It's not Black people's job to save America this time

If anyone saved us from Donald Trump last time, it was Black people.

I don't say this just because Black voters backed Joe Biden 9-to-1 over Trump. Or because "without the large majority of Black voters Biden won, he couldn’t have been competitive nationally or in key Electoral College states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, or Michigan." That's true of every time Democrats have won a presidential election in the modern era. There is no winning Democratic coalition without Black Americans voting overwhelmingly against the authoritarianism they know far too well from the Republican Party.

I'm talking specifically about Black Lives Matter and the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd. A new study finds that counties with BLM protests saw a 1.2-1.8 percentage point boost in Democratic vote share compared to similar counties without any recorded protests.

"Given how close the election was in key battleground states, our findings suggest that the BLM movement may have played a decisive role in determining the election outcome," said Dr. Bouke Klein Teeselink, a lecturer at King's College London who co-authored this research. "This represents one of the most consequential impacts of a social movement on electoral politics in recent history."

And if anyone can be blamed for letting Trump, Elon Musk, and their miserable band of insurrectionists back into power, it's white people.

America's White People Problem

I, sadly, must include myself among those white people.

I do this even though many of the worst humans alive would not because I'm Jewish. I'm also odd and married to one dual American/Canadian citizen and a father of another. But I carry most of the privileges of being a white male.

These kernels of my identity and obligations have all motivated me to make opposing Trump my full-time obsession for over a year now, and I wish I were better at it. My current fixation is doing anything I can to help spark the mass mobilization necessary to stop Trump and Musk's march into authoritarianism.

Research suggests we need to activate at least 3.5% of the population to have any hope of protecting the people Trump and Musk are targeting, maintaining the checks of our constitutional order, and holding free and fair elections in 2026 and again in 2028. That's all I want, and it's what any patriotic American who believes in self-rule must demand.

But here's the problem: White people.

The worst white Americans love what's going on, seeing the unbridled attack on the things that made America the wealthiest country to ever exist as revenge for 60 years of the government not endorsing total segregation.

However, even many of the "good" ones are scared. Thus, many have decided to bow to the worst people in this country, intentionally destroying our public services, environmental protection, and the most incredible system of medical research ever created.

Then there's the biggest group of white people silently abetting what's going down: They're generally ignorant or indifferent to the destruction of the public good and the financial crash that will inevitably follow this intentional blowing up of the mountaintop of our government.

How do you solve a problem like scared white people?

Here's something we know about people, including (or especially) white people: Fear makes them more conservative and more likely to endorse horrors in their name.

What can do the opposite? How do you create more liberal, progressive, or left-leaning people? The opposite: Felt safety.

"Imagining being completely safe from physical harm had done what no experiment had done before — it had turned conservatives into liberals, " explained John Bargh, a professor of social psychology at Yale University.

It's a remarkable insight. It helps me explain why fear feels so much more present in 2025 than in 2017. Powerful white men seem to be competing to buckle to Trump first, and they're all winning.

Of course, you can argue there's far more reason to be scared now than eight years ago—especially if you want to be. Trump won the 14-17th convincing presidential election since World War II instead of the least convincing election in American history. He did so after committing the worst acts of treachery ever committed by a president. He and his allies have studied overcoming the democratic guardrails that kept him from becoming a full-fledged dictator.

And—here's the most worrying thing—the media has completely evolved in Trump's favor.

The right-wing media is the only consensus media left. Any big media outlet backed by a corporate conglomerate has become either a tacit or explicit Trump collaborator. Social media is dominated by one Trump supporter who has eschewed any responsibility to the public and another who is engaged in a revenge murder fantasy against democracy.

Because the media is so rigged and Senate Democrats, especially, have decided not to act as if there is any emergency going on, people are missing something remarkable: An unprecedented rejection of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their undoing of our social contract.

Research shows America's resistance movement is "alive and well." Not only are protests more common now than in 2017, but they're also becoming more effective, says the Crowd Counting Consortium at Harvard.

The neural pathways of resistance this country has formed since 2017 have immediately been activated and are pulsing throughout the country. And while droves of new people aren't yet being drawn into those protests, the opposition actions are getting smarter.

"Historically, street protest and legal challenges are common avenues for popular opposition to governments, but economic noncooperation — such as strikes, boycotts and buycotts — is what often gets the goods," the CCC researchers note. "Individual participation is deliberately obscure, and targeted companies may have little interest in releasing internal data. Only the aggregate impacts are measurable — and in the case of Tesla, Target and other companies, the impacts so far have been measurable indeed."

If you've read this far, you know about the #TeslaTakedown because I'm one of the people who can't shut up about it. However, I haven't written about another example of noncooperation that's also been astoundingly effective: the boycott of Target led by prominent members of the Black clergy. The boycott aims to get the shopping giant to reverse its abandonment of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

And it's working.

Target "warned that February topline performance was 'soft,' after civil rights leaders called for a Target boycott in Black History Month for changing its position on DEI, followed by a sharp drop in traffic to Target stores and website during the Feb. 28 Economic Blackout." The boycott will continue at least until the end of Lent.

Yes, Black Americans are, again, doing the most effective work.

Which leads me to a big mistake I made.

We need more people

As part of my dream of mobilizing mass opposition to Trump, I wrote an article for George Lakoff and Gil Durán's FrameLab newsletter, arguing that mass mobilization was the best way to overcome America's fear.

While there are more protests now than in 2017, the lack of an unavoidably large protest, like the Women's March that greeted Trump's first presidency, has allowed our cowed media to act as if the resistance to this regime is marginal. This helps feed the fear that's captured too many.

The visibility, creativity, and reach of the #TeslaTakedown have shifted that dynamic. However, I argued that we need as many people as possible to participate in events like the March 29th #TeslaTakedown Day of Visibility and the April 5th "Hands Off" Mass Mobilization to create a reassuring sense of safety that will counter Trump effectively enough to get our leaders to follow us.

I included two videos of mass protests in Serbia and Hungary to increase the feeling of safety that motivates people to side with freedom. However, my analysis and plea ultimately failed because I did not include videos of this country's most recent mass mobilization, which may have been the largest movement in U.S. history.

I was almost immediately called out for this ridiculous slight. I reshared the criticism because I found it correct and vital. I promised to reflect on and write about my mistake. So here we are.

All I have for Black People is thanks

I decided to avoid Black Lives Matter for the reason that's now obvious to me: I am talking to my fellow white people because I wouldn't dare lecture or even attempt to guide Black Americans.

First, they don't need me. Second, we have failed them by 1) letting the backlash to BLM become an outright re-segregationist movement and 2) by helping and letting Trump and Musk win. They will suffer, as usual, the brunt of a government that loves to terrorize vulnerable people in general. But they will also suffer uniquely from the way Trump and Musk are targeting government employment, which has been one of the most consistent ways for Black Americans to move into the Middle Class. This, of course, is an undeniable reason why democracy's workforce is being "traumatized" and put on the chopping block.

Black Americans don't need my advice about how to survive and oppose authoritarianism because that's been their whole lives. And white Americans have spent most of our lives benefiting from that oppression or letting Black people down.

Watching the "Black Lives Matter" street mural in Washington DC be erased to give into the Trump regime's demands may be the perfect symbol of how much Black people can depend on their white allies right now.

What's different about now

In "Next Comes What," the podcast I produce, Andrea Pitzer constantly draws on America's Civil Rights movement for many of the best examples of resisting wannabe strongmen. Researching source footage for examples to illustrate Andrea's points continually affirms and deepens my reverence for the strategy, bravery, and resilience of Black people's fight against nearly half a millennium of oppression in this country.

Working on this series, which draws on Andrea's research from her global history of concentration camps, has also given me a sense of how the threat we're facing in this country rhymes with our history of authoritarianism and systemic oppression, but the ambitions also feel broader. Trump and Musk don't just want power; they want unquestioned power.

That requires undoing many of the privileges and institutions that have made America—for "white" people and Jews like me—the freest place ever to live on earth.

This also means we must expect crackdowns like we have never seen before. Trump's most recent trial balloon about sending US citizens to be tortured and to rot in El Salvador is a taste of that. And the people most likely to suffer the most extreme fates first—and those tourists, immigrants, and green card holders who are being targeted already—will likely not have white skin.

This all has to be different

The horrors Trump and Musk have already been unique in how aggressively they've targeted white America—going after scientists, academics, and students in the ways that authoritarians around the world tend to.

The challenge of our moment is to get white people to care about the damage to this country without increasing their fear. I feel—and the science suggests—that nonviolent mass mobilization, as we're seeing in Turkey, is the best way to do that.

I'm calling on all Americans who would like to live the rest of their lives without being ruled by the worst people alive to step out into the streets if they can. Everyone needs to assess their risks and their opportunities to contribute. And I won't lecture any vulnerable people about what they should do.

But I will absolutely say that white people created this mess. And it's our job to fix it.