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Dio Smith had a clean record before they showed up to protest OpenAI executives’ plan to dominate American life, drain increasingly scarce resources, and otherwise steal their future. They gathered with more than 30 other students on August 10 at the artificial intelligence company’s new lobbying headquarters, just blocks from the half-destroyed White House. They dropped banners and held signs, all of which demanded that the company cease and desist.
Cops closed in after two hours. They arrested 13 students, separated them by gender, sent them to two different precincts in D.C., and left OpenAI executives free to continue their $140 million-plus lobbying project to manipulate the government in their favor. Smith was in jail for six hours, taking solace from their preparation with other student organizers and reminding themselves that they were following the paths laid by their ancestors: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Huey Newton.
“I spent a lot of time thinking about my choices with the protest,” Smith told me, “and I believe I made the right choice.”
Smith is 21 years old. They are from Ohio, with a dream of attending law school and one day becoming a lawyer. They see how oligarchs like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are making deals with the federal government to enrich themselves while much of the country struggles to survive on subpar minimum wage and no universal health care.
Like millions of others who have undertaken a record number of protests across the country over the last two years—there were at least 55,061 between January 1, 2025, and March 31, 2026, according to Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium—Smith risked their physical safety and well-being to take action against an aspect of President Trump’s fascist takeover. They organized with others and built power as a group; then they acted on it.
Now, in the lead-up to the midterms, activists say they expect leaders to act on their power, to similarly risk something of themselves to stop the destruction of the country. Some are sick of the new planned economy, where AI rules all. Some are sick of high gas, housing, grocery, and electricity prices. Some are literally sick, because Trump defunded hospitals so severely that 596 of them have closed wards or entirely shuttered and another 613 are at risk of doing so; or because he destroyed food safety so thoroughly that as of early last month at least 18,000 people have explosive diarrhea across at least 49 states.
Others are sick of Democrats undertaking little half measures that ultimately amount to nothing. They are angry about high-ranking Democrats collaborating with the right, such as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) holding meetings with corrupt international land-grabber Jared Kushner rather than New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, or minority leaders Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Jeffries’s refusal to support abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, despite a YouGov poll in July finding that 73 percent of Democrats support doing so.
It’s hard to miss the deep anger across the United States.
“People are fed up about what’s happening in Washington,” Democrat Dr. Adam Hamawy told me before he won his primary in June to represent New Jersey’s 12th District. “People are upset about not just Republicans, but the Democratic Party as well. I think Trump won not because people came out for him, but because Democrats lost voters.”
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