On a larger scale, hundreds of cities and counties (joined by schools, campuses, churches, and restaurants) have stepped forward to declare themselves “sanctuaries” for immigrants the Trump administration would seek to deport. The sanctuary movement (which began well before the 2016 elections) is inspired by the belief that, by coming together, communities can try to prevent deportations from taking place on their watch. But as many have pointed out, this often does not prevent police and border officials from conducting raids and breaking up families. That’s why the American Civil Liberties Union, which raised nearly $80 million through online donations in the first three months after election day, has been coordinating a campaign to pressure state and city governments to adopt a set of nine basic policies aimed at protecting immigrants from Trump’s agenda. Within a month, over a thousand communities had already started to push their local law enforcement agencies to make these commitments. (There have been criticisms, it should be noted, that these demands do not go far enough.)
There have also been many actions designed to highlight the interdependence that exists between citizens and immigrants, which mounting xenophobia seeks to deny. In February 2017, workers across sectors and cities participated in a Day Without Immigrants, highlighting how dependent the American economy is on the people Trump is trying to kick out. As one organizer of the day’s events told a reporter, “We want to make sure that people understand that this city would stop functioning if we weren’t there to build, or cook, or clean.” (After twelve restaurant workers in Oklahoma were fired for participating in the demonstration, at least two nearby restaurants immediately offered to hire them.)
The Revenge of Reality
Another hallmark of the Trump era is the war on facts: not only has the press been cast as an enemy of the people, but scientific information has disappeared from government websites and there has been a de facto ban on talking about climate change through official government communications channels. In response, several creative initiatives have emerged to defend objective reality. Days after the inauguration, the Badlands National Park Twitter account was the first to defect from the administration’s clamp-down on science, tweeting out facts about ocean acidification and the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The posts were taken down shortly after they were issued, but not before sparking a trend of rogue Twitter accounts.
With key scientific research mysteriously disappearing from government websites, there’s been a concerted international effort to save it from the memory hole. Shortly after Trump’s win, the Internet Archive, a San Francisco–based nonprofit digital library, which for the last two decades has dedicated itself to preserving Web content for the public (and already has hundreds of billions of webpages archived), announced plans to find a backup server in Canada to preserve US data. In the days before Trump’s inauguration, “data rescue” events were held in several cities, as researchers and concerned volunteers met to back up data sets from the EPA and other government websites. And in February 2017, a “hackathon” at UC Berkeley drew two hundred data defenders to help save the knowledge generated by public institutions such as the Department of Energy and NASA’S earth sciences programs.
Scientists are often wary of engaging in political activism, since advocacy on the same issue you are researching can be seized upon as evidence of bias. It’s an understandable caution, but faced with the Trump administration’s open attacks on scientific reality and bald attempts to suppress inconvenient research, many scientists have concluded they have to take a stand. Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist, has described the attacks on science as “a trumpet call” to the scientific community.
Which is why, on Earth Day 2017, tens of thousands of scientists participated in the March for Science in Washington, while upwards of forty thousand joined science marches in Chicago and Los Angeles—and these were just the largest of more than six hundred marches held across the USA and in sixty-eight other countries. “If we cannot discuss facts openly,” one Stanford biologist told the Guardian, “how can democracy, based on public discussions and trust in our societal truths, survive? And so we will march.” (One chant that made the rounds: “What do we want? Evidence-based research. When do we want it? After peer review.”) Just one week later, hundreds of thousands of us converged in the blistering heat in Washington (once again, with hundreds of satellite marches elsewhere), coming together under a banner of “climate, jobs, and justice.” This time the demand was not just for science to be respected, but for it to form the basis of a bold and urgent economic and social transformation.
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What has stood out in this wave of early resistance is how the barriers defining who is and who is not an “activist” or an “organizer” are completely breaking down. People are organizing mass events who have never organized anything political before. A great many are discovering that, whatever their field of expertise, whether they are lawyers or restaurant workers, they have crucial skills to share in this emerging network of resistance. And wherever they live or work, whether it’s a laboratory or a bodega or a law firm or inside the home, they have the power, if they organize with others, to throw a wrench into a dangerous system.
At the same time, many of us are realizing that if we’re going to rise to the urgency and magnitude of this moment, we need skills and knowledge that we currently lack—about history, about how to change the political system, and even about how to change ourselves. So, in addition to the highly visible campaigns and demonstrations, there has also been a surge of popular education. For many, a first step is relearning how democracy works. When Harvard graduate students announced an online and in-person “Resistance School,” meant to equip fledgling organizers with “the tools we need to fight back at the federal, state, and local levels,” over fifty thousand people—coming from all fifty states—signed up.
In the days following Trump’s election, a handful of former Democratic congressional staffers drafted a twenty-four-page Google Document, distilling lessons learned from seeing the Tea Party challenge Obama’s agenda district by district. They called it the Indivisible Guide. In Trump’s first hundred days, over seven thousand “Indivisible” chapters were formed—most consisting not of hardened activists but of schoolteachers and retirees, furious that their elected representatives were helping further Trump’s agenda. More than a straightforward how-to manual for bottom-up democracy, the Indivisible Guide and the activism that sprang out of it have offered, as one Virginia-based Indivisible recruit and first-time organizer put it, “not just a political community, but a community that cares for you, where what’s bringing you together is this shared sense of civic responsibility toward this system that’s going off the rails.”