Don’t waste your time planning an ineffective rally. Here are the basic steps to follow to organize a smart protest campaign.
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Category: Politics
“I am 69 years old. I will never not be a racist.”: Reflections from a South African Expatriate
I am a racist. I grew up white in apartheid South Africa. My neighborhood, buses, trains, movie theaters, restaurants, schools, beaches were all strictly segregated. Even park benches were marked “Whites Only.” People of color were known as “Non-Europeans.” Non-Europeans built and cleaned and[…]
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Throw a Creative Mischief Party to Plan for the Next March or Rally
When you find out about the next rally or march, you may wonder how you can increase your impact. There is one thing you can always do, and it’s both easy and fun: throw a protest party to prep for the protest. By protest[…]
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No Safe Spaces: A Poem by Fred Dodsworth
Standing midst the flames
like wolves’ tongues
surrounded by shattered lives,
the sun sets in the East this time,
a dark orange pallor
casting its sickly shadow
over dreams once offered.
“It’s a republic if you can keep it…”
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Direct Action: What to Do When Marching Isn’t Enough to Stop Injustice
The Internet is a buzz right now with talks of marching, should Rosenstein be fired by the Trump administration. I see two narratives around this: “we have to march!” and “marching isn’t enough—we need violent revolt!” The truth is that marching is merely symbolic.[…]
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List of Human Rights Abuses at American Concentration Camps… Er, Detainment Centers
Editorial note: every time we tried to publish this list, new articles would be brought to our attention and the list just got longer and longer. So you can think of these as examples from the past month or so, because I needed to[…]
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Are the American Immigrant Detainment Centers Concentration Camps?
What Is a Concentration Camp? Most dictionaries define “concentration camp” as a space for separating a politically undesirable group, usually with degraded living conditions. In this sense, the terms “concentration camp,” “internment camp” and “detainment center” are interchangeable. But the term “concentration camp” is[…]
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The Gotcha Game
There’s a game radicals, progressives, and liberals like to play. We are always looking for the turncoat in our midst. Did you catch someone confusing transsexual with transgender? Five points for you. Someone ignorantly, but not sarcastically, asks “what’s wrong with the phrase All Lives Matter,” 10 points for you. Sexist blonde joke? 4 points.
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Replacing Pavement with Gardens: Beyond Leftist Fundamentalism
It is early autumn and helicopters are circling the UC Berkeley campus as I write this. I can see them from my window. The tut-tut-tut of their propellers punctuate my thoughts.
A few days ago, I rode my bike up to the university to use the library, and had to navigate through a swarm of media and security workers. An Alt Right speech was scheduled on campus that evening, but it was still several hours away. There were no protestors yet, but cable news teams were already milling all over the place, setting up their equipment, preparing their spins.
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Moral Panic Attack: Callout Culture and Community
Moral panic is a sociological phenomena in which individuals or groups are persecuted within a larger social group. These panics are precipitated by the presence of several key ingredients: social order, fear of that social order being threatened, and the existence of taboos—unnameable things which members of the group cannot address without experiencing fear.
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