Friends,

We hope you took some inspiration from the massive turnout of protests on April 5th — over 1,400 protests across every part of the country. We'll wait for more robust estimates of crowd sizes, but one group estimated 5.2 million people protested — making this one of the largest decentralized protests in US history.

Donald Trump won't change his mind because of a protest. But if that's your yardstick, everything folks do will fall short (until we win).

The yardsticks for an anti-authoritarian movement are not "are we winning yet?" But we do need metrics. The best metrics are about the state of the movement — unity, strategic planning, capability to deploy on multiple fronts, ability to withstand repression, and an ability to hold nonviolent discipline.

The Hands Off rally grew some of these metrics. Organizers used the big moment to train on de-escalation, experiment with different framing, and give a chance for people who haven't been activated to get into motion. These are critical pieces.

Further, and perhaps most important, the protests showed a level of unity much greater than 76 days ago when Trump was inaugurated. Protests erupted in small towns that haven't experienced anything like this in over 20 years. It brought people out who haven't taken a public stand yet. (A beautiful 50 state review on TikTok.) And while there's a lot of room to grow, it built some foundations for a bigger tent — necessary for anti-authoritarian movements — reflected in the wide diversity of signs and underlying values.

For folks who didn't want to rally — or are looking for what's next — we provide a range of options for tangible actions that matter right now: What can I do to fight a coup?

Some other pieces from us!

• National Tax Strike Launches! Folks have worked hard creating a platform to explain how and why people choose tax strikes. It will be updated, especially as folks consider their plans now and for future tax years if things don't get sorted. Get informed, consider your options, and sign up if you want to take part!

• Worried about Trump invoking the Insurrection Act? We just posted an article with Waging Nonviolence about the Insurrection Act with some thinking options and information about the basic structure of the act for us to know.

The Post-Coup Adrenaline Drop

Daniel also wanted to write a different topic on his mind. If this message isn't for you or your group, feel free to move on, we'll send other emails. But if your group is starting to fray, there might be some helpful insights here for you.

This last week a strange thing happened. Almost a dozen organizers shared with me the same story. It went something like this: “We are all exhausted and doing good work — but this week it seems like people just snapped. Things were tough and honestly we weren’t making a ton of progress — but who could in these times. But some of the group just got mean — told me I was a bad leader, threatened to undermine all the leadership as if we weren’t colleagues with lots of integrity.”

Immigrant rights groups. National pro-democracy groups. Medical research offices. Tiny protest groups.

I know these groups well enough to know their leaders lead with kindness and caring. So the attacks appeared to come out of the blue.

I don’t see this everywhere — but it struck me both the number of groups that had this dynamic and there seemed to be a pattern:

• Sometime after Trump’s coup the group moved into hyper speed;

• Heavy losses mounted — fear, lost mobility, lost money, sometimes lost lives;

• The group managed to hold itself together and do a bit of good amidst a sea of loss;

• And then the group dynamic crumbled! Accusations. Defensiveness. Old wounds.

Going down this path could get dangerous: Our fights get too hot, too personal. We go public with them and destroy our precious movement and institutions.

Why now?

I don’t know. But I’ll wager a guess: the adrenaline wore off.

The first couple of weeks of Trump’s regime got me hyped. I’m an activist. And activists’ instincts often include using their adrenaline to race into fires — often without securing our air tanks and fire protective clothing. But humans can only run on adrenaline for so long.

Around 6 weeks into the election I noticed I was moving at lightning speeds. I told my closest friends that the pace I was at was thoroughly unsustainable. “I’ll burn out in a month if I don’t slow down.” A month would be now.

I was able to downshift. I cut projects that I cared about, knowing that if I didn’t I would be in worse shape. I accepted some loss. And I know many others who haven’t had that chance yet.

So we begin to hit walls. At night we walk out of the fire dazed and confused and collapse. Each day it’s harder to wake up and go back into the fray.

I’ve noticed that when I finish work each day I suddenly feel a deep pit of anxiety in my stomach. I asked my wife, an attuned and thoughtful therapist, what she thought was going on.

She laughed, as if I was an idiot. “It’s there all day, Daniel. You just only let yourself feel it when you pause to stop work.”

The unacknowledged grief

The terror and trauma we’re experiencing can’t be underestimated.

In the last week alone, I watched a video of a woman abducted off the street by the US government. I heard stories of kids dying from lack of US funding. I listened to friends worrying how they’d manage over their lost jobs. I texted with friends being asked to do illegal and awful things.

And the amount of time I spent crying last week? Zero minutes.

For me, that’s really low. And it’s an absolute tragedy. I’ve stayed in such rapid motion that I am not letting myself feel the weight. The twist in my stomach. The heaviness in my back. The pulsing dull headache. The heart rate when I wake up. The twitch when I instinctively check the news and brace.

It’s all brace – and practically no release.

Grief needs to get out. It needs to move.

To combat this, I have now committed to a Sunday morning check-in hour with some dear friends, to at least acknowledge our breathlessness. I plan to cry. I’m leaning on trees. I’m reaching out to my friends who are a little more grounded emotionally — and further from the fiery heat than I am.

All of this because I know this: grief that is unprocessed will either drive inwards or be projected outwards.

The anti-hero

The unacknowledged grief is perhaps why we hate Democrats so much right now. Have you noticed our peculiar obsession with them at this moment? Why can’t Dems get their act together and be our hero? And when they do do something like Senator Booker’s marathon 25-hour speech, we label it as woefully insufficient.

Leave aside everything about politics for a moment. My wife reminded me of a dynamic in family work, “Most kids don’t rage the most at the person who abused them, but at their trusted person who couldn’t protect them.”

We want protection. We want a hero.

I’m reminded of a low moment in a campaign I ran many years ago. We were losing and it was painful. Convinced that all we needed was one political hero who could help us — I searched for “hero” in my computer’s music.

Shrek’s “I need a Hero” blared out my feelings — more or less —

I need a hero
I'm holding out for a hero 'til the end of the night
He's gotta be strong
And he's gotta be fast
And he's gotta be fresh from the fight

And then a hero comes along
With the strength to carry on
And you cast your fears aside
'Cause you know you can survive
So when you feel like hope is gone
Look inside you and be strong
And you'll finally see the truth
That a hero lies in you, ooh

What a precious truth.

Even as I write this now, I partially reject it. I do want the Democrats to do their job. I want someone to lay out a reasonable plan. I want a leader.

But it’s in that rejection that we set up all the leaders around us to fail. Afterall, our organizational leaders aren’t heroes — not in the way the way movies portray where one final action scene can vindicate and finish it.

Leaders are just people

A workshop called Insight Seminar has a daring intervention. Midway through the workshop they ask people, “What would a perfect facilitator be like?”

After some suggestions get made, they ask, “And what facilitator do you actually have?” And they get the group to list all the ways they fall short. (When I attended, we made a huge long list.)

There’s no debrief. Just acknowledgement of a terrible truth: leaders are not perfect, they’re fallible, they’re human.

In a moment like this, such a truth can feel excruciating. No brilliant strategy can stop the pain. No tender-hearted leadership can keep us from sometimes going under all these engulfing waves.

Leaders internalize this, too. Many secretly believe they should be heroes and send out all sorts of confusing double-signals. They say “We can’t save it all” but then proceed to march into the fires day after day after day trying to rescue everything and everyone.

Underneath much of this is a story that being human is just not enough. We’d rather be Superman or Wonderwoman than a tiny shrub in a big forest ecosystem.

In response to my self-defeating self-talk that what I’m doing isn’t enough, one friend gave me this advice: “Rather than telling myself what I’m doing is enough, sometimes I try to really steer into ‘What you’re doing isn’t enough.’ Say it so many times it almost becomes exuberant. It isn't enough. It never is. Then walk in the forest and look at all the trees that make it up. Tell them they're not enough to make a forest. Feel silly saying it.”

Self-protect — but don’t kill the movement

As a general principle, I believe people should be be completely honest and open about what’s on their heart.

But we live in some dangerous times. We have opponents who want to destroy our institutions. All of them.

I watched one group take a beating from the government. They didn’t collapse from the government repression — but the pressure was fierce and became internalized. Reporters began digging and people saw the chance to tell their honest stories. The result were journalist exposés, individual staff getting the satisfaction of having “their side” out there, and the organization’s reputation broken until funders backed away, allies stopped coming to its defense, and the organization could no longer do the work.

If we are in a movement, we have an obligation to decide to act not for self-preservation, but for preservation of the work. That means really assessing not just if we are right in our critique, but if our critique being public at this time will lead to a better outcome. Some critiques do. Others are best left inside the house.

What I see a lot of right now is people wanting to critique when, in fact, they just don’t want to do it that way. I don’t want to do a lot of what is out in the movement right now. But that doesn’t mean I should invest precious energy putting it down. Let people go free and focus on building up what’s in my heart.

What’s in our hearts

People shouldn’t take bullshit. But often we do — staying in a place that doesn’t feed us, even if it feeds others.

One of the pernicious dynamics in this time is this: people feel stuck in their organizations rather than free to assess what they most want.

I watched another organization explode onto the frontpage of the local newspaper for weeks. After listening to both sides, I realized the fight was largely over different theories of change. The new staffers wanted a different kind of organization. Rather than saying “We won’t do this” the leadership acted like they might entertain it. Both sides were engaged in a farce.Those new staff didn’t want to be in that organization. And the leadership didn’t make it clear.

Much better to say, “Oh my goodness! This isn’t the organization for you. You want to work with an organization aligned with your way of working! Let me help you find it — or start it. But it looks like you’ll never be happy here.”

Let’s free each other up.

This dynamic is popping up more often post-coup — because many of us are questioning everything. I’ve questioned if I want to do disruption or only do long-term vision. Or do activism at all. Or …

I need space to explore — and that’s always tough in an organization which expects something out of me.

So the challenge for our times: giving each other the space to assess where and how we can do what we most need to do, how we can be true to our hearts.

Be Human

So that’s my best thinking at this moment about part of what’s going on. I’m aware there’s plenty left out — the pernicious problems of NGOization, real abuses excused by leadership, and the many other problems of life.

I know this, though. For my own self, I’ve never gone wrong when I’ve honored my grief, accepted my limitations remembered that the leaders around me are just people, and allowed myself to be led by what’s in my heart.

Or as diva Mariah would say:

There's a hero
If you look inside your heart
You don't have to be afraid
Of what you are
There's an answer
If you reach into your soul
And the sorrow that you know
Will melt away
It's a long road
When you face the world alone
No one reaches out a hand for you to hold
You can find love
If you search within yourself
And the emptiness you felt
Will disappear
Just hold on
And there will be tomorrow
And in time
You'll find the way
That a hero lies in you.

Warmly,

- Daniel Hunter

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