Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin opened this week's call with a claim and a warning attached to it. The claim: Trump is losing, and he knows it. The warning: a regime that knows it's losing at the ballot box doesn't concede gracefully — it sabotages. We may well get a Hungary-style rejection of this administration in November, the way Orbán got his earlier this year. But hoping isn't a plan.
So this episode did something a little different. Instead of a policy deep dive, it walked through what your First Amendment rights actually are when law enforcement shows up at your rally, your door, or your organizing meeting — and what to do in four specific scenarios the movement has already seen play out. Then an hour of live Q&A that got into election-night sabotage, scam PACs, youth turnout, and whether the big-city march is really where the power is.
Here's the whole thing.
Four action items
1. Immigrant Justice Summer, call #4. The fourth call in the training series ran Thursday night: Grow the Circle — Building Your Response Team and Funneling Community Support. The problem it solves is one every one of us has hit. Someone in your life — a friend, a cousin, someone from your congregation — comes to you scared and says what can I do? The goal is that you can answer with your chest: here's the training, here's the link, here's how you sign up. Two group leaders who built exactly that infrastructure in their own communities walked through how they did it.
Call #5, the following week, covers using Signal for rapid response organizing — how it works, why it's the right tool for secure communication, and how to stand those systems up. Both calls are free, open to everyone, and you don't need to have caught the earlier ones. Recordings of the full series are on the Indivisible site.
2. Patrick Roth, MA-08, September 1. This is the last endorsed primary of the cycle. Roth is running against Rep. Stephen Lynch, who holds what Levin called the worst quote of any incumbent this cycle: asked by his own constituents to fight harder after he voted for the Laken Riley Act, Lynch told them, "I get to decide that. I'm elected. You want to decide that, you need to run for Congress." Roth heard it and ran for Congress. No money from bad actors — grassroots volunteers and grassroots donors.
Indivisible is running two phone banks: Monday, August 24 and Monday, August 31, both 5:30–7:30 p.m. Eastern. These are Democratic-voter ID calls, not persuasion against MAGA — you're telling Democratic primary voters that an alternative exists. Races like this come down to a handful of votes, and the binding constraint is simply that people don't know Roth is on the ballot. It's the best possible use of a volunteer shift.
3. March on Washington, August 28. The anniversary of the 1963 march. Indivisible is joining Rev. Al Sharpton and the National Action Network, Martin Luther King III, Andrea Waters King, and the Drum Major Institute for the Defend the Vote Anniversary March. If you're in DC or within busing distance on the Eastern Seaboard, there's likely a bus near you. The through-line is defending the vote, economic freedom, and civil rights heading into a season when the right to vote is under direct threat.
4. Supreme Court deep dive, next week. After Callais gutted what remained of the Voting Rights Act, the top request from the audience was: so what do we actually do about this Court? Elie Mystal joins next week to get into reform options and political paths. There's homework — a short Robert Reich explainer on court reform (three minutes, watch that one if you watch nothing), a Mystal piece on what's gone wrong with this Court, and a New York Times piece from two court scholars with a proposal that hasn't gotten much airtime. A survey is going out for your questions; the last two deep dives drew hundreds, and they drive the conversation.
Know your rights
First, the caveats, because they matter. This guidance was developed with lawyers, especially at the ACLU — but they are not your lawyers and this is not legal advice. If you need help, contact an attorney, the ACLU, or your local National Lawyers Guild chapter.
Second: this isn't a response to a specific imminent threat. There's nothing being held back. It's about the season we're heading into. Reporting out of Minnesota showed the regime targeting activists to suppress nonviolent political organizing, and there are emerging reports of law enforcement targeting people around voter registration and ICE-related work. The expectation is that repression escalates over the next two months, and the point of covering this now is to be clear-eyed without scaring people off the work.
And third, the frame that holds all of it together: we organize in the open. This movement is rooted in the belief that these are our constitutional rights, that we exercise them proudly, and that we want new people to see us and join us. We are not hiding. Being solid on what our rights are is what lets us use them to their fullest extent — and being visibly brave is how other people find their own courage.
Four principles for any encounter with law enforcement
- Stay calm. Breathe. Regulate yourself.
- Do not resist or obstruct.
- Do not lie.
- Document everything. You generally have the right to record law enforcement. Be mindful of your safety and record only if you can do it safely — but capture what you can, however you can.
Scenario 1 — An officer approaches and wants to ask questions
You have the right not to answer. That's what the right to remain silent is. You don't have to say where you're going, where you're coming from, what you're doing, or where you live. If you're exercising that right, say so out loud. You can also take the officer's contact information, think about it, talk to a lawyer, and call back later if you decide to. If you want to go, ask: am I free to leave? If yes, walk away calmly.
Scenario 2 — An officer asks to search you, your car, or your home
Stay calm — don't let the chaos of the moment be used to erode your rights. Ask if they have a warrant.
No warrant: you have the right to say no. But do not physically obstruct. Refusing consent may not stop a search from happening, and a timely objection — "I do not consent to a search," said clearly, before or during — is what preserves your rights later. Then seek legal support.
With a warrant: ask to see it. Take a picture. Check that it's signed and dated by a judge. Ask for time to review it and call an attorney. Don't obstruct. Document the search where it's safe to, and tell them you're documenting. You are still not obligated to answer questions. And you do not have to unlock your phone or hand over your passcode, even with a warrant.
One practical note buried in there that's worth pulling out: turn off face unlock. Switch to a passcode. Agents can hold your phone up to your face to unlock it without your consent. A passcode they cannot compel the same way.
Scenario 3 — You're arrested or detained at or near a protest
Stay calm. Don't resist. Say it plainly: "I want to remain silent and I want to speak with a lawyer." Don't answer questions or sign anything without counsel present. Ask for a phone call — they may refuse, and be aware any call to someone other than your attorney is monitored and recorded. Take mental notes and write everything down as soon as you can: badge numbers, patrol car numbers, which agency, and contact information for witnesses.
Scenario 4 — Someone in your group pushes escalation or violence
This one is here for a reason. In Minnesota, at least one undercover officer joined a group of activists and actively urged them toward violent tactics.
Organizing in public means anyone can walk in — including a provocateur or a James O'Keefe-style hidden-camera operation. The corollary to welcoming people is to use your judgment. And the hard rule: if anyone ever suggests violence, do not laugh it off and do not stay silent. Reject it immediately and clearly. We are a 100% nonviolent movement, and nobody in an Indivisible meeting should ever be less than certain of that.
The recap: stay calm, don't resist or obstruct, remember you have rights, remember you don't have to waive them, document everything. Repression and intimidation are core to the authoritarian playbook. We counter them by refusing to hand over powers they don't actually have. A written version of this guidance is coming, and Levin's recommendation is that every group run its own version of this session so the whole group shares a baseline.
From the Q&A
"Vote blue no matter who" — is that really the plan? Yes, and it isn't new; Indivisible ran the Indivisible Pledge in 2020 to get candidates and groups committed to backing the primary winner. The general-election messaging and training plan drops the day after the last primary — September 2. It's built on data analysis and partner work, and it will support every flavor of Democrat who won, because the gap between any of them and the Republican on the ballot is a chasm. Greenberg's addition: the intra-coalition argument is a preoccupation of people who are very online about politics. What moves actual voters is people they trust, from across the whole party, stressing the same things they care about. Levin was blunter — if someone in your circle is spending September and October yelling about another faction of the coalition, redirect them. Firmly, maybe kindly. We can fight in December.
Where's the positive message? It's coming, shortly after primary season closes, and it's not "Trump is bad, therefore Democrats." Levin pointed to Jon Ossoff as a model: name the corruption, name the villains, say what you're doing for people personally. He also drew a line under the bigger version of the question — what is the party's affirmative vision for 2029? — which is real, but is a post-midterm conversation. We won't have the presidency or the Court. We might have the House and Senate, which is legitimate power in January, and the question for this election is what Congress does with it.
Greenberg added her standing objection to how "Project 2025" gets used: it was a plan for ruthlessly wielding power, not an appealing platform to run on. We need both, they're different things, and Project 2025 was in fact a millstone for Republicans in 2024 — one of the few attacks that genuinely landed.
How do we reach young people? Greenberg pushed back on the framing. This gets treated as a branding and reach problem when it's something deeper — about what young people have lived through, from COVID to smartphones to an economic mess, and whether they experience voting as connected to any outcome in their lives. She named the pro-Palestine, anti-genocide movement as an enormously powerful protest movement, overwhelmingly powered by very young people, that was repressed harshly enough that people are still living with the consequences. So the answer isn't the right ambassador saying voting is cool. It's creating conditions where voting is experienced as an act of power that changes something. That's why Zohran Mamdani pulled unprecedented youth turnout in an off-season election, and why challengers beating entrenched incumbents keep over-performing with young voters. Levin's concrete version: look at where David Hogg and Leaders We Deserve are putting their energy right now — Patrick Roth, a pro-democracy advocate in his 30s running on generational change.
Election Day plus one — what if they disrupt the election? There is a plan, and pieces of it aren't announced yet. But go to nokings.org and you'll see the headline: this fall, rise to the occasion. A No Kings mobilization is coming before the election, with two goals — boost turnout (we start exercising voting rights in October) and build a volunteer force capable of responding to sabotage. That response might be a mass nationwide reaction, and it might also mean digging in where the sabotage is happening, possibly for days or weeks. Announcements are coming with the rest of the No Kings coalition.
Greenberg's framing on this is worth sitting with: it's hard to talk about "when the crisis comes," because by any objective measure we have been in crisis for a sustained period. The VRA has been gutted. Election sabotage and suppression are happening on a regular basis, building on a long history of voter suppression. If there's an outright attempt to steal the election — seizing ballot boxes, declaring martial law — the answer is that we take every relationship, every piece of infrastructure, and every ounce of capacity built over the last two years and make sure that moment is understood across American society as the crisis it is. And in the meantime: winning the election, building your group, and defending immigrants in your community are how that capacity gets built.
How many Indivisible groups are there? More than 2,500, in more than 430 of 435 congressional districts, many districts with several. Every one of them exists because somewhere between one and thirty people decided they had to do something. No think tank or consultancy is coming to save the day — if you're connected to this call but not to a local group, find yours and meet in person. If there isn't one near you, or the one near you isn't a fit, start one. They'll help.
Why doesn't outrage translate into mobilization anymore? Things this administration has done would have been the dominant story for a month in 2017 and pulled hundreds of thousands into the streets. Now they're page B13. Some of that is the fragmented media environment, some is oligarchic capture of media, some is genuine fatigue from the sheer cascade. Greenberg's example is the weekend they closed USAID — wildly illegal, and it has since led directly to hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths, one of the great moral stains on this country — and we could not pull out the popular opposition it deserved. What has worked is a frame big enough to hold everyone's different issues inside one story of opposition to authoritarianism: Hands Off, then No Kings. She's not always satisfied with that answer. It's what has let us show up biggest.
Should groups near DC focus on DC? Levin, who staffed Rep. Lloyd Doggett through multiple redistrictings: yes, an Austin protest registered. But when something happened in the rural, red parts of that district — organizing, an op-ed in a small local paper — the reaction in the office was it's happening even there, we have to pay attention. Big-blue-city mass numbers are one tactic, not the only one, and organizing outside those centers is rarer and lands differently. Go to the March on Washington if it's twenty minutes away. But the bias should be toward organizing where you are, because the people who won't travel to the city will walk down the street. The town in rural Texas where he grew up had no organizing and a hollowed-out local party. It has an Indivisible group now, and they elected a state rep.
Bomb threats at polling places? (They happened in Georgia in 2024.) Coordinate tightly with your local election protection and voting rights coalition on specifics in the moment. But this is a large part of why we push early voting: voting early moves people into lower-volume, lower-pressure windows and shrinks the window in which chaos can actually change the outcome.
Do boycotts work? The framework: a specific target, tangible demands, and a plausible theory of how consumer action shifts that target's incentives. DoorDash meets all three — it functionally initiated a bill rolling back DC home rule because it was angry about a 20-cent delivery tax. There are alternatives, you can call the restaurant yourself, and brand damage is a real cost to them. Generalized boycotts against diffuse targets usually don't clear the bar. The exception is a genuine wave moment, like May Day or the general strike action in Minneapolis this summer, when the scale of collective action creates its own leverage.
Scam PACs. A member reported two texts in one week asking about a "No Kings 4" event that doesn't exist, and others claiming No Kings events failed for lack of donations. Both hosts were visibly angry about this. These operations spread misinformation, convince people the whole thing is a grift, and prey on people without access to real information. Greenberg pointed to Adam Bonica's recent research on the profit model — it runs disproportionately on much older seniors without the media fluency to recognize manufactured urgency, and the records include people who have given more in small-dollar donations than their houses are worth.
What to do: block, report as spam, and tell people which PAC it was. Talk to the seniors in your life about how this works and help them build a giving plan that supports causes they care about without subsidizing it. And the clean tell — if you're on Indivisible's list, you have not received a No Kings fundraising ask, because that's not what they do. No future No Kings has been announced. Any No Kings fundraiser hitting your phone right now is fake. As a general rule: never give to anyone who texts you out of the blue. They bought your contact information in order to soak you.
Dates to put on the calendar
- Mon, Aug 24 — Patrick Roth phone bank, 5:30–7:30 p.m. ET
- Thu, Aug 27 — Immigrant Justice Summer call #5: Signal for rapid response
- Fri, Aug 28 — March on Washington: Defend the Vote, Washington DC
- Mon, Aug 31 — Patrick Roth phone bank, 5:30–7:30 p.m. ET
- Tue, Sep 1 — MA-08 primary
- Wed, Sep 2 — General election messaging and training plan released
- Next week — Supreme Court deep dive with Elie Mystal (submit questions; pre-reads circulating)
- October — early voting begins; No Kings pre-election mobilization expected
The close, from Levin: we are going to defeat them in the House, in the Senate, and at the state level, in the most nonviolent way possible — and we're going to do it by exercising our constitutional rights, because we know what they are and we intend to use them.
That's the plan.
Watch full video here:
