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Friend,
I came out of a training and checked-in with a friend. Rapidly she updated me with the latest: Marjorie Taylor was quitting and Mamdani had both called Trump a fascist to his face and gotten Trump to say he would happily live in a New York City under Mamdani’s mayorship.
We’re indeed in a new phase of the struggle against authoritarianism in the U.S. — and it’s important to name it, track it, and adjust our bearings accordingly. We’ve shaken off the early months of shock, the steamrolled losses, and are now showing we can (sometimes) defend — such as Charlotte's ringing resistance. Parts of the movement, such as Mamdani's win, are even now getting onto the offensive and gaining political power.
To a tiny degree, this shift is being tracked in legacy media. They are noting that we have finally found some upper limits to the Republican party blindly following Donald Trump. Indiana Republicans are holding a hard no against his demand for redistricting. The Epstein files have broken wide open, forcing Trump to a public retreat and “allowing” votes for the release of the files— something he had adamantly fought against.
As usual, the media traces effects very poorly. They talk about election results, and how the landslide in the direction of the Democratic Party revealed a dramatic shift that can be read as a popular referendum on Trump. But they largely miss how much the elections benefited from the massive decentralized organizing even in so-called Trump country., the way Chicagoans resisting Border Patrol reframed the debate on immigration, and arguably largest single protest in US history.
This new phase is positive news. It also presents new struggles — and will likely increase levels of violence as the opposition fears its side is weakening.
So, here’s a hot take on where we are, using a framework from Freedom Trainers, a network of trainers teaching folks across America about collective noncompliance and mass noncooperation, on the “Phases of Anti-Authoritarian Struggle”.
Phase 0: Shock and Chaos
We remember this painful phase. Organizations went into retreat. Individuals turned off the news or fell into disarray. It was chaotic as attacks came from everywhere.
To the public: “nothing is happening.”
In that phase, the dictator‐in‐chief asserted powers seemingly unopposed, often by shocked institutions. Federal agencies from the DOJ and HHS, to the Border Patrol were taken over with bureaucratic whimpers but no coordinated, sustained push-back. We saw early capitulations: several law firms surrendered settlements rather than risk fights, and campuses quietly gave ground in the face of pressure.
This phase brought devastating losses: the death of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the massive funding surge toward a new paramilitary force via ICE, funding cuts for school lunch programs, roll-backs on climate protection, firings of scientists and researchers tracking things like infectious diseases, emergency weather patterns, and the labor market, and open violence against trans people. Our conservative estimates count more than 600,000 deaths resulting from policies set in motion during those early months.
But the shock wasn’t the whole story. Yes, there were no big street marches. But people were shaking off shock in a myriad of resistance strategies — from federal bureaucrats refusing Musk’s 5-line email, to the Feb 28th economic blackout, to thwarting ICE raids, to politicians refusing Trump’s renaming Denali Mountain. The chaos made it hard to discern, track, and observe.
People were just getting to understand the extremes of the authoritarian overreach — from tariff edicts, to agency seizures, to brazen power grabs. But inside the movement, we were begin to not only act — but to build our collective power.
Phase 1: Gathering Strength
By March, some of us were beginning to move out of the chaos to pull together. Tesla protests — which had started in random showrooms in February and individual acts of selling their cars — was organized into a national campaign under Tesla Takedown. By March the campaign had a website, had coordination, and actions in 250 cities globally.
In the gathering strength phase the movement gets more connected, organized, and test different approaches and tactics.
March was also when Rachel Cohen publicly resigned from her law firm who had capitulated to Trump’s demands. That would have just been another move in the chaotic acts of resistance except she then organized — getting a public list of lawyers to object. Strength was organized: firms that caved lost significant clients, talent and credibility. In the ensuing months, law firms stopped their shameless capitulations.
A similar dynamic unfolded with universities — which was organized, like many other institutions, starting from below. President of American Association of University Professors Todd Wolfson explained, “We’re also building an aligned table with our students … and … with alumni” — and thus mobilized colleagues around free-speech and institutional integrity. Students likewise pushed back, as in walkouts organized by the Sunrise Movement.
We can feel the strength they built because, like law firms, university administrators and elite boards are, to varying degrees, no longer reflexively capitulating. Remember Harvard, who first ran straight to the negotiating table (in fact, they hired one of the first firms that had caved to represent them). Harvard only ended up resisting because of the model of other universities, and because the Trump’s regime’s demands became too extreme. Their resistance against Trump’s pressure campaign has remained.
All this work doesn’t mean huge losses aren’t still accruing, but there is strength being organized whereas before it was nothing but losses.
Most of this phase goes unreported by legacy and social media. They ignored all the nightly pots-and-pans protests organized by Free DC. In occupied cities like LA and Memphis they looked for any whiff of a narrative of violence by protesters, but ignored the extent of community resistance to state violence ripping families apart. They overlooked jurors quietly handing “not-guilty” verdicts to anti-ICE protesters. And they missed nurses standing on the frontlines with transfolks and refusing to normalize laws that institutionalize transphobia.
For the most part, the gathering stage is the “quiet build” stage. One of its hallmarks: an openness to coalition-thinking they didn’t have before. Movement groups and insiders found common cause in new ways. Institutionalists and revolutionaries understood they are part of a bigger movement.
Phase 2: Handling Cycles of Attack
Where Trump found pressure, he pivoted to other areas. He militarized cities. He relentlessly signed racist, sexist, transphobic, classist, hateful, shameful executive orders. His regime took control from DC, gutted NIH and EPA, and obtained supremacy over the DOJ.
Then there were frog costumes. And the Disney boycott in solidarity against Jimmy Kimmel's censorship.
We didn’t just stop capitulating and obeying in advance — we entered Phase 2 of handling the cycles of attack. Handling here doesn’t quite mean winning on defense — because our communities suffered greatly.
Sometimes we stopped bad things. Disney’s reversal on Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension followed 1.7 million people’s rapid boycott. Tesla Takedown cleaved Elon Musk out of government. Backed by movement lawyers, courts showed they were able to slow or stop many of the worst excesses.
Sometimes we changed the narrative: After the intense militarization of multiple cities, it was Portland who broke-through with a national frame that undermined Trump’s frame of dangerous antifa and rapist illegals — with frog costumes.
Sometimes we couldn’t stop but we could show meaningful defense. Community and immigrant groups stepped up resistance to ICE raids. Politicians got arrested alongside protestors — giving national credence to efforts.
In that sense we were proving to our people and our community we could handle the attacks.
But that’s different than stopping the attacks. It’s still defensive.
A lot of the method of handling an attack is learning to make it backfire. Trump’s ruthless effort may have won him the shutdown — so far as he made no concessions — but it also lost him considerable support as he showed he would rather make people starve and disable travel rather than agree to lower health care premiums for most US Americans.
Another metric: are people activated? After the first “No Kings” march in June lots of people asked, “What do we do next?” After the second No Kings march in October, lots of people produced lists, suggested actions, and urged various tactics. We’ve shaken off the shock. We’re scheming and fighting back.
The chaotic days of steamrolling over a frozen, shocked people are largely over. Every organization and institution across the country has plan-A and plan-B for when the goons come knocking. Not all tactics and efforts will work, of course. Some are inherently flawed, too cautious, or still operating from an outdated playbook.
As groups make plans, a challenge is to maintain the early openness — the “beginner’s mind” of “we don’t know how to solve this.” That allowed Tesla Takedown to weave together varied peoples: rich Tesla owners with anti-capitalists, pissed off working class folks who knew they’d been exploited with polite middle-class sign holders.
It’s worth pointing that for some groups there’s seemingly been no relief. There are so many frontlines and it's hard to hold them all in our hearts and show solidarity — from Memphis where 1,500 National Guard are integrated into the violent police forces, to small towns facing unrelenting ICE or trying to stop detention centers, to the National Institutes of Health and multiple agencies which remain in constant bombardment, to virulent transphobia established into policy.
It's hard to show solidarity everywhere. Trans folks have borne disproportionate impact — recent passport-removal threats, institutional abandonment by allies, and a fully hostile federal government. Farming communities have been crushed, beef-farmers squeezed by price crashes and export shifts. And so many more.
So this model doesn’t assume we are all the exact same phase at the same time. Some of us will experience relief as others experience greater hardship. Staying in rhythm with solidarity remains a challenge. Helpful if we can remember whenever we feel some relief it’s likely at another group’s back-breaking moment — and vice versa.
In fact, in the Freedom Trainer’s model, we prepare folks by showing how there’s not a singular line of progression. Instead, there’s a lot of cycling between Stage 1 and Stage 2, as our opponents see us building and growing power, feel threatened by it, and retaliate. Stage 2 is handling cycles of attack as they attack again and again and again — with different targets, escalated violence, and renewed vigor.
But we are moving in some better formations and moving towards more offense — and that’s where we are tip-toeing into mass action.
Phase 3: MASS ACTION
While we will continue to gather strength and handle attacks — we are also now building for Stage 3. This isn’t one singular moment of all-out pushback or one decisive mass action. Like the other stages it’s iterative.
Nadine Bloch has laid out different mass noncooperation tactics that we might use: economic boycotts, worker/mass strikes, tax resistance, social noncooperation, opposition fraternization, building alternative structures/institutions/support, jury nullification, and civil servant/ internal regime noncooperation.
We have now occasionally dipped into latter phases of mass action. Seven million activated protestors is nothing to sneeze at. And protests are well documented by researchers to translate into fundraising, voter turnout, and public activation.
So the protests helped do another action that authoritarians hope we won’t do: vote. The losses in elections accentuated fissures in the MAGA coalition. They also were a chance were, for example with Mamdani, movement forces advanced an offensive framework: affordability.
To get to the more muscular tactics en masse that Nadine writes about, we need to find our offensive footing. “No Kings” is the “no” message. We need to find the “positive” articulation. I suspect that’s going to be found in messages that bridge — like Mamdani on affordability, the rising pro-democratic sentiment, the Bernie & AOC oligarch tour.
I suspect we’ll land close to some message that’s like "Freedom for All." We need to assure each other that we are not leaving each other behind — all of us, or none. Likely we will find mass action in issues that find common cause: health care for all, housing for all, security for all, affordability for all.
Finding unified demands organically will help us move towards mass collective action. So will skills. Strike schools. Jury nullification trainings. Election protection operations. Mutual aid. All of these are going to be needed.
And organizing is critical. A mass action doesn’t start on social media alone. It happens when relationships are strengthened and even built with people we haven’t organized with yet, trust is grown, improvisation is ready. None of the major strikes happened because they were planned, per se—they responded to unanticipated moments.
Lastly, we must stay ready, not assume that because the election worked this time, we’re safe. Trump has made clear his plan to tilt the election until Republican control is inevitable. We have to stay on our game.
So let’s look out for each other. Let’s care for each other. Let’s fight with everything we’ve got. We can get through this—and we can build something better.
Warmly,
- Choose Democracy
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