It’s morning again in America. Federal agents snatch students off the streets. The White House boasts of banishing hundreds of people to a Salvadoran prison, ignoring the judges who demand due process. Head Start, federal science research, and domestic violence shelters await the chopping block. Hospitals turn away trans teens. Retirement accounts go up in smoke. The regulatory state unravels while corporate polluters are empowered to spew toxins far and wide. Powerful corporations and institutions abandon their meager commitments to diversity. Milquetoast Democrats barely object, fantasizing that they can win by playing dead. The Trump administration is repurposing antiracism into a grenade and lobbing it at the remnants of the welfare state. Across the world, the right wing is blowing up everything and incinerating the planet. White supremacy is apocalyptic for everyone.

Regular people are stepping into the fray, providing the varied, creative, noncooperative opposition to the neo-fascist administrative takeover that we need. A thousand people gathered outside the upstate New York home of President Donald Trump's border czar to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s abduction of a local family, leading to their release. Street protests and demonstrations at Tesla showrooms, part of a worldwide economic boycott of Elon Musk’s company, have resulted in a whopping 71 percent drop in its profits in the first quarter of the year. Twice as many street protests took place from late January to late March 2025, compared with the same period during the first Trump administration. The demonstrations are smaller than earlier iterations, having to rebuild after the demobilizations of the Biden presidency. While this era of resistance may lack the iconic novelty of the 2017 Women’s March, a more capacious and potentially unruly coalition is being forged — one more attuned to the problem of oligarchy, less inclined to exceptionalize Trump, and potentially more capable of nimble responses to cascading crises.

It’s no surprise that people are fighting back. An April poll of 2,300 registered voters found that 72 percent of the Democrats surveyed support politicians “who are calling on Democrats to adopt a more aggressive stance towards Trump and his administration and ‘fight harder.’” Instead, Democratic lawmakers are “pissed” about such pressure from the people they represent. Constituents in deep red areas have so opposed proposed cuts to social services like Medicaid and SNAP that the National Republican Congressional Committee chair told members to stop hosting town halls to avoid incensed audiences.

For 18 months, the mainstream media and leading Democrats refused to distinguish anti-genocide protests from antisemitism. Now international students who dared to criticize Israel’s death-dealing in Gaza face detention and deportation. We interview the Cornell graduate student Momodou Taal about his decision to leave the country under the threat of political abduction. These shocking acts of state repression are alerting more people to the ways Palestine has been used as a wedge issue by people for whom Jewish safety has been a useful pretext for a power grab.

Power grabs have come fast and furious in recent months and in multiple forms, from Musk’s chainsaw to the public sector known as DOGE to the rolling back of already inadequate renewable energy commitments and the cross-sector witch hunt against antiracism efforts. This issue details some of the ways people are resisting. We profile newly organized federal workers and learn from filmmakers, artists, and Afro-Brazilian Beyoncé fans who understand that culture, to quote contributor Maddy Clifford, is “essential to building the power to defeat fascism.” And let’s not forget that Los Angeles, a global center of cultural power, was literally ablaze earlier this year. Robin D. G. Kelley writes about recovery efforts in Altadena and the community’s vision for regeneration and new beginnings.

To effectively combat fascism, we need to understand it as an international phenomenon. The British writer Gary Younge considers how Trump and his brethren in England and across Europe fuel movements where “a belligerent sense of whiteness and national identity, beset by economic insecurity, is winning elections.” In South Africa, one such movement has gained steam after Trump condemned a new land reform law as racist against Afrikaners. We talk to Zandile Nsibande, a leader of a shack-dweller movement there, who explains why working-class Black people also oppose the law.

Here in the United States, we can understand the latest government and corporate attempts to roll back civil rights, antiracism, renewed labor militancy, and climate progress as part of a counterrevolution without a revolution, a reactionary response to the promise of the 2020 uprisings. Five years after the George Floyd rebellion, our abolitionist dreams threatened the status quo. Now the right — assisted, as ever, by some liberals — is on a deadly rampage to quash those dreams at any cost. Conservative extremists intend to burn down Washington, abolishing the Department of Education, dissolving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and waging a scorched-earth war on antiracism efforts. Poor Black and brown people are already suffering the most, but the consequences will be devastating for almost everyone except the supremely wealthy.

How can we make sense of this onslaught? We asked Black organizers, writers, and academics to consider the state of Black politics and what has changed since the breakthrough in 2020, when millions of people hoped for reparations and racial justice. What happened to the largest and most significant Black movement in two generations? What went wrong in the Black Lives Matter era? Only by answering those questions can we move forward. And we must.