In our human ancestry, there are universal patterns that show up again and again in our stories, movies, myths, symbols and personal lives. These patterns cross cultures and span millennia, they reside within our collective psyches and we recognize them immediately. These ancient, universal patterns are called archetypes, and they hold power within us, individually and collectively. Archetypes are the themes that play out in our lives such as the lover, explorer, hero, the everyday person, jester, healer, teacher, trickster, ruler, and rebel. Archetypes can appear as personal traits or behaviors and can also exist as universal themes that appear repeatedly in literature, films, fairytales and cultural stories that cross time and geography.

These universal themes are used in marketing to draw us into a brand to capture our imagination and our wallets. They are also operative in our politics and influence how we see the candidates. Voters are drawn to candidates who carry a compelling mythic identity for them. Our votes are more often a function of our feelings about a candidate than our rational understanding of who they are or what they will actually do.

That’s the power of the myth, the power of the narrative. These narratives elicit emotions beyond our rational egos and tap into deeper universal energies that compel us and influence our behavior.

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Did You Know:

An almost mythic struggle between competing archetypes is playing out in the selection of the Democratic candidate for Secretary of State. As we explained in our H4D substack last week, there are two candidates vying for the nomination of SOS at the Indiana Democratic State Convention.

That’s because in Indiana there is an archaic, outdated, obsolete, and antidemocratic state law that says the conventions of the state parties can elect nominees for certain statewide positions instead of these candidates being elected in the primary. These statewide positions include:

• In presidential election years, parties elect the Lt. Governor and Attorney General.

• In midterm election years, parties elect the Secretary of State, Treasurer and Comptroller/Auditor.

The Indiana Democratic Party is desperately searching for someone to rescue them from their decades of irrelevance and powerlessness in Indiana politics. Beau Bayh grew up in Washington, D.C. In 2024, he moved to Westfield, Indiana after graduating from Harvard to study for his bar exam. In 2025 he declared his candidacy for SOS, supported by his father’s connections to corporate billionaires and D.C. insiders, some of whom have ties to Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein and the Republican party. The Democratic Party was delighted about his candidacy.

The media and the party see Beau as a hero, rescuing the party from its perilous plight; strong, competitive, handsome, courageous, wealthy with a familiar family name. Attributes of a hero archetype. The party longs for a successful democratic candidate at the top of the ticket who will help elect democrats down ballot and end the era of desolation for democrats in Indiana.

Blythe Potter was already a candidate when Beau Bayh announced his candidacy. She embodies the characteristics of the ‘every person’ archetype. Blythe grew up in Indiana. She is an Army veteran, owns a small business and is raising a family in Johnson County. She knows that Indiana ranks one of the lowest in voter turnout and there are businesses in Indiana who are not good community neighbors. As the chief elections officer and business registrar, she wants to make things better. Her campaign is not funded by billionaires or corporate lobbyists. She is not wealthy nor does she come from a political family dynasty.

As an every-person archetype, her powers are building connections and community, creating a sense of belonging, being approachable, honest, grounded, dependable, empathetic and unpretentious. Great qualifications for the administrative, operational and pragmatic agency of Secretary of State. It’s easy for a people who are looking for a hero to overlook the ‘regular gal’ right here in our own backyard.

Many within the Indiana Democratic Party and most of the media see Beau as a hero. He may or may not embody that archetype as a person. We don’t really know who Beau Bayh is. We only know how the party sees him and how the media portrays him.

Blythe Potter has been overlooked and vastly under estimated by the party elites, party leaders and the media. If given the opportunity to be the Democratic candidate, she can win the midterm election for Secretary of State and help the down ballot democrats win their seats as well. Once elected, she will be the highest ranking elected Democrat in the party, and will help resuscitate a re-imagining of the party into a people’s party that serves everyday Hoosiers in their everyday lives.

Why It Matters:

The political landscape is becoming a wasteland for Republicans. Trump is extremely unpopular, with an approval rating in the low 30%, Governor Braun has the distinct honor of being named the lowest rated first term Governor in the country, with an approval rating hovering at about 25%. The enthusiasm gap between Republican voters and Democrat voters is a ever widening chasm. The 2026 election will not be politics as usual.

The November midterms will be held at a time in our collective history where a vast majority of Hoosiers are suffering. Inflation, detention centers, geo-political disasters, rocketing gas prices, escalating wars, Jim Crow revival, measles outbreaks and threats of a Hantavirus pandemic, the list is endless. And people are tired of the two political parties being self-serving instead of serving the people.

Voters are not looking for a hero, a savior or a status quo politician. Voters are hungry for authentic candidates who understand the issues, who listen to voters not pundits, and who can talk about what matters without using sanitized talking points. Voters have been betrayed by candidates who are funded by billionaires and corporate lobbyists and they are waking up to that fact.

Blythe Potter is the perfect candidate for this moment. Let’s make sure she gets the opportunity.

There is a people powered movement taking place in our political landscape.

What You Can Do:

If we want to co-create a people powered movement and change the political landscape, we have to live into the new narrative. Let’s stop looking for heroes in politics and elect real people who understand the issues and want to make a difference in the lives of everyday Hoosiers. Let’s elect the kind of democrat who will serve the people. Candidates like Blythe Potter, Fady Qaddoura, Andrea Hunley, Jack Chance, Allissa Impink, Victoria Martz, Jesse Brown, Lindsay Gramlich and the scores of other authentic leaders who are emerging in our party.

Volunteer for these candidates, host fundraisers and contribute to their campaigns. Talk to friends, family, neighbors and colleagues about the importance of electing candidates who are committed to serving the needs of everyday Hoosiers and not those backed by corporations looking for unfair tax breaks and harmful deregulations. Don’t fall for the hero myth, it’s yesterday’s fairytale. There is a new narrative for 21st century politics. It’s about time!

All Power to the People,

Debbie and the H4D team

Note: Carol Pearson is a renowned author, professor, consultant, colleague and leading expert on archetypes. She wrote a blog describing the film Deadpool and Wolverine as it related to the political landscape in 2024 prior to the election. If we have captured your attention about the power of archetypes as it relates to politics, this is a must read.

Dear readers, this post is a cautionary tale of how party politics can directly impact your lives and undermine the democratic process. Fasten your seat belts.

Both Blythe Potter and Beau Bayh would like to be Indiana’s next Secretary of State. Both are Democrats: Blythe Potter is a life long Hoosier; Beau Bayh grew up in Washington, D.C., moving to Indiana in 2024. Beau Bayh’s candidacy has the privilege and bone fides of family name, being educated in private schools including Harvard University, serving in Europe as a Marine infantry captain, and working as a law clerk and business litigant. Blythe Potter’s candidacy has the bona fides of roots firmly planted in Indiana, serving in Baghdad as a gunner and driver, being a successful business owner and the mother of three, as well as having a political career launched in her community.

Neither Blythe Potter nor Beau Bayh were on the Democratic primary ballot on May 5th. Instead, Indiana Democratic Convention delegates will determine which of the two people will be the Democratic candidate in November.

Some of those delegates were voted into that role by voters in their county, some were automatically elected because there were not enough delegate candidates for the county and were uncontested, and the rest of the delegate pool will be appointed by party leaders to fulfill the allotted number needed.

What this means is that on June 6th, at the Indiana Democratic State Convention, a pool of about 2000 delegates representing a minuscule fraction of Hoosier voters (about 1/1000) will decide for you who will be our Democratic nominee for Secretary of State.

Did You Know:

The Secretary of State (SOS) in Indiana operates as the chief elections officer and business registrar. It’s not a fancy or very public facing office, but it impacts the lives of every Hoosier. The office has great power over election transparency, functioning, and fairness, as well as voter protections and access to the polls. Very importantly, it also provides oversight and ensures accountability for businesses that already exist within the state and new businesses seeking to register here. A key function of the SOS office is to ensure that businesses operate without corruption or favor. This office is truly the CEO of our state democracy and the chief regulator of Indiana businesses.

Why It Matters:

The take away of the moment is that the candidates for a very important state office will be determined by those inside the party structure. Party leaders will decide who they think is the most electable and which candidate will bring the party more power. The party is desperate to end the authoritarian stranglehold that the GOP has on our state, we all are. But desperation isn’t a strategy.

The party’s favorite for the Democratic nominee for Secretary of State is Beau Bayh. Using the tired and worn out myths of electability, they are falling over themselves with the return of the prodigal son, their white knight who has come to the rescue. Too many believe that money and family dynasty will revive the party.

Memories are short. The Bayh legacy is that Evan Bayh abandoned the party and Hoosiers in 2010, when he announced his surprise decision NOT to seek re-election for U.S. Senate. His workshopped reason was that he just couldn’t tolerate the ‘partisan gridlock’. On January 21, 2011, two weeks after his last day in the U.S. Senate, he reported to work for a lucrative position at the private equity firm of Apollo Global Management, as a policy advisor.

In 2016, Evan Bayh returned to Indiana to run for Senate. Brian Howey, an esteemed political journalist, third generation Hoosier and founder of Howey Politics, wasn’t impressed. Howey wrote that Evan Bayh was responsible for creating the “Democratic disaster; and a lasting “political vacuum” for our state. Howey also attributed the death of Democrats’ long held strength in rural southern Indiana directly to Bayh’s desertion. Bayh’s war chest and dynastic legacy was not enough to win him that election. Todd Young still holds that seat.

Not every person within the party agrees that Beau Bayh is the best candidate and many are challenging the electability myth that has captured party leaders. There is a new energy that is emerging out of yesterday’s party, born out of hope not desperation. Not every convention delegate is buying the party line, and that is threatening the status quo within the party.

In theory, the delegates are a representational body, but there is little opportunity for the voters to have a voice in this process. Let’s change that.

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What You Can Do:

You can become better informed about the choices and let the Democratic Party leaders and convention delegates hear from you as a citizen stakeholder in this election.

There is a growing tide of opposition to Beau Bayh’s candidacy and the information that is being uncovered is important for Hoosiers to know. Hoosier Lemon, a Substack author, is doing extensive research into his candidacy and is posting weekly from now until the convention on the Progressive Indiana Network’s platform. These posts have significant information about the funding sources as well as the Washington D.C. insiders who are supporting Beau Bayh’s campaign.

Blythe Potter’s Instagram is a window into her candidacy. A distinctive difference between the two campaigns is their source of funding. Blythe Potter’s campaign is funded from grassroots donations, not from billionaires with ties to the Republican Party nor corporate interests that would benefit from an ally in the business regulatory function of the SOS office. But her candidacy is more than that. She is also campaigning on rebuilding the Democratic Party into a people’s party, a party that welcomes new ideas and new faces. A party that trusts voters and is willing to do the hard work in winning their trust.

And let’s be clear, we aren’t the only ones who know about Bayh’s funding sources and their ties to corporate billionaires and the Epstein class. We can be sure the MAGA Republicans are doing their homework and opposition research on the heir apparent. It isn’t certain that Diego Morales will make it out of his convention as the MAGA nominee for SOS, perhaps trying to take some of the ‘sting’ out of anti-corruption attacks.

When my senator Fady Qaddoura filed his candidacy papers in 2020, he was told by party officials that he wasn’t the right demographic for that district. He ignored their opinion. He ran a grassroots campaign talking with everyone in his district, not just those identified as Democrats or Independents. He knocked on doors, made phone calls, and asked a lot of questions. He built relationships and he listened to the people. He handily won that election by a margin of 5.2%, and flipped the district from red to blue. It’s candidates like this who will bring new life to this calcified party.

Between now and June 6th, take the time to get to know these candidates and what they stand for. Every Hoosier has a stake in this election.

Reach out to your county chairs or township leaders and let them know your preferences. Ask for a delegate list for your district or county. (To date, there is no official list of elected delegates.)

The H4D team believes it’s time for a change in Indiana politics. We believe there is one candidate who will work exclusively for Hoosiers, who is not funded by Washington insiders and who will herald a new day to Indiana politics. Blythe Potter can win in November. Let’s give her a chance!

All Power to the People!

In solidarity,

Debbie and the H4D team

There is a relentless barrage of bad news that fills our social media feeds and inboxes. Pundits, content creators and a tsunami of Substack publications screech for our attention, seduce us with clever titles, numb our senses and overwhelm our central nervous systems. It turns out that the twenty-four hour news cycle that we can access at our fingertips can be unhealthy for us.

As an author of a Substack publication, I struggle with what to write and how often to post. There is no shortage of news or ‘calls to action’ and I don’t want to just echo the stream of bad news nor continually ask my readers to ‘do something’ in response to the daily atrocities of the MAGA forces. The landscape of independent media and grassroots activism has exponentially expanded since we launched H4D over two years ago.

I am exhausted. My colleagues and team mates are exhausted. The faces on the live stream videos of my favorite authors and journalists look tired, their voices sometimes hoarse. Like Jon Stewart recently said, presidential terms are supposed to age the person holding that office, not the citizens.

Did You Know:

On Sunday, April 25, 2026 the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C. was interrupted by a shots-fired incident. Trump, Vance and others on stage were hurriedly escorted out of the room while those seated on the floor ducked under tables. Later, video footage showed Erika Kirk fleeing the room sobbing that “she just wanted to go home”. The video image of her crying face was a ironic reminder that her deceased husband, Charlie Kirk, killed by an assassin’s bullet in 2025, had boldly proclaimed at a Turning Point USA event just three years ago this month that:

The 31 year old assailant was apprehended. It is suspected that he intentionally was targeting members of the administration. We know that he is an engineer trained at Caltech, that he is a tutor and a self employed video game developer. His social media posts suggest he was disgruntled about the actions and policies of the current administration. He has subsequently been charged with attempting to assassinate Trump.

The MAGA regime is using the incident to promote the illegal, privately funded extravagant ballroom being built in the White House. Some pundits and content creators opposed to this regime initially speculated whether this was a staged propaganda event to distract from Trump’s plummeting approval ratings, the disastrous war, rising prices and and the Epstein files. And so it goes.

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Why It Matters:

Take a moment to pause and reflect on this particular event as an object lesson, as a fractal of a larger pattern that holds the ‘whole’ of what we are experiencing.

• Were you aware that there was a WHCA dinner occurring and that Trump was going to give a speech at an event designed to celebrate the press although he considers the press to be an ‘enemy of the people’?

• Were you aware that the event is historically a celebration of the First Amendment while raising money for scholarships and a celebration of excellent journalism?

• Why do you think that the WHCA president, Weijia Jiang, not only invited Trump to attend the prestigious event but honored his unusual request to give a speech? (He has boycotted every other WHCA dinner in both of his terms in office.)

• Have you noticed the language of many of the journalists and anchors of the legacy media as they describe how the Secret Service agents rushed “the president” off the stage as if he is like any other legitimate president? Are their words in fact normalizing his tenure?

• Trump is demanding that the dinner be rescheduled within 30 days because he insists that it “is very important” and that they need to “get it going”. How do you think Weijia Jiang and the board of WHCA should respond?

• What were your initial thoughts when you first heard about the chaos of this iconic event? What did you say out loud?

What We Can Do:

We must not react to every atrocity, each example of incompetence, the epidemic of corruption, the destruction of norms, the erosion of freedoms and human suffering that are becoming hourly occurrences. We don’t stop caring, we don’t ignore what is happening, but we can’t stay at the granular level of all the destruction and suffering as it happens. However, each singular event is a fractal of the larger chaos, and the chaos keeps repeating! Predictable, consistent, infinite chaos.

We must banish the words, ‘unbelievable’ and ‘unprecedented’ from our vocabularies. It is all believable. It is all to be expected. Corruption, hatred, cowardice and elected leaders abdicating their constitutional oath is precedent. These patterns will repeat until we end this reign of terror by voting the villains out.

It will get worse before it gets better. There is no longer ‘breaking news’. Our country is breaking, our lives are breaking, families are breaking, everything is breaking. That’s the news. Our immediate work is to triage the suffering.

We must limit our consumption of endless commentary, immediate social media posts and doom scrolling. Just because our preferred Substack author or content creator posts something, we don’t have to immediately consume it. Be very choiceful about who and what we give our attention to. Our attention is a valuable gift not to be squandered.

Stay connected to groups who are on the ground doing resistance work. Give the time and attention you can without exhausting yourself. Stay in community. We must learn to stay still in the midst of the chaos.

The Chilean Nobel Prize winning poet, diplomat and politician, Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) instructs us on how to be in times of chaos and suffering:

Keeping Quiet by Pablo Neruda

Now we will count to twelve

and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,

let’s not speak in any language;

let’s stop for a second,

and not move our arms so much.

It would be a delicious moment

with rush, without engines;

we would all be together

in a sudden strangeness.

Fisherman in the cold sea

would not harm whales

and the gatherer of salt

would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,

wars with gas, wars with fire,

victories with no survivors,

would put on clean clothes

and walk with their brothers

in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused

with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about,

I want nothing to do with death.

If we were not so single-minded

about keeping our lives moving,

and for once could do nothing,

perhaps a huge silence

might interrupt this sadness

of never understanding ourselves

and of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us

as when everything seems dead

and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count to twelve

and you keep quiet and I will go.

This Friday, May 1 has been designated as May Day Strong. It is a day of economic noncooperation, a way to stop moving our arms so much and pause to walk in the shade with our brothers and sisters. Economic boycotts are a strategic escalation of the resistance movement. No School, No Work, No Shopping.

Together we can end this pattern of chaos and suffering and create fractals of love and community.

Together, we will prevail.

May Day Strong!

Debbie and the H4D team

Dear readers, we know it’s been a while since we have posted, not because the universe hasn’t offered us a firehose of daily news and events, but because it is becoming harder to discern what is important to say. Our inboxes and social media overflow with hourly updates of disturbing news. We are relentlessly reminded of the indecent, inhumane and corrupt actions of elected leaders and their minions. Our devices are literally becoming purveyors of trauma.

Our mission at H4D is to make meaning of the events that fill our days, not to regurgitate what everyone else is writing about. So, our writing team has gone through a period of writer’s block. We have learned to trust these lulls and wait for the muse to speak to us.

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Did You Know

Social scientists and historians who study the rise and fall of empires suggest that we are in a time of societal collapse. It can be said without hyperbole that we are living in apocalyptic times—not in the radical evangelical fundamentalist pseudo-Christian understanding of apocalypse, but in the true meaning of the word which is to unveil or to reveal. The word apocalypse originates from the ancient Greek apokálypsis, meaning revelation, uncovering or disclosing. In this moment of collapse, when it feels as if the world is literally falling apart, we are called to pull back the veil of our illusions, misperceptions and untruths in order to see what is being revealed.

adrienne maree brown (she prefers lower case letters) writes about the meaning of apocalypse as being a time of unveiling. She is an author, social justice facilitator, healer and doula who lives in Detroit. She explains that in this time of revelation and uncovering, we must “hold each other close” and engage in not only resistance work but ‘radical futuring’ together. She wrote these prescient words in a 2017 blog:

we must increase our collective tolerance for truth. this means we must learn how to hold the full breadth of emotions we feel upon hearing the truth, and to keep listening, changing, taking action, learning. we must be willing to look at what actually needs to happen to address the truth.

we must deepen our connections to each other. there is no way the majority of us will survive this time if we continue working in isolation or in competition. we must meet at the intersections and lovingly figure out how to be in right relationship. we need the largest, and most authentic, collaborative efforts for justice and liberation that have ever been witnessed on this planet.

we must take the risk of leading. we must be willing to assert the solutions we believe in, to experiment with alternative ways of being human on this planet at this time. we must be willing to try out post-normative paths, we must be willing to say unpopular things.

we must divest. i am still trying to figure out what this looks like in real time. i know part of it is boycotts and buycotts and I am excited to see the lists of places we can stop putting our money and where to redirect it already moving around the internet. i know part of it is really being willing to stop financially supporting all of these things we so viscerally disagree with.

i also think we need to learn to divest our attention from the circus in DC. i do not mean to ignore it or to escape it, but it’s not going to work to continue to spend the majority of our hours saying what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck to what’s coming out of DC.

Why It Matters:

If we are to survive this time of collapse so that healing and rebuilding work can happen, we must not avert our eyes to the catastrophic damage that has been done to our country and our world; damage that was in some ways self-inflicted and has been incrementally occurring for decades. Our response to this collapse must be done with compassionate resolve while accepting our own complicity and naming what is happening in ways that can be heard by those who are ready to hear. We cannot solely rely on social media platforms to be sources of meaning making and truth telling, nor allow ourselves to fall victim to their addictive nature.

The most effective way to share these difficult truths as we pull back the veil of our delusions, illusions and blindspots is in community and through our conversations. We must rebuild community that has been torn asunder, knit together new relationships that are diverse in perspectives and experiences, and engage in meaningful conversations that bring new understanding and broaden our insights. We must learn how to listen to one another and how to ask authentic questions that when answered can open locked doors. We must continue to build this pro-democracy, pro-decency movement one relationship, one connection, one question, one conversation at a time.

What We Can Do

There is powerful resistance movement that is growing across the country and across the world. The No Kings Day 3.0 that occurred on March 28th, was the largest national single day protest in history. There were approximately 3,100 different geographic sites across the country with an estimated 8 to 9 million people participating. These single day protests that have been occurring since last April continue to grow larger and more diverse with each successive event. However, single day protests are not enough. They are vital but only part of the solution.

National organizing groups such as Indivisible, 50501, AFL-CIO, and MoveOn are encouraging a ‘tactical escalation’ from our advocacy and single day protests. Social movements that have successfully toppled authoritarian regimes included civil disobedience and economic boycotts and work stoppages. Indivisible’s What’s Next plan of action includes two primary organizational and resistance tactics:

• Host local organizing, solidarity meetings to build capacity for collective actions of noncooperation. Gather your people and expand who you think of as ‘your people’. If we are to be successful in rebuilding our democratic republic, we must move from mobilization into a more robust and sustained movement. Their toolkit for community groups gives you everything you will need.

• Create local awareness and connect with your civic groups and grassroots organizations to support a May Day work stoppage on Friday, May 1, 2026. Make a plan for no work, no school and an economic boycott on that day. Spread the word and stay tuned.

• The actions and movement building we do now will build power to ensure the integrity of the midterm elections and that every vote is counted. The November elections will be a bellwether moment for the resistance to this fascist takeover. We won’t get a second chance.

The collapse and corruption of our beloved institutions, the erosions of democratic norms and the cowardice and lack of basic decency in most of our elected officials is real. We are in apocalyptic times. That doesn’t mean that we should despair or give up. It is a time of revelation. We hold the power, not the little man behind the curtain.

We are in this together!

Debbie and the H4D Team

Notes: Check out our free H4D Solidarity Network communication resources: Hoosier Solidarity Communication Guide; HoosierSolidarity Book and Movie Guide, and HoosierSolidarity Reaching the (Un)reachable Guide

What can an English Romantic poet who lived over 200 years ago teach us in this moment? John Keats had a turbulent childhood and lost both of his parents by the time he was fourteen. His grandmother and guardians guided him through the rest of his schooling and under their encouragement he graduated from medical school. Although he was talented and well suited for a career in medicine, he longed to be a poet. He ultimately abandoned a lucrative and reasonable career as an apothecary/physician to pursue his passion for poetry.

His early work was dismissed by the established literary circles. He fell madly in love but was unable to marry his beloved because of poverty and illness. He nursed his brother through tuberculosis and watched him die of the same disease that took his mother. On February 23, 1821, at the tender age of twenty-five, he too died of tuberculosis. It was only posthumously that he became known as one of England’s finest poets.

What can we possibly learn from this 19th century, twenty-something English Romantic poet in this 21st century hellscape?

His life was a testament that suffering and tragedy don’t get the last word. He believed that our longing is holy and that a poetic imagination can hold profound meaning and creativity. He gave us the concept of ‘negative capability’, which is the ability to accept uncertainty and mystery without incessantly reaching for reason or an explanation of why.

He believed in the discipline of living with ambiguity and the importance of tolerating paradox without collapsing it into certainty or immediate answers. These qualities seem especially relevant for this moment.

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Did You Know:

Our country has past a significant milestone in our decent into fascism; we are entering into the penultimate stage of competitive autocracy. A few characteristics of this stage include:

• a significant consolidation of executive power

• a significant manipulation, harassment and control of independent media

• retribution of perceived political enemies

• manipulating the control and distribution of public resources

• massive campaigns of propaganda and misinformation

• the militarization of the army

• undermining the rule of law and significant influence over judicial institutions

• civil society continues to exist but is under increasing constraint and loss of individual freedoms

The ultimate goal is to control the outcome of elections; voting may occur but elections are not fully fair because the ‘regime’ will have set the stage to maintain power and work to ensure an unfair advantage to election outcomes.

Gerrymandering, voter suppression, manipulation of voter rolls, and undue influence of election officials are favorite tools in their toolbox. The 2026 midterms are a critical moment for us. It is up to us to stop this free fall into fascism and to make sure that history records it as a victory against fascism and not our democracy’s last stand.

Our Indiana Governor and the General Assembly continue to aid and abet this free fall. The most recent example of our home grown authoritarianism is the legislation that just passed out of the Assembly (SB76) which mandates that local police and county jails must honor ICE detainer requests and cannot adopt ‘sanctuary’ polices. The new law also allows the Attorney General to sue local units of government and public universities for up to $10,000 per violation of an existing ban on limiting immigration enforcement activities.

ICE has devolved into a reckless and lawless para military agency that is occupying our cities. American citizens are being murdered in their neighborhoods. Legal residents are being brutally kidnapped and disappeared. Protesters are being targeted and attacked. The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s governing agency, denies these brutal attacks and defends this lawless behavior, yet our state just passed a law that says local police must cooperate with this lawlessness.

Why It Matters:

This is a moment when we must channel our inner Keats to live into the power of negative capacity and hold the paradox of two opposing truths.

It is true that our country is in a dangerously perilous moment. It is true that people all over the world are suffering under the oppressive practices of this regime and that we are being fed a firehouse of lies about what is happening. (This post was written before our country bombed Iran and killed innocent children in school). It is true that there is a remnant of MAGA supporters who support the brutality and inhumanity of this regime. It is true that things will continue to get worse.

It is also true that a powerful people’s movement is rising up in resistance to this regime and that a majority of the population are heartbroken about what is happening to our country and in the world. The is a rising tide of people who are imagining a brighter tomorrow that doesn’t include a return to yesterday’s flawed version of democracy.

Independent media platforms are emerging out of the ashes of mainstream media. Protests are occurring daily across the country and across the world in opposition to the injustices and lawlessness that is occurring. National protests like Hands Off and No Kings grow larger with each successive event. Vocal artists are joining the movement and are bringing joy to the cause. Special elections and state elections around the country have overwhelmingly elected pro-democracy and progressive leaders, often by wide margins in areas previously won by MAGA candidates. ‘Red’ states are beginning to flash bright purple.

Trump is underwater in the polls and becoming more unpopular by the week. He is a terrible fascist even though he was handed the playbook. He has overplayed his hand. It’s up to us to seize this moment, not just for ourselves but for the next generation. Our resistance is fueled by love and creativity. We know we can’t be certain of the outcome, but that doesn’t deter us. We are buoyed by commitment and community.

What We Can Do:

We have come a long way since January 20, 2025. We can’t turn back despite the daily disappointments, challenges and heartbreak. As Mary Oliver wrote, we must let ‘the soft animal of our body love what it loves’ ; to trust the holiness of our heart’s affection for this democracy, our communities, this country. We have to dare to imagine a brighter tomorrow and each of us must do what is ours to do to make that possible. A few things to remember:

• Talk about what matters to you, listen to what others are thinking and feeling. Stay connected.

• Connect with one or two of the myriad of groups that have emerged over the past several months. Volunteer for a political campaign.

• Don’t turn away from the news, but consume in doses that are tolerable. Put your trust in the emerging independent news platforms. Limit social media scrolling.

• Organize or participate in local street side rallies and protests, they are powerful ways to bear witness and bring hope to those who need the reassurance that there are more of us than there are them.

• Participate in the No Kings Rallies on March 28th. Bring friends and family with you!

• Practice becoming more comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity.

• Just keep going. As Robert Frost said, The best way out is always through.

The poets have a lot to teach us!

In holy longing and poetic imagination,

Debbie and the H4D Team

Vaclav Havel (1936-2011) was a playwright, political dissident and statesman. Living under communist rule in Czechoslovakia he became a leading critic of the regime. Because of his activism and prolific writing, he was surveilled, ruthlessly interrogated and imprisoned. During the totalitarian rule in Czechoslovakia, he founded a human rights movement, and wrote about the perils of living in the lie, the propensity of citizens to pretend to believe or at least comply with the propaganda of the regime in order to stay safe or protect their self-interests.

Havel insisted that totalitarianism depends on compliance, normalization of the abnormal and for the people to be willing to accept the lie, either because they believe it or just go along with it for varied reasons. He argued that a defense against such a system is to ‘live in the truth’, which means to reject the lie and act according to one’s own convictions. He taught that truth is dissent and that truth threatens the entire structure of a regime. He believed that living in truth is a form of power for the seemingly powerless and it creates a community who supports one another in resisting a lie-based system.

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Did You Know:

Since our country’s founding, we have been living in an imperfect republic with fascism’s fangs consistently threatening our freedoms. Slavery was a fascist enterprise that nearly ripped asunder our young nation, an enterprise upheld not only by slave owners but sanctioned by the political, religious and business leaders throughout the South. They ‘lived in the lie’ that only some people deserve to be free, that black people were less than human, that God smiled on their brutality and the rights of the individual states trumped the rights a federal government. “Don’t tread on me” has deep, insidious roots in our history. The oppressor of their time was not a single leader but a a social order ruled by religious fundamentalism, a rigid caste system, moral bankruptcy and greed.

Some scholars believe we are living in a ‘Neo-Confederacy’ in part because the original Confederacy never accepted the outcome of the Civil War. When reconstruction began as a way to mend the divisions, the southern states fought against it. The Ku Klux Klan was an early iteration of what has devolved into the Department of Homeland Security. The ‘homeland’ in DHS is not the United States of America, the homeland is the Neo-Confederacy of the red states.

These red states have been laboratories for authoritarianism for at least two decades. Partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression have given legislative control over these states and they are fueling the dismantling of our democracy. Indiana has been a leader of voter suppression, environmental degradation, privatization of government functions, undermining public instruction, stripping worker’s rights and women’s reproductive freedoms, and gun safety deregulation since the early 2000’s. In 2009, Project Redmap supercharged their power.

Blue states and their leaders are now considered the ‘enemy from within’. Within that context we can better understand Kristi Noem’s declaration that DHS was in Los Angeles to liberate it. The Department of Homeland Security has become the militarized force of a neo-Confederate regime. Within their constructed worldview, MAGA followers and their leaders insist that everything they are doing is justified and virtuous.

Why It Matters:

The MAGA regime is being aided and abetted by others willing to live in the lie. Those who have decided that truth is too dangerous or inconvenient are a mixed sort, but the aggregate is a toxic mix and an existential threat to our freedoms. A few of those who are either willingly or passively living in the lie include:

• The billionaires who control Big Tech, digital platforms and the entertainment industry including Apple, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle, CBS and Paramount.

• College and university presidents who have obeyed in advance or complied with threats and intimidation in fear of retribution thus relinquishing intellectual freedom and causing great harm to their students, faculty and staff, as well as decimating invaluable research. These academic institutions include but are not limited to Harvard, Brown, Columbia, Northwestern, Indiana and Purdue Universities.

• Legacy media who have abdicated their role as the 4th estate in holding power accountable and informing the public including The Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

• Corporate leaders such as Target, Home Depot, Lowes, Amazon and Uber.

• Everyday people who are apathetic, disengaged or insist that they stay away from politics because both sides are equally bad.

• Everyday people who chose to stay uninformed and unaware or refuse to believe that ‘Trump will really do those crazy things he says’.

• Everyday people who use social media as their form of activism and political engagement.

• Everyday people who just pretend everything is normal and refuse to face what’s really happening around them.

• Politicians and elected leaders who go along to get along and continue to act as if we are not in the existential threat of our lifetime including most (not all) members of the DNC and Indiana Democratic Party. The Republican party has been seized by MAGA and the white Christian nationalist movement.

What We Can Do

Hannah Arendt(1906-1975) was a German-born American, considered to be one of the 20th century’s most influential thinkers on democracy, power and totalitarianism. She fled Nazi Germany as a Jewish refugee. She stressed ‘thoughtlessness’ was a danger to democracy and that active citizenship was vital to maintain a free society. We can trust the wisdom of those who have lived through authoritarian regimes. They speak from experience and are our muses for this moment.

To be thoughtful people of the truth, we must be informed of what is true. It is our moral duty as a free people to seek out dependable sources of news and information. At best, legacy media sane washes the insane and normalizes the outrageous. At worst it devolves into a propaganda outlet for spreading disinformation. Many of their journalists have moved to Substack, BlueSky and YouTube. These platforms are the emergent platforms for trusted news and information.

We must believe our own eyes, bear witness to the harm, build community, think critically and be willing to speak to the truth. We can do these things in our way, in our own style and always with others. This is not the time to sit on the sidelines and let others do the hard work. This is not the time to fall into denial, despair, disbelief or disillusionment as an excuse for non action. However, we can channel our inner Moira and retreat to a closet or wish for a good coma every now and then. She has lived through some dark times and can be our survival guide.

Connect with local and national groups who are fighting against this regime of terror. Boycott Target, Amazon, Whole Foods, Home Depot, Spotify, Lowes and any other organizations you know that have abandoned DEI values, who are allowing surveillance in their parking lots, who are bankrolling MAGA operatives. Insist that your faith leaders speak up as a moral voice against the terror and brutality of this regime. Banish the phrase “we must be careful of our tax-exempt non-partisan status” from your vocabulary. Be calculating not careful.

It’s going to get worse before it gets better. More people will be murdered, tortured, go hungry, become unhoused and uninsured. More journalists, activists and celebrities will be jailed. This is not a drill.

If we stand together, are strong and collectively resist in our own unique ways, we will prevail. Then we can begin to build a better, stronger and more perfect union.

Positively bedeviled with living the truth,

Debbie & H4D Team

The shiny new year has lost its shine. Within hours after the ball dropped in Times Square announcing 2026, POTUS criminally invaded the sovereign country of Venezuela and kidnapped its corrupt dictator and his wife. Innocent people were killed in this brazen act, including 80 year old Rosa Elene González, but you have to search to find that news.

As we tried to make sense of this senseless attack by the hands of the Mad King we learned of the brutal, state sanctioned killing of a young mother in Minneapolis. Renee Nicole Good was protecting her neighbors from an army of masked thugs operating as ICE agents. Her six year old son had left his stuffed animal in the front seat of their car after being dropped off from school that morning, and their family dog was sitting in the back as the canine companion to the morning routine. Renee Good’s last words, as she smiled at her soon to be assassin were, “That’s fine dude, I’m not mad at you.” Within hours of her killing, the propaganda machine of the regime had tried and convicted Renee Nicole Good of being a ‘domestic terrorist’. She was armed with a whistle and good intentions, they were armed with guns, hate and lies.

It’s going to be a long year.

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Did You Know:

Our beloved country has crossed a perilous threshold. The wannabe dictator masquerading as a President and his Fox News star-studded Cabinet are drunk on the power that the 2024 election handed them. This moment has been a long time in the making. A toxic political climate, the tsunami of misinformation and foreign interference in the 2024 election and a series of self-inflicted wounds by the national Democratic party supercharged the arrival this man-child as the 47th president of our country. The warnings about the rise of fascist authoritarianism in our local, state and federal governments are no longer warnings, we are being invaded from within. That’s how most democracies fall. The wolf has entered the fold and is “showing his teeth and talons.”

In a recent Letters From An American post by Heather Cox Richardson, she shares a compelling historical account of how our government taught its soldiers about fascism during WWII. She explains that beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel who were stationed in the European theatre. The pamphlets were titled Army Talks, and were designed to help the personnel become better informed men and women, and therefore better soldiers. On March 24, 1945, the topic of the week was fascism.

Her entire post is worth reading. For the way weary, I will just summarize her account of that document. Here is what our Department of War warned us about in 1945.

• Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze, nor once in power is it easy to destroy.

• It is government by the few for the few.

• Its objective is the seizure and control of the economic, political, social and cultural life of the state.

• The basic principals of democracy stand in the way of the fascist desires, so they fight to destroy democracy.

• They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.

• Fascism treats women as mere breeders. Children, kitchen and the church was the Nazi slogan for women.

• Fascists maintain power by the use of force combined with propaganda based on the primitive idea of blood and race by skillful manipulation of fear and hate and the false promise of security.

• In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.

• Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America. After all we once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.

• Fascists label as communists everyone who refuses to support them. (Our home grown fascists are calling protestors who are exercising their First Amendment Right domestic terrorists and gangs of wine moms.)

• The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.

Yes, my friends, fascism can happen here. It is happening in front of our eyes.

Why It Matters:

It’s going to get worse. The regime is weaponizing the military and are recruiting scores of untrained right wing MAGA loyalists to serve as ICE agents to be deployed in our cities and neighborhoods. The ‘enemy’ changes by the hour. The target of their hatred and violence includes our neighbors whom they refer to in dehumanizing language as “illegal aliens”, or our Somalian neighbors who are being falsely accused by right wing conspiracists of eating cats and dogs in Ohio and engaging in Medicaid fraud in childcare centers in Minneapolis. These outrageous accusations are inflammatory and dangerous. They have now aimed their guns and tear gas on suburban moms in minivans who are watching out for their neighbors brandishing only their whistles and compassion.

The more informed we are, the better citizens we are. Believing our eyes and ears is a radical act of resistance.

What We Must Do:

There are still remnants of democratic guardrails to reverse this tidal wave of evil. Congress does have the power to rein in this reign of terror.

• Call you elected representatives in Congress and demand a full investigation into the shootings that have occurred by ICE agents. 5 Calls is an easily downloaded app that will give you a script and find your Congress representatives for you. Indivisible National also has a tool that will connect you to your representatives and give you a script for calling or emailing.

• Join an ICE Out for Good neighborhood protest near you, if there isn’t one, organize one. It’s simple. Send out an email or a text to five of your best friends, pick a street corner or overpass and show up for Renee and the 32 others who have died in torturous detention centers across the country. Blow whistles, hold up your handmade signs and stand in solidarity for your neighbors.

• We must all fully understand that we are in fascist takeover by our own government. We have to believe what we are seeing and hearing, and help others see it as well. Share the original version of the Army Talk pamphlet on fascism. Have a thoughtful conversation about what it says and what it means for us in this moment. There is even a discussion guide on page 6 of the pamphlet that is completely appropriate for today. (This archived pamphlet can be downloaded into a PDF, click on the three dots on the left side of the screen)

There’s more we can do as we approach the primary elections and the midterms. We will keep you informed and engaged.

Stay resilient. Stay strong. Stay connected. Believe what you see and hear. The regime is lying.

Seeing and believing,

Debbie and the H4D Team

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Chardin experienced the ravages of WWI, serving as a stretcher-bearer on the Western Front. He also lost two brothers in that war. His experience of the unimaginable horrors and chaos of that time deeply influenced his writings on the human condition and what he believed to be an inherent capacity of humans to evolve into finer human beings. He believed that the creative force of the universe was divine Love, and that divine spark is present in everything created, down to every last subatomic particle and photon of light. His faith in such a universal wholeness and the human capacity for transcendent love despite experiencing unfathomable carnage, cruelty and human suffering is an antidote to my lapses into despair as I reflect on all that has happened these past 12 months.

Did you Know:

Trump and his acolytes have taken a wrecking ball to our Constitution, our freedoms, our national security, international affairs, our health and well-being, our economy, and our democratic institutions. He is weaponizing the Department of Justice to dispense retribution and vengeance on anyone he deems a threat. He is attempting to weaponize the Department of Defense against American cities and their citizens. He has sanctioned his deputies of terror to unlawfully seize and disappear innocent people seeking to gain asylum or legal citizenship.

He continues to curry favor with the murderous dictator of Russia, and has turned his back on our international allies. His assault on international aid groups has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths across the globe; many of those deaths being children. Our legacy media has abdicated their role as the 4th estate and the Voice of America has been silenced. He has unlawfully bulldozed the White House and is remaking the People’s House into a garish, gold plated palace for himself. Congress has aided and abetted his crime spree. Project 2025 is beginning to feel as anodyne as a Boy Scout manual.

Just writing the above paragraph takes my breath away. All this and more is what we have suffered through in 2025.

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Why It Matters:

A people’s movement is gaining momentum and many are waking up to this monstrous regime. But we will only be able to end this nightmare if there are enough people who can see what is happening. Which brings us back to Teilhard.

In the forward to his seminal book, The Phenomenon of Man (published posthumously in 1955), Chardin writes:

Seeing. We might say that the whole of life lies in that verb—if not ultimately, at least essentially. Fuller being is closer union, such is the kernel and conclusion of this book. But let us emphasize the point: union increases only through an increase in consciousness, that is to say in vision. And that, doubtless, is why the history of the living world can be summarized as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to see….To see or to perish is the very condition laid upon everything that makes up the universe, by reason of the mysterious gift of existence. And this, in superior measure, is the human (sic) condition.

Chardin explained that:

Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist known for her fearless advocacy of voting rights, grassroots organizing and moral clarity, echoed Chardin when she said:

Our humanness often keeps us from ‘seeing’ our interdependence and interconnectedness, thus we retreat into mind numbing social media doom scrolling, hyper partisan echo chambers, and endless divisions. But it isn’t a huge leap of imagination to see that we are truly one human family traveling together on this incredible ‘blue marble’ that we call our earthly home.

So, why does it matter that we are awake to what is happening, no matter how painful it is to see it?

To see or to perish. That’s our choice.

What We Can Do:

A civil society that believes in freedom, justice and civil liberties for its people depends upon a social democracy—rule by the people for the people. Our resistance and our activism involves each of us becoming more humane in our humanity and to work for repairing what has been torn asunder. Our collective work is to build a more perfect union.

This work is not only civic, secular work, it is the work of human evolutionary consciousness. We have a moral imperative to ‘grow up, wake up and clean up.’ A radical evolutionary idea whose time has come!

We can resolve to:

• Give voice and bear witness to what is happening. That means learning how to have courageous conversations with family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues who are not yet sure of what is happening.

• Connect with others who are doing the hard work of community organizing, protesting and resisting. Indivisible is a national organization that can connect you to a local group. MADVoters is a statewide grassroots organization doing amazing work. Indiana Action Coalition is developing a campaign to work with city leaders to protect our friends and neighbors from ICE bullies.

• Create local pockets of social proof that a people’s movement is happening. Mini corner protests, bridge brigades, mutual aid initiatives, and harm reduction from ICE raids are happening across the state and the nation. Make it your work to find those groups and support them. Indivisible Central Indiana is organizing community neighborhood groups and local mini-protests.

• Boycott legacy media and rely on the emergent independent media sources. Indianapolis Capitol Chronicle, Mirror Indy, Indianapolis Recorder and Capital B Gary are trusted sources. Substack publications are a rich source of daily information and links to organizations that are doing pro-democracy work. Our favorites are Letters From an American, Robert Hubbell, and Hopium Chronicles. There are scores of others and they are filling the void left by legacy media. Support financially as you are able.

My colleagues and I believe that the future will be finer than the past. We need you to help us grow this movement of seeing and resisting this existential threat to our people. Together we suffer and together we will survive this!

Happy New Year!

Debbie and the H4D team

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But we know that the darkness doesn’t last forever. The day after the winter solstice, we have about a minute more of daylight, and each day after that, we gain increasingly more light until the summer solstice. There is something deeply comforting in that universal, archetypal dance of light and dark.

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Did You Know:

There are moments of lightness and joy in the midst of this darkness. A little more than a week ago, Indiana was main stage in the country as the partisan and racially gerrymandered maps proposed by Indiana Republicans, maps that were drawn by the National Republican Redistricting Trust, without public involvement or review by any Indiana legislator, were soundly defeated in the Indiana Senate. The maps were the result of a national Republican strategy involving President Trump and Vice President JD Vance to maximize GOP congressional seats. The resounding defeat of HB 1032 was a triumph for democracy and a rebuke of Trump and Governor Braun. Both Trump and Braun have threatened various forms of retribution for the 21 GOP Senators who vote ‘nay’; many of whom had already experienced threats against their lives and the lives of their families. That’s how authoritarians govern.

And yet, as grassroots activists and many everyday Hoosiers celebrated this win (over 60% of Hoosiers were opposed to this mid-cycling scheme), just a day later there was a mass shooting on the campus of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, killing two students and injuring dozens more. Innocent young people gathered to study for final exams lost their lives and others critically wounded in a university classroom. We are failing our children.

The next day in Sydney, Australia, there was a mass shooting that killed 15 people at a Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach. The shooters, a father and son duo, are thought to be motivated by Islamic State inspired antisemitism. Australia is reeling from this tragedy, they have made huge accomplishments on reducing gun violence in their country for decades, so this is a huge setback for them. Our country refuses to do anything about preventing gun violence beyond sending hopes and prayers to those murdered in mass shooting incidents. The US Coast Guard attempted to revise their workplace harassment policy by reclassifying swastikas and nooses from hate symbols to being ‘possibly divisive’, but abruptly reversed course on Thursday, December 18 following an outcry from lawmakers and advocates, including Congress’ refusal to move forward with the nomination process for acting commander Adm. Kevin Lunday until that policy decision was reversed. Both Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem are systematically attempting to remove any policies that advocate for DEI considerations for promotions or workplace protections.

And then on Sunday, Rob Reiner and his wife Michele were killed in their home, allegedly by their son; a young man tormented by addictions. Rob Reiner was an accomplished screenwriter, director, actor, human rights activist and philanthropist. He and his wife were beloved by many and their deaths are a huge loss for the pro-democracy movement and an unfathomable human tragedy. While many mourned their deaths and expressed sentiments of sorrow and comfort, the American President engaged in a vile and evil rant on social media against Rob and his activism; a rant so despicable it will go down in history as the rant of a madman.

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Why It Matters:

Since January 20, 2025, the day of the inauguration of Donald Trump, our constitution, the rule of law, national security, public health and safety, international peace, and any sense of daily normalcy have been unraveled by an authoritarian regime. Most of our elected officials have been complicit either in their support of the regime or their refusal to defy the harm and speak out against the assault on our nation. The normal guardrails have failed us, and it is up to us, the people, to reclaim our country and begin the long journey of healing.

What We Can Do:

The country is waking up. Seven million people showed up for the last No Kings Rally, and in most special elections and in state and municipal elections, Democrats are winning, often flipping seats previously held by the GOP. The movement is growing and cuts across race, place and party. We the people have the power to take this country back and rebuild it into a better version of its former self. We must keep growing this movement.

As we build this people powered pro-democracy movement, a part of our work is simply to be light for one another. We have been dealt this time of darkness and so let us move through the darkness in community, in connection, in human decency and in love until together we reach that place of greater light. We have to name the darkness for what it is, but our admission is not submission nor a note of hopelessness or despair. It just is what it is.

The title of this post comes from a poem by Mary Oliver, “The Buddha’s Last Instruction”. The poem tells the story of Buddha’s final teaching before passing. He told his followers not to cling to him but to be a ‘light for yourself’. In the Buddhist tradition, he was emphasizing finding the truth from within and working for your own liberation through the practices of mindfulness, virtue and resilience in this world of impermanence and decay. It was a call to action. His teaching echoes the anthem of the civil rights movements, This Little Light of Mine, the transformation of a children’s song that became a freedom song for that powerful movement of the last century.

Mary Oliver has another poem, The Use of Sorrows. It’s a sliver of wisdom about darkness.

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me

a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

that this, too, was a gift.

It is up to us to turn this time of darkness into a gift; a gift of light and collective transformation. We must name and stand against this willful and malicious destruction of that which is good. If we can stand together in solidarity and push against this darkness, we will be the light not only for ourselves, but for others.

Let there be Light,

Debbie & the H4D Team

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What these thugs have in common is the use of inflammatory and often times dehumanizing rhetoric about their perceived enemies to inflame public disfavor. DJT has channeled Hitler’s penchant for casting ‘the other’ as dangerous and an existential threat, often using Hitler’s exact words such as ‘vermin’ and ‘poisoning the blood’. They are skilled at using seemingly oblique requests to do harm to anyone found in their disfavor, knowing there is a high probability that those veiled requests will result in violence toward their intended target. They are masterful at using their words and their power to incite violence while cleverly able to plausibly deny they had anything to do with it. They are placing a highly predictable bet that some random, unpredictable Rambo will hear the assignment and do the deed.

Archbishop Thomas Becket was assassinated in response to a rant uttered by King Henry II on Christmas day in 1170. Annoyed that the Archbishop had excommunicated some of the King’s followers, he uttered his infamous words, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” The dispute was over the role of rights of the Crown and the Church, the Archbishop was questioning the supreme authority of the Crown over ecclesial matters.

MAGA darling Marjorie Taylor Greene has found herself in the same predicament as the 12th century Archbishop after Trump called her a ‘traitor’. Her life is being threatened because she supports releasing the Jeffrey Epstein grand jury files. Being a target of vicious threats and acts of violence are nothing new for Democrats or faithful civic servants, but MTG didn’t expect such harsh treatment from her MAGA sisters and brothers. She resigned from Congress effective January 5, 2026.

Did You Know:

Back home in Indiana, our Governor continues to align his loyalty to Trump despite Trump’s attacks against lawmakers who oppose his decree to further gerrymander Indiana’s Congressional maps for partisan gain. Trump wants to ensure that all nine congressional seats ( as compared to the seven that are currently held by GOP lawmakers) would be held by the GOP resulting in more than 40% of Hoosiers being completely silenced and unrepresented. Braun and Beckwith agree with Trump.

Let that sink in for just a moment. Our Governor and Lt. Governor have sided with a sitting president who seeks revenge on elected state legislators. Our Governor is siding with a president who, just like King Henry II, has tweeted and ranted about these ‘meddlesome legislators’. Trump’s cries for revenge have resulted in four of our own elected officials being swatted, and another has received a bomb threat at their home. Plausibly deniable, impossible to predict or prove, but statistically dependably reliable.

As I write these words Trump has now called for the execution of six veterans who serve as members of Congress. Their meddlesome sins were to remind the intelligence community and members of the armed service that they do not have to follow the illegal orders of a President who is calling for attacks on innocent Americans and threatening war without Congressional consent. Their oath to the Constitution instructs them to disobey the orders of a lawless tyrant. Trump is escalating his calls for violence against innocent people and against sitting members of Congress who dare to question his tyrannical abuse of power.

George Washington warned us about “cunning, ambitious, unprincipled men” overstepping constitutional limits and becoming despots in his 1796 Farewell Address.

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Why It Matters:

For now, we are citizens of a democracy and not subjects of an authoritarian madman. Trump is ruling like a vicious, vindictive, lawless, murderous dictator and is trampling the Constitution and destroying our democracy. He is a clear and present danger to our country and the world. Our Governor and Lt. Governor are on his side. This is where we are and that is why it matters.

What You Can Do:

We are not powerless and we must not ignore the threat that we are facing. We have to stand together as a free people and call out the danger while refusing to cooperate or comply with the tyranny. A primary mission is to ensure a free and fair midterm election so that we can vote all of these fascist politicians out of office and begin to clean up this disastrous mess. For now, our assignment is to:

• Build community and stay connected with others who are engaged in building a pro-democracy resistance movement. Engage in local mini rallies, donate to food banks and organize local mutual aid campaigns using local charities and civic groups. We have to support one another as things become more untenable in our everyday lives.

• Support the calls to action for the We Ain’t Buying It campaign from November 27-December 1. Target, Home Depot, and Amazon are aiding and abetting this fascist regime, don’t pay them to do the regime’s dirty work.

• If you are an activist, have a neighborhood group or belong to any organization that is standing up against this tyranny, download this boycott toolkit that has been created by Indivisible and their partner organizations. It’s everything you need from downloadable flyers, messaging guidelines and social media tips. Let’s make November 2025 our Rosa Parks moment.

• Support local independent journalism because legacy media are being useful idiots to this regime. H4D recommends Indiana Capital Chronicle, Robert Hubbell’s Substack and The Hartmann Report as a starter pack for daily sources of news. Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson is required reading! The rise of independent media is a positive sign that a renewed 4th estate is emerging out of the rubble of the collapse of legacy news media.

• Connect with your pro-democracy sisters and brothers by joining MADVoters, your local Indivisible group and other activist groups that are standing up for our freedoms.

There is a Buddhist precept that says: There are three things that always rise: the sun, the moon and the truth. Let us be truth bearers and let us bear witness to all that is happening so that together we can all make it to the other side of this darkness.

In solidarity,

Debbie & the H4D team

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Did You Know:

By all accounts, the No Kings Day rallies were a huge success. The day after the rallies, Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, explained the metrics of successful anti-authoritarian protests. He reminded us that our measure for success is not whether we are immediately successful in toppling a dictator; we measure success by the following:

• Is the movement growing, in size and breadth? Are the protests more multi-racial, multi-class, and multi-generational?

  • Participation has grown from 3 million at the Hands Off rallies, to 5 million at the first No Kings to 7 million in October. The last No Kings protest was significantly more diverse and more wide spread than the first two. Voter turnout last night broke records!

• Is the regime loosing popularity and showing signs of weakness?

  • A recent poll suggests Trump’s approval rating at an all time low; 63% of those polled disapprove of how he is handling his job, only 37% approve. The recent polling also indicated that 147 million Americans support No Kings (42%) as compared to only 30% who support MAGA. A successful anti-fascist movement only needs 3.5% (11 million) of the population engaged in a sustained, noncooperation civil disobedience movement. We have a deep bench.

• Is the movement unified?

  • The people engaged in the protests and yesterday’s voters are clear about their message—we rejected kings in 1776 and we reject them in 2025. We support our country, our founding documents, and the rule of law. We cherish our hard won freedoms, and we believe in justice for all people. There is more that unites us than divides us.

• Is the movement doing new things.

  • This is our growing edge. As we move toward the 2026 midterms, we need to become more unified, more coordinated and more integrated in large scale efforts of non-cooperation, boycotts, strikes and civil disobedience. Black Friday and cyber weekend will be a bell-weather as to the degree we can stand in solidarity in boycotting the enablers of this morally bankrupt regime—that means standing strong and not buying from the tech bros and corporate billionaires. Stay tuned for more information about how to be in solidarity during Thanksgiving weekend. Let’s make it a historical event of mass noncooperation. This can be our Rosa Parks moment.

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Why It Matters:

Our government has been shutdown for the longest time in history. The Speaker of the House has the House of Representatives in a suspended recess to prevent swearing in Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, the newly elected Democrat from Arizona. Once she is sworn in, she would be the needed yea vote demanding the release of the Epstein files. Elected officials are on an extended paid vacation with full salary and benefits, refusing to govern just to protect the disclosure of additional sexual predators named in the files. Meanwhile, people we know and love are facing food insecurity, loss of health insurance, loss of paychecks and loss of jobs.

The East Wing of the White House is being demolished and renovated by private funds (unconstitutional and illegal) in full ‘dictator-chic’ interior design. (Yes, that is a real thing!) Children in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs are being zip-tied by violent masked men serving as I.C.E agents. Cruelty is the point, propaganda is the game.

Prices continue to rise and there is growing unemployment. There is a litany of more reasons, but it isn’t helpful to keep listing them—we are living them.

The point is that we have everything to lose if we don’t continue to grow this movement and reject this authoritarian coup. After the events of the past two weeks, Trump will become more desperate which means he will become even more dangerous and unhinged. That is to be expected. We must fight for fair elections and win our country back.

What We Can Do:

Resistance grows at the grassroots level. If you don’t already belong to a local group or a community of concerned citizens, start one. Build community and connection, they are the antidote to tyranny. Share information, support mutual aid resources that addresses local need, create local examples of social proof that there is a vibrant pro-democracy movement happening in our neighborhoods. We don’t have to do everything all at once, each of us just has to do something, sometime.

Stay connected, informed and engaged. Subscribe to as many independent media platforms that you can and support the activist groups that are showing leadership in the movement. Donate directly to campaigns and the local INDem groups that are showing courage, leadership and creativity (caucuses, county parties, elected leaders). Take inspiration from the wins in Virginia, New Jersey, New York and California.

Participate in national boycotts during the holiday season. Watch this space for Black Friday and cyber-weekend boycotts. Indivisible, MADVoters , Chop Wood Carry Water and Red, Wine & Blue are trusted sources for current calls to action.

The growing pro-democracy movement is made up of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. We have momentum. Let’s keep going.

In Solidarity with Frog Guy,

Debbie and H4D team

On October 18, 2025 people from towns and cities across the country will participate in joyous, peaceful acts of love. More than 2,500 No Kings rallies are being planned to protest the tyranny of hate and lawlessness that has taken hold of our government. We the people will come together in gatherings across the nation as a beloved community in a collective display of love for democracy, love for our neighbors, and love for our hard won freedoms.

Rallies and protests expressing political grievance is a right guaranteed in our Constitution. The First Amendment states that:

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Did You Know:

The Republican party is worried about recent poll numbers and the large public displays of civic dissatisfaction. Instead of changing policies, they manufacture disparaging and dangerous lies about the protests. It is a familiar tactic of authoritarians. Anyone paying attention could see this coming; protests against authoritarians (kings) will be met by the king’s disapproval and he will send his loyal soldiers to try and suppress the people. The 1773 Boston Tea Party comes to mind.

The stage is set for the upcoming rallies to be the largest ever in history, surpassing the No Kings rallies in June. They will happen across the nation and in at least 20 other countries. The Hands Off and No Kings rallies of the spring and summer were overwhelmingly peaceful and joy-filled. There is no reason to believe October 18 will be any different.

This isn’t the first time that we have rejected kings. The Declaration of Independence was a declaration against the tyranny of another unjust and vengeful king, King George III. That seminal document listed 27 grievances against King George, and that list sounds remarkably similar to the grievances of today. Here are 10 just to give you a sense of how consistent our modern day protests are compared to 1776:

• He has obstructed the Administration of Justice…

• He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices….

• He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

• He has kept amoung us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures.

• For cutting off our Trade with the world.

• For imposing Taxes without our Consent.

• For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury….

• For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses.

• For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.

• He has excited domestic insurrections against us….

Why It Matters:

David Brooks, a ‘Lincoln conservative’ warns us that without a signifiant mass resistance movement against Trumpism, America may slip into autocracy for decades. He writes in the November 2025 The Atlantic:

Trumpism can also be seen as a multi-pronged effort to amputate the higher elements of the human spirit—learning, compassion, science, the pursuit of justice—and supplant those virtues with greed, retribution, ego, appetite. Trumpism is an attempt to make the world a playground for the rich and the ruthless, so it seeks to dissolve the sinews of moral and legal restraint that makes civilization decent.

If we are to reverse this authoritarian takeover, our pro-democracy rallies need to be the launching pad for a pro-democracy movement that builds a broad, multi-class, multi-racial civic power. We need to mobilize beyond the current base of support and reach out to those who are persuadable to join in this resistance.

Brooks went on to say that this emerging social/political movement must create social tension and include “actions to raise consciousness, including boycotts, walkouts, strikes, marches, street theatre, civil disobedience, and mass petitions.” This movement must be steeped in the disciplines of non-violence and civil disobedience, and there must be a compelling, prevailing vision of what we are fighting for, not just what we are fighting against.

What We Can Do:

We must not be intimidated by the lies and the threats against the pro-democracy protests. We must not be dissuaded from exercising our Constitutional right to gather in the public square nor delay building a mass movement. It is not only our Constitutional right but our moral and civic duty to be informed and engaged citizens of democracy, especially in this moment. That said, we must be clear eyed about the possible consequences of civic engagement in this time of brutality, lawlessness and impunity of the MAGA regime. This work is not just for ourselves, but for the generations to come after us. What do we love enough to risk for?

We must also insist that our civic and activist groups move beyond rallies and protests and work collectively to build a broad based, multi-racial, multi-class coalition and resistance movement. Use your personal connections and influence in your places of work, worship and volunteerism to insist that we pull together as citizens and work across organizations to create a sustained, integrated, coordinated resistance to the tyranny that is being reigned upon our people.

This Saturday, attend a No Kings Rally or organize a mini rally in your own neighborhood. Beyond attending rallies and protests, form and support local, diverse coalitions to build home-grown displays of creative resistance—this will help grow a broad based resistance. Use sidewalk chalk, yard signs, symbols of solidarity, posters, mimes, graffiti, street theatre, corner rallies and costumes not only to protest but to ridicule the absurdity of MAGAism—-neighborhood by neighborhood, zip code by zip code, small town by small town. Let’s throw a ‘better party’ than MAGA. It will clearly be more fun and wholesome.

Most of us didn’t expect to be spending our time resisting an authoritarian takeover of our country. In her poem, A Dream of Trees, Mary Oliver has a few prescient words for this moment:

And so it is.

Lovingly fighting fascism,

The H4D Team

We live in a time where certainty is the predominant currency of political discourse and curiosity is a lost art. When truth is inconvenient for the politically powerful, activists may think that certainty and facts are antidotes to the lies and misinformation. However, our penchant for certainty must be tempered by a discipline of curiosity. Curiosity can open doors and expand one’s mind. Certainty—not so much.

Did You Know:

Experts in authoritarianism have been warning us for years that our democracy is fragile and is backsliding. Most people who are paying attention can see with their own eyes that the current President and his faithful acolytes have successfully consolidated power and hijacked the other two branches of our constitutional republic. Congress and the judicial branch now serve ‘at the pleasure’ of the one who sits in the gilded, gold studded Oval Office on Pennsylvania Avenue. The constitutional mandate for three co-equal branches of governance has no purchase with this current regime. We are suffering under a President and his cabinet who lead by grievance, retribution, cruelty, propaganda and fear. These warnings are being sounded across multiple platforms and civic groups.

The current president and his MAGA posse peddle their own certainty. They force feed the country daily messages of propaganda and lies. They sugar coat their draconian economic, domestic and immigration policies as being ‘good’ for everyday citizens. They traffic in racism, misogyny, revenge, fear and revisionist history. Their messages are ubiquitous and everyone who wants to stay in good favor of the leader sings off the same song sheet. “Prove me wrong” is their anthem.

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Why It Matters:

Many Americans are aware, in varying degrees, of both versions of what’s happening. Many find both versions equally unappealing or off putting. Most people live somewhere in the middle of these two perspectives. Most people don’t wake up in the morning with politics on their mind. They go about their everyday lives aware that there is a lot going on and that things seem unsettled and uncertain. They know prices are rising, the economy is taking a downturn, there is a teacher shortage, hospitals are closing, vaccines have become political; but for many people it’s difficult to make sense of what is happening. If they don’t see themselves as an activist and are not one of the red hat wearing MAGA base, what is their understanding of what it all means? They may be the folks you hear saying, “I don’t pay attention to politics these days,” or “I’m not a political person.” What they really may be saying is that there is no room for them in either conversation. Let’s invite them in!

If we are to reverse the tide of this hostile takeover of our beloved democracy by billionaire bullies drunk on the doctrine of white Christian Nationalism, we must build a broad based, multi-racial, multi-generational, multi-class pro-democracy coalition. We will only be able to do that if each and every one of us are willing to reach out to our family, friends, neighbors, colleagues and strangers with a little less certainty and a lot more curiosity. We need to invite them into a conversation, and listen to how they are making meaning of all that is happening. As Emily Dickinson said:

Let’s be clear. There is a ‘base’ that belongs to a fundamentalist, regressive and radical version of Christianity who whole heartedly sees the world divided into good and evil. Anyone who is not one of them is evil. I am not talking about this group. They are a minority of Americans who co-conspire to break our democracy and replace it with a theocracy. “Shake the dust from your feet” and walk away is the only thing to do.

What Can We Do:

I have taped the title quote from Albert Einstein onto my bathroom mirror as a reminder. It’s a good way to start the day. Let’s become more skilled at asking great questions, and listening to understand—not just for an opening into the conversation so we can jump in and make our point. Let us begin to see one another with new eyes, and listen with the ‘ear of heart’.

Here are a few resources to help:

• Red, Wine & Blue hosted a Zoom workshop sponsored by MindBridge on how to Bridge Divides and Make Connections. The presentation is amazing and very practical. Download their slides and pay special attention to the HEAR process of deep listening and conversation with those with whom you may differ in politics and opinions. It is a great tool!

• Red, Wine & Blue also hosted a video Zoom with Heather Cox Richardson on How To Save Democracy that is filled with hope and great advice.

• H4D has created in collaboration with others a Conversation Guide and Movie Discussion Guide to help with connecting and conversations.

In times of uncertainty and fear, we naturally move into an ‘us and them’ way of seeing the world. It’s important to stay focused, centered and certain of what we love most while remaining open and curious to all those who are with us in this difficult time. We truly are all in this together.

Passionately Curious,

Debbie & your H4D Team!

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September 17, 1787 was a clear, warm and pleasant day in Philadelphia; the day that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed the U. S. Constitution into law. At the time of the signing, there were 13 states in the Republic, the original 13 colonies that had declared their independence from British rule—thus embracing self-governance and rejecting rule by a King.

This day is a somber day of remembrance for our country. Every elected official takes an oath of loyalty to the Constitution and the President’s oath is to “preserve, protect and defend” it. Since taking office, the President, MAGA members of Congress, our Governor and Lt. Governor, all aided and abetted by the six MAGA Justices on the Robert’s Supreme Court have worked to deliberately undermine and upend the freedoms outlined in the sacred document.

Did You Know:

In 1789, James Madison, serving as a Representative in the U. S. House of Representatives, presented a package of amendments to Congress that served to protect individual rights and freedoms. Congress approved twelve amendments and sent them to the states for ratification. By December 15, 1791 ten states had ratified the first 10 amendments. Those first 10 amendments became our Bill of Rights.

The First Amendment guarantees five fundamental freedoms of which Congress or the President cannot lawfully revoke or abridge.

• Freedom of Religion:

  • Congress cannot establish an official religion.

  • People are free to practice their religion without government interference.

• Freedom of Speech:

  • Individuals can express their opinions without government censorship or punishment (with limited exceptions like threats, incitement, or defamation).

• Freedom of the Press

  • Journalists and publishers can share information and opinions without government control.

• Right to Assemble

  • People can gather peacefully for meetings, protests, or demonstrations.

• Right to Petition the Government (redress of grievances)

  • Citizens can formally request changes, complain about policies or demand action without fear of retaliation.

The tragic events of the past week have given us a clear view of what our country looks like when our First Amendment rights are afforded only to those aligned with the government and MAGA ideology. Social media posts are being surveilled and people are losing their jobs because they are posting factual information about Charlie Kirk. Speaking truth about the person is not the same as condoning the violence of his death.

Across social media and workplaces, people expressing other than a full-throated condemnation of his killing are being fired or ostracized in what appears to be a coordinated effort to silence dissent. Newspapers and political journals are being threatened with law suits and loss of tax-exempt status for just printing the facts about Kirk’s ideology, words, and actions.

While there is no evidence that the shooter had any connections with liberal ideology or the Democratic Party, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff accused left wing political organizations of being a ‘vast domestic terror movement’ and vowed revenge on those groups. Many MAGA elected officials are using language that is inflammatory and invites violence against anyone whom they consider not appropriately grieving this loss of life.

While there has been a continual assault on all of our freedoms since the 2024 election at both a state and federal level, last week’s events have amplified the degree to which our Constitution and our civil liberties are being existentially threatened. We must not ‘not see’ this.

Indiana has joined the chorus of reprimanding and disciplining state workers for social media posts. Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita sent a message to Hoosiers that if anyone has a complaint about Indiana educators or school administrators making comments that ‘celebrate or rationalize’ the killing of Charlie Kirk, they can report those people by using the Eyes on Education portal.

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Why It Matters:

Our beloved, flawed and imperfect Constitution is under attack. The goal of this current ‘regime’ is to dismantle and completely unravel the Constitution taking individual freedoms as collateral damage.

In addition to the Bill of Rights, the Articles of the Constitution are also dangerously threatened. The first three Articles explicitly outline the separation of powers into three distinct branches; executive, legislative and judicial. The founders of our Republic were well aware of the dangers of a consolidation of power, especially in the executive branch. Authoritarians can only exist if there is a concentration of executive power, and they demand loyalty and absolute fidelity by everyone—or else!

The Constitution was written to protect us from this President. Many have been disloyal to their oath of office and have helped get us to this dangerous place.

What You Can Do:

If you don’t already have a pocket version of The Constitution, make a trip to your favorite bookstore, independently owned if possible, and purchase a copy. You can also download a PDF copy made available by the Constitution Center. Take a few minutes to imagine what life would be like without this imperfect document, without the freedoms outlined by the Bill of Rights. Imagine being unfree.

As you read this short preamble, what does it mean to you?

We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Take time today to talk to your children, your friends and neighbors about the freedoms we enjoy as a free country. How are we being called now, as citizens of this country, to protect those freedoms for ourselves and others? If you live close enough, attend Carmel, Indiana’s first Constitution Day Democracy Festival on Saturday, September 20th from 1-4 pm, in the Carmel Civic Square.

Limit the time you spend on social media and inoculate yourself against the pull to blame, accuse, or denigrate anyone. Defend the right to speak truth about the person that Charlie Kirk was while grieving his loss of life. Remind others that we must reject political violence completely, not just condemning it when it happens to ‘one of our own’.

Stay informed and engaged. Hold your loved ones close. Pray for peace for all people. Allow yourself to rest, enjoy a sunset, laugh and notice those small miracles that happen every single day.

We are all in this together.

Happy Constitution Day!

The H4D Team

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There are other folks who are completely unaware or checked out of what is happening and many others who are just blissfully complacent. There are many reasons why folks are living their lives as if nothing is happening, but at this point the reasons really don’t matter. What matters is whether we will be successful in connecting across our varied interests and levels of engagement to build a people’s party to resist this autocratic danger.

Did You Know:

Historians and experts in authoritarianism are telling us that we are in the grips of an authoritarian breakthrough. An authoritarian breakthrough is the point at which an emerging autocrat successfully transforms governmental structures, making the reversal of autocracy through electoral means very difficult if not impossible. Authoritarianism is successful when there is:

• consolidation of power into one centralized executive branch

• suppression of dissent including criminalizing and imprisoning political opponents, dissidents and activists that are resisting the takeover

• erosion of the constitutional checks and balances thus giving the regime complete immunity

Deploying the federal military to occupy cities is a key strategy of authoritarians and the occupation of a country’s capital significantly increases their ability to stay in power. This is happening in plain sight.

On Monday, Trump signed a new executive order to expand the use of the National Guard nationwide to ensure a “quick reaction force that is resourced, trained, and available for rapid nationwide deployment”. This is performative posturing but gives us a clear picture of his motivations and his disdain for the Constitution. It is mostly illegal except for extreme circumstances that he can manufacture on a whim. Regardless of the stunt, this is not normal and it is a dangerous moment for our country.

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Why It Matters:

Experts believe that there is still time to reverse this fascist takeover, but that window is closing. The actions of this regime are unpopular and will become even more so as the impact of the reckless policies become more known. Trump and his acolytes are moving quickly in their machinations to solidify the coup. They have now turned their sights to trying to manipulate the midterms through mid-cycle redrawing of Congressional maps and tinkering with mail-in voting.

Vice President J.D. Vance visited Indiana on August 7th to try to convince Gov. Mike Braun to follow Texas’ lead in manipulating Congressional districts in a mid cycle map drawing scheme. Protestors in the Statehouse let it be known just how unpopular of an idea that is for most Hoosiers. Indiana is one of the most partisan gerrymandered states in the country so we now only have two of the nine seats in the U.S. House of Representatives although the actual proportionate number for fair representation should be four seats out of nine. We have NO Democratic representation in the U.S. Senate. Indiana has about a 45%-55% split between Democrat and Republican votes, so Hoosiers are already under represented in Congress.

If their scheme were implemented and successful, Mike Braun and his supermajority MAGA lawmakers would deliberately and maliciously be silencing about 45% of Hoosier voters. On Tuesday, August 26, Governor Braun and the Indiana MAGA delegation flew to Washington, D.C. to meet with Trump. We can assume that he continued to bully them to create a special legislative session in order to manipulate the maps even more in his favor. (It is estimated that a two-week special session would cost taxpayers about $300,000.)

Stay tuned!

What We Can Do:

Scholars who have studied successful resistance movements that have reversed authoritarianism say the most effective way to reverse this trend is to create a multi-racial, multi-class pro-democracy movement that is widespread, sustained, and involves active engagement by at least 3.5% of the population. This movement will need to be based in the disciplines of non cooperation and the principles of nonviolence. We need a trained, resourced and readily available people’s movement that is available for statewide activism in every state.

There also must be ample social proof that a resistance movement is afoot—yard signs, billboards, neighborhood protests and collective ‘noise making’, sidewalk chalk and signs hung the windows of businesses that promotes the values of the movement. Ultimately, it will likely involve sustained strikes and boycotts.

There are groups who are taking up this mantle and working to create a sustained, robust, multi-faceted, strategic response to the injustices and lawlessness of the current regime. Not every civic organization understands the assignment and are using 20th century strategies against a 21st century coup that is coming from inside the house. Those strategies may keep activists busy, they are not helping to build a movement.

While there is urgency in the moment, people are also now more likely than before to be persuaded to look up from their busy lives and devices to see what is truly happening. This pro-democracy movement will begin on our front porches, in our neighborhoods, in our businesses, schools, churches, civic organizations and the other pillars of a healthy society. Relational organizing is the super power of mass movements. It is how we will build a ‘beloved community’ out of this mess.

Some important first steps:

• Connect with national groups that are promoting non cooperation and active nonviolence methods. Indivisible National is a great place to start and will help you connect with a local group.

• MADVoters is doing amazing grassroots organizing, civics education, voter registration and movement building. They understand 21st century activism and will speak up when our elected officials choose party over country.

• Sign up to take a nonviolence training course. The King Center in Atlanta offers online courses and their website has great information to help you get started. The MLK Center in Indianapolis offers in-person courses in a variety of formats.

• Take the 1 Million Rising/No Kings training to host neighborhood conversations to help build the noncooperation resistance movement one neighborhood at a time. It’s fun, it builds community and it builds momentum!

• Download our Conversation Guide and Book and Movie Discussion Guide to help with neighborhood conversations. Visit the Organizing Indiana website for the most up to date information of what is happening in movement making around the state.

• Share H4D with friends, family and neighbors. We will keep you informed while being kind to your inbox!

Yours in joyful resistance and movement building,

The H4D team

Let us all be that prayer; for our sake and for the future’s sake.

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Did You Know:

Our beloved, flawed and imperfect union is now in the throes of an ‘authoritarian breakthrough’. We must understand clearly what this means if we are to reverse the breakthrough. Throughout history, countries that have fallen victim to dictatorial rule experienced the following phenomena on their journey to dictatorship:

• the consolidation of power into one centralized ‘executive branch’

• suppression of dissent, including criminalizing and imprisoning political critics, dissidents and activists resisting the takeover

• the erosion of checks and balances thus giving the regime complete immunity

21st century governmental coups are not happening with military interventions and violent insurrections, they are happening when an authoritarian ‘wannabe’ is duly elected and that leader then uses the levers of a democracy to transform a democratic form of governance into an authoritarian regime. It is a malicious ‘trick of hand’ and is happening under our noses. Not enough people are paying attention.

Why It Matters:

There is a pattern of how a democracy falls into authoritarianism. Each country has its own set of vulnerabilities and predisposed conditions that may contribute to the ultimate demise of its democratic form of governance. For us, the electoral college, make up of the Senate, and extreme partisan gerrymandering has resulted in ‘minority rule’ in our federal government and many of our state governments. We have been moving away from representational governance for decades. These conditions weaken our democracy and leaves us vulnerable.

Once the MAGA regime gained a trifecta in the national government, they began their journey of moving toward autocratic rule. The first six months of this regime was a calculated stage of an ‘autocratic attempt’; a testing of the waters to see how ready our county was to slide into this authoritarian abyss.

Here are just a few examples of their actions in testing the resilience of our democracy and the degree to which they would meet opposition—the entire list would be overwhelming and requires more time and resources than we have:

• The Senate confirmations of recklessly unqualified candidates was the opening gambit. Check!

• The illegal takeover of federal agencies by Elon Musk and the stealing of personal data from the IRS and Social Security Administration by his teenage mutant minion tech bros was a simultaneous double play. Check!

• The firing of all the Inspectors General in the federal agencies that provide oversight against corruption and malfeasance. Check!

• Trump’s continual illegal and unconstitutional tariff manipulations paid for by everyday citizens by increased consumer prices and destabilizing our economy. Check!

• The passing of an egregious budget bill that takes food out of the mouths of poor children, robs everyday citizens of their health care in order to give billionaires a tax break. Check!

• ICE agents, often wearing masks and civilian clothing, abducting people off the streets or from their homes and unlawfully holding them captive in concentration camps without due process. Check!

• Defending and lying about all of the above using propaganda and gaslighting. Check!

Here’s the danger. Now that the autocratic attempt succeeded, the regime moved into the second phase of the mission which is the ‘authoritarian breakthrough’. Now it is even harder to resist the tyranny and the window is closing.

The cowardice of our elected GOP politicians gave this regime an automatic first down in their autocratic attempt. The MAGA regime now has an open field and is running the ball to a dictatorial touchdown. Will anyone attempt a tackle?

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What We Can Do:

Our first assignment is to pay absolute, undivided attention to this moment and to sound the alarm for those who have yet to notice or do not understand what is happening.

Secondly, we the people need to organize and move into a collective display of non-cooperation against this authoritarian breakthrough. There is a national movement and training called 1 Million Rising that is helping to organize and empower a resistance movement. It’s easy to become involved:

• Sign up for the final training on Wednesday, August 13th. Just by signing up you will get the videos and resources of all three sessions for your review even if you can’t attend the zoom session on Wednesday evening.

• If you are willing and able, volunteer to host a “community resistance gathering with your immediate network. This is how we will grow a pro-democracy resistance movement. The 1 Million Rising coalition are experts in what successful resistance movements look like and community conversations are where it all starts.

• Take advantage of the Conversation Guide and Book and Movie Discussion Guide that H4D developed with other democracy defenders as a free community resource for building community and relational outreach.

• Join an Indivisible group near you.

• MADVoters is an Indiana phenomenon and is making national news about Indiana’s resistance against our own homegrown tyranny. Together with other democracy defenders, they made sure that J.D. Vance heard how unwelcome he is in Indiana. Join MADVoters today!

• Hoosiers for Democracy substack is your trusted source for movement building that doesn’t assault your inbox! Invite others to subscribe to H4D and help us grow!

Yours in joyful and persistent resistance,

Debbie & the H4D team

Note: One hallmark of an authoritarian breakthrough is the militarization of the police and federal law enforcement overreach. On Monday, August 11, 2025, Trump declared federal control of Washington, D. C. This is illegal, unconstitutional and a dictatorial move. Beware!

Orwell wrote from his lived experience. 1984 was published in June of 1949. He had personally witnessed the effects of totalitarian governments in both Spain and Russia. He was concerned that America was dismissing the threat of communism and her citizens were under the mistaken impression that ‘it couldn’t happen here’. He wrote the book as a cautionary tale, using explicit examples of how the political speech of an authoritarian leader can be used to ‘defend the indefensible. His fictional terminology was based on what he was experiencing and researching. His novel is well worth the read/re-read for all of us.

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Did You Know:

Orwell had a profound understanding of the impact of words on thought and society. He believed that there should be integrity with the words we choose so that the meaning is straightforward. It has been said that his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ was one of the most important articles on the power of language to come out of the 20th century. His novel made his points very clear to the everyday reader!

Big Brother was the leader of Oceania, a consolidated superstate of the Americas, British Isles, Australia, New Zealand and Southern Africa. The title of “Big Brother” connotes family, loving concern, a strong male to watch over the weak and vulnerable and evoked a sense of being cared for. The use of an endearing term for a leader of a brutal regime provides a veneer of benevolence which is deceiving.

Orwell coined terms to inoculate the reader against falling victim to propaganda and gaslighting. He used the word ‘doublethink’ to explain how the government used language to desensitize citizens from questioning contradictory concepts. Examples included the way Oceania named their governmental agencies. The Ministry of Plenty oversees shortage, the Ministry of Peace conducts a perpetual war, the Ministry of Love approves of cruel punishment and torture, and the Ministry of Truth spreads propaganda and revises historical facts.

Through doublethink, the public comes to believe the Party's contradictory slogans of “War is Peace", "Freedom is Slavery", and "Ignorance is Strength" as logical statements. Doublethink indoctrinated the people into believing that two contradictory concepts can both be true at the same time, thus undermining the capacity for rational thought. This renders a person incapable of understanding contradictions, leaving them vulnerable to government manipulation.

Additionally, the Party implemented ‘newspeak’, a language control program. By replacing or controlling everyone's native language, the public's cultural values and means of communication were gradually lost, making the subjects more susceptible to doublethink.

Why It Matters:

In today’s world, MAGA passes election integrity laws that actually suppresses the vote and make it harder to register to vote. They pass a big beautiful bill that is cruel and will cause enormous suffering economically and socially, targeting the poorest and most vulnerable just to finance a tax break for billionaires. Approximately $45 billion was appropriated from the big beautiful bill to create tortuous and inhumane concentration camps that warehouse those who have been illegally abducted by Homeland Security. MAGA messaging experts are skilled in doublethink and party members are obedient servants to the messaging.

We have our own 21st century version of ‘newspeak’. Leaders in this current regime deny historical facts of slavery and the brutality it caused, they deny that systemic racism has inflicted trauma on generations of minority populations and insist that women’s rights are a silly whim of unhappy, childless ‘cat ladies’. The use of the term climate change has been scrubbed from websites and not allowed to be used by employees of agencies responsible for predicting the weather or responding to climate disasters. College professors in state funded universities stand the risk of being fired or denied tenure if their students accuse them of lecturing on topics that make them uncomfortable or go against their worldview. Indiana recently passed a law that silences academic freedom and is euphemistically called the “Intellectual Diversity Requirement’’. The first executive orders signed by Trump and Governor Braun were to disallow the use of preferred pronouns in government agencies and to abolish programs that contained the phrase “diversity, equity and inclusion’, arguing that “DEI” programs were exclusive and unfair.

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What You Can Do:

Anat Shenker Osorio is our 21st century guru for understanding the power of political speech and its ability to defend the indefensible. She has given us a powerful messaging toolkit that helps us ‘hear’ the misleading messages and gives us the words to say what is really happening. Download the toolkit and practice the dos and don’ts—it takes a lot of practice to say what we mean and mean what we say!

Anat’s guide offers detailed explanations as to why each of these examples are so important. She continually cautions that if we don’t choose our words carefully, we become unwitting messengers of the lies or help normalize and desensitize ourselves to the chaos and destruction that is happening on a daily basis. By using these guidelines, we are not only speaking truth to power, but also speaking truth to each other.

Here are a few examples for this moment we are in:

Do say Epstein cover up…Don’t say Epstein files

Do say concentration camp…Don’t say alligator Alcatraz

Do say forced removal…Don’t say immigration policy

Do say abduct or disappeared…Don’t say deported, arrested

Do say Fascist power grab, hostile takeover of our government…Don’t say Constitutional crisis, government overreach or unprecedented

Do say Trump’s tariffs…Don’t say tariffs

Do say Big Ugly Bill or MAGA Murder Bill…Don’t say Big Beautiful Bill

Do say current regime…don’t say Trump Administration

The ultimate goal of an authoritarian government is to define what is true despite the evidence.

The poet and novelist are warning us! Words matter!

Truthfully yours,

Debbie and the H4D Team

Additional Resources:

Download our Summer of Solidarity Communication Guide and Book and Movie Discussion Guide for additional resources in building a pro-democracy movement one conversation at a time.

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An earlier version of his speech was vetoed by religious and movement leaders because it was considered to be too fiery and radical. Just minutes before he was to speak, Lewis was huddled in a small anteroom behind the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial with Martin Luther King and iconic leaders of the movement as they reviewed his speech word by word, banging out the revised version on a portable typewriter. The young Lewis had fire in his belly and was told he must tone it down! He listened to his elders, but was determined to deliver a speech with a much different tone than that of his hero—Martin Luther King. Later, New Yorker editor David Remnick said it this way, “Certainly King’s speech was the most eloquent that day. But the most ferocious was John Lewis’s.”

John Lewis was jailed multiple times for engaging in nonviolent protests and acts of civil disobedience. On Sunday, March 7, 1965 he led a march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery in support of voting rights for Black Americans. As the protesters crossed the now infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were met by law enforcement officers armed with tear gas, whips and batons. John Lewis’s skull was fractured in that brutal attack. The televised images of the assault galvanized national support for passing the 1965 Voting Rights Act later that year. How ironic that just two years after his much toned down speech at the Lincoln Memorial, his peaceful, non-violent march for voting rights resulted in such state sanctioned violence.

Did You Know:

Lewis’s last public appearance was in June of 2020. He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just months before and was very ill but wanted to visit the newly erected Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington D.C. He said that he was inspired by the national protests that had erupted in response to the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter Movement that emerged in response to the horror of his murder. Lewis was deeply moved by the ‘social proof’ of the Black Lives Matter movement and how it was memorialized by the BLM Plaza saying that:

In March of this year, the Black Lives Plaza mural was removed following pressure from Republicans in Congress who threatened to withhold federal funding from the city unless the mural was removed and the plaza renamed.

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Why It Matters:

Our country has suffered through a hostile takeover of our government and serial attacks on our freedoms since January 20, 2025. Congress is no longer a co-equal branch of governance, the Robert’s court serves at the pleasure of the executive branch, the Department of Justice has been weaponized against everyday citizens. The social safety net that protects the most vulnerable of us has been shredded, and that shredding is just the beginning. Barberic concentration camps are being established across the country to house those abducted for no other crime than being suspected, often without proof, of being here illegally—which is a civil offense not a crime.

The president of the United States threatens to revoke citizenship of those whom he dislikes or dare to speak against him. Aid to foreign countries has been halted, food is being destroyed that would save the lives of dying children if allowed to be distributed before it rots in the ports. Our families and children are dying from catastrophic floods and natural disasters while the leaders of FEMA engage in gaslighting and delay life-saving search and rescue missions because their subordinates must wait for approval before acting. Public Broadcasting is being defunded, long considered a gold standard for news, information and compelling programming. Legacy media cowers in fear of being retaliated against if they print news that isn’t sane-washed or white-washed. Public health is under attack, science is considered to be a ‘woke’ conspiracy, intellectualism is considered politically dangerous to those in power.

Governor Braun and every Indiana elected GOP politician stand in solidarity with the authoritarian takeover.

America, we must wake up! We must make some good trouble, necessary trouble if we are to reverse this tsunami of cruelty and authoritarianism that has hit our shores. If not now, when?

What You Can Do:

This day, July 17th, is designated as a day of action to respond to the attacks on our civil and human rights in commemoration of the legacy of John Lewis. Attend a Good Trouble Lives On event near you. Host a simple gathering of family, friends or neighbors and talk about what you personally have experienced over these past several months as an act of truth telling and solidarity. Hold a mini rally at a corner in your neighborhood with signs that bear witness to this moment. Engage in community service or conduct a prayer vigil for the lives lost due to policy decisions by this regime. Have a freedom concert on your porch or front yard with a play list of civil rights resistance songs and connect with one another in your own ‘beloved community’.

In a conversation with Krista Tippett in 2016, John Lewis said that an important question that he asked himself was “What if the beloved community were already a reality, the true reality, and we simply had to embody it until everyone else can see it?”

Perhaps our collective work is to embody the ‘beloved community’ in our words, our thoughts, our actions. What would that look like for you? Whatever it might be, do it!

Making good trouble together,

Debbie & H4D Team

Did You Know:

Just a few years into the founding of our country, Thomas Jefferson warned us about corruption and tyranny from within our newly formed government. This isn’t the first time our country has faced tyranny, oligarchy and corruption, but it is the first time that these forces have such massive power.

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In 1785 Jefferson warned that:

The public money and public liberty, intended to have been deposited with three branches of magistracy, but found inadvertently to be in the hands of one only, will soon be discovered to be sources of wealth and dominion to those who hold them… They [the assembly] should look forward to a time, and that not a distant one, when a corruption in this, as in the country from which we derive our origin, will have seized the heads of government, and be spread by them through the body of the people; when they will purchase the voices of the people, and make them pay the price. Human nature is the same on every side of the Atlantic, and will be alike influenced by the same causes. The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered. (emphasis added)

Why It Matters:

The wolf has entered the fold. We were warned, but we didn’t heed the warning. It is now up to ‘we the people’ to declare another independence from the corruption that has seized the heads of government.

What You Can Do:

Spend some time today and over the weekend reflecting on what you love most about this country and what makes your heart heavy in this moment. Reflect on what it means to be a free people. What are the freedoms that we have lost and what more do we stand to lose if we don’t take a stand against this corruption and tyranny? Be a voice for truth. Every act of naming is an act of courage. Make use of our conversation guide and share it with others.

Take the time to read the Declaration of Independence over the weekend in between the fireworks and backyard picnics. Make a commitment to stay informed and engaged in the political process, if not for yourself than for the generations that will come after you. Our democracy is in peril. It’s up to us to preserve and protect it.

Our hearts are heavy at H4D, but we are committed to continuing to resist the attacks on our democracy. We have work to do, and we are honored that you are with us on this journey.

Remember to join us in our Summer of Solidarity, gather some sunflowers and flags for your picnic tables and remember that joy is a form of resistance.

Yours in Independence,

The H4D Team

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Did You Know:

A wannabe king threw a global temper tantrum because the universe rained on his parade thus threatening world-wide security and inflicting suffering on innocent people. Trump’s un-authorized war on Iran and reckless bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites have threatened the lives of everyday people here at home and abroad. Americans overwhelmingly oppose this war, but aspiring kings don’t listen to the people.

The Big Ugly Bill disguised in propaganda doublespeak is winding its way through Congress. If passed, this bill will devastate American families, take food away from innocent children, undermine our freedoms, strip healthcare from millions of families and threaten our futures. The bill gives tax cuts to billionaires and will add an estimated $4.5 trillion to the national debt, money that will be paid back by all of us, not the billionaires.

The ugly budget bill adds $170 billion into immigration enforcement. This includes creating internment camps for our neighbors who are abducted off the streets or seized as they responsibly report to immigration courtrooms. On Tuesday, Trump toured one such camp located in the Florida Everglades that is being dubbed as Alligator Alcatraz. The location of this internment camp is intentionally located in the swampy Everglades so that if anyone successfully escapes the razor wire and cages, alligators will attack them. Most people being abducted have not committed a crime other than being undocumented, which is a civil offense—not criminal!

The Roberts Court has spent years paving the way for a MAGA dictatorship, and their latest rulings – most recently in the birthright citizenship case – show they will stop at nothing to take away our freedoms and rule for their billionaire backers. With their decision against Planned Parenthood on June 26, 2025, the MAGA Justices on the Supreme Court took away our freedom to decide what happens to and how we care for our own bodies, taking away the only affordable healthcare many of us can access.

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Why It Matters:

Our country is in an authoritarian freefall. On the anniversary of our nation’s founding, we find ourselves under the oppressive, corrupt and violent reign of a wannabe king. Trump is being aided and abetted by a corrupt and recklessly unqualified Cabinet, a corrupt Roberts Court and a Congress that is impotent and ineffective. Senator Lisa Murkowski, Alaska (R) admitted last April that she was afraid, and that she is not alone. She stated that many senators are afraid of retaliation if they speak up against Trump. On Tuesday, all but three GOP senators voted to approve the senate version of the budget bill, including Lisa Murkowski. A ‘no’ vote from her would have killed the bill.

Senator Murkowski’s cowardice and submission to the threats are not unfounded. In the early morning of June 14, the same day as the No Kings protests and Trump’s military birthday parade, Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were assassinated by a gunman. The murders are considered to be politically motivated. Trump has refused to call the Governor of Minnesota to express condolences nor did he attend their funerals or comfort their grieving families. The MAGA regime sanctions violence against their political opponents. This is not what most Americans want, but this is what America has become.

What We Can Do:

We have to build a people-powered, non-violent movement if we are to survive this fascist takeover of our country. When we use the term ‘fascism’ we are not talking in hyperbole or calling anyone nasty names.

Trump is an authoritarian fascist. Our state has been a laboratory for authoritarianism for over a decade and our state government is brimming with white Christian nationalists who support Trump and his agenda. Our state legislature passed many of its own big ugly bills this 2025 session, including a big ugly budget that strips food and health care from our most vulnerable, suppresses academic freedom in our public universities and is on the path to privatizing our public schools.

H4D has teamed up with other values aligned, grass roots organizations to launch a Summer of Solidarity campaign. We are using sunflowers as a symbol of unity and resistance, and the flag as a symbol of freedom and patriotism. We have developed several resources to support Hoosiers across the state to help grow the movement, one person at a time. None of us can do everything, but all of us can do something.

Here are a few Summer of Solidarity fun things to do:

• Use sidewalk chalk to draw sunflowers on your sidewalk. Share the link to the SOS2025 campaign with friends and neighbors and invite them to decorate their sidewalks too.

• Take selfies with sunflowers you ‘find in the wild’, they are everywhere. Post to your social media platforms using #SOS 2025.

• Paint barns, garages, fences and tool sheds with sunflowers as a symbols of solidarity and social proof there is a movement underfoot!

• Host book clubs that invite conversations about threats to democracy. 1984 by George Orwell or Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury would make great summer reading as cautionary tales.

• Show the movie Bad Faith in your places of worship, civic groups or community centers.

• Talk with friends and neighbors who may be ‘waking up’ to the threats to their freedoms. Download our resource guide for an easy reference about how to connect with anyone across the continuum of political engagement.

• Grow sunflowers in your garden, and fill your house with their sunny faces. Bring joy into this work. Joy and beauty are acts of resistance.

• Hold a mini-rally at a set time and place every week. Be a sign of hope and resistance one neighborhood at a time. These folks in NY gather every Thursday, from 7-7:30 pm to be the face of solidarity and a beacon of light in response to Trump’s tyranny.

• Watch for Good Trouble Lives On protests on July 17, the anniversary of the passing of Congressman John Lewis.

Despair is bad for democracy. The litany of bad news included in this post sounds like it came out of a dystopian novel, but it is all too real. Of course we will have moments of despair.

But we have one another, and if we make enough ‘good trouble’ and grow the movement, we will prevail.

Fabulously Fighting Fascism Together,

Your H4D team