Press Briefing: The Future of Climate Activism

Transcript

Mark Hertsgaard: Hello, and welcome to another press briefing with Covering Climate Now, I’m Mark Hertsgaard. I’m the co-founder and executive director of Covering Climate Now, and our topic today is covering the future of climate activism. But first, Covering Climate Now is a global collaboration of more than 500 news outlets that reach a total audience of billions of people. We’re organized by journalists for journalists to help all of us do a better job of covering the defining story of our time. We convene discussions like today’s webinar where journalists can speak among ourselves about the common challenges we face. We train newsrooms in both English and Spanish, and we provide cutting-edge analysis in our climate beat and other newsletters, and we establish standards of excellence in climate reporting through our annual awards program. All of our services are free of charge and you can find more information and apply to join Covering Climate Now at our website, coveringclimatenow.org.

Today’s webinar is particularly well-timed. Not only is today Earth Day, which has been a high point of environmental activism since 20 million people filled the streets across the United States on the first Earth Day in 1970. Also, last Saturday brought the latest in a series of mass demonstrations against US President Donald Trump. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets across the United States to protest the Trump administration’s demonizing of immigrants, its refusal to spend monies as authorized by Congress, its defiance of legal court orders, and not least its crippling of federal efforts against climate change. This week also brings the launch of Covering Climate Now’s 89 Percent Project. That’s a year-long initiative by news outlets around the world to explore a pivotal but little-known fact: the overwhelming majority of the world’s people—between 80 and 89 percent of us, according to scientific studies—want our governments to take stronger climate action.

The existence of this overwhelming climate majority not only rebuts Donald Trump’s climate denialism, it also offers newsrooms an opportunity for fresh reporting. As journalists, we rightly pay lots of attention to what political leaders say and do, but we should also pay attention to what ordinary citizens think, what they want from their leaders and the actions they take to make their voices heard. So how journalists can best cover climate activism is the subject of today’s webinar and to lead us through it, I pass the mic now to my esteemed colleague here at Covering Climate Now, Theresa Riley, who is our audience editor. Theresa.

Theresa Riley: Thank you, Mark. Across the world, as Mark mentioned, 80 to 89 percent of people say that they want their governments to do more about climate change. In the US, the number is lower, but not by much. Various studies have found that between 66 and 74% of Americans support government intervention. Despite that, the Trump administration has taken a u-turn on climate action, leaving the Paris Agreement, cutting programs and funding, deleting climate data and rescinding rules that reduced emissions, making good on his campaign promise to “drill, baby, drill.” Protests denouncing the administration’s actions have gained traction, but the deluge of executive orders, DOGE layoffs and funding cuts has meant that climate action is just one issue in a laundry list of issues. That includes preserving democracy, freedom of speech, voting rights, and others. At the same time, 41 anti-protest bills have been introduced in 22 state legislatures in the past three months, proposing harsher prison sentences and bigger fines for activists. Amid the flood of announcements coming every day from the Trump administration, how can journalists cover activism and activists as the newsmakers that they are?

We have a terrific panel joining us today to talk through these issues. In the first half hour, I will post questions to them. In the second half hour, we invite questions from our fellow journalists. You can submit your questions via the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. Please be sure to include your name and the name of your news outlet. And while this briefing is open to everyone, please note that we’re taking questions from working journalists only. Now allow me to introduce our panel. First we have Dr. Dana Fisher. She’s the director of the Center for Environment, Community and Equity, and a professor in the School of International Service at American University. She’s the author of several books, including her 2024 book, Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action, in which she offered timely insights on how social movements can take power back from deeply entrenched interests and open windows of opportunity for transformative climate action.

Then we have John Paul Mejia, a national spokesperson for the Sunrise Movement and a fellow at the Democracy Revival Center where he leads youth-centered strategies to counter authoritarianism and renew democratic participation. He’s also a Frederick Douglass Distinguished Scholar at American University and serves on the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Commission on Accelerating Climate Action. And finally, Amy Westervelt is an investigative climate reporter and the founder and executive editor of Drilled, a multimedia cross-border reporting project focused on climate accountability. Please join me in giving our panelists a warm virtual welcome. Dr. Fisher, I’d like to start with you. You’ve been studying activism for more than 25 years. Can you give us a little background on how climate activism has evolved since Trump’s first term?

Dr. Dana Fisher: Sure. First of all, I just want to say thank you for having me. This is such an important conversation to be having and particularly because there has been less conversation about activism than we would expect given how many people have been out in the streets. So with regard to your question, I just would say, so I’ve been studying climate activism since the days of the Kyoto Protocol, but it’s also part of broader research that I do, specifically looking at civic engagement and democracy and activism broadly. In fact, my last book was called American Resistance, which was documenting the first resistance to the first Trump administration and it’s impossible not to think about this long arc of activism that we’re experiencing. So since the first Trump administration we’ve seen or we did see, a reduction in engagement and activism after the Biden administration came into office, which is exactly what’s expected.

I mean, research shows us that when Democrats win, many people do not engage in the same way in activism and particularly not in protest. So that’s exactly what we would’ve expected. But what we did see at the same time, is that there was a rift that formed between different components of the climate movement, mostly due to the incremental policies that ended up being pushed by the Biden administration that supported a clean energy expansion while also supporting more fossil fuel expansion. And many folks within the climate movement were very uncomfortable with that. But we saw a very clear rift there and what we call a radical flank formed that was engaging in performative and disruptive activism. And when I say radical, it’s very important to note here that the radical flank was not engaging in radical violent tactics.

It was exclusively focused on peaceful nonviolent tactics to draw attention. That was the paint smears, the food throwers, they was slow walking, there was crazy gluing, there was folks blocking traffic in all sorts of ways and a lot of bird dogging, which is the people who are disrupting events by yelling at the speakers who are business leaders or in some cases elected officials. So we saw a lot of that, and that was probably the most visible component of the climate movement until Donald Trump took back office in January.

Theresa Riley: Great. And I want to return to something that you said before the election that I thought was really interesting, and I’m hoping you might unpack it here. You said, “If Trump wins, it actually is going to get us to saving ourselves faster.” Can you talk about that?

Dr. Dana Fisher: Yeah. So when I started saying this back before the election, I would say it and people would go like… and there was a lot of cringing going on. I completely understood and I also was very uncomfortable with the conversation, but I also thought that it was really important given what we knew about polling data, et cetera, and the likelihood of Trump taking back the White House that we really need to be thinking about it. So in the book, Saving Ourselves, I document on why we can only achieve the type of systemic changes that are needed and push back against fossil fuel interests through a mass mobilization of civil society. In the book, I talk specifically about the way that civil society will mobilize and research is documenting how it’s doing more and more of this in response to climate shocks that people experience around the world.

And this is climate change-exacerbated extreme events of all sorts. There’s a lot of research that’s growing that documents how people, even people who are on the political right, tend to change their opinions and get more engaged after experiencing climate shocks. So that’s what the book talks about. And when I was asked about Trump, what I also built on in my response was the work that I did for the book American Resistance, where I saw this concerted coalition form across the left that included folks who were focusing and motivated by climate, but also people who were motivated by all sorts of issues, who pushed back and worked together in this relatively fragile coalition to push back against the Trump administration and its policies. And what I said before the election was, “If Trump wins, it would be horrible for the environment.”

And I said, “It would be horrible for democracy,” so I guess I should get some points for predicting that one right. But what I also said was that, “We will see a coalition forming and a lot of these frictions that we see across the left during times of Democratic leadership will be resolved because there will be such a concern about the way that the Trump administration, especially after Project 2025 was introduced, would be pushing back against all of our civil liberties as well as all of our policies that we had on the books that were specifically trying to address the climate crisis, which were insufficient. But we did have these policies, so everybody could work better together and more climate shocks would come, which research shows we’ll actually be good for getting people to work together.” So that was the unlikely combination of events that would be good for saving ourselves, not good for the environment, not good for democracy, at least not in the short term, but in the longer term.

Theresa Riley: Thanks. Amy, I want to talk about media coverage of the recent protests. I personally sense that there’s a lot more action going on that I see on social media, but I don’t really see it in the news. For example, after the April 5th Hands Off protest in which organizers estimated that more than 5 million people participated across the US, a poster on Bluesky observed that international papers covered the widespread protests much more prominently on their front pages than those in the US. This lack of protest coverage in the US is not a new phenomenon. And so I wanted to pose that question to you as a journalist, are protests newsworthy?

Amy Westervelt: Yeah, well, short answer, yes, they are. A, I will say I think that coverage has been improving a little since January, February. There was this story that I know Dana posted about and we talked about that the New York Times did a story pretty early on, I want to say late January, early February saying, “The resistance is dead. There will be no resistance to Trump,” and all that kind of thing. And they have since done a lot of stories, at least covering the protests and highlighting what’s happening. But for me, I don’t live in the US anymore. So I was really desperately looking for proof that people were doing something and it was pretty hard to find in media coverage for the first few months. I do think it’s improving. I don’t think it’s quite as much as it should be. And I think that that’s because of this really entrenched bias in the media that has kind of insisted for years that activists are untrustworthy sources. Somehow CEOs are trustworthy, but activists are not.

I do think that it’s hard to sell an editor on a story about a protest. I think people need to think a little bit more creatively about how we cover these things. So for example, we do a lot of looking at who’s funding what and what their agenda is and who they’re tied to and all that kind of stuff to try to broaden out beyond just like, “This protest happened. There were these many people,” you know, put it in context a little bit. But yeah, I think the media has been successfully molded into an entity that corporations like to deal with, and it’s really on us to just be a little bit more aware that that’s happening and that we’re in a pretty unusual time, I think in all of our lifetimes. And it’s a good time to question some of the rules and norms that have been built up and who they actually serve.

Theresa Riley: Thanks, Amy. So John Paul, the Sunrise Movement’s mission has always been to work inside the system to get the Green New Deal across the finish line. Given what’s happening now in Washington, there’s considerable conversation in the climate movement about what needs to change with the narrative to accelerate action. I’m curious how organizers at Sunrise think about tactics and action that they want to take right now.

John Paul Mejia: Thanks so much for that question and for an invitation onto this awesome panel. I think the way that I want to answer this is in sort of a three-part thing. First, I think that there’s something really relevant about what Amy said. I think social movements and you using the word narrative in the question is really evocative of this. Modern social movements are basically trying to capture attention for a series of ideas that they believe can be popular and that they can win on. And so the medium through which that can happen often is the media. And I mean, that’s kind of what it means. And so I think that in a time, like the one that we’re in right now where everything is ceasing to make sense right now, my personal agitation to a lot of journalists and people who cover climate is to not think of themselves as seemingly kind of like invisible objective people with no interests or any active interests that they’re working through.

I think it’s important to view ourselves all as civic actors that share a terrain that’s increasingly ceding from us and be really curious about each other, because I think that our opposition, the people who want to both shut down the people who are doing climate work and the media, are constantly and tactfully thinking about how they will consume more and more terrain and how they can build solidarities with each other in order to do so. I think it’s time that we start doing the same kind of thinking for each other. Now, to answer your actual question, part of how we at Sunrise, and I think a lot of social movements now are thinking about the next few years and what we have to do, stems from a direct conversation over the past 10 years of what we did. And in the question there’s this idea of we worked within the system.

And I think that there’s a little bit of nuance there that I want to explain first. So a movement is a base of organized people and organized resources that can often propel an idea that they believe in, but compelling ideas are not enough on their own. Part of what Sunrise Movement saw an opportunity in doing was having an active social movement, taking spectacular direct action that could be attention driven, but also have a strategy for how to intervene in the political system so that those ideas could generate political capital and show elites in the Democratic Party that perhaps climate change could actually be an issue worth fighting for that could cultivate their own interests too. And so for that reason, we not only wanted a movement, but we also wanted to work with a faction of elected officials who could represent and negotiate for the movement within the institutions through which we thought the Green New Deal would come from, which is Congress, that institution that hardly exists anymore.

And so through that strategy, I think we saw really interesting play of using a political process elections, primary elections, particularly to show how the movement’s participation could flex into political representation, get people elected, the ideas that they were elected on are like, “Oh man, I guess you can run on these.” And ultimately, whether it was through a midterm wave in 2018 when we elected AOC or even the presidential bid of Bernie Sanders, you saw competitive ideas from movements integrate themselves into a political system, build political capital, and ultimately get to a position where the Democratic Party under a governing trifecta, for the first time in a very, very, very long time, was able to place climate as an issue at a very top priority and in a pretty ambitious way too. So we did many things right, and we got very far, but part of what’s different now is that we saw the limits of our democratic political system crash upon us, right.

Although we had public and political majorities on our side, one senator, with fossil fuel interests that represented a minority of the country, was able to basically say, “Screw it.” And sure, we got the IRA, the public and politics were way beyond that. And so I think the reason I bring this up is because, in the aftermath of this, a lot of climate organizations started moving towards executive actions, right. Climate, emergency campaigns, this, that and the other. And part of what we fail to understand there is that the same politics that we were doing of seeing that our political system couldn’t deliver and that we could just depend on executive authority to get us what we want is kind of what the country went through leading up into the 2024 election.

And so part of what movements are struggling with now is that we have to actually actively work towards bridging and inspiring a democracy conversation that democracy is the way that we can win, and that what we had before it wasn’t perfect, and that what we have now is definitely a false solution to the frustrations of our political system. But yeah, I think at Sunrise we’re thinking in the short term local sense, how do we build resilient social structures that can keep people, one, safe from climate shocks and repression, and two, build the kind of political communities and trust necessary that then can scale up at more long-term moments of federal organizing, whether it’s through participation in elections to oust an authoritarian or forms of non-cooperation. So those are some of the things that we’re thinking about now.

Theresa Riley: Great. Amy or Dana, do you have anything you want to say in response to that? I think these are all really great points, John Paul. Thank you.

Amy Westervelt: I have one thing to add, I’m sure Dana has stuff to say too. I always look at this… I spend a lot of time looking at how people who don’t want climate action behave to understand whether the strategies that are being deployed by people who do want climate action are going to work up against those. And something that I have been looking at a lot is the universe of think tanks behind Project 2025, I feel like Heritage got all of the heat on that, but there’s like 100 plus organizations involved in that, many of them are also part of the Atlas Network, which is a global network of over 500 think tanks that are everywhere. They’re in Latin America, Africa, Australia, Europe, the US, Canada, and they’re sharing ideas back and forth all the time. And something that Atlas talks about a lot in their promotional videos and things like that is that they say, “We are not about any particular policy.”

Our job is to seed the cultural and intellectual ground in which future policy ideas can flourish. And I don’t see that happening on the other side of the fence at all. I think there’s this idea that, “Because we have data and science and maybe morality and ethics and all these things that our story is better and therefore will win out,” or, “These things are obviously in the best interest of the public and therefore we just have to find the right couple of people to promote these things,” and it’s not how it has worked in most situations. And there again, I feel like because I’m speaking as sort of the media representative on this panel, there are so many stories in that vein of why isn’t this stuff? Why isn’t the better story working? Why isn’t the data breaking through? And yes, of course Joe Manchin is a problem, but there’s a significant number of people within the Democratic Party that I think are also pretty opposed to systemic change and are happy to let Joe Manchin be the face of that for them, so yeah.

Dr. Dana Fisher: Well, I have many thoughts. I’ll try to keep it as short as I can. But I’m going to start with something Amy said that made me think of something I wanted to point out, which is I think it’s really important for us to remember that the Biden administration had to lean on a reconciliation package because it was unable to pass proper legislation. And if it had even tried, and I’m somebody who has published so many articles on failed legislation over the years since the 1990s on climate because it always fails, and it always fails because fossil fuel interests have privileged access to power in all sorts of ways, and their money is everywhere across the political spectrum, right. And as a result of that, it is not possible in this country, if we continue to follow the same system that we’ve been following, to actually pass true legislation. Not legislation that passes out funding to shovel ready projects like clean energy projects, but rather real legislation, even though it’s tried.

And anybody who’s interested, I’m happy to share a lot of papers about all the different ones that failed in the past that we did analysis on in all sorts of ways. Anyway, so I just think it’s worth noting here that yeah, Joe Manchin screwed with Build Back better, but Build Back Better was not a perfect bill. And in fact, it was like the lowest hanging fruit and unfortunately it was too high. So I’m going to get rid of that metaphor. So I just wanted to point out that. The other thing I wanted to point out is that, what Amy is laying out here I think is worth noting that this has been a critique of the Democratic Party and politics on the left in the United States for over 20 years now. I wrote a book called Activism, Inc. that was published in 2006. The subtitle of it was How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns Is Strangling Progressive Politics in America.

And it was all about how young people were being used as replaceable cogs in a political system that didn’t really care about building any local infrastructure. And unfortunately, we’re still here. I mean, in fact, the beginning of American resistance starts with saying how so little has changed. And in Activism, Inc., the reason why I bring it up is that I actually did a comparison of the political campaigns and the ties between the campaigns that Democratic Party and the Republican Party and how they connected with think tanks on the left and the right in 2004. If you can think back to that long ago, and guess what? Even back then, folks on the left, young people on the left were like, “Why aren’t we being cultivated and brought into a system that trains us and builds networks of power at the local level?” And that is exactly what needs to happen, and it still hasn’t happened, and instead the left and the Democratic Party have relied on these shortcuts that make it easier to create, you know, maybe it’s astroturf, maybe it’s not even astroturf.

I mean, I think that the distributed organizing that really took over and this idea of parachuting in non-locals to do the work of friends and neighbors, which has been like bread and butter, democratic politics for so many cycles now, it doesn’t work when it’s being met with folks who spend enough time to build Project 2025. And there are tentacles that go into communities across the United States. And I apologize for, I saw that there were comments about how this is US, you know, to think about this internationally. And I would just say that well, the critique of the lack of infrastructure that we have politically, which is something that JP and a lot of his colleagues are starting to think about how to build and is absolutely necessary to get us through the climate crisis as well as this poly crisis that is the struggle to retain democracy in America.

We’re seeing some of these same themes in other parts of the world, particularly across Europe and to some degree in Australia and some parts of Asia. So I think that in some cases, the United States has always considered itself exceptional, but in some ways we can be the test case for what not to do and how to think about what to do better and how to get beyond these kinds of problems that we’ve been seeing. And that has been, you know, it’s been the shortcut and the shortcut used to work because all the folks in the left were like, “Oh, we got the numbers game,” but the numbers game’s not working anymore, and politics shouldn’t be a game anyway. It’s about trying to get us where we need to go and figure out how to build real relational ties that can support people when climate shocks hit, when autocracy hits, and when fascism comes into your community so that you can push back. So that’s what I think is needed.

Amy Westervelt: Can I just add on to that something really quickly? That is, I’ve been saying this for a while, and I think it just becomes more true every year that I think the right, and this is true globally, is more intersectional than the left. And by that I mean, the anti-trans people, the anti-women’s rights people, the anti-racial equity people, the anti-climate people, they’re all in the same groups together all the time. It’s the same pot of funding, it’s very integrated campaigns. They’re very global. They’re working across borders. We did a story a couple of years ago now about how messaging around climate activists was moving from country to country through these think tanks. So you see it showing up in South Africa, you see it showing up in Brazil, you see it showing up in Canada and Australia at the same time, very similar rhetoric and everything because they’re that coordinated. So you’re not going to fight that with climate-only groups. I mean, you’re definitely not going to win the numbers game that way. And I don’t think that you’re going to succeed broadly in any other realm.

Theresa Riley: John Paul, with the Sunrise Movement and other organizations that you’re connected to, is there any kind of movement to do that kind of collaboration?

John Paul Mejia: Absolutely. I mean, I think what we’re seeing right now, I think part of what we have to understand right now too is that the agitation to work outside of our individual issue silos is not only being prompted by the fact that we have to build massive coalitions and have mass participation, but I think we should reach an agitation that’s prompted by the forms of repression that are coming down upon movements right now. So whether it’s college students being abducted and kidnapped by DHS for protesting and for their exercise of free speech to the threats of removing tax-exempt statuses from nonprofits, from 501(c)(3)s. I think part of what we’re seeing right now is a huge threat to some of the forms of activism that have been really popular over the past 10 years and that a lot of the climate movement has relied upon, right.

Specifically, I think one of the problems that we’re facing right now is an emergent partisan sorting of people who pay attention to politics and people who don’t. And I think that’s both something that activists and people who practice politics and the media should be well aware of, right, because this also has to do a lot with media infrastructure and the dependencies on media infrastructure are completely different in the authoritarian regime party versus the opposition. And so I think part of what has to be done right now from an activist standpoint is really lean in to, one, building forms of trust and solidarity within communities, across issue areas that are predicated on safety, dignity and wellbeing, and trying to make the biggest us out of everyday people and the smallest them, to this regime of freaks and weirdos that are trying to rule over every part of anyone’s life right now.

And then the slower and more methodical work that has to be done too across different movement areas is, I mean, truly, just like Amy was saying, I think a sober assessment of we are past the time for any organizational or issue based protagonism right now, we are all so you know the word. And if we don’t come together right now to flex the technical and organizational skills that we’ve picked up and had over the past 10 years and utilize that into a big popular front project to fight back against this administration, we’re kidding ourselves over what the mission is. And so yeah, at the small scale, organizing resilient social structures locally to keep people safe and in the long term planning for a coordinated counteroffensive against this emergent regime is going to be really, really important. And building broad coalitions based on mutual understanding and solidarity are a core part of how that’s done.

Theresa Riley: Thank you, John Paul. Jumping off of some of the things you said, I’m looking at our Q&A, so if you have any questions that you want to put in the Q&A, please do it now. We’re getting to them now. Antonia Juhasz, I think that’s how I say your name. I’m sorry if I mispronounced it.

Amy Westervelt: Antonia Juhasz.

Theresa Riley: Thank you.

Amy Westervelt: Antonia Juhasz, yeah.

Theresa Riley: Antonia Juhasz has a great question. She basically says, “With Trump’s actions, including the pending executive orders targeting climate, environmental justice, climate justice, anti-fossil fuel organizers and other organizations, sources are increasingly fearful of speaking publicly about their work on these crucial topics, especially environmental justice and DEI.” So I’d like to hear from the panel what this means for covering these groups if they’re afraid to speak out. Amy.

Amy Westervelt: I mean, actually I think this is where there’s a lot of relevance with other countries. Like, a lot of people in other countries have been dealing with that for a long time, and those of us who have reported in those countries have dealt with that in those places too. I’m working with a couple of reporters in Brazil right now where they don’t have necessarily the lobbying disclosures or the public information laws that we have had in the past. And it’s a good reminder that, “Okay, yeah, we can still report on things if FOIA goes away.” We can still talk to people. There are ways to protect our sources. I have lots of conversations with sources off the record, sometimes on background. I always connect them with a whistleblower attorney or other type of attorney to help protect their rights before they talk to me because even though that slows things down and sometimes means that I miss the story, I don’t want to be responsible for ruining someone’s life because they talk to me.

So these are all things that journalists in a lot of places have been doing for a long time. And I think honestly, it’s going back to a lot more analog type of things, talking to people directly, not using email, using encrypted comms, meeting people in person, and it means the stories are going to take longer and be more fraught. But I don’t know, I catch myself occasionally, I think everyone does, being a little bit like, “Oh God, we’re probably going to get sued.” But I’m like, “Yeah…” Can I curse in this webinar? “Fuck that.” This is the job. Our job is not to roll over and play dead because there’s a scary government in place.

Our job is to figure out ways around it to get the story out, to protect the people that are talking to us and to find ways to make sure the public knows what’s going on. So yeah, it’s just like everything becomes harder and more risky, and unfortunately, that burden is being placed on a media that is also being decimated. People are losing their jobs, people are having to put out a ridiculous number of stories every month. So it’s a tough time and it’s a tough job, but it’s the job.

Dr. Dana Fisher: Can I add something here?

Theresa Riley: Sure.

Dr. Dana Fisher: Okay. No, I was just going to say with regard to the question though, I think it’s worth noting that there’s a ton of research that talks about climate activism and other activism in a repressive context, right. Under repressive governments, repressive regimes, which the United States regime is joining, as Amy points out, many, many other countries that have been quite repressive to civil society, not just climate activists, but climate activists have in some cases, been a target in many countries, particularly if we look at the UK case and in some parts of Europe. But the research actually tells us that that doesn’t stop activism. It just shifts the kinds of tactics, and it opens up channels for more outsider engagement outside institutional political settings, and also opens up the likelihood of violence, right. And it becomes much more tenuous to maintain nonviolent activism, partially because in those contexts we see a lot more repression that does tend to be aggressive and violent towards the activists themselves.

I can say that from my work studying climate activists in the United States and in other parts of the world, what we find is that climate activists are very committed to nonviolence, but those who are repressing them are not, as well as counter movements. But I also can say that, I’ve been out in the streets serving at these large scale protests that have happened since right before the Trump administration took office again and we’ve been seeing, and I’ve written about this really alarming increases in support for political violence on the left amongst people who are participating in peaceful activism.

These are peaceful, permanent marches, demonstrations, and rallies. And as of the last time we surveyed, which was that the hands-off day of action, which was the April 5th rally, 35% of the people in the streets said that they felt like political violence may be necessary to protect our democracy which is suggesting that we’re seeing shifts that which are likely to continue if we see more repression. Repression is not going to stop activism. It’s just going to change the way it forms. And so I think journalists need to be prepared for that.

Theresa Riley: Dr. Fisher, I’ve read… Does that kind of mean the left is catching up with the right, because weren’t they often thinking that violence would be necessary in big numbers?

Dr. Dana Fisher: Yeah, actually that’s a good way of thinking about it. So historically, folks on the right… Or I mean, historically, meaning before the past year or even six months ago, people on the right were much more likely to support and believe political violence may be necessary. In fact, the most recent American values survey had those who identify as left-leaning at only 8% of them said political violence may be necessary. I mean, we did a nationally representative survey the week before the election, and people who were left-leaning were still much less likely to support political violence rather than those on the right. At this point, those who are actually participating in peaceful protests, though, are actually now up to 33%, which is higher than was documented on the right, although nobody ever went out to right-leaning rallies and asked that question. I imagine that would’ve been high and certainly at January 6th.

I’m guessing we would’ve had a really high percentage of people who said, “Political violence may be necessary.” So yeah, maybe it is catching up, but it’s alarming, and I think it is one way of thinking about where the mindset is of the people in the streets. And I just would say that as of April 5th, and we collected our data, and actually JP was kind enough to help collect data with the team on April 5th, and we actually surveyed there and 16% of the people in the streets were employed by the federal government at the time when they filled out the survey and 6% of the people who filled out the survey actually said that they had lost their job or were no longer working with the federal government since January. So they had left recently. So that’s a very high percentage. I mean, we’re in D.C., right.

But this is not some sort of weird radical flank we’re talking about. This is mainstream. 92% of them voted for Harris. These are straight up Democrats. They’re predominantly white, super highly educated, and very middle-aged, was one of the oldest crowds I’ve ever surveyed. So we’re not talking about people who you might expect would be saying that political violence may be necessary. Oh, and 66% of them said climate change was one of the reasons they were out in the streets. So we are starting to see solidarity across issues, but we are seeing people of color, people coming from communities that are finding themselves targeted are much less likely to join these protests and are much less likely to take surveys when they’re sampled to be surveyed.

Theresa Riley: Thanks, Dana. That was really interesting. I’m just looking through the questions that have been coming in. Oh, this is interesting, from Larry Moffitt, he doesn’t say what his outlet is, but, “The NPR program on the media has studied right-wing podcasters and influencers and found that they reached five times more audience than their progressive counterparts. How to compete and restore a level playing field?” Any ideas on that one?

Amy Westervelt: So I think that that episode on the media was actually talking about research from Media Matters. I don’t know if people saw this. There was this infographic that made the rounds on social media that showed the different bubbles of media influence and how huge the Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson bubbles were compared to progressive media. There’s a huge imbalance in funding of media on these issues, and I mean, it’s a pretty simple answer. It’s money. It’s funding. My personal experience is that not very many climate funders or sort of left-leaning democracy funders in general understand how media works, understand that it’s not a short-term two-year campaign kind of thing. They are frequently funding things and then taking it away and then funding things and then taking it away, which is actually more damaging in the long term than not funding it at all. We had this experience directly where we got a grant to fund some reporting in Guyana, and we had this great reporter, and Guyana is a place where the oil company and the petroleum office of the government is actively trying to hire journalists away. And they had successfully done that.

This journalist was, I think one of two remaining that was reporting normally on the oil project there. And we had what the funder deemed to be a lot of impact, and therefore it was like, “Okay, well we don’t need to fund this anymore,” ’cause they’re very campaign-oriented. So it’s like, “Okay, job done. We can move on now.” Within six months, that person went to work for an energy conference funded by Exxon and the government, so profoundly unhelpful when philanthropy does that and they do it all the time on the left and on the right, it’s very well understood to make these very long-term investments.

But I put this in the chat, but Project 2025 has existed since the Reagan administration. It’s not a new thing that these guys are working together on this stuff. I still have reply guys in the sort of climate skeptic world who have been funded by the same organizations for 20 years just to be out there being like, “Climate change isn’t real.” They’re really consistent and they fund long-term, and that is not happening in progressive media at all. So yeah, that’s the fix. Nobody seems to be interested, but that’s it. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

Dr. Dana Fisher: I want to just add to that and say what Amy’s talking about is the exact same thing though with across the left and across left-leaning think tanks too, right. I mean, we don’t see them cultivating youth. I mean, the right basically brings in young people out of college Republicans and other conservative youth-led groups. They embrace them, they train them, they provide homes for them, they give them healthcare, and instead, we end up with a lot of left-leaning young people who have potential ending up working as contractors and figuring out, trying to cobble together and get funding, and then they get funding and then they’re successful and then they’re sent out to go find something else or go to grad school or become a lawyer or something else. Maybe they become a teacher. But I mean, the point is that is not a way to create lasting change of any sorts. It’s the same thing, same problem.

Amy Westervelt: I’m going to mention the Atlas again ’cause I went to their archive recently and they had this box of stuff on their potential intellectual entrepreneurs program, which is, like, they have this very extensive program where they keep an eye out for people who are talking about ideas that align with them and start investing in them very early, and they have a whole pipeline to draw them along, and they build these lifelong relationships with them. So you’re not going to compete with that by funding here, there, changing your priorities every two years depending on whatever new research report you got. Yeah.

John Paul Mejia: I would also add that there’s actually some interesting writing of this from a movement mentor, Waleed Shahid on Substack that’s quite interesting. But yeah, I think there’s a huge asymmetry between our opposition’s vertically integrated political apparatus that streams funding and capacity that is just absolutely unmatched in resource level and coordination on anything else. And I think I mentioned this earlier, but I do think that part of it also has a lot to do with audience strategy and how they’re competing for attention, not by propagating or starting these individual kind of issues or already partisan media channels to try and get normies into. Part of what has been really effective is in this struggle, in this sort of cleavage between people who pay attention to politics and people who don’t, a strategy of power for ideological power on the right has been appropriating cultural spaces that seem neutral and injecting a lot of right-wing ideology and forms of mobilization into them.

And this is really powerful, at least amongst young men, young men of color, but not just young men. I think young people in general are just really drifting right now, because the only thing that can speak to our cynicism and dissatisfaction with the status quo is an insurgent populist anti-status quo right. And meanwhile, the response from the Democratic Party is to uphold these youth influencers like, sorry, Olivia Julianna, and all of these other people to act as party stalwarts that will discipline other young people or other views online, and it’s just kind of nuts, incredibly hostile to movements. And so I just think that for those who have the resources or for those who operate in these kind of war rooms for messaging, I think that it’s really upon us to try and streamline some of the resource models that we have right now, do some strategic alignment stuff, as much of us need to get together as we can and also try and go on the offensive through persuasion of audiences rather than just activation of our already existing ones.

Dr. Dana Fisher: I just want to add in here for one second to echo and kind of expand what JP was just saying, because I think that’s really important and it’s something that the media needs to think about more seriously, because I did a bunch of work around the youth climate movement 2019, 2020 with the Hewlett Foundation where I spent a bunch of time interviewing these youth climate activists who were engaging in the United States and were connecting. And I also worked with Fridays for Future around the world. And one of the things that was really interesting was watching the way that the media kind of fetishized and reified these influencers. So they identified who were the influencers, and they not only held up to be kind of symbolic of a whole generation rather than looking for the movement and the engagement and the connections that were there in the movement, but in addition to that, then they ended up then being, I think exploited would be the best way to say it, by both the climate movement as well as by folks in power on the left.

And we saw it if you looked at the ways that influencers were brought in during the IRA. I mean, I think that it’s unfortunate because it’s the exact opposite of what we need to do. And many of those folks basically have their own individual organizations or consulting firms, their own PR people, and they’re not building movements, they’re not building infrastructure, they’re not building for social change. They’re building a brand. And that’s a really different process, but that is not going to get… I mean, if we’re talking about activism engagement and success, that’s not going to get us anywhere where we need to go.

Theresa Riley: Thanks.

John Paul Mejia: I’m so sorry, but to wrap that up into a little thing, if this is just geared towards journalists, do not listen to these people for the most part, follow the activists and go to the trainings. These people think really hard, they have barely any money, and they usually have strategies for why they’re doing what they’re doing, and that’s sometimes under covered rather than a lot of these influencers who have no idea what they’re talking about. That’s my pitch.

Theresa Riley: Okay. I guess I just want to get back to sort of thinking about journalists and how to cover activism better. So John Paul, that was great advice. Go to trainings. I think also on the local level, really starting to make a network of people doing things and checking in with them regularly about what’s going on. But is there other advice you could give for journalists, local, state level?

John Paul Mejia: Maybe I was caught up in the heat of a moment. I’ve calmed down a little bit now, some influencers are cool and I know some of them and they’re nice people and they’re smart, but some of them really piss me off. But anyway, I do think that going to the trainings that people host are a really good way of making sense of how activists may be approaching their work. That would be my top line recommendation. I also think that part of the emergent responsibility over the next few years also has to do a lot with how do we innovate and shield activists or work with activists to shield them from certain forms of repression that may come down on us.

I also think that, and I’ve experienced this at least as a spokesperson for Sunrise Movement, which is why I would invite journalists to attend the trainings too, but sometimes when you are working within a field that has a pretty strong reliance on unofficial norms, there’s a lot of your worldview that can be taken for granted, and the way that some other folks may regard their agency in the world may be very, very different to how you view your agency in the world. And I think that that sense of curiosity over, how is this person trying to disrupt the the way things usually take place, and a curiosity about stretching the realm of possibility is always something that activists are trying to do, which sometimes is a little bit hard to understand, but is really worthwhile, because although sometimes it might seem kind of like pie in the sky, more often than not, people are taking really huge sacrifices in order to say the ideas that they dream of and to do the things that are pretty risky that they’re willing to do, and it’s often well-thought-out.

So I just think that treating activists not as just like agitators or kind of wild, and these people who have chosen to do something kind of wild that’s very different than the regular people that we talk to, is a mentality that’s really important to have. And treating those folks as strategic actors as any other political actor is something that I would recommend.

Dr. Dana Fisher: I was just going to add from my side of this, as somebody who’s been studying activism engagement and protests for too many decades now, but I just would say that, and this goes to the conversation that we started this whole thing with about media coverage around resistance 2.0, we can call it, right. One of the things that I think is a challenge is if the media is only looking at these, basically looking at top lines. These moments of resistance, rather than looking for the infrastructure. Back during resistance 1.0, there was this concerted media accounting of resistance groups, what they were doing on the ground, the ways that they were building power at the local levels, and a lot of it focused on indivisible, maybe the swing left or the run for somethings. I mean, there were a number of groups that got profiled and were tracked and followed and written about.

We don’t see that this time around. Instead, we see, “Oh, 50501 is doing a day of action. Let’s go take a picture and write that. There were a couple of thousand people there,” and that’s really different in terms of, first of all, those of us who studied protests know that protests are really the beginning of activism. That’s just where you mobilize people to then organize them and get them to work and to build capacity. So we need to be digging in deeper and not just looking at these moments that are designed to help create salience for the issue, but are also designed to help channel people into real activism and engagement. And so following them back to communities, back to organizations rather than just looking at these pop-ups, I think is a really good way of thinking about it. And I mean, I’m not trying to criticize the protests because they’re very important. I’m out there collecting data. We got a whole bunch coming up next week. We’re going to be out collecting data at those two, but that’s just like the tip of the iceberg, the melting iceberg. But the tip.

Theresa Riley: Amy, last words? We have two minutes.

Amy Westervelt: I don’t know. I feel like I’ve already… I’ve talked enough. But yeah, just again and again, I feel like encouraging people to build relationships that are long-term with sources, that’s how you cover activism. I just want to give a shout-out to our reporter, Alleen Brown, who has been covering activism forever and has been talking to the same people about Standing Rock since 2016, which now positions her to be such a great resource on the Greenpeace SLAP that just happened, for example. So these things, not to be transactional about it, but it is worth your time to invest in building those relationships because that is how you build lots of leads over time, and you build that trust and you learn how to protect those sources as well. So yeah, hot tip, be nice to people, build relationships.

Theresa Riley: Advice for all of us in every walk of life.

Amy Westervelt: Yeah.

Theresa Riley: So I just want to thank you all so much for joining us. I really enjoyed the conversation today. It was really interesting, and I hope people… I’m sorry I couldn’t get to all the questions, but it a was very engaged audience, so I thank you for that as well. Let’s see. At the end of this webinar, you’ll be asked to respond to a survey. So if everybody who’s here participating can answer that, it’s real quick. It’s valuable feedback that helps us plan our programming. So please take a moment to fill it out. This webinar will be posted to our YouTube channel, so if you want to share it with folks, go to our website… Actually, I think we’ll send you a follow-up email that will have the link to that. But again, I just want to thank you all and wish everyone a happy Earth Day.