I’ve been remiss about Black History Month this past week and a few days. I remember last year, I either did, or almost did, one post every day of the month. I was trying for once a week this year. Anyway, I almost did, but here is a post for February 28th.
I chose these two boxers for today. I don’t know why; various reminiscences, I guess. Earlier, it popped into my head that way back in high school, a guy needed help, asking me to write his book report. I had to read the book first, of course. It was a history of boxing, going almost to that current year. It was a small book, though. Anyway, though I didn’t and still don’t care about boxing itself (it reminded me of beauty pageants for women), I do enjoy learning about the people, thanks to writing that book report way back.
Joe Frazier was the world heavyweight-boxing champion from 1970 – 1973. Frazier is perhaps best remembered for his fearless 15-round match against Muhammad Ali at Madison Square Garden, known as the Fight of the Century, where he knocked out Ali. In 2011, Frazier passed away from his final fight of liver cancer.
(snip)
He moved to New York City to live with an older brother and find work. Employment, however, was hard to come by, and to put cash in his pocket he started stealing cars and selling them to a junkyard in Brooklyn. But Frazier harbored dreams of doing something with his life. Many of those dreams were built around boxing. As a younger kid, back in South Carolina, he had dreamed of becoming the next Joe Louis, airing out punches at burlap bags he’d filled with leaves and moss. Up north Frazier’s love for boxing didn’t subside.
After moving to Philadelphia, Frazier found work at a slaughterhouse, where he routinely punched sides of beef stored in a refrigerated room. That scene later inspired Sylvester Stallone for his 1976 film, Rocky. It wasn’t until 1961, though, that Frazier entered the ring and actually began to box. He was rough and undisciplined, but his unpolished talent caught the eye of trainer Yank Durham.
Professional Career
Under the direction of Durham, who shortened Frazier’s punches and added power to his devastating left hook, the young boxer quickly found success. For three straight years, he was the Middle Atlantic Golden Gloves Champion, and he captured the gold medal at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. He turned pro in 1965 and in just under a year had compiled an 11-0 record. In March 1968 he was crowned heavyweight champion where he kept the title until 1973.
Frazier eventually retired from boxing in 1976 to become a community leader and advocate for the youth by opening up a boxing gym to keep the youth off the streets of Philadelphia.
(snip-there is lots of diverse info on the page, linked in the title above)
I’m sorry; we have to click on “Watch on YouTube” to see Joe Frazier sing on (I think?) Merv Griffin.
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We know from some of my previous posts that I’m an Ali fan. I enjoyed his celebrity bravado and even his boxing. But this man, too, has done things to make the world brighter and more just; he served time and lost his title for being a conscientious objector to fighting in Vietnam, and was vilified and harassed for other peace-mongering efforts he made with his platform. Later, of course, he continued to demonstrate for peace and justice, and also for Parkinson’s. He raised good children, as well.
Muhammad Ali(born January 17, 1942, Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.—died June 3, 2016, Scottsdale, Arizona) was an American professional boxer and social activist. Considered one of the greatest boxers in history, Ali was the first fighter to win the world heavyweight championship on three separate occasions; he successfully defended this title 19 times. (snip)
Any season of the year, the Mountain Chickadee is a delight to encounter. In their breeding season, they form neighborhoods of adjacent territories in the conifer forests of western Canada and the U.S., which ring in the early spring dawn with dozens of cheerful whistled songs. In winter, groups of Mountain Chickadees are joined by other birds — nuthatches, woodpeckers, creepers, kinglets — to form large dispersed flocks that move together through the forest, following the chickadees’ namesake rallying call.
Mountain Chickadees are social birds, living in groups of up to three mated pairs and juveniles of the last breeding cycle for most of the year, only breaking off into territorial pairs for the breeding season. In fact, while we tend to think of the breeding season as the time when mates are chosen and territories are established, most of this actually occurs in the winter. This is when the social hierarchy is solidified between the individuals in a group, and come spring, the dominant birds will reliably take the best territories. While boundaries may shift somewhat, the same birds will usually hold the same territories year after year. Pair bonds are formed during the winter as well, and usually last for as long as both birds survive.
Mountain Chickadees are well-known for their caching behavior. To survive harsh mountain winters, these chickadees hide surplus food throughout their winter territories, a behavior known as “scatter hoarding.” A single chickadee may cache tens of thousands of food items — insects, conifer seeds, or goodies from bird feeders — over the course of a year. They may cache food any time they have extra, and may recover caches any time of the year, but spend the most time caching in the fall, and the most time eating from them in the winter. In fact, studies have shown that Mountain Chickadees living in harsher winter environments have better spatial memory and are more adept at remembering where they have cached food. Unsurprisingly, these birds also survive longer. (snip-MORE)
More than most, the Black-billed Magpie is a bird that inspires strong emotions in humans. A familiar species across much of the West, the Black-billed Magpie is intelligent, adaptable, and bold. For these attributes, they are both admired and loathed. While considered an annoyance or an inconvenience by some, they are also highly social and will occasionally leave “gifts” for humans who feed them.
Like many other intelligent and opportunistic corvids, magpies will take advantage of whatever resources they can. As such, the Black-billed Magpie is probably best known as a scavenger of garbage, carrion, and poorly guarded picnics. This has given these birds a bad reputation, with many regarding them as pests. A common folk belief is that magpies will wound cows to eat their flesh or drink their blood. Magpies will, in fact, stand on the backs of cows to probe and peck. However, the goal is typically not to eat the cow itself, but the parasites on the cow, such as ticks, that are doing just that. Cows are not the only beneficiaries of this behavior — magpies will eat ticks off of other large mammals, including bison, moose, elk, and deer.
The Black-billed Magpie holds a special place in mythology as well. Magpies are recognized as messengers in numerous Indigenous cultures of North America, sometimes to the aid of humans, sometimes to carry news to the Creator. One widespread story tells of how the magpie, for helping humans and birds alike, was given the honor of “wearing the rainbow” — a reference to the iridescent sheen on this bird’s wings and tail. (snip-MORE)
I have posted roughs here and there since my stroke, but I haven’t done a blog of them. I didn’t expect to be drawing that many since it’s kind of difficult to draw, but lo and behold, I’ve been drawing a lot of roughs lately. To share those, I figure the best thing to do would be to bring back the blogs of roughs.
There may be a few of these that I have already published, but I can’t remember them all, and I’m not going back through my blogs to see what I have and haven’t published.
I’ve been sitting on this one for about two weeks. I like the idea of them being in the same location, with the tell being the Washington Monument.
I don’t remember if I shared this one already, but it was drawn on February 18. The cartoon I eventually drew and published that day was the right one.
I didn’t think this was going to work, and the two people I showed it to didn’t get it, even though they had seen the movie The Jerk. (snip-MORE)
Did you watch the State of the Union last night? If you didn’t, no worries. I got you. And if you did not watch, no one can blame you. At an hour and 47minutes, it was the longest State of the Union address to Congress ever, even breaking the previous record, which also belonged to Donald Trump. When it comes to giving long-ass boring speeches that don’t seem like they want to end, Donald Trump is the Fidel Castro of American politicians.
To give you the gist of the speech, I’ll share what a few writers from The New York Times stated: “A tedious, tiresome performance,” “crabby rambling,” “the heat mongering continues,” and “long, exhaustive, and repetitive.” The speech probably did very little to lift Trump up from his current 36% approval rating.
Trump didn’t give a lot of details of his agenda or programs last night, so he killed time by handing out awards like it was a game show because, you know, showmanship. He handed out two Congressional Medals of Honor, one Purple Heart, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a hockey player. These are all awards that Donald Trump would love to give himself. (snip-MORE)
Doesn’t make it better news, just local. I want to add:
This came about because there is a Republican supermajority in Kansas’s legislature. And that came about because the Republicans, who were in trouble in KS because of things they tried to pull (think Missouri/abortion, etc.) that voters don’t want, were worried that they could lose their majority in the Houses. They told Republican voters that if they didn’t keep a solid majority, there would never be a Republican elected ever again because Dems would redistrict Republicans to that place in Egypt. (But they weren’t that funny about it.) So, Republican voters, yet again, voted Republican even though they had strong misgivings, gave us a supermajority, and now the SOB legislators are doing what they, and only what they, want to do. And here we are on the trans issue, and it’s not the only issue they’re going to force.
I strongly, so strongly advise everyone reading to please please please pay attention to the down ticket elections, who is running, and what they’ve done and what they’re saying they’ll do. You have to elect people who understand they work for you, not vice versa. And now, on with the story.
Jaelynn Abegg, a trans rights activist from Wichita, leads a group of around 50 people who used bathrooms Feb. 6, 2026, throughout the Statehouse to demonstrate what she called the absurdity of a state bathroom ban. The same law that includes the bathroom ban also invalidates driver’s licenses for transgender people. (Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)
TOPEKA — Transgender rights activist Jaelynn Abegg was furious Thursday morning when she received a letter from the state informing her that her driver’s license had been invalidated because of a new state law.
Abegg, a Wichita resident, said she would only get a new driver’s license if she needs one before fleeing the state, which she plans to do as soon as she can afford it. In the meantime, she figures her U.S. passport will be “ID enough.”
“When things like this happen, I honestly get a little bit of a demon of rebellion in me, and I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to manifest that, if at all right now, but I can tell you that I’m very angry,” Abegg said. “I’m heartbroken. “This is my home state. I’ve lived here all but two years of my life, and yet, every year since I’ve been living as a woman and having come out as transgender, this state has done nothing but break my heart. If this state was a romantic partner, I would definitely call this an abusive relationship at this point.”
The Kansas Department of Revenue this week sent a letter to Kansans affected by a new law, which took effect Thursday, that requires the gender marker on a driver’s license to match a person’s sex at birth.
The letter informs trans Kansans that because the Legislature didn’t include a grace period for updating credentials, they are “invalid immediately, and you may be subject to additional penalties if you are operating a vehicle without a valid credential.” A spokesman for the agency told Kansas Reflector the law invalidated about 1,700 licenses.
The letter directed trans Kansans to surrender their driver’s license to the state before they can receive a new one, which will cost them $8.
“We apologize for the inconvenience this causes you,” the unsigned letter said.
Republicans in the Legislature placed transgender Kansans in their crosshairs at the start of this year’s session. The House Judiciary Committee scheduled a hearing with less than 24 hours notice on the second day of the session for a bill that would invalidate their driver’s licenses. The bill was a response to a Kansas Court of Appeals ruling last year that determined there was no harm in letting people change their gender markers, which Kansans have done since at least 2002 with no complaints.
A week after the rushed hearing, in a flurry of procedural maneuvers, the committee took action on the bill without warning. Republicans added language that would make it illegal for someone to use a public building bathroom, or similar space, like a locker room, that conflicts with their sex at birth. They then inserted the contents of the House bill into an unrelated Senate bill that passed the year before. That allowed the House and Senate to pass Senate Bill 244 the next day without ever holding a public hearing on the bathroom provision.
Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed the bill on Feb. 13. The House and Senate subsequently overrode her veto with all but one Republican, Rep. Mark Schreiber of Emporia, voting in favor of the bill.
Abegg, who organized a Feb. 6 “pee-in” protest, in which trans people and their allies filled a bathroom at the Statehouse, said lawmakers were “blatantly subverting the democratic process … because they know they’re going to get blowback.”
“This is a hallmark of a Legislature and of a government that has a deep, deep sickness in it, and it really saddens me that we’re living to see days like this, where there’s that sort of situation going on, and there’s not a greater public outcry about it,” Abegg said. “This should be a concern to everyone who values democracy and who values Kansas as a free state.”
Trans Liberty, a political action committee that fights for trans rights, issued its first-ever statewide evacuation order Thursday, when it urged transgender Kansans to flee.
Samantha Boucher, founder of Trans Liberty PAC, said in a statement there is “something deeply wrong with a government that erases its own citizens’ legal identities.”
Abegg said the warning to leave is “absolutely the right approach.”
“I don’t think that legislators in Kansas are done harassing trans people,” Abegg said. “I think that transgender health care for adults is coming next. It would not shock me within the next two to five years to see them come after name changes for transgender people. The cruelty has always been the point, and the objective has always been the complete erasure of transgender people from public life.”
Trans people and their supporters rally Feb. 6, 2026, at the Statehouse in opposition to Senate Bill 244. (Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)
Jessie Lawson, a trans woman from Wichita, initially planned to go to the DMV and refuse to pay for a new license, then decided against it.
“I can work from home and, for the moment, minimize the risk of getting pulled over,” Lawson said.
She said her first thought when she read the letter from the state was to wonder “how conservatives can live with so much fear and hate in their hearts.”
“Even at my most angry, I’ve never wanted to see an entire demographic of people wiped off the planet the way they do. It’s unreal,” she said. “The second thought is how I’m going to survive now that bigotry has been officially sanctioned by the state of Kansas.”
Lawson said she has wrestled with whether she should leave the state where she has lived her entire life.
“I have a great job and own my own home,” Lawson said. “All of my friends are here. Leaving would be very difficult for me. At the same time, this place is becoming increasingly hard for me to exist safely as bigotry takes more and more control of the state government.”
She added: “Please publish whatever you get from us. There needs to be a record that we existed and strove for peace and joy as long as we could.”
Rep. Brooklynne Mosley, D-Lawrence, posted on her Facebook page that she would be available Friday to drive people to the DMV to replace their birth certificates. She said she was willing to personally pay for up to five individuals’ fees if they have financial constraints.
The new law also affects birth certificates.
Jill Bronaugh, spokeswoman for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, said individuals will be responsible for contacting the Office of Vital Statistics to replace their invalidated birth certificates, and a $20 fee will apply.
The agency identified 1,849 birth certificates on which the sex has been changed, which can be attributed to correcting data entry errors or recognizing gender changes, she said.
“Each amended birth certificate will be reviewed manually by staff to determine if the birth certificate must be invalidated and amended,” Bronaugh said. “This process is expected to take several months to complete.”
The SAVE Act appears to be dead, at least for now.
Trump wanted his party to enact the SAVE Act because it was supposed to make it more difficult for citizens he thinks are Democrats to vote: Its strict ID requirements would have impacted poor people, elderly people, students, married women, and others.
Although Trump pushed hard for its passage, most recently during the State of the Union address, enough Senate Republicans defected to make passage a possibility too remote to pursue. Republicans attempted a “talking filibuster” to get the bill across the finish line, but the procedural unity that would have required failed to materialize. Per Punchbowl News, North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, Utah’s John Curtis, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, and possibly others who weren’t named broke ranks.
It’s a major loss for the president.
There is also good news out of Fulton County, Georgia.
Instead of the hearing we were expecting on the County officials’ request to have their 600 boxes of election records restored to them this Friday, we got an order from Judge J.P. Boulee.
The County officials asked the Judge to use Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41 to restore their property to them. That rule permits: “A person aggrieved by an unlawful search and seizure of property or by the deprivation of property may move for the property’s return.” Judge Boulee set forth the four requirements for establishing that the moving party is entitled to have their items returned:
(1) the government displayed a “callous disregard” for the plaintiff’s constitutional rights;
(2) the plaintiff has an individual interest in and need for the material whose return he seeks;
(3) the plaintiff would be irreparably injured by denial of the return of the property; and
(4) the plaintiff does not have an adequate remedy at law absent the Rule 41 proceeding.
The Judge pointed out that a successful Rule 41 proceeding would not deprive the government of the use of evidence for lawful purposes. If returned, the County would be required to preserve the documents for the government’s later use—a requirement that it is already subject to, because these are election records that must be maintained.
The Judge noted his obligation to hear testimony and take evidence if he was ultimately called upon to decide the dispute. That’s something that DOJ might be eager to avoid, given the apparent irregularities in their process, which saw the head of the Atlanta FBI office step aside and a U.S. Attorney from Missouri, instead of the one in Atlanta, handle the matter. He then gave the government an out: “the Court believes it is best for the parties to work toward a mutually agreeable resolution before receiving additional evidence.” He gave them until March 4 to agree on a mediator and until the 18th to report back on whether the mediation succeeds.
It’s a strong move from the Judge. He declines to rule on whether the County officials can meet the high standard for proof under Rule 41. But the fact that he hasn’t denied their request out of hand and is treating it this seriously strongly suggests to the government where this is headed if they don’t reach a deal to return the records to the County. Rule 41 proceedings don’t usually make it this far, and the government has to be concerned that’s a very bad sign for them. The risk that they will still have to return the items they seized pursuant to a court order, and that all of their maneuvering will be publicly exposed in the process, is substantial.
There’s a subtle additional benefit here. The subtext has always been that this process, designed to cast doubt on election officials in the County (even though recounts and court cases confirmed the outcome), was designed to permit Republicans who control the state legislature to take over elections. It will be much more difficult for them to proceed while this process lingers, so a delay of even a couple of weeks, with the elections drawing ever closer, isn’t a bad thing.
And finally, a caution.
The Washington Post reported this morning that “Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.”
Of course, at the time, and with Trump officials in place running cybersecurity, there was a different message. In a Joint Statement, the National Coordinator for Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience CISA, the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council (GCC), and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council (SCC), reported that “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history . … There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised … While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections … we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too.” Chris Krebs, Trump’s Director at CISA, told 60 Minutes that “[Election] Day was quiet. There was no indication or evidence that there was any evidence of hacking or compromise of election systems on, before, or after November 3 … We did a good job. I would do it one thousand times over.”
Beyond that, a 2021 intelligence review concluded that China did not engage in efforts to influence the 2020 election. There were multiple audits and recounts, court rulings, and investigations without any finding of widespread fraud. There was no evidence of coordinated foreign interference.
So we all get it. It’s another ginned-up emergency. There wasn’t an outbreak of irrepressible crime on American streets that necessitated the federalization and deployment of the National Guard. Trump made that up. A Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, wasn’t invading the United States. Trump made that up. There wasn’t a balance of payments problem that warranted the imposition of exceptional tariffs. Trump made that up. And there’s not an emergency involving our elections that means Trump should take control of them. He’s making that up too—to the extent that there’s an emergency, he’s the cause of it.
The order Trump’s election denier buddies are pushing would use the supposed China emergency as the reason to declare yet another national emergency. The Post’s reporting suggests they will claim that permits them to “mandate voter ID, ban mail ballots, and change voting machines in November’s midterm elections.” How convenient—all the stuff they want to do, but can’t, because the law doesn’t permit it or Congress won’t pass laws authorizing it, tied up with a nice, neat bow into another one of those “uh oh—emergency, so I can claim extraordinary powers” executive orders Trump has become so fond of using.
The reality is that the president lacks constitutional authority to control elections. The Constitution gives that authority to the states. Even if Trump declared another national emergency, there is no basis for the assertion it would permit him to seize control of the elections. All this plot shows is that Trump lacks confidence in his party’s ability to win the midterm elections.
The election deniers are back in the White House and hard at work, as they were in 2020, to try and prevent American voters from determining the outcome of this year’s elections. Just like it did in 2020, the rule of law will prevail here.
Pro-voter lawyers will go to court if Trump tries to implement this kind of desperate attempt to rig the election. And they will win. Even the Supreme Court has ruled against Trump, now in both the National Guard and in the tariffs cases, when he attempted to drum up fake emergencies to justify his assumption of exceptional powers. Nothing is certain with this Court, but district court judges who are increasingly taking this administration to task and holding it to account are likely to pave a smooth path. And working against the administration is the clear fact that the greatest threat to free and fair elections isn’t China, non-citizens, or Democrats—it’s this president and his cronies.
For years, I’ve been working to educate the public on the fact that voter fraud isn’t the problem—all of the evidence is to the contrary. The real issue is Republicans who use false or dramatically overblown claims of fraud to suppress the vote, and keep eligible citizens from voting. Let’s stay informed and make sure they don’t get away with that this year.
The international accompaniment movement teaches us that to sustain an emergency response to state violence, we must build durable, collective and supportive structures now.
Targeted state violence and rising fascism are being met with creative organizing by people in Minneapolis and across the country, from mass marches to neighborhood mutual aid to ICE watch foot patrols. These are all beautiful manifestations of resistance that have kept many people safe and demonstrated widespread repudiation of the Trump administration’s policies.
Yet as state-sanctioned violence becomes more coordinated, normalized and national in scope, we must continue adapting our response systems to shifting needs. Emergency response structures set up in moments of crisis can often lead to isolated, reactive decision making with responsibility falling on a few shoulders, creating the conditions for burnout, security failures, movement fragmentation and individual and organizational missteps or even collapse.
Here we can draw on some hard-earned lessons from our predecessors in the decades-long international accompaniment movement, who witness, stand with and provide security support for human rights defenders, communities and activists under attack by authoritarian regimes in Latin America.In response to sometimes devastating losses, accompaniment organizations developed a set of skills and strategies over many years for collaborative, sustainable decision making to respond to security incidents while under conditions of constant threat. We ourselves learned these skills in our many years of working with accompaniment organizations in Guatemala, Honduras and Colombia from 2008 to 2022.
We share here principles and practices from this legacy, which we hope organizations and networks, whether formal or informal, can use to develop emergency response structures that are sustainable, don’t overly burden a few individuals with the difficult decision making, actively build collective capacity and shared analysis, and support skill-building for more people in our movements.
What we present here are suggestions, and we invite you to adapt them to particular organizations and situations. They may take a bit more planning and preparation than may seem available in moments of urgency. But if we want to sustain our movements for what, unfortunately, is likely to be a long struggle, we must begin now to put durable, collective and supportive structures into practice.
1. No one person decides alone
Decision making in emergency security situations is emotionally and mentally taxing. Stress can narrow our literal and metaphorical fields of vision. And because the weight of a decision can be incredibly heavy to bear — especially if things go wrong — no one ever made a decision alone in the accompaniment organizations of which we were a part. We had clearly established protocols for which people, based on their roles in the organization, would come together for specific emergency response decisions.
For example, we established regional subcommittees based on where a security incident occurred. Each subcommittee was composed of a security lead, a representative from the advocacy team and on-the-ground volunteers, who worked together to assess, analyze and respond to emergency situations.
Applying this principle in a U.S. context, organizers of a publicly advertised protest could set a team of folks who gather at an office or a home to monitor social media and news reports for security incidents or threats, and be ready to make decisions about emergency response.
2. Prepare decision-making structures and roles beforehand
Emergency response or crisis moments are when people are most activated and are also the most likely to lead to organizational, interpersonal or movement conflict. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, we are being subjected to situations of prolonged violence directed at ourselves and people we care for. We want to show up in the best way possible, yet often also feel frustration, impotence or rage.
In our accompaniment organizations, we mitigated stress and conflict (to the extent possible) by having clear processes and roles for decision making.
First, we frontloaded as many decisions as possible before an emergency, allowing us to focus on the situation at hand rather than spend time debating who would do what and delaying important support for the impacted individuals. Knowing who is going to be involved in emergency response reduces the need for conversation and shortens the response time.
The Peace Brigade International accompanies the Front of People in Defense of Land and Water in Amilcingo, Mexico. (Facebook/Peace Brigades International)
We have seen this play out in high-risk moments in our accompaniment work. For example, when we responded to nationwide protests that extended over months and saw daily murders of protesters by military and police forces, we set up a rotating decision-making group. Because roles and communication channels had already been agreed upon, colleagues didn’t have to debate who should verify information, call other allied organizations or set up our emergency response protocol. They could simply act.
Second, we made decisions in consensus. While clear decision-making structures are essential, that doesn’t necessarily mean they have to be hierarchical. We’ve found in our accompaniment work that decisions are easier to implement when everyone has a hand in shaping them. A consensus-based decision-making structure keeps any one person from carrying the whole mental load (see “No one person decides alone”) and lets us actually use the full brainpower in the room. We all come with different lived experiences, risk tolerances and ways of thinking, which means we’re bound to catch things others won’t and, luckily, vice versa.
This works best when folks talk it out together and create a clear timeline to decide. In the example above, if the group got stuck, they would start with a quick break to rest and regroup, and if that fails, go to a smaller predesignated subgroup — and, if even that doesn’t work, have a clear fallback decision-maker. Something else we’ve learned: Consensus tends to work better when we trust each other and each other’s criteria, so it helps to make the effort to get to know each other, grab a coffee or go for a walk before the emergencies happen.
3. Some participants in decision making should be offsite
It might seem logical that those directly involved in the emergency response should be onsite, able to see the situation firsthand and respond immediately. In fact, we learned in our accompaniment work that involving folks offsite as advisors or even decision makers can provide essential perspective, bring in crucial information and further spread the decision-making burden.
In one protest scenario, while tensions escalated on the ground, an off-site team a few blocks away tracked both police staging and local news sources and relayed that information back to organizers. This wider view allowed on-the-ground leadership to make informed choices without relying only on what was immediately visible.
4. Rotate the decision makers
Holding a decision-making role in an emergency situation is not easy; it means putting your body on high alert, navigating complex situations and grappling with violence directed at our communities. This, unsurprisingly, takes a toll on us over an extended period of time (more on this below).
Even if we believe we can hold this indefinitely, the reality is that, without moments to regulate our nervous systems, our bodies normalize the constant alertness, making it harder to activate when necessary and to properly analyze what is truly an emergency. We want our emergency decision makers to be well-rested, regulated and connected — for their wellbeing and ours, too.
That’s why we recommend that the decision makers in an emergency situation shift on an agreed-upon rotation. Depending on organizational structure, the best rotation might be every protest or event, or it might be a time period, like a week. This not only gives us a chance to skill up more folks in emergency response (always a benefit for our movements!), but it also gives us decision makers a chance to rest and recharge.
In the protest scenario previously mentioned, once things settled for the day, the people who had been making decisions rotated out. Some went home to sleep; others took quiet time away from phones and updates. A few days later, once they were rested enough to look at what they’d learned and what might need to change next time, they checked back in for the follow-up stage.
5. Institute Urgency Guides
Prolonged emergency situations make it harder over time to accurately recognize urgency. When everything feels critical, true emergencies can become blurred. Clear guidelines help mediate this by providing structure and clarity for decision making under sustained stress. In our accompaniment work, we used the following guidelines to categorize our responses:
On alert (prior to emergency): The situation seems to be escalating. We have seen a few signs indicating the risk level may be increasing (increased presence of armed actors, state or non-state, counter-protesters gathering, surveillance signs, suspected infiltration, etc.). Start to notify the security team (on and offsite) and start to implement increased security measures.
Immediate response (minutes to hours after): The emergency situation is active; the threat has not yet passed and there is potential for the situation to escalate or repeat. The physical and emotional well-being of impacted individuals is prioritized immediately.
Rapid (24 to 48 hours after): The specific situation has passed, but there is potential of it repeating in the near future. This could be because we will go to the same location in the next few days, or the event we are hosting will continue, or the aggressor is still nearby or indicating potential harm to our communities.
Follow-up (a few days to weeks after): The situation has passed. Here we focus on analysis and whether we need to adapt our organizational and movement strategy. This is also a great time to broaden the analysis by including allies in answering questions like: What was the aggressor’s desired impact? Have we seen this strategy used before? What are the increased security measures we may need to implement based on this situation?
We have used this for years in accompaniment spaces, allowing us to clearly mark stages in our response and who had to be involved. For example, when activists we were supporting suffered an assassination attempt, the attention moved from split-second decisions (immediate response) to checking in with impacted participants, ensuring medical attention, locating others who could be targeted next and finding safe houses, to adjusting security plans for the next day and watching for signs the situation might flare up again (rapid response). Later still, the group circled back to look at what had happened and what it meant going forward (follow up).
6. Establish ways to take care of yourself and your team before and after taking on decision-making roles.
When stepping into an emergency response decision-making role, it is essential to shore up your emotional resources before an emergency and repair your heart and mind afterward. This will look different for everyone, but all organizations and networks should dedicate time and space for everyone involved in emergency response to do this. You might employ the same tools for shoring up and for repairing: They could include a nice walk with your dog, tea with a close friend, reading a good book or taking a bath.
Whatever you need to rest and recharge, identify those activities and build them into your plans. We know this is hard, and to be clear, this level of care has not always been consistently present within accompaniment organizations; its absence often contributes to rapid turnover and diminished response capacity. Naming this matters. After more than a decade of collective work in emergency accompaniment, we have seen clearly that constant crisis response is not sustainable if people’s nervous systems are never given real opportunities to rest and regulate.
This is why we believe it is so important to speak directly about intentional, collective care practices not as an ideal, but as a necessary condition for the longevity and effectiveness of accompaniment and emergency response itself.
We don’t need to reinvent the wheel
These tools aren’t a panacea for the real risks presented by escalating state violence. They won’t stop all arrests, injuries, raids, deportations or assassinations. They won’t undo the harm already done or bring back the people we’ve lost. But the more we incorporate skillful emergency response tools into our repertoire, the more we can stay connected to one another under pressure, reduce preventable harm, and keep showing up again and again without burning out, fragmenting or turning on each other.
None of this work is new. We are drawing from the accumulated knowledge of mentors, organizers, human rights defenders, journalists, accompaniers, medics, lawyers and movement elders who have spent decades responding to fascist and authoritarian governments across regions and generations. From underground networks resisting military dictatorships, to civil rights organizers facing state-sanctioned terror, Indigenous land defenders, abolitionists, anti-colonial movements and transnational solidarity networks, people have long been building collective security, emergency response and care structures under conditions that mirror in many ways what we are facing now.
Luckily, this means we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We just need to know how to look to the past, to other contexts and to each other for guidance and support. The more intentional we are,the better we’ll be able to keep up the struggle so that, one day soon, we will not just have survived fascism but defeated it.
A recent article from Jesse Singal in the New York Times seemed to indicate the organization might be quietly retreating from supporting trans youth care.
Yesterday, anti-transgender activist and columnist Jesse Singal published a piece claiming there were “cracks in the wall” around gender-affirming care (which you can find fully fact-checked here). To make that case, he relied heavily on a statement from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons that bypassed the organization’s normal scientific review process and was advanced under pressure from leadership aligned with the Trump administration, including a president who is a major Republican donor. Singal also invoked the American Psychological Association, suggesting the organization was retreating from its 2024 position supporting transgender care and rejecting claims that gender identity is “caused” by external factors. But a representative for the APA tells Erin In The Morning that the organization stands firmly by its 2024 guidelines supporting transgender youth care and provided documentation indicating Singal mischaracterized its position.
“No, APA’s position has not changed,” says a representative speaking for the APA, attaching a link to their 2024 policy statement which provided broad support for gender-affirming care. “APA continues to support unobstructed access to evidence-based care for transgender and gender-diverse individuals of all ages.”
The 2024 policy statement is to date one of the most significant supportive stances of any medical organization for gender-affirming care. It states that gender-affirming medical care is medically necessary, opposes bans on gender-affirming care, declares that being transgender is not caused by autism or post-traumatic stress, establishes the organization’s support for combatting disinformation on transgender healthcare, and finds that rejection of a trans youth’s gender identity can increase their risk of suicide and harm their psychological wellbeing. The policy was passed overwhelmingly, 153-9, with each voter representing a large subset of the organization’s 157,000 members. Now, the organization says that it is not accurate to claim that there is any regression on support for transgender youth care from the organization.
The organization also disputes Singal’s portrayal of a 2025 letter written by Katherine McGuire to the Federal Trade Commission. In his piece, Singal claims the APA “cautioned that gender dysphoria diagnoses could be the result of ‘trauma-related presentations’ rather than a trans identity,” and noted that “co-occurring mental health or neurodevelopmental conditions (e.g., depression, anxiety, autism spectrum disorder) … may complicate or be mistaken for gender dysphoria,” framing this as evidence that the organization is retreating from its 2024 policy supporting transgender youth care. That interpretation is incorrect, according to an APA representative, who says the letter does not contradict the organization’s 2024 position and does not represent a regression in its support for evidence-based transgender care. (snip-MORE)
And again with the big-money outsiders meddling in state lawmaking:
The ballot initiative is bankrolled by billionaire anti-trans donor, Richard Uihlein, and represents a new line of attack against transgender people in blue states.
Anti-trans organization “Protect Girls Sports in Maine” has announced that it has collected enough signatures to get a combination transgender sports ban and school bathroom ban onto the November 2026 ballot, making Maine the second state this year to announce a ballot initiative targeting transgender people in a blue state after a similar effort in Washington. This comes after Maine Gov. Janet Mills fiercely rejected Trump administration attempts to strongarm the state into enacting such restrictions on its own, under threat of losing school lunch money and more. Now, voters may directly determine the fate of transgender youth in schools across the state after a massive signature drive bankrolled by billionaire Republican megadonor Richard Uihlein, the latest in an attempt by ultra-wealthy conservative donors to export anti-trans discrimination across the United States through direct ballot measures.
“Not only will our initiative become the only citizen-led issue to appear on the 2026 Maine ballot, but we will likely be the first state where voters can protect female sports at the ballot box this November. We will pave the way for the rest of this nation,” said Leyland Streiff, the lead petitioner, about the ballot initiative turn-in. Notably, he remained cagey about bathrooms, which the ballot initiative will also heavily impact, in a possibly strategic angle to hide that the bill is much more expansive than he gives credit for.
The initiative would, according to the summary page, define a person’s sex for school purposes as “a person’s biological status as male or female recorded at birth on the person’s original birth certificate.” It would “require schools to maintain separate restrooms, locker rooms, shower rooms, and other private spaces for each sex,” going beyond sports. It would also create a “private right of action” for a student who “suffers direct injury because of a violation of a provision of the initiated bill,” allowing students to sue if they encounter transgender students in bathrooms at schools or in sports. Lastly, it specifically carves out transgender students in bathrooms and sports from the Maine Human Rights Act.
Maine LGBTQ+ organizations fiercely condemned the bill. David Farmer, speaking on behalf of an opponent coalition of LGBTQ+ organizations across the state, called the referendum a “one-size fits all approach to sports participation and bathrooms that will increase bullying and harassment and cost local schools millions of dollars for construction and litigation.” He also called out the billionaire backing of the bill, stating, “This is a cynical attempt by one of the richest people in the world to manipulate voters in hopes of influencing the U.S. Senate race, the race for governor and the races for Congress.” (snip-MORE)
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