On twenty-one months of opposition and what comes next, from the founder of American Opposition.
By Carlos Álvarez-Aranyos
On October 17, I went back to the steps of the Colorado State Capitol in Denver.
Twenty months earlier, on February 5, 2025, more than ten thousand people had gathered on those same steps to answer a call I had posted on Threads just ten days before. They came with cardboard signs and cold hands. They came not knowing whether anyone else would come. And then they looked around, and saw each other.
This time, we had asked people to come for something smaller and harder than a march: A folding table. A registration form. A written plan for when, where, and how they would vote. Three names of people who might otherwise stay home. We called it National Fucking Vote Day, and we picked that Saturday for a reason—it was the day the ballots arrived, and an unopened ballot on a kitchen counter is the most dangerous object in American politics.
We weren't alone. On the same Saturday, Indivisible, 50501, the ACLU, the American Federation of Teachers, Black Voters Matter, MoveOn, Voto Latino, and others gathered under the banner of No Kings: Vote Early. Nobody negotiated it. There was no summit, no committee assigning territory. A dozen organizations looked at the same calendar and arrived, independently, at the same conclusion.
I told the crowd that kings don't fear crowds. Kings fear the moment a crowd becomes a count.
I believe that because I grew up intimately aware of what happens when a count stops. I was born in the Dominican Republic in 1980, under the shadow of Joaquín Balaguer, an elected fascist who wore the mask of democracy for twenty-two of thirty years. In May of 1978, as the votes turned against him, his soldiers walked into the election board in the middle of the night and stopped the count. I'll come back to what happened next. It's the reason I do this work.
What follows is a reckoning, written at the threshold, about what worked, what it cost, and who still has to answer for what happened to this country.
THE PLAN
The Threads post wasn't an improvisation. It was the first executable step of a plan I had written in my head in the last week of January 2025, as Stephen Miller and Russell Vought began rolling out executive orders that had been drafted a year earlier. I had helped run the institutional defense of democracy in 2020. I knew, watching those orders fall, that the defense we had built for the first Trump term would not work against the second. The adversary had studied which levers defeated it the first time, and had come back with a plan to disable every one of them.
So we built a plan of our own. It had three phases, and it ran straight through this election.
The first was mass mobilization. Democracies depend on the willingness of ordinary people to appear in public, in large numbers, at the moment their institutions fail them, and to declare by their presence alone that consent has been withdrawn. The French do this. The South Koreans do this. The Serbs who brought down Milošević did this. Americans had mostly stopped doing it after the civil rights movement. We had traded the street for the internet, and it hadn't been a fair trade.
You can't rebuild that habit through exhortation. You rebuild it through practice. Twelve days after the first National Day of Protest, on Presidents' Day, the crowds doubled. 50501 gave the day the name that stuck—No Kings—and it traveled farther than any of us could have carried it alone. Indivisible brought its reach to Hands Off! in April. Veterans led the largest veterans' demonstration in American history on the anniversary of D-Day. In Los Angeles, I walked with a quarter of a million people past National Guard troops and federal snipers. By last October, seven million Americans were in the streets. By this March, more than eight million.
The second phase was direct action: Taking the energy of the crowd and aiming it like a spear at the people who could stop this and wouldn't. On September 2 of last year, fourteen hundred of us walked out of Union Station with Representative Al Green and knocked on every congressional office in a single afternoon, demanding impeachment. Within five hours, Hakeem Jeffries's staff called to ask for a meeting. It proved a theory I'd been carrying since the beginning: If we get in their faces, the numbers don't have to be that big.
So we kept getting in their faces. We marched to the gates of Mar-a-Lago with the Revolutionary Black Panther Party. We stood outside the cages at Broadview. We went to Cookeville, Tennessee—a county that voted for Trump by better than three to one—because you cannot save a country you refuse to visit. When tuberculosis spread through the ICE detention center in Aurora, we called an emergency protest, and Colorado's attorney general filed suit.
We pulled the economic levers, too. We called the first boycott of Tesla, and Elon Musk called me evil. We called for a boycott of Disney until Jimmy Kimmel was back on the air. We helped stitch together more than a hundred organizations in seventy-two hours for the Mass Blackout. And when the regime needed pictures of violent protesters to justify its crackdown, the movement handed it Operation Dildo Blitz instead. Authority that depends on dignity cannot survive being laughed at, and a population that can laugh for twenty months is a population that hasn't given up.
The third phase is direct campaigning, and it is underway now. American Opposition is a political action committee. We can't coordinate with candidates, but we can show up on their behalf. In June, in Denver, a twenty-nine-year-old named Melat Kiros, who was pulling espresso shots a year earlier, defeated a fifteen-term incumbent. Troy Jackson won in Maine. Establishment incumbents fell in New York. We said the energy wouldn't stay in the marches. It didn't.
THE WORK NO ONE SAW
The marches are what people remember. They were never most of the work.
Behind every National Day of Protest sat a strategic communications operation: The names, the flyers, the messaging, the coalition calls that ran past midnight, the press releases drafted on a kitchen counter. Our job, from the first day, was to serve as a hub—strategizing, branding, and unifying an effort that belonged to everyone. A friend watching it take shape last winter described it better than I could: It looks like a brand, operates like a campaign, and grows like a movement.
Behind every speech sat opposition research. On February 25, 2025, three weeks after the first protest, we launched the Trump Administrative Action Database, fed by firsthand accounts from civil servants working inside the government. It has grown into what is likely the largest organized catalog of this administration's actions anywhere in civil society. Most people will never open it. That's fine. It wasn't built for this year. It was built for the reckoning that comes after, because authoritarian regimes survive on forgetting, and we will not let this one be forgotten.
There was the scorecard, designed to measure the president against his own promises, number by number, in red and green. There was the congressional pressure: The lists of which members might break, the constituents who could reach them, the timing of the knock. There was the rapid response—a White House protest called with five hours' notice when the president threatened Iran with annihilation. There was mutual aid, when the Mass Blackout turned into a week of giving at Christmas.
And there was the quieter work of public address. In June of last year, with the National Guard occupying Los Angeles, I wrote a letter to Major General Scott Sherman, the commander of those troops. I addressed him by name. I thanked him for his service. I told him I had grown up under an elected fascist and knew where we were because I had lived it. I told him I hoped he saw the conflict between his mission and his oath. I ended it with the only honest sentence I had: "All I have is hope. I hope that's enough."
I wrote it because a movement that can't address its adversaries as people who still have a choice isn't a movement. It's an army. We didn't build an army.
Nearly all of this was done by volunteers whose names I can't share. For their safety, the identities of our team remain secret, with the exception of Tim Boivin, who has carried our media relations and much of our organizing on his back. Their results are public. Their names are not. That is the clearest measure I know of what it costs to stand up in this country right now.
THE PARTY THAT WOULDN'T FIGHT
I want to be fair to the Democrats, because many of the people inside that party are friends, and many of them are doing necessary work under conditions no one prepared them for. But fairness requires honesty, and the honest account of these twenty-one months is that the movement succeeded in spite of the Democratic leadership, not because of it.
On March 4 of last year, I stood outside the Capitol and asked Democrats to rise and walk out of the State of the Union. Don't boo him, I said. Defy him. They stayed in their seats. When a government funding fight demanded that they rally the public, they surrendered before the first shot was fired—an act of anticipatory obedience so complete it belongs in a textbook on authoritarianism. When the president bombed Iran without the consent of Congress, a senior Democrat called it justified. When Zohran Mamdani spoke plainly about the stakes, the party hesitated to stand beside him.
They found nuance where we needed clarity, caution where we needed courage, and sternly worded letters where we needed action. They kept pulling levers that no longer moved anything, and when the levers didn't move, they pulled harder.
Pulling a broken lever harder isn't a strategy. It's a category of defeat.
The institutions around the party did no better: Two major pro-democracy summits convened in the past year. Neither invited the grassroots organizers filling the streets. A hundred million philanthropic dollars went to the same organizations, strategies, and actors that helped get us into this crisis. The sector wasn't failing because of bad actors. It was doing exactly what it was built to do: Represent problems rather than solve them.
Meanwhile, the street delivered: Democrats won every race they could win last November—a historic first. The House voted almost unanimously to release the Epstein files after Republicans had blocked it again and again. Republicans are retiring from Congress in record numbers. Donald Trump has become the least popular president in history. The four primary impeachment resolutions filed in this term came from the movement in the streets—three from the Removal Coalition, one from Stand Up For Science, none from the professional class that claims to speak for us.
None of it was the party's doing. The congressional Democrats are, after all, still less popular than Donald Trump.
We've been watering the dirt, and Republicans have been getting mired in our mud.
WHAT IT COST, AND WHAT WE OWE
People close to me keep asking whether this has been worth it.
I've given it all the money I had, and I am now facing bankruptcy. I've been called a terrorist on Fox News and evil by the richest man in the world. I've been interrupted mid-speech in Miami by the founder of the Proud Boys. I've breathed tear gas on a frozen night in Minneapolis, outside the hotel where the commander of the federal immigration deployment was sleeping. In April, when the LAPD kettled us with gas and projectiles on National Fuck ICE Day, I escaped through the tunnels of the Los Angeles subway. I live with a steady stream of death threats, and I am physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausted.
I don't tell you this for sympathy. I tell you because millions of Americans have paid prices like these and worse—Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Keith Porter in Los Angeles, Dawson McCracken in Cookeville, the families separated at the border and the people who died in ICE custody. The movement is built on their sacrifice, not on mine.
And so it has to be worthy of them.
In May, we learned that organizations inside our own movement had accepted large donations from Reid Hoffman, whose name appears in the Epstein files and who acknowledged maintaining a relationship with Epstein after his 2008 conviction. We didn't name those organizations. We asked them to return the money. Some people told me that was a distraction, that we shouldn't hand MAGA an attack line. They had it backwards. A movement that exists to hold power accountable can't preach accountability and practice convenience.
We don't have to be perfect. But on the big questions, we have to be right.
The same honesty applies to credit: American Opposition lit a match. We didn't build the fire. 50501 has been the backbone of this movement from the start. Indivisible brought it to scale. The Removal Coalition, We Are The Flood, FLARE, Refuse Fascism, the Revolutionary Black Panther Party, the veterans, the National Handmaid Army, and thousands of local organizers carried it into places we never could have reached. When we say "we," we mean every single person who’s participated in this movement.
THE WINDOW
Winning on November 3 is necessary. It is not enough.
The window that opens the morning after this election won't stay open long. If we deliver a majority and hand it back to the same leaders who forfeited these past two years, we will have restored 2024.
And 2024 is what produced 2025.
The people who created this crisis will never end it. So our next task is to replace the Democratic leadership in both chambers with leaders who fought when it mattered. Leaders who marched. Leaders who stood outside the detention centers. Leaders who know how to bring effective lawsuits, how to put pressure on election officials, how to protest—and, above all, how to show up. Leaders who answer to the street because they never forget who they work for: The American people.
We are not asking for a seat at their table. We've already proven that the street sets the table.
The first front of what comes next is the system. Our direct-action infrastructure will move from the streets to the districts, from protest to pressure. The scorecard becomes a Democracy Scorecard: Every member, of every party, measured on every vote that touches our democracy, in real time, with their neighbors watching. The database becomes a briefing book for House Oversight and a referral file for inspectors general and state attorneys general. A Democracy Renewal Commission will push the reforms no one in Washington has had the stomach to pass. Those who vote with this regime and then go home claiming they had no choice will discover that the anger in the streets knows their address, and that we kept the receipts.
The second front is the culture, because the guardrails didn't fail because they were badly written. They failed because the country stopped believing in the project they were built to protect. That work—with students, with veterans, with young people watching artificial intelligence quietly close the doors their parents walked through—will take a generation.
To carry all of it, we are launching a new campaign in the same voice that carried us here. In September, we gave this country two words most organizations wouldn't print: Fucking Vote. They spread because they said out loud what millions of Americans felt in their chests. Some people are moved by a neighbor with a clipboard. Some are moved because they are furious and done waiting. A movement that speaks in only one register reaches only one kind of person.
Our post-election pressure campaign will be addressed to everyone who takes office in January, beginning with whoever asks to lead the Democratic caucus. Its message is as old as the Constitution: Our government is a contract between the people and those who serve them. They wield our power. With our consent. On our behalf. When they forget, we will remind them—at their offices, in their districts, in their primaries, and on the day they come back to ask for our votes.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
I promised to tell you what happened after Balaguer's soldiers stopped the count.
The Dominican people refused to accept it. The outcry was immediate, at home and abroad. Under that pressure, the count resumed. Balaguer lost. And for the first time in Dominican history, power passed peacefully from the ruling party to the opposition.
I grew up in the silence that surrounded that night—the silence of a people who had decided, without ever voting on it, that being quiet was how you stayed safe. I know the tingle in the spine when a conversation goes somewhere it shouldn't. I know the sound of a dinner table changing the subject on behalf of everyone. My father spent seven years as a political prisoner in a country that ran on that silence.
But I also know what broke it, once, in 1978. Not an army. Not an institution. A people who refused to be silenced.
I came to this country as a boy, and I chose it as a man. I fell in love with it the way only an immigrant can: Aware of what it is, and of what it could be, and of how thin the line between the two has always been. For twenty-one months, I've watched Americans stand on that line in the cold, in the heat, in the gas, and in the dark—and refuse to step back.
That silence isn't here yet. It's still possible to keep it from arriving. That possibility depends, more than on any strategy I could describe, on the willingness of ordinary people to refuse it personally: To show up, to be counted, to say what they think, and to keep saying it to the people who work for them long after the votes are tallied.
On the eve of the first National Day of Protest, I wrote a founding letter before anyone had heard of us. I ended it with a sentence I've carried ever since, and I'll leave it with you now:
Don't forget to be brave.
This ends when we end it. So vote. And then look every person we elect and in the eye and tell them plainly, without apology, in the voice we found in the streets: You answer to us.
