When 66 protesters from a coalition of veteran and military family organizations were arrested on April 20, these images went viral worldwide. This attests to not only the specific weight given to veterans who speak out against wars, but also the deep hunger to see any kind of tangible action against the United States and Israel’s profoundly unpopular war with Iran.
Despite decades of demonization of Iran by U.S. politicians, amplified by mainstream media, Trump’s war on Iran was met with immediate disfavor in March. Still, there has been little substantive resistance in Congress and relative quiet in the streets of cities that saw record-breaking protests against President George W. Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s.
Yet, over these last 20 years, veterans never stopped organizing against U.S. wars and militarism. The organizers of the April 20 action — About Face Veterans Against War, Veterans for Peace, 50501 Veterans, the Center on Conscience and War, Military Families Speak Out and others — are building antiwar veteran and service member leadership, offering a vision of how we could end this country’s marriage to reckless, crushing militarism.
GI resistance is the tradition, dating back to the Revolutionary War, of American soldiers choosing to stand on their conscience and withdraw their consent to carry out the orders of commanding officers. The spectrum of resistance has encompassed the Vietnam War era’s more visible draft dodging and widespread disobedience in the ranks, and the quiet, mostly unseen refusal of soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars to execute civilians, load their guns, carry out missions, report for duty or even to deploy.
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✍️: Clare Bayard
📷: getty
A call for bold action from the Gaza flotilla
As flotilla vessels continue the journey to Gaza in defiance of Israel, volunteers and their loved ones encourage a “litany of actions” in solidarity with Palestine.
When Trump won the first time in 2016, I drank shots of tequila in front of my computer and then passed out in anguish. When Trump won in 2024, I couldn’t do that. This time around, I was a mom.
By afternoon on election day, the red shifts on the map became overpowering — and yet I still had to pick up my son from childcare. I had to get him dinner, sing songs in the bathtub and make up stories for his stuffed animals. I still had to create a world that was joyous, delicious and full of love even though I was horrified by the political present.
This is a very particular muscle I have had to build since becoming a mother. It’s different than building a practice of hope. It’s beyond feelings and all about the tangible needs of life. It’s being able to turn hope into something physical even when deeply worn down. Moms, aunties, grandmothers and other caretakers — we have to pull ourselves off the couch and make the sandwiches and brush the hair.
This complicated dynamic mothers must hold, of nurturing children while social injustice rages, is something I’ve seen resonate across social media recently, with many women commenting on the realities of keeping children loved and happy while the world burns.
Mothers are the everyday weavers of utopia. Philosophers, journalists, tech experts, Hollywood writers and pundits may throw up their hands and proclaim that our species is doomed, and yet in millions of homes around the world, mothers and caregivers are ensuring that on the contrary, we do live in a world of joy where resources are shared.
There is so much to learn from mothers in Minnesota who are showing that the future can be better — by moving their anguished bodies to attend protests, deliver diapers and pick up their neighbors, and showing our children and our communities that we can operate with more humane ways of being.
#happymothersday
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✍️: @thelmalutun
📷: @layqanunayawar
On May 1, organizers reported over 5,000 May Day Strong actions across the country — the most widespread distribution of May Day actions ever. Numbers are interesting — but they’re not nearly the story here. Because this May Day was even more important than you think.
The need for escalation became all the more urgent in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, the legal crown jewel of the civil rights movement. So, in response, we have to return to risky tactics in the struggle for our democracy.
In New York, protesters shut down entrances to the New York Stock Exchange — a daring tactical escalation. In Raleigh, North Carolina, 20 school districts closed for the largest statewide teacher rally since 2019. In each of the thousands of May Day protests, people spoke to specific local conditions, but tied to the overall frame of workers over billionaires.
But perhaps most importantly and consequently, May Day Strong was a structure test for future economic disruptions. In a structure test you’re testing to see who is with you — who is ready to move and who just says they’re ready to move.
May Day Strong proved the organizing phenomenon that getting people in motion is difficult, but once people stay in motion, getting them into greater motion becomes easier. And that is a different kind of victory, measured by different instruments.
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✍️: Daniel Hunter
📷: Getty
#mayday
#maydaystrong
#workersoverbillionaires
Activists have refused to be intimidated by ICE, successfully confronting agents on the street to prevent harassment and arrests. Such ad hoc resistance has its limitations, however, since ICE activities often occur out of public view.
Activists are using a systemic approach by targeting businesses that underpin ICE’s ability to function. Because ICE cannot carry out its operations alone, it relies on a network of companies to provide equipment, intelligence, communications, travel, accommodations and everything else required by a highly militarized force.
For example, Palantir has been the target of a campaign because, among other things, it provides surveillance software and database management services to ICE. The Coalition to Stop Avelo targeted Avelo Airlines, forcing it to end its deportation contract with ICE. And boycotts have been launched against Home Depot for allowing immigration raids on its property and Hilton Hotels for accommodating ICE agents.
No matter how formidable an opponent appears on the surface, chances are they have social, political or economic connections that render them vulnerable. Power research can help campaigns identify pillars of support, and finding the right target can be the difference between success and failure.
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✍️: James L. VanHise
📷: Getty
Mehk Chakraborty wrote about the role of mutual aid as Israel waged war on Lebanon earlier this month. This included online networks through message rooms and networks on the ground. We spoke with Mehk about her experience reporting and the importance of the story as Israeli bombardment continues, despite the ceasefire.
In January 2026, a man installed two phone booths in cities 1,560 miles apart.
One phone booth was in Abilene, Texas, one of the most conservative pockets of the country, and the other was in one of the most liberal, San Francisco. Signs on the phone booths read, “Call a Democrat” and “Call a Republican,” respectively. Anyone walking by could either make a call or pick up a ringing phone.
There were 387 recorded conversations during the six-week “party line” experiment and, even though many were short, they were surprisingly profound. Many calls have ended with both people saying they felt better and more positive about the country after the call.
While the party line experiment may have been held in the name of neuroscience, it holds five key lessons for how we can organize more effectively in a hyper-polarized, digitally mediated world by prioritizing connection, curiosity, and creativity.
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✍️: Hilary Hodge
📷: Matter Neuroscience
Across villages in India, protests erupted in December 2025 after the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, government scrapped one of the largest social safety nets in the world and replaced it with a watered-down version.
While the new law raises the number of days that the government will pay people to work from 100 to 125, it adds restrictions. Before, people who held job cards could apply for work whenever they needed it. Now, there is a 60-day pause period during the sowing and harvesting period. And, most concerning to advocates, work availability is now subject to a capped federal budget.
After Modi signed the new act into law on Dec. 20, unions and other workers’ organizations started mobilizing the rural population, running campaigns and demonstrations explaining the fine print and how it strips away the right to guaranteed employment.
Protesters across rural India held funeral processions to lament the death of the old program. In the northwestern state of Rajasthan, women wailed, wept and thumped their chests at administrative block offices and headquarters, echoing the local custom of professional mourners, known as rudaalis.
The ongoing protests aim to apply electoral pressure to the ruling party and force the government to repeal the new act and strengthen the old one.
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✍️: Ritwika Mitra
📷: Ritwika Mitra
The scenic campus of Birzeit University sits on a hill near Ramallah, 12 miles northwest of Jerusalem, in the occupied West Bank. Vast blue sky is visible from every road and sidewalk. Palestinian flags wave in the breeze.
The familiar campus bustle of classes, friends and events was violently interrupted on Jan. 6, 2026, when Israeli forces raided the university in broad daylight, firing live rounds and employing sound grenades and tear gas to disperse crowds of students. Forty-one people were injured, with three students sustaining gunshot wounds and three hit by shrapnel, according to Al Jazeera. Eight thousand students were trapped on campus during the military assault.
Since its transition from a college to a university in 1975, Birzeit University has been forcibly shut down by Israeli military order 15 times.
In response to these violations and forced hiatus, Birzeit student volunteers birthed the Right2Education campaign. They provide legal aid to students and faculty facing arrest and imprisonment by the Israeli occupation forces and have begun to develop an international network of solidarity around the human right of education for Palestinians.
The campaign has expanded beyond Birzeit University, with affiliated chapters at Hebron University in Hebron, Al-Quds University in Abu Dis and An-Najah National University in Nablus.
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✍️: Ashley Ver Beek
📷: Getty, Birzeit University
On Sunday night, the streets of Budapest were filled. Tens of thousands of Hungarians poured into the streets along the Danube River, singing folk songs and waving flags celebrating the end of Viktor Orbán’s rule.
For us fighting democratic backsliding, this is exceedingly consequential. Orbán wrote the authoritarian playbook now being used by Donald Trump and actively exported his approach. The people’s playbook used to oust him is a critical case study to learn from — from how the opposition party organized in Orbán’s strongholds, to how they made repression backfire when he overreached, and more.
One of the most important tactical decisions of the opposition party, Tisza, was the creation of Tisza Szigetek, or “Tisza Islands.” Beginning in mid-2024, the party began systematically building local chapters across the country — not just in Budapest’s liberal districts, but in the small towns and rural constituencies where Orbán’s party had historically been uncontested. By January 2025, social media analysis suggested there were 208 “islands” with over 20,000 members.
The Tisza Islands were not top-down campaign field offices. They functioned with genuine local autonomy. Crucially, this meant that by election day, Tisza was able to deploy a breath-taking 50,000 activists as election monitors across the country’s polling stations.
As with any electoral win, the work is only started. Orbán still controls Hungary’s media. He packed the Constitutional Court. For organizers, this is the sobering coda: Electoral victory is a door, not a destination. But on a Sunday night in Budapest, they earned a moment to celebrate. And we should take a lot of hope from that, too.
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✍️: Daniel Hunter
📷: getty
When Dolores Huerta came out about the abuse she suffered from Cesar Chavez, Jenna Peters-Golden was not that surprised, because they had seen similar situations before. “I feel sadness, of course, for all individuals who are impacted by sexual violence, but I also feel a lot of grief at how much weaker and fragmented our movements and and wins can be because of the role that sexual violence plays inside of that,” Peters-Golden said.
Peters-Golden knew that there needed to be a change, and as a survivor, they wanted to be part of the solution. They got involved in Philly Stands Up, a transformative justice organization that aimed to hold accountable people who perpetrate sexual violence and abuse in movement and activist spaces.
While a lot has changed since the days that some unions wouldn’t even allow a charter for women workers, some of that male-centered culture remains and is a main driver of harassment, she said. Men still speak over women at meetings, appropriate their ideas and are celebrated as superstars for doing the exact same work that women do — sometimes less.
“When there’s a culture where sexual violence is normalized, especially when leaders are getting away with it … there’s something really important for us as movements to think about in terms of how we relate to leadership,” Peters-Golden said.
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✍️: Victoria Valenzuela
📷: Ya Basta Center, getty
When a homeland is decimated by war and life must be repeatedly rebuilt anew, how does one find the way back to purpose?
An estimated one in three people have been displaced since fighting started in Sudan, and Sudanese people make up almost 15 percent of all internally displaced persons globally. Nearly 12 million people have been displaced within Sudan alone.
“Most dangerously, it forced us to face questions we were not prepared to face,” said Sudanese theater director and artist Rabee Al-Hassan. “How long will this identity accompany you? Will you be able to be an active and influential member of the society in which you experience oppression?
Yet, even amid war, artists like Al-Hassan reject fear and despair; instead they are amplifying narratives of survival and illuminating humanity during the most horrific of crises.
Resistance theater, a form of participatory theater that gives voice to taboo, confronts themes of human rights, social justice and equality, as well as despair, fear and post-war trauma.
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✍️: Lital Khaikin
📷: WNV/Rabee Al-Hassan
