Block & Build

This week we are building our Attention Economy Navigator for the month of October 2026. It's our guide to what you should be paying more attention to, and what you can probably pay less attention to. And why those stories might not be what you’d assume.

Joining to help build this month's Attention Economy Navigator in real time are Director at Fight for the Future, Evan Greer and Senior Multimedia Producer for Convergence, Josh Elstro.

You can also read the article version on the Convergence website, or watch the panel plot these stories in real time on YouTube.

Day by day, it's becoming more difficult to predict any outcomes of the midterms. It's especially difficult to predict how Republicans might respond to varying degrees of defeat at the polls. President Trump has made his intentions to steal and bribe his way toward a MAGA victory very clear. This has included aggressively demanding the passage of the SAVE Act, which was designed to limit access to voting. It has also included more off-the-wall, farcical schemes like offering straight-up $5000 bribes to every American if Republicans win. But the threat is serious: we’ve seen his administration send federal goon squads to local elections boards and organizing groups as an intimidation tactic over the past few years. It’s intensifying with investigations into sitting members of the opposition, like the search executed by Homeland Security Investigations agents at the home of Representative Ilhan Omar.

But we aren’t powerless in the face of this antidemocratic abuse. Many organizing efforts are underway around the country to make sure next month's elections are as safe, fair, and secure as possible. Many scenarios being gamed out involve public-facing protest against federal interference should it happen. 

Artists and organizers Rachel Schragis and Josh Yoder, who make up the movement and protest art collective Look Loud, worked with organizations across the country to understand what election defense should look like. After talking with organizers about the necessary optics and strategy, they created what they’re calling the Election Defense Visuals Drive–a collection of art and templates that are freely available for any movement organization or activist to download and print to use in defending election integrity in their area.

The drive is full of art which is ready to send straight to a printer, stencil and design templates to make your own, and even slogan brainstorming for concise messaging. You can access it now at lookloud.org/electiondefense and there will also be a link to the drive in this episode’s show notes for anyone interested in putting it to use in their own election defense work.

Rachel and Josh join the show to discuss the idea and purpose behind this toolkit as well as the deep consideration that goes into protest optics, down to details like color choice and word counts.

On January 17, 1969, an altercation at UCLA ended in gunfire that left two members of the Black Panther Party dead. Watani Stiner–who was a member of the conflicting Us Organization–was there that day. But despite not shooting anyone, he and his brother George were sentenced to life in prison for conspiracy to commit murder and second-degree murder. He spent the next several decades in prison, as well as a few in exile after an escape. He’s now on the outside and shares his story of accountability and repair for a crime he didn’t commit because he contributed to a culture that enabled it.

In this episode, Watani tells his life’s story–from what led to that fateful day and his perspective on what happened–as well as the cascading impacts the incident had on the rest of his life and his journey toward restorative justice.

Watani is also joined by his friend, neighbor, and restorative justice facilitator, Kazu Haga, who recently published a piece for us at Convergence about Watani’s story and how the COINTELPRO era of the 60s intersects with movement work today: "Learning from COINTELPRO’s Survivors: Accountability and Repair."

Semiconductors are at the heart of every piece of electronics you interact with on a daily basis. Despite being invented and innovated in the US, much of the manufacturing of semiconductors and the technology they power was "offshored" from the 1980s through the early 2000s as part of the globalization of our economy. In an effort to counter that loss of jobs and industry, the Biden administration passed the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which reinvests over $50 billion domestically in the manufacturing and research of semiconductors in the United States. While this has started to proffer new work opportunities and industrial development in the US, workers in the industry are organizing for wall-to-wall unions in their facilities as well as better conditions for the communities that house them.

The result of that organizing is CHIPS Communities United, a coalition organizing for an equitable and sustainable semiconductor manufacturing industry. Their alliance includes labor, environmental, social justice, civil rights, and community organizations representing millions of workers and community members nationwide. Their vision is to win well-paying union jobs for all workers in semiconductor factories, to protect local environments, and to keep workers, their families, and community members safe from toxic chemicals.

This week's guests include Rand Wilson, a CCU Organizer with more than 40 years of experience working with a number of national and local unions; Joe Turmes, a Boise, Idaho, based engineer, artist, and activist who has spent nearly 30 years in the semiconductor industry, currently at Micron; and Max (appearing pseudonymously to protect their identity), a fab tech based in Oregon currently working to unionize their workplace.

In the aftermath of the September 11th, 2001 attacks, the US government enjoyed broad, bipartisan support for mounting what President George W. Bush termed a “War on Terror.” We were told that "war" required new tools, new techniques, and new resources to fight a global, asymmetric foe–one that maybe was lurking inside the United States, and that was driven by a supposedly civilizational grudge match between the Islamic world and the West.

Some of those tools, from the Department of Homeland Security, which houses Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to the legal designations used to profile, surveil, debank, and indefinitely detain people and organizations with alleged ties to terrorism, were decried even at the time as massive overreaches of government power. Blanket laws like the PATRIOT Act gave law enforcement unprecedented license to surveil domestic communication. Much of the way this was deployed was driven heavily by Islamophobia. Street violence against people perceived to be Muslim skyrocketed. The FBI infiltrated–sometimes entrapping members of–Muslim community organizations and mosques.

Today, in 2026, those tools are in the hands of the Trump Administration. There’s a direct line between the infrastructure built under George W. Bush and NSPM-7, the Trump Administration memo declaring anti-fascists to be terrorists. And the tools they’re using to go after organizers were honed over the past 25 years.

To understand how this has impacted movement work today, we’re taking a look back, but we’re not going to stay in the past. Our guests today include Executive Director of Detention Watch Network, Silky Shah and Executive Director of Muslims for Just Futures, Darakshan Raja last week. We had a wide-ranging conversation about our shared political formation in the years after 9/11 and what their organizations are doing, in what feels like a fresh moment of opportunity to question the logic of the so-called War on Terror, to dismantle the weapons built to fight it.

Listeners may be familiar with stories from the past few years about left and movement organizations coming under legal attack. These include an indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center on fraud charges, claiming their strategy of paying informants to expose extremist groups is fraud. Or bad faith accusations by Israel against UNWRA, a relief agency of the United Nations tasked with trying to provide food and other supplies to Gaza amidst Israel’s ongoing genocide.

These types of legal attacks can accomplish their intended goal even if they don’t succeed in court. The mere threat of legal action can scare donors out of support for work that formerly seemed innocuous.

This week's episode features two organizers who have worked on issues related to how donor-advised funds are unique chokepoints for philanthropic funding. Our guests include Beezer de Martelly, who has over a decade of experience in philanthropy organizing and recently published an article for Convergence on the subject titled “A Blueprint for Donor-Advised Fund Organizing.” Our other guest is Fatema Ahmad, whose work at the Muslim Justice League has included getting UNWRA reinstated as a philanthropic destination for Fidelity, one of the largest donor-advised funds in the world.

In this conversation they lay out some of the terms of debanking and donor-advised funds for listeners less acquainted with these models. We then discuss the campaigns seeking to repair these financial relationships and what organizers need to know about the politics of philanthropy.

This week we are building our Attention Economy Navigator for the month of August 2026. It's our guide to what you should be paying more attention to, and what you can probably pay less attention to. And why those stories might not be what you’d assume.

Joining to help build this month's Attention Economy Navigator in real time are Managing Editor for Convergence, Akin Olla and Senior Multimedia Producer for Convergence, Josh Elstro.

You can also read the article version on the Convergence website, or watch the panel plot these stories in real time on YouTube.

In the past year, this show has explored how organizing against data centers is becoming a unifying rally point that breaks through this country’s typical “red vs. blue” dynamic. From urban cores to rural farm communities, serious organizing is happening to stop or slow the rapid development of these facilities at the local and state level. People are fed up with tech companies massively scaling up development to feed generative AI and large language models at the cost of polluting communities and skyrocketing consumer energy bills.

Our guest this episode is Saul Levin, a long-time organizer who saw something fascinating among the diverse and complex experiences of the communities taking on this work. He wanted to go deeper with AI and data center organizers from around the country, zooming in and platforming their personal stories. The result is his fantastic new podcast The Hum, which published its first series of episodes this summer with more coming next month. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts.

Saul discusses the show as well as what he’s learning about the movement against data centers and the corporations forcing them on to our communities.

"How Parallel Institutions Challenge Authoritarianism" by Saul Levin and Samantha Markel

Leading a union can be difficult. Even more difficult? Leading the educators union in the second-largest school district in the country, United Teachers Los Angeles, through the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, we talk to the woman who did just that: immediate Past President of UTLA, Cecily Myart-Cruz. She was also the first woman of color to be elected to the position.

During her tenure, she made strides in racial justice and protections for immigrants. She helped secure more financial protections for the district, its workers, and more. Under her leadership, UTLA was able to expand what is possible through organizing that includes the community, not just its members. But now, public schools across the country are under attack from the right, including the Trump Administration's plans to dismantle the Department of Education. 

As she steps away from the position, she joins us to talk about her tenure from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to her transition to a new role as a member of the National Education Association’s Executive Committee. We'll also discuss the threats currently facing public education–a foundational piece of our democracy–everywhere.

On November 5th, 2024, New York State voters found an option to vote for Proposition One, or the Equal Rights Amendment, to be enacted into state law. Prop One guaranteed abortion rights and reproductive healthcare for all New York State residents. Prop One easily passed and made its way into law, just two years after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision repealed Roe v. Wade, abolishing federal abortion rights. 

New York is just one example of how state ballot initiatives are being used to win back abortion rights in a post-Roe landscape. Some have succeeded, like in Ohio. Other states are caught in back and forth ballot battles. Like Missouri, which protected abortion under Amendment 3 in 2024, and finds a measure asking voters to repeal those same protections in 2026…also under the name “Amendment 3.”

Here to talk about this issue and how ballot measures are shaping the November general election is the Policy and Legal Advocacy Director at the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, Jennifer Parrish Taylor. BISC is an infrastructure organization that helps organizations fighting for reproductive justice, the rights of marginalized communities, and others utilize ballot measures across the United States.