’t to abandon Brandon Johnson — it’s to organize harder around him.

The case for Johnson (yes, really)

I’m not going to pretend Johnson’s numbers are good. They’re not. A recent Mansueto Institute/NORC poll found only 13.6% of likely Chicago voters actually want him to run for a second term, and his approval rating sits in the low-to-mid 20s. Earlier in his term it was worse — single digits at one especially brutal point.

But here’s the thing centrist media never says out loud: a progressive mayor with no political capital and a hostile City Council is not the same thing as a failed progressive experiment. Johnson has been fighting an establishment that never wanted him there, with a City Council that’s spent three years actively working against him, all while managing a genuine humanitarian crisis (the bussing of migrants from Texas and Florida) that he didn’t create and that got weaponized against him at every turn.

The 60-day shelter policy was a real failure — no argument there. But the alternative on the table isn’t “a better progressive.” It’s a guy with $21 million in campaign cash he raised from trade unions and literally every billionaire family with interests in Chicago.

The move isn’t blind loyalty. It’s what Leo said on stream: call-ins, not call-outs. Push Johnson publicly and often on the things that matter — housing, the quantum data center fight, police accountability — before the field solidifies and it’s too late to shape anyone’s platform. This is the moment to make noise, not the moment to disengage.

Meet the field

Alexi Giannoulias — Secretary of State, frontrunner, thirst trap enthusiast

Giannoulias is the guy nobody hates, which in Chicago politics is its own kind of superpower. He’s sitting on roughly $20–25 million, he’s got major trade unions locked up, and he’s also pulling in money from basically every billionaire family with a stake in this city, including those with ties to the mob.

He’s been decent on some things — voting access, library funding, hiring more Latino staff than is typical in state government — but “decent” doesn’t erase the fact that his entire coalition is billionaires plus building trades. When your top donors are the same families quietly killing tenant protections and blocking real estate reform, that tells you who you’d actually be answering to as mayor. Also: yes, he’s got a lot of thirst traps out there.

Susana Mendoza (”Electric Susie”) — State Comptroller, old machine, rebranded reformer

Mendoza wants credit for being the deciding vote to abolish Illinois’s death penalty in 2011. She was one of the most aggressively pro-death-penalty members of the General Assembly, pushing to expand capital punishment and giving floor speeches about how the state’s method of execution was too humane. She’s since walked that back, but her political roots run straight through the old Chicago machine, including ties to Ed Burke.

George Cardenas — Cook County Board of Review, former 12th Ward alderman

This one should disqualify itself. As alderman, Cardenas backed the zoning that let MAT Asphalt build a plant directly across the street from McKinley Park — one of the prettiest parks on the South Side — over the objections of the community he represented. The company tied to that plant gave his campaign fund tens of thousands of dollars. He chaired the city’s environmental protection committee at the time. He then failed upward into a Board of Review seat, one of the last true patronage jobs left in Illinois government, and now he wants to run the whole city. No.

Mike Quigley — Congressman, 5th District

A career foreign-affairs and defense-focused congressman testing the waters more than actually running. He’s fine on most issues, unremarkable on the rest, and doesn’t have the coalition or the fire to make it out of a crowded field. Feels more like a graceful exit strategy than a real campaign.

Matt Brewer — businessman

Rich guy, running. That’s about the extent of what’s publicly known right now. Worth watching only insofar as any self-funded candidate is worth watching.

What actually matters right now

Marty Quinn — one of Johnson’s most consistent City Council opponents — just announced his retirement after 15 years representing the 13th Ward. That’s a genuine shift in the balance of power on the Council, and it’s a reminder that the ground is still moving. Nothing about this race is locked in yet.

That’s exactly why now is the moment for organizing, not resignation. This is the window to put real, specific demands in front of Johnson’s campaign before Giannoulias’s $21 million buys the narrative that progressive governance doesn’t work in Chicago.

🎬 Brando & Pop Culture

• 1:22 — Godfather trivia: the cat, cotton balls, showing up unprepared

• 3:04 — Apocalypse Now: Coppola’s “we went insane” quote

• 6:41 — Sean Bean’s LOTR lines-on-his-knee story

• 20:47 — Brando’s 1973 Oscar boycott, Sacheen Littlefeather speech

💍 Taylor Swift

• 11:04 — Wedding backlash: “royal family” talk, Swifties vs. incels

• 17:55 — Guest list controversy: Cartier raffle, Auschwitz guard joke

🌍 Trump & Iran

• 29:48 — “Islamic Republic of Japan” gaffe, breakdown

• 39:48 — Dementia speculation, the Zelensky slip-up

• 42:36 — Downfall (Hitler bunker) parody clip

• 46:04 — MOU collapse, ceasefire analysis

• 52:53 — Jared Kushner’s role in negotiations

• 56:16 — Shia Islam, martyrdom, Iran’s military culture explained

• 59:39 — Trump declares ceasefire “over,” new strikes

🐴 Democratic Party

• 1:12:04 — Reading David Brooks’ Atlantic op-ed

• 1:20:07 — Hubert Humphrey/DFL history parallel

🗳️ Michigan Senate Race

• 1:29:19 — Haley Stevens vs. Abdul El-Sayed: money & messaging

• 1:35:07 — Prank call to Haley Stevens’ office

• 1:57:38 — Abdul’s property tax proposal, online backlash

📰 Grab Bag

• 1:43:22 — Trump’s “he died like a dog” al-Baghdadi speech, revisited

• 2:00:03 — Nancy Mace’s “Black English” controversy

• 2:10:50 — Charlie Kirk assassination theories discussed

• 2:19:37 — Melania Trump “boyfriend” documentary bit

• 2:25:36 — Sign-off

Streamed live with guest Chris Valenti. Follow for daily episodes.

Get more from Megan Thuy in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

• 00:45 — Lauren introduces The Good Work, her new mutual aid & community organizing nonprofit

• 01:59 — Graham Platner scandal recap: the Nazi tattoo, the affair, the NYT piece

• 07:26 — Why “it’s just an Oppo piece” isn’t the own people think it is

• 08:48 — White men, the benefit of the doubt, and vets running for office

• 11:07 — Abdul El-Sayed vs. Graham Platner: the double standard, explained

• 13:45 — The gaslighting timeline: what Platner knew and when

• 16:03 — Elizabeth Warren, the Maine Dem caucus, and the mass endorsement pullout

• 20:28 — Pivot: Taylor Swift’s wedding and the internet meltdown

• 23:06 — Full rundown of the critiques (tacky spectacle, cost, timing)

• 25:19 — The White House’s Taylor Swift IP use nobody’s talking about

• 39:35 — White feminism 101: Kimberlé Crenshaw, intersectionality, and Susan B. Anthony

• 44:32 — Miss Rachel vs. Taylor Swift: what real platform use looks like

• 46:04 — The $26M donation breakdown — and what it conveniently avoided funding

• 1:00:33 — Switching gears: Nolan Wells

• 1:01:14 — Full timeline: Horn Island, the missing GoPro, the deleted photos

• 1:10:57 — The Tamori Jackson case: the 2016 Belize drowning nobody remembers

• 1:16:25 — Raising kids who don’t leave people behind — for white parents specifically

Follow for more on her organizing work.

Get more from Megan Thuy in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

1. He changed the waiting period

New companies used to wait 3 months before joining the index — that window existed so the hype could die down and the price could find reality before your retirement fund was forced in.

SpaceX reportedly demanded Nasdaq change the waiting period to 15 days as a condition of choosing Nasdaq, and Nasdaq complied.

2. Changed the float minimum

SpaceX only made 3% of its shares available to the public, Which normally would limit how much weight it carries in the index — less stock available should mean less forced buying.

But Nasdaq eliminated that rule too, and then applied a 3x multiplier to SpaceX’s index weight so your fund has to buy as if three times more stock exists than actually does.

Why does that matter? Because artificial demand drives the price up. SpaceX gets the benefit of billions in forced purchases without actually giving the public meaningful ownership.

3. Doubled the actual value of his company

Morningstar says SpaceX is actually worth $780 billion. It’s being sold at $1.77 trillion.

By its own valuation it’s being positioned as the 7th most valuable company in America — sitting next to Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia. By actual revenue it would rank 200th.

The company lost $4.9 billion last year. And right before going public, Musk folded his separate losing AI company into SpaceX. xAI alone lost $6.3 billion in 2025. Grok has no meaningful market share.

Also, Twitter has lost half its revenue since he bought it.

So your retirement fund bought Starlink, rockets, a failing AI product, and a social media platform in decline, all valued at twice what analysts say it’s worth with no op out.

4. Changed the rules for insider selling

Normally, insiders can’t sell their shares for 180 days after an IPO — that rule exists to stop them from cashing out and leaving regular investors holding an inflated stock.

SpaceX negotiated around it. Insiders can start selling just weeks after the IPO in staggered tranches. When one early investor was asked directly if he’d sell at the first opportunity his answer was — “we’ve been invested almost ten years. It’s our business to return capital to investors.”

The rules were changed. The float was manipulated. The valuation was inflated. And the insiders are already headed for the exit — and most people will never know it happened.

And that is how Elon became a trillionaire.

I’m a policy and media organizer for a coalition that has been fighting to repeal Illinois’ anti-boycott law for well over a year. Just in the last few months, AIPAC and AIPAC-aligned groups sent letters to Illinois lawmakers urging opposition. There are credible reports that major donors — who also spent millions on dark-money AIPAC campaigns in Illinois’ congressional primaries — have been working to keep the bill from advancing.

How a Foreign Lobbying Campaign Became Illinois Law

The statute was drafted by a political operative now at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and was enacted in 2015 — the same year Israel’s government launched a $25 million anti-BDS lobbying effort targeting U.S. state legislatures, a budget that grew to $72 million by 2018. Illinois became the national template; the law has since been replicated in more than 35 states.

Since the “ceasefire”, at least 786 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed and 2,217 have been injured. Sexual violence, attacks on schools, and forced displacement continue in the West Bank. Ethnic cleansing has begun in Lebanon as part of the Greater Israel Project.

The Law that Breaks Laws

1. The board that enforces the law — the Illinois Investment Policy Board — was designed to avoid accountability.

Illinois law requires anyone managing public pension money to act “solely in the interest of participants and beneficiaries.” The IIPB gets around this by not technically managing the money. Instead, it publishes a list of banned companies, and pension funds are legally required to follow it.

When Ben & Jerry’s announced in 2021 that it would stop selling ice cream in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the IIPB voted unanimously to ban Unilever — Ben & Jerry’s parent company — from Illinois pension portfolios. Several states that had adapted IL’s anti-BDS law quickly sold off over $430 million in Unilever shares by the time Illinois pension funds were required to sell. The stock had already absorbed that coordinated downward pressure and Illinois retirees bore the cost.

Illinois’ Constitution protects pension beneficiaries from having their benefits diminished, but this law places protecting Israel from boycotts above the rights of pension beneficiaries.

2. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that boycott is protected by the First Amendment.

In NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware (1982), the Supreme Court ruled unanimously: boycotts are a form of collective political speech, and the government cannot punish participants for engaging in them.

Additionally, this is considered viewpoint discrimination. The law doesn’t prohibit a company from not doing business in Israel. It prohibits doing so for while holding political beliefs the law’s authors don’t agree with. The IIPB investigates why a company made a commercial decision — and blacklists them if it decides the reasoning was political. In Sorrell v. IMS Health (2011), the Supreme Court reaffirmed that content- and viewpoint-based restrictions on expression are subject to heightened scrutiny.

3. The law leverages our pensions to censor the truth.

Morningstar, one of the world’s largest financial research firms, owns a subsidiary called Sustainalytics that provides ESG ratings that investors use to assess human rights risk. When the IIPB was notified that Sustainalyitics provided low ESG ratings to companies operating in the occupied West Bank, IIPB threatened to blacklist Morningstar from Illinois pension portfolios. They claimed that those low ratings could lead to the boycott of Israeli companies.

Morningstar complied and killed Human Rights Radar entirely and removed the flags on Israeli companies. Then in 2024, Sustainalytics announced it would no longer cover human rights issues in what it called “contiguous territorial disputes”. And that is how the IIPB used $120 billion in public pension capital to pressure a private research firm into removing documentation of human rights abuses from the investment ecosystem.

Take Action Now

This law was written by a foreign policy operative, funded by a foreign government, and has spent a decade using Illinois retirees’ money to protect a regime credibly accused of genocide from accountability.

The Illinois legislature has the power to repeal it. So far, they haven’t.

On April 30 at 10 AM, HB 2723 — the bill that would repeal this law — has a subject matter hearing. If you live in Illinois, you can make your position known in under 2 minutes by filing a witness slip:

You don’t have to write anything or show up anywhere. You just mark yourself as a proponent of HB 2723. Step-by-step instructions are here: ILCHR.org/slips

This week, a NJ Democratic candidate accepted an endorsement from J Street, a liberal Zionist PAC that many refer to as “AIPAC lite” (which isn’t necessarily false). This endorsement led to a public and polarizing conversation. Before I started organizing for IL State Legislation, I probably would have had the same knee-jerk reaction to a candidate taking a J Street endorsement. But that knee jerk reaction ignores the unlikely alliances needed to make incremental changes.

Zionism is a political belief rooted in ethno-nationalism and responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and now Iranians and the people of Lebanon. Liberal Zionists believe that the Israeli government can be reformed. I do not.

But I also believe that the American government was built on genocide and apartheid and cannot be reformed. That it’s working exactly as it is designed. But if I were to alienate every person who believed that the American and Israeli governments can be reformed, I’d have few allies to actually make a difference with.

I also have a red line at genocide. But holding it with full moral seriousness doesn’t require abandoning the strategic thinking that gives us any chance of changing something. If we care about the people on the other side of that line, we owe it to them to be as tactically disciplined as we are morally committed.

We need to stop the violence by any means necessary — and that’s going to be uncomfortable.

I don’t necessarily believe that J Street is “good”. But I do think they are useful and provide entrenched Zionists an off-ramp from AIPAC and permission structure to repeal anti-BDS laws and condition aid to Israel without fear of being outcast as “antisemitic”.

Our Brains Under Authoritarianism

Authoritarians manufacture chaos deliberately. Under cognitive overload, we become susceptible to the same rigidity that allows authoritarianism to survive.

We stop tolerating ambiguity and start reaching for absolute terms, simple answers, clear enemies.

As ideological rigidity increases on both ends of the spectrum, cooperation collapses and movements fracture from within.

Oversimplified red lines are a symptom of that state. But over-simplified criteria causes us to welcome in people who are actively harmful while blocking potential short-term allies.

Brain imaging research confirms this isn't only a right-wing phenomenon: authoritarian attitudes across the political spectrum are linked to reduced capacity in the prefrontal regions that govern impulse control and complex reasoning.

The line gets drawn for ease of mind, not for building power, and that's exactly what authoritarians rely on to keep us from organizing.

A red line at genocide is not effective if that red line prevents us from building power required to stop the genocide.

In We Do This 'Til We Free Us, Mariame Kaba invokes Kwame Ture:

She further explains that we are both products and perpetuators of the system we're trying to dismantle. We can't simply destroy it - the system itself is ingrained in us and we continue to rebuild that system until we unlearn how we uphold it.

“The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.” - Audre Lorde

Cancel culture and public call-outs are also tools authoritarian regimes use to silence dissent, enforce conformity, and make the cost of deviation visible and public.

When we deploy those tools, we’re training ourselves and our communities to respond to ideological impurity with public punishment. Again, this is what prevents movements from building.

Provide Off-Ramps

Authoritarian systems hold because of infrastructure — business, labor, faith institutions, education, civil service, military and police. We can chip away at those pillars by giving people off-ramps and spaces to move a notch over. Our job is to make sure that somewhere exists, and not burn it down because the person stepping onto it isn’t fully there yet.

J Street is an off-ramp from AIPAC’s stranglehold on U.S. foreign policy. A candidate who takes it has moved, and can be moved further. Treating that as betrayal closes the door on one of the few paths that might actually matter.

That’s one of the most threatening things that can happen to an authoritarian system — and one of the first things our movements shut out with purity standards. If we have no room for people leaving the institutions that prop up the regime, we’ve ceded that ground entirely.

Bill Moyer’s Movement Action Plan describes the goal of movement: slow erosion of the supports that hold power in place — accumulated pressure from every person willing to take one step further than where they stood before.

You can hold your values completely and still make room for people who are moving toward them. That’s a requirement of organizing.

We just watched what organized looks like. In New York City's 2025 mayoral primary, Brad Lander and Zohran Mamdani were both progressive candidates drawing from the same voter pool. Instead of splitting the vote and handing the race to Andrew Cuomo, they cross-endorsed each other publicly. Lander told his voters to rank Mamdani second. Mamdani returned the favor.

Lander described it simply as "politics as a team sport for making the city better."

According to Data for Progress, good polling gives progressives a clear path to victory, if they’re willing to use it. In a 2020 Massachusetts primary, polling showed the most conservative candidate, Jake Auchincloss, narrowly ahead. The data showed progressive consolidation could have flipped the result, but since progressive candidates didn’t consolidate, Auchincloss won exactly as predicted.

Illinois just ran several crowded primaries facing the same conditions: donor interference, divide-and-conquer tactics, and a fragmented progressive field.

LA has until June 2 to organize and consolidate.

Consolidation is A Critical Strategy

If candidates are serious about making sure the best policies can be passed for the people they represent, they’ll do whatever it takes to support that outcome. That’s why endorsement questionnaires and forums often ask candidates if they will commit to supporting the lead progressive candidate, even if that means exiting the race.

In October 2025, both Bushra Amiwala and Kat Abughazaleh committed to exactly that at a public forum. When it was time to live up to that commitment, the expectation to consolidate was reframed as an attack, causing further divisions among progressive voters.

Electoral consolidation is not a dirty word. One of the core functions of polling is to identify which candidates have the best shot to win so progressive organizers can consolidate around them.

Under plurality voting in a crowded primary, splitting the progressive vote between candidates with identical platforms doesn’t honor those candidates. It hands the race to someone who doesn’t share those platforms at all.

“They have the same policies” is the argument for consolidation. Not against it.

Personal feelings about a candidate are a separate question from strategic action toward shared community goals.

In Los Angeles, several candidates are drawing from overlapping voter pools. The conversation about consolidation is coming. When it does, the question isn’t which candidate deserves to stay in. It’s which outcome serves the most vulnerable people in the city. The candidates are a vehicle to the outcome.

Stop Shopping. Start Organizing.

Americans are conditioned to participate in democracy like consumers and to evaluate candidates like products. Does this one reflect my values? Does their story resonate with me? Do I feel seen by their campaign?

This is by design — the donor class has spent decades perfecting a consumer model of civic participation: focus on individual candidates instead of collective outcomes and turn every primary into a personality contest.

Even when we agree on what we want, we can’t coordinate around getting it.

The concept of freedom requiring sacrifice has been packaged as something that happens in a war zone, but the sacrifice that actually builds free societies looks different.

• It’s the person who agrees to be uncomfortable so someone else can be safe.

• It’s the candidate with identical policies who concedes to the more viable candidate because the outcome matters more than the credit.

• It’s the voter who sets aside personal connection because the math is clear and the stakes are real.

The civil rights movement did not win because everyone got to lead. Ella Baker spent decades building other people’s power instead of her own. Every material gain that working class and marginalized communities have ever made was built by people who repeatedly chose the collective over themselves.

You’re Not Having an Organic Disagreement. You’re in an Op.

The progressive movement has largely abandoned organizing in favor of mobilizing, resulting in a movement that mistakes activity for power. Real organizing requires understanding the power structure you’re up against and building the kind of majority that can actually disrupt it.

A fragmented left that’s constantly re-litigating who deserves to stay in the race is doing mobilizing work: emotional, reactive, individual. When the frame shifts from what we’re building to who deserves to build it, everyone downstream reinforces the fracture without realizing it.

“Divide-and-conquer” has always been the elite’s strategy to prevent organized and united communities. Racism, partisanship, and identity conflict are deliberately maintained tools to create fractures in groups that could unite toward common goals.

When the conversation moves away from shared goals — and the necessary steps to meet those goals — and instead focuses on competing identities, we are playing out the divide-and-conquer tactic without even recognizing it.

Part two of an ongoing series on the 2026 Illinois primaries and the tactics shaping progressive politics nationally.

Before October of 2025, I spent most of the last fifteen years outside of Illinois. I returned just in time to jump into local policy organizing and watch the primaries up close. A few important observations of the political environment:

1. Illinois Democrats are more conservative than Texas Democrats.

2. The ADL and AIPAC infrastructural to politics here. Money doesn’t need to move through AIPAC to carry its agenda when Zionist political priorities are woven into the donor class, the fundraising network, and the social fabric of north shore progressive politics.

That context shapes what looks normal to the average Illinois Democratic voter. Zionism is baked into the political baseline and “progressive” has been defined down to mean roughly: not an old centrist Democrat who still thinks Bill Clinton was peak governance.

When a system is that entrenched, someone like Daniel Biss is progress and is positioned to neutralize some of that structure. And someone like Kat Abughazaleh is progress that would be detrimental to that structure.

Which is why the most effective attack against Kat wasn’t about her politics.

It was that she wasn’t from here.

Limiting Progress: from “Carpetbagger” to Southern Strategy

“But she’s a carpetbagger.”

After the Civil War, former Union soldiers, teachers, missionaries, and businessmen moved to the South to assist in rebuilding efforts, start businesses, or take part in politics. They often supported progressive measures such as public education, civil rights, and infrastructure development. Threatened by idea of progress, Southern Democrats called them “carpetbaggers” and characterized them as opportunists.

The goal was to delegitimize outside forces that threatened to accelerate progress the existing order wasn’t ready for, to make progress feel like an imposition, and make the people carrying that term feel like they don’t belong.

In 2020, just outside Chicago, a woman at a Naperville City Council meeting called Asian residents who supported a recreational marijuana ban “roving carpetbaggers.” The council passed a resolution denouncing her statement as racist as the community recognized immediately what the word was doing: using in-group/out-group as a weapon against people who had every right to participate in their own civic life.

Five years later, the same weaponization showed up in a Democratic primary twenty minutes away. In late January, it started with content stating, “how dare Kat celebrate the Bears’ playoff game. She’s not even from here”.

That’s the through line worth naming. Carpetbagger doesn’t require explicit racism to operate as long as its community has primed to protect its own definition of who belongs. In Naperville in 2020, people recognized that priming immediately, but in IL-9 in 2026, the same attack circulated through progressive networks largely unchallenged.

The difference was who was using it, who it was being used against, and who was being protected by it.

Southern Strategy

After the Civil Rights movement, Southerners were threatened by the idea of integration and felt abandoned by the Democratic Party. Kevin Philips, a political strategist, implemented the Southern Strategy, which activated used dog whistles of racism to mobilize voters who felt that progress had gone too far, moved too fast, or been claimed by people who weren’t really from here.

"We must ensure that our schools reflect the values of local communities, not the priorities of disconnected elites in Washington or elsewhere."

The Southern Strategy, a deliberate Republican Party effort beginning in the late 1960s, sought to realign white Southern voters by appealing to their racial anxieties. Figures like Richard Nixon and strategist Kevin Phillips advocated for “law and order” and “tough on crime” policies that disproportionately targeted Black Americans, all while using racially coded language to avoid overt racism.

This strategy redefined political campaigns, embedding dog whistles into mainstream discourse. Nixon’s campaign advisor, H.R. Haldeman, famously summarized this approach: “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

The IL-9 race and similar races in IL just showed us an updated version of this strategy.

Biss is genuinely more progressive than what Illinois has historically produced. He’s not a Clinton Democrat. He’s not AIPAC-funded. He represents real distance from the old centrist baseline. In the context of Illinois politics, that distance is progress.

But there’s a specific ceiling built into his progressivism. On Palestine, he holds the position the donor infrastructure requires — one that’s acceptable looks inside a political system where imperialist priorities are the entire infrastructure.

That’s the same structure the Southern Strategy exploited. Rights for everyone, except the group whose inclusion would actually restructure power.

Biss is progressive, but he is still a liberal Zionist. Ideologically, he is progressive except when it comes to Palestine, a framework not far from the “rights except for Black Americans” ideology that led to Southern Strategy. This is a system that produces acceptable progress that will not threaten the infrastructure underneath it.

Kat threatens the infrastructure. That’s why the carpetbagger attack wasn’t really about where she lived.

White Feminism’s Blind Spot

In-Group/Out-Group Dynamics

Women who show up for reproductive rights, who organize against ICE, who understand intersectionality as a framework — became some of the most effective enforcers of the legitimacy attack against Kat. Not all of them. Not even intentionally. But enough that it shaped the information environment.

I say this carefully, because most of these women are genuinely good-faith actors, but that’s exactly the point.

White feminist political networks in Chicago are built on a specific kind of power: donor access, north shore fundraising relationships, and establishment credibility, which is not inherently wrong, but it creates a class position that comes with blind spots.

Many treated their read on the race as the authoritative one. They were defensive, unusually so, when their read was challenged. Candidates who fit comfortably within their existing framework got the benefit of the doubt that was not extended to the candidate dubbed an outsider.

What made them susceptible wasn’t malice, but when legitimacy attacks on Kat started circulating, they didn’t trigger the same skepticism these women would normally apply. It matched a conclusion that felt right.

That’s how in-group/out-group dynamics work when they’re operating below the level of conscious awareness. The attack was laundered through electability language and local accountability framing — or, through dog whistles.

Patriarchy Upheld

The day before the primary, a woman came forward to say that when she was a 20-year-old math student at the University of Chicago, her 26-year-old professor pursued a romantic relationship with her after the term ended. Both eventually agreed it wasn’t appropriate and ended it.

No, it’s not rape, but it is exactly what the NYT piece by Amia Srinivasan describes — a pedagogical failure. A professor who redirected a student’s intellectual desire toward himself rather than toward learning. As Srinivasan writes, to want someone who wants to learn from you is to want them for their powerlessness. The woman who came forward said the experience was demoralizing enough that she left mathematics entirely despite her ability.

It doesn’t fit neatly into the consent framework, but progressives who hold elected officials to higher standards on every other issue found this one worth skipping over.

When the person in question is your candidate, the framework softens. The same intersectional analysis that would apply clearly in any other direction simply didn’t activate here.

That’s white feminism’s consistent failure: not that it lacks the tools, but that it applies them selectively based on who’s being protected.

The Dark Money Smear Campaign

Someone looked at the IL-9 landscape and saw exactly which levers to pull, which anxieties to amplify, which candidates to elevate as proxies, and which attacks would spread through progressive spaces without triggering progressive antibodies.

Dark money paid influencers $1,500 each to post scripted attacks against Kat. Instead of leading with policy, the Democracy Unmuted brief led with: she moved here to run. She’s not from here.

The brief specifically targeted Rogers Park, Skokie, Evanston, and Glenview, where voters already had local allegiance to a mayor, a state senator, a school board member — and would be most reactive to the idea of an outsider swooping in.

The person who executed that campaign had just won an award for his work on the Biss campaign.

I don’t believe Biss directed this. I do believe it was funded by people who shared a genuine fear of a shifting status quo and knew how to exploit that fear. The operation created conditions where good-faith progressive voters would absorb the messaging, feel its logic, and treat it as their own conclusion.

Why This Matters Beyond IL-9

If you can use progressive infrastructure to slow a progressive candidate — if you can get the left to police its own left flank using in-group legitimacy as the weapon, you can keep progress contained.

You just need to understand social dominance theory better than your targets do.

This is part one of an ongoing series. As more reporting surfaces on the infrastructure behind the IL-9 race, I’ll dig into the specific mechanics and how they connected to the broader campaign ecosystem.

As someone who spends my days working at the messy intersections of restorative justice, countering authoritarianism, and its special brand of violent extremism, this mess is warranting of a conversation. Among many things, its poured gasoline on dynamics that have long been playing out in Democratic, progressive, left, and anti-fascist spaces for years. The side-taking, the tribalism, the rapid willingness to eat our own — none of this is new.

We’ve been primed for it. Our movements have developed a muscle memory for disposability politics — a reflex that says, “mess up once, disagree once, stumble once—babe, bye.” Even the mere perception of a trip-up or a whiff of hypocrisy can be enough to flatten us, leaving us quicker to discard each other than to work through the (totally inevitable) tensions of conflict.

This isn’t just interpersonal. It’s a structural vulnerability. Authoritarians and extremists thrive on division — and we keep handing them free ammunition. Every time we collapse into infighting, we reinforce the narrative that our coalitions are fragile, unserious, and incapable of holding the complexity of all our people.

Conflict, as we know it, is very fundamentally human. And, it’s a sign that there’s a relationship there. The test isn’t whether conflict shows up (because, it will), it’s how we handle it. Do we react with hostility, defensiveness? Do we dehumanize each other, name call? Or do we practice the discipline of holding our integrity, facing accountability, naming our experiences, while keeping relationships at the center through our disagreement? This isn’t about tone policing or ignoring harm: it’s about facing what is happening with clarity and openness to truly addressing the issues without further fragmentation.

I get especially worried when I see the way we treat each other in these moments, because on top of folks clearly feeling hit, the mean, dehumanizing, and public dragging happening feeds the dynamics the far-right banks on. The comments section under almost any related post is flooded with humiliating, shaming, dehumanizing and just straight up mean chatter. That’s the stuff this admin’s extremists weaponize. They target people who already feel alienated or humiliated by their “group”, offering real relationships and community in exchange for loyalty (and sometimes, jobs). Every time we drag someone for not being “ethical enough” “radical enough” “smart enough,” “pure” “right” etc enough, we’re fueling that pipeline. And what I’m observing in these comments? Oooph.

What’s more, all of this infighting has us punching sideways and down instead of up. If it was different circumstances, I’d question if this whole sitch was planted propaganda: keep us busy fighting each other so that the people and institutions taking away our rights move unchecked. Why are the actual funders and gatekeepers getting a pass? Why is it on creators to weather this storm, rather than on the organizations fueling it to show accountability?

Bottom line is that wherever you sit in this fire, we cannot afford to be this fragile. This week it’s this article, next week it’ll be something else. We need to get a handle on disagreement within the resistance.

Because, in spite of living through an era of cancel culture and healthy-boundaries-gone-wrong, conflict isn’t collapse. Disagreement isn’t betrayal. And importantly: resilient movements aren’t conflict-free — they can take the heat, face the mess, and still move forward together. That’s the muscle we’re missing and what, together, we have to build.

Donate to the self-deployed, self-organized, and self-funded volunteers who showed up when no one else did.

Start building Mutual Aid Communities <3

And please feel free to buy me a coffee.

Friday, July 4th, residents along Central Texas’ Guadalupe River were devastated by flooding. Initial reports confirmed at least 24 dead in Kerr County, with 20 girls attending camp still missing.

By Saturday, July 5th, I learned Travis County had also been hit. I started a group chat for anyone in my network willing to help. As it turned out, Texans across the region heard Hill Country’s cries.

Over the next few days, veterans, street medics, firefighters, and emergency responders—both local and national—stepped up where government leadership failed. Floodwaters had overwhelmed the community, causing needless deaths and destruction, yet officials did nothing.

Organizers from 50501’s Houston chapter headed to Central Texas to set up medical clinics for those in desperate need.

Meanwhile, unheard flood victims escalated their pleas on social media, met with radio silence from officials.

The System Wants You to Wait for Permission. We Didn’t.

What we’re seeing is what happens when disaster response is treated as a privilege, not a right. From DOGE cuts gutting weather forecasting to Ted Cruz slashing emergency budgets, from local sheriffs refusing to deploy rescue teams to Kristi Noem’s team insisting it’s “not the government’s job”—the message was clear: You’re on your own.

So we acted.

On July 7, our volunteer team met over Zoom, tracking calls for help on social media. That’s how we found Sandy Creek, an unincorporated area that looked—and still looks—apocalyptic.

The need was completely valid, no matter who was voicing it.

After a local news outlet interviewed the same flood victim, bringing awareness to Travis County’s lack of response. Unsurprisingly, I later received a text: Judge Andy Brown is trying to get ahold of you about misinformation.

In that moment, I was too busy trying to find a staging area for the incoming North Carolina convoy bringing aid and equipment to the neglected area.

Deploying food trucks to areas that had no access to food. Figuring out how we were going to pay for all of these hotel rooms that victims needed. I passed the County Judge along to another volunteer admin, who tried to understand where the breakdown in communication could have been.

The need was real. The system wasn’t coming. So we did.

But then something ugly happened.

After a local news outlet interviewed a flood victim, exposing Travis County’s inaction, the backlash began. The narrative shifted:

• “Don’t self-deploy.”

• “Only donate to ‘reputable’ orgs.”

• “You’re platforming the wrong people.”

• “You’re spreading misinformation.”

Suddenly, the focus wasn’t on the fact that people were drowning in neglect—it was on policing who deserved help and who was “allowed” to give it.

The Lie That Keeps Us Powerless

The idea that only bureaucracies and big nonprofits can respond to crises is a myth—one that keeps us passive, dependent, and divided. If we had waited for permission, who would have fed the stranded? Housed the displaced? Treated the sick?

Millions pour into big charities, yet our volunteers have been self-funding gas, hotels, and food trucks while digging bodies out of the mud.

Meanwhile, the same system that abandoned flood victims tried to gaslight us into believing we were the problem.

I kept asking my team—nearly all Black, Brown, and queer womxn—“Am I crazy? I see the damage. I smell the death. Why are they acting like we’re the ones doing something wrong?”

The answer? Because mutual aid is a threat.

When we respond without waiting, we prove that communities can care for themselves—and that scares the people who profit from our helplessness.

Mutual Aid Was Necessary - Start Joining Us

The kind of people who drop everything for people they don’t know - people whose politics hurt them - are the kind of people who are not recognized for their efforts.

Black, Brown, and queer organizers mobilized and put themselves in the middle of Texas’s hill country because they know that disasters reveal systemic inequity and there would be more people suffering in the margins.

Meanwhile, white liberals couldn’t stop dismissing the reality because they didn’t like the messenger. We are in the midst of a moment that reveals the system’s grip and how we uphold it: who we trust, who we fight for, and where we direct our rage.

• Punching down at struggling people (even flawed ones) helps fascism. The ones who claimed to dismiss the flood victim because of her racism did not seem to understand class consciousness, let alone racial inequity.

• Punching across at BIPOC organizers because you don’t like the imperfect victim they are helping certainly does not dismantle fascism.

• The only acceptable target is up at the system that wants us begging instead of organizing.

If you believe in community resilience over corporate nonprofits, in action over permission, in solidarity over selectivity—then help us keep going.

Donate to our selfless volunteers if you can.
Share if you can’t.
But most importantly: remember that people power is the strongest power.

& if you appreciate my work, I’d love to be able to pay for daycare. Feel free to buy me a coffee <3

The Trap of Extremes: Why We’re Stuck in Protest Binary Thinking

Fascism doesn’t just attack from the outside—it thrives by turning us against each other. One of its most insidious tactics is accelerationism: flooding movements with crises, fear, and urgency until we lose the ability to think in nuance. The result? Activists who should be allies end up in endless loops of tactical infighting:

• “Permits = compliance.”

• “Only riots get results.”

• “You’re either a radical or a cop.”

These aren’t just disagreements—they’re symptoms of a system designed to make us fracture. When we internalize these binaries, we do the work of the far right for them: isolating, exhausting, and immobilizing our own movements.

But there’s a way out.

How Accelerationism Works (And Why It’s Winning Right Now)

The playbook is simple:

1. Overwhelm movements when you want to size power with relentless state violence, misinformation, and bad-faith debates.

2. Collapse nuance until every discussion becomes a purity test.

3. Freeze solidarity—because if we’re too busy calling each other out, we can’t effectively challenge power.

We see this everywhere:

• Debates over “sanctioned vs. unsanctioned” protests becoming moral litmus tests instead of strategic discussions.

• Online leftists dismissing entire tactics (and the people who use them) as “blue maga” or “violent.”

• Real organizers burning out because they’re forced to defend their choices to allies instead of focusing on the actual opposition.

The Antidote: Movement Ecosystems, Not Protest Purity

The alternative isn’t “kumbaya” unity—it’s strategic pluralism. Here’s what that looks like:

🟢 Green Zone: Sanctioned and Organized

Permitted protests don’t have to be toothless. They can be:

• Entry points for new activists.

• Training grounds for de-escalation, legal rights, and mass mobilization.

• Shields for more vulnerable participants (e.g., undocumented folks, parents with kids).
  Example: A permitted march with medics, jail support, and clear escalation plans if cops intervene.

🟡 Yellow Zone: Unsanctioned but Controlled

Civil disobedience isn’t just chaos—it’s disciplined pressure:

• Sit-ins with planned arrests (and pre-arranged legal aid).

• Walkouts with clear demands (not just performative disruption).

• Die-ins that force media attention (without abandoning vulnerable participants).
  Key: No one is disposable. Everyone knows the risks and backup plans.

🔴 Red Zone: High-Risk, High-Impact

These are last-resort tactics, not first moves:

• Blockades that shut down critical infrastructure (with community backing).

• Occupations that demand concrete concessions (not just vibes).

• General strikes that paralyze business-as-usual.
  Crucial: Red tactics fail without green/yellow foundations.

The Goal: From Binary to Infrastructure

Movements that last aren’t built on either/or—they’re both/and. That means:
✅ Respecting risk differentials (not everyone can do red zone actions).
✅ Linking tactics (e.g., using permitted rallies to recruit for direct action trainings).
✅ Calling IN instead of calling OUT (e.g., “How can we escalate together?” vs. “You’re a coward.”).

Fascism wins when we’re too divided to mount a unified resistance. But history shows that the most effective movements use multiple tactics at once:

• The Civil Rights Movement had both MLK’s marches and the SNCC sit-ins.

• ACT UP combined die-ins with FDA negotiations.

• Climate movements use permitted rallies to feed unsanctioned blockades.

The next time someone tells you there’s only one right way to protest, ask:
“Who benefits from us thinking that?”

The state wants us to beg for legitimacy to say “we’re peaceful” while they attack us anyway. Our power comes from refusing their framing.

Every demand that we condemn “violence” is a trap to divide us. Every debate about “good vs. bad protesters” distracts from the real issue: state violence. Our response must always redirect focus to what does matter: who are we fighting for?

False Promises of Safety Get People Hurt

When we tell protesters, "This is a peaceful demonstration," we unintentionally:

• Disarm them mentally. People arrive expecting police to "respect their rights"—only to be met with tear gas, rubber bullets, and mass arrests.

• Create shock and panic. When violence does happen (because the state always escalates), attendees freeze instead of reacting.

• Ignore historical reality. From Selma to Standing Rock, police attack even prayer circles. "Peaceful" is not protection.

The Trap of "Peaceful Protest" Messaging

When we say, "We are a peaceful movement," we:
✅ Think we're: Protecting our communities and promoting safety.
⚠️ Actually doing:

• Giving the state a veto power ("Someone stopped being peaceful—now we can attack").

• Legitimizing police violence against those who aren't "peaceful" by their standards.

• Wasting energy defending respectability instead of focusing on system accountability.

Example:

• ❌ "We condemn violence and remain peaceful!" → Media spins: "See? Even they admit some protesters are violent!"

• ✅ "Police are attacking people demanding justice. We will keep protecting each other and demanding an end to State violence."

The State Decides What "Violence" Is

• Standing still? "Unlawful assembly."

• Chanting? "Inciting a riot."

• Holding a vigil? "Disrupting public order."
  The uncomfortable truth is that no tactic is ever "peaceful enough" to avoid repression.

What to Say Instead

Shift the Focus to State Violence

• ❌ "We are a nonviolent movement."

• ✅ "The only violence here is police beating unarmed people who are protecting community members."

Refuse to Entertain "Good vs. Bad Protester" Debates

• ❌ "We don’t condone property damage."

• ✅ "“We care about our neighbors and communities. We have a lot to rebuild here. Our focus is on keeping each other safe, and seeing checks and balances on the executive branch. When we have these in place, we can address property damage."

Center the Demand, Not the Method

• ❌ "We protest peacefully for change."

• ✅ "Our protesters were chanting, singing, connecting across their grief as we united under a common goal - liberty and justice for all."

When Press & Politicians Demand Condemnations

DON’T:

• "We reject all violence!" (Feeds their framing.)
  DO:

• "We reject the state’s violence. Police started this—we’re demanding they end it."

• "Why aren’t you asking the mayor to condemn police brutality instead?"

Source: LA Times | June 8

Ignore "Looters," "Agitators," and "Bad Actors" in Protest Coverage

Focus on State Violence, Not Respectability Politics

When documenting protests, corporate media and even well-meaning journalists often distract from the core issue by fixating on:

• "Looting" or property damage

• "Outside agitators" or "violent elements"

• Debates over "good" vs. "bad" protesters

This is a deliberate tactic to:

1. Justify police brutality ("They had to respond to chaos!")

2. Divide movements ("I would support your protest if people weren't ---")

3. Redirect blame away from state violence and onto marginalized people.

Philadelphia on Jun 10: Officer with knee on protestor’s head.

Source: X | @SamanthaMelamed

Why We Refuse to Engage With These Distractions

1. The State Wants You to Focus on Property—Not Its Violence

This is how they maintain control of the narrative and position us to keep answering to them, rather than answering to us.

• Property is insured; lives are not. A broken window is not equivalent to a police baton cracking a skull.

• Police and media amplify "looting" narratives to manufacture consent for repression.

• History shows the FBI and police have always blamed "outside agitators" (e.g., MLK, BLM, Standing Rock) to discredit movements.

2. "Good Protester vs. Bad Protester" Is a Trap

• No movement is monolithic. Some will march silently; others will fight back. Neither justifies state violence.

• Respectability politics kills movements. If your coverage requires protesters to be "perfect victims," you’re aiding the state.

• The police don’t care. They’ll brutalize everyone—peaceful marchers, medics, journalists.

3. Filming "Agitators" Endangers People

• Footage of property destruction or clashes is weaponized to target activists (e.g., FBI raids, felony charges).

• You cannot know who is an infiltrator (undercover cops provoke violence) vs. a frustrated protester.

• Your camera should document the state, not the crowd. Police are the armed, organized force—they are the story.

LA | June 8

How to Cover Protests Effectively

1. Film the Police, Not the Protesters

• Document arrests, brutality, munitions used (rubber bullets, tear gas).

• Ignore "provocations" unless police are DIRECTLY involved. Even then, focus on their response.

2. Never Amplify Police Claims About "Violence"

• Example: If police say, "Protesters threw fireworks," your response is:

• "Police in riot gear fired tear gas into a crowd after reports of projectiles."

  • Not: "Violent protesters forced police to respond."

3. Contextualize Resistance

• Instead of: "Protesters set fire to a precinct."

• Say: "Protesters burn police building after years of unchecked brutality in their community."

• (This doesn’t endorse tactics—it explains why people revolt.)

• Prompt: "What would you do when your loved ones continue to go missing and no one has been able to stop it?"

• Personalize, tell the story of grief, rage and pain: humanize our resistance

4. Reject "Both Sides" Framing

• The imbalance of power is the story. The state has guns, tanks, and legal immunity. Protesters have signs and Molotovs. They are not the same.

Keep telling the stories of the people we want to protect: people subjected to state sanctioned kidnappings and police brutality. People who are living in poverty while the wealthy get tax cuts. When we use our time and platform defending the movement, we miss time that can be used to amplify our community members and expose state violence.

Because protecting your body and nervous system is part of the work, making us collectively more effective. It is not indulgent to take care of yourself.

What’s Included & How to Use this:

• Primer on what trauma is, how it shows up in us individually (biologically and psychologically), culturally, and systemically

• Overview of how we see trauma and stress within our movements and how to work with it as a creator

• Trauma-informed strategies and message framing for reporting on revolution & resistance

• Practices for taking care of yourself in the midst of trauma and stress

Creators and journalists are not just documenters but are stewards of collective memory and carriers of change

• In contexts of war, atrocity, and state violence - trauma and chronic stress are the only natural human response. Trauma is fundamentally the most human experience - it is our bodies’ automatic response in an attempt to keep ourselves alive, safe, and protected

• Stress is not bad: when we see wrong things happening it is right to be enraged, to feel our stress response activated. In the short term this makes us more effective: we can run faster, think quickly, connect dots, act in alignment with our authenticity without double-thinking

• Like unaddressed trauma, in the long-term, chronic stress can cause unwanted dynamics that can reduce our collective efficacy, eat at our closest relationships, reduce our ability to see things clearly or think creatively and expansively, and distract us from our goals.

Journalists and creators are not just conveyors of information. They shape collective narratives and social norms that influence change. The stories we tell shape what’s possible and what will harden.

A Primer on Trauma & Stress

Trauma is the body’s natural response to keep us safe when the body experiences an overwhelming inability to cope. No two people have the same experiences of trauma, and not everyone experiences trauma even if they experienced the same event. Only you can know if you’re experiencing it and it is never your fault, weakness, or individual failing for feeling the way you do.

• Individual Trauma: Devastating personal events — violence, loss, or violation — shaping perception and behavior. This can be secondary (you see something done to someone else) but it is experienced the same in your body as if it happened to you.

• Collective/Mass Trauma: Shared experiences (e.g., state violence, displacement, genocide) creating a field of stress and mistrust.

• Chronic Stress: Persistent uncertainty, discrimination, scarcity — rewiring threat perception and social response.

• Intergenerational & Cultural: Trauma passed down through narratives, norms, and social structure — not just DNA.

Helpful Narratives: Trauma Creates Adaptations — So Must Our Content

• Name the systems, not just symptoms “be tough on systems but soft on people” etc

• Show communities as having the only authority of what safety and care means to them

• Link historical continuities of harm and resistance.

Highlight healing infrastructures (community and mutual aid, interfaith organizing, intergenerational relationships, peer care).Trauma unaddressed overtime can alter the brain, body, and behavior — and at scale, deeply shapes culture, systems, and norms. Understanding how trauma shows up is essential to transforming these patterns across our world through the stories we tell.

Tips for storytelling when violence and trauma are ongoing:

Ask: Is my storytelling building safety, dignity, and collective capacity & possibility? Or reinforcing despair, mistrust, fear-based narratives and fragmentation?

⚠️ Harmful Reporting Patterns to Avoid

• 🔁 Overexposure to Violence Without Context

  • Constantly showing graphic violence without balancing it with stories of resistance, care, or context keeps audiences in a state of chronic stress.

  • Yes, horrific things are happening — but what else is true? People are also organizing, surviving, protecting each other, and building futures amidst the chaos. Tell those stories too.

• 🙅🏽‍♀️ Erasure of Resilience and Response

  • Only amplifying pain and violence flattens reality. Trauma-affected communities are not passive victims — but across history are the most effective strategists, healers, and builders.

  • Ask: Who is responding? Who is creating safety? Who is centered or missing from the conversation?

• 👁️ “Othering” of Systematically Marginalized Communities

  • Oversharing violent imagery of BIPOC, immigrant, queer & trans and disabled communities can unintentionally reinforce racist tropes — portraying folks as inherently chaotic, broken, or doomed.

  • Re-center narratives around power, resistance, and intergenerational wisdom. BIPOC communities are not just enduring violence — who are organizing to transform it.

• ⚖️ Simplistic Victim/Perpetrator Binaries

  • Reducing stories to “good vs. evil” erases the structural roots of harm — like settler colonialism, racism, and inequality — and overlooks community complexity.

  • Instead, offer nuance: What conditions produced this? What histories shaped it? Who is unseen in this framing?

Creating content with a trauma lens

• Trauma-aware content feels like relationship-building, not extraction or “trauma porn:”

  • Explain the purpose and outcome of your reporting.

  • Avoid retraumatizing questions and imagery when possible and if you must, do not post without layering strategies of what to do

  • If interviewing or inviting to collaborate with people actively targeted by the state: ask what they want told and do not post without express consent.

  • Be transparent about what you won’t be able to control (e.g., headlines, edits).

  • Normalize human, emotional responses to violence

Trauma breeds despair. Collective efficacy is the antidote – narratives that build collective efficacy:

• Protest as protection, not just rage.

• Communities not only resisting, but building something emergent, safer, better.

• Shared identities across divides — not just isolated suffering.

• Long-view change stories (truth commissions, reparations efforts, remembrance culture).

Journalism can help stitch the social fabric back together — by giving communities a sense of visibility, coherence, and shared meaning. A trauma-aware reporter is also a weaver of repair

The following tables outline how we see this in our movement work and how we can work with it as creators:

.

Tending to Yourself: Chronic Exposure to Violence

• Secondary trauma is real — especially if your own body carries unresolved stress.

• Tune into your body: practice body-based care (see below for resources on accessible practices), commit to building real community to ensure you have people watching out for you and vice versa, practice decompression through joy, movement, fun and community and narrative processing.

• Notice if your own framing has become numb, detached, out of alignment, overly fear-based, or you feel like you can never unplug and rest — these are signs of chronic exposure and burnout which can cause serious and life threatening physical and psychological symptoms

Reporting on harm, atrocities, genocide, and war can activate:

• Hyperarousal: anxiety, racing thoughts, emotional flooding.

• Hypoarousal: numbness, dissociation, fatigue, cynicism.

Practice Body-based check-ins:

• Where am I tense?

• Am I grounded in the moment or overwhelmed?

• Do I feel “with” the story or detached/floating?

Micro-practices to stay regulated before, during, and after exposure to distressing content –

5 minutes of practicing these can help to keep you moving with clarity and focus:

• Pre-reporting: Box breathing, orienting to the space (look at colors, textures, sounds).

• In the field: Feel your feet on the ground; drop your shoulders; long exhale.

• Post-reporting: Shake it out, tap your chest (vagus nerve stimulation), or walk mindfully. Use a physical ritual (e.g., wiping your hands, closing a notebook, touching an object) to mark emotional closure after stepping into rest.

Remember:

We’re living through an era of rupture and global change— by grief, by injustice, by violence that tries to make itself look normal.

As a creator, your role is not just to witness or report, but to help shape what we remember, what we care about, and what we make possible next.

You don’t have to do it perfectly. You don’t have to do it all.
You just have to stay human — soft enough to feel your humanity, grounded enough to keep going, and brave enough to tell the truth.

Your nervous system matters. Your boundaries matter. Your joy matters.
This guide was written to remind you that your wellbeing is part of the work — and that our collective future depends on the stories we choose to tell.

Keep creating. Keep resting. Keep connecting. Keep resisting.

In solidarity, xoxo

From the revolutionaries of South Africa to the Freedom Riders in the Jim Crow South to the Black Lives Matter protests of the last decade — history tells stories time and time again of those demanding basic rights being painted as public enemies.

As things continue to heat up in LA, Minnesota, and across the US, we need to be prepared for a predictable, dangerous reframing of reality: protestors are "rioters," whistleblowers are "traitors," and those who are targeted by and grieve state violence are accused of inciting it.

Sure, in any mass movement, there are chaos opportunists. But repeat after me: they are not the threat.

The threat is those who steal children from their parents, who cosplay as ICE and police, who erase trans lives from public protections, redraw maps to block the ballot, and brutalize dissent in the name of discriminate control.

We’re not waiting for permission to protect each other. We know that narrative warfare is real — and naming the truth is a form of power. So we name it: kidnapping, constitutional violations, political theater meant to incite fear. But we also name what’s more powerful — our readiness, our organizing, and our refusal to surrender to their script.

And y’all remember: this shit precedes Trump. Before 2016, the U.S. was already standing shoulder-deep in revolution-worthy injustice.

Because, injustice in the United States is not an aberration — it is a systemic feature embedded across every major institution. Black Americans are incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of white Americans, with one in three Black men projected to be imprisoned in their lifetimes. Police violence continues with impunity, as over 1,200 people were killed by law enforcement in 2023 alone — yet 97% of those cases resulted in no charges. Meanwhile, economic inequality has reached staggering levels: more than 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, while white families hold eight times the wealth of Black families. Employers spend over $400 million annually to suppress union organizing, and affordable housing remains out of reach for millions.

Racial and gender disparities are mirrored in education, health care, environmental exposure, and the democratic process itself. Majority-Black school districts receive thousands less per student than white ones, Black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes, and LGBTQ+ youth face suicide rates four times higher than their peers. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, and felony disenfranchisement further exclude systematically marginalized communities from political power. These statistics are not isolated—they tell a unified story of a nation whose systems were built to privilege a few while dispossessing the many.

And now, the Trump-aligned far right is mounting another full-scale attack on democracy. In just his first 100 days back on the political stage, Trump has intensified the authoritarian blueprint — promising retribution, demanding loyalty oaths, and echoing tactics from Hungary to Israel.

Abroad, our government props up violent militias, just as Israel has now reportedly armed a Gaza-based group affiliated with ISIS to counter Hamas — a move echoing the U.S.’s long history of backing extremist forces when opportune for our own interests.

The system is working exactly as designed – and the narratives that contort our movements as the problem are already on blast.

So when we hear the resistance framed as ‘public enemy number one’, a ‘threat to public safety’, and worse, we turn the mirror back on them–on the harms and violence we have endured for generations.

We don’t take the bait.

We don’t validate their narrative by arguing within its frame.
We don’t waste energy denouncing each other’s tactics or dragging each other in the comments or through one-upping hot takes (we won’t cancel us!)
We don’t let manufactured panic drown out the lived truth that we keep us safe.

We pull a Kendrick on their Drake — we don’t stoop to perform respectability. We rise with clarity, receipts, and a united front. We stay on task and focused - relentlessly, ruthlessly: we keep the frame intact.

Sustaining control of our narrative will work.

We carry the legacy of every resistor before us. Our solidarity is an act of remembering what it means to be human, to struggle for liberation across lineages and borders. We resist as an act of love. For justice for every unaddressed harm done to beloveds before us that bankrolled our realities today.

This is not the time to fracture, to tear each other apart or fuel the far-right with our divisions. It is an opportunity for us to remember our collective and shared humanity. To take our moral imperative seriously in this lifetime and be willing to work together across tactics. To accept that this moment is messy and woefully imperfect and yet it is live, now.

We do not let them confuse us. We get ahead of the narrative —not just with our words, but with our strategy, steadfast solidarity, rigorous fact checking and refusal to be silenced or compliant.

Protestors are not the problem.

Oppressors depend on us being fragmented, hopeless, and despairing. But–history is on our side and every day more and more people continue to show up.