[[link removed]]

FIGHTING BACK: A CITIZEN’S GUIDE TO RESISTANCE  
[[link removed]]


 

Timothy Noah
March 27, 2025
The New Republic
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Civil society can’t be saved in the courts alone. It’s up to us
as a people to stand up and push back. _

,

 

Democracy is not a spectator sport.

That truism has been repeated by notables from Gen. Jim Mattis
[[link removed]] to Barack
Obama [[link removed]] to George
Shultz
[[link removed]],
Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state. But it’s fitting that the
person credited
[[link removed]] with
first saying it was a private citizen whom nobody particularly
remembers.

Lotte Scharfman (1928–1970
[[link removed]])
was a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria who became president
[[link removed]] of
the Massachusetts chapter of the League of Women Voters. Her cause was
an obscure one: She wanted to reduce the size of
Massachusetts’s bloated
[[link removed]] House
of Representatives from 240 members to 160. The measure failed
[[link removed]] on
its first vote in the House in 1970, for the obvious reason that no
representative wanted to risk losing their own seat. But after several
House members were voted out later that year for opposing the reform
measure, it cleared the state legislature
[[link removed]],
and in 1974 it won overwhelming approval from Massachusetts voters.

Corruption was “a way of life” in the Massachusetts state House of
the 1960s and 1970s, a state investigating panel later concluded
[[link removed]]—it
was rife with bribery, extortion, and money laundering. Yet even in
that civic sewer, a legislative body was persuaded to do something
that most political scientists would tell you is a logical
impossibility: put one-third of its own members out on the street.
That should clue you in to the power of participatory democracy.

“People know deep inside them,” Ralph Nader told me recently, that
“if they really blow their top, nothing can stop them.” Is
Nader, who at 91
[[link removed]] has logged six
decades
[[link removed]] walking
the citizen-action beat, feeling optimistic that President Donald
Trump’s multifront assault on constitutional government can be
stopped? “Not optimistic,” Nader replied. “Just realistic…. As
some people stand up to power, it becomes contagious.”

Granted, this country has never witnessed an abuse of presidential
authority so extreme as what Trump is right now wreaking in every
conceivable direction. But as I write this, an extraordinary national
mobilization is underway. Every conceivable method of lawful
opposition is being applied to arrest Trump’s bizarre and frequently
illegal sabotage of the very government he was elected to lead. Some
acts of resistance will work; others will fail. It will be some time
before we have a clear sense of what works best.

Surveying this Boschian hellscape, many good people will despair. Yes,
Trump is much more dangerous than he was during his first term (which
was harrowing enough). He’s more giddily reckless about impounding
funds, shutting down agencies, disobeying court orders, and using the
government to punish political enemies. But if you allow yourself to
tune out this ugliness, you might as well have voted for the man. The
president is counting on such demoralization. “If you are overly
cynical and think ‘Oh, there’s nothing we can do,’” warned
David Cole, former national legal director of the American Civil
Liberties Union, “that also has a snowball effect.” Democracy is
not a spectator sport.

There’s no messiah who will sweep in and make everything better.
That’s up to you and me.

How can ordinary citizens fight back? To scout the best approaches, I
canvassed activists, lawyers, scholars, politicians, and union leaders
for advice. Some of what they suggest will lie beyond your abilities,
expertise, financial resources, or sense of personal safety—in which
case, choose something you _can_ do. Just about everyone I spoke to
emphasized that there is no silver bullet—no single arena, not even
the courtroom, where Trump’s illegal power grab can be stopped.
“There’s no messiah” who will “sweep in and make everything
better,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation
of Teachers. That’s up to you and me. The good news is there are a
lot of us.

Indeed, there may be even more than we can know just yet. Because
Trump isn’t careful about whose interests he acts against,
Resistance 2.0 has potential to evolve into a bipartisan movement.
“Successful authoritarian regimes determine what their winning
coalition is,” observed Leah Greenberg, co-founder of the resistance
nonprofit Indivisible [[link removed]], “and then they
work very hard to keep that coalition together.” Trump lacks such
discipline, and as a result he frequently screws over natural allies.

Trump alienates the military by installing as defense secretary Pete
Hegseth, a boozer and womanizer
[[link removed]] who
called an officer of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps a “jagoff
[[link removed]]” and, after he was
confirmed, fired
[[link removed]] the
top JAG officers in the Air Force, Army, and Navy. Trump alienates Big
Pharma by installing as health and human services secretary a
recovering heroin addict
[[link removed]], womanizer
[[link removed]], and
(according to his cousin Caroline Kennedy) “predator
[[link removed]]”
who less than two years ago said
[[link removed]],
“There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.” As
HHS Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recommends treating measles with
cod liver oil and letting bird flu spread unchecked through poultry
flocks. Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says, “I’m not
worried about inflation,” and “access to cheap goods is not the
essence of the American dream.” Trump, meanwhile, terrorizes Wall
Street with market-killing tariffs
[[link removed]] and stray
[[link removed]] threats
[[link removed]] not
to honor the national debt.

No matter who joins this fight, it won’t be won next week, or next
month. Barring impeachment and removal, Trump will be president for
four long years, and not even his allies expect him to become less
authoritarian and kleptocratic. So pace yourself. But the sooner you
join in, the more effectively we can limit the damage.

Here’s how.

Sue the Bastard.

The most obvious arena in which to stop a lawbreaker is the courts,
and that’s where Resistance 2.0 begins. More than 70 lawsuits
[[link removed]] were
filed against the Trump administration just during Trump’s first
month in office, challenging everything from his attempt to end
[[link removed]] birthright
citizenship (which is embedded in the Fourteenth Amendment
[[link removed]])
to Elon Musk’s de facto shutdown
[[link removed]] of
the United States Agency for International Development (which
distributes about $40 billion
[[link removed]] in
international aid per year).

The result was a blizzard of federal court rulings that blocked, at
least temporarily, various administration actions—46 rulings in
Trump’s first eight weeks, according to _The New York Times
[[link removed]]._ His
previous presidency occasioned 64 court injunctions
[[link removed]],
or more than half of all such rulings since 1963. That was over a
period of four years. This time, Trump could easily exceed 64
injunctions within four _months._ At this writing, judges have
enjoined Trump from, among other things, firing
[[link removed]] National
Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox; withholding
appropriated federal grants and loans
[[link removed]];
and allowing Musk’s government-efficiency gumshoes access to
Treasury Department payment systems
[[link removed]].
Four separate judges blocked Trump’s revocation of birthright
citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants.

“The system is working,” Skye Perryman, president of the
public-interest law nonprofit Democracy Forward
[[link removed]], told me. “Litigants are using the
courts to ensure compliance with orders…. Courts are requiring
status updates. That is good.” When we spoke in late February,
Perryman told me Democracy Forward had filed more cases against Trump
than any other organization.

Granted, injunctions and (more commonly used) temporary restraining
orders are an imperfect tool. They aren’t that easy for plaintiffs
to get, and Trump administration lawyers are expert at finding
bad-faith ways to evade them (most outrageously when it deported
around 250 Venezuelans in March). At some point, it’s expected that
the Trump administration will stop pretending and, following the
advice of Vice President JD Vance (“Judges aren’t allowed to
control the executive’s legitimate power
[[link removed]]”),
openly defy the courts. But the courts can always hold individual
agency officials in civil or criminal contempt, leveling fines or
throwing offenders in jail.

It might not end there. This president could respond, New York
University law professors Trevor W. Morrison and Richard H.
Pildes speculated
[[link removed]] in _The
New York Times, _with pardons, or by ordering U.S. marshals not to
enforce rulings from the bench. But such blatant lawlessness, they
argued, would create chaos in financial markets, which depend on
America’s reputation for political stability. At which point, it
seems to me, an instinct for self-preservation might boost support
among congressional Republicans to impeach.

What role is there for John Q. Citizen? If you’re a lawyer, consider
volunteering for a nonprofit group engaged in Resistance 2.0, or
donating money. Both are usually best done at the local level, but
don’t neglect national nonprofits taking on Trump, which
include Democracy Forward [[link removed]], Public
Citizen [[link removed]], and State Democracy Defenders
Fund [[link removed]]. “The litigation is
the fire starter,” Norm Eisen, SDDF’s co-founder, told me. “This
week alone, I got two orders stopping government wrongdoing.” The
national groups typically work in conjunction with local groups, whose
names can be found on court filings readily available online. It’s
the local groups that are best positioned to identify specific harms
to citizens caused by Trump’s recklessness. They are also most in
need of whatever type of assistance you can offer.

Also: “Support your local attorney general and make sure that we
have enough budget and resources to fight these fights.” That advice
comes from William Tong, Connecticut’s attorney general
and president-elect
[[link removed]] of
the National Association of Attorneys General
[[link removed]]. Attorneys general are in the strongest
position to challenge Trump policies in court. “They have the
deepest pockets,” Peter Shane of the NYU School of Law explained,
and “in blue states they have a political incentive.” They are
often well-connected to activists. Maurice Mitchell, national director
of the Working Families Party, noted with pride that Letitia James,
the New York attorney general who won a more than $450 million civil
judgment
[[link removed]] against
Trump for financial fraud, came out of the WFP.

A series of Supreme Court rulings during the past couple of decades,
Shane told me, made it easier for states to establish standing to
challenge the executive branch; to quote _Massachusetts v. EPA
[[link removed]]_ (2007),
states are “entitled to special solicitude in our standing
analysis.” In most instances (_Massachusetts v. EPA _was an
exception), these Supreme Court rulings were anti-regulatory, as were
a parallel set of rulings, culminating in _Loper Bright Enterprises
v. Raimondo
[[link removed]], _that
invited judges to second-guess federal agencies. Today, with Trump in
the White House, 60 percent of all district-level federal judges were
appointed by Democrats, and appeals courts divide more or less evenly
[[link removed]] between
Democratic appointees and Republican ones. Our reactionary high court
may soon find that what was sauce for the red-state goose has become
sauce for the blue-state gander. Not that partisanship has played much
of a role thus far in court rulings against Trump. Many have come from
Republican-appointed judges.

March.

“The combination of litigation and mobilization is a new one in this
moment,” observed Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the Nader-founded
Public Citizen. “It’s a very interesting new dynamic.”

Civil society can’t be saved in the courts alone. It’s up to us as
a people to stand up and push back.

Gilbert is right. The civil rights movement, for instance, had its
litigation phase, which culminated in 1954’s _Brown v. Board of
Education [[link removed]],_ and then
its mobilization phase, which culminated in the 1965 marches from
Selma to Montgomery. The anti-Trump movement does Selma and _Brown v.
Board of Ed_ simultaneously, with lawsuits and public protests
ricocheting off each other. Cole, the former ACLU legal director,
noted that the United States has “a much more robust civil
society” than, say Hungary, whose strongman Viktor Orbán wrote the
playbook Trump seems to be following. But civil society can’t be
saved in the courts alone: “It’s up to us as a people to stand up
and push back.”

That’s happening. On February 17, for example, thousands of
protesters chanting “No kings on President’s Day
[[link removed]]”
marched in Washington and in state capitals to reassert constitutional
separation of powers—reinforcing courtroom challenges against
Trump’s violation of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, the Civil
Service Reform Act of 1978, and so on. Thanks to social media, such
protests can be organized at lightning speed. The President’s Day
event, and a similar protest held two weeks earlier, were organized by
a new group called 50501
[[link removed]] that didn’t even exist
[[link removed]] until
late January. In February 2017, there were over 900 protests
nationwide, according to the Crowd Counting Consortium, a joint
project of Harvard and the University of Connecticut. In February
2025, there were around 2,000.

The purpose of such protests is not to influence the president.
“Trump doesn’t really get moved by hundreds of thousands of people
marching against him,” noted Daniel Hunter, self-described
“activist-educator-trainer” and co-founder
[[link removed]] of Choose Democracy
[[link removed]], a political action committee. The
purpose, a Democratic strategist explained to me, is to bring
like-minded people together into resistance networks; to attract
publicity that will draw new people into the movement; and, through
that same publicity, to alert _other_ politicians that failing to
oppose Trump will cost them support.

What next? “Tesla Takedown” protests are proliferating, causing
Tesla’s stock price to plummet. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, more
than 50 people
[[link removed]] showed
up at a Tesla dealership waving signs that said, “No One Elected
Elon Musk” and “Hell No! Billionaire Grift.” In Portland,
Oregon, demonstrators picketed outside a Tesla showroom with signs
that said [[link removed]], “Stop Musk
Sell Your Tesla.” The same methods can be applied against any other
oligarch who actively pushes forward Trump’s agenda.

Finally, there’s what Choose Democracy, in a dead-tree resistance
guide published before the election titled _What if Trump Wins?
[[link removed]]_,
calls “strategic disobedience.” “I’m a disrupt and disobey
person,” Hunter told me. For the adventurous, an online Choose
Democracy guide provides a link to a _Simple Sabotage Field Manual
[[link removed]]_ prepared during World War
II by the Office of Strategic Services. It steers protesters toward
milder recommendations, such as worker slowdowns and stalling during
meetings, and away from what in peacetime would constitute criminal
activity, such as setting fires or vandalizing equipment. The latter
are terrible ideas for more reasons than I have room here to
elucidate. As Sgt. Phil Esterhaus used to say on the TV cop
show _Hill Street Blues
[[link removed]]:_ Let’s be careful out
there.

Pester Your Elected Officials.

Congressional Democrats are getting a lot of criticism for failing to
stop Trump. And it’s true, as Jodi Jacobson, executive director of
the nonprofit Healthcare Across Borders
[[link removed]], told me, that “you cannot
rely on Democrats to do the work for you.” But to presume you ever
could rely on them is to treat democracy, _pace_ Lotte Scharfman,
like a spectator sport. There are actions that members of Congress can
take—even when in the minority—but to the extent they don’t take
them, it isn’t just their fault; it’s also yours, for failing to
demand them.

Don’t expect your representative to thank you. Axios ran a
titillating story
[[link removed]] reporting
that House members were “pissed
[[link removed]]”
that groups like MoveOn and Indivisible were generating thousands
[[link removed]] of
phone calls to congressional Democrats complaining about Trump
policies. Even House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was reportedly
ticked off. Some of these representatives went on the record. “I
reject and resent the implication that congressional Democrats are
simply standing by passively,” griped Representative Ritchie Torres,
Democrat of New York.

The thrust of Axios’s reporting was that these out-of-control
progressive groups were at risk of alienating their congressional
allies. But that gets it backward. This wasn’t a bad-news story; it
was a good-news story. The congressional Democrats’ annoyance
demonstrated that they were feeling appropriate pressure from voters
to swing into action. The groups that mobilized them had done well.

Indivisible sprang up after the 2016 election to educate voters
[[link removed]] about
how to harness their power as constituents, adopting some tactics (but
none of the politics) of the right-wing Tea Party movement.
Indivisible ended up playing a significant role in preventing Trump
from eliminating Obamacare
[[link removed]] and
in the Democrats’ recapture of the House
[[link removed]] in
2018. After the 2024 election, Indivisible updated its primer on
constituent power; the new _Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink
[[link removed]]_ is refreshingly blunt.
Elected officials care about “advocacy that requires effort” such
as phone calls, personal emails, “and especially showing up in
person.” They don’t usually care about form letters or a social
media post. A constituent acting alone is easy to blow off; a
constituent acting with other constituents is not, especially if the
others include constituents who are wealthy or otherwise prominent. A
list of requests will be ignored; a “concrete” single request for
a vote or a public statement will not. Indivisible acknowledges in its
new guide that “responsiveness to our advocacy” has “weakened
since Trump first won office.” Republicans are more afraid of
primary challenges; the mainstream press has less influence; and
elected officials have gotten better at limiting their exposure to
anybody who might disagree with them. But the mechanisms of
accountability “still exist,” and “we choose to use” them.

Congressional Republicans, for instance, can’t altogether avoid
holding town meetings in their districts, and when they do, they hear
from irate constituents, not all of them Democrats. At a February town
hall meeting conducted by telephone
[[link removed]],
Representative Stephanie Bice, Republican of Oklahoma, fielded an
angry question from a man named John Adams about “college whiz
kids” at DOGE making cuts to Veterans Affairs. Adams identified
himself as a registered Republican and retired Army officer who served
five combat tours. “Despite what you want to try to spin it as,”
Adams said, “anytime you cut a thousand people from the workforce,
that comes with a cost.”

Bice replied, “Thank you for your service, sir,” and justified the
cuts by saying, “Did you know that the VA was in charge of payments
for illegals for housing?” Which didn’t satisfy Adams and
also wasn’t true
[[link removed]].
The VA has an agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to
process _medical_ (not housing) payments for undocumented
immigrants _that ICE holds in detention against their will._ This
work is performed by “no more than 10 employees,” a VA
spokesperson said last year, and the cost is borne by ICE, one of
several federal agencies to contract such services out to the VA
(which, through processing around two million medical claims
[[link removed]] annually
to veterans, got quite good at it). ICE and other agencies tap VA
bureaucrats _so they don’t have to create costly and duplicative
bureaucracies of their own,_ the very thing DOGE’s whiz kids
supposedly want to root out.

What should constituents pressure Congress to do? Nader pointed out
that Democrats “can have unofficial hearings in the House and
Senate.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer threatened
[[link removed]] three
weeks into the Trump administration to initiate such hearings “if
Senate Republicans continue to refuse to uphold their congressional
duty to provide oversight on the Executive Branch.” But it was
already obvious that Republican oversight would not materialize, and
that these unofficial hearings should commence. In March, Democratic
Senator Alex Padilla of California held one such hearing
[[link removed]] on
local impacts Trump impoundments had on infrastructure. More hearings
should follow on the effects of the president’s funding cuts to the
National Institutes of Health on the availability of cancer drugs; on
Trump withholding money appropriated through the Inflation Reduction
Act to create manufacturing jobs in red states; on the effect of VA
cuts on the processing of VA medical claims; and so on.

Tom Malinowski, a former Democratic representative from New Jersey,
told me the House can also take more direct action by proposing
resolutions that are “privileged,” i.e., must get a floor vote
whether the Republican leadership wants one or not. Under
the Impoundment Control Act [[link removed]],
for instance, the comptroller general (who heads the Government
Accountability Office, Congress’s investigative arm) is authorized
[[link removed]] to report to Congress on
whether the president requested congressional approval for withholding
funds, as required by law. Spoiler alert: Trump did not. If the
comptroller general said Trump did not, that would trigger a mandatory
vote and, Malinowski explained to me, “If both houses don’t vote
to approve the impoundment, then it doesn’t stand.”

The comptroller general is appointed by the president, but his
independent agency, the GAO, works for Congress. That may explain why
Trump hasn’t fired him yet. The current officeholder is Gene L.
Dodaro, who’s held the job 17 years. If Dodaro were to report that
the president didn’t follow the Impoundment Control Act, then Trump
would likely jettison whatever scruples previously kept him from
trying to fire the man (who, by statute, can be fired only by
Congress). But Congress would still have to vote on impoundment. Even
if both houses approved it, Republicans wouldn’t like going on
record as ceding power of the purse to Trump.

Another privileged resolution
[[link removed]] Malinow­ski
would like to see brought up would concern whether Trump’s use of
the International Emergency Economic Powers Act
[[link removed]] to impose
indiscriminate tariffs is legal. That would force Republicans
“either to go on record against the president or own the economic
chaos that results,” Malinowski wrote
[[link removed]] in
The xxxxxx.

Keep Up.

None of the foregoing is of much use if you don’t keep up with
whatever mischief the Trump administration is into at any given
moment. If you’re reading this article, odds are that you know
already pretty well how to stay informed. But it isn’t easy, because
Trump is doing so many outrageous things in so many parts of the
government all at once. Even experienced Washington reporters like me
struggle to keep up. (Don’t tell my boss!)

The most important thing is to follow the mainstream press. It’s
long been a badge of honor on the right not to subscribe to _The New
York Times [[link removed]]_ or _The Washington Post
[[link removed]]._ Liberals have lately followed
suit. That’s just foolish. These national newspapers, along
with _The Wall Street Journal [[link removed]],_ are imperfect
but indispensable sources of reliable information. So is your local
newspaper, if you’re still lucky enough to have one.

But you should also use social media. Yes, most of it is a fetid swamp
of half-truths and outright lies, and if it disappeared tomorrow, I
wouldn’t be terribly sorry. But some of it conveys useful
information. I lack space here to explain how to spot the difference,
but universities routinely post guides
[[link removed]] about
[[link removed]] this
[[link removed]].

The two social media sites mentioned to me most often as I reported
this story were Bluesky [[link removed]] and (to my mild
surprise) TikTok [[link removed]], which Trump saved
[[link removed]] after
Congress exiled it based on its Chinese ownership. “If you aren’t
on TikTok,” said Pamela Keith, who represents a group of FBI
agents suing to halt
[[link removed]] Trump’s
attempted purge of January 6 investigators, “then you aren’t
following the resistance.”

Keith is particularly enthusiastic about TikTok
[[link removed]] and Substack
[[link removed]] posts
by Aaron Parnas, who, improbably, is the son of Lev Parnas, a
Soviet-born Giuliani crony who did prison time
[[link removed]] for making
illegal contributions
[[link removed]] to
Trump’s 2020 campaign. “My father’s stuff is completely
irrelevant and has no bearing on what I’ve done,” Aaron snapped at
me when I asked him about Lev. A lawyer in his mid-twenties with more
than three million TikTok followers
[[link removed]], Aaron Parnas follows
anti-Trump lawsuits round the clock. “Every time one of these orders
comes out,” Keith told me, “we hear it from him first.” When I
asked Parnas whether he kept a list of his scoops, he said no: “I
wish I had the bandwidth.”

Despite streaming video 24/7 on social media (he TikTok’d his own
wedding
[[link removed]]),
Parnas is the opposite of flamboyant. Indeed, I found him as
scrupulously deadpan as Edward R. Murrow. “I try to keep my personal
views out of it,” he told me. “I have both Democratic and
Republican viewers.”

Parnas’s video dispatches often find their way onto MeidasTouch
Network [[link removed]], another frequent conveyance for
information about Resistance 2.0. MeidasTouch Network is more overtly
political, functioning as both a news source and an anti-Trump
political action committee. Its podcast recently edged out
[[link removed]] Joe
Rogan’s as the most streamed in the nation.

Ken Harbaugh is a Navy veteran who hosts a popular show
[[link removed]] on MeidasTouch
Network focused on national security. He told me that individuals in
the military, the reserves, and the National Guard are more receptive
to opposing Trump than most people understand. They pledge
[[link removed]] to
serve their military superiors and commander in chief, yes, but also
to serve the Constitution and the Uniform Code of Military Justice
[[link removed]].
What happens when these duties come into conflict? “Even though
we’re acculturated to obey orders and in some cases obey them
without hesitation,” Harbaugh said, “we’re actually obliged to
disobey illegal orders…. The constitutional crisis that looms might
not be decided before the Supreme Court. It might be decided by a
captain at the border ordered to shoot immigrants.”

Other useful sources of information include the 1440 newsletter
[[link removed]] (a daily news digest), CivilServiceStrong.org
(information for federal workers), the AFL-CIO’s Department of
People Who Work for a Living
[[link removed]] (federal
workers), Democracy2025.org
[[link removed]] (lawsuits), and Protect Democracy
[[link removed]] (lawsuits).

The woods are burning. What are you waiting for?

All these websites teem with Trump horror stories. Share them online
or, better yet, in person, because you can’t resist effectively by
acting alone. There are local resistance groups aplenty; join one and
get the word out. “Sadly, messaging about democracy and autocracy
falls flat,” wrote Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown law professor and rule
of law expert, in a text message to me. “But people get it when you
talk about the threats to vital services, when you talk about
billionaires taking everything over to make themselves richer, and
when you talk about tyranny and liberty.”

The woods are burning. What are you waiting for?

[Illustration of protesters holding signs in front of the American
Flag. Headline below the illustration: WHERE TO START]

GET INFORMED

Join the TRUMP ACCOUNTABILITY WAR ROOM
[[link removed]], which
offers fact sheets on the bad actors in Donald Trump’s Cabinet and
primers on their policies, and the AFL-CIO’s DEPARTMENT OF PEOPLE
WHO WORK FOR A LIVING [[link removed]], which tracks
how funding cuts are affecting federal workers.

Follow MEIDASTOUCH NETWORK [[link removed]], a pro-democracy
news organization with a massive social media presence and a suite of
podcasts. MeidasTouch personalities such as LEIGH MCGOWAN
[[link removed]] (a.k.a. POLITICSGIRL
[[link removed]]) and AARON PARNAS
[[link removed]] have reinvigorated the
resistance on TikTok, Instagram, and Substack.

Monitor constitutional oversteps and the legal challenges to Trump’s
executive orders with LAWFARE
[[link removed]] or JUST SECURITY
[[link removed]].

GET STRATEGIC

Explore Choose Democracy’s interactive CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE
[[link removed]] activity, which asks you
to “guide us towards a better, more humane democracy.” In “WHAT
CAN I DO TO FIGHT THIS COUP?
[[link removed]],” the group offers
drop-down menus of resistance techniques arranged by level of
difficulty. It also provides training agendas on everything from
de-escalation to mutual aid.

Study Indivisible’s PRACTICAL GUIDE TO DEMOCRACY ON THE BRINK
[[link removed]], which shares strategies for
defending the democratic process against authoritarian creep and a
list of tactics constituents can use to pressure their elected
officials.

Review the tool kits, how-to manuals, and informational leaflets
at BUILD THE RESISTANCE [[link removed]]’s
comprehensive, crowdsourced resource hub.

GET OUTSIDE

Check NOVOICEUNHEARD [[link removed]], which compiles
peaceful protest opportunities, viewable by state or by organization,
across the country. For an even more expansive inventory, look at THE
BIG LIST OF PROTESTS [[link removed]].

Brush up on your rights at the ACLU’s protesters’ rights page,
which shares information on the kinds of locations where you are
protected, when you need a permit, and what to do during a police
encounter. Call the RESISTANCE HOTLINE
[[link removed]] at 1-844-NVDA-NOW or
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