My latest -- on the wrecking of the East Wing, the impact and limits of protest, and the power of hyper-local organizing lakauffman.substack.com/p/living-in-...

My latest -- on the wrecking of the East Wing, the impact and limits of protest, and the power of hyper-local organizing lakauffman.substack.com/p/living-in-...

This is gone now. The East Wing lobby two years ago.

Trump's ballroom donors include: -Google, whose CEO thanked Trump for "resolution" of an antitrust case -Palantir, which has lucrative contracts with ICE -Blackstone's Stephen Schwarzman, who would profit from Trump's regulatory rollbacks for private equity Pay-to-play.

Y’all here is a fun fact: Portland has a brand new volunteer organization called “operation inflation” that allows people to borrow inflatable costumes for protests. They just started a couple weeks ago and have like a 160 costume library (and counting because people keep donating).

40+ years ago, a peace initiative from Egypt triggered a sea change inside Israel, led by the Peace Now movement. My new book recalls that history and offers some lessons for today’s fraught conflict in Israel-Palestine. Details here: open.substack.com/pub/theconne...

STARRED review in Library Journal for WE WILL RISE AGAIN, the speculative activism anthology edited by @drkarenlord.bsky.social, @older.bsky.social and me! Pre-order here: www.simonandschuster.com/books/We-Wil...

"Resistance doesn't always look like marching in the street or holding rallies ... Sometimes noncooperation looks like regular people stubbornly holding to the existing rules and procedures of a democratic society." My latest: lakauffman.substack.com/p/on-complia...

I was interviewed in WE WILL RISE AGAIN: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope, out from @sagapressbooks.bsky.social on December 2nd. You can preorder the collection now at www.simonandschuster.com/books/We-Wil...!

I was interviewed in WE WILL RISE AGAIN: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope, out from @sagapressbooks.bsky.social on December 2nd. You can preorder the collection now at www.simonandschuster.com/books/We-Wil...!

"Resistance doesn't always look like marching in the street or holding rallies ... Sometimes noncooperation looks like regular people stubbornly holding to the existing rules and procedures of a democratic society." My latest: lakauffman.substack.com/p/on-complia...

Some good news: for the last four years, I have been quietly working on a new book titled *For the Long Haul: How to Stay in the Fight for a Better World*. I have signed a contract with @akpress.org and they will be co-publishing the book with @btlbooks.com. The book will be out next fall!

Safety is sexy

I took a bit of a break from my newsletter this summer, but I'm back with some thoughts on the many forms that cooperation and noncooperation can take, in our era of authoritarian overreach lakauffman.substack.com/p/on-complia...

I was interviewed in WE WILL RISE AGAIN: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance and Hope, out from @sagapressbooks.bsky.social on December 2nd. Could this collection be more timely and needed? Give this project some love by preordering now at www.simonandschuster.com/books/We-Wil...!

I was interviewed in WE WILL RISE AGAIN: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance and Hope, out from @sagapressbooks.bsky.social on December 2nd. Could this collection be more timely and needed? Give this project some love by preordering now at www.simonandschuster.com/books/We-Wil...!

Most of the ideas mentioned in this article—higher minimum wage, free tuition at public colleges, higher taxes on the rich—are not only popular now but were realities in the past, including in NYC, during the booming postwar years, when America was “great.”/1 www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/u...

Disabled people are being arrested in DC today as they're protesting Medicaid cuts. Source of this photo, ADAPT www.facebook.com/theRealNatio...

People in wheelchairs are getting arrested right now in the Russell Senate Office Building in DC. They showed up to tell Congress not to cut their Medicaid, because they cant afford health care without it. If you look closely you can see the zip ties on their hands. #WeWontGetOverLosingMedicaid

See that spike? That's the hundreds of people who saw Zohran win and said "huh, maybe I can run for office too." runforwhat.net

Escape the Heat, Find Some Shade We know that shade can help reduce urban heat, but by how much. How valuable is the urban tree canopy? This story at Our Trees shows some temperature measurements in urban conditions on a 90F day. The results are pretty amazing! Read the story, and please subscribe.

New from me: Why the most important #NoKings demos were in small towns; news of an Iranian-Israeli dialogue group's ceasefire petition; and more on updating the Dems dusty old playbook. open.substack.com/pub/theconne...

Lander has been released and says he’s fine, minus a missing button He says he’ll get due process, but the man he was trying to protect will not “He’s not gonna sleep in his bed tonight,” he said. “So far as I know, he has no lawyer. He has been stripped of his due process rights”

Brad has been released and the crowd breaks into a chant of “Free them all.”

Lander is being release now from DHS/ICE custody now.

Here's a longer video of Brad Lander's detention just now inside 26 Federal Plaza as he tried to walk a man out of immigration court, by masked federal agents.

Corollary: Publishers don't pay to create the index for a nonfiction book, the author pays out of their advance.

Lots of folks asking about the #s at the nationwide June 14 No Kings actions. My team won't have our own estimate for a few weeks; we validate every record to the fullest extent possible. Our current data are updated through the end of May; see the piece below for our report on trends prior to 6/14.

THIS: "sexual harassment tells you everything about someone's relationship with power" Thank you for this concise and on-the-mark framing, @ourobororoboruo.bsky.social

Mobilization has also been nationwide. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some activists are intentionally demonstrating in their local town rather than just traveling to a nearby big city for events.

In over 99.5 percent of protest events in April and May, we recorded no injuries, arrests, or property damage — an unprecedentedly tiny fraction for a movement of this size and geographic dispersion.

My team and I at the Crowd Counting Consortium (@[email protected], Soha Hammam, & Chris Shay) have a new piece out: wagingnonviolence.org/2025/06/amer.... In it, we show that through May 2025, the size and scale of anti-Trump protests have dwarfed those in 2017. 🧵

As of 6/15 15:30 ET, our projections have shifted downward towards the 4 to 6 million range, because many recent submissions are from smaller towns. HOWEVER, there are major data gaps in the following categories: 1. College towns 2. South Florida 3. LA County 4. Large metro suburbs Please help!

You can always count on The New York Times to minimize the scale and impact of protest. Yesterday's 2000+ No Kings actions smashed records for the most demonstrations in a single day. So the Times decided to publish a horseshit map of just a handful of "confirmed locations." We're not fooled.

I’ve really been appreciating this local protest strategy. - easier to get to - more people see the protests first-hand - we make local connections, see people we know, build community

My latest: With one possible exception, there have never been this many coordinated protests on a single day in the U.S. before. I explore why the omnipresence of these peaceful demonstrations matters so deeply, in the face of authoritarian overreach: lakauffman.substack.com/p/when-peace...

Our unofficial crowdsourced estimate of yesterday’s protest turnout is rising to 4.2-7 million as we gather more data. At this point potentially the second-largest single day of protest in U.S. history! www.gelliottmorris.com/p/no-kings-d...

"With the possible exception of the early days of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, there have never been THIS MANY COORDINATED PROTESTS on a single day in the United States before. The ubiquity of these protests is historic." (emphasis mine) Dear The @nytimes.com

No Kings, except this one

Having spent a good chunk of yesterday participating in a crowdsourced effort to count these...this is wrong. I found many more local news outlets reporting on their town's protest just by Googling than those listed here. Phoning it in, NYT?

“Trump's flood-the-zone strategy hit us all like a tsunami – violent, destructive, shocking. But note how our response has been like a rising tide: steady and inexorable in its spread.”

Why #NoKings matters & how protests work.

My latest: With one possible exception, there have never been this many coordinated protests on a single day in the U.S. before. I explore why the omnipresence of these peaceful demonstrations matters so deeply, in the face of authoritarian overreach: lakauffman.substack.com/p/when-peace...

Based on crowd-sourced records of No Kings Day event turnout, and extrapolating for the cities where we don't have data yet, it looks like roughly 4-6 million people protested Trump across the U.S. yesterday. That's nearly 2% of the U.S. pop! Mobilized anti-Trump resistance is exceeding 2017 levels

This is a reference to the iconic, Pulitzer-winning image of a Vietnam War protester. He later moved to SF, renamed himself Hibiscus and formed a drag troupe called the Cockettes. Happy Pride!

There were people protesting in my cousin’s ~5600 population town in middle of nowhere Colorado, that NYT map is wildly underselling this

Political violence in the United States comes overwhelmingly from the right. Here is an essential guide to how organizers can make that violence backfire: www.endpoliticalviolence.org/guide