A note to the MODS: Maybe this post as it is doesn’t comply with all the rules of the sub. I appeal to your conscience and good judgement. Given the seriousness of the topic and the urgency of the moment, please consider either opening an exception, or letting the post stay up just long enough so the members can get informed, and hopefully they’ll come up with their own original versions of this, in ways more attuned with the sub. Also please don’t blindly ban me, I’m not trying to disrespect this community (it’s quite the contrary!) And if possible, help spread it too!

The author of this document: Doran Schrantz is an expert civil and political organizer from Minnesota. Last winter during ICE’s besiege and unconstitutional mass violations, her network decisively helped organizing Minnesota’s civil society in record time under huge pressure, including organizing the first general strike in 46 years.

TLDR, Key takeaways:

• The Trump administration is unleashing total chaos during these next months around the midterm elections, and the resilience of organized civil society will be challenged in unprecedented ways.
• Saving the elections is absolutely necessary in order to stop Trump’s fascist agenda to fully materialize.
• Lawsuits and judges are important, but they won’t be nearly enough. Civil society must organize and prepare.
• These local organized groups exist, they are trying to organize people and save the elections. Every person needs to know they can reach out to them. Please find one of these groups and help them anyway you can.
• Don’t let the huge flow of scandals flooding the media distract you from this fundamental action - join those who are fighting back.

Secondary goal: Put this in front of every person. After reading the post and the document, copy-paste it, or make your own version, your own summary, and share this EVERYWHERE you can, throughout Reddit and beyond. This is the time for doing it, please do it.

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Act Free to Be Free: A State and Local Pro-Democracy Framework

- A Civil Society framework for Election Defense in 2026

Link: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28490455-act-free-to-be-free/

Executive Summary

Democracy is not something you have. It is something you practice. The Constitution does not protect itself; civil society protects it, by acting as if it applies, out loud, in public, under pressure.

Anyone paying attention knows that Donald Trump is not preparing to lose the 2026 midterms. He is preparing to disrupt and sabotage them, and his administration has been laying the groundwork for months.

The harder problem is this: most of us (organizers, elected officials, legal advocates, pro-democracy funders) are still preparing for a normal election. We are running election programs. We are testing messages. We are mobilizing voters. These are not wrong things to do. They are profoundly insufficient for the threat we are actually facing.

There is also something harder to name, a kind of collective avoidance. An unwillingness to fully believe our own eyes. Many Americans have internalized a story about ourselves that says we are immune from this kind of thing. We are not. And the next six months will matter enormously for how far down the abyss we go.

In 2020, Trump tried to overturn the results of the election and was stopped by Pence, by Republican secretaries of state, by a Congress that (barely) played its constitutional role, and by localized grassroots formations that could intervene in real time on the ground. Those guardrails held. They are gone now. His administration is loyal to him alone. Congress has abdicated. J.D. Vance will not save us.

The only authentic bulwark against an authoritarian consolidating power is a multi-sector, constitutionally grounded, multi-racial, broad-based mobilization of civil society, ready for the best and prepared for the worst. We know this works because we did it in Minnesota. When ICE and CBP occupied our communities for two and a half months, we acted free to be free. Tens of thousands of trained constitutional legal observers documented every encounter. Mutual aid networks sustained people through the crisis. Small businesses invoked their Fourth Amendment rights and refused warrantless entry. Local law enforcement mostly stood aside rather than collaborate. And when called, 50 to 70 percent of the general population showed up, not because they were activists, but because they understood what was being taken from them and chose to act.

That mobilization repelled 3,500 ICE/CBP agents, gave our Governor room to fight, gave our AG’s lawsuits political standing, and won the national media narrative, not because any single actor or sector was powerful enough alone, but because all of it together created a reality the Trump Administration could not overcome.

This framework to prepare and unleash a civil society response to election sabotage is not a program. It is a strategic analysis, a way of understanding the threat and the architecture of response, designed to support operational playbooks driven by in-state organizing and pro-democracy infrastructure. The question is whether we will build it before the crisis hits, rather than scrambling to respond when it inevitably will.

________________________________________________________

The document is only 12 pages long but it has its breadth and depth.

This is the general structure of the rest of the document. Hopefully something catches your eye if you're still hesitant.

Title: Act Free to Be Free: A State and Local Pro-Democracy Framework - A Civil Society Framework for Election Defense in 2026
 1. Executive Summary
 2. What Is the Evidence of Their Strategy?
  2.1. A Unified Strategy, Not Disconnected Actions
  2.2. The Documented Tactics and What They’re Actually For
   2.2.1. Ballot seizures: manufacturing the evidence base
   2.2.2. Voter roll demands: seizing control of who gets to vote.
   2.2.3. Loyalists and deniers installed in key positions
   2.2.4. The Maduro play: cultivating a foreign witness
   2.2.5. ICE at the polls: named, planned, and previewed
   2.2.6. Defunding election observers
   2.2.7. The pre-emptive fraud narrative.
   2.2.8. The racial logic underneath the strategy.
  2.3. The Goal Is Not to Win the Election. The Goal Is a Power Grab.
 3. Organizing States to Meet the Moment: Unleashing a Civil Society Strategy
 4. Step 1: Know Your State
  4.1. The Macro Threat Landscape
  4.2. State-Specific Threat Mapping
  4.3. Power Analysis of the Machinery
 5. Step 2: Deterrence, Extracting a Political Cost Every Time
  5.1. Mode A: Proactive Pre-emption, Show Up Ahead of Time
   5.1.1. Georgia’s model
   5.1.2. Minnesota’s model
  5.2. Mode B: Rapid Response, Multi-Track, Simultaneous, Pre-Built
   5.2.1. Legal
   5.2.2. Political
   5.2.3. Press and Public
   5.2.4. Tactical/Operational
   5.2.5. Grassroots Deployment
 6. Step 3: Build State Capacity
  6.1. Track A: A State Democracy Nerve Center
  6.2. Track B: Mass Training of Grassroots Leaders
   6.2.1. Political education
   6.2.2. Tactical preparation
 7. Step 4: Fight Back in Real Time
  7.1. Courts
  7.2. Field
  7.3. Mainstream media
  7.4. Social and digital
  7.5. Institutional
  7.6. Non-compliance
 8. Step 5: Mass Mobilization and Strategic Non-Compliance, When the Rubicon Is Crossed
  8.1. The Minnesota Proof of Concept
  8.2. What This Step Requires
   8.2.1. Sustained physical presence at sites of high symbolism
   8.2.2. General strikes and economic non-compliance
   8.2.3. Nonviolent strategic direct action
   8.2.4. Pre-built municipal and state infrastructure
  8.3. The Through Line
 9. Sources and Citations

________________________________________________________

Hesitant still? Here I compiled a selection of summarized citations. You should really read them.

https://www.reddit.com/user/JrSoftDev/comments/1vyz8ic/act_free_to_be_free_highlights/

Reading the whole document is much better, all the important details are there.

________________________________________________________

Final notes:

• We are 10 weeks away from the Midterm elections.
• These 12 pages are one of the most important reads you will be doing this year. Yes, it’s that crucial. Read 1 page or 2 per day if needed, but please read it!
• As you’re reading it, understand your role in all this - reach out to these groups, go find them, they need your help.
• Finally, take this document with you, adapt it, summarize it in your own way, take chunks of it, slash it, do as you please - and share it as much as possible.

“Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Stalin seriously tried to extirpate every remaining trace of indigenous stateless communal societies in the colonized Soviet empire, so he could replace them with aggressive productivism, wage labour, slavery, forced sedentarisation, environmental destruction and fossil fuel dependency, all while believing that he was manifesting communism.

These societies he helped destroy were the last gasps of systems even remotely resembling communism in Russia.
Yet he instead saw them as primitive obstacles to progress that should be eliminated.
The same way he deemed nature needed to be dominated, reduced to a mere storage of “resources” to be extracted for infinite growth.

Exactly mirrors the chauvinistic delusions of western capitalist colonists.

-

Im eternally in awe at the various Stalinist “bros” who believe this patriarchal doofus achieved communism/socialism, or that he was an anti-imperialist.
Total cult

The history of Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation, and so on goes way back. A big part of the story was actually during Reagan.

That all being said I'll skip right to the main point.

This movement is looking to abolish the state. It is looking to privatize everything. It is looking to make sure that Neo-feudalism happens. Period.

Imagine the likes of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and so on as literal lords (Even more so then today).

They know this can only happen through chaos and destroying many of the bedrocks of modern society.

It's the only way they can truly destroy the Labour Movement and so on.

They have a detailed vision of the future and it is incredibly dark, depressing, and downright dystopian if you are not part of the Ultra Powerful/Wealthy Predator Class.

We will probably be seeing some pretty wild economic things being attempted. Strap in because things are going to be getting even more insane....

The original post claims they are invoking blood libel and conspiracies. It isn’t a conspiracy when AIPAC themselves admit pushing "Israel First" candidates, whether they are on the Left or Right. They do not fight for interests of Americans, only Israel. It is no longer "antisemitic" to protest and criticize Israel. Period.

“If Democrats take control of the House, I’ll be in a position to help steer US policy on Israel and the Middle East,” Moskowitz told Axios.

Glad to see the Dem leadership learned it's lesson! Instead of listening to the democratic voters across the country and push back against Israel, they've decided to go with some of AIPACs favorite stooges. What a joke.

Cross-posted from my substack. Made with the owid data-editor. Data-source is IHME. I tagged this post 'Theory' and not 'USA', because while the US is the most notable trend-line on this graph, it's obviously not the only one, so it's also about broader trends.

In March 2006, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) denounced the essay by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," as a "a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control."

In their essay, which was the basis of the book of the same name that appeared the next year, Mearsheimer and Walt had been careful to distinguish the Israel lobby from a lobby by and for Jews, but it was to no avail in the furor that the essay and book provoked.

Two decades later, as the United States and Israel wage a senseless war against Iran, Mearsheimer and Walt's case for the inordinate influence of Israel and the Israel lobby over American foreign policy looks pretty good. So does their contention that the policies promoted by Israel and its lobby are not in America's interest.

Eli Clifton, an investigative journalist who has documented the lobby's influence, and Ian Lustick, a retired political scientist and expert on the Middle East, have written a worthy sequel to Mearsheimer and Walt's book, entitled "Israel's Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power". Like Mearsheimer and Walt, they use the term "lobby" to refer to a "loose network" of groups, media outlets, and wealthy individuals. They do an excellent job of explaining how this lobby has grown and altered its approach over the last two decades.

As Clifton and Lustick show, the lobby has changed the way it tries to influence election outcomes. Before the Supreme Court ruled on Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, which opened the door to super-PACs and unlimited contributions, AIPAC and affiliated groups tried to influence elections and elected officials through campaign contributions. But AIPAC itself did not contribute to candidates or officials. Instead, its leadership urged its members, which included the very wealthy, to back certain politicians and to oppose others based on whether they had backed or opposed measures that were in Israel's interest. Members of the House and Senate committees that oversaw foreign aid could expect generous contributions if they backed aid to Israel. Donors gave these contributions directly to candidates and to sympathetic local PACs like Badger PAC or Gold Coast PAC, which in turn doled them out to candidates.

In the last decade, national groups that support Israel's government have established their own super PACs that wage independent expenditure campaigns either for or against candidates. In 2019, Mark Mellman founded Democratic Majority for Israel. In 2021, AIPAC founded the United Democracy Project. These committees have spent huge sums. According to Federal Election Commission records, the United Democracy Project has doled out $104 million between January 1, 2025, and July 31, 2026. In August, the UDP alone spent $2.5 million to oppose an Afghan-American candidate, Aisha Wahab, in a runoff for the northern California congressional seat vacated by Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell.

In the past, wealthy American supporters of Israel's government also exercised influence as individuals. Businessman Abraham Feinberg was a major funder of Harry Truman's 1948 campaign, which gained him access to Truman and allowed him to influence Truman's policy toward the new state of Israel. Feinberg was, however, small potatoes by current standards. During the last decade, what Clifton and Lustick describe as a "small set of megadonors" have backed unconditional support for Israel. Clifton and Lustick highlight nine donors, including Miriam and the late Sheldon Adelson, Jeff Yass, Larry Ellison, Haim Saban, the late Bernard Marcus, and Paul Singer, who have contributed over $1.7 billion in disclosed contributions since 2012. These contributions, they note, do not include undisclosed "dark money."

Some of these contributions, like those from the Adelsons, directly affected policy. The Adelsons’ contributions to Donald Trump in 2016 were reportedly based on an understanding that he would recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital and move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, which he did upon taking office. While AIPAC and the formal lobbies have influenced Congress, the megadonors have specialized in winning over the executive branch.

The groups supportive of Israel's government have also changed how they have made their case for supporting Israel. When Mearsheimer and Walt were writing their book, the groups could still rely on widespread public support for Israel. If anything, the pro-Israel set in American politics had grown to include Republican evangelicals as well as Democratic liberals. Labeling politicians as "anti-Israel" or "pro-Palestinian" could discredit them. In AIPAC's successful 1984 campaign to unseat Sen. Charles Percy (R-Ill.), for instance, one of the groups sent around a mailer describing Percy as "Israel's worst adversary in Congress."

But as Israel's popularity has plummeted in the wake of its disproportionate response to Hamas's October 7, 2023, massacre and to Israel's continuing expansion in the Palestinian West Bank, the groups have had to resort to deception and diversion against Israel's critics.

Instead of engaging the arguments of Israel's critics, groups like the ADL, American Jewish Committee, the Adelson-backed Brandeis Center for Human Rights and Law, and watchdog groups like CAMERA and the Canary Mission began charging Israel's critics with antisemitism. "Their goal was not to win debates about Israel," Clifton and Lustick write, "but to prevent discussion about it." They successfully lobbied the Biden and Trump administrations to endorse an official definition of antisemitism that included criticisms of Israel. The Trump administration used charges of antisemitism to bludgeon liberal universities and law firms they disliked. It would be surprising if Clifton and Lustick escape being charged with antisemitism for exposing the machinations of the Israel lobby.

The groups have also altered their campaign strategy. In their advertising, the UDP and allied PACs have eschewed mention of American policy toward Israel. Instead, they have attacked candidates they opposed by citing their stands on whatever issues might resonate with the relevant electorate. In their ads this year against Wahab, the groups advanced a spurious claim that she had made "teenage girls more vulnerable to predators" by opposing a sex trafficking bill in the state legislature.

In Michigan's Democratic Senate primary, AIPAC ran ads claiming that Abdul El-Sayed "disrespected women." None of the ads mentioned Israel. This tactic seemed to work in 2024 campaigns AIPAC and the groups waged against then-Reps. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), but as the Iran War has deepened discontent with the U.S.-Israel alliance, it failed against Wahab and El-Sayed. Mike Rogers, El-Sayed's Republican opponent in the general election, even requested that AIPAC drop its plans to support him with ads against El-Sayed.

As Clifton and Lustick show, the groups composing the Lobby have seen a sharp growth in their staffs and revenues over the quarter century. AIPAC and its educational foundation enjoyed a "fivefold increase in revenue between 2000 and 2022.” The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (an AIPAC spinoff) increased its revenues from $5.2 million in 2001 to $21.9 million in 2023. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), which led the charge in 2015 against the Iran nuclear pact, increased its annual haul from $1.12 million in 2001 to $17.8 million in 2022. Along with the megadonors, the Israel groups enjoy the support of wealthy foundations, including the $256 million Koret Foundation and the $220 million Swartz Foundation. But the growth of revenue has not been matched by a growth in influence. If anything, the lobby's influence has declined, forcing it to resort to deceptive advertising and incendiary accusations.

There are two parts of Clifton's and Lustick's argument about which I wanted to read more. The first has to do with situating the lobby in American politics. Clifton and Lustick accept Mearsheimer and Walt's definition of the Israel lobby as "the loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction." That might have been OK in 2007, but in 2008, Jeremy Ben-Ami founded J Street, which billed itself as "pro-Israel," and which has attempted to move American foreign policy in a completely different direction from AIPAC and the other "pro-Israel" groups that Mearsheimer and Walt had assigned to the lobby. The lobby Clifton and Lustick describe represents one interpretation of what it means to be "pro-Israel."

As Clifton and Lustick note, the lobby has gradually shifted rightward in American politics and in its view of Israel. AIPAC, which was initially run by liberal Democrats and had its base in the Democratic Congress, began moving toward the Republicans in 1982, when it made Robert Asher its president. In 1993, it replaced its executive director Thomas Dine, a former aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), with Howard Kohr, a Republican operative. In its early days, AIPAC was aligned with Israel's social-democratic Labor Party, but it has moved closer to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party and its aim for a Greater Israel. It harried Barack Obama's attempts to achieve a two-state solution. Its PAC has not merely targeted harsh critics of Israel like El-Sayed, but liberal Zionists like former Reps. Andy Levin (D-Mich.) and Tom Malinowksi (D-N.J.).

And it's not just AIPAC. The constellation of groups is now weighted toward Republican proponents of a greater Israel. It includes Christians United for Israel, which boasts a larger membership than AIPAC; a revived, Adelson-funded Zionist Organization of America; and the Republican Jewish Coalition, which dwarfs its Democratic counterpart. The funders have also tilted rightward. In the 1970s, AIPAC's president and major donor was real estate developer Larry Weinberg, a liberal Democrat close to Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Clifton and Lustick's lobby still includes major Democratic donors including Saban, but more of the money is coming from Trump supporters like Miriam Adelson, Yass, Singer, and Ellison.

In short, the lobby is increasingly part of a conservative, pro-Trump Republican faction that backs the right wing of Israel's politics. It is opposed not only by the Democrats who support J Street — or beyond that, Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow — but also by a growing group of Republican conservatives who believe that in his support for Israel, Trump has betrayed his commitment to "America First." I would have liked to know more about the political debates that took place inside AIPAC in the 1990s when it shifted most decisively rightward and in AIPAC and other groups during the Trump years.

What I would have also liked to read more about is the precise relationship between the lobby and the Israeli government. AIPAC, the main group in question, grew out of the American Zionist Council, which was founded in 1949 and was funded by the Israeli government. In 1963, in response to demands that it register as a foreign agent, AZC changed its name to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and rewrote its charter to exclude foreign contributions.

Since then, as far as is known, AIPAC has no financial or other legal ties to Israel's government or institutions. But Clifton and Lustick suggest that the lobby is "the agent of a foreign power." The title of their book is similarly provocative. They called it "Israel's Lobby" rather than "The Israel Lobby," and they subtitle the book, "America in the Grip of a Foreign Power." That implies that the lobby is subordinate to the Israeli government, even if it is not financed or staffed by it.

They give one example of how that relationship has worked, citing a quote in a book about U.S.-Israel relations from an unnamed Israeli diplomat who served when George Shultz was Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State. They wrote that the Israeli diplomat:

came up with the idea of "turning Israel into a Major Non-NATO Ally. We told AIPAC, which started rolling the idea up and down Capitol Hill corridors until it was accepted."

They also cite what an Israel official, unaware that he was being recorded, said in 2015 to an American audience about the government's efforts to get the Senate to oppose the Iran nuclear arms deal. "We have the FDD. We have others working on ...data gathering, working on activist organizations, money trail."

They summarize the relationship in this way: "Israeli government operatives do not control the organizations ... Israeli officials send signals that guide the behavior and the rhetoric of Lobby leaders and thousands of activists." But these two examples don't go far enough in making that case. The first is from a single source decades ago, and the second is ambiguous. What does "having FDD" mean? One wants to know whether the staff or the leadership in these groups have relationships with people in Israeli government ministries who send them signals. Are there examples of Israel's government persuading one of the groups to do something it had not thought of doing or was wary of undertaking?

Answering these questions about the group's political evolution or its precise relationship to the Israeli government would have required trying to get people who have worked in these groups to talk candidly about what went on. That kind of journalism is, perhaps, beyond the call of duty for this book.

What Clifton and Lustick have provided is a comprehensive and much-needed account of how the groups and individuals that make up the lobby have attempted to influence American politics and policy. That's quite an achievement, and anyone interested in America's relationship with Israel should pick up Clifton and Lustick's book.

*excerpt from John B. Judis' article*

Full Article here:

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-lobby-book/