Sand in the gears

Last week, I wrote about how courts and crowds are, for now, the best means to keep control of our government and protect the most vulnerable Americans from abuse. I’d planned to follow up today by addressing some historical examples you might not know, in which people have used public protest or private tactics to delay or block oppressive governments.

But given what’s happening right now, I want to take some time today to focus on what’s going on in the courts and also to look at the kinds of protest that have taken place—and been successful—in just the last few days. With all the bad news about what the president and his allies are trying to do, it can be easy to miss just how much is getting accomplished.

Courts ftw (mostly)

More than 90 cases have been filed against the new administration in the five weeks since Trump took his oath of office. Judges are in the process of blocking executive orders and policies left and right. It will be a huge next step to make sure all these decisions are enforced, and the Supreme Court isn’t at all reliable as a bastion of democracy right now. But we need to acknowledge that so far lower courts, on the whole, are standing for institutional over personal law. That’s not always the way it goes, even at this stage of peri-authoritarianism.

On February 24, a court granted a temporary restraining order blocking the Department of Education and the Office of Personnel Management from giving DOGE access to sensitive information. The same day, Judge Royce Lamberth granted a request to expand a preliminary injunction protecting trans women from being sent to men’s prisons and guaranteeing their access to medical care.

The same day, a court blocked enforcement of an order allowing Department of Homeland Security to detain immigrants in and near churches without a warrant. Still on Monday, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly was demanding the name of the person in charge of DOGE, the team surrounding Elon Musk, and how any team members working under the auspices of that project were hired. Again, the examples listed here all happened in one day. 

In recent days, judges have also blocked the Treasury Department from granting access to DOGE-affiliated individuals to any payment record. The Supreme Court, on a 7-2 vote, rejected the administration’s attempt to appeal a temporary restraining order reinstating Hampton Dellinger to his position as Special Counsel in the Office of the Special Counsel (Dellinger has since taken action against DOGE).

Blocking implementation of executive orders banning and targeting DEI initiatives, another judge wrote that, “Plaintiffs’ irreparable harms include widespread chilling of unquestionably protected speech." These are just a few of the things that have happened in courtrooms since Friday.

Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania announced on Monday that more than $2 billion in money for his state had been freed up after originally being blocked by the Trump administration.

Defiance in action

Everything I’ve mentioned so far is due to judges and courts. When it comes to protests, even though we have a lot to do, Americans have been busy, too.

Protest can take a lot of forms. People can demonstrate in public, or express their views in writing. They can mock public figures. They can privately offer help, legally or illegally, to those targeted by the government. They can slow walk or even quietly block implementation of policies they reject as immoral or dangerous to the public. They can vandalize buildings or vehicles. They can turn to violence. I’ll discuss violence a little more in a minute, but I want to focus on nonviolent tactics for now.

When Elon Musk demanded, through an Office of Personnel Management email, that all government employees make a list of five accomplishments from last week and send them to him by midnight Monday, random Americans wrote to him with song lyrics or insults. Musk’s attempt collapsed on itself under the weight of public ridicule, poor implementation, and the refusal of several agency heads to respect his authority. Now 21 DOGE staffers have resigned rather than using their knowledge to "compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services."

In a more comic turn, someone hacked the feed for TV screens at the Department of Housing and Urban Development on Monday, showing visitors an AI-generated video of Trump fondling Elon Musk’s bare feet. As many people have noted, intentionally or accidentally, Musk has two left feet in the video. This kind of ridicule might seem juvenile, but it can be really useful to show the limits on power of authoritarian wannabes—and it can also undermine the popularity of strongmen in ways that help to delegitimize them with the part of the population that admires swagger and bullying.

I’ve talked before about how focusing only on a national-level personal battle with Trump can be a losing approach, because his supporters have become hardened in their opinions about him and reflexively dismiss most criticism. This is one of the reasons that Musk has proven to be a good target for things like the HUD video: he’s thin-skinned and doesn’t seem to have Trump’s snake-oil salesman carney appeal with the general public. He’s just not popular. By attacking Musk and making Trump appear subservient to him, the ridicule diminishes both men.

And protests have focused on doing just that in the last week, with Americans around the country targeting dozens of Tesla dealerships in places like New York, Seattle, and Kansas City. From Vermont to California, demonstrators have picketed Tesla showrooms, with one San Francisco location hosting demonstrators four times in eight days.

People are also taking their representatives to task nationwide in townhalls, over everything from federal job cuts and Medicaid funding to Trump’s lack of support for Ukraine. In the absence of town halls, voters and residents are still making themselves heard. My friend Beth Macy reported from Roanoke, writing that hundreds of people showed up on Monday to protest outside Congressman Ben Cline’s office, demanding a town hall meeting. The protesters are showing up every Monday at noon to make themselves heard. He didn’t show up, and staffers let in just four constituents at a time to hear their complaints.

Some of you might remember last November, when I went to Roanoke to speak at a gathering put together by my friend Dina Imbriani, who decided to invite her local friends to help figure out ways to protect the most vulnerable people in her community. So many people who heard about the gathering wanted to be involved that she’s been setting up workshops and trainings ever since. Last night, she held another DoGood Virginia group meeting with the mayor and a state legislator as speakers. This time, hundreds showed up to find out how to connect and protect everything from immigrants at risk to trans rights and women’s reproductive health.

Journalism has been doing some fabulous work, too, from independent journalists like Marisa Kabas breaking all kinds of news about the administration’s furtive actions to strip the federal workforce, target trans staff, and more. The Associated Press has tried to stand against Trump’s insistence on bringing reporters to heel over language and naming. Wired is likewise doing an amazing job—I finally subscribed. Even The New York Times has been calling Trump’s lies out as lies.

Still in the fight

The deluge of court cases and public efforts will go on for years. Many victories won’t be definitive or final. Some losses can be fought, some can be appealed. I’m not saying everything is fine—the goal of the Trump administration has been literally to traumatize those it targets, and they’re doing as much damage as they can as quickly as they can.

On a national level, so many people have learned how to protect themselves that ICE is having trouble meeting its quotas. A recent arrest attempt was derailed by a network of activists from Union del Barrio in Alhambra, California. Perhaps as a result of being repeatedly foiled, agents seem willing to act even more thuggishly in retaliation. These campaigns cause real harm.

And there are secondary effects, too: you’ve probably already heard, an 11-year-old girl Jocelynn Rojo Carranza died by suicide after her peers threatened to report her parents to ICE for deportation. Other immigrants appear to have been brutalized during arrests.

On a state level, reactionary legislatures are doing what they can to promote extremism. In West Virginia, where I grew up, they’re trying to remove even the rape and incest exceptions from its anti-abortion laws.

But the people who want to do this kind of harm to more people are, again and again, coming up against hurdles they have to jump, to the brink of trenches they can’t cross yet, and even brick walls that our institutions and everyday Americans are putting in their path.

Some historical notes

I mentioned that there are long histories of protest that show different ways it can work. There are so many great, creative examples of people around the country, I’ve ceded the bulk of this post to things happening now, to show you how people are improvising and doing great things in our current setting.

But I do want to throw in a couple historical examples you might not know. The variety of possible protest actions are nearly limitless. By and large, we’re not anywhere near the worst-case scenarios we can look to in the past. But I want to mention a few in which people nonetheless managed to find ways to disrupt the system.

A Portuguese consul staffer in Bordeaux, France, during World War II, Aristides de Sousa Mendes helped what’s estimated to be between 10,000 and 30,000 Jews flee the Nazis. He said, “'If so many Jews can suffer because of one Catholic, it's all right for one Catholic to suffer for many Jews.'“ Portugal was not a democracy at the time, and de Sousa lost his career as a result, but saved many thousands of lives.

At Neuengamme in Germany during the war, detainees even found ways to swap the identities of the dead with the living, so that those who were in trouble could be said to have died, keeping them from official retribution. Even at Auschwitz, the Sonderkommando who were forced to help in the gas chambers took more than a year to plan a revolt and managed to demolish crematorium IV, though they paid with their lives.

When it comes to America, I’ve mentioned the astounding successes from Jim Crow-era African American resistance already. Let me throw in one more from the postwar era shared by organizer Scott Nakagawa, which may be less familiar to you, as it was to me.

Ahead of the Hawaii General Sugar Strike of 1946, there were issues of culture and language and groups that had been pitted against each other on the sugar plantations. Some workers were higher-paid than others. Many did not speak English. The fact that these companies controlled life on islands that lay so far away from any other place kept a lot of the people at the mercy of those running the plantation.

Workers brought in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and prepared for a long-term strike. Caught in an isolated setting under the thumb of the plantation owners, workers ended up turning the tables. They took a “we’re not stuck in here with you, you’re trapped in here with us” approach that effectively dismantled the corporate lock on sugar production along with the Jim Crow system that had been imposed there.

Workers held a 79-day strike that successfully shut down 33 of 34 sugar plantations on the islands. But it took advance planning, discipline, and solidarity. To support the strike, communities held dances, planted gardens, gathered food through fishing parties, and got local stores to donate food. They even organized a baseball team.

Americans as a nation are not yet ready for that kind of action. And if we’re lucky, we’ll never have to do it against those kinds of odds. But the protests and connections regular people are already out there undertaking are building the kind of community in which serious and sustained efforts will be possible, where the discipline and collaboration across differing priorities become part of muscle memory.

***

Now I want to address at two bits of feedback that percolated after last week’s podcast, each of which went very different places. One person scolded me for lulling people into complacency, for making people the situation isn’t that bad. I’ll be honest—that comment surprised me. So let me say clearly that just because I try to lay out in a calm way what could happen and suggest that we aren’t completely screwed quite yet, that’s in no way intended to suggest that we aren’t in danger.

The country as a whole is in danger and many vulnerable populations inside it are at tremendous risk right now. What I’m trying to communicate is that there’s a lot that people are doing—a lot you yourself can do right now, today, to keep the worst that might possibly happen from becoming reality, or undo some of the harms already done. If you make even small efforts, it can have a multiplier effect.

I also want to address another comment that brought up the possibility of violent uprising as a third option, along with courts and crowds, to fight Trump and his allies. Researchers Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan conducted a study looking at 323 mass actions around the globe between 1900 and 2006 that resulted in the overthrow of a government or in territorial liberation. They found that overall, nonviolent civil resistance is far more successful in creating broad-based change than violent campaigns are. This finding was not what Chenoweth had expected. There’s some suggestion that violent resistance to authoritarian governments helps to establish extrajudicial violence as an acceptable tool across the board, making it harder to build democratic movements in the long run.

To be clear, I’m not saying that violence has never had a role in political change in history, but statistically, using nonviolence, your odds are better for achieving actual change. And though nonviolent protesters have certainly felt the force of the state in terrible and unjust ways in even the recent past, turning to violent protest is far riskier in most cases for those involved. There are, however, ways for people to engage in nonviolent protest at very little risk to themselves.

And what I’m trying to do with this newsletter is to get as many people as possible engaged. Chenoweth and Stephan found that a tiny proportion of the population being involved essentially becomes a tipping point for a successful outcome—just 3.5 percent. Others have suggested that the tipping point likely varies with the kind of government oppression involved and the historical setting. But even if change required just 3.5 percent, that’s well over 10 million people we should be pondering how to get involved to secure democracy. And it’s a lot easier to gather people into that coalition if it’s a nonviolent one.

Like my friend Dina in Roanoke, you don’t have to be experienced at organizing to be successful. It can help, but expertise is not required in order to take action. If you want to know about upcoming gatherings, including more Tesla protests, the March to “Stand up for Science” on March 7, and more 50501 protests, you can follow Joe Katz’s Bluesky feed.

If you’re not tied into a community and don’t have easy access to creating one, Garrett Bucks made a list of tiny but meaningful actions you can take. It includes wheat-pasting signs, posting stickers, and using sidewalk chalk to get your messages out, as well as one-on-one encounters in your daily life and… subscribing to newsletters!

The important thing to remember for today is that just by wanting to address the harms happening, you are already part of a vast community, some of it working through institutions, some of it taking place in the streets. But successfully defending against authoritarianism requires us to get involved. This is not a problem that will go away on its own.

We have the knowledge, and we have the means to do something with it. All that’s missing is those who have yet to act. And whether they’ve long realized the country was in danger, or whether they’ve just recognized the crisis we’re in, there’s room for them in the fight.

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