Category: Politics

By Posted on Posted in Activism, censorship, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics in Government, Ethics: General, language, Mindset, Peace and War, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Trying to make sense of these complex issues isn’t easy. It’s something most progressive Jews struggle with constantly. This is very much a personal piece, based on grappling with this situation since I was a small child. I don’t claim that this post speaks for anyone other than myself.

To complicate things, the words “zionism” and “antisemitism” have wildly different meanings to different people. I define zionism as the tenet that Jews, like other ethnic and cultural groups around the world, have the right to a homeland of our own.

The version of zionism I was raised with was an idealistic extrapolation of this principle that embraced the social experiments in Israel, such as intentional communities (notably the kibbutz and the moshav), women’s equality extending even to compulsary military service, and the commitment to agriculture and reforestation that would “make the desert bloom” as it had in biblical times. This happy, upbeat vision even had a soundtrack: happy, upbeat Israeli songs in Modern Hebrew such as “Tzena, Tzena,” popularized here in the US by the politically progressive quartet The Weavers in 1951.

But it was also rooted in the shameful slogan, “a land with no people for a people with no land”: a racist lie that ignored the thousands of years of Palestinian history dating back at least as far as the Old Testament battles with the Philistines, a lie that was used to justify the Naqba (also spelled Nakba)—the expulsion of tens of thousands of Palestinians from what is now Israel—and the continuing oppression of Palestinians both within the Green Line that marked Israel’s 1948 borders and in the West Bank and Gaza, which are still majority-Palestinian but have been under Israel’s control since the 1967 war.

Another myth underpinning the idealistic version of zionism is the idea that Israel, the lone democracy and only non-Muslim country in the region, was our democratic outpost, the only place championing human rights in a region that was openly hostile to Jews and to Israel: the little David surrounded by heavily armed Arab Goliaths who wanted to drive Israel into the sea.

The human rights champion part would be great if it were true. But Israel’s society is stratified. In 1986, when we first visited, there was still a clear prejudice in favor of Jews of Eastern European origin or born in Israel or Palestine; Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal were second-class citizens, third class for those from Turkey, Iran, and the Arab countries, fourth class for those from Africa—and the non-Jewish Arab populations, whether Muslim, Christian, or Druze, were at the very bottom.

The first two classes had integrated by the time we returned in 2014, but the rest of the stratification remained. Discrimination against Arabs and Palestinians remains rampant. From roadside checkpoints to destruction of their villages and orchards, long imprisonments, and more, Israel has fomented oppressive conditions for the populations under its heel.

This certainly didn’t start under Netanyahu, but he has made it much worse, culminating in the genocide of the Gaza war and its continuing aftermath.

Another strain of zionism is the post-Holocaust push for a Jewish homeland so there would always be a refuge for Jews, historically marginalized, ostracized, expelled, and murdered for more than a thousand years—a way of giving teeth to the “Never again” slogan that sprouted as the truth of those awful years started to come out. It was that experience that gave wings to the dream of a Jewish state.

The movie “Israelism” is a really good analysis of how we Jews in the US were raised to believe we were doing good for the world in our zionism—how good a job the propagandists for Israel did at inculcating these messages and beliefs across US Jewish society—even as our heroes from David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weitzmann to Golda Meir secretly embraced ethnic cleansing and driving the Palestinians out.

*                                   *                                   *

Antisemitism is prejudice against Jews. It’s an odd choice of word, because Arabs are also Semitic peoples. For progressive Jews, it is something completely separate from criticism of Israel or sympathy to the Palestinian cause. I claim a right to criticize Israel, just as I criticize the government of my own country (especially in its brutal and disgusting current incarnation). In fact, I’ve criticized and protested against every US president since Nixon, who was elected when I was eleven—yes, even Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden. They all did things I thought were wrong, and I wasn’t shy about writing letters or showing up for—or even organizing—demonstrations or lobbying my elected officials to change those policies.

But in the right-wing Jewish world, any criticism of the Israeli government, even the current genocidal one that by comparison makes even the horribly cruel Stephen Miller look relatively tame, is labeled antisemitism. Ditto any endorsement of the Palestinian cause. Somehow, these people can’t envision a world that has room for both Jewish and Palestinian homelands.

These would-be censors have gone so far as to add a rider to a military spending bill protecting Israel from boycotts. This passed the US House last September but, thankfully, as far as I can tell, has not been taken up in the Senate. We’ve also seen the punishment of pro-Palestinian students such as Lebanese Mahmoud Khalil and Turkish Rumeysa Ozturk, imprisoned and deported (Khalil) or threatened with deportation (Ozturk) over their criticism of Israel.

This ridiculous conflation of opposing the Israeli government with hating Jews goes back decades. In the 80s, I was in a group called New Jewish Agenda that advocated a two-state solution. For this, we were ostracized and marginalized within the mainstream Jewish community. We did not get speaking opportunities at synagogues. I am amazed to watch Jewish Voice for Peace emerge from similar marginalization in recent years to become the main US Jewish voice for Palestinian rights. I’ve been thrilled to see integrated Israeli-Palestinian peace groups such as Combatants for Peace and Standing Together get those synagogue speaking opportunities in the last 20 years or so.

And yet that right-wing narrative is so embedded in mainstream Jewish institutions that I know many people who are in pretty much basic agreement with me on so many other issues but can’t overcome their own Islamophobia or anti-Arab bias. They still see any criticism of Israel, especially from non-Jews, as antisemitism. They call NYC Mayor Sohran Mamdani, who constantly makes pro-Jewish statements and has Jewish advisors, an antisemite even as they paint their signs for the next No Kings march—because Mamdani has accurately called out the Netanyahu government’s war crimes, protection of anti-Arab extremists, and oppression of its own Palestinian population.

In fact, this post was inspired by a conversation on Facebook that started with me praising Mamdani for his comment in response to having higher poll ratings than Netanyahu among NYC Jews: “My focus is on delivering for each and every New Yorker, and I’m proud to be the mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population in the country” and pointing out that he has made many pro-Jewish statements in his time campaigning for and serving as Mayor.

That generated two comments from this camp. “I am not at all impressed with him. His stance on Israel and Jews is dangerous and deplorable.” and, in response, “I agree. Look, he’s entitled to his opinion about the Middle East. But keep it to yourself, Zohran. Your job is to make NYC a more liveable city. Focus on that and you’ll get great support. Stop talking about Bibi (who I dislike, too, but for different reasons).”

My immediate response was:

I have actively looked into a bunch of accusations that claim Mamdani is antisemitic. If I could find any, I’d immediately stop supporting him. However, what I find each time are the ACCUSATIONS of antisemitism rather than any actual speech or action that is against Jews. He has been loud and consistent in condemning Netanyahu and Israel’s present government, yes. But that’s not antisemitism. It is condemning genocidal, brutal attacks on Palestinians and Lebanese and claiming to do so in the name of all Jews. Well, I am Jewish and I condemn Netanyahu and his genocide. Just as I speak out as a citizen of the US against the brutal policies of this government and its insistence that the government only has to represent right-wing so-called able-bodied, cis, straight, mostly male Christian Nationalists—who are not Christian, if you read Christ’s words—so I speak out against what is happening in my name over there.
What’s even worse is the way right-wing Jews insist on conflating criticism of Israeli policies with hating Jews. IMHO, that leads directly to more antisemitism, because the haters say, “look, the Jews are telling us that all Jews support Israel’s government and that government represents all Jews. THAT leads to wildly negative outcomes. Ignorant people will ingest that sick messaging and then commit pogroms—just as ignorant people in the US right have attacked immigrants, trans people, and others who got on this administration’s bad side.
This post is a longer response.

 

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, media-general, Mindset, Peace and War, People Helping People, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Today should have been the joyous 250th anniversary of the world’s first modern-state democracy. (Yes, I know, the structure borrowed heavily from the  Haudenosaunee Confederacy.) Instead, it feels all-too-much like a family gathering at the bedside of someone on life support, someone who may not make it too much longer.

Democracy has taken such a beating in the year and a half since an open fascist, racist, sexist, anti-planet, convicted criminal, self-dealing monster—the greediest and cruelest president in history, a man who has used his office not for good but for personal enrichment and war against his perceived enemies that this anniversary feels like a deathbed watch. He so embodies all the reasons the Colonies left the paternalistic mix of oppression and protection provided by King George that Andy Borowitz wrote this updated Declaration of Independence. Here are the first three of his long list of grivances:

  • He has engaged in corrupt schemes to profit from his office, plunder the Treasury, and steal from the taxpayers.
  • He has desecrated the People’s House and the nation’s capital.
  • He has perverted the Department of Justice to take revenge on his perceived enemies.

But the patient—our democracy—while bleeding profusely and crying out in pain, is not dead. We are in charge of the miracle cure, and it’s called nonviolent resistance.

And this powerful and honorable tradition, which has brought down many governments and reformed many others, goes back thousands of years. The earliest documentation I know of is from Exodus 1:1-19, which tells the story of how the midwives Shifra and Puah disobeyed Pharaoh’s command to kill the Hebrew male babies, telling him that the women gave birth so fast, they couldn’t get there in time. Which is why, today, I chose to wear a t-shirt that proclaims, “Resisting Tyrants Since Pharaoh,” even though the protest march I planned to wear it to was canceled due to an extreme heat advisory.

In recent days, we’ve seen the impact of nonviolent resistance. We’ve seen the impact of mass protests like No Kings in the slow and grudging willingness to resist at least a few of T’s irrational and unconstitutional demands from both the Supreme Court and the Republican majorities in Congress—both of whom could have easily reined in T’s authoritarianism and attacks on democracy just by holding to the settled body of law, as they were more willing to do during his first term. It’s too little and too late, but it’s a sign that the voices of ordinary citizens are being heard even when those in power claim to ignore them.

We’ve also seen the impact of courageous individual actions taken at great personal risk, such as USAF Major Jason Watson, who has 23 honors and decorations in his long military career and was arrested on July 1, in uniform, for holding a sign saying “Impeach Convict Remove” on the steps of the US Capitol. His action could not only cost him his job (three years before retirement). He could also serve considerable prison time and forfeit his retirement pay. Fully aware of the consequences, he carried out the action anyway, in the long tradition of people like Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked the Pentagon Papers, vastly strengthening the peace movement during the Vietnam war) and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Also this week, we’ve had prosecutor Jack Smith finally talking about the cases against T that would have almost certainly resulted in another round of convictions had they been allowed to go to trial. Smith says openly and directly that he “will not be intimidated.” But if the treatment of James Comey, Leticia James, Mark Kelly, and others is any clue, it’s a pretty safe bet that he will be harassed in some powerful way by government stooges who act as if the First Amendment only applies to Trumpistas. The first link is to the video, the second, to a written summary.

These brave actions are perhaps even more important than the mass demonstrations—because they show raw courage and a willingness to sacrifice everything for what’s right. Many have died for these principles, both here in the US and elsewhere. To name four prominent non-US examples: Alexei Navalny in Russia, Salvador Allende in Chile,  Steve Biko in South Africa, Gandhi in India.

This is even more remarkable considering the level of repression this government has engaged in, including:

Yet, we persist. Millions of people in the US have participated in at least one No Kings march or at least one mass organizing call by a broad coalition of progressive groups (among them Public Citizen, MoveOn, Movement Voter Project, 50501, and several others) spearheaded by the Working Families Party. Voting turnouts are high, and many “safe Republican”seats have been switched. Numerous administration policies have been overturned or cancelled under public pressure, though not without doing substantial damage first. Activists from many groups have trained other activists in peaceful protest, nonviolent civil disobedience, finding levers to encourage noncooperation among the officials carrying out these brutal policies, and so much more.

And we have not only inspiration, such as the photos of protests around the country Robert Hubbell publishes daily in his Today’s Edition newsletter (usually a mix of sidewalk and park protests alongside “bridge brigades”displaying banners and signs from highway overpasses.

We also have road maps, such as…

  • An amazing list of 346 nonviolent tactics, the first 198 compiled by Gene Sharp in the pre-Internet, pre-Covid era, and another 148 compiled by Michael Beer of Nonviolence International. Personal note: I’ve been a fan of this list for years and have cited it several times. Two weeks ago, I got to meet Michael, chat with him as we hiked our neighborhood mountain, and have dinner with several others as we hosted a gathering for a mutual friend who was in from California. He told me he could have expanded the list again with many more tactics, but he wasn’t able to keep up with them.
  • The work of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, especially Why Civil Resistance Works (Columbia University Press, 2011). This scholarly study compares the success of violent versus nonviolent struggles and provides evidence to explain why nonviolent ones have both a higher success record and, usually, more lasting effects. The above link takes you to the book’s page on Bookshop.org, where your purchase supports the independent bookstore of your choice, instead of the billionaire who continues to be one of T’s most prominent enablers in the second term. I believe in using our economic power to help accomplish our goals, so I avoid shopping at the world’s largest online store, just as I do most of my searching and much of my web browsing on Ecosia.org, a nonprofit which plants a tree for every search (and I think another tree for every tab opened on its browser).
  •  Chronicles of the current struggle, the history of resistance, and of people you may not have heard of but whose contributions matter. A few among dozens: Waging Nonviolence, Choose Democracy, Black Lives Matter, Rebecca Solnit, Heather Delaney Reese, Heather Cox Richardson, Jessica Craven, especially her Sunday Extra Extra good news roundup, the aforementioned Robert Hubbell (link is above), Black History Stories, A Mighty Girl (feminist history), Josh Helfgott (LGBT and political news), Moments from the Past (Black and general history)…
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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, language, Mindset, People Helping People, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Headlining it “Never think you are too powerless to make a difference!,” I shared a post on Facebook about an elementary school teacher in the then-broke Chicago school system finding a way to fund that system by forcing the city’s utilities to pay their fair share, as required but not enforced under existing law.

Someone commented that this victory could never have happened today, because “The courts are all shills for the other side. They would look at her hand written ledgers and say she made it all up.”

This was my response:

You’re such a pessimist! I’ve been part of enough successful “impossible” struggles that I named my TEDx talk “Impossible” is a Dare! [To watch that talk, click the link above and select “videos” and then “event videos”].

Yes, we lose a lot. But we win sometimes. And if we choose not to bother because we won’t win, we certainly lose. Right now, I’m active on two fronts. The immigration justice work is depressing, because as long as the current federal government is in power, we will always be sticking a finger in the dike to try to prevent a flood: it’s not enough but it’s something. Once in a while, we even win some small victory.  Occasionally, as in the Minneapolis resistance, we win a big one.

I’m a lot more optimistic about the safe energy work, even after hearing the State Senator in charge of the energy bill basically say yesterday that he was going ahead with trying to repeal our nuclear protections.

Why? Because even if we lose the fight to keep the repeal out of the bill (which is likely), we are a long way from done. Any nuclear plant trying to build in MA is going to be confronted in every public hearing, and even if they get their permits, there will be people in front of the construction sites holding big signs and maybe even filling the jails in civil disobedience. There might even be a movement to withhold that portion of the electric bill going to the project.

One of those victories that inspired the TEDx talk was starting the movement that led me to the work I’ve been doing for about 25 years. A developer announced a plan to build 40 McMansions all the way up the mountain right next to a much-loved state park. It wasn’t the plan itself in the newspaper article that moved me to take action, but the quotes from local environmentalists who should have known better, all issuing variations on “this is terrible, but there’s nothing we can do.” When I saw those quotes, I knew I had to prove them wrong.

So I put out a call for the first meeting of Save the Mountain. I rode my bicycle around the neighborhood distributing fliers, announced it in local media, and spread it around to my friends.

From that first press release and flier, I maintained the mindset that we would win. I expected that 20 or 30 people would show up, maybe 5 would get seriously involved, and we’d make the developer’s life miserable for five years or so before our victory.

It was a pleasant shock when 70 people crammed themselves into our dining room, formed a core group of more than 30, assigned ourselves into committees—and won just over a year later. I attribute a lot of both our success and our rapid pace of victory to that success mindset. It was a game changer.

That activist campaign used everything I knew after 20+ years in marketing. After we won, I started pondering what lessons from the activist world could make a difference on the business side, and that’s how I started sharing the message that social and environmental good are business success tools. Four of my ten books are specifically about that, most recently Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. I’m happy to send you a PDF at no charge if you subscribe to my newsletter and then reply to the welcome message requesting one.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, language, Mindset, Peace and War, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , , ,

This post started on Facebook, as a response to replies to this article by an Israeli expat living in the US who’s an expert on genocide, which I posted on April 22. There’s a spirited discussion going on at that post, which you can read by clicking on this sentence. Be sure to read the replies to the comments, and the replies to the replies—and to make sure that you’re viewing either “all comments” or “newest” and not “most relevant,” which will block some of the responses.

What follows is a response to Richard, who defends Zionism as providing a safe haven for Jews in a world that never had one before, a place where Jews can seek refuge from the pogroms of their particular generation—and to Robert, the person he was responding to, who posted that trauma often begets trauma, unless there is a deliberate effort to “alchemize” it into something positive, and who criticizes Zionism as “designed by colonialist and brutally implemented, and is now more ruthless than ever.” It’s posted there as a reply to Robert

This post is a substantial expansion of what I wrote—with considerable updating here but not in the original response, including several links to back up my claims:

Robert, Zionism had two impulses: One was protection against antisemitic violence, as Richard so eloquently describes in his response to you. The other was the one we progressives were hoodwinked into believing: that this was the chance to create a utopia, a place where women and men were equal, a place to recover a desert “land with no people for a people with no land”—(as I was told at the yeshivas [Jewish day schools] I attended as an elementary school student and again in the meetings of the Jewish Student Union at my secular city-wide high school), a semi-socialist endeavor based on cooperation.

It’s a bit hard to find, but the movie, “Israelism,” has an excellent analysis of how that idealism didn’t match the reality on the ground. Something I don’t remember if the movie addresses is the way the land itself was colonized. In my childhood, we were always sending money to the Jewish National Fund to plant trees in Israel. But just as we didn’t know about the Palestinians forced into exile, we also didn’t know that JNF was ripping out native species to plant non-native pine forests that have not been kind to the ecosystem—and of course, the Israeli government frequently bulldozes Palestinian olive trees in retaliation for perceived injuries, while Israel also often narrows the land of the local Palestnians so the settlers end up harvesting stolen oil.

The racist plans of Golda and Ben-Gurion [Perplexity.ai search for “statements against arabs from David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir made before 1967”, conducted April 24, 2026) were not in the open, and neither was the reality that, ahem, this was NOT “a land with no people.” It was a land whose people had largely been kicked out in 1948. So you had the yin and the yang, protection from evil and creation of good. But the creation of good was largely built on a lie and certainly doesn’t match the cruelty of today’s Israeli government agains tthe people their parents and grandparents threw off their land. Yes, Palestinians within the Green Line can vote and even have representation in the Knesset. But they have been actively discriminated against the whole time, just as Blacks in the US have been. Housing and job opportunities are not equal. Open racism is common.

Richard, I’ve been to Israel twice, in 1986 and again in 2014. Both times, Dina and I have sat and talked with Palestinians—and on the first trip, we interviewed several leaders of different organizations within the Israeli peace movement. We stayed part of the time with a Palestinian family in the Galilee, part of the time with my right-wing settler relatives, and even in an Arab-owned hotel in East Jerusalem. And we visited the ultrareligious Yiddish-speaking branch of my family that had fled to Israel to escape the Holocaust. On the first trip, we stayed in a traditional kibbutz, and on the second trip, a kibbutz for people in the Transcendental Meditation world. My right-wing Orthodox sister made Aliyah [moved to Israel] with her husband and three of their four grown children, who have all had kids born in Israel.

So I have sat down and broken bread with people on all sides of the spectrum—including a man who was ten years old in 1948 when the soldiers told his family they’d be back in their homes in two weeks. That was not a planned encounter; he was conducting a one-person Occupy movement at the one surviving building (the Orthodox church) in his childhood village WITHIN the Green Line, which the Israelis had bulldozed and turned into a national park that he now had to pay to enter.

That interview was conducted in Hebrew and translated for us by our host, a Dutch Holocaust refugee. He and his fellow refugee wife were two of the three Jews in a Druze village (the third was an elderly woman we didn’t get to meet, the last of her line, whose family managed to stay during the Babylonian Exile of 70 A.D. when the Jews were thrown out of present-day Israel). He also took us around to meet a bunch of his neighbors. And this couple were also the custodians of the actual carob tree that sustained Shimon Bar Yochai when he was hiding out from the Romans in a cave, 2000 years ago.

To me, if Zionsm is to remain viable, it MUST “alchemize” into something far more humane—something that would bring reality to the Koolaid we collectively swallowed as the utopian vision that didn’t exist was spooned out to us through a wall of lies, false promises, and exceptionalism. In its current form, not only is it attacking others, it also makes Jews LESS safe around the world. This is in part because conservative elements of the Jewish community insist on conflating antizionism with antisemitism—a conflation that I utterly resist and abhor. This division within the Jewish community is not new. It goes back at least as far as the founding of modern Israel in 1948.

But most Jews who get interviewed on national newscasts—politicians and college presidents, assorted right-wing pundits—claim that any criticism of Israel is antisemitism, and punish anti-Zionists (Palestinians especially, but also groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace). At the same time, the current US government has weaponized false claims of antisemitism to extort money from universities and attempt to control college curricula and suppress student activities—while, ironically, waving a banner of free expression.

These actions from the government and from right-leaning Jewish officials give the real enemies of Jews something to cling to and organize around, and creates a climate where hate crimes against Jews are somehow seen as forgivable because those who attack Jews just because they’re Jews can claim that Jews themselves have said that Jews must support the Israeli government’s vicious actions. We Jews are stereotyped as suppoters of an evil empire, and thus fair game for whatever mayhem comes our way. Thus, they claim they’re just opposing the racist and brutal incarnation of Zionism as conducted by the Netanyahu government.

Netanyahu has given advocates of peace and human rights real things to worry about (e.g., the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and looking the other way when Israeli settlers attack Palestinian civilians in the West Bank or within the Green Line)—never mind that a huge percentage of Jews both in Israel (which has had a massive peace movement for decades, though it had to rebuild after the Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023) and in the Diaspora.

It’s important to note that many of these right-wing ideologues spouting this nonsense identify as so-called Christian Nationalists (not Christian at all, if you read Christ’s teachings, as I have). And many have a public history of antisemitism themselves. Here are some of the president’s anti-Jewish remarks and actions. And here are more of them (slight overlap) along with notes on antisemitism from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., FBI Director Kash Patel, and several other appointees.

I condemn the violence on all sides, including the violence of lies that demonize either people.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, censorship, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Innovation, localism/locavore, Mindset, Networking, Politics, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

One of the strongest local economy advocates I know is Michael Schuman, who publishes the Main Street Journal. Today, he took on the US president’s attempts to strongarm voters and rig the election. And then he noted that David Plouffe, a key advisor in Obama’s successful “out of nowhere”run for the presidency in 2008, has said that demographically, he can’t win.

Schuman says the way to defeat Plouffee’s defeatism is to get half a million Democrats to move to states where T narrowly squeaked by in 2024. North and South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana all went GOP by less than 150,000 votes. These states are contiguous with each other—so, if that shift happened, we’d have an entire new liberal REGION bordering progressive Minnesota on the east and with only a thin strip of the Idaho Panhandle separating it from progressive Washington to the northwest. And it’s worth remembering that as recently as 1979, George McGovern—probably still the most progressive major-party presidential candidate in my lifetime—was the more conservative senator from South Dakota.

I agree that Plouffe is wrong. And so are all those pundits who keep howling at us that the Dems need to move way to the right.

But I’m not convinced that Michael Schuman’s solution is the way to get there. First, it’s going to be very hard to find those half million people willing to start their lives over for a hope of shifting their new state blue. Second, it’s going to be even harder to coordinate that effort so that just enough people land in the right districts in each of the swingable states. Third, there’s no guarantee it will work. Republicans would get wind of it and work much harder to get their base out or to recruit new residents of their own.

Fourth, and most importantly, a new culture doesn’t easily impose itself on an already established culture. I am a New York City native living in a rural area, on a working dairy farm in Massachusetts. My neighbors have 600 cows. New YorkCity values and lifestyles won’t work here. You want to build quality relationships with your neighbors, and that doesn’t happen by storming in, taking over, and stomping on the opinions and values of your neighbors. I seasoned for 17 years in a small college town and learned to be “bicultural” before I made the big move to the farm. If the existing communities feel disrespected, there will be no progress.

Here’s what I suggest instead: The Dems could finally figure out how to talk about real issues that working people care about without negating the social equity and environmental justice pieces. They need a lot more candidates like AOC, Bernie, and Mamdani, who’ve shown that we can move mountains if we organize where people are, and we don’t need to sacrifice the justice agenda to do it.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Diversity, Ethics in Government, People Helping People, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice, Uncategorized Tagged with , ,

I sent a shortened version that fit in their contact forms with a copy to my own delegation, but here’s the entire letter. If it inspires you to write your own letter, Jeffries has a separate contact form for non-constituents.

 

Dear Leader Schumer and Leader Jeffries:

Please encourage your caucuses to terminate ICE funding and abolish the agency. The US managed without ICE until 2003. Democrats should be demanding to abolish it entirely—and there is wide public support for this: G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers, a data-driven Substack, says it could be as high as 70%. It is the only course that can be morally and politically justified right now.

As a strong Democrat, former member of my local Democratic Committee, advisor to several successful local candidates since the 1980s, business owner since 1981, and immigration justice activist since 2019, may I humbly suggest that THIS is the moment to take a strong stand. ICE has broken so many laws about due process, use of deadly force, profiling, overstepping its legal requirement NOT to do local police work, and much more. It must be held accountable NOW.

  • Public sentiment following Renee Good’s murder is strongly against this rogue agency.
  • The memo just leaked that ICE unilaterally tells agents they don’t need a judicial warrant to break down the door of someone’s home will add to the people’s fury.
  • Even before the murder, millions of people have watched ICE’s brutal violence unleashed against ordinary people with no criminal record on video, and thousands have seen it live on the ground. Just as nightly news coverage of the horror shifted public support away from the Vietnam war, revulsion against ICE has shifted the territory on immigration.
  • We’ve all been affected by this barbarism. Homeowners have lost their landscaping crews, restaurant patrons can’t get decent service because so many cooks and servers have either been taken or are too afraid to come in, businesses are shutting down because they can’t get workers. It would be difficult to find a US resident who is more than two degrees of separation from one of those abducted.
  • US citizens and members of registered Native tribes who have more of a claim on our land than we do have been taken, as have immigrants here legally. Often, they’ve told their captors they have proof, but the agents are far more interested in making quota and having the chance to behave viciously than they are about justice or fairness or legality. And refuse to look at the documents. Sometimes it has taken weeks for the system to release. To name just two among many high-visibility cases, Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Mahmoud Khalil were detained for MONTHS. In Abrego Garcia’s case, the government quickly acknowledged that his arrest, detention, and deportation to a hellhole prison in a country the government was expressly prohibited from returning him to was a mistake. Khalil was here legally until the government unilaterally revoked it with no notice and no appeal process AS THEY WERE ARRESTING HIM. He was obviously punished for his publicly stated and First Amendment-protected political opinions.

THIS IS THE TIME FOR DEMOCRATS TO BE BOLD. In the early days of Trump 2, I kept hearing, “where are the Democrats? Why aren’t they shutting this atrocity down?” ICE is out of control and has ignored its mandated obligations around due process in favor of unchecked violence against the people. “Taco Trump” backs down whenever he faces a real challenge. We’ve seen that many times and saw that again in today’s news of his capitulation on retaliatory tariffs against the eight countries that came to Greenland’s defense. We Dems need to step up and loudly and consistently say to the American people (and vote accordingly):

  • The administration is stealing your healthcare money to fund an illegal and morally reprehensible—and totally unnecessary war—against the immigrants and descendants of immigrants and Native people as well as those who have flooded the streets to protect the first group’s rights who make this country great.
  • Biden, Obama, and Clinton controlled illegal entry without resorting to this disgusting violence and intimidation.
  • It’s becoming more and more clear that Trump sees ICE as his private army that he can use to attack opponents and suppress dissent. We’ve even seen elected officials and faith leaders handcuffed and/or detained, even in cases where they attempted to exercise their right of oversight at ICE and CBP facilities.

These talking points are what is resonating. We’re hearing them from a few individual members of Congress, but from the leadership, we’ve heard far too much about trying to get along and pass some lame bill that barely impacts ICE or Trump. Don’t make the mistake of 2016 when our candidate tried to defend the status quo while the people were crying so loudly for change that they elected a racist, clueless monster because HE was calling for change while she was calling for more of the same.

The working class of the US is in pain right now. We need to tie those economic struggles to Trump’s policies on deportation and a bunch of other things. We need to be loud, strong, and consistent. We need to be making these points in the news media every day—including on Fox. And we can start by supporting the people’s demand to abolish ICE once and for all.

Sincerely,

Shel Horowitz

 

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Business-general, Consumer Issues, Democracy, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Green Business, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Innovation, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Mindset, Politics, poverty, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , ,

The first thing I do when I get online each morning is read a few things:

  • Poems of the day from Rattle, The Academy of American Poets, and Second Coming.
  • Heather Cox Richardson and Robert Hubble for analysis of the craziness in the US government right now and how people are fighting back.
  • Seth Godin for his deep insight, creative thinking, and common sense in the business and learning worlds, and news roundups from among The Guardian, New York Times, and/or Associated Press. (Disclosure: I donate to The Guardian and Associated Press)
  • Bob Burg, with his daily sermon on succeeding by treating people right, is often on the list.

Today, Godin opened my eyes to a completely new understanding of economics with one sentence:

The price variation in any market reflects not what the market will bear, but what the people in that market can bear to charge.

Brilliant. And I don’t think I’ve come across this anywhere else. It changes everything, doesn’t it?

He backs up his thesis with examples as different as the pricing of luxury handbags and concert tickets. He discusses how rock musicians who allow promoters to scale tickets out of the range of affordability for most of their fans pay a price in loyalty. And he talks about how that particular dynamic came out of outsourcing concert pricing to third party vendors like Ticketmaster who don’t really give a flying f about the fans as long as they can find enough who are willing to pay hundreds of dollars when they could just as easily spend $10 on a movie in the theater or nothing to watch it at home.

I’ve made those choices many times. I paid $6 in 1972, as a 15-year-old without a lot of cash, to see the Rolling Stones in Madison Square Garden. That’s only $46.24 in today’s money. Most of the time, if a concert or theater ticket is more than $100, I will choose a different form of entertainment. I think I have made four exceptions: The Who, my all-time favorite rock band that I had never seen in concert; tickets for touring Broadway productions of “Hamilton” and “Wicked”; also an actual Broadway show, but I’m not sure which one it was.

The three that I remember were actually worth the money and I didn’t regret spending it. But if I had spent that much for some of the mediocre concerts I’ve seen by top acts, I would have been furious, feeling totally ripped off. I saw many of them as either a concert reviewer or an usher, and thus didn’t pay to be ripped off. But it was frustrating even to give up an evening for something that wasn’t worth it and was charging a lot, even though I wasn’t paying. it was an insult to the fans.

But concerts are by definition discretionary purchases. Let’s look at price elasticity in other contexts that Seth didn’t mention—such as necessities.

Many have jumped in price far beyond inflation. Housing is one of them. But housing is something we have to have. Other societies consider housing a basic right. There is no homelessness problem in Cuba. Medical care and higher education, two other sets of services that have shot up in price here in the US, are also provided to everyone there. But they have an authoritarian government and they have deep poverty.

When I visited in 2019, the biggest complaint that I heard, and I heard it from almost everyone I met, is the inability of wages to keep up with the cost of living. Most workers make about $20 US a month. Doctors make $60 or $70. Our guide told us that the only reason his wife is able to afford to be a doctor is because he makes far more than the typical Cuban income from his clients’ tips. Sometimes, it is about trade-offs.

But sometimes, it’s not. Europe proves that decent, democratic governments can afford to treat healthcare as a right and keep higher education extremely affordable as well (housing, not so much). And they’ve also made huge progress in greening the economy.

China also has an authoritarian government. But the streets of its cities are crowded with relatively inexpensive electric cars (which is to say, still totally out of reach for most Chinese—but enough can afford them that massive traffic jams are common). This transition was quite conspicuous between my first trip to China in 2016 and my return in 2024. I rode in several of them and was impressed with how well they seem to be designed. Those stubborn trade-offs with their moral dilemmas.

Yet, for the past year, we have an authoritarian government in the US. The ugliness of its actions and policies would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

But unlike Cuba and China, the benefits are not accruing to ordinary people. This government is about benefiting billionaires and openly, blatantly lining its leader’s and his friends’ pockets while collecting undeserved and insincere tributes from those who understand that they can flatter their way to what they want, even if they want things that are absolutely at odds with the interests of us ordinary people.

Seth’s thesis is not the whole picture, though. It’s a both-and, not an either-or. Price sensitivity is certainly an issue in purchase decisions—but so is sensitivity to what your market could pay without feeling exploited and ripped off. In my own business, I’ve kept my pricing far lower than most, because that makes me affordable to the solopreneurs and microbusinesses I enjoy serving. I don’t want to live in the corporate world enough to charge too much for my preferred clients, and those huge corporations have in-house people who do what I do. I also recognize that money is one means to an end, and there are others—such as what I referred to earlier: volunteering or reviewing instead of buying tickets

It is also quite possible to make a good profit serving the bottom economic tier. I recommend two great books on this: The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits by C.K. Prahalad (out of print; that’s a link to a used copy) and Business Solution to Poverty by Paul Polak and Mal Warwick. That link takes you to bookshop.org, where your purchase supports the independent bookstore of your choice instead of lining the pockets of an oligarch who has aided and abetted the authoritarian government that has taken over the US.

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By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics in Government, Ethics: General, language, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

 From today’s NY Times email newsletter, “The Morning”:

President Trump does not seem interested in de-escalating anything in Minneapolis. This week, he said that one justification for the shooting of Renee Good might have been that she had been “disrespectful” to officers. Being disrespectful is a form of speech, though — one protected by the Constitution.

With Trump, it’s always a clue that if he accuses someone of bad behavior, he is doing/has done it himself. This is on the same day that news broke about Trump giving the finger and two F-bombs to a Ford employee who called him out as a “pedophile protector”—which the Times mentioned in that same newsletter. The link above is to The Guardian, because the Times uses paywalls.

But Trump showing the emotional maturity of a two-year-old yesterday is just the latest in a lifetime flinging insults at individuals, groups, and whole countries. This is what he said about racism in 1989  (followed by the response decades later by a Black commentator whose offer to Trump to tour Baltimore after Trump disparaged that city was declined). 1989 was also the year he ran a full-page ad in all four of NYC’s daily newspapers calling for the death penalty for five Black youths falsely convicted of rape and later exonerated.

And ever since he rode that golden escalator to announce his candidacy in 2015, it’s been a nonstop barrage. He mocked a reporter’s physical disability. He called Africa, Haaiti, and El Salvador “shithole countries” and called for increased immigration from Norway (a White-predominant country) in 2018 and—just a month ago, on December 9, 2025—not only admitted the comment (which he’d denied at the time) but bragged about it and added Somalia to the list. For years, his racism led him to deny that Obama was born in the US. If that lie were true, Obama would have been ineligible to serve as President. He repeatedly attacks and insults his opponents—Biden and Harris, of course—but even former loyalists that he drove away, including then-Vice President Mike Pence and one of his biggest loyalists in Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene. And his history of insulting and objectifying women—individuals as well as women as a class—is just as bad as his racism and ableism.

Worst of all, the vile xenophobic anti-immigrant rhetoric of his first campaign and term has not just increased. It has morphed into something truly evil: a war against immigrants that empowers a poorly trained, poorly vetted goon squad army of ICE and CBP agents to rain terror down on immigrant neighborhoods, whose residents are snatched from cars, homes, workplaces, and even their immigration court hearings—with zero due process and extreme violence—and sent to far-away gulags in the US and in countries where these victims have no connection. The conservative Cato Institute lists a multipronged attack on immigrants and citizens, from revoking legal status of people who came here legally to multiple attacks on the Constitution and due process. This is unlike anything in US history. It’s even more extreme than the detention of Japanese immigrants and descendants during World War II—for which the US has apologized and made reparations. Many US citizens have been caught in these sweeps and illegally detained. And much of what ICE is doing is a wildly illegal expansion of the powers they are chartered with. They are not supposed to take a police role other than in matters of illegal immigration (as I document in the Appendix, below). And they are not supposed to shoot people. Yet, Time Magazine reports today that  “Immigration agents have fired at or into civilian vehicles in at least 13 instances since July.” That would include the two people shot since the murder of Renee Nicole Good last week, in Portland, Oregon. At least four of those were fatal. Add to that the 32 people who died in ICE custody in the past year.

Trump’s hypocrisy takes many other forms, too. Examples:

  1. He’s praising protesters in the streets of Tehran even as he decries them in any state that voted for Kamala Harris.
  2. Killing more than 100 Venezuelan sailors (95 as of November when this article was written), then invading the country and kidnapping its (admittedly thuggish) leader on the pretext of interdicting drugs, but pardoning the biggest drug dealer of them all, former President Hernandez of Honduras. Of course, we all know and he hasn’t tried to hide that it’s really about the oil.
  3. Claiming to be a law-and-order president but inciting the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol and then pardoning even those rioters who physically attacked police officers.

Please let your Representative and two Senators in the US Congress know that you find this unacceptable and you want them to withhold funding from ICE until it starts obeying all relevant laws on search and seizure, delineation of responsibility, due process, and use of force. If they balk at that, defund the agency at least until Minnesota is allowed to fully participate in the investigation of Good’s murder—and then keep pressing for more accountability. And please share this post widely.

 

Appendix: Perplexity.AI Report on what ICE is and is Not Allowed to Do

I asked Perplexity, the AI engine I tend to use for serious research and factchecking, “In what situations is US Immigration and Customs Enforcement allowed or not allowed to act as local police do?” Because both AI and traditional search engines may or may not return the same results for the same search, and because AI results are not written by a human and therefore not subject to copyright, I’m copying the entire answer. Drawing on ten different sources including the BBC, the Massachusetts state government website, and the ACLU, it is quite illuminating:

 is a federal civil immigration agency, not a general police force, so it can enforce federal immigration and certain federal criminal laws but cannot simply “act like” local police enforcing state or local law. Its actions are further limited by the U.S. Constitution, federal statutes, and by how much local police choose or are allowed (under state law) to cooperate.?

What ICE is allowed to do

  • Enforce federal immigration law. ICE can stop, detain, and arrest people it has probable cause to believe are removable (deportable) from the U.S., and can place them in immigration detention and initiate deportation cases.?

  • Enforce certain federal crimes. ICE can investigate and bring cases involving immigration-related crimes like human trafficking, document fraud, and smuggling under federal criminal statutes.?

  • Make public?space arrests with probable cause. In public places, ICE may arrest someone if agents have probable cause the person is removable and likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained; they may also execute valid arrest warrants in public.?

  • Enter homes with judicial warrants or consent. ICE may enter a private home only with the occupant’s voluntary consent or a judicial warrant signed by a judge; an internal ICE “administrative” warrant alone does not authorize entry into a private residence.?

  • Conduct raids and surveillance within legal limits. ICE can conduct operations at homes, workplaces, and in communities and can use data collection and digital surveillance tools, subject to constitutional limits on searches and seizures.?

  • Request help from local law enforcement. ICE can ask local agencies to notify them when someone is being released or to hold a person briefly through “detainers,” and can enter formal agreements (287(g)) that deputize some local officers to perform limited immigration functions.?

What ICE is not allowed to do

  • Cannot enforce state or local non?immigration laws. ICE does not have authority to enforce purely state or local offenses (like routine traffic violations or most state criminal laws) unless a separate federal authority applies.?

  • Cannot enter homes using only an ICE form. An ICE administrative warrant (Form I?200/I?205) does not let agents force their way into a private home; without consent or a judicial warrant, they must stay outside or in common/public areas.?

  • Cannot force local police to act as immigration officers. Local agencies cannot be compelled to carry out civil immigration enforcement; they decide whether to cooperate, and many jurisdictions legally limit that cooperation.?

  • Cannot use detainers as binding orders. ICE detainers are requests, not mandatory orders; local agencies may violate state law or the Constitution if they hold someone past their release time without proper legal authority.?

  • Must comply with the Constitution. ICE arrests, searches, and detention are constrained by the Fourth Amendment and due process requirements, just like other law enforcement; unconstitutional stops, searches, or holds can lead to liability.?

How ICE differs from local police

  • Scope of authority. Local police are generalists enforcing broad state and local criminal laws within a limited geographic area, while ICE has a narrow subject?matter focus (immigration and related federal crimes) but nationwide reach.?

  • Civil versus criminal. Much of what ICE does is civil (removal/deportation) rather than criminal prosecution, so ICE can detain someone for immigration violations even when no crime is charged, which is different from typical local policing.?

  • Limits on cooperating with ICE. Many cities and states have “sanctuary” or similar policies that allow cooperation on serious criminal matters but forbid or restrict participation in routine civil immigration enforcement.?

When ICE and local police can overlap

  • Joint operations on crime. Local police may work with ICE when investigating federal crimes (for example, human trafficking or gang cases) where immigration issues also arise.?

  • 287(g) agreements. Under 287(g) “jail?enforcement” agreements, certain local jail officers are trained and authorized to perform specific immigration tasks (like issuing charging documents or detainers) under ICE supervision, but they still must follow constitutional and state?law limits.?

  • Information sharing and notifications. Where allowed by state and local law, police may share booking information or give ICE notice of a person’s release, even if they cannot legally hold the person longer just because ICE asked.?

Situations where ICE is more restricted than local police

  • Protected or sensitive areas (policy?based). For years, ICE policies limited enforcement in places like schools, hospitals, and churches, though recent DHS actions have rescinded some of those “sensitive location” protections; policy can be more restrictive than what the Constitution alone requires.?

  • Entering private spaces. Local police with state?court warrants for state crimes may enter a home to arrest a suspect; ICE, by contrast, often relies on administrative warrants that do not permit entering a home without consent, so ICE’s ability to mimic a home arrest by local police is more limited.?

If you want, a follow?up can focus specifically on how these rules work in Massachusetts and what they mean for day?to?day interactions with ICE.

 
 
 
 

 

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, media-general, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , ,

If you cringe when protestors describe the federal government as fascist, consider what happened today in Minneapolis, where a US citizen mom of a six-year-old was gunned down in cold blood by an ICE agent after she tried to escape when an agent ordered her (using the other f-word, according to some accounts) to get out of her car.

AP has about a dozen (somewhat repetitive) news stories about this. If you can stomach it, the BBC has the actual murder starting with an agent attempting to yank her car door open and continuing as she backs the car away and then is shot point-blank by a different agent.

Judging by this quote in the AP reports by Kristi Noem, “He’s been in situations like this before, and he certainly has been out there and followed his training today,” the feds know exactly who this terrorist murderer is. I hope Minnesota and/or Minneapolis law enforcement brings him to justice immediately.

I am APPALLED at everything the feds did in this totally avoidable and unacceptable assassination and the vile cover-up lies that they’ve been telling ever since—but I AM grateful for the mass public and local/state government outrage and their demand the ICE get the F out of the state. This is at least the fifth killing by immigration agents since T’s inauguration last year.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

Guest Post by Nina Amir

Promoting a cause or growing a movement often benefits from an atypical approach to activism. Instead of [editor’s note, as both a writer and activist: I would add “or in addition to”] marching, protesting, boycotting, or even building community with hashtags or forums, write and publish a book related to your cause. Allow your written words to create positive and meaningful change.

Most activists like to “do something,” such as participating in a march, joining a protest, writing letters, or fundraising for a cause. However, if you’re leading a movement—or want to further one —a book can provide a powerful boost to your other efforts.

Not convinced? Here are five powerful ways a book can support your cause.

 

  1. A book will attract new members to your movement.

When you launch your book and begin promoting it, you attract people to your movement who previously knew nothing about it. This is especially true if you share about the book on social media sites or with online ads.

With a book, you can shift your messaging from “join my movement” to “find out more about my cause here.” Plus, if you produce an ebook (rather than a printed book), you can give it away using free promotions. This tactic encourages people to download a digital book while it’s free, which can place your ebook on your publishing platform’s Top 100 (bestseller) list. That makes it more likely to be found by those interested in your movement. (You can run an evergreen free book campaign as well.)

 

  1. A book helps you promote your cause on a wider scale and to global audiences.

If you make your book available in markets across the world, global audiences discover it. As a result, your cause may move across oceans and continents.

Many book distribution services, including Ingram Spark and Amazon, offer global distribution. If your book is available in other countries, it only takes a few people sharing it in those markets to give your movement huge global visibility and an influx of international members.

 

  1. A book explains your cause and the steps required to achieve change.

It can become tedious to continually repeat your cause’s “pitch” to get people interested and involved. Additionally, you might find it boring to constantly tell others exactly how you feel they can make a difference in the world.

If you aren’t excited and passionate each time you share about your cause, your audience may feel your lack of excitement. And that low energy decreases the likelihood that they will join your movement.

You can explain all the details of your cause in the pages of a book…once. And you can provide readers with all the steps or ways to join your movement, including specific actions that result in change…once. You don’t have to continually repeat yourself. Simply, hand them a free copy of your physical or printed book. (Be sure to bring copies with you wherever you go.)

 

  1. A book can generate discussion about your cause.

People who join social media groups or forums enjoy discussions about topics they are passionate about. Your book can provide them with fodder for such conversations.

Readers love book groups. And those interested in a particular subject often join book clubs to discuss books on those topics.

You can create your book with this in mind. Include a chapter or appendix that encourages readers to form groups to discuss the book and implement the steps for creating change.

 

  1. A book becomes a unique, unforgettable “business card.”

There’s a common saying: “A book is the best business card” or “Your book is your business card.” Indeed, someone is more likely to remember you by your book than a business card that gets lost in their wallet or on their desk. Even digital business cards can be difficult to track.

Consider publishing a paperback version of your book. Then, offer a copy to anyone you meet who seems interested in your cause or knows someone who would want to learn more about your movement. People are less likely to lose the book, forget you, or forget to pass it along.

You can also get quite creative with a book. For example, you can leave copies for people to find at bus stations, on subway seats, or at the local coffee shop. You never know who might pick it up, read it, and join your movement. Or, better yet, someone influential might find it, read it, and share it in a way that goes viral.

 

What if you aren’t a writer?

As you probably realize by now, a book can prove quite supportive as you promote your cause. But maybe you don’t consider yourself a writer. Maybe you don’t believe you can write and publish a change-inspiring book.

Or you may want to devote your time to what you do best—activism. That’s okay.

You don’t need to be a writer to write and publish a book. Here’s why:

  • You can write a “messy” first draft to get your ideas on paper and then hire a great editor to polish your work into a publishable manuscript.
  • You can hire a ghostwriter to write the entire manuscript for you.

I don’t suggest using AI to write the book for you—at least if you want it to help support your cause. However, you could use AI to help you research the book or put your thoughts into a cohesive outline. If you decide to use AI to write the manuscript, rewrite, edit, and revise to make it “yours” or be sure it sounds like you. Of course, an editor or professional writer can help you create a final draft that is publishable—and doesn’t sound like AI wrote it.

Possibly, the idea of writing a full-length book feels daunting to you. In fact, your book doesn’t have to be long. You can write a short book—5,000 to 20,000 words long—and get your point across well and support your cause.

As for publishing, there are lots of experts who can hand-hold you through the process or teach you how to do it yourself. It’s not that hard. But beware of companies that charge a lot to help you self-publish, since most are vanity presses in disguise.

Don’t be put off by the writing and publishing process, especially if you believe a book could support your activism by providing a powerful educational and promotional tool. Instead, write a book that can change the world.

Do you believe a book could help you support your cause? Tell me in a comment below.

 

Nina Amir, the Inspiration to Creation Coach, is an 19X Amazon bestselling hybrid author. She supports writers on the journey to successful authorship as an Author Coach, nonfiction developmental editor, Transformational Coach, and Certified High Performance Coach (CHPC®)—the only one working with writers.

Nina’s most recent book, Change the World One Book at a Time: Make a Positive and Meaningful Difference with Your Words, will be published in January 2026 by Books that Save Lives. (Preorder it now and receive two bonuses!) Previously, she wrote three traditionally published books for aspiring authors—How to Blog a Book, The Author Training Manual, and Creative Visualization for Writers. Additionally, she has self-published a host of books and ebooks, including the Write Nonfiction NOW! series of guides. She has had 19 books on the Amazon Top 100 List and as many as six books on the Authorship bestseller list at the same time.

Find out more at https://ninaamir.com or https://writenonfictionnow.comFacebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail