It’s later than you think, but it’s not too late.

APRIL 22, 2025

Look around, take stock of where you are, and know this: Today, right now—and I mean right this second—you have the most power you’ll ever have in the current fight against authoritarianism in America. If this sounds dramatic to you, it should. Over the past five months, in many hours of many conversations with multiple people who have lived under dictators and autocrats, one message came through loud and clear: America, you are running out of time.

People sometimes call the descent into authoritarianism a “slide,” but that makes it sound gradual and gentle. Maria Ressa, the journalist who earned the Nobel Peace Prize for her attempts to save freedom of expression in the Philippines, told me that what she experienced during the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte is now, with startling speed and remarkable similarity, playing out in the United States under Donald Trump. Her country’s democratic struggles are highly instructive. And her message to me was this: Authoritarian leaders topple democracy faster than you can imagine. If you wait to speak out against them, you have already lost.

Shortly after Trump was reelected last fall, I called Ressa to ask her how she thought Americans should prepare for his return. She told me then that she worried about a failure of imagination. She knew that the speed of the destruction of institutions—one of the first steps an authoritarian takes to solidify and centralize power—would surprise people here, even those paying the closest attention. Ressa splits her time between Manila and New York, and she repeatedly warned me to be ready for everything to happen quickly. When we spoke again weeks after his inauguration, Ressa was shaken. President Trump was moving faster than even she had anticipated.

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I heard something similar recently from Garry Kasparov, the Russian dissident and chess grand master. To him, the situation was obvious. America is running out of time, he told me. As Kasparov wrote recently in this magazine, “If this sounds alarmist, forgive me for not caring. Exactly 20 years ago, I retired from professional chess to help Russia resist Putin’s budding dictatorship. People were slow to grasp what was happening there too.”

The chorus of people who have lived through democratic ruin will all tell you the same thing: Do not make the mistake of assuming you still have time. Put another way: You think you can wait and see, and keep democracy intact? Wanna bet? Those who have seen democracy wrecked in their home country are sometimes derided as overly pessimistic—and it’s understandable that they’d have a sense of inevitability about the dangers of autocracy. But that gloomy worldview does not make their warnings any less credible: Unless Trump’s power is checked, and soon, things will get much worse very quickly. When people lose their freedoms, it can take a generation or more to claw them back—and that’s if you’re lucky.

The Trump administration’s breakneck pace is obviously no accident. While citizens are busy processing their shock over any one shattered norm or disregarded law, Trump is already on to the next one. This is the playbook authoritarians have used all over the world: First the leader removes those with expertise and independent thinking from the government and replaces them with leaders who are arrogant, ignorant, and extremely loyal. Next he takes steps to centralize his power and claim unprecedented authority. Along the way, he conducts an all-out assault on the truth so that the truth tellers are distrusted, corruption becomes the norm, and questioning him becomes impossible. The Constitution bends and then finally breaks. This is what tyrants do. Trump is doing it now in the United States.

In the Philippines, it took about six months under Duterte for democratic institutions to crumble. In the United States, the overreach in executive power and the destruction of federal agencies that Ressa told me she figured would have kept Trump busy through, say, the end of the summer were carried out in the first 30 days of his presidency. Even so, what people don’t always realize is that a dictator doesn’t seize control all at once. “The death of democracy happens by a thousand cuts,” Ressa told me recently. “And you don’t realize how badly you’re bleeding until it’s too late.” Another thing the people who have lived under authoritarian rule will tell you: It’s not just that it can get worse. It will.

Americans who are waiting for Trump to cross some imaginary red line neglect the fact that they have more leverage to defend American democracy today than they will tomorrow, or next week, or next month. While people are still debating whether to call it authoritarianism or fascism, Trump is seizing control of one independent agency after another. (And for what it’s worth, the smartest scholars I know have told me that what Trump is trying to do in America is now textbook fascism—beyond the authoritarian impulses of his first term. Take, for example, his administration’s rigid ideological purity tests, or the extreme overreach of government into freedom of scientific and academic inquiry.)

Between the time I write this sentence and the moment when this story will be published, the federal government will lose hundreds more qualified, ethical civil servants. Soon, even higher numbers of principled people in positions of power will be fired or will resign. More positions will be left vacant or filled by people without standards or scruples. The government’s attacks against other checks on power—the press, the judiciary—will worsen. Enormous pressure will be exerted on people to stay silent. And silence is a form of consent.

The truth is, checks and balances work only when individuals are courageous enough to speak out. Many American citizens, though, have been conspicuously quiet in the early days of Trump’s second term. People like Kasparov and Ressa, who have lived through the flip to authoritarianism elsewhere, warn that this is a mistake, as do many scholars who have studied totalitarianism and dictatorships across history. At a time like this, hesitation can mean the difference between freedom and tyranny.

These are not uncertain times , not really. The trick of aspiring dictators is they tell you exactly what they’re going to do ahead of time. There’s a famous saying about propagandists—that they repeat the lie until it becomes true. But corrupt leaders use repetition effectively in other ways, too. An authoritarian repeats lies, yes, but he also repeats outrageous truths until they no longer sound outrageous, at least to some. Tell people again and again that you’re going to imprison political enemies or journalists, or otherwise take away basic freedoms, and the public becomes primed to accept the attack when it finally happens. The role of technology in the rise of authoritarianism cannot be overstated: Social platforms built for scale—and designed to reward anger, hate, and snap reactions over truth—helped Trump win the presidency, serve as networks for anti-freedom propaganda, and have assisted others like him in gaining power around the world. Technologies that could be used for democratic expression are instead used to warp public opinion and suppress dissent.

Back in 2017, Duterte’s propagandists made the hashtag #ArrestMariaRessa go viral—that was two years before he finally used a pretense to arrest her. By declaring his intent so far in advance, the president ensured that when he had his perceived enemies arrested, it would be shocking but not surprising. This is how dictators lead people to believe that something abnormal is normal, or that something illegal is permissible. This is how people come to find themselves “just following orders.” Sometimes, when you know what’s coming, that can be enough to let it happen.

Months before Duterte was elected in 2016, Ressa interviewed him for Rappler, the news organization she’d co-founded in the Philippines in 2012. Like Trump, who has sworn to root out “the enemy from within,” Duterte had taken aim at his own government. “I will stop corruption, I will stop criminality, I will fix government,” he told her at the time. He went on: “When I said I’ll stop criminality, I’ll stop criminality. And if I have to kill you, I’ll kill you. Personally.” When an authoritarian tells you he’s going to do something, believe him. Each outlandish statement is a trial balloon, one step closer to action. And when people don’t push back—or, worse, when supporters cheer him on—the boundaries for acceptable behavior permanently shift.

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This is why Trump calls journalists purveyors of “fake news” and the “enemy of the people.” It’s why he floats the idea of executing his perceived political foes, and doing away with the First Amendment. It’s why he has moved beyond simply wanting to deport people who are in this country illegally and now says “homegrowns are next” when he talks about his desire to send Americans to a gulag in El Salvador. And it’s why he is trying to take over universities and other once-independent institutions. In his first month back in office, Trump banned the Associated Press from the White House because it wouldn’t agree to use only the words he liked. He seized control of the White House press pool, which previously operated independently, run by members of the press. And his Pentagon told journalists that it would end long-standing tradition and do away with the press pool that has the chance to travel with—and ask questions of—the secretary of defense. Trump continues to muse, as he has done before, about crushing the press and anyone who leaks information to reporters. Trump ranted in a social-media post about anonymous sources, saying that “a big price should be paid for this blatant dishonesty” and threatening to sue reporters and news outlets. He went on: “I’ll do it as a service to our Country. Who knows, maybe we will create some NICE NEW LAW!!!”

Trump keeps moving the goalposts this way. Remember when he mused publicly that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it? He wants people to believe that they deserve to be punished, and that he deserves to do whatever he wants, with impunity. More recently, Trump put it this way: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

One key difference between Trump and Duterte, at least so far, is violence. Duterte started carrying out the extrajudicial murder of citizens within hours of taking the oath of office. He was, he said, making good on his promise to crack down on crime. (He’d previously done the same when he was a mayor, with the help of vigilantes and even police officers.) His administration, human-rights groups say, ultimately killed tens of thousands of civilians. “I’m not really a bad guy,” one of Duterte’s supporters told Patricia Evangelista, one of the reporters who worked in Ressa’s newsroom. To this man it was simple: “Some people need killing.” Ressa remembers it as a surreal time. She learned quickly that once a dictator takes power, dehumanizing forces are suddenly all around. This is how an authoritarian changes a culture: by getting supporters to cheer on grotesqueries of all manner, including the cessation of the freedoms he’s telling you he is about to seize. This is why so many Americans are horrified by Trump’s indifference to due process. Due process is important on principle—it’s a constitutional right. But doing away with it also signals that the state believes it can do whatever it wants to people.

Ressa has some advice for Americans: If you’re in a leadership position, she says, you must demonstrate that you understand the seriousness of the situation, and that you’re there to protect the people who are depending on you. But also, you have to know that not everyone is brave. Not everyone is ready to stand up for their freedom; those who are fearful are easily manipulated, and can put others at risk. When the stakes are this high, she advises, there’s no time for weakness. Remember that a weak link—be it an individual, a university, or a law firm—is a point of danger for those who need to hold the line. As I’ve written before, capitulation is contagious. But so, too, is courage.

In January 2018, Rappler received its first shutdown order from the government. Ressa and her co-founder, Chay Hofilena, immediately held a press conference to make sure that people understood that Duterte was trying to intimidate their newsroom and silence its reporting, and that it would not work. Years later, Duterte would again try to shut down Rappler’s website. But the goal was always to keep publishing no matter what—and Ressa succeeded. Preparation was everything. Her leadership team had a shutdown plan. She and her colleagues ran drills on how to bring their website back online within 24 hours, relying on servers in other countries, if the government of the Philippines shut them down. (Funnily enough, she had already positioned Rappler’s servers in the United States as a safeguard—she figured that America, home of the free, would protect the right to free press. Today, she advises American news organizations to move their servers elsewhere.)

Rappler also created a buddy system for the newsroom. “We knew that our journalists might be framed for crimes, and we warned them about that,” she told me. “We reminded them that if any altercation took place with the government, the first thing they should do is to pick up their phone and start live-broadcasting what was happening.” They did drills so that “going live” would be muscle memory for them, so that when the time came, they could be frightened and flooded with adrenaline, and start broadcasting anyway.

This practice paid off. At one point, one of Ressa’s journalists, Pia Ranada, arrived at the presidential palace for a press briefing only to be told that she couldn’t enter. She wasn’t given a reason. But she remembered her training: Ressa recalled to me that you can see in Ranada’s footage that her hand was shaking as she turned on her camera and asked why she was being kept out. The president’s security team indicated that the order had come from above, but wouldn’t say why. Even then, Ressa recalled, she and her colleagues did not know how bad it would get. “I always knew Duterte would come after the press—he told us he would!—but I failed to imagine the worst of it,” she said. “I never thought I would actually be arrested. I was wrong.” Corrupt governments use lawfare to punish people. Legal battles are expensive, and can destroy people’s reputations and livelihoods. Not everyone has the financial resources to go up against the government.

Ressa was arrested the day before Valentine’s Day in 2019, charged with “cyberlibel” over a story published before a cyberlibel law had even taken effect. In a little over a year, Duterte’s government filed 10 arrest warrants against her with a cumulative maximum prison sentence of 103 years. (Every time Ressa got arrested, Rappler’s audience and friends would step up and donate generously. “I liked to joke that this was not a sustainable business model,” Ressa told me.) Now, nearly a decade later, Ressa has defeated eight of those criminal charges in court—and Duterte is in prison at The Hague.

You find out very quickly who your true friends are when the government tries to break you. But it’s lonely, too. When Duterte was coming after Ressa, she worried that any friends who stood up for her were placing themselves at risk. There came a time when she felt she couldn’t even go out to lunch with a friend, in case that friend’s business or family would then be targeted by the government. For a time, she wore a flak jacket on her commute—roads were a favorite hunting ground for death squads, who would shoot people from their motorcycles; getting to and from places was the most dangerous part of her day. Others knew this too: At one point, a good samaritan offered an armored car. But Ressa eventually drew the line. As a former war-zone correspondent, she had a high risk tolerance. She also had a sense of mission: No one could stop her from telling the truth.

Dangerous times call for high levels of both calm and courage. You need to assume the worst is going to happen, and work backwards from there. People like to join the pack, and that’s not always a bad thing. Strength in numbers is real. You need to create a community around you. Not just for your own protection, but for everyone else’s. Remember that facts still matter. Every individual who speaks out, every person who calls a lie a lie, demonstrates fealty to the truth. Do not assume that your voice does not matter. It does. You also choose truth by what you read, how you choose to spend your time. If people no longer care about reality, authoritarians learn that they can do whatever they want. Put another way: If you lose reality, you lose the rule of law. You lose democracy. You are no longer free.

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All you can do is hold the line. Hold the line to the standards of your industry’s ethics. Hold the line to what the Constitution says. The minute you step back, or voluntarily give up freedom, it is gone for good. Dissidents do not always win. Garry Kasparov spoke out against Putin and ultimately fled his country for America because he faced persecution at home. In the Philippines, the people were able to beat back Duterte democratically—but democracy is still extremely fragile there, certainly more so than when Duterte first won the presidency.

Basic American freedoms are already far more vulnerable today than even one month ago, even a week ago. The United States has long been a bulwark for democracies everywhere. Not so at the moment. But it is not too late. Find your people. Fight for your values. Collaborate with those who still believe in truth, and humanity, and the inalienable rights of the people.

“When I hear people ask if they should flee to some other country, some faraway land, I want to shake them. You want an escape plan? To where?” Ressa said to me recently. “If the United States of America falls, it’s the ball game.”

It is easy to dismiss warnings about the demise of American freedoms as hyperbole, or the darkest pessimism. But there’s a paradox here. Those who have the greatest sense of urgency about the need to protect democracy in the United States, those who have seen firsthand how bad it can get and how quickly freedom can be snuffed out—they are optimists in their own way. We should listen to them not only because they may be right, but because they recognize what Americans know in their bones to be true: This nation, these freedoms, they are sacred. They are ours. And it is not too late. Not yet, anyway.

Adrienne LaFrance is the executive editor of The Atlantic. She was previously a senior editor and staff writer at The Atlantic, and the editor of TheAtlantic.com.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, in April 1775, Boston was on edge. Seven thousand residents of the town shared these streets with more than 13,000 British soldiers and their families. The two groups coexisted uneasily.

Two years before, the British government had closed the port of Boston and flooded the town with soldiers to try to put down what they saw as a rebellion amongst the townspeople. Ocean trade stopped, businesses failed, and work in the city got harder and harder to find. As soldiers stepped off ships from England onto the wharves, half of the civilian population moved away. Those who stayed resented the soldiers, some of whom quit the army and took badly needed jobs away from locals.

Boston became increasingly cut off from the surrounding towns, for it was almost an island, lying between the Charles River and Boston Harbor. And the townspeople were under occupation. Soldiers, dressed in the red coats that inspired locals to insult them by calling them “lobsterbacks,” monitored their movements and controlled traffic in and out of the town over Boston Neck, which was the only land bridge from Boston to the mainland and so narrow at high tide it could accommodate only four horses abreast.

Boston was a small town of wooden buildings crowded together under at least eight towering church steeples, for Boston was still a religious town. Most of the people who lived there knew each other at least by sight, and many had grown up together. And yet, in April 1775, tensions were high.

Boston was the heart of colonial resistance to the policies of the British government, but it was not united in that opposition. While the town had more of the people who called themselves Patriots than other colonies did—maybe 30 to 40 percent—at least 15% of the people in town were still fiercely loyal to the King and his government. Those who were neither Patriots nor Loyalists just kept their heads down, hoping the growing political crisis would go away and leave them unscathed.

It was hard for people to fathom that the country had come to such division. Only a dozen years before, at the end of the French and Indian War, Bostonians looked forward to a happy future in the British empire. British authorities had spent time and money protecting the colonies, and colonists saw themselves as valued members of the empire. They expected to prosper as they moved to the rich lands on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains and their ships plied the oceans to expand the colonies’ trade with other countries.

That euphoria faded fast.

Almost as soon as the French and Indian War was over, to prevent colonists from stirring up another expensive struggle with Indigenous Americans, King George III prohibited the colonists from crossing the Appalachian Mountains. Then, to pay for the war just past, the king’s ministers pushed through Parliament a number of revenue laws.

In 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, requiring the payment of a tax on all printed material—from newspapers and legal documents to playing cards. It would hit virtually everyone in the North American colonies. Knowing that local juries would acquit their fellow colonists who violated the revenue acts, Parliament took away the right to civil trials and declared that suspects would be tried before admiralty courts overseen by British military officers. Then Parliament required colonials to pay the expenses for the room and board of British troops who would be stationed in the colonies, a law known as the Quartering Act.

But what Parliament saw as a way to raise money to pay for an expensive war—one that had benefited the colonists, after all—colonial leaders saw as an abuse of power. The British government had regulated trade in the empire for more than a century. But now, for the first time, the British government had placed a direct tax on the colonists without their consent. Then it had taken away the right to a trial by jury, and now it was forcing colonists to pay for a military to police them.

Far more than money was at stake. The fight over the Stamp Act tapped into a struggle that had been going on in England for more than a century over a profound question of human governance: Could the king be checked by the people?

This was a question the colonists were perhaps uniquely qualified to answer. While the North American colonies were governed officially by the British crown, the distance between England and the colonies meant that colonial assemblies often had to make rules on the ground. Those assemblies controlled the power of the purse, which gave them the upper hand over royal officials, who had to await orders from England that often took months to arrive. This chaotic system enabled the colonists to carve out a new approach to politics even while they were living in the British empire.

Colonists naturally began to grasp that the exercise of power was not the province of a divinely ordained leader, but something temporary that depended on local residents’ willingness to support the men who were exercising that power.

The Stamp Act threatened to overturn that longstanding system, replacing it with tyranny.

When news of the Stamp Act arrived in Boston, a group of dock hands, sailors, and workers took to the streets, calling themselves the Sons of Liberty. They warned colonists that their rights as Englishmen were under attack. One of the Sons of Liberty was a talented silversmith named Paul Revere. He turned the story of the colonists’ loss of their liberty into engravings. Distributed as posters, Revere’s images would help spread the idea that colonists were losing their liberties.

The Sons of Liberty was generally a catch-all title for those causing trouble over the new taxes, so that protesters could remain anonymous, but prominent colonists joined them and at least partly directed their actions. Lawyer John Adams recognized that the Sons of Liberty were changing the political equation. He wrote that gatherings of the Sons of Liberty “tinge the Minds of the People, they impregnate them with the sentiments of Liberty. They render the People fond of their Leaders in the Cause, and averse and bitter against all opposers.”

John Adams’s cousin Samuel Adams, who was deeply involved with the Sons of Liberty, recognized that building a coalition in defense of liberty within the British system required conversation and cooperation. As clerk of the Massachusetts legislature, he was responsible for corresponding with other colonial legislatures. Across the colonies, the Sons of Liberty began writing to like-minded friends, informing them about local events, asking after their circumstances, organizing.

They spurred people to action. By 1766, the Stamp Act was costing more to enforce than it was producing in revenue, and Parliament agreed to end it. But it explicitly claimed “full power and authority to make laws and statutes…to bind the colonies and people of America…in all cases whatsoever.” It imposed new revenue measures.

News of new taxes reached Boston in late 1767. The Massachusetts legislature promptly circulated a letter to the other colonies opposing taxation without representation and standing firm on the colonists’ right to equality in the British empire. The Sons of Liberty and their associates called for boycotts on taxed goods and broke into the warehouses of those they suspected weren’t complying, while women demonstrated their sympathy for the rights of colonists by producing their own cloth and drinking coffee rather than relying on tea.

British officials worried that colonists in Boston were on the edge of revolt, and they sent troops to restore order. But the troops’ presence did not calm the town. Instead, fights erupted between locals and the British regulars.

Finally, in March 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd of angry men and boys harassing them. They wounded six and killed five, including Crispus Attucks, a Black man who became the first to die in the attack. Paul Revere turned the altercation into the “Boston Massacre.” His instantly famous engraving showed soldiers in red coats smiling as they shot at colonists, “Like fierce Barbarians grinning o’er their Prey; Approve the Carnage, and enjoy the Day.”

Parliament promptly removed the British troops to an island in Boston Harbor and got rid of all but one of the new taxes. They left the one on tea, keeping the issue of taxation without representation on the table. Then, in May 1773, Parliament gave the East India Tea Company a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies. By lowering the cost of tea in the colonies, it meant to convince people to buy the taxed tea, thus establishing Parliament’s right to impose a tax on the colonies.

In Boston, local leaders posted a citizen guard on Griffin’s Wharf at the harbor to make sure tea could not be unloaded. On December 16, 1773, men dressed as Indigenous Americans boarded three merchant ships. They broke open 342 chests of tea and dumped the valuable leaves overboard.

Parliament closed the port of Boston, stripped the colony of its charter, flooded soldiers back into the town, and demanded payment for the tea. Colonists promptly organized the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and took control of the colony. The provincial congress met in Concord, where it stockpiled supplies and weapons, and called for towns to create “minute men” who could fight at a moment’s notice.

British officials were determined to end what they saw as a rebellion. In April, they ordered military governor General Thomas Gage to arrest colonial leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who had left Boston to take shelter with one of Hancock’s relatives in the nearby town of Lexington. From there, they could seize the military supplies at Concord. British officials hoped that seizing both the men and the munitions would end the crisis.

But about 30 of the Sons of Liberty, including Paul Revere, had been watching the soldiers and gathering intelligence. They met in secret at the Green Dragon Tavern to share what they knew, each of them swearing on the Bible that they would not give away the group’s secrets. They had been patrolling the streets at night and saw at midnight on Saturday night, April 15, the day before Easter Sunday, that the general was shifting his troops. They knew the soldiers were going to move. But they didn’t know if the soldiers would leave Boston by way of the narrow Boston Neck or row across the harbor to Charlestown. That mattered because if the townspeople in Lexington and Concord were going to be warned that the troops were on their way, messengers from Boston would have to be able to avoid the columns of soldiers.

The Sons of Liberty had a plan. Paul Revere knew Boston well—he had been born there. As a teenager, he had been among the first young men who had signed up to ring the bells in the steeple of the Old North Church. The team of bell-ringers operated from a small room in the tower, and from there, a person could climb sets of narrow stairs and then ladders into the steeple. Anyone who lived in Boston or the surrounding area knew well that the steeple towered over every other building in Boston.

On Easter Sunday, after the secret watchers had noticed the troop movement, Revere traveled to Lexington to visit Adams and Hancock. On the way home through Charlestown, he had told friends “that if the British went out by Water, we would shew two Lanthorns in the North Church Steeple; & if by Land, one, as a Signal.” Armed with that knowledge, messengers could avoid the troops and raise the alarm along the roads to Lexington and Concord.

The plan was dangerous. The Old North Church was Anglican, Church of England, and about a third of the people who worshipped there were Loyalists. General Thomas Gage himself worshiped there. But so did Revere’s childhood friend John Pulling Jr., who had become a wealthy sea captain and was a vestryman, responsible for the church’s finances. Like Revere, Pulling was a Son of Liberty. So was the church’s relatively poor caretaker, or sexton, Robert Newman. They would help.

Dr. Joseph Warren lived just up the hill from Revere. He was a Son of Liberty and a leader in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. On the night of April 18, he dashed off a quick note to Revere urging him to set off for Lexington to warn Adams and Hancock that the troops were on the way. By the time Revere got Warren’s house, the doctor had already sent another man, William Dawes, to Lexington by way of Boston Neck. Warren told Revere the troops were leaving Boston by water. Revere left Warren’s house, found his friend John Pulling, and gave him the information that would enable him to raise the signal for those waiting in Charlestown. Then Revere rowed across the harbor to Charleston to ride to Lexington himself. The night was clear with a rising moon, and Revere muffled his oars and swung out of his way to avoid the British ship standing guard.

Back in Boston, Pulling made his way past the soldiers on the streets to find Newman. Newman lived in his family home, where the tightening economy after the British occupation had forced his mother to board British officers. Newman was waiting for Pulling, and quietly slipped out of the house to meet him.

The two men walked past the soldiers to the church. As caretaker, Newman had a key.

The two men crept through the dark church, climbed the stairs and then the ladders to the steeple holding lanterns—a tricky business, but one that a caretaker and a mariner could manage—very briefly flashed the lanterns they carried to send the signal, and then climbed back down.

Messengers in Charlestown saw the signal, but so did British soldiers. Legend has it that Newman escaped from the church by climbing out a window. He made his way back home, but since he was one of the few people in town who had keys to the church, soldiers arrested him the next day for participating in rebellious activities. He told them that he had given his keys to Pulling, who as a vestryman could give him orders. When soldiers went to find Pulling, he had skipped town, likely heading to Nantucket.

While Newman and Pulling made their way through the streets back to their homes, the race to beat the soldiers to Lexington and Concord was on. Dawes crossed the Boston Neck just before soldiers closed the city. Revere rowed to Charlestown, borrowed a horse, and headed out. Eluding waiting officers, he headed on the road through Medford and what is now Arlington.

Dawes and Revere, as well as the men from Charleston making the same ride after seeing the signal lanterns, told the houses along their different routes that the Regulars were coming. They converged in Lexington, warned Adams and Hancock, and then set out for Concord. As they rode, young doctor Samuel Prescott came up behind them. Prescott was courting a girl from Lexington and was headed back to his home in Concord. Like Dawes and Revere, he was a Son of Liberty, and joined them to alert the town, pointing out that his neighbors would pay more attention to a local man.

About halfway to Concord, British soldiers caught the men. They ordered Revere to dismount and, after questioning him, took his horse and turned him loose to walk back to Lexington. Dawes escaped, but his horse bucked him off and he, too, headed back to Lexington on foot. But Prescott jumped his horse over a stone wall and got away to Concord.

The riders from Boston had done their work. As they brought word the Regulars were coming, scores of other men spread the news through a system of “alarm and muster” the colonists had developed months before for just such an occasion. Rather than using signal fires, the colonists used sound, ringing bells and banging drums to alert the next house that there was an emergency. By the time Revere made it back to the house where Adams and Hancock were hiding, just before dawn on that chilly, dark April morning, militiamen had heard the news and were converging on Lexington Green.

So were the British soldiers.

When they marched onto the Lexington town green in the darkness just before dawn, the soldiers found several dozen minute men waiting for them. An officer ordered the men to leave, and they began to mill around, some of them leaving, others staying. And then, just as the sun was coming up, a gun went off. The soldiers opened fire. When the locals realized the soldiers were firing not just powder, but also lead musket balls, most ran. Eight locals were killed, and another dozen wounded.

The outnumbered militiamen fell back to tend their wounded, and about 300 Regulars marched on Concord to destroy the guns and powder there. But news of the arriving soldiers and the shooting on Lexington town green had spread through the colonists’ communication network, and militiamen from as far away as Worcester were either in Concord or on their way. By midmorning the Regulars were outnumbered and in battle with about 400 militiamen. They pulled back to the main body of British troops still in Lexington.

The Regulars headed back to Boston, but by then militiamen had converged on their route. The Regulars had been awake for almost two days with only a short rest, and they were tired. Militiamen fired at them not in organized lines, as soldiers were accustomed to, but in the style they had learned from Indigenous Americans, shooting from behind trees, houses, and the glacial boulders littered along the road. This way of war used the North American landscape to their advantage. They picked off British officers, dressed in distinct uniforms, first. By that evening, more than three hundred British soldiers and colonists lay dead or wounded.

By the next morning, more than 15,000 militiamen surrounded the town of Boston. The Revolutionary War had begun. Just over a year later, the fight that had started over the question of whether the king could be checked by the people would give the colonists an entirely new, radical answer to that question. On July 4, 1776, they declared the people had the right to be treated equally before the law, and they had the right to govern themselves.

Someone asked me once if the men who hung the lanterns in the tower knew what they were doing. She meant, did they know that by that act they would begin the steps to a war that would create a new nation and change the world.

The answer is no. None of us knows what the future will deliver.

Paul Revere and Robert Newman and John Pulling and William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, and all the other riders from Charlestown who set out for Lexington after they saw the signal lanterns in the steeple of Old North Church, were men from all walks of life who had families to support, businesses to manage. Some had been orphaned young, some lived with their parents. Some were wealthy, others would scrabble through life. Some, like Paul Revere, had recently buried one wife and married another. Samuel Prescott was looking to find just one.

But despite their differences and the hectic routine of their lives, they recognized the vital importance of the right to consent to the government under which they lived. They took time out of their daily lives to resist the new policies of the British government that would establish the right of a king to act without check by the people. They recognized that giving that sort of power to any man would open the way for a tyrant.

Paul Revere didn’t wake up on the morning of April 18, 1775, and decide to change the world. That morning began like many of the other tense days of the past year, and there was little reason to think the next two days would end as they did. Like his neighbors, Revere simply offered what he could to the cause: engraving skills, information, knowledge of a church steeple, longstanding friendships that helped to create a network. And on April 18, he and his friends set out to protect the men who were leading the fight to establish a representative government.

The work of Newman and Pulling to light the lanterns exactly 250 years ago tonight sounds even less heroic. They agreed to cross through town to light two lanterns in a church steeple. It sounds like such a very little thing to do, and yet by doing it, they risked imprisonment or even death. It was such a little thing…but it was everything. And what they did, as with so many of the little steps that lead to profound change, was largely forgotten until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used their story to inspire a later generation to work to stop tyranny in his own time.

What Newman and Pulling did was simply to honor their friendships and their principles and to do the next right thing, even if it risked their lives, even if no one ever knew. And that is all anyone can do as we work to preserve the concept of human self-determination. In that heroic struggle, most of us will be lost to history, but we will, nonetheless, move the story forward, even if just a little bit.

And once in a great while, someone will light a lantern—or even two—that will shine forth for democratic principles that are under siege, and set the world ablaze.

“The people had just begun to jump when we got there,” Perkins later recalled. “They had been holding until that time, standing in the windowsills, being crowded by others behind them, the fire pressing closer and closer, the smoke closer and closer. Finally the men were trying to get out this thing that the firemen carry with them, a net to catch people if they do jump, the[y] were trying to get that out and they couldn’t wait any longer. They began to jump. The…weight of the bodies was so great, at the speed at which they were traveling that they broke through the net. Every one of them was killed, everybody who jumped was killed. It was a horrifying spectacle.”

By the time the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was out, 147 young people were dead, either from their fall from the factory windows or from smoke inhalation.

Perkins had few illusions about industrial America: she had worked in a settlement house in an impoverished immigrant neighborhood in Chicago and was the head of the New York office of the National Consumers League, urging consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for workers. But even she was shocked by the scene she witnessed on March 25.

By the next day, New Yorkers were gathering to talk about what had happened on their watch. “I can’t begin to tell you how disturbed the people were everywhere,” Perkins said. “It was as though we had all done something wrong. It shouldn’t have been. We were sorry…. We didn’t want it that way. We hadn’t intended to have 147 girls and boys killed in a factory. It was a terrible thing for the people of the City of New York and the State of New York to face.”

The Democratic majority leader in the New York legislature, Al Smith—who would a few years later go on to four terms as New York governor and become the Democratic presidential nominee in 1928—went to visit the families of the dead to express his sympathy and his grief. “It was a human, decent, natural thing to do,” Perkins said, “and it was a sight he never forgot. It burned it into his mind. He also got to the morgue, I remember, at just the time when the survivors were being allowed to sort out the dead and see who was theirs and who could be recognized. He went along with a number of others to the morgue to support and help, you know, the old father or the sorrowing sister, do her terrible picking out.”

“This was the kind of shock that we all had,” Perkins remembered.

The next Sunday, concerned New Yorkers met at the Metropolitan Opera House with the conviction that “something must be done. We’ve got to turn this into some kind of victory, some kind of constructive action….” One man contributed $25,000 to fund citizens’ action to “make sure that this kind of thing can never happen again.”

The gathering appointed a committee, which asked the legislature to create a bipartisan commission to figure out how to improve fire safety in factories. For four years, Frances Perkins was their chief investigator.

She later explained that although their mission was to stop factory fires, “we went on and kept expanding the function of the commission ’till it came to be the report on sanitary conditions and to provide for their removal and to report all kinds of unsafe conditions and then to report all kinds of human conditions that were unfavorable to the employees, including long hours, including low wages, including the labor of children, including the overwork of women, including homework put out by the factories to be taken home by the women. It included almost everything you could think of that had been in agitation for years. We were authorized to investigate and report and recommend action on all these subjects.”

And they did. Al Smith was the speaker of the house when they published their report, and soon would become governor. Much of what the commission recommended became law.

Perkins later mused that perhaps the new legislation to protect workers had in some way paid the debt society owed to the young people who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. “The extent to which this legislation in New York marked a change in American political attitudes and policies toward social responsibility can scarcely be overrated,” she said. “It was, I am convinced, a turning point.”

But she was not done. In 1919, over the fervent objections of men, Governor Smith appointed Perkins to the New York State Industrial Commission to help weed out the corruption that was weakening the new laws. She continued to be one of his closest advisers on labor issues. In 1929, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt replaced Smith as New York governor, he appointed Perkins to oversee the state’s labor department as the Depression worsened. When President Herbert Hoover claimed that unemployment was ending, Perkins made national news when she repeatedly called him out with figures proving the opposite and said his “misleading statements” were “cruel and irresponsible.” She began to work with leaders from other states to figure out how to protect workers and promote employment by working together.

In 1933, after the people had rejected Hoover’s plan to let the Depression burn itself out, President-elect Roosevelt asked Perkins to serve as Secretary of Labor in his administration. She accepted only on the condition that he back her goals: unemployment insurance, health insurance, old-age insurance, a 40-hour work week, a minimum wage, and abolition of child labor. She later recalled: “I remember he looked so startled, and he said, ‘Well, do you think it can be done?’”

She promised to find out.

Once in office, Perkins was a driving force behind the administration’s massive investment in public works projects to get people back to work. She urged the government to spend $3.3 billion on schools, roads, housing, and post offices. Those projects employed more than a million people in 1934.

In 1935, FDR signed the Social Security Act, providing ordinary Americans with unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services.

In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a minimum wage and maximum hours. It banned child labor.

Frances Perkins, and all those who worked with her, transformed the horror of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire into the heart of our nation’s basic social safety net.

“There is always a large horizon…. There is much to be done,” Perkins said. “It is up to you to contribute some small part to a program of human betterment for all time.”

—

Notes:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1933-02-19/ed-1/seq-23/

https://francesperkinscenter.org/life-new/

https://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu/primary/lectures/

https://www.ssa.gov/history/perkins5.html

Matthew and Hannah Josephson, Al Smith: Hero of the Cities, A Political Portrait Drawing on the Papers of Frances Perkins (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969).

But they are not doing that.

Instead, they are permitting unelected billionaire Elon Musk, whose investment of $290 million in Trump and other Republican candidates in the 2024 election apparently has bought him freedom to run the government, to override Congress and enact whatever his own policies are by rooting around in government agencies and cancelling those programs that he, personally, dislikes.

The replacement of our constitutional system of government with the whims of an unelected private citizen is a coup. The U.S. president has no authority to cut programs created and funded by Congress, and a private citizen tapped by a president has even less standing to try anything so radical.

But Republicans are allowing Musk to run amok. This could be because they know that Trump has embraced the idea that the American government is a “Deep State,” but that the extreme cuts the MAGA Republicans say they want are actually quite unpopular with Americans in general, and even with most Republican voters. By letting Musk make the cuts the MAGA base wants, they can both provide those cuts and distance themselves from them.

But permitting a private citizen to override the will of our representatives in Congress destroys the U.S. Constitution. It also makes Congress itself superfluous. And it takes the minority rule Republicans have come to embrace to the logical end of putting government power in the hands of one man.

Musk’s team in the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has taken control of the U.S. Treasury payment systems that handle about $6 trillion in annual transactions for the U.S. government, thus gaining access to Americans’ personal information as well as information about Musk’s competitors. From there, Musk claims to have been cancelling those transactions he thinks are wasteful. He claims, for example, to have “deleted” the popular Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Direct File system that enabled people to file their taxes online for free, without the help of paid tax preparers.

Musk’s team apparently consists of six engineers, aged 19 to 24, who are taking control of the computers at government agencies. From the Treasury Department, they went on to the U.S. Agency for International Development, which receives foreign policy guidance from the State Department. Their breaching of the computers there compromises our national intelligence systems, which must now be considered insecure.

From there, they went on to the General Services Administration (GSA), which manages the federal government’s 7,500 or so buildings. Musk’s people sent an email to regional managers telling them to begin ending the leases on federal offices. According to Chris Megerian of the Associated Press, the person in charge of that initiative is Nicole Hollander, who describes herself on LinkedIn as employed at Musk’s social media company, X.

Today, according to an email sent to employees of the Small Business Administration, Musk’s people have gotten into that agency’s human resources, contracts, and payment systems. The Small Business Administration supports small businesses and entrepreneurs, and under the Biden-Harris administration, small businesses boomed thanks to small-dollar loans to women, Black, and Latino entrepreneurs.

By this afternoon, Musk’s people were digging into the data of the Department of Education with an eye to dismantling it from the inside before Trump tries to shut it down with an executive order, although only Congress itself can shutter the department. According to Laura Meckler, Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, and Hannah Natanson of the Washington Post, Musk’s DOGE staffers had accessed sensitive internal data systems, including the personal information of millions of students who are taking part in the federal student aid program. It is highly unlikely that Congress would destroy the Department of Education, so Musk and Trump hope to hollow it out from within.

On a livestream last night, Musk said of his destruction of the federal government: “If it’s not possible now, it will never be possible. This is our shot, This is the best hand of cards we’re ever going to have. If we don’t take advantage of this best hand of cards, it’s never going to happen.”

Three federal employees unions are suing the Trump administration to stop Musk, and today, Democratic members of the House and Senate tried to enter the USAID building but were denied entry. Led by Senators Chris Murphy (D-CT), Brian Schatz (D-HI) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Representatives Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Gerry Connolly (D-VA), the Democrats condemned what Raskin called Musk and Trump’s “illegal, unconstitutional interference with congressional power.”

“Elon Musk, you may have illegally seized power over the financial payment systems of the United States Department of Treasury,” Raskin said, “but you don’t control the money of the American people. The United States Congress does that—under Article I of the Constitution. And just like the president, who was elected to something, cannot impound the money of the people, we don’t have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk. And that’s going to become real clear.”

Senator Murphy said: “[L]et’s not pull any punches about why this is happening. Elon Musk makes billions of dollars based off of his business with China. And China is cheering at [the destruction of USAID]. There is no question that the billionaire class trying to take over our government right now is doing it based on self-interest: their belief that if they can make us weaker in the world, if they can elevate their business partners all around the world, they will gain the benefit.”

Murphy continued: “But there’s another reason this is happening. They’re shuttering agencies and sending employees home in order to create the illusion that they’re saving money, in order to…pass a giant tax cut for billionaires and corporations.”

While Musk and his DOGE team are trying systematically to dismantle the government, today Judge Loren L. AliKhan of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to freeze trillions of dollars in grants and loans before DOGE got going. AliKhan said that by impounding funds—which Congress declared illegal in 1974—Trump’s Office of Management and Budget “attempted to wrest the power of the purse away from the only branch of government entitled to wield it.” It is Congress, not the president, that determines federal spending.

Meanwhile, the elected president, Donald Trump, sparked a crisis last Friday when his White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, announced that he fully intended to go through with the trade war he had hyped on the campaign trail. Trump announced he would levy tariffs of 25% on most products from Mexico and Canada and of 10% on products from China, beginning at 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday, in violation of the trade agreement his own team had negotiated during his first term.

As soon as Leavitt announced the upcoming tariffs, the stock market began to fall, and by last night, stock market futures had fallen 450 points on the expectation of tariffs hitting at midnight tonight. Today, the stock market continued to fall. Even reliable Trump allies began to complain that the tariffs would raise prices. The Wall Street Journal editorial board called Trump’s tariffs “the dumbest trade war in history.”

Today, the president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, announced that she and Trump had “reached a series of agreements” that would pause the threatened tariffs for a month. Mexico agreed to “reinforce the northern border with 10,000 elements of the National Guard immediately, to prevent drug trafficking from Mexico to the United States,” while the U.S. “commits to work to prevent the trafficking of high-powered weapons to Mexico.”

When Trump announced their conversation shortly afterward, he omitted the part of the agreement that committed the U.S. to try to stop the flow of guns to Mexico. He also did not mention that, in fact, Mexico committed to putting 10,000 troops at the border in 2021. As Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post commented above a record of Mexican troop deployments: “Any news outlet reporting Mexico conceded anything to Trump to get him to delay tariffs has not done its homework. Trump boasts he got Mexico to commit to stationing 10K troops at our border. Apparently he didn’t realize Mexico already has 15K troops deployed there[.]”

The crisis at the northern border worked out in a similar fashion. After conferring, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Trump announced a 30-day pause in the implementation of tariffs. Trudeau agreed to appoint a border czar and to implement a $1.3 billion border plan that Canada had announced in December.

In other words, while Musk was causing a constitutional crisis, Trump created an economic crisis that threatened both domestic and global chaos, then claimed Biden administration achievements as his own and declared victory.

The tariffs on Chinese goods went into effect as planned. China has promised to levy tariffs of up to 15% on certain U.S. products beginning a week from today. It also said it will investigate Google to see if it has violated antitrust laws.

Notes:

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/03/nx-s1-5285539/doge-musk-usaid-trump

https://apnews.com/article/guatemala-honduras-mexico-immigration-border-patrols-917c0fea87c0a807b371da207d34c8cc

https://www.sba.gov/article/2024/10/24/new-report-reveals-historic-surge-small-business-financing-under-biden-harris-administration

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2025/02/03/trump-education-department-dismantling-executive-order-draft/

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.276842/gov.uscourts.dcd.276842.30.0_3.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/03/us/politics/white-house-spending-freeze-omb-judge.html

https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-donald-trump-doge-21153a742fbad86284369bb173ec343c

https://www.axios.com/2025/02/03/democrats-usaid-building-house-senate-protest

https://raskin.house.gov/2025/2/full-remarks-raskin-condemns-president-trump-and-elon-musk-s-illegal-and-unconstitutional-abolition-of-usaid-at-press-conference-outside-the-agency

https://www.canada.ca/en/public-safety-canada/news/2024/12/government-of-canada-announces-its-plan-to-strengthen-border-security-and-our-immigration-system.html

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/04/china-levies-tariffs-on-select-us-imports-starting-feb-10.html

https://www.axios.com/2025/02/04/treasury-sued-doge-sensitive-information-musk-trump

https://apnews.com/article/china-tariffs-us-trump-150fab3a44ec055845e47c82bde544c2

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/02/trump-tariffs-wall-street-journal-editorial

Bluesky:

meidastouch.com/post/3lhbwpt7dyc25

crampell.bsky.social/post/3lhcalxfhi22k

ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3lhc3hhxzc223

lbarronlopez.bsky.social/post/3lhcbictfds2e

markey.senate.gov/post/3lhcm574bjc2z

philinvestigates.com/post/3lhckanksnc2a

atrupar.com/post/3lhc65bdqst2e

X:

micah_erfan/status/1886515403649688003

GOOD NEWS

You’ve probably heard that the sun doesn’t shine at night and the wind doesn’t always blow. Clean energy tech is well aware of this: and that’s why energy storage is one of the fastest-growing areas of innovation today.

I’ve written before about the variety of energy storage techniques being developed in Texas, from gravity-based systems to compressed air. Just the other week, I mentioned that Finland is home to the world’s largest sand battery and is constructing one of the largest underground heat storage facilities in the world.

These technologies are ideal for large-scale systems, but for smaller applications—like home energy storage units, electric vehicles, and laptops—lithium-ion batteries remain the go-to solution. That’s why it’s great news that the global price of lithium-ion batteries has dropped 20 percent,reaching a record low of $115 per kilowatt hour. There was also a 44 percent increase in the number of battery energy storage systems installed last year around the world, and 80 percent of that went into grid-scale storage systems that will ensure around-the-clock supply of energy to the grid.

This is just one example of how, regardless of what the Trump administration says, the world is accelerating towards a clean energy future. Last year, the E.U. got a full 11 percent of its power from solar energy, besting coal, and that percentage is only expected to grow in coming years. Also in 2024, investors across the globe spent almost twice as much money on green energy than on fossil fuel projects, with investments hitting $2 trillion, a new record.

”The world is undergoing an energy transition that is unstoppable,”says Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change. And if his title sounds familiar, it’s because that’s Christiana Figueres’ previous role! In her guest edition last fall, she agreed, saying that “Renewables aren’t only healthier, faster, cleaner and more abundant. They undercut fossil fuels where they are at their weakest: their rampant and unsolvable inefficiency. Politics will not be able to stand in the way of this technological transition.”

NOT-SO-GOOD NEWS

The new U.S. president issued a slew of executive orders targeting climate action efforts since his inauguration, rolling back many Biden-era programs with the stroke of a pen. One Executive Order pulls the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement again, although it will take a full year to legally go into effect. This means the U.S. will join Iran as the only two countries in the world not participating in this global treaty.

The U.S. already receives 10% of its electricity from wind, and U.S. wind energy production reached a record high in 2024. However, another sweeping Executive Order pauses new federal permits for both onshore and offshore wind farms. And yet another Executive Order reverses the Biden-era incentives for electric vehicles, stating that “the US will not sabotage our own industries while China pollutes with impunity.” But last year, more than 50% of vehicles sold in China were EVs, compared to only 20% in the US. InNorway, the global leader, the EV share stands at 90%.

In his inaugural address, Trump doubled down on fossil fuels. “We will drill, baby, drill,” he said. “We have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have – the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it. We’re going to use it.” According to the BP Statistical Review, though, it’s Venezuela that has the most oil reserves of any country; the US is number nine. Russia has the most natural gas, while the US is number five.

Trump also declared a “national energy emergency” and yet failed to mention solar and wind as domestic energy sources. “If there’s an energy emergency and we need energy, then you would want to [include] wind and solar energy–but he is clearly excluding expressly those,” said Michael Burger of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. “It lays bare what’s really driving this, which is fossil fuel interest.”

If you want to learn more about these executive orders, I recommend this episode of The Daily. The Climate Backtracker, a project of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, is keeping tabs on all the things the new U.S. administration is doing to “scale back or wholly eliminate federal climate mitigation and adaptation measures.”

WHAT YOU CAN DO

It’s easy to feel discouraged when we see the impacts of climate change-fueled disasters like the LA wildfires juxtaposed against policy changes and setbacks we know will make the problem worse. In weeks like this, when the weight feels heavy, it’s more important than ever to remember that no one can tackle the climate crisis alone. Now, more than ever, we need each other. And when we work together, we can change the world.

History illustrates the power of the individual when we come together. As I wrote in this essay after the most recent IPCC report came out:

In a world that seems increasingly out of control, we are desperate for hope: real hope, a hope that acknowledges the full magnitude of the challenge we face and the very imminent risk of failure.

Where can we find such hope? We find it in action. The world has changed before and, when it did, it wasn’t because a president, a prime minister, a CEO or a celebrity decided it had to.

Change didn’t begin with the King of England deciding to end slavery or the President of the United States giving women the vote or the National Party of South Africa opting to end apartheid. It began when ordinary people – people of no particular power, wealth, or fame – decided that the world could and should be different.

Who were William Wilberforce, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and all the countless others who shared and supported and fought for their visions of a better world? They were people who had the courage of their convictions, who used their voices to advocate for the systemic societal changes needed.

We are the people who changed the world before: and we are the people who can change it again.

Change begins with individuals, but it thrives in communities. In the past, individuals have altered the course of history by coming together, and tackling climate change is no exception. That’s why it’s so important for each of us to find our people— to amplify our voices and experience the strength, comfort, and hope that comes from knowing we’re not in this alone.

What inspires you to care about climate change? Is it your children, your garden, the sport or place you love, your faith, or your community? Whatever your motivation, there’s a group out there for you—people who share your values and vision for a better future. From Science Moms to Third Act,EcoAthletes to GreenFaith , countless communities are already making a difference. I’ve compiled a list of climate action groups on my website. Check it out, and find the one that feels right for you.

As my book, Saving Us, concludes, “The first step across the abyss we all face together is to recognize we are not alone. Together, we are the answer to climate change; and building that bridge begins with a conversation, today.”

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Wed Jan 29 at 6:30pm ET – Envisioning a Livable Future with Nancy Tuchman, Benjamin Sovacool, and John Carroll University – in person at John Carroll University in University Heights, Ohio, and free online, but registration is required.

Waiting for someone else to fix the problems that directly impact all of us has effectively protected much of the status quo — for far too long. Our too-common inaction has enabled others’ bad choices and freed bad actors from accountability.

We.
Can actually.
Do something.

That’s the premise behind Third Act, a national organization of “elders” (age 60+) who realize there is no time to waste addressing the biggest problems we face — as a country and a planet. Founded by Bill McKibben, a noted climate activist, Third Act is a motivated movement of Americans determined to stop being part of the problem and become part of the solution. Together, we harness our unparalleled generational power to safeguard the climate and democracy. It is a simple but powerful idea — in part because there are currently 70 million Americans who qualify to join us!

Our seasoned generation holds the political and economic power to enact real change. Combining life experiences, countless skills, and extensive resources, we are uniting to help preserve democracy and safeguard our climate — for our children, grandchildren, and future generations. Too many of us have been silent for too long, and our silence has been misinterpreted as support for those undermining democracy and harming the planet.

It’s time to get busy — making what Georgia’s beloved Rep. John Lewis called “good trouble.”

In two short years, Bill McKibben has already inspired 70,000 elder Americans to join Third Act. Its Upstate New York Working Group has characterized the movement as “ordinary people doing extraordinary things… together.” Coordinated actions have had a direct and immediate impact on issues that threaten all of us. For example, writing 200,000 postcards encouraging people to vote in November, influencing the Federal government to pause natural gas permits to reduce climate impacts and pressuring Citibank to stop lending to fossil fuel producers.

And we’re just getting started.

Knowing there is power in numbers, Third Act is launching the Third Act Georgia (TAGA) Working Group on Sept. 4, 2024. Like 34 other Working Groups around the country, TAGA will act with urgency — to protect our democracy as we approach the November elections, and our climate as we face a rapidly narrowing sliver of time to make a meaningful difference. Our strategy is to execute relevant campaigns, organized and executed by like-minded elders, that build a more sustainable future.

As many Georgians know, our legislature has enacted some of the most restrictive election laws in the nation. The outcome of the 2024 Presidential election may well depend on Georgia voters. And Georgia’s governor, state legislature, and public service commission all refuse to address urgent climate change issues. Third Act Georgia wants to excite our generation of elders to join the front lines to help protect democracy and provide a sustainable future.

Many of us were children of the civil rights era, teenagers as women’s rights took hold, or college-age kids during the Vietnam War. We understand the power of collective action.

Now, it’s time to harness it again — for our future.

Third Act Georgia will officially launch Sept. 4, 7 to 8 p.m., with a zoom webinar featuring thought-provoking speakers Bill McKibben, Robert Hubbell, and Bill Sapp. They will discuss the power of Third Act’s grassroots activities. Then, organizing members of Third Act Georgia will describe specific volunteer opportunities. Click here to register and participate in the webinar.

“Age shouldn’t be an excuse for doing nothing. It should be the incentive to do something. We elders have the wisdom and the experience to know change is possible! We just have to put in the work. And there’s no time to waste. It’s not too late to make a difference,” McKibben said. “To preserve democracy. To pursue clean energy that protects our nation’s natural resources. To protect the future, for us and our children’s children.”

Now is the time to do something. Register for the Zoom webinar launch on Sept. 4.