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Rebels & Rights

The Dispatch

Dispatches from the movement. Stories, strategy, and the occasional screed.

15 dispatches & counting

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How to Talk to Someone Who Disagrees With You (Without Losing Your Mind)

You've got a family member who shares conspiracy theories. A coworker who dismisses climate change. Here's the playbook organizers actually use. Deep canvassing. That's what it's called when trained volunteers have long, personal, non-defensive conversations with voters who disagree with them on high-stakes political questions — immigration, trans rights, abortion. Research on the technique shows it works, in the sense that matters most: it changes minds durably, not just in the moment. The conditions that make deep canvassing work are almost the opposite of what most political debate looks like. What Doesn't Work Facts, deployed as weapons. Studies, cited as evidence of your superior reasoning. Memes. Emotional arguments calibrated to win rather than to connect. Waiting for the other person to stop talking so you can make your next point. None of these approaches change minds at scale. Most of them entrench the person you're talking to. This isn't a counsel to abandon your positions — it's an observation about the mechanics of persuasion. People don't update beliefs because they've been logically defeated. They update beliefs when they feel heard enough to become curious. What Deep Canvassers Do Instead They ask about personal experience first. Before the issue comes up at all, they find out about the other person — their life, their family, their own experience of whatever's at stake. They listen without correcting. They share something vulnerable about themselves. They invite rather than argue. David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, the researchers who studied deep canvassing most systematically, found that a ten-minute conversation with a stranger using these techniques reduced transphobia by a measurable, lasting amount. A political ad didn't do that. A debate moderator didn't do that. A ten-minute human conversation did. The Hard Part The technique requires that you actually be curious about the other person. Not performing curiosity. Actually wondering what their experience has been. That's the part that's hard to train and harder to sustain when you're angry — when the stakes feel too high and the other person feels like a threat rather than a potential ally. Organizers who do this work talk about the distinction between "getting" someone to change their mind versus "being with" them while they do it. The first treats the conversation as a contest. The second treats it as a collaboration. You're not always going to want to do that. Sometimes people say things that are so harmful that curiosity isn't the right tool. Protecting yourself and the people around you comes first. But when the relationship is worth preserving and the risk is manageable, the research is pretty clear: staying curious is the most effective political act available to most of us on most days. The Small Things Listen more than you talk. Ask about their experience, not their opinion. Share yours without demanding they share yours. Find the human thing underneath the political position — there's usually a fear, a loss, a need for dignity that the position is trying to address. Meet that, if you can. Wear the shirt. Start the conversation. The rest takes practice.

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Rebels & Rights 2 min read

The Youth Climate Strikes Are Growing Up. Now What?

Greta Thunberg sat outside the Swedish parliament with a handmade sign in August 2018. By the end of that year, the movement she sparked had millions on the streets. Seven years on — where is it? The short answer: distributed, professionalized, and still working. The climate strikes of 2019 were a particular kind of phenomenon — global, youth-led, photogenic, and energized by the clarity that comes from not yet having had to compromise. Students walked out of school. Millions marched in cities they'd never previously organized in. For a moment, it felt like something fundamental had shifted. Then the pandemic. Then the political cycles. Then the grinding reality that the institutions being asked to change are very, very slow. What the Movement Became The youth climate movement didn't disappear after 2019. It evolved. Some of its leaders moved into electoral politics. Some into policy advocacy. Some into direct action with a sharper edge — blocking pipelines, disrupting fossil fuel infrastructure, facing arrest. Sunrise Movement, which organized much of the US youth climate activism, shifted toward electoral work — endorsing candidates, running canvassing operations, building political power state by state. The Sunrise endorsement became a meaningful signal in Democratic primaries. That's infrastructure that didn't exist before. Internationally, groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil adopted a more confrontational posture — disrupting art exhibitions, blocking roads, attracting enormous criticism and significant press coverage. The debate about tactics — whether disruption alienates more people than it activates — is genuine and unresolved. What Science Keeps Saying The IPCC reports don't get less alarming. The window for limiting warming to 1.5°C has effectively closed, by most assessments. What remains is a fight over how bad 2°C gets, and 2.5°C, and beyond. The young people who started marching in 2018 are now old enough to vote, run for office, and understand — in visceral terms — that they will live in the world their governments are currently choosing. That's a different kind of motivation than protest. It's the motivation of inheritance — inheriting a crisis you didn't create and can't fully escape. Where the Fight Connects Climate justice has always been intersectional in the Crenshaw sense — disproportionate harm falling on communities that contributed least to the crisis. Indigenous nations dealing with pipeline incursion and land theft. Low-income neighborhoods adjacent to petrochemical facilities. Global South countries that emitted almost nothing and are flooding, burning, and drying first. The youth movements that have lasted longest are the ones that understood this from the start — that climate can't be separated from racial justice, from housing justice, from the politics of who gets to live where and under what conditions. Rebels & Rights donates to Sunrise Movement and climate-justice frontline organizations from our protest and resistance product sales. The fight is long. We intend to be in it.

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Rebels & Rights 2 min read

The New Abortion Landscape: What Changed, What's Left to Fight

It's been over two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Here's where the rights stand, state by state, and where the fight goes from here. The Dobbs decision didn't create a post-Roe America. It created dozens of them — one per state, with the legal landscape shifting continuously as courts, legislatures, and ballot initiatives fight over what access actually means on the ground. For anyone trying to understand the current moment, the complexity is the point. Confusion serves the people who want to restrict access. Clarity is political. The Map Right Now As of early 2026, thirteen states have near-total abortion bans in effect. Several more have bans at six weeks — effectively before most people know they're pregnant. A handful of states have constitutional protections for abortion access. The rest are somewhere in the middle, with gestational limits, procedure restrictions, and legal ambiguities that shift case by case. Travel for abortion care has become the norm for millions. The burden of that travel falls disproportionately on people who are already most vulnerable: those without paid leave, those without transportation, those without funds for hotels and childcare and the lost wages that a multi-day trip requires. Meanwhile, providers are leaving restricted states. Clinics are closing. The infrastructure of reproductive healthcare — built over decades — is eroding in real time. What's Actually Working Ballot initiatives. In state after state, when voters get to decide directly on abortion access rather than deferring to legislatures, they vote to protect it. Ohio, Michigan, Vermont, California, Montana — all passed constitutional protections in 2022 and 2023. Kentucky and Kansas rejected bans. The strategy of building state-level constitutional protections is the most durable path forward available right now. Abortion funds. Organizations that pay for travel, logistics, childcare, and the procedure itself have stepped up significantly since Dobbs. They're underfunded, overstretched, and essential. Medication abortion. Access to mifepristone and misoprostol by mail has opened a channel that state bans struggle to fully close. Legal fights over this access are ongoing — the outcome matters enormously. Where the Fight Goes The federal level remains contested. A national right to abortion access — through statute or constitutional amendment — remains a long-term organizing goal. In the meantime, the work is state-by-state, case-by-case, clinic-by-clinic, and person-by-person. At Rebels & Rights, a portion of every sale goes to reproductive rights organizations — abortion funds, legal advocacy groups, and direct-service providers. The fight is too distributed for any single approach. So our giving is too. The slogan on our shirts isn't a memento from a moment that's over. It's a live demand. The fight continues.

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Rebels & Rights 2 min read

Sounds Gay, I'm In — The Story Behind the Slogan

Enthusiastic consent. Every time. This pride staple is for the joyfully queer, the loudly allied, and anyone who says yes first and asks questions later. "Sounds Gay, I'm In" started as five words written in marker on a piece of cardboard. A protest sign in the most direct tradition — handmade, portable, declarative. It showed up at three different marches in three different cities in 2025. Someone photographed it. The photos spread. That's how most of the best slogans work. They don't come from focus groups. They emerge from people who needed to say something and said it. The Politics of Joy There's a long tradition of treating joy as a political act in queer organizing. Not joy as escape from the struggle — joy as the struggle. The insistence that queer life is worth celebrating, protecting, and making visible isn't incidental to the movement. It's the core of it. "Sounds Gay, I'm In" works because it does two things at once. It claims queer identity with enthusiasm rather than apology. And it extends an invitation — to allies, to the curious, to anyone who wants to be on the right side of history even when they're still figuring out what that means. In 2025, with anti-LGBTQ+ legislation accelerating across state legislatures, and with trans kids in particular facing coordinated legal assault, that kind of emphatic, joyful allyship isn't soft. It's resistance. Who Made This The original image was drawn by an independent artist who has requested to remain anonymous. Their version — the hand-lettered, color-blocked design you see on this shirt — is the one that resonated. We license it directly from them, and they receive royalty on every unit sold. We're not in the business of extracting value from queer art. We're in the business of getting it on bodies and keeping money in artists' hands. Where the Cause Money Goes Ten percent of every sale goes to LGBTQ+ organizations doing legal work, mutual aid, and youth support. Right now that includes groups working directly on trans healthcare access, anti-discrimination legal defense, and emergency housing for LGBTQ+ youth who've been displaced from their families. We don't pick one organization and stick with it forever. We follow the need. As legislative attacks shift, the organizations doing the most critical work shift too. We stay responsive. Wear It Loud This design exists to be seen. Wear it in spaces where queer visibility is an act. Wear it in spaces where it prompts a conversation. Wear it on the way to the march, at the march, and at the diner after. Sounds Gay. You're in.

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Rebels & Rights 2 min read

What Is Intersectionality — And Why Does It Matter for Organizing?

You've probably heard the word. But the concept is more powerful — and more practical — than the discourse makes it sound. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" in 1989 in a law review article about a discrimination case involving Black women at General Motors. The women sued on the grounds of both race and sex discrimination. The court dismissed their case — partly because the company employed Black people (in factory positions) and employed women (in secretarial roles). The discrimination the plaintiffs experienced, the court reasoned, didn't fit neatly into either category. Crenshaw's insight was precise: the discrimination these women faced wasn't just racism plus sexism. It was something that emerged from the intersection of their identities — something neither legal framework, alone, could capture. The word she gave us was a tool for seeing what the existing system couldn't. Why It Matters Now Thirty-five years later, intersectionality is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It's in corporate diversity trainings. It's in academic curricula. It's also routinely invoked without the precision Crenshaw intended — used as a synonym for "complicated" or "involving multiple identities," rather than as the specific analytical lens it is. In organizing spaces, this muddiness costs us. When we say "reproductive rights are a feminist issue," we're being accurate — but incomplete. Reproductive access in the United States is radically stratified by race, class, geography, immigration status, and disability. A white woman in a blue city and a Black woman in a rural red state face the same abortion ban on paper. In practice, they face entirely different obstacles. Intersectionality isn't an add-on to movement work. It's not "and also remember marginalized people." It's an epistemological tool: a way of asking whose experience is centered when we define a problem, and whose is rendered invisible. The Practical Work In concrete terms, intersectional organizing asks: Who's in the room when decisions get made? Whose needs are treated as complications versus baseline requirements? Which communities are expected to wait for the "main" issue to get resolved first? Organizations that have taken this seriously tend to share certain practices: leadership structures that center those most affected, not most available; issue framing that names compound harms rather than isolating them; coalitions built on shared analysis rather than shared optics. The Combahee River Collective — a Black feminist organization active in Boston in the late 1970s — articulated what would become the foundation of intersectional politics before Crenshaw named it. Their 1977 statement remains one of the clearest articulations of why you can't separate political struggles: "We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity." Wearing the Politics At Rebels & Rights, we design toward this. Our products don't reduce political identity to a single cause — they're made for people who know that the fight for reproductive rights and the fight for LGBTQ+ safety and the fight for immigrant dignity aren't separate. They're the same fight, wearing different faces. The royalties from every sale go back to artists who've lived this analysis. The cause contributions go to organizations doing the unglamorous work of making intersectional politics practical — legal defense, mutual aid, organizing infrastructure. None of this is theoretical. It's just what it looks like when the framework actually works.

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Diverse group stacking hands in solidarity
The Dispatch 3 min read

What Is Intersectionality — And Why Does It Matter for Organizing?

You've probably heard the word. But the concept is more powerful — and more practical — than most people realize. Where It Comes From Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term in 1989, in a paper about Black women workers who experienced discrimination that neither "race discrimination" nor "sex discrimination" law adequately captured. Her insight: people hold multiple identities simultaneously, and those identities interact in ways that create unique experiences of oppression — experiences that existing legal frameworks made invisible. The classic example from Crenshaw's original paper: a group of Black women sued General Motors for discrimination. GM argued they couldn't have discriminated against Black women because they hired Black people (men, in factory jobs) and they hired women (white women, in secretarial positions). The court agreed. The Black women lost — because the law couldn't see the intersection of race and gender as a category worth protecting. That's not a quirk of 1989 law. That's the persistent failure of single-axis thinking in a world made of overlapping systems. Why It's More Than a Buzzword Somewhere along the way, intersectionality became a rhetorical punching bag — a word that certain corners of the internet treat as a synonym for "overcomplicated identity politics." That's a deliberate misreading, and it's worth pushing back on. Intersectionality isn't an ideology. It's an analytical tool. It asks: when we talk about a social problem, who does our analysis leave out? When the reproductive rights movement focuses primarily on cisgender women with financial resources and mobility, it leaves out the people most affected by abortion bans: poor women, women of color, rural women, undocumented women. When climate policy focuses on clean energy without addressing who bears the pollution burden, it misses the environmental justice crisis in frontline communities. When mental health advocacy centers on therapy and medication access, it often ignores how poverty, housing instability, and racist policing drive mental health crises. Intersectional analysis doesn't make these movements weaker. It makes them more accurate — and ultimately, more effective. What This Means for Organizing Here's the practical part. If you're doing any kind of organizing — whether that's running a mutual aid group, staffing a phone bank, planning a march, or building a coalition — intersectionality shows up in concrete choices: Who speaks and who's centered. If your march's main stage features only one type of person, your coalition reflects that. Who's invited to the table to help plan? Whose concerns shape the agenda? What demands you make. "Protect abortion access" is a starting point. "Fund abortion funds that serve low-income people who need to travel for care and don't have paid leave" is more specific — and more intersectional. The more specific you get, the more clearly you can see who you're actually fighting for. Who you treat as an authority. Frontline communities — the people most directly affected by the issues you're fighting about — should be leading, not consulting. This isn't just ethical. It's strategic. People closest to the problem are often closest to the solution. How you build solidarity. Single-issue organizing often creates fragile coalitions that collapse when circumstances change. Movements that understand how their issues connect to others — housing to healthcare, voting rights to criminal justice, immigration to labor — build broader, more durable power. A Note on Getting It Wrong Intersectional thinking is not a purity test. Every movement makes choices about where to focus, and those choices involve tradeoffs. The goal isn't to be perfectly all-encompassing in every campaign — it's to be honest about who you're centering and why, and to remain accountable to the communities most affected. You'll make mistakes. The movement has always made mistakes. The measure isn't perfection — it's whether you're willing to hear criticism, reckon with it, and adjust. Kimberlé Crenshaw didn't coin a word to police other people's politics. She identified a gap in how we see and address injustice. Filling that gap, however imperfectly, is the ongoing work. "If you can't see the problem, you can't solve it. Intersectionality just asks us to look more carefully." Where to Go From Here If you want to go deeper: Kimberlé Crenshaw's original 1989 paper is freely available online and more readable than you'd expect for academic writing. Her 2016 TED talk is a good 19-minute introduction. The African American Policy Forum, which Crenshaw co-founded, publishes ongoing research applying intersectional analysis to contemporary policy. And then: look at whatever you're already doing. Who is centered? Who is missing? What would it look like to include them — not as an afterthought, but as co-architects of the work?

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Youth activist holding There Is No Planet B poster
The Dispatch 4 min read

The Youth Climate Strikes Are Growing Up. Now What?

The kids who skipped school to protest in 2019 are now voting, organizing, and running for office. What happens when the movement enters its next phase? The Moment That Changed Everything In September 2019, somewhere between four and seven million people took to the streets in 161 countries for the Global Climate Strike. It was, by most measures, the largest climate protest in history. The movement was led by teenagers. Many of them skipped school to be there — which became both the point and the controversy. Greta Thunberg, then 16, addressed the UN the following week and delivered a line that will probably be in textbooks: "How dare you." It was the distillation of a generation's fury at being handed a crisis they didn't create and being expected to politely wait their turn. That was seven years ago. Those teenagers are now in their twenties. Some of them are in law school, some are running campaigns, some burned out and stepped back, and some are still in the streets. The movement they launched has grown, fractured, deepened, and transformed. What the Youth Climate Movement Actually Accomplished The strikes didn't stop the Keystone XL pipeline or the Amazon deforestation. They didn't produce a global carbon treaty. By the narrow measure of legislation-won, the movement's direct achievements are modest. But that framing misses almost everything important. The strikes shifted the Overton window on climate policy in ways that are hard to overstate. In 2015, Bernie Sanders was considered a fringe figure for putting the Green New Deal in his platform. By 2020, every major Democratic presidential candidate had a detailed climate policy. The political cost of dismissing climate change as a concern went up substantially. That's not nothing — that's the precondition for everything that comes after. More concretely: a generation of young organizers got trained. They learned how to run a campaign, manage media, coordinate across borders, deal with internal conflict, and move from protest to policy. The alumni of the 2019 climate strikes are everywhere in progressive organizing now — not just on climate, but on voting rights, housing, immigration, and democratic reform. The Tensions That Define the Current Moment Every successful movement eventually has to grapple with its own success. The youth climate movement is no exception. Speed versus depth. The urgency of climate change pushes toward speed — we don't have time for slow deliberative processes. But fast movements often make mistakes that set them back. The youth climate movement has had to learn, sometimes painfully, how to move fast without leaving communities behind. Protest versus power. Strikes are good at naming a problem and forcing attention. They're not designed to pass legislation or implement policy. The movement has been wrestling with when to be disruptive and when to engage inside the system — and how to do both without losing credibility on either front. Whose climate crisis. Early youth climate organizing was criticized, not unfairly, for centering young white activists in wealthy countries while the communities facing the worst climate impacts — in the Global South, in frontline communities in the U.S. — were often absent from the main stage. That criticism has been heard. Environmental justice — the intersection of climate, race, and economic inequality — is now central to the movement's politics in ways it wasn't in 2019. What "Growing Up" Looks Like The teenagers who started this movement are now young adults who can vote, donate, run for office, and run organizations. Some of them are doing exactly that. Sunrise Movement, which grew out of the youth climate strikes, has evolved from a protest organization to a political machine — endorsing and canvassing for candidates, training organizers, and building long-term power in electoral politics. Climate Cabinet, a newer organization, works specifically on connecting climate policy to local and state politics, where a huge amount of the actual work gets done. The Global Climate Strike still happens every September — though the crowds are smaller than 2019. Some interpret that as the movement losing steam. Others argue it reflects a shift from symbolic protest to concrete political work, which is how movements evolve when they mature. What Comes Next The next decade of climate politics will be won or lost in legislatures and boardrooms and voting booths, not primarily in the streets. That's not a defeat for the movement that started with strikes — it's the natural trajectory of successful organizing. The people who learned to organize in 2019 are going to be doing this work for the next forty years. They're angry, they're capable, and increasingly, they have real power. If you want to support them: vote in every election, including local ones. Support organizations doing frontline environmental justice work. And when the next generation of kids skips school to march, remember that you were probably told their tactics were too disruptive too.

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Two women in conversation — productive dialogue
The Dispatch 3 min read

How to Talk to Someone Who Disagrees With You (Without Losing Your Mind)

The research on what actually changes minds — and what makes things worse. A guide for anyone who has ever left a dinner table in despair. The Bad News First Most of the things people instinctively do when trying to change someone's mind don't work. Statistics make people defensive. Fact-checking in the moment tends to produce the "backfire effect" — where people double down on wrong beliefs when corrected. Anger, however justified, shuts down the part of the brain responsible for updating beliefs. Long lectures produce resentment, not conversion. If you've been in a political conversation that felt like talking to a wall, this is probably why. What Actually Works: The Research The good news is that political persuasion researchers have spent decades studying what actually changes minds, and they have some concrete answers. Deep canvassing. This technique, developed by the Los Angeles LGBT Center and now used widely in progressive organizing, involves having extended (10–20 minute), non-confrontational conversations that focus on personal narratives rather than arguments. Studies have found it produces durable attitude change — the effects persist months later. The key elements: genuine curiosity about the other person's experience, sharing your own personal story, and not trying to "win." Motivational interviewing. Originally developed in addiction counseling, MI is built on the insight that people resist being told what to do but are often open to exploring their own ambivalence. Rather than making the case for change, you ask questions that help the other person articulate their own reasons for it. It requires genuine listening and suppressing the urge to argue. Finding shared values before disagreeing on specifics. Most political conflicts are actually conflicts about how to achieve shared values, not the values themselves. Most conservatives and most liberals want families to be safe, children to be healthy, and economies to be functional. They disagree intensely about how to achieve those things. Starting from shared values before moving to disagreements changes the entire tone of the conversation. Practical Tactics Ask more than you tell. "What made you feel that way?" gets further than "that's wrong because..." Acknowledge what's true in what they're saying. Most political positions contain at least a kernel of legitimate concern. Finding and acknowledging it — genuinely, not condescendingly — disarms defensiveness. Share your personal story. Abstract arguments bounce off people. Personal stories that explain why you care about something reach them differently. "I care about this because my mother couldn't afford healthcare" lands differently than a PowerPoint about the uninsured. Don't try to win the conversation. If you go in trying to defeat someone, they'll sense it and shut down. Go in trying to understand them — genuinely. You might not change their mind. You might change your own. Both are valuable. Know when to disengage. Not every conversation is worth having. Someone who is arguing in bad faith, who gets off on provoking you, or who is using hateful rhetoric is not a persuasion project — they're a boundary question. It's okay to say "I don't think this conversation is going anywhere useful" and leave the table. The Longer Game Individual conversations rarely produce dramatic change. What they do is move people slightly — and over time, in combination with other inputs, slightly becomes significantly. The research on how people change their minds politically is humbling: it rarely happens in a single confrontation. It happens gradually, when someone accumulates enough experiences, conversations, and information to make a shift feel safe. Your job, in any given conversation, isn't to get someone all the way from A to Z. It's to move them a half step, and maybe plant a question that they keep thinking about after you're gone. That's slow work. It requires patience and humility. And it's probably the most important organizing skill you can develop.

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