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nonviolence
'We Will Not Back Down,' Says Indivisible as Trump Aims FBI, IRS at Liberal Groups
"Let’s call this what it is: A baseless attempt to chill free speech and scare people away from exercising their constitutional right to protest an authoritarian regime."
Oct 10, 2025
The pro-democracy group Indivisible is among those speaking out against the Trump administration's reported targeting of progressive and liberal organizations with various government agencies, including the FBI and IRS, as part of what critics call an "authoritarian playbook" by President Donald Trump that seeks to criminalize dissent, chill free speech, and frame nonviolent protest and opposition as "domestic terrorism."
In-depth reporting by Reuters named Trump's far-right, xenophobic White House advisor Stephen Miller as "playing a central role" in the internal effort to wield the power of federal agencies at a variety of organizations that the administration claims—contrary to all available evidence—are funding or orchestrating violent protests and political attacks.
Granted anonymity to speak more freely about the internal mechanics of the operation, Reuters' reporting is based on discussions with "three White House officials, four Department of Homeland Security officials and one Justice Department official to produce the first comprehensive account of how decisions are being made, forces deployed, and operations coordinated in the crackdown."
"Trump wants to scare people away from exercising their constitutional rights. We won’t let him succeed. Don’t let this smear distract you. The best response to attacks on our rights is to exercise our rights. That means showing up in huge numbers on October 18."
According to Reuters, "Miller is deeply involved in reviewing government agencies' investigations into the financial networks behind what the administration labels 'domestic terror networks,' which include nonprofits and even educational institutions, a White House official said."
In response to [a Reuter's request], the White House highlighted seven political protests in 2023 and 2025 that included acts of violence directed against law enforcement officials, and two incidents of vandalism at Tesla dealerships this year as well as half a dozen social media posts celebrating the damage.
It named nine liberal groups, donors or fundraising organizations that it said helped finance or plan protests where the violent incidents occurred.
While the second White House official stressed that the organizations were not necessarily potential targets, the material provides insight into the administration's thinking.The list includes Soros' Open Society Foundations; ActBlue, the funding arm of the Democratic Party; Indivisible, a grassroots coalition opposed to Trump policies and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, a Los Angeles-based group.
"The goal is to destabilize Soros’ network," a third White House official said.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Soros's network of charitable organizations rejected any claim by Trump or the White House officials that its operations have anything to do with violent conduct or promoting violence.
"Neither George Soros nor the Open Society Foundations fund protests, condone violence, or foment it in any way," the spokesperson said. "Claims to the contrary are false."
Other groups named by the White House officials were two Jewish-led advocacy groups, IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace, both of which have organized protests and nonviolent sit-ins to oppose the genocide in Gaza being carried out by the US-backed Israeli government.
Citing the Reuters reporting, Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin said in a social media thread Thursday night that the fact a looming crackdown on groups opposed to Trump and his far-right agenda is coming less than two weeks before "before the largest peaceful protest in modern American history is absolutely intentional." On October 18, massive protests are planned nationwide as a follow-up to the "No Kings" day of action that took place in June, bringing an estimated one million people into the streets against the Republican Party's authoritarian lurch under Trump.
According to Reuters, "Miller is taking a 'hands-on' role in investigating the funding of nonprofits and educational institutions and is sharing recommendations from Attorney General Pam Bondi and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent with Trump and other top advisers," as well as sharing information with the joint terrorism task force.
"We don’t have all the details, but it appears Trump’s regime is gearing up to smear us with ludicrous accusations that we’re somehow tied to violence at protests—a claim that’s as false as it is predictable," said Levin. "Let’s call this what it is: A baseless attempt to chill free speech and scare people away from exercising their constitutional right to protest an authoritarian regime. We have been committed to nonviolence from the very beginning. It’s a core principle, not just a talking point."
"We will not back down," Levin said in the post. "Trump and Miller can lie, smear, and threaten all they want. They will lose."
"By floating false allegations of violence," he concluded, "Trump wants to scare people away from exercising their constitutional rights. We won’t let him succeed. Don’t let this smear distract you. The best response to attacks on our rights is to exercise our rights. That means showing up in huge numbers on October 18."
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Meeting Our Angry Moment With Fellowship and Laughter
What we can do is call attention to the forms of nonviolent resistance that challenge our prevalent culture of rage and alienation.
Oct 08, 2025
One strangely hot November afternoon, I waited for my elementary-school-aged kids to arrive at their bus stop. The quiet in our rural area was eerie. It captured the mood in the days after a national election that no one in my little community yet knew exactly how to respond to.
In my rush out the door, I’d grabbed my baseball cap, with the logo for my preferred presidential candidate on it, to shield my eyes from the sun’s glare.
The bus arrived and left. I collected my charges and, just as we were preparing to walk home, a tall young man leapt from the passenger seat of a battered Chevy pickup truck parked at the side of the road. He shook one sunburned finger at my hat and yelled, “Traitor! Traitor!” his face red with rage, or possibly alcohol—who knew? I gripped the pepper spray I carry in my pocket and told my kids to run home. They disappeared into the woods.
Luckily, the man scuttled back into his vehicle and drove off as soon as I looked him in the eye and sized him up. (Maybe word hadn’t yet spread that masks could do more than protect from illness. They could also let a man harass families without the moral weight of the act landing on him. How little we understood, just months ago!)
If a certain prevalent strain of MAGA masculinity feeds on anger and hate—just look at “he who hates his political opponents” (aka our president!) and his speech at Kirk’s funeral—it’s not an easy persona to sustain.
Once his truck disappeared, I walked home, rattled, not sure how to explain what had happened to my kids. But in the foyer, they explained the whole scene for me in their own satirical way.
One child shook a finger and yelled, in a mockingly deep voice, “Traitor!” Another pretended to swoon in response. “Oh no! I am so scared! What a big, brave man!” They collapsed in giggles.
This is the sort of anti-bully cosplay I’ve come to see often in recent months: Kids I know strutting around with their chests puffed out like roosters, imitating a neighborhood bully who insults immigrants. Expressions of fake awe about motorcycle gangs that pass by displaying Confederate flags and other racist symbols of the old South and revving their engines for attention. (“Wow! They are so strong and tough! I want to shake their hands!”)
As private as this mockery tends to be, lest (sadly) someone retaliate with violence, it gives us a way to express our sorrow at what is happening to the American value of peaceful coexistence, while lightening the mood. Such laughter diminishes the bullies among us, at least in our hearts. As leaders like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and comedian Jimmy Kimmel show so well, it can diminish them publicly by holding up a mirror to their bluster and overreach.
Humor as Resistance
The use of parody against authoritarian leaders is nothing new. Among my favorite models is Serbian activist Srdja Popovic’s book Blueprint for Revolution. Recounting his own experiences with the student movement that, in the 1990s, resisted then-dictator Slobodan Milosevic, Popovic explains how jokes about ruling elites can make them look less invincible, while also puncturing widespread fear. And better yet, leaders who try to suppress such humor tend to look ridiculous. For example, Serbian police arrested (so to speak) a barrel with Milosevic’s face painted on it after Popovic and his fellow activists encouraged citizens to line up and hit it with a bat.
We in the mid-Atlantic region got a taste of how such mundane gestures can goad leaders into buffoonery when then-Justice Department employee Sean Charles Dunn threw his sandwich at one of the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers President Donald Trump recently deployed in Washington, DC. The Department of Justice tried to charge Dunn with assaulting a federal officer, a felony, but a grand jury declined to bring such charges against him. Whether or not Dunn actually meant to be funny, that incident reminds me of how a seemingly small act of resistance can indeed expose executive overreach.
As I walked in a September protest against President Trump’s National Guard occupation of Washington, I watched leaders of the tens of thousands of marchers hoist a banner depicting Dunn with his sandwich and felt strangely encouraged by the raucous cheering that echoed through the capital. He has, in fact, become a potent symbol of the anti-Trump resistance.
Men and Rage
I guess there’s nothing new about angry men, either—at least not in my neighborhood. My home sits in a valley, and the nearby rural highway often feels to me like a repository of white male road rage. I moved here in 2020 and, just in that first year, I watched two drivers at two different moments plow, purposefully or not, into the vehicles in front of them. In one case, the driver got out and began hurling racial slurs at the group of Latino farmworkers he had slammed into.
If you’re unlucky enough to be standing by the side of that road, you’d better believe that you could get hurt, even if it’s just by someone speeding. The battered guardrails at the valley’s nadir attest to that. Once, a cop pulled me over when I was walking home along that very road after my car broke down to warn me that I could get hurt by the reckless drivers there. Safe in my white suburban mom identity, while pointing at the dimpled metal of the rails along that stretch of road, I replied, “No kidding. Why don’t you pull more of them over instead of me?” He blushed and actually agreed before letting me go home.
What causes a young man who, unlike Donald Trump, professes to be tired of hate to kill?
And mind you, those guys on my road are anything but aberrations. Many signs these days point to a scourge of anger and despair among American men, who all too often don’t seem to have been raised to express a wide range of emotions. A Pew Research study from early 2025 found that 57% of US adults think children’s caretakers place far too little focus on teaching boys to talk about their feelings when they’re sad or upset. Less than a third said the same about girls. In another survey, at least two-thirds of parents felt that boys were uncomfortable expressing feelings of fear, sadness, loneliness, and insecurity. Nearly half of those parents also felt that boys were uncomfortable expressing feelings of love. By and large, while women and men might feel anger in similar numbers, men are significantly more likely to act out their anger using verbal or physical aggression.
Though laughter offers a wonderful way to respond to stress, it turns out that it, too, is remarkably gendered. Women are more likely to laugh in social settings, while we as a society tend to expect men to make other people laugh through jokes and humor. Right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan is a notably popular exception to such a generalization in his ability to express vulnerability and laugh at himself. An analysis by Industry Leaders Magazine argues that his largely male audience does indeed value his willingness to admit he’s been wrong and his openness to laughing at himself. As one example, in an interview with English comedian Russell Brand, Rogan poked fun at himself as a child, a kid then learning martial arts, calling himself “so weird” and laughing.
When we express ourselves peaceably rather than by being accusatory, threatening, or violent, we connect with others, as Rogan shows so well (regardless of what you or I may think of his politics). And the ability to connect that he has—a trait conservative activist Charlie Kirk arguably had as well—may otherwise be in short supply among today’s male adults, especially on the political right. About a third of Americans report that they are lonely at least some of the time, though women tend to reach out more often to friends or loved ones when they feel that way. It’s probably no accident that men in this country are four times more likely than women to die by suicide.
If a certain prevalent strain of MAGA masculinity feeds on anger and hate—just look at “he who hates his political opponents” (aka our president!) and his speech at Kirk’s funeral—it’s not an easy persona to sustain. Just consider all the mourners who showed up at Kirk’s memorial service in genuine grief. Perhaps what most unnerved the Trump administration, when comedian Jimmy Kimmel flashed that clip of the president redirecting a question about Kirk’s death to the subject of his new White House ballroom, was confronting how alone he was in his indifference.
After Charlie Kirk
Given all the hostile rhetoric of Trump and his party toward their political foes, I find it easy to blame him and his followers for the uptick of political violence in this country over the past decade. After all, the vast majority of domestic extremist attacks have been perpetrated by individuals professing right-wing ideologies. Yet, as Jia Lynn Yang of the New York Times points out, this year’s spate of violence against public figures did not map as clearly onto the political spectrum as in earlier eras. Today, the attacker tends to be a “lone individual, lost in a conversation with an online void.” After all, Charlie Kirk’s shooter didn’t even vote in the last election. In a text exchange, he referred to the engravings he had made on his bullets, which included words like “catch, fascist,” as “mostly a big meme.”
While it would be reductionist to blame violence on video games and other nihilistic online spaces, it’s worth considering that the current generation of young people do, of course, spend more time online than any previous generation. If popular war games form part of their immersive environments, we as a society would do well to look more closely not just at the political leanings of shooters, but the contexts within which political violence flourishes in contemporary America.
What makes a gun feel like the solution to any political disagreement for some individuals? And if people like Kirk’s alleged killer Tyler Robinson, don’t see it as a solution, then what does it mean to shoot someone? If political assassination is a crime of despair, what series of events leads a person to such a feeling and such an act? Psychology tells us that anger makes us feel more powerful because of the adrenaline that courses through our bodies prior to acting out. But what causes a young man who, unlike Donald Trump, professes to be tired of hate to kill?
A New American Way?
I’m at a loss. And I think many of us may be. But what we can do (and by we here, I mean those of us who write stuff) is call attention to the forms of nonviolent resistance that challenge our prevalent culture of rage and alienation. The people participating in the “We Are All DC” march that I mentioned earlier held homemade signs like “DC crime wave” (with a picture of President Trump waving from the White House), played music, and sang. Though arguably comparable in size to the DC Women’s March of 2017, this demonstration warranted exactly zero articles in the New York Times. Somehow, in the age of Donald Trump, such legacy media outfits tend to prefer to amplify angry male voices rather than those of resistance, which, I think, is a genuine problem, explain it as you will.
If you think that a focus on resistance, humor, and joy is a losing path, as Kamala Harris’ “joy-based campaign” turned out to be, maybe you should remember that being with others in person does materially change the chemistry of our bodies. When we laugh or cry, especially in community, our bodies can release dopamine, serotonin, and other chemicals that support empathy, communication, and a sense of hope for the future.
You might try a little humor or mockery to get through the day.
Perhaps with a greater sense of community, we would also take in more of our disturbing world and not, for instance, forget the two Minnesota lawmakers another extremist shot and killed in June or the young Black student recently found hanging from a tree in Mississippi. They received remarkably less attention than Charlie Kirk.
Unfortunately, our field of vision remains narrow indeed and, like the road I stood on that day last November, it contains a disproportionate number of angry white men. And no less unfortunately, we’re speeding down it quickly with a maniac in the driver’s seat, and it lacks the guardrails of a law-abiding Supreme Court and a constitutionally aware secretary of defense.
Unless we start talking to one another, that road seems to be leading nowhere good. In the meantime, you might try a little humor or mockery to get through the day. If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend it.
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Report From Rome: One of One Million
So many people in the US and abroad express that they don’t know what to do in response to the utter violence they are witnessing. Start by doing what the Italians did this past Saturday, get outside and walk with others who feel the same.
Oct 06, 2025
I have attended countless protests in cities across the US. The last protest I attended was in Hawai’i, where I live and work, at the No Kings March on April 5, 2025. Estimates have it at 3,000 participants. As a sociologist and geographer, I have a decent sense of demography and space. As a long-time activist, I know how important it is to the powers that be to deny our numbers and the peacefulness of our protest.
Old Friends and Italy’s Grassroots
I had the good fortune to attend the Saturday October 4 protest in Rome, scheduled at 2:30 pm local time, on a glorious sunny autumn day in a light only the Mediterranean can provide. These protests were called by the pro-Palestinian organizations as a nationwide event with activists and union members bussing in from various parts of Italy (buses with arrivals that were slowed due to police interference). The day before a national strike was called by the Italian General Confederation of Labor (GCIL). For the first time in over 20 years, it was not a demand for better labor conditions, but a political action in support of the Sumud Flotilla, which has been seeking to give food and medical items to Palestinians being starved by Israeli occupation.
A colleague and friend, who I had not seen for over a decade, though we were close participating in global justice protests in the mid-2000s, invited me to travel with her and her children and join the protest in Rome with her circle of friends. She had returned to her home in Italy about seven years ago. There are multiple reasons for return migration, but after having children, and even with a tenured university position, the school shootings in the US were something she could not shake off.
Gelato and the Everyday in Social Justice
I joined the protest with her daughters, her friends’ daughters, and found myself amid five "tweens," with a Palestinian flag painted on my cheek, thanks to the girls’ artistic flare. The parents were friends since college days and had, like me, never stopped tending to causes of social justice. One friend commented that her father shared concerns of his grandchild participating in the procession. We joked about this word, and as we walked through the day, took rest under shade and fine jazz (“Watermelon Man”) being played loudly in front of the Colosseum. We eventually recognized the march to be just that—a calm, nonviolent procession, of at least a million people heading to San Giovanni square.
Just before getting to the square, we stopped to get the girls gelato and freshen up our water at the public tap. This was a remarkable way to be in the center of Rome with a million persons in protest and in peace. At San Giovanni, we stood and chatted, chanted a bit, the girls sat on the curb. We were there until after 7:0 pm, waiting for a friend of a friend of a friend to meet us so we could all get dinner. Eventually, we could not wait, our hunger got the best of us and several members of the party retreated to San Lorenzo, my friend’s old haunt from her college days in Rome.
Flags and Words and Stories of Truth
It is remarkable that Reuters, Politico.eu, and other reports of the march mention clashes in their headlines and show sensationalized photographs. If we are accurate these occurred after the march, when the police in the area should have already departed rather than engage with some rightly aggravated youth, about .02% of the marchers. The five hour walk was locked in with the traditions of non-violence, it is the largest in Italy for over two decades. It was remarkable for me, in its calm, its warmth, and the matter-of-fact understanding that we can’t go on with our everyday lives while starvation and slaughter continue and Israeli forces act with impunity on land and sea.
Unlike US protests where we pride ourselves on verbiage, flags were the centerpiece in Rome. Yet the presses (even those I consider neutral) focused on the few flags among thousands, that promoted Hammas, or challenged the Israel Defense Forces. This is selective representation and a mischaracterization of the day, which was similar to an Italian religious procession with babies and children, elders, and those of us in between walking, chanting, and laughing. Side by side strangers knowing together that we are doing this in solidarity with those who have lost homes, their children, and mundane pain and joy.
So many people in the US and abroad express that they don’t know what to do in response to the utter violence they are witnessing as carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the National Guard in the US and in Palestine, Ukraine, or Sudan. Start by doing what the Italians did this past Saturday, get outside and walk with others who feel the same, talk, drink some water, and buy snacks for the kids.
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