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An IPCC for Inequality Is Good, But It Can't Replace the Movement That Made It Possible
The gap between rich and poor will not be closed in a seminar room, it will be closed the way every advance against entrenched power has been won, by people organizing, demanding, and refusing to be told that the way things are is the way they have to stay.
Sep 25, 2026
For years, the people organizing against extreme inequality have made a simple argument that the world’s institutions preferred not to hear: The gap between the very rich and everyone else is not an accident, not a law of nature, and not something we have to accept. It is a choice, made by people with the power to choose differently.
For a long time that was a fringe position. It isn’t any more.
You can see the shift in the news that South Africa is pushing to create an International Panel on Inequality, like an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the wealth gap, to pull the evidence together in one authoritative place and put it in front of governments. Joseph Stiglitz backs it. More than 500 economists have signed on.
Nobody skipping meals is waiting for a footnote. What they are waiting for is action, and action comes from pressure.
This is a good thing, and we welcome it. When the establishment builds an institution to take your issue seriously, it means the argument is being won. The people who got this far deserve credit.
But I want to be honest about where the real momentum is coming from, because it matters for what happens next. The panel is a sign of progress. It is not the engine of it. The engine is the movement that dragged inequality up the agenda in the first place, and that movement is where the story of actual change has been written.
Look at what the IPCC has actually done so far. For 30 years it has produced the best climate science anyone had ever assembled. It won a Nobel Prize. It leaves no room for honest denial. And for a long time, governments read it and carried on much as before. The science mattered enormously.
However, it moved politics fastest when people forced it to: kids walking out of school on Fridays for the Future, communities blocking fossil fuel projects like the Keystone XL Oil Pipeline. The movement was decisive. Change came when the two worked together, and not a moment before.
Inequality is in the same place as the climate crisis now—the evidence is not the thing we are short of. We already know the shape of it. The richest 1% took 41% of all the new wealth created between 2000 and 2024. Around 2.3 billion people, nearly 1 in 4 of us, now skip meals because they can’t afford to eat. South Africa, which is carrying this panel forward, is the most unequal country the World Bank has ever recorded.
A panel will sharpen that picture, and sharper is better. But nobody skipping meals is waiting for a footnote. What they are waiting for is action, and action comes from pressure.
Here is the encouraging part: That pressure is already working.
When Brazil used its G20 presidency to put a global tax on billionaires on the table, it did not come from nowhere. Movements, campaigners, and economists had pushed the idea for years, and the Fight Inequality Alliance was part of that.
The economist Gabriel Zucman drew up a plan: a 2% minimum tax on the world’s roughly 3,000 billionaires, enough to raise around $250 billion a year. In November 2024, for the first time, G20 leaders agreed to cooperate on taxing the ultra rich. An idea dismissed as impossible a few years earlier was suddenly the position of the world’s largest economies.
That is what movements do. They move the line of what is politically possible, and they do it faster than any institution.
This is why the movement matters, and why its role in this next chapter should be front and center. We are the ones knocking on the doors, running the campaigns, and keeping the pressure on long after the summit is over and the experts have gone home.
We have been doing it without a panel, and we have already moved things many said could not be moved. Give that movement the authoritative evidence a body like this can provide, and you do not only get a better report. You get a sharper weapon in the hands of the people already fighting.
The tax has not been won yet. The United States and Germany refused to back a binding version, and it was watered down to a promise to cooperate. But notice why.
It did not stall for lack of evidence. Zucman had done the numbers, and nobody serious disputed them. It stalled because the people who would pay still had the power to slow it down. That is the real contest, and it is not a contest of data. It is a contest of power, and power is shifted by organized people, not by publications.
I say all this as someone who spends more time with campaigners than with economists, and I will be honest about our own side too.
Movements do not win every time. We are sometimes better at naming a problem than at holding the ground we take. But the lesson of the last decade is not that we need fewer people in the fight and more in the seminar room. It is the opposite. The evidence has been overwhelming for years. What has changed the weather is people refusing to accept it.
So build this panel well, and build it close to the movement that made it necessary. Let it answer the questions people are actually fighting over. Get its evidence into the hands of the people doing the pushing. Check whether it does speak to the inequalities and the solutions people are talking about and demanding change for. Treat the organizers and the communities living this every day as partners in the work, not an audience for the findings. Do that, and this panel becomes part of something genuinely powerful.
Because the gap will not be closed in a seminar room. It never has been. It will be closed the way every advance against entrenched power has been won, by people organizing, demanding, and refusing to be told that the way things are is the way they have to stay.
The evidence is on our side. It has been for a long time. Now comes the part that actually changes lives.
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Elections Won't Save a Movement People Don't Trust
Democracy has always depended on more than elections. It depends on institutions that people believe are worthy of their participation and capable of improving their lives.
Sep 25, 2026
As millions head to the polls in the 2026 elections, voters are showing up disappointed, forgotten, and worn down from years of failed policies.
After nearly two decades working inside campaigns, Democratic leaders, national advocacy organizations, and movement institutions have made it clear: We’ve got a problem on our hands.
The challenge before us is not simply that Democrats have a messaging problem, nor is it that Republicans have become better communicators. The deeper problem is that we have spent years trying to win elections while underinvesting in the communities, relationships, and culture that make political victories durable.
People don’t organize their lives around resistance alone. They organize around belonging, purpose, hope, and the possibility that tomorrow can be better than today.
Narratives don’t emerge from communications plans, but rather from institutions that people trust. This distinction matters.
We keep hearing the same question: Why aren’t more young people and people of color engaged in the civic process? This is the wrong question.
The question we need to be asking is whether or not our current institutions are willing to or even positioned to share power with us. More often than not, participation is shared only after decisions are made, and usually with an ask attached.
We are not waiting for institutions to tell us how to participate. We have lived the reality of what happens when institutions fail, time and time again. We have seen how powerful it is when we build our own.
Young Black folks in particular are organizing, creating, building community, and culture. Especially for those who are young, queer, and Black, so much of the language and swagger that shapes our lives has been created by us. We know that when institutional belonging is unavailable, community creates belonging. We got us.
As Black queer Americans, we inherit a tradition shaped by people who understood that institutions rarely surrender power simply because the moral argument is clear. Generations before us organized, marched, litigated, and forced America to confront the distance between its ideals and its reality. Progress has never been inevitable. It has always been demanded.
A collective 20 years inside politics has made it clear to us: Institutions rarely fail overnight. Long before they lose public trust, they lose relevance. They become more concerned with protecting existing power than with creating new possibilities, optimizing for stability rather than adaptation.
Eventually, they find themselves speaking fluently to one another while struggling to connect with the people they were created to serve. That is where much of the progressive movement finds itself today.
Americans are losing faith in politics and in the idea that our institutions can solve the problems shaping their everyday lives.
People do not experience institutional failure in constitutional language or policy briefs. They experience it through rising costs, unstable jobs, inaccessible housing, underfunded schools, broken infrastructure, and the growing sense that the rules apply differently depending on who you are and how much power you hold. They talk about fairness, opportunity, dignity, and whether working hard still leads to a better life.
These conversations are not separate from politics. They are politics. We can’t continue mistaking communications for culture.
Too often, the response has been to refine the message rather than rebuild the institution that delivers it. We have mistaken communication for culture, which has led to the consequences we are all currently living with.
The progressive movement has become extraordinarily sophisticated at producing content. We can generate messaging guidance overnight, build rapid-response campaigns within hours, and create endless streams of digital content. Yet none of those capabilities automatically produce trust.
Trust is earned when people see themselves reflected not only in the message but in the leadership, values, and relationships behind it. You can’t message your way out of a deficit of trust. No amount of message testing can compensate for institutions that people no longer believe understand their lives.
This is where imagination becomes essential.
Since 2016, countless postmortems have focused on messaging, media strategy, and digital infrastructure. Those conversations matter, but they begin from an incomplete premise. They assume we already have a compelling story to tell.
We are not convinced we do.
Sentiments such as “fight” or “protect democracy” are important calls to action, but they are not visions of the future. They put us on the defensive and describe what we oppose more clearly than what we are building. People don’t organize their lives around resistance alone. They organize around belonging, purpose, hope, and the possibility that tomorrow can be better than today.
That kind of vision cannot be manufactured through advertising.
It grows from culture. It expands from artists, educators, organizers, faith leaders, entrepreneurs, local institutions, and civic spaces where people build relationships long before anyone asks for their vote.
We can look back at the Obama era, as one example of how politics can bend the arc of history. If you were near a college campus on November 4, 2008, you remember the celebrations. Music poured from dorm rooms and car speakers, topped off with dancing in the street. For a brief moment, hope felt less like a slogan and more like a possibility finally personified. The belief in our collective power and the possibilities it could create ignited a generation.
Research supports what many organizers have understood intuitively for decades. Economist Raj Chetty’s work on economic mobility found that social capital (the relationships that connect people across communities and opportunities) is among the strongest predictors of upward mobility. That insight extends beyond economics.
Relationships shape what people believe is possible. They influence trust, aspiration, and whether institutions feel relevant to everyday life. Politics is no different.
Queer communities have long understood something about the power of relationships that institutions are only beginning to relearn. We call it chosen family: the idea that belonging can be deliberately built through relationships of trust, care, responsibility, and mutual recognition. There is a civic lesson in that tradition. Durable movements are built the same way. Not through an email list or a message tested to perfection, but through relationships strong enough to survive disagreement, disappointment, and the space between elections.
The same is true for Black communities, particularly Black women, whose creativity, organizing, and cultural leadership have repeatedly expanded the boundaries of American democracy while too often receiving recognition only after the fact.
Innovation doesn’t come from preserving the status quo. History has shown us that it comes from creating space for voices that institutions have historically overlooked.
That means the work ahead demands more than better campaigns. It requires rebuilding civic infrastructure and cultivating leaders rather than personalities. A focus on relationships instead of audiences and investing in organizations that remain present between election cycles.
Institutional renewal is no longer optional as artificial intelligence, economic uncertainty, climate disruption, and political polarization reshape public life simultaneously. The pace of change is accelerating, while confidence in the institutions meant to guide us continues to decline.
That should concern all of us. Democracy has always depended on more than elections. It depends on institutions that people believe are worthy of their participation and capable of improving their lives.
The encouraging news is that Americans have not completely lost faith in one another. Mutual aid networks, local organizers, community leaders, and everyday people continue to demonstrate the generosity and resilience our institutions often struggle to match.
We must build institutions strong enough, imaginative enough, and trustworthy enough for the story to tell itself. There’s no other choice.
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Elevating Data Center Activism for the 2028 Election
To fight back against Big Tech, the movement must articulate a clear diagnosis of the problem, adapt to changing political landscapes, translate early wins into lasting policy, and forge broad alliances.
Sep 13, 2026
As data centers sprout across the nation, a new movement is emerging to challenge the tech companies building them. The rapid spread of these facilities raises critical environmental, health, economic, and political questions, positioning health, climate, and social justice activists to play a central role in elevating these questions for the 2028 elections.
To date, the movement against data centers has made impressive gains. In the first four months of 2026, local opposition disrupted at least 75 data center projects worth approximately $130 billion. In June 2026, more than 200 advocacy organizations urged Congress to reject legislation fast-tracking the financing and permitting for large AI data centers. By July, New York State Gov. Kathy Hochul imposed a statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers—a model other states and cities are considering. National groups such as Food and Water Watch, the NAACP, Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Democratic Socialists of America have distributed resources to support local campaigns.
Public opposition has shifted dramatically alongside this activism. In August 2025, a poll of 4,000 Americans showed 43% supported having a data center built near their home. Just eight months later, in Spring 2026, support plummeted to 21%—a drop described by the pollster as “a scale of change in public opinion that I didn’t know was still possible in the US.”
However, the movement also faces significant headwinds. Big tech companies like Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Open AI are investing hundreds of billions of dollars to support new data centers to meet AI’s growing computing demands. As Karen Hao explains in Empire of AI, tech owners believe being first and largest will ensure dominance, driving relentless expansion.
Data center and AI activists are raising core questions: Who should decide whether communities allow data centers? Who pays the long-term costs and reaps the benefits?
Earlier environmental movements received some support from presidents seeking environmental legacies, but President Donald Trump provided public subsidies enabling the AI industry to bypass opponents.
Despite widespread local opposition to data centers and bipartisan support for regulation, the movement lacks a comprehensive national narrative to counteract the industry claim that AI will solve all problems. To tell such a story, previous and current movements must articulate a clear diagnosis of the problem, adapt to changing political landscapes, translate early wins into lasting policy, and forge broad alliances. My analysis of past successes of health and environmental movements suggests five strategic pathways emerge for the data center movement.
Connect Concerns About Data Centers to Other Issues People Care About
Successful movements link distinct problems to create multiple paths into activism. The women’s movement brought together advocates for sexual and reproductive healthcare, women of color, working women, lesbians, and people with disabilities. This inclusive alliance built the power needed to expand access to abortion, ban pregnancy discrimination, and protect women from insurance industry bias. Even when differences among its supporters emerged, the movement’s unifying goals provided a framework for common action.
Data center activists have raised health, environmental, and social justice concerns: increasing air pollution, water depletion, and excess noise. One study estimates that by 2028, the annual public health costs of data center air pollution will reach $20 billion. Activists also recognize that data center expansion enables AI and tech companies to deepen surveillance, target harmful social media campaigns, and facilitate harms to mental health.
Organizers can build a unified constituency by addressing both immediate harms (unregulated construction) and systemic issues (AI expansion enriching billionaires at public expense).
Build Crosscutting Coalitions
Effective movements united diverse groups around shared economic and social interests. The Fight for $15 movement successfully raised the minimum wage to at least $15 an hour, in at least 68 cities, counties, and states, winning more than $150 billion in higher pay for more than 26 million workers. It united low-wage workers, unions with the resources to pay organizers, and activists from Black Lives Matter and #MeToo.
Data centers activists can replicate this coalition approach. They can link residents concerned about the impact of local data centers and workers and labor unions whose jobs will be displaced by the growth of AI. They can enlist advocates for democracy, social justice, and tax reform who object to the political influence and low taxes of tech billionaires.
Pursue Transitional and Transformative Goals
Movements frequently debate whether to emphasize immediate or long-term goals. In the movement for universal healthcare, organizers argued whether to support the Affordable Care Act as a step forward or to demand Medicare for All to reduce healthcare industry power.
Mark Hannay, from Metro New York Health Care for All, suggested a “both-and framework.” Metro fought for Medicare for All, but also for funding for New York City’s public hospitals and Medicaid and stronger regulation of the healthcare industry.
Data center and AI activists adopt this approach by pairing immediate demands—such as construction moratoria and stronger air and water protections—with long-term systemic reforms, including antitrust enforcement, elimination of corporate subsidies, and higher taxes on tech billionaires.
Use Multiple Strategies to Achieve Policy Goals
ACT UP, a leading force in the fight to get the government to respond more effectively and rapidly to the AIDS epidemic, used inside-outside, disruptive and conventional, and litigation and community organizing to achieve its goals. ACT UP found that multiple approaches increased pressure on the government to respond and mobilized more constituencies.
The data center movement has already used community organizing, demonstrations, litigation, legislation, and media campaigns to advance its goals. Maintaining this diversity, aligning its deployment to maximize impact, and developing a strategic plan for 2028 and beyond will help sustain momentum and drive policy wins.
Articulate a Vision
Enduring movements unite people around a vision grounded in shared values. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a world where character triumphed over skin color provide a moral vision for the civil rights movement. For more than a decade, environmental justice activists have proposed that all people have the right to environmental protections and a voice in shaping their communities’ environments. This expansive vision has enabled this movement to win local, state, and national policy changes and bring together environmental, climate, people of color, and women’s activists across the country.
Data center and AI activists are raising core questions: Who should decide whether communities allow data centers? Who pays the long-term costs and reaps the benefits? What role should voters—rather than tech industry executives—have in directing the future of AI?
By offering clear, practical answers and using the experiences of past activist campaigns, the growing data center-AI movement can put these questions on the nation’s electoral and political agenda. In doing so, they can become a powerful force for healthier, safer, and more just communities and a world where AI is used to benefit humanity.
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A Model of Labor Organizing With the Potential for Broad Social Change
In his book Unions, Race, and Popular Democracy, Kim Scipes describes an example of social justice unionism that should change the way that we think about organizing not only in the workplace, but in any response to important issues around the world.
Sep 12, 2026
"The book isn't just a celebration of the past, but an encouragement to see what we can learn to help us today" (Scipes, p. ix, 2026).
Dr. Kim Scipes’ Unions, Race, and Popular Democracy: Building A Progressive Labor Movement is a commemoration of one union’s distinctive approach to social justice unionism that should change the way that we think about organizing not only in the workplace, but in any response to important issues around the world.
Though centered in labor activism from a sociological lens, the findings and framing of Scipes’ work produce an analysis critical for Northwest Indiana and Chicago historians, labor unions, activists, and all individuals pondering the steps to achieving a better world. These findings reach far beyond one workplace, one academic discipline, or one social cause.
To reinforce the diverse application of this work, I approach this review from a communication studies background.
What happens if we all looked outside of ourselves to care, regardless of political party, race, age, gender, or occupation, about intentionally seeking positive change that benefits the well-being of all?
In the book, Scipes reveals two opposing conceptualizations of trade unionism by comparing the organization of two Chicago unions in the steel and meatpacking industries during critical decades of the 20th century.
From the beginning of the book, it is clear that this study was built on a solid foundation. The selection of 1933-55 for this study was important, as this period frames a time of "insurgent trade unionism that emerged from below," with 1933 marking the "beginning of modern American trade unionism" (Scipes, p. 4, 2026).
Further, considering the 1886 struggle for the eight-hour day, the establishment of International Workers Day, the headquarters of the Eugene Debs' led American Railway Union, the site of the Industrial Workers of the World, and more, Chicago was an extremely relevant site for this study (Scipes, p.5, 2026).
From this foundation, three significant claims emerge.
The first is a claim that marks the heart of this book. Upon expansive archival research; the design of a measurement scale; and the synthesis of labor organization records, theory, union case studies, and more, Scipes uncovers that despite being two worker’s unions in the same period of time, comprised of individuals with comparable educational and cultural backgrounds in the same city, faced with comparable issues, both the steelworkers’ (Steel Workers Organizing Committee: SWOC and United Steelworkers of American: USWA) and packinghouse workers’ (Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee: PWOC and United Packinghouse Workers of America: UPWA) unions had two different approaches to addressing racism, white supremacy, and in turn, unionization. Understanding the unions’ navigation of racism is crucial when it is considered how much worker control prevented union organization, as workplace leadership often divided workers by racial group and sparked competition that kept them from realizing efforts that could benefit their collective well-being (Scipes, p. 14-15, 2026).
The steelworkers enacted a form of “business unionism,” while the packinghouse workers took a “social justice unionism” approach.
In the context of this study, the steelworkers' business unionism characteristically refused to address divisions of race among workforces and “took a limited approach to trade unionism, keeping the union divided and weak” (Scipes, p. 190, 2026).
This form of unionism separated members' working lives from their lives outside the plant, leading “to terrible consequence when the regional steel industry collapsed in the 70s and 80s and thousands lost jobs and pensions” (Scipes, p.190, 2026).
Conversely, the meatpackers’ use of social justice unionism brought forth a form of economic trade unionism that “understands the necessity of addressing the needs and concerns of all of its members, in the union, workplace, and the community with mutual efforts to improve the well-being of all” (Scipes, p.197, 2026).
Scipes’ second key claim builds on the first in important ways. Scipes demonstrates the increased power of social justice unionism over business unionism for the well-being of the workers and world positive social change.
To illustrate this, he shared powerful accounts of the way that both unions responded to racial housing discrimination in the community.
The USWA approached racism and discrimination in completely different ways compared with the packinghouse workers. Local steelworker organizations "were not generally interested in becoming involved in community affairs to any great extent" (Scipes, p.179, 2026).
They did not involve themselves in efforts to address racial oppression in the community or housing discrimination. In fact, there is even evidence to suggest the steelworkers ignored the housing riots that took place from 1953-54 at the Trumbull Park Homes in Chicago.
But, the packinghouse workers' fight to "abolish racial terror and discrimination" in the wake of a housing crisis for Black workers was monumental.
Related to their efforts, Scipes cited a powerful quote from United Packinghouse Workers of America President Ralph Helstein: "it is not enough to eliminate discriminatory practices in the plant, but we also have to do it in the community, because you can't work with a man all day long... and then pick up where you left off the next day... it's essential to carry on this kind of activity in the communities in which you lived" (Scipes, p.177, 2026).
The PWOC made it possible for Black workers to walk freely and safely in the community: “Any public space which refused them service would be quickly put out of business by a boycott of the white union members” (Scipes p. 178, 2026). The UPWA efforts continued to accelerate through this period, even leading to the sponsorship of a 1949 conference on housing to address the public housing crisis. Though not a perfect union free of the marginalization of women (p.158), power emanated from the bottom up in the packinghouse workers’ union, enabling popular democracy (p. 192). At every turn, they directly confronted issues of racism and discrimination as conscious union and policy projects.
And importantly, these external efforts did not harm the internal professional well-being of these workers. When measured, Scipes found that “wages for meatpacking workers grew either at the same rate or at a faster rate than it did for steelworkers during the 1939-1958 period… the packinghouse workers did not suffer financially from the social justice unionism of the UPWA…" (Scipes, p. 200, 2026).
Expanding on the relevance of these findings for today’s society, Scipes’ third major claim of this work asserts that we have not had a labor movement since 1949 (p. x). Despite recent efforts to revive the trade union movement through the Chicago Teacher's Union, Starbucks, Amazon, and more (p. ix), Scipes argues that we have only had a trade union movement since 1949, as a trade union movement only looks out for the well-being of union members and a labor movement champions the well-being of all working people (p.x).
Scipes believes that we can revive the labor movement and unify workers. I believe that this book provides us with a road map to unifying all people.
Beyond from the systematic approach by which this study was conducted, my hope is inspired by two additional factors. The first is Scipes’ foundational credibility that informed the body of this work.
Scipes has been active for over 40 years in the labor movement and published more than 300 writings while traveling around the world throughout his life, working in fields in blue-, white-, and pink-collar jobs, working in the print trades, earning his PhD at 51, and teaching for more than 18 years with Purdue University Northwest.
He is still active in Northwest Indiana, Chicago, and the Calumet region today, reinforcing the relevance of the perspective of his research.
“He has seen a range of socioeconomic backgrounds and living conditions across the globe while studying labor practices and movements, from the streets of The Hague to villages in the Philippines,” (Purdue University Northwest, 2021), and cares about finding true understanding through his research process. Of this process, he has been quoted: [When I’m researching,] “I’m out with workers, at union offices, traveling by bus, boat, van. I’m out there integrating with the ordinary people” (Purdue University Northwest, 2021).
He furthered this sentiment with a nod to Alice Walker: “Activism is my rent for living on the planet” (Vasilko, 2022).
So, when Scipes affirms in his book that "with strong, resolute leadership... [workers] can be won to opposing white supremacy and racism... this is not theory, this is not ideology. It is shown to the practices of these labor organizations" (p. 181) I believe that the strength of his credibility is such that we can apply these findings beyond labor organizations.
Which leads me to the second factor of my hope: the currently unrealized positive persuasive power of these findings when applied to society as a whole. It is this part of my review where I can most strongly apply my own scholarly background.
From a communication lens, when I read this book, I was especially interested in the application of Lloyd Bitzer's rhetorical situation (1968), social movement theory (Melucci 1989 and 1995), and the concept of the enthymeme (Brock, 2014).
To preface my application, the enthymeme is a persuasive rhetorical process employed to lead an audience to a desired meaning with intentional word choice by convincing an audience they are co-creators in the process. The phenomenon is imperative for successful collaboration for social change.
And the enthymeme is critical for the creation of meaning, as a proposed meaning has no power without mass consent (Brock, 2014). The enthymeme guides an audience toward the desired mass consent for new meaning, or change. It is important to note that guiding an audience toward mass consent is not inherently evil, it just depends on the speaker's intention. The enthymeme can be used for positive social change by guiding an audience to accept that climate change needs to be addressed, civil rights matter, violence is bad, etc. Most crucial to this study, the enthymeme is most powerful when the audience has common understandings of identity and meaning.
In 1974, French feminist theory argued that the stakes of feminist struggle against patriarchal-driven oppression and discrimination required an overthrow not to the patriarchal system, but to the system of power and the division itself (Vasilko, p. 16, 2023). Meaning that activists must look beyond individual differences and division and fight for the common good of all, leading to a positive, life-enhancing society to benefit all, much as the meatpackers realized in this study.
Lastly, Bitzer (1968) and Melucci (1989 and 1995) have shown us that a shared identity is imperative to keep the momentum of social change protected from co-optation if any exigence is to truly be addressed, which means that social change, overall, requires a shared identity (Vasilko, 2023).
When all of this is synthesized, this leads us back to Scipes for one of the most important theories of his career: polyconflictualism.
Scipes’ polyconflictualism explains the basis for why groups of people who share many comparable characteristics, exist in the same period, and face similar conditions respond to a situation in entirely different ways, just as the steelworkers and packinghouse workers responded completely different to white supremacy and racism. With this theory, he argues that belonging to comparable groups does not automatically guarantee that group members will respond the same way. Instead, group members must be aware of their individual agency and intentionally seek common ground to form collective identities strong enough to address social issues to enhance the well-being of all (Scipes 2025; Scipes 2026).
Recognizing a collective exigence and collective identity is key to positive social change.
Laying out his hopes for the future after his book, Scipes challenged: "What I'm talking about here is building a union pathway to support all who are willing to work to advance the standard of living and improve the social well-being of all... building grassroots power from the ground up in social justice unions controlled by their members... for the purpose of working together and improve conditions for all involved" (Scipes, p. 210-211, 2026).
To readers of this review, I ask an important question as AI impact, environmental destruction, and war accelerate: What happens if we all apply these findings more broadly, beyond labor organization? What happens if we all looked outside of ourselves to care, regardless of political party, race, age, gender, or occupation, about intentionally seeking positive change that benefits the well-being of all?
With strong organization and shared experiences, common threads could be recognized, allowing collective identity and impact to be maximized and a better world to be possible, even as our differences co-exist.
We all have more in common than we realize. It is time to celebrate this book and find ways to apply it to labor unions, organization for positive change, and our world today.
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Staying Grounded When the Earth Cracks: On Political Focus in an Age of Overstimulation
Surviving these times requires more than just consuming information or reacting to every crisis. It requires building the discipline to focus.
Sep 06, 2026
There’s a question that has become almost unavoidable in movement spaces over the last several years: “What is giving you hope right now?
Usually, the question is asked with good intentions—a way to remind people of their why in the middle of authoritarianism rising, civil rights rolling back, endless surveillance, and the noise of it all.
I often asked myself, “What is giving me hope?” because people I deeply respect pushed many of us to think seriously about hope, radical imagination, and our responsibility to believe that another world is possible. And I still deeply believe in the importance of those things.
My father once told me that the thing that kept him focused while incarcerated for 24 years was the hope and vision that one day he would be reconnected to me. I’ve watched my mother make miracles happen and find ways to provide because of the hope and vision she had for me to have a better life than she did.
I’ve realized that long-term discipline requires a certain level of alignment through rest, quiet, and reassessing our personal intersections of passion, curiosity, capacity, skill, and impact.
But I’ve also found myself becoming a little irritated by the question, even wondering whether the way many of us talk about hope in the first world can become disconnected from the actual conditions so much of humanity has endured throughout history. The more I learn, the more I realize that so many people continue struggling under conditions far worse than what many of us can imagine, and yet they still endure and fight.
Just this week, I was reading I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, which focuses on the organizing traditions of the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. In one section, a young organizer from the 1960s explains that every single time he got up to organize Black people in the South, he had to seriously consider the possibility that he could be stabbed, beaten by white mobs, or lynched.
And yet, they organized anyway.
I think about Palestinians enduring genocide and starvation and still fighting. I think about political prisoners who have effectively been abandoned by much of the public and are still fighting.
At some point, I started realizing that hope alone isn’t what’s carrying people through history. Or at least not entirely. Sometimes people continue struggling because they believe they can win. Sometimes they continue because they feel a responsibility to the people around them. Sometimes they fight simply because their independence and ability to live self-determined lives are worth dying for. I still struggle with these things, and my thinking is constantly adapting. Still, I now spend a lot of my time thinking about discipline, focus, and endurance, especially in this political moment.
I have dealt with actual motion sickness since childhood. But I think many of us are dealing with social and political motion sickness right now. We are trying to simultaneously process global crises, local crises, personal crises, historical crises—you name it. Eventually, your nervous system starts collapsing under the weight of it all
What keeps me grounded is not trying to respond to everything, but instead trying my best to stay focused. Paying attention to what is actually within my control. Committing deeply to a set of responsibilities instead of scattering my energy across a thousand directions and not doing anything well.
And for me, that focus has required that I ask difficult questions about where I actually have the capacity to contribute in meaningful ways, and also if my contribution is actually building toward something constructive. I’ve realized that long-term discipline requires a certain level of alignment through rest, quiet, and reassessing our personal intersections of passion, curiosity, capacity, skill, and impact. Otherwise, over time, it becomes much harder to remain grounded, focused, and useful to the people around you.
Without moments of stillness, it becomes difficult to hear yourself clearly enough to know what you actually think, feel, or believe beneath all the noise. Enough space to actually feel what is happening in your body. And creating a little space to process those questions you have been avoiding.
I’m finding that those moments of quiet are helping me see the world, and myself, more clearly.
Part of what prompted me to write this is that I often get asked some version of the same question: “How do you hold all of this?” The work. The reading. The organizing. Being an executive director, being present for family and my daughter, and trying to stay informed about everything happening in the world. And honestly, I’ve been trying to struggle through that question myself. The truth is, there is no perfect answer, and I get it wrong all the damn time.
Building the capacity to endure is a process, like anything else. Part of the reason I’m able to hold the level of responsibility that I currently do is because of conditioning. That foundation was built years ago as a collegiate athlete, structured around 5:00 am workouts, study sessions, classes, two-a-day practices, late nights, and early mornings. It was an environment that forced me to learn how to push through discomfort, organize my time, and function while exhausted.
Today, that same discipline and structure have simply been redirected toward movement work, political education, writing, relationships, and community. But the capacity itself wasn’t built in a year; it required nearly two decades of routine, failure, and adjustment.
I don’t have all the answers, but I do think I’m slowly learning that surviving these times requires more than just consuming information or reacting to every crisis. It requires building the discipline to focus, the patience to grow over time, and the willingness to create enough silence in your life so you can hear yourself think again.
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7 Lessons From the US and Brazil for Durable Democracy
Sociologists Aldon Morris and Nara Roberta Silva remind us that authoritarianism is neither inevitable nor self-defeating: Democracy endures only when ordinary people organize creatively, disrupt oppressive arrangements, build durable institutions, and discover new capacities through struggle.
Aug 11, 2026
By late summer of 2026, the campaign against America's democratic institutions had become almost dizzying in its reach. It moved through turbulent waters from the Strait of Hormuz to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, raised new tariff barriers and imagined golden ballrooms, revived Jim Crow at the polls and McCarthyism at the State Department, and found time, between denunciations of Canadian wildfires and Democratic Socialists of America, to take aim at the Smithsonian Institution.
The widely admired museum, established “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men” and celebrating the 180th anniversary of its founding on August 10, 2026, became the object of a sustained assault. Complaining about the institution’s allegedly “woke agenda,” the Trump administration displaced the Smithsonian’s traditional Folklife Festival by holding something it named "The Great American State Fair" in its place. Notwithstanding the failure of the latter, the Smithsonian’s celebration of the US Republic’s Semiquincentennial also drew the administration’s ire.
The resulting “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” Executive Order (July 24, 2026) demanded “content corrections” and warning notices across Smithsonian exhibits and buildings. On August 4, a federal funding cut of more than 10% reduced the Smithsonian’s budget to its lowest level in over a decade.
If there was any doubt that the censorship and the budget cut belonged to the same antidemocratic project, Samuel J. Redman, a University of Massachusetts Amherst professor and student of Smithsonian history, notes that he cannot “recall a single instance where exhibits have been directly wrestled with by the upper echelons of the federal government.” Among the administration’s grievances was the Smithsonian’s depiction of race relations. The White House report specifically objected to the Smithsonian framing civil rights activist Emmett Till’s murder as being “not just part of a racist past” but a reflection of “our ongoing present” (p.113). It also decried a Smithsonian web page featuring the bullet-riddled historical marker showing where Till’s body was found in 1955.
Crises become politically meaningful only when people build institutions, practice disruption, invent new forms of solidarity, defend truth, sustain hope, and connect local struggles to global ones.
Grappling with this history and its antidemocratic turn, I sat down to have a conversation with two prominent scholars of social movements, Dr. Aldon Morris of Northwestern University and past president of the American Sociological Association, and Dr. Nara Roberta Silva of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and author of an award-winning Brazilian book on the #Occupy movement in the US, for a better understanding of this moment.
The situation in the United States is, after all, not completely unique. Brazil and the United States are both headed into pivotal national elections this fall. Both countries experienced violent coup attempts in 2020. And the two multiracial giants of the Americas are both countries where Black leadership in the struggle for democracy remains critical.
For Dr. Morris, the administration’s consternation at the Emmett Till story is suggestive of the conversations that authoritarians wish to preempt. Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley, Emmett’s mom notably insisted on an open casket at his funeral, “I think everybody needed to know what had happened to Emmett Till.” And so, the world saw Till’s mutilated body and his community’s grief, sparking a global movement. It is “the story about how a mother ignited and fired up the country and therewith the world about racial inequality,” Morris observes.
Before drawing general lessons about the long struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, Morris and Silva pause to reckon with the immediate crisis. Both begin from the creativity and agency of social movements, yet Morris—speaking for a generation shaped by the Civil Rights Movement—admits to a profound sense of historical surprise. “We had no idea that we would be here right now,” he reflects. “We did not think that truth itself would become something that was to be banned.” In his view, the administration’s campaign against the Smithsonian is therefore not only a dispute over museum exhibits or Black history. “He is not simply attacking Black history,” Morris argues. “He is attacking the distribution of truth about the relationships between human beings, races, and nations. An attack on something like the Smithsonian is a flash point revealing the kind of trouble we face.”
For Dr. Silva, a scholar of US movements as well as those active in her native Brazil, the administration initiatives are a “defining feature of our historical moment” characterized by “the erosion of the public sphere.” In fact, looking at former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s negative impact on that country’s democratic project, Silva concludes, that the “very idea of public has been severely damaged.” Although Morris and Silva disagreed about the extent of erosion, both were similarly concerned about authoritarian historical revisionism. Invoking one of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s favorite quotes, “Truth, crushed to Earth, will rise again,” Morris outlined a hopeful, but by no means certain path into the future. “I think that work like that of Nara and myself shows that human agency among the oppressed is a very important social change factor, and it has to be ignited and energized to make a difference.”
Both thinkers are extremely sober about the prospects for democratic change. Looking at the structure of authoritarian movements in Brazil, Silva suggests that we have to address its broad base, even if it is minoritarian in nature: “Coordination exists at the top, but, as a system, the structure is hydra-headed, with several foci working to galvanize followers, create narrative lines, and break new ground.” As such, progressive projects, while themselves broad based and majoritarian in conception, must necessarily carry out institutional reform and enact “a socioeconomic program that meaningfully addresses the crises that brought about the reemergence of authoritarianism.”
Taking a long view, Morris cautions: “What we see is a dialectical process between oppression and efforts of change, social movement activity... We fought a civil war to overthrow slavery in the 1860s. [W. E. B.] Du Bois showed that it was the agency of the slaves themselves that essentially freed the slaves through the general strike. So we get this brief period that looks like we're finally going to have democracy, equality between the races. That lasts for about 11 or 12 years, and then we get the overthrow of Reconstruction, and all of what came after that. All of the violence against Black people, the lynching, and the Jim Crow regime, right?” The US continued “in this oppressive situation and then comes the Civil Rights Movement” and only to be followed by the current, long rollback. “My sense,” Morris avers, “is that social movements, especially the effective ones, are always trial and error.”
Following along with Silva, Morris offers a transnational vision: “We need grassroots movements connected from the United States to Brazil, to South Africa, to Gaza—to all over including the Congo. What I'm saying is that the struggle has always had these global dimensions, but the world has never been so globalized as it is now. We have to be much more concerned with worldwide democracy, worldwide transformation, because what we know is that the systems of oppression are global.”
Before outlining the elements of a hoped-for transnational, pan-democratic movement, Morris finds hope in the face of dismal, on-the-ground facts: The shared global attention to Gaza. This point often confounds liberal and conservative commentators alike, as seen in the handwringing over Michigan US Senate nominee Abdul al-Sayed and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, both whom have been outspoken on Palestine. But, for Morris, recalling the Emmett Till moment, “It is hard for large numbers of people across the globe to really wrap their minds around 20 to 30 thousand babies being starved to death and killed, to whole families being wiped out, and 90% of the population and more dislocated, the destruction of every university in Gaza, the destruction of hospitals, and so forth. This is the one place that seems to be generating some kind of international coherence.”
Silva agrees that a transnational human rights politics is well established, but she is concerned, “We are still a little lost about how to operate in the new terrain of digital media ecosystems, fragmented and precarious workforces, declining organizations, and unstable party systems.” Further, she laments that movements that often put hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people onto the streets nevertheless may secure few immediate positive outcomes or even significant media attention—a point explored adroitly in several national contexts by journalist Vincent Bevins in If We Burn. For Bevins, as with Silva and Morris, the capacity to formulate demands, move beyond mere mobilization to develop organization and leadership, explain the discrepancy between the scale of popular mobilization and outcomes.
Morris shares this concern: “Another March on Washington to celebrate the 1963 March on Washington is not going to accomplish anything as long as it is merely ritualized behavior. The real challenge is whether this generation of activists will be creative again—whether they will figure out how to engage in protest that matters. Marches and demonstrations become ritual when they don’t create social disruption against oppressive forces.”
Silva sees a version of this dilemma in Brazil, as social movements gained greater access to the state under Workers’ Party administrations but also saw their capacity for independent mobilization and disruption decline. Yet recent experience shows that protesting can still exert considerable leverage—in September 2025, nationwide demonstrations blocked attempts to further entrench oligarchic control. Some of the most effective moments of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's current administration have come precisely when pressure from below has reinforced, or forced, action from above. For Silva, the Brazilian experience suggests that the challenge for social movements is not simply to mobilize large numbers of people but also to disrupt political routines.
Over the course of our conversation together, the two sociologists reach agreement on the following lessons for durable democracy:
- Crises matter, but they do not by themselves produce successful mobilizations. Prompted by a question about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minnesota, Morris and Silva emphasized that the decisive issue is how people transform moments of crisis into collective action. Morris’ scholarship on the US Black community’s early bus boycotts during the Civil Rights Movement offers one such example. On the other hand, Silva writes about how Brazilian protests over bus fares were initiated by leftists but later co-opted by the far right.
- Movement institutions and organizations matter. Durable movements require infrastructure: legal support, sustained dialogue between activists and scholars, leadership development, and the patient work of building organized communities.
- Disruption is necessary. Alluding to my own South African heritage, Morris asked me, “What did Mandela’s ANC do? It made Apartheid ungovernable.” Returning to the United States, he continued: “It wasn’t just marching. It wasn’t just singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ It was crippling the economy in Birmingham. The activists mastered the process of social disruption.” Channeling Dr. King, Morris recalled the wisdom of creating crises “so crisis-packed that the oppressors have got to deal with us.”
- Truth is a social movement resource. Neither Silva nor Morris is tempted by epistemological relativism. As Morris put it, “We are not going to go backwards and act as if the truth doesn't matter anymore.” The attacks on the Smithsonian, museums, books, and critical race theory matter because authoritarianism seeks to monopolize historical understanding. A democracy movement, by contrast, depends on an accurate account of history and the public institutions capable of sustaining it.
- If truth is a democratic resource, so too is hope. But hope should not be confused with naïveté. It requires acknowledging the seriousness of authoritarian movements while recognizing that history still offers grounds for optimism. Hope arises not only from past victories, but also from democratic possibilities emerging in the present—from global solidarity with Gaza to neighbors standing with neighbors in Minneapolis and Chicago. These moments remind us that ordinary people continue to discover new capacities for collective action and democratic renewal.
- Internationalism is indispensable: Democracy must become transnational. In response to Silva’s statement that Brazilian and US authoritarian movements are already global, Morris calls for “pan-democracy movements.” Democracy movements must become equally interconnected, for “the local and the global are now inseparable.” Yet, befitting a social scientist who made local organizers visible where others had often emphasized charismatic leaders, Morris also cautions: “You can't forget what's happening at the local level and just go global, but you can't just concentrate on the local and not go global.” Both thinkers view recent electoral insurgencies in the United States as promising precisely because they have incorporated global themes, international solidarity, and organizing among immigrant workers—the most globalized of local actors.
- Finally, people discover themselves through struggle. Reformulated several times over the course of our conversation, this point gathers the preceding lessons together: Crises become politically meaningful only when people build institutions, practice disruption, invent new forms of solidarity, defend truth, sustain hope, and connect local struggles to global ones. In that process, movements do more than oppose domination; they also create the capacities, organizations, and democratic subjects needed to overcome it.
For me, then, the attack on the Smithsonian is about far more than the fate of public museums or competing interpretations of the past. It is part of a broader struggle over whether democratic societies can sustain the institutions, historical memory, and public spaces needed to preserve truth, solidarity, and collective action. Morris and Silva remind us that authoritarianism is neither inevitable nor self-defeating: Democracy endures only when ordinary people organize creatively, disrupt oppressive arrangements, build durable institutions, and discover new capacities through struggle. If there is a lesson from US history and from contemporary Brazil for this moment, it is that the next democratic turn will not be granted from above; it will be ignited from below.
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De-ICE Citizens Bank: A Model of a Successful Civil Resistance Campaign
The grassroots effort was a textbook example of sustained, targeted civil resistance that can undermine Trump administration policies; by chipping away at corporate supporters of programs like ICE, citizen activism can erode and stop these initiatives.
Aug 02, 2026
Just as a great loaf of bread requires the right ingredients to rise, a winning civil resistance campaign needs three essentials to rise up: a compelling vision, broad community engagement, and a spark for action.
The De-ICE Citizens Bank campaign had all these ingredients, which is why it succeeded in forcing Citizens Bank to stop financing prison company giants, CoreCivic and GEO Group, operating dozens of detention centers for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The Rhode Island bank severed its ties in mid-July after months of protests and other targeted actions across the country.
Hundreds of rallies, faith-led actions, shareholder demands, billboard and flyover campaigns, and withering financial pressure—withdrawals totaling $380 million, with more still happening—created a tsunami of opposition the bank could not ignore.
It is a textbook example of sustained, targeted civil resistance that can undermine Trump administration policies. By chipping away at corporate supporters of programs like ICE, citizen activism can erode and stop these initiatives.
While Bank of America and a half-dozen other banks ended their relationships with private prison companies in 2019, Citizens strengthened its ties, providing more than $2.8 billion in loans and other credit to CoreCivic and GEO Group over a dozen years.
“No, Citizens Bank won’t credit you at all for its decision, but it is what it is,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said, during a 10-minute segment on the campaign win in late July. “Actions have consequences, including when you work hard, when you organize, and when you decide to just never give up.
"And then the day does come when you win.”
It Started With One Person
This civil resistance story began with a single person, a woman in Texas, taking a stand. She didn’t carry a protest sign or march alone. She built a website.
Horrified by ICE’s mass incarceration campaign early last year, research-nerd activist Laura Berlin, a mother of two teenagers, built a website, boycottcitizens.org, to expose Citizens Bank’s role.
While Bank of America and a half-dozen other banks ended their relationships with private prison companies in 2019, Citizens strengthened its ties, providing more than $2.8 billion in loans and other credit to CoreCivic and GEO Group over a dozen years.
Drawing on Securities and Exchange Commission filings and other documents, the website showed Citizen’s duplicity, loan-by-loan, year-by-year. Still, the website didn’t get much attention when it was launched 13 months ago, only a dozen or so views a day in the first few months.
That all changed in January when ICE’s aggressive crackdown sparked and exploded. Just as a dozen Northeast activists were organizing their first coordinated protest day against Citizens Ban—an effort of the new De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition—mother and poet Renee Good was gunned down January 7 by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.
Campaign interest and traffic on Berlin’s website took off. When Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse, was shot and killed 17 days later in the same city, momentum skyrocketed.
And It Kept Growing
On January 24, the campaign held three-dozen rallies in six states. By March, there were 70 protests in a dozen states. Three months later, 140 protests were organized nationwide, drawing in thousands of regular people angry about an immigration crackdown that has booked and detained more than 600,000 people, 66,000 of whom have been deported.
As protests swelled, coalition members brought new partners into the campaign. One brought in a key union group and activist students at Brown University. Others brought in faith groups. Dozens of local Indivisible groups also joined, including a Rightful Resistance group in New York City that specialized in billboard campaigns.
The Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO), a powerful faith group with deep historic ties to Citizens Bank, was an especially important partner.
The city’s pullout was a bit of a surprise, with the vote and initial withdrawal of $150 million happening in less than 24 hours. It was a clear sign that the campaign, which had swelled to 175 groups in 17 states, was now a movement.
In the early 2000s, GBIO teamed up with Citizens to offer a financial literacy program for its immigrant members around Boston. The bank also lowered fees for immigrants sending remittances to their families. “We were proud to bank with Citizens, and I was proud to be a member of the bank’s board of directors at that time,” wrote Rev. Ray Hammond, a key GBIO leader, in a recent column.
By winter 2026, the good vibes were over.
In early March, GBIO sent a letter to the bank requesting it cut financial ties with the prison companies. In April, Hammond and other shareholders confronted Citizens CEO Bruce Van Saun at the bank’s annual meeting in Providence. As Van Saun answered questions about reputation and legal risks, hundreds of protesters, young and old, sang and chanted loudly outside. They also pledged to withdraw their deposits if changes were not made.
The financial pressure campaign, "Not with Our Money, Citizens," came at a key moment. While rallies and billboards boosted awareness and sullied the bank’s reputation, the campaign now had a lever to harm the bank financially.
Within a few weeks, GBIO and the coalition had mobilized $20 million in withdrawal pledges by churches, synagogues, nonprofits, and individual customers angered by the bank’s role in bankrolling prisons. By May, GBIO had pulled $2 million of its deposits, while a similar faith organization in Ohio, the Greater Cleveland Congregations, was threatening to do the same.
Millions of withdrawals may sound like a lot, but it’s relatively small for a bank like Citizens, with $233 billion in assets. At weekly meetings, coalition members brainstormed how it could increase the financial bleeding—to turn those millions into hundreds of millions.
New Jersey Takes a Stand
The answer came in June and the spark came from New Jersey. After weeks of hunger strikes and protests at GEO Group’s Delaney Hall ICE prison in Newark, municipalities started fighting back. The first blow was Jersey City’s June 7 vote to close its accounts with Citizens and pull all $276 million of its deposits.
The city’s pullout was a bit of a surprise, with the vote and initial withdrawal of $150 million happening in less than 24 hours. It was a clear sign that the campaign, which had swelled to 175 groups in 17 states, was now a movement.
One month later, Montclair, New Jersey did the same—another $91 million in deposits out the door. And other communities, including Bloomfield and Hoboken, were looking to follow suit.
Three days after Montclair’s vote, Citizens Bank called it quits. With no public fanfare, it released a statement to a Boston Globe reporter saying, “Citizens has determined that it is now appropriate to exit the credit facilities for these clients.”
The bank called it a ‘business decision,” while repeatedly downplaying the role of activists.
We know better.
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Funders Need to Catch Up to the Anti-Data Center Movement
The anti-fracking movement and the Inflation Reduction Act coalition were both built in part on early philanthropic bets on local and national organizing; data center resistance can follow the same pattern, but only if the money shows up while the moment is live.
Aug 01, 2026
The fastest-growing movement in the country is running on almost no institutional money, and it's effectively fighting against some of the world’s most rapacious billionaires.
It is an organic, grassroots movement to stop AI data centers.
Data centers not only raise electricity bills, they are draining water often already in short supply, drive pollution and emissions, and are routinely negotiated in secret.
Communities have figured this out faster than local governments, and with stunning success, local groups are winning their campaigns against data center projects all over the country.
Fund the organizers and trainers who can turn 833 local fights into a coherent national and international movement without flattening what makes each one local. And fund fast.
Opponents successfully blocked or delayed at least 75 projects worth roughly $130 billion in the first quarter of 2026, matching all of 2025 in three months. Active opposition groups more than doubled to 833 across 49 states. Legislators filed more than 300 data center bills in the first six weeks of the year.
None of this came from a philanthropic strategy, but rather from neighbors and unlikely allies in church basements and county planning hearings.
Movements at this stage have energy and passion. And they have potential and momentum. But what they don't have is the resources that can sustain a strategic fight. No staff to hold momentum between hearings, no legal defense when developers sue, no trainers to turn a first-time zoning meeting attendee into an organizer, and nothing linking the fight in Prince William County to the ones in Hancock County, South Jersey, Dublin, and Santiago.
The anti-fracking movement and the coalition behind the Inflation Reduction Act were both built in part on early philanthropic bets on local and national organizing. Data center resistance can follow the same pattern, but only if the money shows up while the moment is live.
As the most significant institutional funder of non-violent, disruptive climate activism, Climate Emergency Fund directs resources where grassroots energy, public concern, and campaign opportunity most clearly align. Right now, that is the AI data center resistance. So far in 2026, more than a third of our granted support has gone to groups planning campaigns around data centers and AI. Our venture philanthropy model moves early-stage funding to new groups fast, sometimes before they have a name, and stays close through what we call intensive accompaniment. The data center fight rewards exactly this approach, because the decisive moments are rezoning votes and permit hearings that will not wait for a grant cycle.
I know the objections, because I hear them from funders and civil society. Some say climate philanthropy should retreat to safer ground while nonprofits are under attack. Some, following the Gates Foundation's lead, want to pivot to affordability. Others, like Sunrise Movement, argue the fight against authoritarianism comes first. I understand all three impulses, and I think the data center fight answers all three.
This is the affordability issue: Electricity prices are, as Charles Hua of the consumer group PowerLines put it, “the new eggs,” with residential bills in Indiana up 17.5% in a year and Georgia Power customers absorbing six rate increases in two years.
This is the democracy issue: communities discovering projects negotiated in secret, behind nondisclosure agreements and shell companies, then organizing to demand consent. They understand fundamentally that the future belongs to all of us, not just seven tech billionaires and their allies.
And it is the climate issue: The International Energy Agency projects that gas and coal will meet more than 40% of new data center electricity demand through 2030, with retired coal plants at risk of coming back online.
Funders do not have to choose among their priorities here. This is the nexus.
It is also, frankly, the most defensible grant a climate or democracy funder can make. At the very least, supporting a community group that testifies or protests at a county board meeting is constitutionally protected, small-d democratic activity with bipartisan support. What a strange thing that fear of an administration touting threats against “anti-tech extremism” would cause funder retrenchment around perhaps the most politically unifying issue we’ve seen in a generation. In an era when funders worry about risk, this is what low risk and high leverage look like at the same time.
So the ask is specific. Fund general operating support, because these groups need salaries, not deliverables. Fund pooled legal defense, because litigation designed to drain and intimidate is coming. Fund the organizers and trainers who can turn 833 local fights into a coherent national and international movement without flattening what makes each one local. And fund fast.
Philanthropy likes to say it provides risk capital for social change. The people are already in the room. The only question is whether we will fund them to stay there.
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From the Haymarket 8 to the Michigan 8
How the state uses conspiracy charges to crush social movements.
Jul 14, 2026
On the morning of June 10, 2026, the FBI, together with an ensemble of local and state police departments, including the University of Michigan Police Department, conducted a series of simultaneous raids and arrests in Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin in spectacular militarized fashion. The operation targeted eight individuals engaged in Palestine solidarity activism at the University of Michigan.
That afternoon, FBI director Kashyap Patel announced that the targeted individuals “engaged in a coordinated campaign of violent, criminal acts seeking to pressure University of Michigan leaders and other businesses in the Eastern District of Michigan to cut off all ties with Israel.” The alleged violent, criminal acts in question? Property damage. The coordinated campaign in question? Per their indictment, “using encrypted messages, social media, and overseas collaboration platforms […] [and] the internet and social media to broadcast their message.”
To be clear, the Michigan Eight are not being charged with property damage or vandalism. Instead, they are facing charges of conspiracy to transmit a threat, conspiracy to tamper with a witness, and destruction of property to prevent seizure. Less than a week after the raids against the Michigan Eight, 15 individuals were similarly indicted in Minnesota on various conspiracy charges for their participation in community activism and mutual aid in the context of Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s (ICE) Operation Metro Surge that saw 2,000 ICE agents deployed in Minnesota, leading to over 3,000 arrests, two protesters shot by ICE agents, and one individual dead in ICE custody. The conspiracy charges faced by the Michigan Eight and the Minnesota 15 carry a maximum sentence of 5-20 years and, when there are multiple counts of it, defendants face potentially decades in prison. A week after the Minnesota 15 indictments, anti-ICE protesters were sentenced to between 30 and 100 years in prison after being convicted of various conspiracy charges related to protest activity at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas.
These are just three out of several other recent cases involving social movements and conspiracy charges. What links them is not the recurrence of some crime called “conspiracy,” but the conversion of ordinary political association into proof of unlawful intent. Conspiracy charges are among the most common charges brought against social movements precisely because they represent an extremely broad, far-reaching, and powerful tool of the state. You do not need to have taken any action, nor do you need to know the other alleged co-conspirators to be found guilty. Federal prosecutors simply have to establish that at least one alleged conspirator has taken an overt (legal or illegal) act toward the alleged plan. Needless to say, virtually anything can be claimed to be an overt act.
The only conspiracy related to the Michigan Eight or the Minnesota 15 is the one that has been constructed by the federal government.
Aside from formal charges of conspiracy, there is also the more diffuse concept of conspiracy that the prosecution in these cases use more generally to paint activists as dangerous, terroristic individuals engaged in a plot against the state. For example, during the detention hearing on June 12, 2026, for four of the Michigan Eight, one of the federal prosecutors, Margaret M. Smith, assistant United States attorney at the Department of Justice, made several references to the defendants being part of a revolution and a “revolution organization.” This language, as we shall see, has a long association with conspiracy charges. It does more than just describe the alleged beliefs of defendants. It represents the bridge by which belief, affiliation, and collective organization can be made to stand in for actual evidence of particular criminal acts.
But what does the nebulous concept of conspiracy mean and why does the government keep using it and who is it meant to target? The late Michael Parenti once noted that “conspiracy means to collude together in secrecy for what are potentially illegal or immoral ends and [the ruling elites] do this all the time and they talk about the necessity of it and they even give it a name, they call it national security.” Indeed, the only conspiracy related to the Michigan Eight or the Minnesota 15 is the one that has been constructed by the federal government. In fact, across more than a century of American history, the recurring pattern that has shaped the state’s response to dissent and protest has been the tendency to treat collective organization itself as a crime. The First Amendment may protect the freedom of speech and assembly as the very conditions of democratic politics, but conspiracy charges have long made these supposed rights conditional.
The Long History of Conspiracy Charges
The state has a long history of using the concept and charge of conspiracy as a weapon against social movements that have sought to expand democratic freedoms. We must therefore place the particular case of the Michigan Eight and the Minnesota 15 in a longer history that involves the Haymarket Trial (1886-1887), the Espionage Act (1917), the Smith Act (1940), the Anti-Riot Act (1968), RICO (1970), and more contemporary post-9/11 developments such as the Patriot Act (2001). These historical moments represent the cumulative expansion in what the state can make conspiracy mean: from attributing responsibility for an unidentified act to an entire radical milieu, to treating speech as dangerous, group membership as suspicious, mundane logistical organization as evidence of criminal intent, and decentralized movements as racketeering enterprises. While, in case of the Michigan Eight, the targets are Palestine solidarity activists, and while in the case of the Minnesota 15, the targets are anti-ICE organizers, the tools that have been assembled and are still being expanded and perfected can and will be applied to other groups. What is at stake here is no less than ability to collectively organize to create a better and more just world and to resist oppression.
In 1941, the legal scholar Albert J. Harno wrote that, due to its “elasticity” and “vague boundaries,” the concept of conspiracy “presents serious potential dangers of abuse.” Only, there is nothing “potential” about its dangers. From some of its earliest applications right to the last two weeks, the charge of conspiracy has been the bane of organized labor and other broad social movements that the state has sought to repress. One facet of the seemingly endless elasticity of the concept of conspiracy relates to the category of unindicted conspirators. In the case of the Michigan Eight and the Minnesota 15, this term is constantly invoked in the indictments. Aside from the fact that unindicted conspirators cannot testify on behalf of the defense, prosecutors can introduce the out-of-court statements of unindicted conspirators in court as evidence against the defendants without these statements considered hearsay. Prosecutors can thus introduce texts, emails, phone calls, et cetera, involving unindicted conspirators as evidence against the defendants even if the defendants were not a direct party to these communications. Moreover, the shadow of not knowing whether one is or is not an unindicted conspirator introduces even more fear into social movements. This uncertainty is a feature of conspiracy law and one of its political effects, thus extending the coercive reach of an indictment beyond the courtroom.
Conspiracy and Labor Repression
Nineteenth-century labor cases show where this logic first acquired its legal form and political function. Labor Studies scholar Risa Lieberwitz notes that the charge of conspiracy has historically “provided a powerful weapon against groups advocating political and social change [and] the labor movement [in particular] was the target of many criminal conspiracy prosecutions during the 19th century, beginning with the Philadelphia Cordwainers’ Case of 1806, which was both the first criminal conspiracy trial in the United States, and the first recorded labor case.” If the Cordwainers’ Case demonstrated that workers coming together to demand higher wages could be a criminal conspiracy, the trial of the Haymarket Eight showed how conspiracy could make an entire political milieu culpable for an act that the state could not directly attribute to any one defendant.
On May 4, 1886, a bomb was thrown during a labor demonstration at Haymarket Square in Chicago. Till this day, no one can say for certain who threw that bomb. During the trial, prosecutors could not prove who threw it nor prove that the defendants had planned the bombing. They could not even, in some cases, prove that they had been present when the bomb was thrown. What they could prove was that the Haymarket Eight had given speeches, written articles, edited newspapers, belonged to radical organizations, and broadly advocated for a social revolution.
The concept of conspiracy was what allowed the prosecution to transform this into evidence of collective responsibility for the bombing. The prosecution did not need to identify the bomber; it only needed to argue that the Haymarket Eight had been part of a conspiracy to create the conditions in which such a bombing became likely. In other words, the defendants were guilty of belonging to and contributing to a radical workers’ milieu that the state had defined as dangerous. Haymarket helped established what would become a recurring pattern where membership in particular groups (whether well-defined or as vague as “antifa”) and speech (like posting messages on social media) and acts (like organizing a meeting or using the internet) can become evidence of a conspiracy.
Conspiracy, Speech, and Political Organizations
Haymarket thus supplied the basic argument that the state would repeatedly adapt: When direct proof of individual action was absent, prosecutors could substitute much fuzzier ideas. World War I expanded this basic framework under the sign of national security. The federal government used the Espionage Act of 1917 against socialists, labor organizers, anti-war activists, and others who opposed conscription or otherwise criticized the war. During this time, the Department of Justice conducted a series of mass raids and arrests, collectively known as the Palmer Raids (1919–1920), in more than 30 cities and towns, targeting thousands of individuals, particularly Italian-American and Jewish-American socialists, the so-called “hyphenated Americans” that President Woodrow Wilson railed against, warning that “any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.”
In Schenck v. United States (1919), the Supreme Court unanimously held that the First Amendment did not protect Charles Schenck, who had distributed anti-draft and anti-war flyers to draft-age men, from prosecution under the Espionage Act precisely because, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. concluded, "The words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.” In other words, the Supreme Court ruled that otherwise lawful speech could be punished if it was thought likely to obstruct or encourage resistance to government aims.
In Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the Supreme Court did not expressly overrule Schenck v. United States, but it effectively superseded Schenck's clear-and-present-danger standard and, on the surface, introduced a more expansive interpretation of the First Amendment, holding that advocacy of illegal action cannot be punished unless it is “directed towards inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” Yet, the so-called Brandenburg test still reveals the subjective nature of, well, law in general, its interpretation, and its enforcement. In this case, the key subjective terms are “imminent” and “likely.” Whether an action is imminent and whether speech is likely to produce an action requires a level of guesswork that is wholly reminiscent of the trial of the Haymarket Eight.
Described as a “prison for ideas” by the National Committee to Win Amnesty for the Smith Act Victims in 1954, the Smith Act of 1940 would extend this logic within the context of the Cold War. Among other things, the Smith Act criminalized “knowingly or willingly advocate, abet, advise, or teach the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing any government in the United States by force or violence.” In the late 1940s and 1950s, communists in particular were prosecuted under the law, not because they had launched an armed insurrection, or even taken material steps toward an armed insurrection, but because they belonged to organizations that taught Marxist theory and advocated for communist revolution.
Like their predecessors in 1886 who did not have to prove that the Haymarket Eight had thrown the bomb, prosecutors in these cases did not have to prove that communists had entered into an agreement to commit a crime (the most basic definition of conspiracy), but that the Communist Party itself was a criminal enterprise. The state did not need to demonstrate that any communists had agreed to carry out a specific unlawful act in the near future. Instead, their membership in the party and their ideological beliefs were sufficient proof of criminal liability. Charisse Burden-Stelly summarizes it well, writing that “membership in the CPUSA automatically meant conspiracy of insurrection.”
Conspiracy and Protest
In the context of popular protests and anti-war mobilization, the Anti-Riot Act of 1968 made it a federal offense to cross state lines or use interstate facilities with the intent to incite, organize, or encourage a riot. If the Smith Act treated membership as evidence of insurrectionary conspiracy, the Anti-Riot Act adapted the same logic to the mass movements of the 1960s by treating travel, communication, planning, and assembly as evidence of an intention to produce disorder. The Chicago Seven would be the first to be prosecuted under the Anti-Riot Act and charged with conspiracy to incite a riot and crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot. Again, we see the danger in the elasticity of the key terms of the act that allowed the federal government to frame lawful activities taken to organize a protest, in this case at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, as evidence of unlawful intent, namely, to incite a riot.
On February 18, 1970, seven defendants were acquitted on conspiracy charges, two were acquitted on all charges, and the remaining five were convicted of travelling across state lines with intent to incite a riot and sentenced to five years in prison. Over two years later, those convictions would be overturned by an appeals court panel that found numerous errors made by the judge. Yet, the damage to the defendants’ lives and to the broader public had been done. Even when defendants are acquitted or have their convictions overturned, conspiracy charges succeed in the ideological work for which they are perhaps best designed, leaving behind a public narrative in which dissent and protest are not cornerstones of democracy, but dangerous, hidden plots conducted by shadowy figures.
Even unsuccessful prosecutions impose a real material and mental cost on defendants and, more generally, they impose a heavy cost on the public at large, forcing all of us to consider whether participation in collective protest or forms of dissent may expose us to repression.
The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) Act of 1970 would give an even more expansive tool for prosecutors to bind heterogeneous individuals and acts under the label of a single, criminal enterprise. RICO has increasingly been used by federal and state prosecutors to target labor unions and broad social movements. The statute’s breadth gives prosecutors considerable flexibility in defining a criminal enterprise and explaining how otherwise separate acts fit together.
In September 2023, Georgia prosecutors brought a sweeping state RICO indictment against dozens of activists associated with opposition to the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, commonly known as Cop City. The indictment alleged that a broad protest movement constituted a criminal enterprise and cited a wide range of activities, including alleged acts of property destruction, distribution of literature, mutual aid, reimbursements, fundraising, communications among activists, and protests and demonstrations.
Prosecutors used the flimsiest of evidence to rope even more people into this “conspiracy” as “co-conspirators.” Signing a petition was enough to get a visit by the police and having mud on one’s shoes in a forest was taken as evidence of participation in alleged acts of property damage at a construction site. The significance of the Stop Cop City case lies less in the specific allegations, but in the indictment’s construction of a broad social movement as a unified, organized criminal enterprise. Social movements are almost by definition heterogenous and decentralized. They always comprise individuals with different goals, tactics, and levels of commitment.
The dismissal of the RICO charges against the defendants in December 2025 does not make this case any less troubling (the state could refile charges or repeal the dismissal). On the contrary, the dismissal sharpens the stakes of indictments like this. While the dismissal shows how weak the charges were in the first place, the state successfully punished the defendants. Even unsuccessful prosecutions impose a real material and mental cost on defendants and, more generally, they impose a heavy cost on the public at large, forcing all of us to consider whether participation in collective protest or forms of dissent may expose us to repression. From this perspective, it does not matter much that a court may eventually reject prosecutorial overreach when the threat of prosecution may shape the way we behave.
Responding to Repression with Trust and Solidarity
One lesson that we can learn from the historical continuity between each of these episodes is that movements for economic and racial justice, movements against wars and imperialism, and anti-fascism as a concept (through the targeting of “antifa”) have all been described, in different moments, as threats to public order. In each case, the state and its prosecutors have been able to portray individuals participating in these movements as public enemies. The language of conspiracy is especially useful in this process because it turns ordinary features of collective life into suspicion. Each of these historical cases has contributed to the ever-expanding use of conspiracy charges in state repression of social movements. Across these cases, the object of prosecution moves further and further away from identifiable unlawful acts to the social relations that make collective action possible. This past should inform our understanding of the recent cases and remind us not to take at face value the charges against the Michigan Eight and the Minnesota 15.
Like the cases from the past, the present charges are an attack on political speech and, more broadly, all those who seek to collectively work toward a more just and freer future. Isaac Sant, one of the Minnesota 15, has noted that what they are facing is “not a normal criminal trial; this is a political case, this is political repression against organizers.” The long history of conspiracy charges and state repression suggests that political repression cannot be defeated alone in the courtroom. This is because conspiracy cases do not just target the named defendants; the broader targets are concepts like trust, collective organization, and solidarity, that is to say the very bases of social movements.
Like previous generations of workers faced with political repression, we must seize the current crises as an opportunity to revitalize the labor movement from the ground up. That revitalization is not going to come from union leadership, but from you and other rank-and-file worker-organizers. As the veteran labor organizer Daniel Gross recently noted, in Unions of Our Own (2026), “A truly just society with reliable economic security, where we can live freely on a healthy planet, simply cannot happen without organized workers and liberatory unions.”
This moment threatens our very ability to collectively organize for a better world at the same time as it represents an opportunity for workers everywhere to double down on collective organization, whether it is to keep our fellow workers safe from abductions; to organize toward divestment from companies profiting from war and genocide; or to fight the daily struggles of autonomy, respect, and dignity on the shop floor. In all cases, every victory, big or small, is not a concession, but a privilege that workers have wrested from state and capital. The stakes of not meeting this moment could not be heavier.
Correction: The piece has been updated to reflect the fact that Brandenburg v. Ohio superseded, rather than overruled, Schenck v. United States.
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America Works Best When We the People Are in Charge
When ordinary people organize, mobilize, and refuse to accept the dictates of an elite few, America moves forward.
Jul 03, 2026
Two hundred fifty years ago, Americans rejected monarchy. They rejected the idea that power should rest in the hands of one person, one family, or a distant ruling class. Instead, they enshrined an American promise: Legitimate power comes from the people.
Our Constitution opens with three words: “We the People.” As the country marks its 250th anniversary, that promise is worth remembering: In America, the people are supposed to be in charge.
Indeed, every day we see neighbors working together to improve their lives, their communities, and the country.
Earlier this year, hundreds of residents of San Marcos, Texas, packed into public meetings with concerns about a new data center. The Caldwell/Hays Examiner, a local paper, summarized the sentiment: “Electricity bills may soon spike while access to clean water diminishes drastically, given the unfathomably giant data center on its way.”
Do “We the People” govern ourselves, or are we ruled by concentrated power?
The local government rejected the unpopular project, and similar efforts are taking place across the country. In every place the message is clear: The people who live there, not a distant tech company, should be in charge of the community’s resources.
Rural communities are also taking on Big Ag. For example, Grassroots Organizing of Western Wisconsin brought residents together and passed local safeguards that limit threats from factory farms and support family farmers, clean water, and local infrastructure.
Iowans won a big victory against a global pesticide manufacturer. Knowing their state’s unusually high cancer rates, Iowa Farmers Union mobilized from the bottom up and blocked a law that would have shielded a billion-dollar corporation from accountability.
These patriotic efforts help fulfill the promise of “We the People.” They also show what’s possible when people come together to shape the decisions that affect our lives.
Unfortunately, few Americans feel in control right now. We face an unpredictable economy, cuts to healthcare, cruel and reckless Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, and attacks on mail-in ballots. Even that recent win in Iowa is in jeopardy—the Supreme Court just shielded the pesticide company from thousands of lawsuits brought by farmers and families who blame Roundup for their cancer.
These are all symptoms of a single disease: a nation where too much power rests with an elite few rather than with ordinary Americans. That’s exactly what researchers at Topos Partnership found. After listening to nearly 5,000 Americans, we heard one idea emerge: The people are supposed to be in charge.
The real story isn’t Democrats versus Republicans, or newcomers versus citizens, or some fabricated clash of civilizations. The real story—the one that unifies and energizes—is about who decides. Do “We the People” govern ourselves, or are we ruled by concentrated power?
Most Americans in our research recognize that the answer to that question is complicated, but also that being reminded of our defining story could help heal a fractured nation. As one moderate Colorado man expressed: “When everyday people don’t feel in charge, it creates anger, frustration, bitterness. But when everyday people feel like they’re having an impact, it creates a sense of belonging.”
When ordinary people organize, mobilize, and refuse to accept the dictates of an elite few, America moves forward. We’ve seen it in workers establishing safer workplaces and the civil rights movement expanding “who counts” in our country. We decided our nation belonged to us—and acted like it.
Let America’s history and recent successes be the inspiration. This July 4, the most patriotic thing we can do is remember whose hands this country is supposed to be in: ours. When we come together, the people are in charge.
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