The midterm election was a repudiation of Trump and of his Silicon Valley billionaire enablers. This has created a huge opening that we should celebrate — yet we should be clear-headed about the challenges ahead. Victory over Trumpism and Silicon Valley technofascism is by no means assured. Trump’s appointment of Stephen Miller, a white nationalist, to chief of staff is a flashing warning sign.
Trump and Miller have massive power to use the Justice Department, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and other tools of the federal government to target Trump’s opponents. And the Silicon Valley billionaires will use their extraordinary wealth and power to try to crush attempts to stop the build-out of massive data centers, which they desperately need to power their AI expansion. There are growing fears that AI investments have created a stock market bubble that is leaking and ready to burst. The $2.5 trillion sell-off of AI and tech stock on Nov. 5 is a terrifying illustration of how AI speculation may crash the whole economy. So while we should breathe in the hope the electoral results have delivered to us, we must also redouble our resolve and prepare for the battles ahead.
Over the past two years, many of us felt overwhelmed, strangled and suffocated by unrelenting attacks that came from every direction, from ICE kidnapping our neighbors, to the U.S. bombing and warring on other countries, to absurd conspiracy theories and racist ranting by Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their ilk. As we can now see, the increasingly vicious nature of their words and actions was also a sign of their weakness and growing desperation.
But weakness and desperation should not be confused with surrender. As our history reminds us, the forces of entrenched power and wealth are nothing if not resilient. They will use every tool at their disposal to deflect or dilute reform, divide their opponents, and prepare countermoves that will roll back our gains. The Reconstruction of the post-Civil War years gave birth to the reactionary “Redeemers,” who succeeded in undoing efforts to advance racial equality. The forward thrust of the New Deal was blunted by the Red Scare. The civil rights gains of the 1960s were challenged by the Southern Strategy and the Reagan Revolution.
So we should prepare ourselves for the reality that the forces that we have been fighting will not simply throw in the towel. We should not assume that the lawless ways of the Trump presidency will suddenly cease or that its billionaire backers will retreat to the comfort of their gated communities and private jets and cease their efforts to commandeer our future. Far from it. We must expect that they will use every bit of the considerable power they still hold to thwart real change.
Silicon Valley AI billionaires have made clear that they aren’t content with just becoming billionaires and trillionaires. Their goal is far more expansive and scary. They want to eliminate democracy altogether and replace it with a CEO autocracy. Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel is worth $37 billion and publicly says, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
The election has shown that the popular mood is behind us. We have a unique window to thwart the Silicon Valley billionaires and to build and exercise power. None of us has a road map of how to do this, but there are some promising paths we can take. A central task is figuring out how we stop funding, bankrolling and purchasing from the technofascist billionaires. We need to stop financing our own destruction.
There are a series of exciting campaigns already happening that are trying to do exactly that, and each one offers opportunities for people to be involved individually and organizationally. These campaigns offer, if successful, a vehicle to organize and activate hundreds of thousands of new activists directly in the fight for democracy and against the Silicon Valley AI overlords.
10 reasons to resist AIThe $6 trillion of public employee pension fund assets and $900 billion in university endowments are currently a key source of capital for Musk and other oligarchs. We need to cut off, or at least limit, the massive flow of capital to the AI oligarchs and drivers of data center construction. It is a form of assisted suicide for union pension funds and public employee pension funds to invest in the very corporations whose goal is to destroy unions and public sector jobs and services.
Unions and union members have a central role to play in protecting their pensions from AI investments that are both risky and self-defeating. They should call for this money to be invested in things like affordable housing and green retrofitting programs that create good union jobs, address pressing issues like climate change and the housing crisis, and support local economic development. Members can start speaking up en masse at public pension board meetings. Local unions can pass resolutions like the Chicago Teachers Union did in October 2025, with a “Resolution For A Pension Fund that Provides A Dignified Retirement While Promoting a More Just Society.”
Students and higher education workers have an opportunity to challenge heavy investment by many university endowments in AI. The University of Michigan was one of the first investors in OpenAI. The University of North Carolina holds significant shares in SpaceX SuperIntelligence after the merger of SpaceX with xAI in February. The UNC fund made its initial SpaceX investment through Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel’s Silicon Valley “Founders Fund,” which heavily funds AI start-ups. Duke University also has $70 million in assets tied to the Founders Fund.
The work challenging these investments has already started with the Action Center on Race and the Economy’s Stop Funding Billionaires campaign, which is organizing members of unions and community groups to oppose continued investments in AI and bad corporate actors. Stop Funding Billionaires is working with Americans For Financial Reform, the American Association of University Professors, California Common Good, the People’s Lobby and others to halt Anthropic’s upcoming trillion dollar initial public offering.
The #BlockTheIPO campaign is calling on banks, institutional investors and stewards of public funds to boycott the Anthropic IPO, to pause all investment in AI and data centers, and to pledge not to bail out AI companies with public taxpayer and retirement funds until the financial and safety risks of AI are addressed. The campaign has combined research exposing the dangers of AI investment with direct action and protests targeting both Anthropic’s offices and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, whose bank is part of a syndicate of banks underwriting the IPO.
Labor has another critical role to play in this by adopting the approach of Bargaining for the Common Good, or BCG. BCG builds power by bringing unions and their community allies together around shared demands that benefit both workers and communities. When it comes to corporate accountability, BCG can look like organizing and bargaining campaigns that target the financial powers — Wall Street, private equity, hedge funds — whose influence determines the behavior of corporate CEOs and government officials alike. Such campaigns provide a model that can facilitate the alignment of labor unions and popular movements against the rampant spread of data centers, and in defense of democracy.
This isn’t an exhaustive summary, but it gives a feel for what is developing and what roles we can play. We are educating and organizing an army of union members, students and higher education workers to demand no more investments from pensions and university endowments in AI tech corporations.
Even as we push back on data centers, we must also continue to challenge corporations whose actions have been eroding our democracy. Cities and states should stop using our tax dollars to subsidize, buy from or give tax breaks to companies that have won Trump administration contracts through corrupt “pay to play” procurement practices. Municipalities should also stop enriching corporations carrying out Trump’s authoritarian agenda. Not with Our Money is working with elected leaders and allies around the country to halt purchasing from companies like Palantir that are powering the surveillance state, ICE’s deportations and detention centers.
Another example of this work is the global Purge Palantir campaign, which is fighting the spread of the surveillance state and the model of algorithmic governance. It’s calling public and private sector employers to stop using Palantir products and politicians to refuse political contributions from Palantir. Similarly, Tesla Takedown has focused on Elon Musk and Tesla and has conducted nonviolent protests at dealerships around the country to protest Musk’s many nefarious activities, beginning with his stint dismantling the government through DOGE.
Campuses should also organize to expose university investments in private equity companies that have teamed with Trump to threaten the future of higher education. The University of Michigan and Washington University are two of many examples of endowments that have invested in the private equity company Apollo, despite CEO Marc Rowan’s role as a key architect and promoter of the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” — an attempt to enforce ideological conformity, censorship and political oversight on universities, including an unconstitutional loyalty oath.
The All Eyes on Yass campaign is organizing to make it unacceptable for politicians who want labor and community support to take contributions from billionaires like Jeff Yass who are spending millions supporting school vouchers and undermining public education. Like the Purge Palantir campaign, the All Eyes on Yass campaign is telling politicians they have to pick which side they are on.
The path to the future we want and need is certainly more open today than it was only a week ago. But we have a long and treacherous road ahead and significant obstacles to overcome.
As I think about the challenge that confronts us, I think of a lesson I have had to learn the hard way. You see, I am allergic to bees. I have been stung by a yellow jacket, and I know that terrifying feeling of my throat swelling, of feeling the air being cut off, and literally fearing that I could go into shock and die within minutes. It’s the same suffocating feeling many of us in occupied Washington D.C. are experiencing as Flock cameras, ICE, the National Guard, police checkpoints and the surveillance state increasingly impact every part of our lives.
I’ve learned that being deathly allergic to bees means that you can either hide inside, out of fear of being stung, or you can study and learn about bees to limit the possibility of being killed by them. I have made it my business to deeply understand bees, and specifically, the yellow jacket, the only bee that has ever stung me. I’ve learned yellow jackets are most dangerous when they feel their nests are being encroached upon, and that this danger surges in the fall, when the weather is getting colder and they know they will soon die off for the season. They strike out and sting you for no apparent reason when they feel their time is coming to an end.
I see waning Trumpism as analogous to yellow jackets in autumn. Like yellow jackets facing encroaching winter, those whose support made Trumpism possible know the demographics of the country are changing, that whites won’t always remain in the majority. They fear that we might be developing an immunity to their politics of division and hate. They also know how much their wealth and power depends on the bailouts, theft, fraud and massive financial manipulations that their control of the political system has allowed them. They know that their dominant role in this country and the world can come to an end if they can’t hold onto power now.
If we are wise enough to grasp their psychology, if we are strategic, if we organize, if we are prepared, if we are inspired and moved by knowing our season is coming, we can do more than just survive this change of seasons.
For most of my life I’ve carried an Epipen to inject myself if I got stung. A combination of careful avoidance and life-saving injections have kept me alive despite multiple stings. But after learning to accommodate and survive bees, I’ve realized that surviving is insufficient; fear isn’t the way I want to live. So I have started a multi-year course of bee venom injections that over time will make me immune to bee stings. Soon, getting stung by a bee may be a painful annoyance, but it won’t threaten my life.
Similarly, we can start to inoculate ourselves against fascism. That means preparing ourselves to engage in mass noncompliance and nonviolent civil disobedience directed not only at the lawless administration that still holds power, but at the corporations that are supporting and profiting from Trumpism. Each time we engage in non-compliance — standing up to defend our immigrant neighbors from ICE — we start to build our immunity to fear. When we sit-in and engage in nonviolent civil disobedience at a corporate office or an airport, we build the systemic response that can ward off the stings they will no doubt seek to deliver in the weeks and months ahead. I know from my own experience with yellow jackets that they will reemerge in spring if we don’t destroy their nests.
We have a unique window to take on Trump and the tech billionaires. A central task is to join forces to cut off their funding and financing.
Americans voted against militarism in the midterms. Now, the new Congress must prioritize ending wars abroad and repression at home.
We can finally exhale and celebrate. Then we need to sustain movement energy for the long-haul pressure campaigns ahead.
