B4. Radical Ecology

Oral arguments were held July 21st before U.S. District Judge Nancy J. Rosenstengel in the case Friends of Bell Smith Springs v. U.S. Forest Service (Case No. 3:25-cv-01377-NJR), a lawsuit challenging an ongoing logging project in the Shawnee National Forest.

This article The data center fight is going global was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Earlier this year, Gallup asked a national sample of Americans whether they would support an AI data center being built in their local area. Seventy-one percent opposed it, 48 percent of them strongly. Opposition to living near a nuclear power plant was markedly lower, at 53 percent. Republicans, Democrats and independents all rejected data centers. Asked why, respondents most often pointed to environmental concerns: water, energy, land use, noise and air pollution — and the lack of community consent.

At Social Change Lab we recently ran a randomized controlled trial with 3,467 participants to answer a question the AI accountability movement has been wrestling with: Which of AI’s many harms actually move people from concern to action? We tested 11 different arguments, from environmental effects to job losses and the harms of algorithmic bias; from AI enabling more pervasive surveillance to the risk of superintelligent AI leading to human extinction. 

The results showed that AI’s environmental impacts were the strongest predictor of willingness to act. Job displacement — the issue people mention most unprompted, ranked much lower. Extinction risk came last. And the emotion most strongly associated with action was not fear or anxiety, but anger.

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The data center backlash that’s uniting America

These findings should concentrate the minds of climate organizers and funders alike. Data centers have become a focal point for public anger not just over AI but over climate policy around the world. Unlike abstract metrics such as “CO2 parts per million,” every data center is tangible; it requires a planning application, a zoning decision, a water permit and elected officials willing to approve — or reject — it. These local decisions create concrete opportunities for organizing.

In the United States, the movement to halt data centers has grown with remarkable speed: The New York State Assembly recently passed what could become the country’s first statewide moratorium; Seattle became the largest American city to adopt one after residents generated more than 96,000 emails to the city council; and more than 500 organizations from 47 states have joined the Stop Data Centers Coalition. 

“Concerns about data centers are agitating even people who have never taken a public stand on any issue before,” Deeda Seed of the Center for Biological Diversity told Waging Nonviolence in June. “They’re willing to take a stand on this.”

But the movement is growing far beyond the United States. In fact, one of the clearest victories so far came in a Dutch town that few people outside the Netherlands had heard of before 2021.

The case of Zeewolde

In February 2021, Meta proposed building a 200-megawatt hyperscale data center on 410 acres of reclaimed farmland outside Zeewolde, a town of just over 22,000 people. It would have consumed at least twice as much electricity as the town itself. Residents, farmers and Extinction Rebellion campaigners objected not just to the scale of the project, but to the secrecy surrounding it. Officials had spent two years negotiating with Meta while keeping the company’s identity out of the public record, and many residents felt scarce renewable energy was being handed to a foreign corporation for little local benefit. 

The campaign worked on two fronts at once. Locally, they plastered posters on the town hall, organized a residents’ petition and waged nonviolent direct action. Days before the December vote, 20 Extinction Rebellion activists occupied the council building’s public hall with banners reading “We want Greta, not Meta,” until police cleared them out. Nationally, allies in The Hague were pressing a different lever. Part of the land Meta needed belonged to the state, and motions in both chambers of parliament urged ministers to use that leverage. 

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Campaigners lost the first vote when the council approved the project in December 2021. But they won almost everything that followed. Within months the Dutch government imposed a moratorium on new hyperscale developments; local elections delivered a council majority to the anti-data center Leefbaar Zeewolde Party; the Dutch Senate blocked the sale of the government-owned land Meta needed; and by July 2022 the company had abandoned the project. The Netherlands subsequently restricted hyperscale facilities over 70 megawatts to just two designated sites.

In Zeewolde the fight was against a single project. In Ireland it was taking on the whole tech industry, which began aggressive expansion in the 2010s. Resistance to data centers came early there, too — and initially it was successful. In 2018, Apple abandoned a $1 billion project in Athenry after objectors ran the approval to the Supreme Court of Ireland. 

The government’s answer was to back the tech sector harder, using legislation to route large applications past local councils. Data centers kept coming. Organizers built a real coalition to stop them, united around a  moratorium bill in the Dáil, the lower house of Ireland’s parliament. 

But when a moratorium arrived, in 2021, it was instituted by the grid operator, which stopped issuing connections around Dublin for fear of blackouts. Nobody had voted for it, and when it lapsed in December 2025, there was no political win to defend. Friends of the Irish Environment, Friends of the Earth Ireland and ClientEarth are now suing to overturn the new rules. Data centers used 23 percent of Irish electricity last year, up from five percent a decade ago, and they are forecast to reach 31 percent by 2034. 

Zeewolde’s win was written into national law by a parliament that a grassroots campaign had won over. Ireland’s pause arrived as an engineering judgment — and departed as one.  

A global movement

Outside Europe and the United States, the sharpest conflicts are often about water.

In Santiago, Chile, community opposition forced Google back to the drawing board in 2024 after a court ruled that its proposed Cerrillos district data center had failed to account properly for climate change in assessing impacts on the city’s overstretched aquifer. A second Google project in nearby Quilicura was halted by residents the same year.

“We don’t need more data centers here taking our water so people in the Global North can draw funny pictures on AI,” Tania Rodríguez, founder of the Chilean water rights group Mosacat, told Time magazine.

In neighboring Uruguay, campaigners went to court in 2022 to discover what Google was planning. They learned the proposed cooling system would use 2 million gallons of drinking water a day from a supply under severe strain. As the campaign  said, “No es sequía, es saqueo,” or “It’s not drought, it’s pillage.” The project ultimately proceeded only after Google agreed to reduce its scale and abandon using water for cooling.

An ad for Le Monde in Paris in July 2026 expresses a widely held anti-AI sentiment. (Blood in the Machine/Brian Merchant)

The movement is spreading. In Australia, Greenpeace is calling for a moratorium while community groups like Tomorrow Movement organize against major projects in Western Sydney. In France, data centers are featured in municipal election campaigns. Across Africa, where at least 11 governments have spent more than $2 billion on AI-enabled surveillance systems (including CCTV, license-plate readers, facial recognition and command centers where the feeds converge), AI infrastructure often raises concerns about surveillance as much as energy use. Abeba Birhane’s concept of “algorithmic colonialism” puts a name to a familiar pattern of extraction and unequal power, something of particular concern in authoritarian contexts. 

The climate movement has spent decades searching for an issue that is local, immediate, genuinely winnable and has broad political appeal. Data centers may prove to be exactly that. Communities have shown that these fights can be won. So how can others do it? And will the movement have the resources to take on the best-funded industry in history?

How to fight a data center

Of the thousands of people all over the United States and around the world who are stepping up to fight AI data centers, the vast majority aren’t lawyers or politicians. Most are regular people who are using what skills they have to fight off a raw deal for their community. In Central Oregon, farmers have organized tractor parades to city hall in protest; in Maryland, a concerned beauty salon worker quit her job and led a successful fight for a moratorium; and in Apex, North Carolina, an unlikely coalition of teachers, parents and IT professionals came together to defeat an AI data center. These are people using their skills and everyday know-how to build power with neighbors — and you can do it, too. 

1. Find out what they haven’t told you

Almost every successful campaign begins with research.

Companies consistently announce projects in terms of investment, jobs and innovation while leaving crucial questions unanswered. They use shell companies, non-disclosure agreements or opaque planning processes to hide the details — and the most important information is often what’s hidden.

How many permanent jobs will the facility really create? What will it mean for electricity prices and grid reliability? Where will the water come from, and where will it go? What subsidies or tax incentives have been offered? What noise, air and light pollution will nearby residents experience?

Residents can find the answers to these questions by researching online, scrutinizing planning applications, filing Freedom of Information Act requests, talking to people fighting projects by similar companies, checking zoning documents, and more. The work doesn’t need specialist skills so much as determination — you already have the tools you need. The Commons Social Change Library recently published a practical guide for organizers wherever new projects emerge.

And doing this work tends to motivate others to show up and help out. We can all contribute something, even if that’s making food for folks searching the internet: Anyone can fight and anyone can win.

2. Build the broadest coalition

One of the most successful things about this organic movement so far has been the ability of groups to focus on common goals instead of differences. A huge majority of Americans oppose AI data centers. Again and again neighbors with different politics, ideas, professions and class backgrounds are uniting because they agree on one thing: They don’t want an AI data center in their community. Conservatives and progressives find themselves making the same case at the same council meeting.

That breadth is really important. Tech companies often expect opposition from the “usual suspects” and have their arguments rehearsed. But they are much less prepared to push back on church groups, local businesses, sports clubs, zoo staff, neighborhood associations and concerned residents who have never attended a public meeting before. 

3. Understand what winning looks like 

Once some information is gathered and a group of people is getting together, a lot more resistance is possible. Moratoriums are popular because they buy time once people recognize that we are on our back heels in the fight against Big Tech. Some pundits have complained that this isn’t a full solution, and it’s not — a moratorium isn’t radical at all, it just means pausing to reboot since we are up against the richest companies that have ever existed. Slowing things down is part of the stage for achieving something bigger. 

Because of the power imbalance and loose rules for big companies, the two most common wins right now are reactive: stopping individual data center projects and winning moratoria or bans. Neither is perfect, but both can be building blocks towards more transparency, robust regulation and eventually building alternatives that fit with what communities actually want. Ultimately, part of why data centers are so hated is because they are externalizing so many costs onto people — from increased public health risks, to higher costs of living, to dangerous pollution. 

Winning is about understanding those trade-offs and moving the discussion toward investing in things we actually want and need, like public libraries and skate parks and safe bike lanes, all of which create jobs. When students, environmental advocates and neighbors came together to defeat a data center in New Brunswick, New Jersey, local officials immediately shifted to the other option on the table and kicked plans into gear to build a public park instead. That is the alternative: more shade, more trees, and spaces to gather and exercise, instead of a creepy box full of wires and chips.

Resourcing the fight

As we’ve noted, this organic, volunteer-based movement against AI data centers is one anyone can fight and anyone can win, and movements can and often do come about and grow organically. But, some of the most successful movements throughout history, from the U.S. civil rights movement to the Indian independence movement, were resourced in their earliest stages. Such an influx of funding helps ensure a movement can be sustained beyond local fights and scale to a more cohesive, strategic, national or global campaign. 

Yet, funders often arrive to movements last, hopping on the bandwagon once an issue has become popular. The lag is structural: Philanthropy funds organizations, and the most effective groups in passionate moments often don’t have official names, let alone 501(c)(3)s or professional grant writers. Often, they start with a WhatsApp group, a church hall meeting or an improvised coalition of neighbors. By the time a grant cycle catches up to a movement, the legislative windows have sometimes passed. 

That is exactly where the data center movement finds itself today. Across the U.S. — and increasingly around the world — data center resistance movements have energy and are building more and more momentum. What they often lack are the things that allow movements to grow: organizing staff, legal support, trainers and the connective tissue that allows communities to learn from one another instead of reinventing every campaign from scratch. Foundations can step up now to help ensure this fight goes even further than just local wins. 

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There is good reason to invest early. Some of the most successful environmental campaigns of the past two decades — from the movement against fracking to the coalition that helped secure the Inflation Reduction Act — were strengthened by philanthropic support before victory looked inevitable. Early funding allowed organizers to build sustainable networks rather than simply react to the next crisis.

That precedent is why Climate Emergency Fund has moved more than a third of its 2026 grants to groups organizing around data centers and AI, sometimes before those groups have a name. It serves as a form of venture philanthropy: Fund early, move fast, stay close to the communities doing the work. We are already seeing funding requests arrive from four continents as resistance to AI infrastructure becomes an increasingly global phenomenon. 

Many funders tell me they want to focus on affordability, democratic resilience or climate. The fight over AI infrastructure sits at the nexus of all three. It is about rising electricity bills, secret deals behind NDAs and the fossil fuel infrastructure that underpins the industry’s growth. 

AI is often presented as inevitable. Yet the infrastructure behind it still depends on local planning decisions, water supplies, electricity grids and politics. Those decisions remain contestable. Zeewolde, Cerrillos, New Brunswick — these were all stopped by committed groups of regular people who found out in time, who showed up and who kept showing up. For a climate movement searching for local, tangible and winnable campaigns, this might be a once in a lifetime opportunity.

This article The data center fight is going global was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Our dear friend, colleague, and founding Board member of Global Justice Ecology Project, Njoki Njoroge Njehû, passed away peacefully at her home in Nairobi, Kenya, on Saturday, 18 July 2026. Njoki was a major figure in the global economic justice movement. She served as director of 50 Years Is Enough: U.S. Network for Global Economic Justice, a coalition of more than 200 organizations founded to challenge the policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. She was also one of the principal organizers of the April 16, 2000 demonstrations in Washington, D.C.—known as A16—against the IMF and World Bank. A16 brought tens of thousands of protesters into the streets surrounding the institutions and was the first major mobilization against unjust economic globalization following the shutdown of the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle in 1999.

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This article Movements cannot shy away from conflict was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This is an excerpt from “For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness,” originally published at Convergence.

The truth is, most of the groups and organizations that make up our movements do not have a strategy for winning. They might think they have a strategy. They might tell themselves they have one. They certainly tell their funders or dues-paying members they do, and on their websites there is plenty of stuff written under the header “Our Strategies.” They have mission statements, vision statements or other grandiose paragraphs in flowing prose that say what they think they’re doing. They have lists of programs — the things they do, hope to do or once did.

But they have not, for the most part, spent real time and energy getting a grasp on the challenge their organization exists in order to solve. They are not usually clear on their purpose, beyond the visionary sense and in the narrower, more practical sense — the specific part of all this grave need around us for which they are going to actually take responsibility; the specific point of intervention they are going to make and how that specifically is going to add value to our greater project of liberation. They are rarely clear on the role they play in the broader ecosystem, nor are they willing to adjust it because of what else is going on around them. They don’t often, if we’re honest, have a coherent plan for how to get from here to there despite the real constraints they will face from the world around them and the opponents who continue to forward their own interests. They do not usually know what they want to win in practical terms, nor how they will measure their successes or failures. In fact, they do not often genuinely measure these successes or failures at all, beyond what ends up in self-congratulatory social media posts, glossy end-of-year reports, inflated fundraising documents and glowing emails to the base inviting them to the next thing. They do not, almost ever, know how to make the strategic decision to shut down programs that are failing or sunset their organization to make way for something else. They are aided and abetted in all this by leaders who are conflict avoidant, by members who are more concerned with their belonging than on good strategy, by consultants and facilitators who have made a living helping groups stay on the surface and maintain their business as usual, and by funders who expect this kind of behavior and decide on their survival based on it. And they push one another to do this too, by competing over media attention and limited funding, and bullshitting each other at conferences and coalition meetings.

I know, because I have been in movements for over two decades, played a leadership role at Occupy Wall Street, built organizations and supported some of the cutting edge movement groups of our time. I know, because I have led movements like this, run organizations like this, have been a facilitator like this, have been a fundraiser like this, have been a bullshitter like this myself. Mostly, I have done this out of fear of conflict. I thought I was being good, being noble: avoiding conflict to shield people from pain, to keep resources and activity flowing, to keep my people happy and connected, to keep the train moving. But none of this led to the work we were doing becoming greater than the sum of its parts, or prevented the pain of loss in the long-run anyway. And years later, I can see that I avoided conflict for selfish reasons, too: to shield myself from having to actually justify the thoughts and feelings driving me, to protect my ego, to protect my place in the group (and my income), to maintain an image of confidence and success and security that masked my fear of failure. I avoided conflict to protect my team from loss, but, honestly, to protect myself from loss too.

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Conflict avoidance is widespread in our movements and the organizations that drive them. We avoid conflict by diffusing tension with humor, discouraging anger, expressing negativity with passive aggression and gossip instead of discussing things directly. We sweep conflict under the rug, find surface-level tensions on which to spend our energy or project grievances onto some external actor (like, for example, a facilitator). We replace deep planning with an untenable pace of doing, or with producing documents everyone can agree on but that ultimately don’t change much. We use tools like stack, where people are called on in the order they raised their hands, or progressive stack, where the order is arranged based on the facilitator’s sense of people’s identities. And these tools, although reasonable, often lead to circular, abstract conversations where people are not responding to one another directly but rather saying whatever they wanted to say when they raised their hands 15 minutes earlier. When we see tension come up in a conversation, we move on to the next person on the stack, and the opportunity for engagement flutters off into the ether instead of landing at someone’s feet. We encourage compromise toward a middle ground to avoid polarization, and though compromise is good in many contexts, it can also be the avoidance of choice — a way to mediate conflicting interests and desires rather than pushing to get somewhere deeper, sharper, clearer. We let folks stay on the surface, and accept indirect statements, behaviors that don’t line up with stated intentions and ideas that would fold under cross-examination. We hire facilitators who do all this for us too: steer us away from the bumps, protect the agenda at all costs, smooth things over to support the group feeling connected and help us get to the end instead of to the bottom.

But I have also seen good strategy, been led by people committed to doing the hard work of making it, and even — I am lucky to be able to say — tasted its fruits. It almost always rests on a real orientation to power — wanting it, being willing to sacrifice for it, and it almost always begins with the willingness to tell the truth, even when it is difficult.

On the precipice of good strategy

This retreat center has weird chairs. They are folding chairs without legs, so the bottoms lie flat on the carpeted floor, and the backs sort of crank backward into an L shape, but it’s easy to flop over or sink into them, especially late in the day. I often have to get the participants out of their seats to keep them from drifting.

It’s the fall of 2021 and I’m with Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, or CAAAV, a long-time New York City community organization that’s been remaking itself for the past few years, organizing Asian tenants to break the relationship between the real estate sector and the government so that their base — mostly Chinese and Bengali tenants — can afford to stay in their homes, in their neighborhoods, in this city. Right now they have an active campaign in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and are building a new base of Chinese, Bengali and Korean tenants in Queensbridge Houses, a public housing complex in Long Island City, Queens. We’ve spent some months now reading Richard Rumelt’s strategy book “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy,” designing what he calls a strategy kernel, and putting it through the wringer. They have gone toward conflict many times already — something we have learned together is critical to good strategy — and they are getting sharper and deeper, but something still isn’t quite landing.

We abandon the weird chairs, and move to stand in a half-circle around the big whiteboard where they’ve scribbled and diagrammed for the better part of a week. As we stare quietly, I am struck, not for the first time, by the scale of the task before them. I wonder how on earth they will beat this much more powerful opponent, how they will turn their small advantages against the opponent’s weaknesses. So I ask, What’s actually going well? Where are you growing? Where are you strong?

Emily, one of the veterans, says: Chinatown. They struggle there too, of course; they constantly feel under capacity, without enough time, without enough money. But they punch above their weight, are in the middle of a campaign that they really have a shot at winning, and are building a solid base. The others agree. They have been in the community for ages; this is the part of the work that CAAAV has always been known for.

I continue: Ok, so then why not take the Chinese organizers out of Queensbridge and put them there? Why not throw down where you have something going already, and really throw your full weight behind the campaign you’re in?

This question is not altogether innocent. I have a sneaking suspicion that no one has made this suggestion because if they moved all the Chinese organizers out of Queensbridge, it will more or less crush that operation, require them to let go of it. Someone says something to this effect. Most of the others nod, and seem to move on, accepting the boundary and continuing to gaze at the whiteboard, as if staring at it hard enough will reveal something hidden.

New York City tenants with organizations including Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence rallied outside of a Rent Guidelines Board hearing to demand a rent freeze. (Instagram/CAAAV)

But then Em, a young Chinese organizer who has been doing that work in Queens, interrupts the quiet pondering: Well, what if we just . . . didn’t do the organizing in Queensbridge anymore?

We all take our eyes off the whiteboard and look at Em. It is significant that this question comes from Em, someone who is doing the work and demonstrating commitment and care for the leaders being developed there. It feels like people are taking this option seriously for the first time, but I know the group might still back away here. They are thinking now about the leaders who they have organized there — poor and working-class Asian tenants who are sacrificing so much to help build something there. They are thinking, too, about the Korean and Bengali staff who have been recently hired to do this work, talented and energetic people who have been trained and invested in, who won’t have a place in Chinatown. They are thinking, probably, about the conflict that going down this road might force them to have in this room, worried about its costs. Maybe they’re thinking also about CAAAV’s reputation, or funders, or partners. They are thinking, in short, about loss — this strange, dark shadow that often keeps us doing things that aren’t quite right because doing them is better than the risk of something new.

Conflict for the sake of good strategy

There are lots of reasons for the lack of good strategy we often see across movement organizations, but conflict avoidance is one of them. Facing that isn’t the only thing we need to do to correct course, but it is a prerequisite, because groups need the capacity to be in healthy conflict in order to develop good strategy and the ability to carry it out.

Sometimes the conflict we are avoiding is between one another on our teams, or between us and other organizations, or with our funders, or our members. But perhaps unexpectedly, often enough, the conflict is inside us — between the parts of us that want to be big and powerful and effective, and the part of us that is ambivalent about power, the part of us that is afraid of the loss that comes with all real choice. Many of us are truly not in the habit of telling the truth when it is hard; we prefer, instead, to stay on the surface, to keep doing what is comfortable and within reach, to keep one another happy, to avoid the hard choice that might put us in conflict with one another or force us to give up things we care about, to protect the little islands we have made for ourselves despite the tidal waves heading straight for us. Conflict avoidance most often looks, in the end, like dishonesty.

But groups that don’t tell the truth cannot form a winning strategy, and they are unlikely to be healthy and strong enough to actualize it even if they did. So much of good strategy — and strong movements more broadly — is about making choices, to prioritize one thing over another, to let go of some things all together, to say many nos for the sake of a strong yes. Good strategy is about painstakingly clawing our way toward the truth: what is real about the opponent, about us, about the world, about our role, about the best way to move from here to there, about what we will need to change, even if it’s painful, in order to get there. Groups that lie to themselves about these things make strategies divorced from reality. Groups that lie to themselves and each other about these things can’t make real hard choices. And groups that lie to themselves about the tensions that exist in their strategy or their group dynamics also lie to themselves about everything else — about what is realistic for them to accomplish, about their competence and levels of accountability, even about their deadlines and when they’ll start their meetings. 

It is understandable that we sometimes avoid the conflicts that might lead to good strategy, because conflict can be difficult and dangerous. Many of us, especially those most often on the receiving end of the systemic abuses of this empire, have faced devastating conflict in our work, in our social lives, even in our movements. We’ve seen conflict break things we care about. Not all conflict, after all, is healthy, and even healthy conflict can be painful. And we have so few models for generative conflict, and often find ourselves unequipped, unpracticed and unsupported to carry it out.

The truth is, if we move toward conflict, we will encounter loss. We’ll discover disagreements where we thought we were aligned, weaknesses where we projected only strength, messiness where there was previously order. Sometimes we will work it out, but sometimes we won’t. In our organizations, moving toward conflict will sometimes mean changing course, letting partners down, disappointing funders or members. Sometimes it will mean parting ways with our teammates, hurting or being hurt, firing or being fired. Sometimes it will mean the group dissolving, leaving before the job is done, finding ourselves without a vehicle through which to do anything about the things we continue to want to change. Sometimes it will feel like failure. I cannot even count the number of times — as a facilitator and as a leader — that I avoided the conflict beneath the surface to escape this pain, to protect the people around me from it, to protect myself. It wasn’t just out of fear and comfort; it was also out of love. I loved the people around me and thought that what was best for them was to stay together, thought that conflict would wreck that.

But failure is a tricky thing. Often when we imagine it, we see groups imploding from infighting, mass firings or quitting, the organization disappearing. This happens sometimes, and it is painful when it does, to be sure. But more often, failure doesn’t look like collapse at all: It looks like organizations continuing forever and ever in mediocrity. It looks like achieving far less of our potential because we aren’t willing to confront each other and get to the bottom of things to become a stronger team with a sharper strategy. It looks like a movement incapable of meeting the moment. Conflict avoidance makes this kind of failure much more likely than open conflict would.

People are, in the end, much more capable of facing the truth than we sometimes imagine; we do it all the time. All we need are small supports, encouragements, structures and processes to do it well. In fact, avoiding it takes an enormous toll, requires immense effort, relies on endless tricks. If we want to build powerful groups, powerful organizations, powerful movements, we will have to cultivate truth telling as a skill, a reflex, a superpower. 

From Chinatown to Zohran

There is a brief silence that covers the room with the weird chairs, as the organizers from CAAAV consider what Em has said. And then Sasha, the executive director, steps into the gap, walks through the door: No, really. This is an actual option. Let’s play it out.

It is rare to have leaders who are willing to say no to something important for the possibility of a sharper, clearer, more powerful yes; rare, I think, to find groups that are really, truly committed to sacrificing things they care about for the sake of winning. But when I am in their company, I can feel it like a kind of electricity, and it is humbling.

The group begins to loosen, and as they start to talk about what could shift, their eyes light up. Emily and Julie talk about what they could accomplish if Alina and Em joined them in Chinatown; it could mean the difference between winning and losing their campaign to prevent four luxury towers from going up and displacing many of their residents. Em breathes a sigh of relief at the possibility of having a real team, rather than working alone to organize Mandarin-speaking Chinese tenants in Queensbridge while Oni works alone with the Bengalis and Kit alone with the Koreans. They admit that they don’t have much of a chance of winning there.

CAAAV tenants union members celebrate NYC Mayor Mamdani’s two-year rent freeze for stabilized apartments in June 2026 in Queens, New York. (Instagram/CAAAV)

They’ve knocked on every Asian door in Queensbridge, and even if CAAAV was successful in organizing all of them, it would make up only a tiny minority of the population there. Sandra reminds the group of the logistical cost of shifting their operation in such a big way again, offers some thoughts about how to do it. Alina says, voice catching, that she has always dreamed of organizing in Chinatown, where her grandma lives in a small apartment that she spent visiting as a kid and living in with her as a young adult. Every time I visit, she says, a tear escaping despite her best effort, I can see that my grandma is trying to hide some new pain over something lost and gone — a favorite restaurant closed, a service she needed suddenly shut down, an old friend pushed out of the neighborhood. Farihah and Oni start to wonder about Sunnyside, Woodside and Astoria, these neighborhoods in Queens that Bengali immigrants are making home — a huge new base of people to organize. When Farihah, whose ambition and determination are both inspiring and intimidating, shares that Astoria is where her own family landed all those years ago, the fire usually in her eyes is replaced by something softer and more vulnerable, something seemingly aware of the challenge and the need and the stakes. They all go on talking and scheming, and there is some laughter, some arguing, some more scribbling on the whiteboard. And then there is thoughtful quiet again.

Someone asks: But, what about the leaders in Queensbridge? The doubt creeps back into the new quiet, a doubt brought on by real costs — the real impact on real people’s real lives. They say the names of some of these leaders they have supported and trained and sometimes coaxed into the fight, these poor and working-class immigrants who have so much to lose, so few resources, such a hard road ahead. They talk about the time they’ve spent, about the work being unfinished. They talk about heartbreak.

And then Kit, clear and determined, says: We have to do it anyway. We aren’t going to win if we don’t get more strategic. We owe it to our people to build as much power as we can. This is the first time Kit has spoken, and there is a silence bigger than the others after she does, because everyone knows that what Kit is suggesting could very well cost her her job. Kit is Korean, was brought on to organize Korean-speaking tenants in Queensbridge, and one of the most likely scenarios of the pivot the group is moving toward will mean not only throwing down harder than before in Chinatown, but building a new base of Bengali tenants somewhere in Queens, likely Astoria. There may not be a role for her anymore.

I ask Kit how it feels to say this out loud and she replies: Honestly, I feel relieved. I know it’s going to hurt some of our folks. I know I might not have a job anymore. But winning is more important. And now it feels clear, even if it’s a little scary.

The silence now seems proud — reverent, almost. They look at one another with kind eyes, and it feels like a decision. Sasha comes in again to offer structure and process. They lay out the beginning of a plan to gradually phase out of Queensbridge in a way that helps the members there understand the choice, get themselves organized another way and continue on with CAAAV if they want to. They start to design a process to gather data about different neighborhoods in Queens where they might organize this growing Bengali community and make a plan to test the organizing on the ground. They talk about the campaign in Chinatown, which has always felt like a losing battle, but which they now suddenly feel they might actually be able to win. They set next steps to write out the new strategy kernel.

They can’t yet know, at this moment, that these shifts will result in them stopping the towers from going up in Chinatown, but also lead to the embodied conclusion that if they want more than partial victories in these never-ending defensive battles — want to win a city their people can afford to live in — they will need the power of city hall behind them; they can’t yet know that this will lead to their sibling organization, CAAAV Voice, having some of the first conversations, hushed and tentative at first, about throwing down for a longshot democratic socialist mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani; they can’t yet know that they will organize a formidable Bengali base to win a massive affordable housing campaign in Astoria against a private developer; they can’t yet know that pouring immense volumes of sweat and tears there will result — alongside the hard work of other immigrant-led organizations like Desis Rising Up & Moving, or DRUM, Beats, and the steady organizing of the Democratic Socialists of America, and others — in the creation of a new power base that will end up being essential to that longshot candidate actually becoming mayor. They can’t yet know that, some short months after this mayoral victory — because of a million small decisions made by a whole host of actors that add up to greater than the sum of their parts — the city will pass a historic rent freeze, something they have only barely dreamed of at this point. They can’t see the future, and neither can I.

But there is enough here: enough clarity about their leverage and their options, enough willingness to take risks and experience loss and enter into conflict for the sake of good strategy; there is enough courage, enough honesty, enough choice, enough possibility.

Telling the truth

Not having good strategy sends resources, attention and activity in different — even contradictory — directions. It’s a waste of what precious few tools we have; it usually means we lose. And the losing that comes with bad strategy shapes us over time, gets swallowed up in the form of despair, calcifies into ideas and behaviors that make up the politics of powerlessness — an ambivalence toward power, where we turn inward on each other rather than face outward to the public and our opponent. 

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In the end, breaking the conflict avoidance that blocks good strategy is really about telling the truth whenever we can. And if we want to be different, we’ll have to practice. We can all begin by doing the small but vital things that are in our control: say what we mean, steer toward tensions instead of away from them, ask follow-up questions when we sense there is something being left unsaid, get curious about what is inside us and inside others, be honest about misalignments when they arise. Every day, little by little, we can just be a little more honest, even when it is hard — about our groups, ourselves, each other, our fears and doubts, our hopes and dreams, the stakes, our plans. We can anticipate conflict, make time for it, create regular rhythms for feedback, have ongoing conversations about how power is being wielded in our spaces, regularly question our own strategic choices and put them relentlessly to the test. We can build all of this into our meetings, our retreats, our planning sessions. We can invite people from the outside to facilitate or advise us in these risky, delicate, transformative journeys; demand that they challenge us, help us fill our gaps, take us through the fire and not around it. 

We should do all of this for the sake of good strategy and stronger groups. We should do it because organizations and movements that have good strategy win more often, and those embodied experiences of winning are some of our best protections from the politics of powerlessness — the choice to stay small and pure and righteous over growing and opening and taking big risks. But we should do it, too, because telling the truth is central to transformation. It is a fundamental part of looking at what is and what might be and making the choice to climb the distance between; a chance to flex that muscle of becoming and becoming again; an opportunity to become bigger as individuals and greater than the sum of our parts as groups. And it is absolutely central to the task we have taken up as movements more broadly: to take control of our lives, to shape the world, to make of it something nearer to the world we all deserve.

This article Movements cannot shy away from conflict was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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This article The Yippies and the power of counterculture was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, an authoritarian presidency has been accompanied by a brutal crackdown on social movements. While there are strikingly new features of Trump’s reign, many of the assaults on freedom and the persecution of activists have parallels in the histories of U.S. imperialism, the anti-Vietnam war movement and the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, and the rise of the right in the 1980s.

And many of the questions organizers are asking today were in debate then. How do you balance militant activism with the need to build a mass movement? What role do creativity, theatrics and joy take in resistance? What does it mean to support those who are facing the brunt of the state’s criminalization of protest?

This is why “Levitating the Pentagon and Other Uplifting Stories: A Life of Activism,” a recent memoir by New Left organizer Nancy Kurshan, comes at a critical moment. Kurshan takes a magnifying glass to her decades of organizing experience in an attempt to pull out the lessons that are most informative for today. I talked with Nancy about her history in revolutionary organizations like the Weather Underground and the Yippies — known for their theatrical antiwar activism — and how she sees their choices years later.

Your book is named after the Oct. 21, 1967 demonstration organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (the precursor to the Youth International Party, or the Yippies), in which they claimed they would attempt to psychically raise the Pentagon building into the air. I don’t think you would be surprised that when I first heard that story, it was explained as a type of disconnect: These people really believed they were about to levitate the Pentagon. Can you put the levitation in context? 

We always claimed we did, in fact, levitate the Pentagon, but just not high enough — although I doubt a single one of us thought we would literally succeed. But we did hope to help end the war and, in order to do that, we did need to have those evil spirits expelled by enough people to help change policy. 

For instance, there was a young Daniel Ellsberg watching from an upstairs window of the Pentagon who later became a famous whistleblower by releasing the Pentagon Papers. So maybe we did succeed at driving out the evil spirits or at least hastening that process. Who knows?

As you discuss, this was a much more strategically conceived demonstration than it first appeared, even if it had some elements that weren’t that strategic.

That demonstration in particular was very strategic. We were not yet Yippies when a small group of us arrived in New York to help build a national antiwar protest in Washington. Our strategic goal was to build a larger, more militant movement and one that tapped into the energy of the emerging counterculture. Our little band of youthful agitators argued for the demonstration to be the at Pentagon, as opposed to the usual humdrum protest outside the White House. We wanted a target that made it clear this was not just about an argument of words but about a conflict in which millions of lives were being taken by weapons of destruction — over 2 million Vietnamese lives and 60,000 American GIs. And we wanted our slogan to be: “Shut it down!” 

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And we wanted to do this by organizing mass civil disobedience. And the reason I stress mass is because there had already been very orchestrated, “stepping over the line” civil disobedience carried out by a few very wonderful, committed people. But it was time to massify it. And we did it. Hundreds were arrested. It was the largest civil disobedience of the anti-Vietnam war movement to that date. 

The other strategic aspect was we wanted to appeal to the youth of America. The hippie phenomenon was taking hold in many places throughout the nation, and the Pentagon protest was able to project a union of antiwar and countercultural streams. Later the colorful, satirical approach of the Yippies was very resonant with young Americans. 

What would you say is the value of these theatrical and performative protest actions?

Theatrical and performative protest are incredibly valuable. The whole Pentagon protest was a theatrical event, but one particular photo of Super-Joel placing a flower in the musket of a National Guardsman has traveled around the world. 

Subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1968, Jerry Rubin dresses as an “international guerrilla,” accompanied by Nancy Kurshan in witch garb.

After Black Panther Fred Hampton and others were assassinated, and the guilty verdict in the Chicago Conspiracy trial came down, Anita Hoffman, Tasha Dellinger and I held a press conference and we burned judges’ robes in front of a banner referencing the Jefferson Airplane’s “We Are All Outlaws In The Eyes of Amerika,” [from the song “We Can Be Together.”] The photo went around the globe. 

During the wars in the 1980s in Central America, we went out in canoes and dyed the Chicago River red and left “bloodied” hands on the walls of the federal building. 

The 1,000 Grandmothers for Future Generations, a climate justice organization that I am a part of, has fantastical, huge puppets — the Water Protector, Flo the Hummingbird, the Fierce Protector and Winds of Change. The names alone are great, but the creatures are fabulous. And people, including children, love them. The incredibly original, creative banners and signs are proof that we are not “paid agitators.” Sometimes the movement’s fabulous art is reflected in the mass media, more often on social media. But always in our hearts and minds. 

Your book includes a deep dive into the Chicago Eight trial, in which eight antiwar activists were prosecuted for allegedly inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, including Yippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and Black Panther Bobby Seale (although Seale wasn’t present and had no connection). You were involved in court and jail support for the defendants, the kind of organizing that became increasingly important as repression against organizers grew. Can you talk about why this kind of prison solidarity and court support activism are so key, and what other campaigns you’ve been involved in?

I believe that prison support should play a central role in any vibrant movement challenging the status quo. I don’t think a movement can persist and grow if political prisoners are locked away without support. I was privileged to be part of a campaign to free 11 Puerto Rican independentistas, a campaign that was conducted in Puerto Rico, in Chicago and around the globe. After decades of imprisonment, their sentences were ultimately commuted by President [Bill] Clinton. That never would have happened if it weren’t for a persistent and intense campaign to free them across decades. I saw in that campaign what real loyalty looked like when day after day and year after year, decade after decade, there was a ceaseless attempt to hold the political prisoners in community, to tell their stories, to organize protests, to visit them, to raise funds and to incorporate them into the daily life of the community, primarily in Puerto Rican neighborhoods, but also among other allies.

I was part of the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown, a campaign in the 1980s and ’90s to end the ongoing lockdown at the United States Penitentiary Marion [now named Federal Corrections Institution Marion], a federal prison where inmates were confined to their cells for 23 hours a day and without normal contact and recreation. I wrote a book about it, “Out of Control: A 15 Year Battle Against Control Unit Prisons,” published by Freedom Archives. For 15 years we organized and protested to end mass incarceration and particularly long-term solitary confinement. That was our primary effort. However, we worked along with our Puerto Rican friends and others, incorporating demands to free political prisoners into our work, as they joined in fighting long-term solitary [confinement], which disproportionately fell on political prisoners like the 11. We also together assembled, published, collated and distributed four editions of “Can’t Jail the Spirit,” collections of biographies and photos of all the political prisoners we knew of at the time. 

I applaud the work of groups like The Sentencing Project and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. And when significant charges come down, whether on activists from the movement against Palestinian genocide or the immigration or climate movements, let’s show solidarity and have their backs. 

How did the struggle against white supremacy and for civil rights develop your consciousness as an organizer?

Anti-racism had always been, since high school, at the center of my political thinking. I was a Northern supporter of the Southern civil rights movement and then later, I was part of Students for a Democratic Society. I was committed to building an interracial movement of the poor. I was a middle-class white girl knocking on apartment doors of Black folks who were more hospitable than you can imagine. 

Then along came Malcolm X and the evolution of the civil rights movement into a movement for Black liberation. I heard both Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X speak and I got it: Black people are not the problem, and white people need to organize our own communities to oppose racism. 

My militancy grew in response to the way the Black movement had been treated and the response that ill-treatment generated in younger Black activists of my generation. We noted everything that was going on. The refusal of the Democratic Party to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the brutal murders of [James Earl] Chaney, [Andrew] Goodman and [Michael] Schwerner, and the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had a deep impact on me and many other activists.  

Over your years in organizing, how did you balance militancy and radicalism with the need to build a mass movement? 

Sometimes well, sometimes not that well. It was and is a conundrum wrapped in an enigma. This is a huge topic and I could look at each decade of my life and try to see how I – and we – dealt with that balance. But that would be a whole long piece. So I’ll just touch on it.

Previous Coverage

The day they levitated the Pentagon

I advocated for militancy in the form of nonviolent direct action, as exemplified by the October 1967 Pentagon demonstration. Our advocacy included satire and theater, thus the levitation. But our slogan of “Shut it down!” represented our militant intent, as did our refusal to leave. [The] Chicago ‘68 [Democratic National Convention protests] continued our militant trajectory and we were still able to grow the mass movement. 

Many of the Black youth in the movement were becoming more militant. The Black Panthers were sick and tired of being the victims of white hatred and violence, whether by the police or by racist white folks. So they marched into the Sacramento capitol of California with rifles and declared themselves the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. 

This was a time of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI COINTELPRO [counter-intelligence program], whose core objective was to “prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify, and electrify, the militant Black nationalist movement.” It involved overt and often illegal operations aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting and neutralizing domestic political organizations. Neutralizing? Scores of dead Black people give meaning to the definition. I was in Chicago when Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was assassinated. I walked through the bloody scene where they killed him in his sleep. He was old enough to be my baby brother. 

As Black, Puerto Rican, Mexican and Native (Indigenous, to use today’s language) contemporaries became more militant, we asked ourselves how we should respond. We supported what they were doing. So why wasn’t it appropriate for us to join in? Should we be onlookers or should we be like Old John Brown and his family — white folks who actively opposed slavery with their lives. 

For some of us becoming more militant meant joining the Weather Underground. By doing so, I never expected to become divorced from the mass movement. My passion was deep and I didn’t realize the mass movement would recede so quickly. 

What did that receding of the mass movement look like?

There were collectives around the country, particularly in college towns and other youth communities that persisted. I encountered many of them when a group of us traveled around the country in 1974. But in hindsight we could see that after the ending of the Vietnam War, and the repression of the Black movement, and also of Puerto Rican, Mexican and Native American [movements], the mass movement significantly receded.

By 1976 we in the Weather Underground Organization planned a Hard Times Conference in Chicago, a conference to address the economic recession taking place nationally, in large part to help reinvigorate a mass movement that would link a militant fight to combat racism and sexism together with the concerns of all working-class people. That didn’t work. I wasn’t there because I was delivering a baby at that moment. Large numbers of people showed up from around the country, but there was too much internal division for the convening to be successful. 

We made mistakes but perhaps objective conditions were not ripe. Our youthful passion often overlooked a clear view of objective conditions. We thought if we just worked harder, we could change anything and everything. 

You talked about your move away from the “straight left,” which was the term for the less theatrical and subcultural organizing left, in part because the cultural values of young people were coming up against the entrenched social conservatism you were fighting against, and this made many of the more buttoned-down leftist tactics seem antiquated. What was the value of this countercultural movement in terms of resisting the war and structural injustice? 

I lived in several different situations, but the most extraordinary was the Bachenheimer houses on Parker Street in Berkeley. The complex was a cluster of houses that went on rent strike for a couple of years. Bachenheimer was the name of the landlord/slumlord in charge of overcharging and under-repairing everything.

The rent strike meant much more than simply not paying rent. We, like so many others, had rejected the traditional materialistic values of U.S. society and were looking for more meaningful, cooperative and creative ways of living. We treated the houses as if they were our own, tearing down walls and rehabbing as desired. The backyards of the buildings ran together and there was a large outdoor common area.

The rent strike was a collective decision and action taken by all the Bachenheimer houses. We weren’t out to con the landlord. On the contrary, we believed that people had the right to decent and affordable living conditions, and we put our rent checks into an escrow account every month — payable when and if Bachenheimer brought the houses up to code. 

The nature of that community was not lost on the FBI. My FBI file [obtained through the Freedom of Information Act], indicates that: “This department had not had any success in developing any sources or informants … in the 2200 block of East Parker, Berkeley, California. … Because the residents of this block are ‘hippie type individuals,’ their attitude towards any type of authority or law enforcement official is somewhat negative, therefore, communication with them is also somewhat limited.”

I wonder if any left organization was better guarded against snooping FBI agents or undercover informants than the Bachenheimer houses. Although the rent strike may have been exceptional, there were communities of similar character all around the country.

Do you continue to see value for radical movements in the development of a counterculture as important?

I suspect that the melding of the antiwar movement and countercultural hippies probably led to the most successful influence on disaffected working-class youth [of any recent movement]. I can’t prove it, but I doubt anyone can disprove it. My family was solidly middle class by the 1960s, but I encountered countercultural working-class youth in Kent, Ohio as well as in Berkeley, California, the Lower East Side of New York, the Twin Cities, Minnesota, and in Manchester, New Hampshire, all of whom were antiwar. They were not that different from people I knew as a young child in Brooklyn. 

I also met with deserters from the U.S. Army in Sweden and worked with Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In fact, resistance to the war inside the military, and organizing on the outside at coffee houses set up near military bases, was essential to ending the war and most of the participants were working class, albeit not only white folks. Tremendously aided by the music of Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan but also the Rolling Stones; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff and so many others. 

That assessment of the past hasn’t changed. Yes, many people both from the political movement and the counterculture returned to the mainstream, but in doing so, many maintained, in varying degrees, the values and thinking of the political/cultural movements. The civil rights movement was probably the grandmother/grandfather of them all, but it can be argued that the counterculture advanced notions of sexual liberation that, although shot full of male supremacy, or perhaps partly in reaction to that, then led to the birth of the women’s and gay liberation movements. You could argue similarly about the current climate movement. The seeds were there in the counterculture.

And the antiwar movement, unique in that it led to the eventual, massive alienation from the war machine, is still having reverberations today. The war in Vietnam remained popular much longer than the current war on Iran. That is echoes of the so-called Vietnam Syndrome.  

So I suggest that the mainstream has actually been moving towards us. Perhaps a slow evolution but a change in direction. And of course subsequent movements were critical — Occupy and Black Lives Matter. All these movements encourage changes in consciousness. And what we are seeing in this era, is the counter-revolution, if you will. In other words, the collective “we” has had a great influence which is why there is such a fierce response. It’s hard to tease out the different elements but it’s clear that all the mass struggles of our people have planted seeds that have blossomed in subsequent generations.

I returned to Vietnam in 2013 as a guest of the Vietnamese government, in thanks for helping end the war. It was the first time that I completely internalized that yes, we had made a positive difference. 

What kind of advice do you have for organizers today who are asking questions about the role of cultural struggle?

Don’t give in to cynicism. The current powers that be would love nothing better. When asked if I’m hopeful, I like to quote the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci, “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” I take it to mean we have to see the reality for what it is, not through rose-colored [glasses]. But we have to continue to act. 

My wish is to see some massive nonviolent actions — I like the ideas people are putting forth of a general strike.

But there are many other tools in the tool box as well. Find your own voice and use it in whatever way you see fit. Ask yourself what you think needs to be done, and consider what your own talents and inclinations are.

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Let’s continue to deepen our connections in the communities where we live, at the same time as we keep an eye on and respond to world events because the people in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran, in Cuba are our sisters and brothers. We are all connected and they have been paying a heavy price.

Let’s build a big tent. Don’t get hung up on small differences. And let’s not throw anyone under the bus. Let’s continue to embrace the most vulnerable, and that includes the undocumented folks and trans people. We can build a big tent and do all that. 

The time is now. The place is here. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

This article The Yippies and the power of counterculture was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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This article The strategic satire of India’s Gen Z ‘Cockroach’ movement was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On June 29, thousands of people gathered at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar — the capital’s designated site for public demonstration — in the second week of a growing sit-in accompanied by a wave of online dissent. What is being called India’s first “Gen Z protest” was spurred by an education system that many young Indians believe has failed to offer fair opportunities.

Protesters arrived carrying the Indian flag, copies of the constitution and red roses, which they handed to police officers stationed at the venue. Volunteers reminded participants to remain disciplined, avoid confrontation and document events on their phones.

“The truth has no spokesperson except your camera,” organizers told the crowd.

Many participants carried signs reading “Main Bhi Cockroach,”  or “I too am a cockroach,” and wore cockroach masks, reclaiming the label that inspired the movement.

From simmer to outrage

On May 12, the government invalidated the results of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), India’s highly competitive medical entrance examination, citing allegations of exam paper leaks and widespread irregularities.

Nine days after taking the exam, more than two million students found themselves back to where they had started — preparing for one of the world’s toughest examinations with less than a month’s time, competing for fewer than 130,000 undergraduate medical seats. Reports of severe student distress, including at least 13 cases of student suicides, emerged from across the country.

The cancellation reignited longstanding criticism of how India’s examination system is administered and the mounting psychological pressure placed on students seeking professional careers. Since 2021, at least 93 suicides linked to the intense competition and financial burden of the NEET exams have come to light. Meanwhile, the NEET papers have leaked at least 89 times over the last 10 years, affecting 65 million students. 

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Amid growing public anger, Supreme Court Chief Justice Surya Kant made a remark on May 15 that turned an already simmering online conversation into a wave of collective outrage. 

While questioning the conduct of lawyers he suspected of having fraudulent degrees, he turned toward the country’s unemployed youth, describing them as “cockroaches” and “parasites.”

“There are youngsters like cockroaches, who don’t get any employment or have any place in the profession,” he said. “Some of them become media, some of them become social media and activists, and they start attacking everyone.”

Justice Kant later said that his comments referred to individuals accused of obtaining fake degrees, and not the nation’s youth, whom he called the “pillars of a developed India.” 

But by then, the discussion had moved past the clarification.

In the midst of the online uproar, Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old Indian student based in Boston, casually posted a question on X, “What if all cockroaches came together?”

​The birth of Cockroach Janta Party

​Dipke’s call quickly sparked a wave of responses, with millions of young Indians embracing the cockroach as a symbol of resilience.

On May 16, Dipke announced the launch of Cockroach Janta Party, or CJP, a satirical political outfit. It was widely seen as a jibe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s political party, the Bharatiya Janta Party, or BJP, which has been in power since 2014.

“The CJP began as an idea after we saw millions of youth were repeatedly being denied a voice,” Dipke told me. “When authorities suppress people’s voices, that’s exactly when people should come together and raise their voices.”

The party introduced itself as “the voice of the burnt-out youth” and “a political party for the people the system forgot to count.”

DipkeHe set up a party website, outlining its objectives and inviting supporters to pledge their membership. Its requirements reflected the movement’s irreverent tone. Prospective members, the website joked, should be unemployed, lazy, chronically online and possess “the ability to rant professionally.”

Within a few days, tens of thousands of people had signed up through an online registration form, while the hashtag #MainBhiCockroach (“I too am a cockroach”) spread widely across social media. The movement also drew public support from several opposition politicians.

The party’s Instagram account has now surpassed 22 million followers, overtaking the official BJP account, which has around 9.4 million followers despite being widely regarded as the world’s largest political party by membership.

Its presence on X, however, has faced restrictions multiple times. The CJP account, which has attracted more than 200,000 followers, has been inaccessible twice within India, with users receiving a notification that “the account has been withheld in response to a legal notice.”

The manifesto

Behind the satire lay serious political concerns.

“We are not here to set up another PM CARES, holiday in Davos on the taxpayer’s salary slip or rebrand corruption as strategic spending,” the website said. “We are here to ask — loudly, repeatedly, in writing — where the money went.”

Its mission statement speaks directly to the generation driving the movement — a cohort that came of age amid economic uncertainty, competitive examinations and near-constant political engagement online.

“Build a party for a generation raised on promises, notifications and low battery warnings,” the statement reads. “A generation that is overqualified, frustrated, angry at what’s broken and financially confused,” the website further explained.

For supporters, the satire succeeded because it gave voice to frustrations that had been building for years. Behind the absurdity of a political party named after one of the world’s most resilient insects was a manifesto addressing issues that have long dominated public debate in India: the lack of judicial independence, doubts over free and fair elections, growing corporate control of media, frequent party defections and the underrepresentation of women in politics.

One proposal called for retired Chief Justices of India to be barred from accepting seats in the Rajya Sabha — the upper house of Parliament — after leaving office. The demand reflects concerns raised by critics that post-retirement appointments to political office blur the separation between the judiciary and the executive.

Another focused on electoral integrity. In deliberately hyperbolic language, the manifesto declared that election officials responsible for removing legitimate voters from electoral rolls be arrested under India’s principal anti-terror law — a key tool that the Modi administration uses to silence its critics — because “taking away voting rights of citizens is no less than terrorism.” The proposal referred to a recent controversy in which 9.1 million names were stripped from voter rolls in the West Bengal state elections won by the BJP in April.

Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) founder Abhijeet Dipke leads chants during a CJP protest on June 6, 2026. (Getty/Arun Sankar)

Gender equality also features prominently. While India’s Parliament passed legislation in 2023 reserving one-third of parliamentary seats for women — a reform that has yet to be implemented — the CJP argued that women should instead hold half of all cabinet positions and seats in Parliament.

The manifesto also took aim at India’s media, proposing that television channels and news organizations owned by some of the country’s largest business conglomerates lose their broadcasting licenses to make way for independent journalism. Although framed satirically, the proposal echoed longstanding criticism from media watchdogs and opposition groups that growing corporate ownership has weakened the independence of India’s mainstream press.

It also targeted one of the country’s most persistent political problems: party defections. The manifesto proposed permanently disqualifying elected lawmakers who switch political parties after winning office, a practice that has repeatedly altered governments at both the national and state levels despite existing anti-defection laws.

Taken together, the manifesto is less a conventional political program than a vehicle for expressing public frustration through humor. Its proposals were intentionally exaggerated, but the concerns they referenced were familiar to many Indians.

From meme to movement

“Time to turn this tiny joke into a revolution,” the official CJP account on X posted after Dipke announced he was returning to India from Boston.

Upon his return on on June 6, Dipke travelled directly from the airport to New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, the capital’s designated site for public demonstration, where the party held its first protest, demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over the repeated paper leaks and other alleged failures in conducting competitive examinations that affect millions of students and job seekers.

Despite the movement’s massive online reach, fewer than 2,000 people attended the inaugural rally, according to media reports. The turnout highlighted the gap that often exists between digital support and physical mobilization.

Standing before the crowd in Delhi’s summer heat, Dipke gave Pradhan until 5 p.m. that day to resign. When no response came, he extended the deadline by another week.

“But this doesn’t end here. Dharmendra Pradhan has wronged an entire generation. If he is not removed or does not step down within the next seven days, we will be forced to continue our protest on the ground,” he wrote later on X.

Rather than fading, the movement continued to gain momentum and has now entered into its second month.

“So far, we have not seen any substantial and meaningful effort from the government to address our demands,” Dipke told me. “If our demands are not met, our movement will still remain peaceful and continue through constitutional and democratic means.”

Beginning June 11, CJP supporters organized demonstrations across cities like Pune, Lucknow, Amritsar, Hyderabad and Bangalore. The demand remained unchanged: Pradhan must quit.

When the minister refused, the organization escalated its campaign, announcing an indefinite sit-in at Jantar Mantar beginning June 20. “This protest will go on for as long as it takes,” Dipke declared. “Nobody will move till Dharmendra Pradhan resigns.”

“I am appealing to all cockroaches, parents and teachers from Delhi to come and join us at Jantar Mantar,” he continued. “We will stay put for as long as we can, but we will not be able to pull this off unless we have your support.”

Students, teachers, parents, lawyers, activists, trade union members and farmers began arriving from across the country. Volunteers coordinated food, water and medical assistance, while supporters continued to amplify the movement online. So far, 800,000 online petitions have been signed demanding Pradhan’s sacking.

Major support has come from student organizations such as All India Students Association and Students Federation of India, or SFI. SFI has been protesting against examination irregularities since early May, with several members detained during demonstrations in different parts of the country. 

“The students and youth have been frustrated for quite some time,” said Aishe Ghosh, joint secretary of SFI. “The repeated incidence of paper leaks and rising unemployment has made the students and youth hostile towards the government.”

India is home to the world’s largest population of youth between the ages of 15 to 29, and has recorded the highest unemployment rate among graduates, estimated at 15.2 percent.

For Ghosh, the demonstrations reflected more than a single policy failure. “The ongoing protest is just a combination of the long-term anger and frustration,” she said.

Among those who answered Dipke’s call was Dr. Dighe, a Mumbai-based physician whose son took the NEET examination in May.

He said the cancellation of the results had taken a significant toll on his son’s mental health, but that his decision to protest also came from his experience as a doctor.

“I understand how important this examination is for the medical students who later become doctors,” he said. “I am here at the protest for my son, for the future of several other NEET aspirants and to save the medical profession of this country.”

The protest was also expected to draw support from several farmers’ unions, which announced plans to join the demonstration on June 28. However, on the morning of the protest, several leaders were reportedly placed under house arrest, preventing them from reaching the site.

“If leaders are placed under house arrest before joining any peaceful democratic movement, it is a matter of grave concern,” Dipke told me. “In a democracy, every citizen and organization has the right to express their views peacefully. We believe that dialogue and participation strengthen democracy, while restrictions and oppression do not.”

A distinctly Gen Z protest

As the protest grows, the CJP has developed a style of resistance that looks very different from the traditional political demonstrations in India. Memes and satire heavily drawn from internet culture are becoming central to how young people express political anger. Videos shared across Instagram, X and YouTube show protesters blending humor with dissent, creating a protest culture that feels distinctly Gen Z while addressing long-standing concerns over education, unemployment and government accountability.

The movement’s online identity quickly spilled onto the streets. At Jantar Mantar on June 29, protesters carried hand-painted placards filled with political criticism with meme culture, Bollywood references and internet humor. One sign read, “We asked for ‘Make in India,’ you gave us ‘Leak in India,’” referring to Modi’s flagship manufacturing campaign and the repeated examination paper leaks that triggered the movement. Another simply read, “Bro is still employed,” alongside a photograph of the Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, while others promoted the campaign “Pradhan Go Back.”

Between speeches and performances, groups of students were also seen playing cricket, giving the protest the feel of a community gathering as much as a political demonstration.

The familiar slogan of “Azaadi” (freedom) was reinterpreted to express frustration with the education system. Organizers also asked demonstrators to bring candles “in memory of each student who committed suicide, and the ones whose government failed to protect.”

Thousands of young people and activists gather at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar for the Cockroach Janta Party’s indefinite peaceful sit-in. (Samrat Sonawane / CJP)

Visual symbolism has become another defining feature of the movement. Groups beat steel plates and spoons, reversing Modi’s 2020 call for Indians to bang utensils in support of frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. This time, the gesture became a demand for accountability from the government. Organizers launched  a “Diaper Donation Drive,” encouraging supporters to write messages on diapers demanding the education minister’s resignation and send them to his office.

Despite these colorful tactics, Ghosh said the movement has received little attention from the mainstream media.

“The state is careful and alert to any eruption of collective anger or dissent,” Ghosh said. “Hence, it is using all mechanisms to control the narrative of the ongoing protests. Except for a section of social media, mainly the mainstream media has been blacked out from coverage.”

But throughout, students documented the protest as it happened, filming Instagram Reels, livestreaming speeches and posting photographs that carried the movement beyond the protest site and onto social media in real time.

Under state surveillance

As the CJP protest gathers momentum, the police presence has become increasingly visible. Protesters arriving at Jantar Mantar were required to show identification and pass through a scanning machine before entering. 

The security arrangements extended well beyond the entrance. Plainclothes police photographers and videographers blended into the crowd, documenting the gathering from within. CCTV cameras have been installed and around 270 body cameras are being used by Delhi Police. Several police buses remained parked outside the protest site throughout the day, while drones hovered overhead, keeping a close watch on the demonstration from the air. The CJP alleges that the government is also monitoring protesters’ phone calls and chats. 

“If people participating in peaceful protests are placed under excessive surveillance or made to feel intimidated, it is contrary to democratic values,” Dipke said.

As evening fell, the atmosphere grew more tense. Police repeatedly announced that protesters would have to vacate the site.

Soon after, electricity to the stage was cut, silencing the sound system. Demonstrators allege that police then temporarily blocked food and drinking water from entering the venue and cut off the water supply in nearby restrooms.

Several hours later, electricity was restored, food and water supplies resumed and restrictions on movement in and out of the protest site were eased. Yet the sit-in continued under heavy police surveillance as it entered its third week.

Police intimidation extends beyond the protest site itself. Delhi Police put up a notice declaring the protest unlawful and has tracked down organizers in person to intimidate and interrogate them.

“Many supporters who have been helping the protesters with food and water are being targeted by the authorities,” said Samrat Sonawane, a CJP volunteer. “Large teams from the Delhi Police and Crime Investigation Department have been visiting homes of several Delhi-based protesters in the early hours of the morning.”

“The authorities are also going to protesters’ relatives’ homes and warning them not to participate in the protest, claiming it is linked to terrorist activities,” Samrat added.

Despite the growing restrictions, CJP organizers continued to seek dialogue with the government. They say they have received no response. “The government has become totally deaf, dumb and blind to the demands of the youth,” CJP spokesperson Sourav Das said.

Ghosh believes the government’s reluctance to engage with the protesters is deliberate.

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“The government is actually avoiding engaging with the ongoing protest as a tactical strategy to further avoid antagonizing the larger student community,” she said.

On June 28, the education reformist, climate activist and Ramon Magsaysay Award recipient Sonam Wangchuk, who had been at Jantar Mantar since June 6, announced an indefinite hunger strike — a form of nonviolent protest with a long history in India. 

“Hunger strike is not the first but the final democratic expression of a movement,” Dipke said of the strategic decision to move toward hunger strikes. “The purpose of this strike is not to confront anyone, but to seriously draw the attention of the government and society towards this issue.” 

Democracy in question

Many protesters spent their nights sleeping on roads and pavement despite Delhi’s sweltering summer heat. For many, it was the first time they had ever participated in a public demonstration. Several students chose to remain at the protest site even after retaking the examination on June 21, saying the movement had grown beyond the paper leak and had become a fight for accountability in India’s education system.

For much of this generation, Modi’s government is the only political administration they have known. Their protest unfolded against the backdrop of a decade in which demonstrations over issues ranging from the Citizenship Amendment Act to the years-long farmers’ movement have faced heavy policing, legal action against organizers and administrative restrictions. Civil liberties groups and opposition leaders have argued that these measures reflect a shrinking space for peaceful dissent. 

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“This government doesn’t want the coming generation to question it,” Samrat said. “The more the public turns towards illiteracy, the easier it becomes for the BJP to continue running the government.”

When asked about the ongoing protests, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan dismissed the CJP as a “B team of disruptive elements,” a remark that fueled further criticism from protesters, who said the government was choosing confrontation over conversation.

The heavy surveillance at Jantar Mantar, combined with repeated attempts to end the sit-in, reinforced the students’ belief that the government was unwilling to engage directly with their demands. Yet despite the barricades, police presence and administrative restrictions, they continue to return each day, insisting that their struggle was no longer only about a leaked examination, but about the future of public education and the right to be heard.

“Our protest is fully nonviolent and falls within the scope of our constitution,” Dipke said. “Instead of breaking the morale of the protesters, this situation has created more awareness towards their rights.”

Whether the protest ultimately compels political action remains uncertain. But for the hundreds of young people who have spent days and nights at Jantar Mantar, it has already become something larger than a demand to reconduct an examination or remove a minister. 

It is a test of whether peaceful dissent can still compel those in power to listen. As Dipke said, “Prime Minister Narendra Modi must decide whether [ten million] students or one incompetent minister is more important.”

This article The strategic satire of India’s Gen Z ‘Cockroach’ movement was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Fifty years ago, America celebrated its bicentennial with a coast-to-coast displays of bunting, flags, community ceremonies, and constant talk about “hope” and “unity.” Now as we face our semi-quincentennial, the…

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This article Finding real national pride on America’s 250th birthday was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

During this year of celebrating our nation’s 250th anniversary, I’ve been experiencing an unexpected emotion: pride.

For months, it’s been something far different — a mixture of disappointment, disbelief and disgust at the undermining of our freedoms, our wellbeing, our children’s futures and even our prospects for survival.

But recently, something shifted for me. I saw the excitement and global unity of World Cup fans. I talked to small business owners here in my small town in Washington state who were placing signs in their windows to let immigrants know they are welcome. I saw my community come together to march and rally on Juneteenth, with speakers reminding us that all people deserve freedom — and that we still have work to do to achieve that founding aspiration of our nation. I watched gay and straight neighbors at a joyful and defiant Pride parade in Seattle.

So many people are choosing courage and freedom for all, doing the risky, heroic work of resisting a would-be dictator and his sycophantic henchmen. I am feeling more confident that the courage and strength of the American people will get us through this period of darkness — but only if we reckon honestly with how we got here.

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That means doing exactly the work the Trump regime is working so desperately to prevent: coming to terms with our nation’s history of race-based violence, exclusion and displacement, beginning with the killing, land grabs and cultural suppression of the Indigenous peoples who were the original caretakers of this continent, and continuing with the cruel enslavement of people whose forced labor built the nation’s wealth.

The work we need to do is more than an anti-bias workshop. It is the deeper and long-overdue work our nation and institutions need. Instead of papering over inconvenient history and its continued harm, we can do the work that begins with the truth, allows healing, strengthens a culture of integrity and builds the solidarity needed to face the enormous challenges before us.

The conviction that this work is necessary led me to create a free zine, “Community Reckoning,” that offers a process for reckoning with our history. We don’t need to wait for leadership from Washington, D.C. to take on this challenge. We can start now in our communities, congregations, universities, civic groups and other organizations. “Community Reckoning” offers a path to doing this work together.

The framework is simple: Stop the harm. Tell the truth. Acknowledge. Repair. The STAR acronym echoes the North Star that guided enslaved people escaping bondage.

The cover of the author’s zine “Community Reckoning” bearing the STAR acronym. (Sarah Van Gelder)

This framework grew out of lived experience when I co-led, along with an Indigenous tribal elder, a community group formed after the 2001 desecration of Suquamish Chief Seattle’s grave. Over several years, Native and non-Native residents countered the political influence of a property owners’ group that had been actively hostile toward the Suquamish Tribe (Stop the Harm). We learned and shared the tribe’s history (Tell the Truth). We acknowledged the harms done when tribal land was taken and the tribe’s very existence was under assault, and celebrated those working to improve relationships between the Native and non-Native communities  (Acknowledge). Finally, working alongside the tribal government, we helped win the return of land that had once been the center of the tribe’s village, where Chief Seattle had lived most of his life (Repair). The trust and transformation that resulted from this collaboration rippled outward for years.

The STAR path can also be seen in Georgetown University’s reckoning with the 1838 sale of more than 270 enslaved people to pay the university’s debts. Students and alumni who researched this history discovered that — contrary to the story the university had told — thousands of descendants of these families were still alive. Apologies followed: Rev. Timothy Kesicki, S.J., said, “The Society of Jesus which helped to establish Georgetown University and whose leaders enslaved and mercilessly sold your ancestors, stands before you to say that we have greatly sinned. … We are profoundly sorry.” Former President of Georgetown John J. DeGioia said, “Slavery remains the original evil of our Republic — an evil that our university was complicit in.”

The students persuaded the administration to rename two university buildings that had been named for the Jesuit leaders who arranged for this sale, and assessed themselves a fee in honor of those whose lives financed the institution’s existence.

The Jesuit order has donated and raised funds for a Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation, which is now giving $10,000 scholarships to descendants, supporting modest home improvements to allow aged descendants to remain at home and sponsoring educational events and dialogues on racial justice.

These stories and others, along with practical tools, resources and inspiration from wise leaders, are contained in the zine.

The zine is built around practical ways communities can begin this work: learning local history, acknowledging harms, preventing ongoing injustice and working toward meaningful repair. Every community’s path will be different. But every community has one, and the integrity and deepened relationships that result are well worth the hard work.

Integrity is the reward

Some people say we should put this reckoning off yet again — that there are more urgent matters as we face an authoritarian regime committed to entrenching its power, and other existential crises.

But we will only achieve sustainable progress when we heal our nation’s foundational wounds — a process that can’t wait for some ideal future.

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We need to build a movement that heals our nation’s traumas

For centuries, politicians and economic elites have used racial resentment to prevent working people of different backgrounds from joining together to win real improvements. They’ve turned natural allies into rivals while they consolidate power and ever-larger shares of our nation’s wealth.

The result is an increasingly powerful group of the ultra-rich supporting the right-wing surge in the United States and elsewhere. People of every race — but especially people of color — struggle to afford housing, education, health care, gas and even food, things most people in wealthy countries take for granted. Politicians answer to big money and to the lobbyists who flood the centers of power. The monied interests get their way, not us.

If we’re going to build power, we can only build it on a foundation of solidarity. And solidarity is only possible in movements that are fully inclusive — and have done the work of racial reckoning. Without it, internal fault lines caused by unaddressed trauma, unrecognized privilege and unintended harms will continue to undermine trust.

True reckoning means we don’t wait for a fracture. The burden doesn’t fall on people of color to identify the flaws or the injuries of institutions that have yet to reckon with their own history, biases and privilege. Instead, we collectively take on the needed work.

National healing

The benefits of this work go even further — they include the possibility of profound healing for all of us. Instead of accepting lies and half-truths, we build a foundation based on honest reckoning and the integrity that comes from insisting on the truth.

A person, an institution or a nation that papers over a traumatic and unresolved story doesn’t make it go away. The consequences of the falseness keep showing up.

We might prefer to tell ourselves we’re the greatest country on earth, the most free, the most exceptional; we might not want to think about what that greatness was built on.

Maybe what looks like American confidence — the swagger, the entitlement, the insistence that we have nothing to apologize for — is really a brittle facade. It’s what shame looks like when it doesn’t get named.

A university, a denomination, a nation that hasn’t told the truth about its own past has to keep defending a story that doesn’t hold up — and that takes energy and vigilance, and sometimes results in anger at any who would challenge the facade.

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The good news is that the alternative to living with half-truths isn’t shame. It’s something better than both swagger and shame. It’s integrity. A person, an institution or a nation that has told the truth about its own history no longer needs to defend a false story. It can simply stand on what’s true. That’s a sturdier foundation than any myth.

Our history has been one of atrocities — and extraordinary courage. An honest accounting of our nation’s founding injustices gives us the opportunity to make them right. When we do, we won’t need the swagger anymore, because we’ll have something sturdier: the real thing. We can be unified in pride for this country, and unstoppable in coming together to build what could truly be a more perfect union.

The zine, “Community Reckoning” is free to download, print and share here.

This article Finding real national pride on America’s 250th birthday was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Today we had another conversation with our frequent guest and comrade Professor Eskandar Sadeghi of The University of St. Andrews in Scotland, who’s an international authority of Iranian history and…

This article An intimate reckoning with the Weather Underground was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Looking for a quintessentially American book to read this 4th of July? 

As we celebrate and/or mourn the 250th birthday of the most militarized, most violent, (almost) most corrupt, most polluting, most inequitable and most sad nation on the face of the Earth, I am reading “Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground.” Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s new book about his Weatherman parents is more than just a great beach read (which it also is, literally). It is the most appropriate book to read instead of subjecting yourself to a PTSD-triggering fireworks display.

It chronicles a small group of revolutionaries who used dynamite, bombs and guns to blow up buildings, statutes and police cars, break people out of prison and generally make mayhem half a century ago. But it is not just history to view on the page. It says so much to our MAGA moment.

It is a story of history, conscience and memory at a time of AI slop, official lies and active amnesia. It is a story of youthful rebellion against the Vietnam War that matures into revolutionary sabotage, political violence and life “underground” that eventually settles into careers in education and law outside of the mainstream. It is the story of surviving some of the most harrowing political moments of the last half century. It is a story of a family.

I grew up in a very different corner of the left than Ayers Dohrn. There were no drug-fueled orgies, shootouts with the cops or days of rage in the Catholic left. But there was a similar stridency, urgency and seriousness about my family life. There was jail and prison and fear of FBI infiltration and dirty tricks. There were people with no last names who showed up for a meal or a night and headed back into the underground. We also survived separation and secrecy, and I am also not raising my children on the knife’s edge of the revolution. So, Ayers Dohrn’s effort to tell his family’s story with truthfulness, curiosity and distance landed so very true for me. 

Don’t need a weatherman to know

Who were the Weathermen? They’ve been memorialized countless times on screens small and large, most recently (sort of) in “One Battle After Another.” But in real life, they were mostly white, mostly college educated, mostly middle-class young people who had been part of Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, before splintering off from that group in the summer of 1969 to join forces with the Black Panthers and incite revolution, laying waste to what they left behind. They felt like they had tried everything else!

In recounting this episode, Ayers Dohrn was able to use FBI notes and communiques to highlight their role in fomenting the clash between the more progressive and radical factions, manipulating members into all-out conflict with one another and essentially destroying SDS. Ayers Dohrn quotes Weatherman faction leader Mark Rudd reflecting that it was “the single greatest mistake I’ve made in my life … scuttl[ing] America’s largest radical organization — with chapters on hundreds of campus[es], a powerful national identity and enormous growth potential — for a fantasy of revolutionary urban guerrilla warfare.” What could have been is not explored.

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At this point, we’d need speculative fiction to spin out the possibilities of true solidarity between the largely white, campus-based antiwar movement and the Black Panther Party and its affiliates. It sure scared the FBI! In fact, in a memo to agents in the field, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote that SDS and the Black Panther Party working together would “pose a formidable threat. … It would be a definite advantage if these two groups were alienated.”

This story is told with cinematic depth, gleaned from Ayers Dohrn’s interviews with participants and from declassified FBI files. The new organization was small, secretive and “fiercely committed to following the leadership of the Black vanguard, to fighting the police and to going out, if necessary, in a blaze of revolutionary glory.”

A declaration of a state of war

The mostly middle-class, young, white activists had been working on many fronts for years, but their “organizing and peaceful protest had failed to stop the war.” They were going to try something new — but actually it wasn’t new. It was old. It was violence. And, for a time, it was street riots against the police and property damage during protests. But then their friend and Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was assassinated by Chicago police and the FBI in a barrage of 90 bullets. And then the horrors of the My Lai massacre were revealed, and as 1969 became 1970, the Weathermen declared war on the United States.

An FBI wanted poster for Bill Ayers. (FBI)

Ayers Dohrn describes a series of bombings at the homes of judges, banks and police stations, and a complicated plan in New York City’s West Village that would have brought the carnage of Vietnam to a military Officer’s Ball at Fort Dix in New Jersey. The Fort Dix plan was thwarted not by the FBI or a rival faction of revolutionaries, but by chemistry. The bombs went off in the 11th Street townhouse the revolutionaries were using as a temporary safe house (while the parents of one of the Weathermen were on a St. Kitts vacation). Three Weathermen were killed in the blast and the house was obliterated. Bill Ayers’ girlfriend at the time was among the dead and he carried that grief and memory into Ayers Dohrn’s life. As a little kid, Zayd remembers going with his father to lay flowers at the site every year. 

Recalling that loss, Ayers Dohrn asks his father how he contemplated killing people with those bombs. Bill Ayers responded that “We often said things like, ‘I need to be a tool of the revolution.’ … Or ‘I need to be an instrument of the rebellion.’ And that instrumentalizing of our lives was more than a weakness. It was a horror.”

That realization and the other reflections Ayers Dohrn is able to elicit from his parents as they think back on their roles as revolutionaries are the backbone of this book. Bill and Bernardine Dohrn are able to reflect, see mistakes and missteps, explain their priorities, and accept responsibility for the harms they inflicted because they survived and so many other people who were part of this splinter movement did not.

It was a horror

It is difficult and brave that Zayd Ayers Dohrn contends with violence and memory without letting anyone — even his mother and father — off the hook. Against the backdrop of an administration and a president that can’t remember, or won’t admit to, crimes of three sentences ago, he holds his father and mother to a high standard. And they can take it. They survived the days of rage and purity tests and self-criticism sessions and the run-ins with the law and stretches of prison and dirty tricks that so many others did not.

His mother, Bernardine Dohrn, is now living with dementia, as is my own mother, and I found his present-day conversations with her the most poignant and difficult of the book. Memory threads all the way through this book. What do we remember? Why do some memories stick? 

Ayers Dohrn began his reckoning with family history in an extraordinary 10-part podcast called “Mother Country Radicals,” which was Fred Hampton’s term of endearment for the Weathermen. But as he researches his own past and excavates his own memory, there are things that don’t add up, don’t stitch together, memories that don’t bear up to scrutiny. There are contradictions that he can’t square.

Once the podcast was released, he received letters, diaries and phone calls from old fellow travelers. These new resources, along with 7,833 pages of FBI files, convinced him that there was more to the story and he sat down to write. The book is more in-depth, intimate and searching than the podcast. Ayers Dohrn is less star struck by his parents’ bravado too. Now, he is a parent, too, noting decisions that Bill and Bernadine made that put the family in jeopardy, that were hard for him, that caused him pain. He sees and feels the impact of his parents’ choice of the revolution over parenthood. “Over and over, you can see the same pattern, repeated: Asked to choose between solidarity and family, revolution and love, my parents and their comrades chose the cause almost every time.”

A 1969 mugshot of Bernadine Dohrn from an arrest at a Chicago protest, later circulated by the FBI. (FBI)

Family lore had it that Bill and Bernardine hung up their revolutionary bonafides when they became parents. But the documents Ayers Dohrn received after the podcast aired show that was not true. They continued to take risks even after they became parents of Zayd and his younger brother Malik. One memorable camping trip in West Virginia as a family turns out to be a trip to case Alderson Prison for Women where Black Panther leader Assata Shakur was serving out her sentence. She was eventually liberated from prison in another operation and Bill Ayers played a small — but very risky — role in that while Bernardine was home with Zayd.

Ayers Dohrn confronted his dad by asking: “What would have happened, not only to him but to me, my mother and my unborn brother?” Ayers responded: “It was a difficult decision. It felt monumental, it felt important. We were pretty clear that Bernardine would be with you. … But yeah, it was, in retrospect, really risky. And really on the edge.” But in the end, Bill Ayers played his part, “Because it mattered. Because the world needed it to happen.”

They continued to do leg work for the Black Liberation Army and other radical groups like Action Five even after they informally adopted 14-month-old Chesa Boudin. That should have been a clear warning to stop. Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, Chesa’s parents, had acted as getaway drivers for an Action Five robbery on a Brinks armored truck in October 1981. The job quickly went off the rails and three people injured, and three others were killed — Nyack police officers Edward O’Grady and Waverly Brown, and Peter Paige, one of the team from the Brinks truck. Boudin and Gilbert spent decades in prison for their crimes while the Ayers Dohrn family raised their son. 

Life underground

I described this book to a friend, and she got stuck on the word underground. “Wait,” she demanded, “you mean they lived underground, like moles or Hobbits?” No, they lived under assumed names, worked cash jobs, had fake IDs. They were on the run from the FBI, facing jail time and family separation. They had disappeared from “normal society” and were dependent on friends and fellow travelers for support.

A striking moment in the book comes when Ayers Dohrn recounts that at one of his father’s off-the-books jobs, as a longshoreman in San Francisco, he gets the sense that something is about to go down. Bill Ayers saw men on the rooftops and by the union hall, standing out in their cheap suits and cop-loafers. But he was already at the docks and there was nowhere to run. The docks are all of a sudden swarmed with police and his co-workers started yelling “La Migra! La Migra!”

 “It only took a few minutes; the feds rounded them all up, chasing them to the edge of the water or just tackling them down to the concrete of the parking lot. And they let all the white people go” Ayers Dohrn recounts.

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Daniel Berrigan and his fearless nonviolence, at 100

The officials were not looking for Bill Ayers, of the Weathermen. They were rounding up undocumented immigrants. Ayers Dohrn writes that his father had “always assumed, with the self-centered paranoia of a federal fugitive, that he was the only outlaw hiding out on the docks. … But it turned out that half of the men on his crew were invisible, even to him. They were all living on a different plane, off the grid. Undocumented. Underground.”

In his autobiography “To Dwell in Peace,” my uncle, Father Daniel Berrigan writes that while he was underground, avoiding a prison sentence for the Catonsville 9 action and speaking constantly to young people, he heard that the Weather Underground wanted to dialogue. On Aug. 8, 1970, just a few days before he was captured on Block Island, he made an audio recording and sent it off through intermediaries. It had been just six months since the three Weathermen were killed in the bomb blast on 11th Street.

A new kind of anger

In the message, addressed to his “Brothers and Sisters,” Dan Berrigan invites them to “a new kind of anger which is both useful in communicating and imaginative and slow-burning to fuel the long haul which is the definition of our whole lives.” He calls them away from violence for the sake of violence, noting that there is a great risk that violence “will change people for the worse and harden them against enlightenment.” He continues by sharing that “I hope your lives are about something more than sabotage.”

I looked around for evidence that Dan Berrigan ever sat down with the Weather Underground, or that his message received a reply. I did not find any, but the group did shift tactics after the 11th Street explosion. Ayers Dohrn writes of a meeting that his mother called a few weeks later where the group became the Weather Underground and “disavow[ed] deadly violence going forward.” They did not become paragons of pacifism after this, but they stopped a posture of open warfare against the American people. 

In “Absurd Convictions, Modest Hopes: Conversations After Prison with Lee Lockwood,” Dan shares that the Weather Underground did respond to his communications, saying, “In fact the response was almost beyond my hope, because it indicated that they really were serious and were growing more thoughtful about such things.” That’s where that thread ends, as far as I can tell, but it is beautiful to consider the “calling in” and constructive dialogue that could have followed, as both sides — motivated by a fervent commitment to racial equality and an end to war — kept talking.

In his message to the Weather Underground, my uncle has a beautiful formulation of the concept of underground, writing: “Instead of thinking about the underground as temporary or exotic or abnormal, perhaps we are being called upon to start thinking of its implication as an entirely self-sufficient, mobile, internal revival community, so that the underground may be the definition of our future.”

Ayers Dohrn dedicates his book to his wife Rachel and their children Dalin and Light. Late in the book, he writes that “every generation is born into a world desperately in need of transformation, and young people in every era have inherited a struggle — a fight to make things better — that stretches back long before any of them were born.” 

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I read “Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young” with horror and hope — in equal measure. There is plenty to rage about in the Mother Country these days. You do not have to look far to find a replay of the horrors that radicalized Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and their friends. The war lust, impunity and corruption of the Trump administration and the craven weaponization of the justice system under FBI Director Kash Patel makes President Richard Nixon and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover look like Boy Scouts, and that is saying something!

Our society is full of the dirty, dangerous, violent and young, but so much of the violence is turned inward into self-harm and online into self-referential time frittering. It does spill out into the streets and it is political, but it is not, for the most part, organized or coordinated. The political violence of the Weatherman and the Underground that felt so justified and satisfied, that urge to “do something” and to “take a stand,” did do something. But most of that something was sowing chaos, alienating potential allies and narrowing the political space available to others. That violence was used — over and over — to rationalize indiscriminate state-sponsored repression and violence. In the process, almost incidentally, they did build something of value, the idea of an underground, and that persists and continues.

There is a lot of hope here for me in this idea of a permanent underground that sustains and revives, a subculture of connection and support that is not on the same map (literally not plottable) as the systems that exploit and oppress.

Those who survived those harrowing years as fugitives, undergrounders and radicals, built community, raised families, showed up for one another. And they were able to do all that because they survived. Or, perhaps, they survived because they could do all that.

This article An intimate reckoning with the Weather Underground was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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