These days, it can feel an awful lot like the ground beneath us (and our democracy) is cracking.
Threats to human rights, the planet, and the future we dream of howl like wolves outside the door.
And the pace of information is relentless. Designed to exhaust us, make us feel helpless, and keep us from fighting back.
But we are not powerless.
We can resist. We can take care of ourselves and each other. We can remember our shared humanity. And we can keep our eyes on a future worth fighting for.
I had intended to have a section of the February edition of Resourcing the Revolution dedicated to resources I’ve gathered over the past couple of weeks. But the amount of hopeful writing, sobering revelations, and actionable guides got… well… a little out of hand.
So, instead, this post is a living repository of voices — writers, thinkers, and revolutionaries — offering wisdom, strategy, and perspective.
Post last updated: May 2, 2025
Let’s start with the mid-month missive I wrote for newsletter subscribers at the beginning of February:
There are times along our journey when we stop and think… What. The. Actual. Fuck.
The past four weeks have seen a torrent of change. Like the crashing of a thousand waves, all at once. Hardly time to take a breath, much less gather yourself before the next one comes crashing down.
And (I believe) this is all on purpose.
The magnitude of change happening in front of our eyes has been designed to overwhelm us. To cause us to withdraw. To stick our heads in the sand. To fear. To spiral in anxiety. To sow division and chaos.
With a firehose of information headed our way every minute of every day, and from every possible direction, it’s important to choose our sources of information carefully (as well as how much you allow into your sphere).
Remember, we can’t do anything if we get so overwhelmed that we shut down. Pay attention, but in ways you can manage long-term. Burned out and in shock… that’s not going to inspire anyone else to join the fight.
As Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, “Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”
When choosing your news sources, look for both factuality in reporting and tendencies toward bias. (And follow the money; who is profiting from you believing what they’re “selling”?
There are two big names in understanding media bias:
There are several places I check regularly, as well as some of the writers I’ve included in the list below:
WTF Just Happened Today calls itself Political News for Normal People. It’s a breakdown of just that: what happened, links to news sources, and “notables” if you want to dig deeper.
Letters from an American is a Substack written by Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of American History. I’ve been told that mostly progressives have been sharing her work, but I personally don’t see much bias.
The Alt National Park Service page on Facebook. I’ve been following them since 2016, and now that things have gone seriously sideways, they have been a line on what’s really happening inside certain US Government agencies.
We (the People) Dissent is a bulletin board, a collection of information and announcements on upcoming protests, boycotts, call campaigns, and strikes. Their pledge — to keep it simple and provide a variety of ways to engage.
Here’s an interesting take about what’s flawed in the mainstream American media’s coverage of this new administration:
“I’ve long believed that the American media would be more clear-eyed about the rise and return of [47] if it was happening overseas in a foreign country, where we’re used to foreign correspondents writing with more incisive authority.“
And before we get into the heady section of this post, a thread of good news (for Democracy).
Now let’s get into the four other categories of resources, starting with resistance.
Defy and Resist
We analyzed the literature of protest and spoke to a range of people, including foreign dissidents and opposition leaders, movement strategists, domestic activists, and scholars of nonviolent movements. We asked them for their advice, in the nascent weeks of [this] Administration, for those who want to oppose these dramatic changes but harbor considerable fear for their jobs, their freedom, their way of life, or all three.
There are some proven lessons, operational and spiritual, to be learned from those who have challenged repressive regimes—a provisional guide for finding courage in [47]’s age of authoritarian fear.”
Right now, in 2025, everything feels chaotic. Disorganized. Like there are a million things to do, There are protests, petitions, news articles, social media rants—we are calling, sending postcards, emailing representatives but nothing is actually moving the needle. Worse than that, no clear leaders, no singular force is pulling us all together. It’s all a swirl of sound and fury that that signify nothing. Or so it seems.
Take heart—this isn’t a sign of failure, it’s a sign of where we are in the process. We’re still in the early stage of this movement, and at the start, every social movement feels like this—scattered, frustrating, impossible.
But here’s the thing: momentum is building. And it might help to see how.”
This is the entire point of Operation Flooding The Zone. As these new elites syphon funds to their own late-stage collapse coffers, they need us – the masses – to be tied up in distracted, overwhelmed knots. They need us to miss the *actually substantial* orchestrations amid the scatter-gun Shit. And they need us to give up, tune out, disassociate and to go…consume.”
It may feel like a lot of our Democratic legislators are being quiet and not doing much. But AOC has some words for you:
If you’re looking for some great databases of the ongoing resistance (as well as some other useful resources) here’s a thread on Bluesky of where to start:
Jason Kottke has a writeup of a few other writers talking about “The Information Overwhelm,” a tactic often referred to as flooding the zone with shit:
Let’s be clear: the narrative that Americans are sitting idly by, doing nothing in the face of injustice, is a lie. The government and corporate media have a vested interest in making you believe that protests aren’t happening, that mobilization isn’t occurring, that we have all simply accepted the state of things. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. […] The fact that you don’t see it on mainstream news isn’t proof of inaction—it’s proof of suppression.
Corporate media, social platforms, and government entities suppress footage, de-rank protest videos, and minimize coverage of demonstrations. They want to make it seem like resistance is futile, like no one is fighting back. This is psychological warfare. If you believe that you are alone, you are less likely to take action. If the world believes Americans are complacent, they are less likely to stand in solidarity with us. This is a deliberate tactic to make us feel isolated and powerless.
History has shown us that when the people rise, change is inevitable.“
The fascists like to call people who care about others ‘snowflakes,’ but I know that you know what happens when enough snowflakes come together. Creating a storm, becoming an avalanche, these things are not easy. Like JFK said, you do it because it is hard. Become a snowflake, join with others, and relentlessly resist.”
If the U.S. ever found itself in a situation where an invading force—or, say, a homegrown authoritarian regime—managed to get its hands on the government, what would we do? If every federal agency, every institution that keeps this country running, suddenly fell under hostile control, what would resistance look like? France already gave us the playbook. Let’s take some notes.”
Our enemy is apathy, cynicism, and fatalism; the pernicious, authoritarian-friendly belief that we are merely victims of world events rather than active participants in a global struggle for freedom and justice. Every time one of us—a family member, a community organizer, a representative, a senator—takes a step forward in this fight, a thousand pairs of eyes watch and learn. Courage is contagious.”
My definition of defiance is ‘to act according to your true values when there is pressure to do so otherwise.’ We say integrity, benevolence, and compassion are important, yet we don’t always act like they are. We can be compliant in ways that impinge on those values. We want to consider: Does the situation go against our values? That’s the key question. If it does, if it’s something that you would not feel comfortable with, then that is the moment to defy.”
“Perhaps the most effective tool in responding to misogyny is the strategic question. These questions serve a dual purpose: they shift the conversational power dynamic and force reflection from the person making inappropriate comments.”
Democracy is in grave peril, but it is not dead. Fascists depend on convincing us to give our power away and fall in line, that the fight is over and we lost. And while we must be clear-eyed about the threat, we must not do the fascists’ work for them by giving them powers they do not have.”
People are doing things. You will meet those people when you start doing things. […]
There is no magical way out. We are reaping what has been sown by many, many years of inattention to the eroding foundations of our democracy and we must face it.”
At the end of the day, when the dust settles, the actions that good people take or don’t take determine the outcome. While that may not seem reassuring or comforting, it’s powerful stuff. There is still time to steer the future in the right direction.
You are the future and you can create a just, equitable world if you are willing to do your part – and that is the only reassurance I can give you.”
Here’s how to be really annoying, according to the CIA:
A declassified World War II-era government guide to “simple sabotage” is currently one of the most popular open source books on the internet. The book, called ‘Simple Sabotage Field Manual,’ was declassified in 2008 by the CIA and ‘describes ways to train normal people to be purposefully annoying telephone operators, dysfunctional train conductors, befuddling middle managers, blundering factory workers, unruly movie theater patrons, and so on. In other words, teaching people to do their jobs badly.'”
Will Americans recognize what is happening, or will they be sufficiently distracted, pacified, or misled by their billionaire overlords into inaction. Social-media platforms have one purpose, which is to keep people attached to their devices. It does not matter to them if what they are showing people is real or factual; what matters is that no one stops scrolling.
The goal is to keep Americans in that cage. The purpose of this cage is to make companies a profit, but we are now entering an era when the government is pressuring them to keep Americans docile, obedient, controlled, and, in some cases, hopeless, ‘spinning on an endless hamster wheel of reactive anger,’ as the journalist Janus Rose put it.”
Only two institutions stop leaders like these, the military and the people. […] These are foreign to American political instincts. We have never needed to dig for this tool. But that is about to change. We need to greatly expand our resistance toolkit, and quickly, before [47] dismantles everything our 248-year experiment in multiracial democracy has built.”
No group of people is entirely to blame for what’s happening, and no group of people is totally without responsibility for what’s happening. But every group, and every individual, has a part to play in making things better now. […] Starting with the Founders and moving through all the chapters of American history, the souls of all the greats who have been among us are calling out to us now: You’re on. Don’t fuck this up.”
I wrote this for people who, like me, have spent much of the past few weeks hoping that somebody else would do something bolder in this political movement. We are downtrodden because we’re full of rage and heartbreak, but the polls tell us that our neighbors don’t share those feelings. We realize we’re seeing something that so many aren’t, but we’re not sure how to bridge the gap. We have wished (appropriately) for bravery from our media, from elected Democrats, from public officials in general. However fair those wishes are, they come with a risk: that we miss the opportunity to be the lonely voice for justice in our own community, the person who makes it a little easier for a second and third and fourth lonely voice to start perking up by our side.”
Along with the 5 Calls App I mentioned in the linked Mid-Month Missive, there are also other call scripts floating around.
Here’s one that will help you contact your representatives and senators and tell them to vote against ANY government funding bill until the administrative coup is ended.
Take Care of You (and Yours)
Back in the good ‘ole days when I was no stranger to marching and civil disobedience, I wrote the following guide to self-care for activists:
Let’s face it: being involved in days of large-scale action doesn’t exactly lend itself to an environment that is beneficial or conducive to self care. In fact, it’s often exactly the opposite. Long days, most often outdoors, with a stressful lead up… that often end up with us crashing afterward. We push ourselves so hard getting to the finish line that our bodies often collapse right after, leading to sickness and general exhaustion.
But what if there was a way to alleviate some of this stress, and make our participation in days of action a little bit easier on our bodies, and a little bit more fun in the process?”
We are very clearly in a lot of emergencies right now. They demand action. But action demands thought and thoughtfulness: who are we, what are our values, our goals, our allies, our possibilities, and our powers? What can we learn from those who’ve faced similar crises, what’s distinct about this one, and what equipment is at hand? […] Sometimes even in an emergency, or rather especially in an emergency, meditation as gathering ourselves and deepening our understanding is exactly what we need to do.”
The changes of this time require of us our grief, for all things must change and should rightly be mourned. It might even be that the grief is what opens us, what rouses us from our slumber into a charged state. In mourning we can also begin to incorporate into our waking awareness the truth that our reality is but a segment or aspect of a much greater reality, a reality that is always speaking to us in a language that our bodies can understand, for it is a felt experience. And if we do not give the paradigm of the day authority over our own experience, and allow the Mystery to blossom within us, something wild happens.
The world that is now crowning in our collective Imaginal realm, the world that will become in this next age, the Age of Repair, this world can begin to take root in the here and the now. We can begin the work of bringing it forth.”
Dr. Stephen Porges, who developed Polyvagal Theory, explains that when we’re in a chronic state of fight-or-flight, we start seeing everything as a threat — even things that aren’t. Our bodies stop distinguishing between an actual crisis and a perceived one. We can’t think straight. We make impulsive choices. We either shut down completely or live in a constant state of simmering panic. And yet, despite everything, we have to keep moving. We have to find a way to stay present, to stay engaged, to stay here.”
Hatred and outrage make me sick. They steals my creativity. They exhaust me which is part of the ruling party’s plan — grind me down so I feel powerless and give up. Hatred erodes everything I hold sacred. It changes me into someone I don’t want to be. […] Join me in refusing to let hate corrode our hearts. To warp our brains with fear, fear that others try to profit off. Let’s refuse to reduce ourselves to being less than human, and everybody else as well.”
This can mean not trying to go full tilt at a speed that was comfortable for your younger self — or maybe just your ideal self. This means being very realistic about where your body is and where your creative practice is. This means literally slowing down […] and also slowing down our expectations.”
I’m not sticking my head in the sand, but I have increased somatic practices to mitigate the dysregulation that’s been creeping in. I can’t afford to let my health suffer more than it is and I don’t want to be driven to paralysis or overwhelmed by fear and anxiety, which will lead to degrading my sense of hope that a better world is possible.
There are small, simple things that we can do repeatedly everyday to help build capacity within our body’s nervous systems. I say this while also acknowledging that some people are dealing with more than others on physical, practical, and material levels, and that no bodies are built for this. What I’m offering is something small and accessible to all that can help to resist the deregulation we are being made to feel.”
Five Ways to Create a Calming Political Environment: Resisting authoritarianism requires endurance, but most people opposing [this administration] aren’t doing enough to protect their own resilience. While we can’t manage everything, we can be intentional about the factors that shape our emotional resilience. In doing so, we won’t just feel better—we’ll build a stronger, more effective movement.”
What do we know about fear? The first predictable characteristic is that fear always begets more fear. First, what you fear can easily be associated with other similar but different things. If you are afraid of the dynamics of one conspiracy theory you can easily fall prey to others until that is your reality, everything is going to kill you. If you know this you can easily set traps for people and make them more and more afraid and the more they are afraid the more you can control their behavior.
Second, that it is catching from others like a virus. This is the motive behind mob behavior. Notice that every one of them is afraid of annihilation one way or another. That is always lurking behind the human experience. The cure for the fear of annihilation is to finally get annihilated and find out that it didn’t hurt, it didn’t actually work, and that you are perfectly fine without the burden of an ego that is constantly threatening you. This is where the Taoist sage laughs long and hard.
Fear then is not necessary to human survival at all. What is necessary is to be mindful, discerning, and prudent in the situation.”
I had behaved exactly as they expected a leftie intellectual to behave, thus missing an opportunity to invite any new or even exciting ways of thinking about issues they already engage with. Rather than surprising them, I had confirmed everything they thought they already knew. I had done everyone at the table a disservice—me, a journalist who has made it her job to have difficult conversations. […]
We are all going to be confronted with incredibly difficult conversations with people we disagree with to such an extent their existence feels like a threat to our safety—and in many cases it is. Aside from casting a vote, we can do nothing … to address the systemic inequalities that generated such a vast ideological divide beside how we choose to have these conversations.
And converse we must. Remember the wisdom of David Graeber who said the moment we think we cannot talk to another human being is the moment we have decided they are no longer human. Language makes us human; we enact violence on that we consider to be less than.”
Listen. It’s gonna be a weird bad day. It’s just the first of the weird bad days.
And if we’re being honest, it’s not even the first of them, it’s just another in a long line of weird bad days where the weird part and the bad part are spiking simultaneously, like an outbreak of a particular kind of illness. It’s not just turbulence on a flight, it’s a turbulent flight, from start to finish, snout to tail.
But we can get through it, we can land the plane.
This country is a mess, it’s always been a mess, always will be a mess, but it’s our mess. We’re with it, in it, and have often helped to make it, and that’s not defeatist, that’s not apathetic, it’s just realist to see that we’re a fucking goofy nation that has stumbled and staggered up and down some big hills and into some mucky fucking ditches. Just try to remember we need to climb the hills to see the beautiful views, you know? And first we gotta get up and out of the damn ditch. Beyond that? I think at the end of the day the people we’re with, that we surround ourselves with — that matters.”
Thing is, it just doesn’t work like that. People individually are messy and we’re not pebbles on a train track able to derail the entire train just be existing as a pebble. Things are fucking shitty out there and it’s okay to feel like they’re impossibly, overwhelmingly shitty and it’s further okay to say how things feel impossibly, overwhelmingly shitty. You don’t need to correct someone’s feelings, because feelings aren’t facts.”
If the ruling class has learned anything from history, it is that as long as they can divide the poor, they will stay rich. They pit rural workers against urban workers, white against Black against Latino, women against men, immigrants against native-born, all while they consolidate wealth and power at historic levels. Both major parties in the US are doing this, and the only winners are the wealthy elites.”
What I’m writing about here is the hazy idea of collapse. It’s come into my intellectual consciousness (and algorithm) slowly over the last few years, and more intensely recently. But before that was a feeling that came much earlier, and it’s one that may sound very familiar to you.
It’s a nagging sense that has hung over modern life since 2020, or 2016, or 2008, or 2001 — pick your start date — that things are not working anymore. And that waiting for them to get better after the next Most Important Election of Our Lives, or another war to end, or a new economic recovery cycle doesn’t seem to be having the desired effects. […]
Seeing the world change so quickly in such a short amount of time in 2020 jolted something awake in me. Collapse, though I may not have called it that at the time, felt breathtakingly close. It no longer made sense to me to pursue the same version of success I had up to that point. Even though I was covering the travel industry critically and aggressively, the entire premise of friction-free, carbon-intensive travel started to feel like a relic. No matter where I worked or who published my work, I wasn’t sure I would ever be allowed to fully articulate what I believed the problem was.
The good news is that the work of doing this is not some kind of grim disaster preparedness. It can actually be very joyful. Indeed in writing about connection, care and how to build a village over the last year, I realized I’ve been writing about collapse already.
So what does that look like? It’s worth pointing out that in Bendell’s definition I shared above, he does not say collapse is the end to sustenance, shelter, security, pleasure, identity, and meaning — just that it’s an end to our “normal modes” of acquiring all those things.
So start thinking today about how you can attain some of those things elsewhere, from non-monetary or transactional means.
Indeed if you lean into collapse awareness, you might be surprised how those small steps I listed above start to expand and morph. How you suddenly have more energy to engage in the kinds of things you didn’t before — even the incrementalist politics of There. How you care about different things. How it feels much lighter than you expected.”
SNARF stands for Stakes/Novelty/Anger/Retention/Fear. SNARF is the kind of content that evolves when a platform asks an AI to maximize usage. Content creators need to please the AI algorithms or they become irrelevant. Millions of creators make SNARF content to stay in the feed and earn a living.
We are all familiar with this kind of content, especially those of us who are chronically online. Content creators exaggerate stakes to make their content urgent and existential. They manufacture novelty and spin their content as unprecedented and unique. They manipulate anger to drive engagement via outrage. They hack retention by withholding information and promising a payoff at the end of a video. And they provoke fear to make people focus with urgency on their content. Every piece of content faces ruthless Darwinian competition so only SNARF has the ability to be successful, even if it is inaccurate, hateful, fake, ethically dubious, and intellectually suspect. […]
Unlike the platforms, we care about internet content and know that it moves culture and the world forward. We have an opportunity to fight back against SNARF and bring some joy and fun back to the internet.”
A biocentric philosophy places all life at the same level as human life. This philosophy recognizes that we are all equal, all deserving of a place to live, to eat, to have shelter, and an ecosystem in which to thrive. Ecocentrism zooms out a bit and says the entire ecosystem is equal to the human biosphere and the ecosystem as a whole has a right to sovereignty and life.
While these shouldn’t be radical ideas, because we also depend on that same ecosystem to survive, they really are quite radical.”
I’ll leave you with a take about Senator Cory Booker’s historic filibuster from March 31 to April 1st from Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
“The point of Senator Booker’s filibuster is to be INSPIRED by this man to go find YOUR ROLE, not to wait for them to go save us now.”
The point of Senator Booker's filibuster is to be INSPIRED by this man to go find YOUR ROLE, not to wait for them to go save us now. That is not this assignment.Thread of places to go to get started. More coming out of LiST this Thursday.
As we’re becoming increasingly aware by the day, the fight for democracy, justice, and a livable future isn’t a sprint — it’s a marathon.
And the fact that you’re here, seeking knowledge, building resilience, and finding ways to take action, proves something powerful:
You haven’t given up. We haven’t given up. And we’re not alone.
This repository will keep growing, just like our collective power. Keep coming back when you need guidance, strength, or a reminder that resistance is not futile — it’s necessary.
Take what you need. Share what resonates. And most importantly, keep moving forward.
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