Anatomy of a movement

All over the country, people are trying to figure out how to push back against Elon Musk and Donald Trump, to stop the damage they’re doing to the country. The U.S. has a long history of successful resistance movements, but most often, it’s been marginalized groups who have shouldered the burden, often fighting for their survival and simultaneously improving life for all of us.

This time around, a rogue administration is swinging a baseball bat at the federal government itself, which is beginning to affect people across the board. Across a ten-day period in March, the Social Security website has crashed four times. The White House is planning to cut 80,000 jobs from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Based on Treasury receipts to date, it looks like $500 billion in taxes may go uncollected, due to staff cuts and lax enforcement. The future of the US Postal System is threatened. People are unhappy.

Some Americans have been on the front lines, calling leaders to account for decades, but those who are newer to taking action in their community are now trying to find their way. This isn’t something that can happen instantly. To be organic and represent the community is a process.

Today I want to offer a snapshot of that process, along with my trip yesterday to Roanoke, Virginia. I want to look at the challenges facing a blue dot in a sea of red when dealing with unresponsive representatives. My hope is that it will let people around the country who may not yet be plugged into action against the Trump administration get a glimpse of how one community is working out what to do.

On the road again

Last Thursday, my friend Dina Imbriani wrote to ask if I would come and speak to a group of protesters on Monday. Those of you who have been following these Tuesday posts know that Dina decided after the last election that she needed to do something. She set up an organization called DoGood Virginia, bringing together people who want to help.

The first meeting, where she also asked me to speak, was made up mostly of her friends. Their last meeting had over 300 attendees. It’s about three and a half hours by car to Roanoke from my home in Northern Virginia, but I said I would go.

Since I live just inside the beltway, it’s easy for me to cover big national events in the nation’s capital. For my readers and listeners, I’ve reported from DC on Inauguration Day, from USAID headquarters the day news came down that Musk wanted it shuttered, from the steps of the Capitol on Presidents Day, and most recently, the March for Science.

And typically, it’s true that the urban centers and capital cities are where the end stages of the fates of nations are decided, by the people or by tyrants. But in large nations that cover multiple time zones, what happens in other cities and town across the country often plays an important part and paves the way for those end stages. Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” came before his “I have a dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. And well after making what became his most famous speech, King joined the march from Selma to Montgomery.

Any movement to stop abuse of power and presidential overreach that’s going to succeed in the the United States is likely to need roots nationwide. So I like heading to places other than my own backyard to find out what’s happening.

Sitting with discomfort

As I’ve mentioned before, I spent most of a decade teaching martial arts and self defense as director of outreach for a Washington, DC-based nonprofit. I founded a violence prevention bulletin, got grants for community programs, and for a few years taught as many as 18 classes a week all over the region. At that point, I was very much working in the community activism space.

Later, I moved into journalism and felt more at home there. My personality is more geared to be interested in nuance and open questions. I wanted explore to how past events were continuing to play out today, from eugenics to climate change.

Since childhood, my fondest dream had been to become an author. Eventually, I shifted to writing books that dealt with some of the same themes. Even today, books laying out difficult history and how that history applies to us now are where my heart is. They are my first and still my favorite work to do.

However, my 2017 book on concentration camps and the disintegration of the societies that used them didn’t miraculously end any detention systems around the world. It didn’t keep Trump from being re-elected.

With his return, I realized I still has this knowledge that it was key to share, but I would probably need to do something different. Which has left me in this odd space between still being an author and journalist, while sometimes having a public role actively working to push back on the harm that Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the Republican Party are doing.

This in-between space isn’t a comfortable one for me, but it’s the place where I think I’m most useful right now. And these are critical times for reinforcing democracy.

Out on the streets

My friend Dina was hoping to leverage the energy of a weekly Monday noontime protest happening in her city by holding an organizing talk with breakout sessions right afterward. This week is spring break in the school system—meaning that some people, like teachers, who might not be able to attend weekday protests, could probably come.

Indivisible.org has been cheerleading weekly Monday protests in front of Representative Ben Cline’s Roanoke office. Cline is the Congressman for the Virginia’s Sixth district. Voters report him being less than responsive when they share their concerns about layoffs by government agencies and local employers.

I made sure to arrive early enough that I could cover the demonstration in person and see what was happening for myself. Some 300 people or so stood on each side of the street in front of the Truist building downtown. A woman named Beth Deel appeared in the crowd, striding across the landscape in a black costume with rainbow streamers blowing in the wind. An hour later, she would lead one of the breakout groups at the organizing meeting.

I talked to another woman in the crowd who said she’d written a note about her concerns to Cline, only two get a two-page letter extolling the virtues of DOGE in response. Curious, I went into the Truist building and tried to go to Ben Cline’s office myself.

But as I walked through the building lobby, I saw a sign by the elevator doors indicating that all visitors must register. (The congressman’s office is just one of the tenants of the building). I asked if I could go up to Cline’s suite. The two men behind the desk agreed they couldn’t let me up. I asked if I could go in the hallway with one of them and just take a picture of his office door. Everyone was polite, but they said it was private property, and they would have to call the owner to try to get permission.

Given that I’d committed to speaking after the protest, and wanted to cover the demonstration itself, I didn’t take the time to wait and find out whether it might be possible to see Rep. Cline’s door that day.

Rejoining the crowd, I noticed there were at least a half-dozen Ukrainian flags. Some people had added Canadian flags to their intricate signs as well. Others had resurrected posters they’d carried the day before in a demonstration to support the U.S. Post Office.

I spoke to some attendees who already knew people who’d been laid off. Others were worried about friends or family who relied on Social Security and Medicaid, saying that before long, repercussions of federal layoffs were going to have big effects locally.

Speaking out

After the protest, more than a hundred demonstrators walked down the block to the library, where I gave a short talk.

I tried to let them know that I had interviewed people in countries that succumbed to authoritarianism, and that things can get very dark, but that we have many more tools still available to us than people in those places did. The sooner we use them, I said, the better off we all would be.

I pointed out that meeting people where they’re at is not the same as letting people throw whole communities under the bus. I encouraged them to work on coalitions in which no one who wants to join and is willing to do the work gets excluded.

Just that morning, I’d seen reporting about the United States Student Association, a group for college students that hasn’t been active since the 1980s. The group has resurrected itself, with more than a hundred students from over a dozen states joining to take action. A Kentucky group that defeated school vouchers in their state is relaunching to try to help save the U.S. Department of Education.

Americans all over are taking just the kinds of action that everyday people in the community organizing session on Monday were working on.

Big questions remain, such as how to best support and expand the efforts of those who are already helping and how best to call out or replace elected officials who aren’t doing their jobs. I’ll continue to highlight the TeslaTakedown protests, because they’ve been the most visible symbol of the 2025 movement so far, galvanizing people to take action with a specific goal (and occasional dance parties!).

They’re becoming popular enough that they’re triggering some reactionary backlash. In West Palm Beach, Florida, a man was arrested for threatening protesters with his car. In Berkeley, a counter-protester began waving a stun gun at people in the crowd before an emeritus professor grabbed him by his hair, dragging him off his bicycle, at which point police took him into custody.

Stability is contagious

Protests remain a visible face of all the other work going on, as well as a place for people to interact. I myself, having only been to Roanoke four or five times in my life, recognized people I saw in the street. Others knew me from this podcast. Face-to-face interaction is such a critical way to build community.

And the protest made the front page of Tuesday’s Roanoke Times. Which means the protesters are also expanding awareness in their city about what’s happening. It’s possible to win people over one at a time before you gain supporters in droves.

You might be surprised how few people it takes to make a difference. Someone I’ve mentioned in these posts before is Mark Fallon, who stood up against torture at Guantanamo. A decade ago, Mark was talking with me and described his shock over how few people it took after 9/11 to dismantle remove human rights protections and any obligation to the rule of law.

This week, I saw a description of the opposite of that concept. It was posted by the CEO of Bluesky, Jay Graber. She quoted Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine, who said, "When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order."

I’m not a woo person, so I don’t want to overload the metaphorical capacity of a scientific observation. But I’ve experienced myself how even a small number of people can be the coherence that stabilizes a crisis situation.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about another resonant sentence, one that rose directly from our recent troubles in the U.S. It’s by Lauren Morrill, a Georgia-based author of books for young adults. In 2017, she wrote, "I don't know how to explain to you why you should care about other people."

If you by default feel empathy for others, it can be shocking when other people don’t. But for those who are more mercenary or (to be more generous) maybe just less trusting of interdependence, I do now know how to explain to you why you should care.

The reason you should care is because caring for each other creates stability, and stability is contagious. If you want to live by your own wits in the whirlwind with the world tilted against you, then you’re all set in our present moment. But if you want a stable, functioning society, we are just going to have to care for each other.

Voices of experience

At the organizing event after Monday’s protest, several people talked to me about what was going on in their lives. The stories of two women in particular stuck with me most. The first had moved to the U.S. years ago from the Dominican Republic. She understood dictatorship, she said, from daily life there. And she knew the kind of organizing that was happening that day in Roanoke was important.

“You have to find the big issue that moves everybody,” she said. She thought it might be Medicaid and Medicare. She was trying to help.

Another woman took me aside just before I left to drive home. I had talked her briefly on the street outside Ben Cline’s office, but only for a moment. She asked about the research I’d done for my camps book. She explained that her family was originally from South Korea and had fled oppression there.

She recognized the way that the current administration was eating away at everyone’s rights. She saw that government was turning its back on the people. But she was having trouble getting her neighbors to come out and do anything to stop it.

“They think someone else will take care of it,” she said. But her family had been through dangerous times before, and she knew better.

Sooner or later, most people will learn themselves. But it’s incumbent on us to act now, while we have so much latitude to change the trajectory of what’s happening. If the people of Roanoke can come together to find their way, so can the rest of us, in each of our towns and cities—and in the end, the country, too.

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