The Restorative Power of Protest

If the Internet’s got you down, get out in your community.

Welcome to The Wayfinder, your guide to our toxic information environment. Have a personal question about disinformation, online safety, or digital harms? Submit it to my advice column here! Over in the subscriber chat, you can let me know what you’d like me to write about next:

I really struggled to write this newsletter this week. I know, I know. It’s only the second week of the rebrand. C’mon, Jankowicz, get your big girl pants on.

But it was a rough ten days. The United States illegally invaded a foreign country. Thousands of users per hour, including underage girls, were deepfaked into pornographic content by Elon Musk’s Grok. (Musk then accused the governments that encouraged X to follow their laws of “censorship,” now a word that has entirely lost its meaning to the right-wing.) And most brutally, a 37-year-old Minneapolis mother, Renee Good, was murdered by a paramilitary officer who appears to have let his misogyny get the better of him. The Trump regime then launched into a nationwide re-education campaign to convince us that a man with a gun is entirely powerless against a mom driving a car away from him at a few miles per hour.

All of these events weighed on me. I couldn’t get anything done; I felt lonely and scattered and small. What’s the point of the work I’ve dedicated my career to—helping people navigate their information environment—if two Americans can watch the same video and one sees a coward assassinating a fellow citizen while the other sees a hero eliminating an extremist?

I wrote 800 words on the famous Orwell quote—“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command”—and deleted them. I would not be doing my job if I simply admired the problem, and none of you need me to tell you that the Trump regime is lying (though these lies are blatant and ghoulish, even by this administration’s standards).

When a protest popped up on Mobilize.Us at a nearby park, I bought some foam board and paint and made childcare plans with my husband. I needed to be there.

It was nothing like the massive events I’ve attended on the National Mall. A few hundred people gathered in a parking lot at a busy intersection. At the same time, over a thousand other events were held around the country.

We heard speeches from local leaders, including a rector who shared a blessing that began:

May God bless you with discomfort,
at easy answers, half-truths,
and superficial relationships
so that you may live
deep within your heart.

We booed, we screamed, we laughed, we mourned—both Renee Good and the 31 other individuals confirmed to have died at ICE’s hands since January 2025, the highest number in more than 20 years. Passersby honked their horns and flashed thumbs ups out their windows. I talked with other moms in their 30s and protestors in their 60s and 70s about my cheeky sign. (On the back, it riffed on the Orwell quote—“Believe the evidence of your eyes and ears.”) I left feeling energized and much less alone.

Isolation is the poison that the Trump regime and the broligarchs that support it are counting on to win. In a 2023 Department of Health and Human Services survey, 29 percent of Americans aged 30-44 said they were “frequently” or “always” lonely, and 73 percent of those surveyed believe technology is to blame. When you are constantly ingesting a feed of horrible news, you can become convinced that you’re just one small person staring at a glowing box, that your action can’t amount to anything, that too few people feel the way you do. You keep scrolling. You become passive. You become meek.

So next time that loneliness starts to creep in, I challenge you to get out and do something in your community. As Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said in an interview before he returned to Russia, where the Kremlin murdered him in a hard labor camp:

“If they decide to kill me, it means that we’re incredibly strong. We need to use this power, to not give up, and remember that we’re a huge power…The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. So don’t do nothing!”

It’s a sentiment that applies to Good’s murder, too.

I put together a resource list so you can avoid doing nothing. Maybe protests aren’t your speed, but being a volunteer penguin caretaker is. Maybe you teach English to refugees, or you make a lasagna for someone in need. No matter what you choose, getting out and into community with your neighbors will be a reminder that no matter how much hate the other side harbors, there is still good in the world, and still something worth fighting for. 🧭

Resources for Community Engagement

These resources are U.S.-focused, but many other countries have similar services.

• Search for protest actions on Mobilize.Us; they include everything from rallies to postcard writing.

• Find volunteer opportunities on Idealist; who knows, maybe your local aquarium needs a volunteer penguin wellbeing monitor, too.

• Host dinners for friends and neighbors; Amanda Litman did this every week in 2025 and reports that it was a wild success!

• Sign up for My Civic Workout, a newsletter that sends you 5, 10, and 30 minute tasks to stay civically active.

• See if your local faith-based community has upcoming volunteer opportunities or social events.

• If you decide to monitor ICE activity from a vehicle, check out Kristofer Goldsmith’s tips. (He also has an anti-fascist book club, if that’s your jam.)

• Check out Meetup for less-politically-oriented opportunities. Having fun and taking breaks is a key component of fighting fascism.

Did one of your friends just get very into a new yoga studio that has some questionable views on vaccines? Submit a question to my monthly disinformation and digital harms advice column here!