Feeling powerless doesn’t mean you are powerless

This article Feeling powerless doesn’t mean you are powerless was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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The Trump administration and Project 2025 seek to rapidly shock the system and invoke a state of paralysis that could allow them to take permanent control of the country. Authoritarianism is a system of controlling a population — not by persuasion but by a little bit of raw power and a lot of fear.

Fear with a dose of raw power can make people fold. It can cause capitulation as companies, universities, organizations and individuals try to make deals with a bully.

We’ve been seeing this dynamic since Trump took office. The most recent follows on the heels of the killing of Charlie Kirk. Many of us have spent our lifetimes teaching against the use of violence to oppress, repress or silence. All violence is wrong — and so of course is Charlie Kirk’s murder. 

But the Trump regime is short-cutting past grief and into revenge — using this murder to silence dissent and expand its fear campaign. The Guardian reports that “teachers, firefighters, journalists, nurses, politicians, a Secret Service employee, a junior strategist at Nasdaq and a worker for a prominent NFL team,” have been fired or censured. The Washington Post just fired Karen Attiah, its last full-time Black opinion writer.

Perhaps the news that has received the most attention this week is comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show being pulled off the air “indefinitely.” The pretext is flimsy, at best. But it’s consistent with Project 2025’s overarching goals, which the Trump-appointed FCC commissioner, Brendan Carr, helped write. This FCC commissioner put direct pressure on Disney/ABC to censor Jimmy Kimmel for his views. As the American Federation of Musicians said plainly, “This is state censorship.”

Right now, a disorganized majority has been losing to a tightly controlled, organized minority. Just look at Washington, D.C., where Republicans and far too many Democrats voted to further shrink D.C.’s right to self-rule, passing a bill where 14-year-olds in D.C. can be tried as adults. There are a slew of additional bills targeting D.C. that have been proposed, and the grassroots group Free DC is urging people to call their congresspeople (especially since Democrats haven’t been unified in opposition). 

Some days the feelings of powerlessness in the face of so much wrong is overwhelming. I can feel small. I am small. I can get sucked down in a vortex of overwhelm and wonderment that we cannot stop all these bad things.

But feeling powerless doesn’t mean you are powerless.

The people push back

The day after Kimmel was pulled off the air, national organizers quickly put together a call for boycotting Disney. But even before the national call, people were already self-organizing on Reddit and elsewhere, with some activists telling me the Disney/ABC website had crashed.

Unions are also rallying against the censorship, with the number of statements growing by the hour. Free Press made an easy call system to fight for free speech. Indivisible made sharable social media posts.

People trying to cancel on the phone are reporting that the system to cancel accounts is now breaking down, advising, “If you think you canceled, double check. The process involves multiple confirmation emails. If you only received one, you might be stuck halfway.”

The chorus of boycott has even grown to include Disney stars, such as Tatiana Maslany of Marvel’s “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law,” who has urged her followers to cancel their Disney+, Hulu and ESPN subscriptions. 

In a cultural act of protest, many have turned to another Disney show, “Andor,” for inspiration, sharing a quote from the character Karis Nemik’s manifesto: “The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.”

This moment is catching fire with protests outside ABC headquarters in multiple cities. A widely shared list of Disney boycott targets suggests people stop watching or streaming major ABC shows, share about their canceling subscriptions on social media with the hashtag #BoycottDisneyABC and tell key advertisers to drop Sinclair Broadcasting Group, the company that owns 31 ABC affiliate stations.

Stepping into courage

These are all signs of people getting better organized. Despite our capital being under a National Guard occupation where residents are woken to neighbors being pulled from their homes and jobs by masked men, individuals are countering in a host of ways — from trolling police with Star Wars music to a D.C. police officer openly condemning this takeover to running emergency hotlines to sharing Know-Your-Rights materials, and so much more. The local nonprofit news source The 51st published a great article on these efforts — unsurprisingly outside of legacy media, which is better at printing stories of fear than of courage.

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Chicago is another example. Despite a crusade of fear and threats, Chicagoans have so far scared off the Trump administration from deploying the National Guard. Yes, ICE vans are still prowling neighborhoods, homelessness remains criminalized and political infighting runs deep. But the National Guard have not yet been sent in, even though Trump made the pronouncement — “we’re going in” — over two weeks ago. 

The people said no, with polls showing 68 percent opposed (but no authoritarian cares about a poll) and with protests in the street and pressure to align their politicians in formation. Then the governor said no, adding, “There is no emergency that warrants the President of the United States federalizing the Illinois National Guard, deploying the National Guard from other states, or sending active duty military within our own borders.” The mayor also said no, penning a New York Times op-ed saying, “the National Guard is the wrong solution to a real problem.”

It’s a remarkable story of Chicagoans coalescing across historic divides and a fractured political scene, uniting the governor, mayor and other political leaders, as well as community and labor groups. Initially many thought it couldn’t be done. But the story of Chicago needs to serve as encouragement (to give courage) that we can face down threats together, and that our pushback can work.

Instead, Trump went looking for a weaker target, declaring Memphis to be next. Local organizers are already reporting that groups that have historically struggled to come together are meeting and planning there, too.

From these stories let us take a bit of courage. Courage isn’t the absence of fear — in fact courage can only be shown when you have fear. I’ve got some fear. We all do. And let’s encourage each other to step into courage, too.

To further quote from Nemik’s manifesto: “There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. … And know this, the day will come when … moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.”

This article is adapted from a Choose Democracy newsletter email.

This article Feeling powerless doesn’t mean you are powerless was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/09/you-are-not-powerless-kimmel/