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In this episode, Layal speaks with Rivera Sun about how civil resistance in the United States is shifting form and strategy. Rivera traces the long tradition of nonviolent action in the United States. Movements have always used boycotts, strikes, and refusal to reshape power. What feels new today is the speed, scale, and coordination of resistance in response to rising authoritarianism.
The conversation focuses on economic noncooperation. Layal and Rivera examine campaigns that target corporations and billionaires who enable authoritarian power. From Tesla boycotts to subscription cancellations, people withdraw consent from systems that profit from repression. Purchasing power becomes political power.
The episode also addresses state violence and immigration crackdowns. Rivera describes how communities protect one another through nonviolent intervention, accompaniment, and public refusal. Ordinary people step between armed authority and vulnerable neighbors. They reclaim law through collective presence.
The conversation closes with endurance. Resistance requires discipline, care, and imagination. Nonviolence sustains movements when fear and fatigue set in. Humor, creativity, and solidarity rehumanize everyone involved. The episode argues that this generation resists for a livable future built on dignity, democracy, and shared responsibility.
Rivera Sun is an author, activist, and strategist working at the intersection of nonviolent action, culture, and social change. She has written multiple books and novels, including “The Dandelion Insurrection” and the award-winning “Ari Ara” series, where the aspects of resistance, justice, and collective power through storytelling are contested. She serves as the editor of Nonviolence News and works as the program coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence. Rivera also sits on the board of the Backbone Campaign and on the advisory board of World Beyond War. Her work supports movements that use disciplined nonviolence to confront authoritarianism, militarism, and economic injustice.
Across her writing and organizing, Rivera focuses on building durable movements rooted in creativity and collective care. She brings historical perspective to present struggles while grounding resistance in hope and human dignity.
Visit her website: store.riverasun.com
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Layal Beyhum: Hello everyone and welcome to the Nonviolence Now podcast brought to you by Pace e Bene, where we explore the principles of nonviolence, where it all started and how it shows up in today’s digital world. Hello everyone and welcome to today’s episode on the Nonviolence Now Podcast.
I’m joined by Rivera Sun, who is an author and activist who has written numerous books and novels, including The Dandelion Insurrection and the award-winning Ari Ara Series. She is the editor of Nonviolence News and the program coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence. Rivera Sun serves on the board of Backbone Campaign and the advisory board of World Beyond War. I will be adding Rivera’s website onto our description. It’s Layal with you here today and I am super excited to be talking with Rivera on a very important matter, which includes the No Kings Protests alongside the series of movements that we are seeing across the U.S. Rivera, how are you doing today?
Rivera Sun: Thanks so much for having me on the show, Layal. It’s a real pleasure to be here.
It’s an exciting and tumultuous time in the world. And there’s a lot going on in terms of nonviolent action happening across the United States, so I’m happy to dive in and talk about that.
Layal Beyhum: Just for our audience to be aware of what we’re gonna be tackling today, it’s really going to touch on the movement that explicitly rejects the strongman politics that is defined within the Trump era. We are witnessing this rise of the No Kings movement, a political and cultural rejection of strongman politics, Trump era authoritarianism, and the myth that one figure can speak for the whole.
We’re also seeing across the country that, despite this authoritarian wave, people have been resisting in many new ways. From the mass ICE resistance in Chicago to coordinated boycotts of Spotify, Disney, and even US goods abroad, the concept of protests and the way it is manifested has been shifting. It’s gradually moving from banners to bank accounts. Economic refusal is becoming a language of conscience, which is translated towards a form of non-cooperation shaped by a generation that knows how power works and refuses to subsidize it. But at the same time, with this blend of things that is going on, we, however, see that this is equally an era of confusion. So we have authoritarianism on the rise, which is often being disguised as populism, fear, or manufactured grievances. People are stepping back from democratic engagement and returning to the fantasy of the savior figure, the strong man who promises order. Rivera, what does nonviolence mean in a moment like this?
Rivera Sun: Thanks, Layal. I think, you know, nonviolent action, first of all, has a very long history in the United States. I mean, we literally coined the term civil disobedience. We won our independence from Great Britain by waging some of the world’s most successful boycotts to date, boycotting the importation of British goods in the colonial era.
The Civil Rights Movement is renowned around the world. We actually won women’s suffrage before Great Britain because of the disciplined nonviolence commitment of our activists. And, you know, through subsequent waves of movements, we have shaped the forward edge of progressive politics in this country through nonviolent action. We can include in that things like the labor movement, the disability rights movement, the LGBTQ movement, all marked very strongly by participation in things like protests, boycotts, strikes, shutdowns, walkouts, civil disobedience, blockades. So we have an amazing tradition of this in the United States, and we are now facing new kinds of problems, not entirely separate from what we faced in the past, but with new flavors and new rapidity and speed with which they are dismantling even the semblance of democratic institutions in this country.
Layal Beyhum: I really loved the fact that you said things aren’t necessarily, they are changing but not that much. It’s just the different seasoning in the way things are shifting.
So within today’s shifting protest culture, which is somewhat decentralized, digital, unexpected and morally charged, what main differences have you identified?
Rivera Sun: So, within the resistance to the Trump administration’s authoritarian slide–where he is seizing absolute power, he is running roughshod over the law, he’s using regulatory agencies to retaliate against his critics and to withhold from prosecuting or punishing the misdeeds of his supporters–we are seeing different kinds of action rise up. We’ve used protest in the past as a very robust part of our democracy through which we exercise our First Amendment rights and we express our grievances, our outrage, our support for a solution in the hopes that Democratic senators and representatives and the president himself will hear this and listen to the will of the people.
As that falls on the deaf ears of the Trump administration, people are turning to the other end of the nonviolent action toolbox in which we’re not just asking for things, we’re not just making demands, we are withdrawing our cooperation and support from the very systems that are being used to oppress us. Some of these look like economic resistance. Some of it looks like direct resistance of ICE raids as they attempt to round up our migrant and immigrant neighbors. Some of it looks like public officials refusing to let Trump officials take over their branch of the federal government. And then this list goes on. We are seeing incredible widespread resistance and it is really quite a profound set of campaigns that are making up this anti-authoritarian movement.
Layal Beyhum: Rivera, from what you’ve spoken, you touched on several aspects. You touched on the economic boycotts. How about we start there and we’ll take it on moving forward. What kind of economic boycotts have taken place recently?
Rivera Sun: One of the major problems that we are facing in this authoritarian slide is the backing of those authoritarians by billionaires and their mega-corporations. One of the major tactics or strategies of resistance has been multiple campaigns of boycotts or economic resistance.
These calls started almost immediately after Trump was inaugurated. Some have been very broad and diffused, like boycott all the corporations. Some have been very specific and targeted. With the installment of billionaires and possibly (soon to be trillionaire) Elon Musk as the head of a government agency called DOGE that basically gutted our public services as well as USAID around the world, one of the major campaigns that rose up was Tesla Takedown, which asked people to stop buying cars from him because of this abusive behavior. They held pickets and protests outside Tesla’s showrooms and that really crashed the Tesla sales projections. They’ve cost them over a million dollars in car sales in the course of this campaign, and they are not giving up now either. There’s an ongoing part piece of this campaign, even though Elon Musk has withdrawn from DOGE. Actually, that was in question for a while, whether he would stay or whether he would go. I do think we had a direct role in getting him to go. We are seeing that the campaign is continuing on to try to stop him from becoming the world’s first trillionaire through some really shady practices at the Tesla corporation. That was one early economic campaign that was very rapid, very widespread, very targeted, and actually fairly successful in some ways.
I think the next one that came up that was really incredible was the #BoycottDisneyABC campaign, and we should talk about that because, to make a long story short, Trump leaned on our regulatory agencies and our media corporations to kick a comedian, Jimmy Kimmel, off the air–which is a gross violation of the First Amendment rights that we enjoy, of freedom of speech in this country, and the traditional separation of powers between the executive branch of the federal government and our free press. This was shocking to Americans, and the campaign asked people to very quickly cancel their Disney+ subscriptions and protest over this. Disney was the parent company of the smaller corporation that was involved in this. We saw a million and a half people cancel their Disney+ subscriptions right away within days. We saw shareholders starting to dump their stocks. We saw celebrities starting to speak out, people like the Lilith Fair, musicians saying they wouldn’t do their opening performance to launch their documentary with Disney over this. What happened was within 10 days, they reinstated Jimmy Kimmel.
This was really significant because had this moment succeeded and gone the other direction, we would have seen media company after media company after media company give in more and more to the abusive whims and dictates of the Trump administration.
Instead, the media is now in this position where they have to take seriously the will of the people. They have to take seriously the fact that We the People take seriously the rights of our country, the rights of free speech and a free press, and the rights and limitations that go with the presidential office.
It was a major victory for so many reasons and a good example of a very effective campaign.
Layal Beyhum: To prove its effectiveness, I mean it really transcended the US borders, it reached Europe, it reached the Gulf countries because boycotting Tesla was something that became so widespread in France. I lived in Paris at the time and people were also demonstrating on the streets calling to boycott Tesla.
We also saw similar marches taking place in Italy and some people actually chose to sell their Teslas in the GCC and went for alternative options from one sense to target Elon Musk and to say I don’t want to be part of this and equally to show some sort of solidarity with the Palestinian cause in parallel. We are seeing this intersectionality of this moral consciousness being strengthened through economic power. People are gradually realizing that their purchasing power is actually a power, it’s actually a weapon, which is not something necessarily was quite evident in the past and we cannot neglect the fact that digital media and alternative medias have been playing such a fundamental role in unifying our world with particular values and with particular foundations, which was also what has helped these movements replicate so massively. Rivera, how about you contextualize the Starlink hallmark? How are people organizing today? Is there a need for an icon? Is it truly just the alternative media and is it just happening randomly?
Rivera Sun: It is not random, but it is multi-pronged and decentralized. What we are seeing in the US is not one unified campaign calling for all these actions, but a whole set of different campaigns and groups of organizations doing their part of this. Now there’s a lot of longing in the populace, or at least part of the US populace, to see something like a large general strike to, you know, end this nightmare that we are experiencing once and for all, or at least flex our collective civil resistance power to stop some of the worst abuses that we’re seeing. We haven’t seen that emerge quite yet.
It is a tall order for a country the size of the United States. We also haven’t seen mass protests sustained over many days, as we have seen around the world, in Bangladesh, in Indonesia, in Morocco right now, in many other countries. What we have seen is these large No Kings protests, also the 50501 protests, and such as the May Day Strong, which are holding like 2,000 simultaneous demonstrations all over the country. For a country with a geographic size of ours, this is a very smart strategy. It means that people can get to their local protest wherever they are, and in fact, we have a history of this coming out of the Occupy Movement in 2011 that had 400 encampments across the country, but what we’re seeing now, which is new, is that even within one major metropolitan area or a big city with many suburbs, we’re seeing demonstrations being held in different districts or neighborhoods or in all the suburbs. We’re also seeing protests being held in areas that are overwhelmingly conservative, right?
But what we’re seeing is the people on the left-leaning side of the spectrum having the courage to stand up to their neighbors who disagree with them and say: this is seriously wrong. This isn’t about right or left anymore. This is about the question: do we want a democracy? Or do we want to live under authoritarianism? And what will you decide? So these big demonstrations are also at historic levels. We’ve never had so many people in the streets all at once. It’s very encouraging, but we also know that it’s not enough, right?
We need the other types of actions. We need this economic resistance we’ve been talking about. We also need civil disobedience and noncompliance and strategic noncooperation with the edicts of the Trump administration. We need municipalities and governors, which we are seeing within some of the states, to stand up to some of these policies and say: we refuse to adopt them. We refuse to implement them. We’re also seeing state governors coordinate alliances, like healthcare alliances, to make up for the gaps or the shortfalls that are coming out of the austerity measure kind of policies and budget items that have come through the Trump administration. So amidst all this widespread resistance, and we can even talk more in detail about some wings of this, there have been some notable trends. First of all, we have seen a lot of resistance from older people, actually, whereas traditionally throughout the world and throughout history, students are at the vanguard of many mass movements.
This wave of resistance has had a notable older generation turnout. Now, the students are not inactive. They were in the front line of Trump’s crackdown–malicious crackdown–on universities and targeting of particularly migrant and immigrant students who were involved in the pro-Palestinian encampments and organizing on campuses. They faced some very severe repression, very frightening things early on. And I think they’ve been regrouping. But just this past weekend, we saw demonstrations on over 100 university campuses against things like the threat to privatize student college loan debts or the Campus Compact in which Trump is trying to get all these campuses to agree to his anti-DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) policies, or pander to his worldview. And the students are saying: no, we need our institutions to stand up to this and to make our campuses and our places of higher learning a place that welcome all identities, that stand up for and protect their students, that uphold our rights to protest and that protect things like science and history, which are under assault by the administration, which wants to re codify white supremacy and patriarchy and erase people’s lives.
Layal Beyhum: It’s really ironic when an extreme rises, another extremely opposite alternative emerges. Let’s take a look as well at what just happened in New York. I think we can say a huge congratulations to New York’s recent mayor Zohran Mandani, 33-year-old, youngest ever Muslim immigrant to ever be mayor in American history in the city of New York.
How do you think this transition, his campaign at such a heated moment, how do you see this contrast? What logic is there behind this contrast emerging? And what kind of logic happens with this kind of reaction, knowing that New York is notably the place for the finance bros, it’s the place for the Zionist lobby, and it’s the place where Zohran’s campaign was very simple. It focused on affordability, introducing free buses, free public transport, and that was fundamentally based on taxing the ultra rich.
Rivera Sun: Zohran Mamdani’s campaign is right in step with the sentiment of the people, right? These are not actually highly controversial among everyday people. We want lower rents. We want affordable health care. We would love affordable or even free public transportation. And overwhelmingly, your average American wants to tax the rich. I mean, I think we really get, as a citizenry, that letting them get away with just keeping all this money–that they’ve largely gained through the exploitation of the average citizen and average worker–is grossly unfair. And it puts an unfair tax burden on the lingering vestiges of the middle class. They have the highest tax burden in the country. They are struggling financially to survive. They’re up against high cost of living. So even across the aisle, some of these policies actually do connect to your average citizen.
Now, the bad actors you just mentioned, they are losing their minds right now. I don’t know that the rest of us are all that sad about this meltdown. And it really marks a watershed about who we want to be as a people. What do our institutions and our civic governments serve? What is the country meant to do collectively for the people that inhabit that country? And arguably for all the people of the world, the way that we interact with the rest of the world? I think Zohran Mamdani’s campaign was very fresh, very in touch with the people. It also represented the besieged idea of a multiracial, multicultural democracy, something that millions and millions and millions of us believe in. And that the right wing has robustly denounced and attacked and vilified. So a vote for Mamdani was a vote for a future, a vote for not just a future, but a reality that we already inhabit and we want to be honored, upheld and celebrated.
And it was a huge morale boost for everyone. It also came amidst a wave of other electoral campaigns in which voters resoundingly told the right wing that they’re not happy with what they’re doing. We have seen this before in earlier elections. I think we will see this again in upcoming elections. You know, the Trump administration and the right wing MAGA crowd’s policies are increasingly deeply unpopular. And it’s a matter of citizens showing their dissatisfaction in tangible ways, and voting is one of them. And some of the tactics we’ve been talking about are also another one.
Layal Beyhum: There are so many intersectionalities with everything we’ve been talking about, which is something I find extremely enriching to the conversation because there’s just not one path to things. It’s just the interconnection of all different elements that make things not make sense and make sense at the same time.
To touch on Trump’s losing–or the Trump administration–losing its popularity, what is going on with the ICE crackdowns and what have people been doing to counter it nonviolently?
Rivera Sun: One of the things that Trump’s authoritarian regime rode into power on is anti-immigrant xenophobia. It was very popular amongst the populace, and in some ways remains fairly popular in disturbing ways. This is not unusual. We see the same trend across Europe, across many other countries around the world. It is a hallmark of authoritarianism and how it comes to power is deeply disturbing and is something we must all resist.
In the U.S., what this looks like tangibly is that the Trump administration has promised in its campaign–and has actually followed through on that promise–to unleash a immigration crackdown, to deploy ICE agents, that’s our Immigration Customs Enforcement branch. They come out armed, they’re wearing body armor, and they are increasingly lawless and breaking the law and doing violent assaults on people. They’re doing racial profiling, which means that if you look like you are an immigrant, regardless of your actual status, you are in danger of getting seized by them in broad daylight–maybe at your kid’s school, maybe at your workplace, maybe as you’re walking down the street–thrown into the back of a van and sent to a detention center where you have no contact with your loved ones, no contact with a lawyer, no contact with the outside. Your basic human rights are being denied. Oversight and inspection by the lawful agents of that, including by public officials and elected legislators, is being categorically denied at the gates of these facilities. So we don’t know what’s happening inside until someone gets released or actually gets to talk to a lawyer, which could take months. People are being unlawfully detained; 170 citizens have been detained. Twenty-two people have died within these ice facilities. People have disappeared–we don’t know where they are at all. We’ve seen extrajudicial deportations to places like El Salvador’s gulag system, where the Venezuelans sent there endured unfathomable tortures. So all of this from start to finish, much of this is completely illegal. The Trump administration is doing nothing to control and rein in its ICE agents.
Layal Beyhum: Rivera, if I’m not mistaken, beyond it being illegal, this is against the Constitution.
Rivera Sun: Some aspects of what they are doing are against the Constitution. And on top of all of this, one of the things that Trump has done that is highly controversial and arguably very illegal is deploy National Guard to certain cities like Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Chicago to back up ICE or to crack down on supposed crime. So this is a heavy militarization. We don’t do this in the United States. We don’t have troops on the streets like this. And it’s creating a feeling of being occupied, of being under assault, attacked, besieged.
Now, amidst all this, people have been incredibly courageous with nonviolent struggle. They have organized the local neighborhood patrols to keep their eyes out for when ICE shows up on the scene. In Chicago, they’ve handed out thousands of whistles. Whenever someone sees an ICE agent, they start blowing on the whistle and two things happen. If you’re in danger of being deported, you can get to a safe spot. Now we’ve organized private residences and businesses to uphold their constitutional rights, to deny ICE agents access to private areas unless they have a signed judicial warrant, which they (ICE) almost never do. And so we’re organizing people to say, no, you’re not allowed here.
The other thing that happens when the whistle gets blown is that regular citizens pour into the streets and they form a crowd of people between the ICE agents and wherever they want to go. And in many cases, they are walking them backwards out of the neighborhoods. They’re saying, nope, you’re not allowed in here. We’re not going to let you get by. This is just a fraction of the robust organizing that is happening all over the country to try to protect our migrant and immigrant neighbors, and also push back against this increasing violent racist assault on our communities. There are many, many stories of how the resistance is organizing, but it is one of the larger direct action campaigns that we have seen in recent years.
Layal Beyhum: We have also seen instances on social media, I have personally watched these, where public officials would take to the streets and call ICE out, tell them you have absolutely nothing to do here, or demand everyone to remain in their houses, lock their doors and simply to not comply to whatever it is that they’re asking.
I even once saw that ICE was pinning people down in an emergency room of a hospital and they ended up pinning down a US senator who speaks Spanish, she was screaming saying I am a senator and they just wouldn’t believe her or they just wouldn’t listen to her. After a while, they finally figured out that she was actually a senator and no measures were taken (against ICE).
Rivera Sun: Yeah, so multiple interesting things are happening here, some terrible, some heartening. First of all, we are seeing– among some of our public officials–incredible courage and commitment to the people. We had a raid, an ICE raid, that happened in this agricultural town, Oxnard, California, (correct: Perris, CA) and the mayor got on the public emergency alert system and put out a shelter-in-place warning to everyone. They said: stay home, ICE is in the area. That was an incredible use of a public safety mechanism to protect your citizenry–or your residents, if we have to be specific here.
On the other hand, we are seeing complete lawlessness from ICE. We’re seeing ICE arresting immigrants who have gone to their court hearings. They’re complying with how you’re supposed to go ahead and get your paperwork, and they’re coming out of these immigration court hearings and being snatched by ICE. We have Catholic priests now. Pope Leo actually got the Catholic bishops to organize a nationwide process of protective accompaniment, particularly to hearings like this. But in other instances as well, so that if ICE goes after these vulnerable community members, they have to go through the moral and spiritual will of the Catholic Church. This is unprecedented at this level. The Catholic Church has a long history of solidarity and has been very active in places like Los Angeles, in Chicago, organizing the demonstrations outside detention centers, but also doing mutual aid relief. Many migrants and immigrant families are in their houses afraid to come out the door. Faith-based communities are organizing to deliver food, to deliver medicines, to help the children come and go from school, to make sure that if a parent gets snatched, a child is not just left on the sidewalk as ICE is doing. This is what I mean by the robustness of this movement. It is everywhere, it is involving thousands and thousands of people, and it is keeping public attention on the fact that we have this completely out of control agency of armed, these completely out of control federal agents with no oversight from the highest powers in the land.
Layal Beyhum: Equally, the world is responding to it. So the Trump bully administration is not just doing this to the people inside the US. They’re also imposing insane amounts of trade taxes and tariffs around the world. But ironically enough, the world is choosing to not comply. And I think before we look at the world, let’s look at the neighboring countries, starting with Canada.
Rivera Sun: Canada’s resistance to US bullying and arrogance has been incredible. Surprising, right? We have a historically long, deep friendship with Canada, which Trump managed to blow up in a few weeks.
He did this first by threatening to make Canada the 51st state, which is incredibly insulting to everyone except the little Trump enthusiasts in Alberta province. It’s always a creative day with Trump. We never know quite what he’s going to do. And then he engaged in the tariff wars, which were not just on Canada, but Canada’s were especially insulting because of the close intertwinement of our economies. So Canadians didn’t take this lightly. First of all, they won a hockey game over us, which was a huge morale surge for them. But it started off the slogan, the hockey slogan of “elbows up” which is this idea that, you know, Canadians have this reputation of being friendly and like they’re going to roll over and they’re like, no, just as we win at hockey, we’re going to resist you. We have a hardcore edge to us.
They also have canceled–by the thousands, tens of thousands–their vacations in the United States. Traffic over the border has slowed to a crawl. They canceled, you know, trips to Florida where many people overwinter. They have stopped buying U.S. made goods. So there’s this incredible economic pushback to this idea that we’re going to bully them into compliance with whatever we want. And I do think that, you know, it’s a long road. It’s not an easy thing for them to do. There will be hard economic repercussions for them that they’ll have to navigate. But I think if they do that well, they will see that their country actually flourishes in a really different kind of an economy. And at the same time, they will protect their sovereignty.
Layal Beyhum: How do you see things moving forward?
Rivera Sun: We have some major challenges ahead of us, and the road through them is not entirely clear at this moment. We do have large scale organizations mobilizing these demonstrations, which are playing an important role in the ecosystem of resistance, heartening people, showing how many people agree with us, signaling to everyone else in society that we are a political force to be reckoned with. At the same time, to really resist an authoritarian regime like this is going to take coordinated nationwide resistance. I think we can do it.
I think there are some important major milestones and steps in terms of coalition building, collaboration, and preparedness for flashpoints that need to happen. Flashpoints would be things like Trump declaring a martial law, for example. Or one place that could be a flashpoint is the release of the Epstein Papers and how much we want to push on this to hold these politicians accountable. There are a number of things brewing. We’ve seen around the world that seemingly smaller issues can snowball into serious challenges to governments and regimes, notably Bangladesh in 2024. The students rose up to get a fair jobs policy in government hiring. And after the government cracked down with a massacre, it broadened into an anti-authoritarian campaign that was successful in ousting their authoritarian military-backed regime.
I think we have to be alert in this country for those kind of moments. I think we are going to need to see something like a general strike at some point. And there’s a lot of preparation that people can do. For a country of 350 million people, pulling off that scale of an action will take lots of organizing, lots of coordination and lots of preparation. So I keep telling people: we don’t know when the general strike will be. We know it will probably need to happen. So let’s prepare ourselves now. So that when the call comes, we’re ready. We’ve already thought this through.
Layal Beyhum: And are there entities that have been speaking about this? Are there closed-door meetings that are taking place? Are there open spaces where these discussions are happening? How can people join the movement?
Rivera Sun: Great question. I think one of the things that people should do is find a place to plug in and stay connected to that particular campaign.
If ICE resistance is your thing, give it your all. If you want to help make the next economic boycotts on Home Depot, Amazon, and Target surge to the next level, go find those boycotts. They’re fairly easy to find online. We’ll make sure we put the links in the show notes. And give of your time quite generously to these efforts, and know that we are resisting on all fronts, and all fronts matter to this struggle. Everything that we do stretches them thinner and thinner in how they crack down. Everything that we do slows down the next assault that they’re trying to roll out in their authoritarian regime. And so stay connected to wherever you want to plug in, and just keep your ears open. When we have a general strike, that’s really going to take off. You’ll hear about it, for sure.
Layal Beyhum: Thank you Rivera. Do you mind telling us a bit more about Campaign Nonviolence?
Rivera Sun: So, I work with the host-parent organization for Nonviolence Now Podcast. And that is a group called Pace e Bene. We’re a 37-year-old nonviolence organization. We have been around for a long time. We’ve supported a lot of historic movements. And one of the things that we do is we organize people to build a culture of active nonviolence. Not just this kind of resistance stuff we’ve been talking about today, but also many of the demands and the policies that are anchored in reducing harm and increasing well-being for the people as systemic and structural nonviolence. We also make sure that people stay connected to the importance of nonviolence in these times.
And I would mention that amidst all this U.S. resistance, our commitment to nonviolence has been notable. It has been strong. It has been consistent. It has weathered several direct challenges. And the people have continued to stay committed to it. And it is becoming a superpower in our resistance and showing a contrast to the violence of the administration. We did see this very dramatically on display in Portland, Oregon, when Trump threatened to send in the National Guards to back up his plans for ICE raids there. Instead of having a recurrence of the street brawls of 2020-2021 (which had been circulating as old footage on Fox News to try to justify–through misinformation–this crackdown on Portland), Portlanders showed up in inflatable frog costumes. They showed up in roller skates with their roller derby teams. They showed up with their singing chorus, with their salsa dance classes, with their fitness clubs, to show in the streets that there was no justification for an armed federal agent or National Guard crackdown on Portland. They defied the entire mass media apparatus that was pumping out these lies about war-ravaged Portland and saying: that’s not true. Come to Portland. See what’s going on here. There’s no need for this. And they have so far been successful in stopping Trump from setting foot in that city.
Layal Beyhum: There’s quite the thing about using irony, satire and comedy to stand in the face of authoritarianism. It has been such a smart and tactical move.
And if we’re just looking like now, I’m thinking about several instances that have happened around the world where the use of satire and jokes to demean this propaganda image or whatever breakdown of extremism that’s going to take place from the regime itself is being so easily rebutted with something so simple to the extent that the person standing on the other side feels so belittled and feels so much shame to the point where they turn around and leave. An instance like this happened in Donbass in Ukraine. There was a huge Russian tank approaching Donbass and protesters decided to simply sit down and say: smash us all if you can. They all used their human bodies as shields. They all sat there. I mean, the bulldozer could have easily just, you know, walked over them. But the Russian soldiers felt so belittled to the point where the tank actually went away. Can you imagine?
Rivera Sun: One of the dynamics of nonviolent struggle, which is very important for us to lean into as much as we can, is that we are here to re-humanize one another. Not just our own people, but those who are standing against us as well. And the reason we want to do this with creativity, with humor, with the surprising power of vulnerability (like you just described) which runs counterintuitive to certain logics of struggle and fighting, is that violence requires us to dehumanize one another.
In violence, we have to see people as the enemy. We have to see them as less than human. We have to even have them out of sight, out of mind, which is another form of dehumanization. In nonviolent struggle, we’re trying to re-humanize people, bring people back to our common humanity. At which point, it actually becomes harder for us to perpetrate violence on each other. So whenever we can show up with our full identities, such as our grandmothers knitting in rocking chairs, or if we are mothers who love our children. Or if we are, you know, people who like to show up in inflatable frog costumes and use that great leavening agent of humor to break through the illusion (which in the case of ICE agents and National Guards is very strong) that they are here to fight some kind of enemy. Right? If we can call that bluff and say: no, you’re not, we’re not here for that, you’re not here for that either. They have to step back a moment and say: well, what am I doing here? And I think this kind of questioning is very powerful in terms of slowing assaults and decreasing repression. It’s not a fail safe. It doesn’t work immediately in all situations. But the dynamic is common enough in nonviolent struggle that we should know about it and we should use it skillfully because it can be a powerful force on our side.
Layal Beyhum: This has been such an enriching conversation. We have one last aspect to tackle, and I think this is how we would really buckle this entire conversation, because our listeners might be thinking, all right, so much is going on. I have a lot of things going on in my personal life, but I do want to contribute, or I have been contributing a lot to the point that I feel drained, to the point that I’m tired, but I don’t mind being tired because now that I’m morally conscious and morally aware, I have to be doing something. There needs to be some sort of utility to my existence, and it is definitely to contribute to my community in one way or the next. So with this, moral conscious rises–which I’m a huge fan of–and it gives me the joy and the motivation to see what life has yet ahead for us, because it’s really restoring our faith in humanity. And, despite all of this surge of AI, we’re seeing this deep humanization. But everything comes at a cost. So how would we cultivate that moral clarity if we were to say it in that way without burning out? How can we in some sort of way develop a spiritual discipline for nonviolence, and how can collective tenderness sustain long-term resistance?
Rivera Sun: Great question. You know, we have been dealing with this assault under the Trump administration for 10 plus long months now, and it has been relentless, relentless. And many people are feeling the fatigue. Many people are feeling the overwhelm.
But one of the things that can sustain us is, first of all, remembering that we are a very large country. There are 350 million of us. If you need to step back for a minute to reconnect to your love for humanity, the love of the earth, the love for this vision of democracy that we have unrelentingly pursued through our entire history of the country against incredible odds and many, many governmental and elite regimes that wanted to deny democracy to most of us … If you want to step back to reconnect to that, do so. And ask someone to step in, right? Go to the next person and say: hey, I do this one task for a movement. I can help them with their newsletter each week. Can you be that person for a few weeks? Right? We need to invite more people into the movement. And when we’re feeling that fatigue, it’s often an opportunity to do so.
The other surprising thing is that, as Joan Baez, the wonderful folk singer said, action is the antidote to despair. One of the most despair-inducing things that we feel right now is just scrolling through the bad news, right? So, notice how many hours a day you’re doing that versus how many hours a day you are actively doing something for the movements, or actively doing something for mutual aid and taking care of your neighbors. Remember that we are simultaneously stopping the world we don’t want and building the world that we do want, and stay connected in equal measure to each.
I personally also find great spiritual and moral strength and inspiration from remembering how many people around the world have met these kinds of situations and prevailed–from the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace that stopped the Second Liberian Civil War and ousted a dictator in pursuit of democracy to the Chileans getting rid of the dictator Pinochet to the People Power Revolution winning democracy out of the clutches of their dictator to the South Koreans stopping martial law last December to the Pakistanis who protected their courts from a crackdown and ousted their authoritarian president over that. The list of these stories goes on and on. There are literally millions and millions and millions of living being human beings right now in our world who have met these kind of authoritarian regimes, risen up with civil resistance, and won back democracy. If they can do it, so can we. And our task is not to think if we can do this but when. Let’s do it soon and let’s do it brilliantly. Let’s do it with great vision and great love because the future is ours to win.
Layal Beyhum: Amen to that. It’s worth taking a second and really letting everything you just said digest and simmer in our thoughts and in our minds because it’s deeply true and exceptionally inspiring. Sometimes we really do have the tendency to get overwhelmed and to lose track of purpose. And the fundamental reason why we do this is love. Because we love life, we love peace, we love justice, we love living a decent life, and we are all equally entitled to it. So, as much as things get overwhelming, at the end of the day we have to be there for each other … but to be there for each other, it needs to start with ourselves.
There needs to be some sort of inner work. I mean, I’m in Lebanon right now and the electricity just cut off, but at least we can tend to think and look on the bright side. The weather is great today. We’re having this wonderful conversation together. To be able to maintain that calm, it really takes a deep sense of prayer and belief that someday things will get better. And this is, as well, another reason to get up and keep pushing towards everything you want to achieve or see in the world around you. Rivera, I’m going to leave you with the final reflection being: if the last generation marched for rights, what is this generation–in your opinion–marching for? And how do we keep it peaceful, powerful and purposeful?
Rivera Sun: I think this generation–and the generations standing together right now–are marching for a future for humanity, a future worth living. And I think the only way that we win that future is through functional democracies. So that is a core component of it.
You know, we want a world where our ecosystem is honored and respected so that our species is not in danger of this extinction. We want an economy in which everyone has enough, which is not unreasonable and completely achievable. We want peace, so nobody lives under the fear of bombs and guns and bullets, also completely achievable and something that people around the world are united for. So, I think we’re rising up for some very fundamental things, very basic things. And I think that we need to remember that it is not just here in the U.S. There are over 25 major campaigns worldwide against authoritarians, against inequality, against economic hardship. And so, people around the world are sharing these aims, ideals and visions for the world we want to inhabit. That is powerful.
And I think remembering that we’re in this together can be liberating and transformative.
Layal Beyhum: Rivera, I want to thank you so much for your time and for this wonderful discussion. Today we managed to cover different aspects of nonviolence, how satire and humor can counter it, how economic power is fundamental in this fight, in this plea for justice, and how unifying our goals and standing together in solidarity can actually make a huge impact. And most importantly how important it is for each one of us to contribute to something dear to them and at the same time take a step back and breathe.
If there’s one thing you’d like to leave the audience with, Rivera, what would it be?
Rivera Sun: Resistance is everywhere, nonviolence is at the heart of it, and we, when we work together, we will win.
Layal Beyhum: Thank you so much and I wish you all a great day. Thank you for joining us on the Nonviolence Now Podcast. We hope today’s episode left you feeling inspired.
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