John,
Welcome to The Blue Wave Weekly!
Every week I’ll be sharing insights, updates, and ways for you to get involved and help us build the Blue Wave. This work takes serious resources, so if you’re able, please make a donation to support Blue Wave California today. Here’s this week’s edition:
Hope is in action.
This week felt like one of those weeks where you can almost hear the country creaking, like something old is splintering, and something new is trying to be born. People are waking up. Not in the “I saw a headline” way, but in the deeper, harder way: the myths are cracking. And when that happens, Nadine Smith put it perfectly: “we either run back to the comforting story we’ve been told… or we face the truth and decide what we’re going to build next.”
The Big Picture: They Want You Frozen. Don’t Give It to Them.
Trump and Republicans are doing what authoritarians always do: flood the zone, shake confidence, and make people feel powerless. This week it showed up in two big ways:
1) Attacks on Elections (and the “What if there’s no election?” trap)
Trump is floating “nationalizing” elections, demanding voter rolls, and sending federal agents to poke around ballots and election systems, especially in blue states. It’s a strategy, not a policy: delegitimize what they can’t win, and suppress what they can’t control.
But we need to be crystal clear: we are going to have elections! States run elections. Terms expire. The system can be strained and abused, but it can’t be erased by a tantrum in the Oval Office. The real point of this talk is psychological. If you’re stuck asking “what if elections are cancelled,” you’re not spending that energy organizing to win them.
So we say it out loud: We’re having elections. We’re winning elections. And we’re going to win so big it’s undeniable.
2) ICE and DHS: This Is the Leverage Moment
While Republicans play games and pretend there’s nothing they can do, they are choosing to keep funding, and expanding, the machinery that’s terrorizing communities. This isn’t “immigration policy.” It’s a moral choice.
And it’s also a political choice because 16 Republican Senators could end this madness right now. Sixteen. That’s it. If they had any spine, any humanity, any loyalty to the Constitution they pretend to worship, they could stop the escalation. Instead, they’re betting we’ll get tired.
Don’t.
Democrats are holding the line in a place we have real leverage right now: the DHS budget negotiations. They need to hear from us every day. Tell them to fight for enforceable guardrails. Fight for oversight. Fight to stop funding a masked, unaccountable force that behaves like it’s above the law.
The Movement: The Work Is Real, and It’s Getting Stronger
One of the most encouraging things right now is that resistance isn’t just “back.” It’s more seasoned, more coordinated, and more ready to absorb the wave of people who are coming off the sidelines.
Jess spoke at a packed Indivisible meeting in the San Fernando Valley last weekend. Hundreds of people, organized, trained up, plugged in, and moving with purpose. That matters because authoritarianism thrives when people feel isolated. The antidote is the oldest one we have: Community.
If you’ve been feeling alone or overwhelmed, go find your people. A local Indivisible group. A community defense training. A protest. A meeting. Something that puts you back in the real world with others who refuse to surrender their agency.
Black History Month: This Is the Blueprint
This week’s Practivist Pod conversation with Nadine Smith, civil rights leader, host of Wide Awake America, and now President & CEO of Color Of Change, hit on something we can’t afford to miss:
They aren’t just trying to erase history for political spite. They’re trying to erase it because it contains the instructions.
Black history is American history. And it’s also the history of people confronting state violence, confronting censorship, confronting disinformation, and building freedom anyway. Nadine shared her own family’s story of the Great Migration, of the “Black Angels” nurses who cared for tuberculosis patients when others wouldn’t, and of how easily truth gets buried even before the Trump era.
And then she said something powerful and true: “If we can’t see it, we can’t replicate it.”
That’s why we don’t “celebrate” Black History Month like it’s a museum exhibit. We study it like a field manual. Because what we’re living through now demands the same things it always has: courage, organizing, and the stubborn insistence that we can build something better than what we inherited.
What’s Coming: No Kings III (March 28)
Mark your calendar for March 28. Then don’t stop there, pull a couple people in now. Text them. Make a plan. Get it on the calendar like it’s a wedding.
The point is not just a massive day. Mass mobilization is a tactic. The strategy is sustained, organized people power, over weeks and months, using multiple tactics:
- rapid-response actions when the regime escalates
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trainings and community defense
- congressional pressure campaigns
- large national mobilizations that break the “invincibility” myth
And if we want Democrats to keep holding the line and then actually govern with power after we win, they need a grassroots machine behind them that’s resourced and relentless. That’s the work we’re building at Blue Wave California, turning this moment into durable, electoral power.
Action: Do This This Week
1) Call your Senators — every day this week
Use 5 Calls and tell them:
-
Do not fund ICE/DHS without enforceable guardrails.
- No more stopgaps that kick the can and empower abuse.
- Thank the Democrats who are holding the line—and tell them to stay strong.
2) Get 3 people into the March 28 No Kings III
Not “you should come.”
A plan: time, place, and who’s going with whom.
3) Plug into a local group
If you’re not already in one, find a local Indivisible group (or an adjacent resistance group) and show up. (You can bring a friend here too)...
Reasons for Hope
Jess’ reason for hope: Chicago held a snowplow naming contest, and “Abolish ICE” got submitted 9,200 times. It’s funny—but it’s also a signal: culture is shifting, and defiance is spreading in unexpected places. Sit-ins, songs, drumlines, creative protest—Americans are refusing to obey in advance.
My reason for hope: Minneapolis forced a drawdown—700 ICE agents reportedly pulled out of the city. Not enough. Not close. But it happened for one reason: people stood up in brutal conditions, under intimidation, and refused to let fear do the regime’s work for them. That’s what changes the math.
Nadine’s reason for hope: ordinary people doing extraordinary things—like a school board member standing alone in the face of political retaliation and telling the truth anyway. Or neighbors running into the street in the middle of the night in subzero temperatures to protect each other. That choice—over and over again—is what defeats authoritarianism.
We’re in a hard chapter. But we’re not helpless. And we’re not alone.
See you in the field.
Hope is in action.
— Steve
