'Eco-Socialism' now! Inside Sunrise Movement's ‘revolution’ playbook
Students have always enjoyed flaunting revolutionary politics — the posters, the slogans, the Che Guevara T-shirts.
Like gender fluidity and ultimate frisbee, these radical affectations often don't survive graduation. It's a tale as old as time: One day you’re shouting into a bullhorn; the next, you’re typing on Slack.
Members also earn 'rays' on a Sunrise patch as they progress through the ranks — a visible marker of participation and standing within the organization.
What does endure, however, is the sophisticated political machinery designed to harness this youthful fervor and put it into action.
'Political revolution'
This week, watchdog group Defending Education published internal documents outlining a coordinated push for political upheaval from one of the country’s most visible youth activist organizations.
The Sunrise Movement is a 501(c)(4) environmental organization that describes itself as “a movement of young people fighting to stop the climate crisis.”
But slides leaked to Defending Education from a March 17, 2026, membership meeting reveal a highly structured and strategic operation calling for a “political revolution” and “structurally chang[ing] the foundations of this country" — language that goes well beyond climate advocacy.
The message is as simple as it is sobering: The goal is not reform, but replacement.
The revelation here is not the Sunrise Movement’s rhetoric. “Revolution” is already central to the group’s public-facing language; its homepage describes itself as part of a broader climate revolution. What the slides add is clarity: That “revolution” is not just metaphor, but a program laid out in concrete terms, from pressure campaigns and mass noncooperation to institutional targeting.
Path to a 'New System'
The goal: “Eco-socialism, [a] multi-racial democracy, and Green New Deal legislation.”
A section titled “On the Road to Revolution” lays out a path to a “New System” — including passing Green New Deal policies and “ending the billionaire 2-party system.”
The slides also describe a strategy of “repolarizing” the country. One passage calls for “get[ting] majority of society out in the streets and an explosion in voting,” arguing that “we need to repolarize society” to move people away from what it describes as a “(corrupt) system” and toward a new one with “more democracy.”
Target: Hilton
The materials also outline how that shift is meant to occur in practice — through a sequence of escalating actions tied to specific campaigns.
It begins with a March 28 No Kings event and builds toward a May 1 national strike. In between: sustained pressure.
A slide titled “Hilton to May Day” points to coordinated economic disruption, including efforts to target "ICE enabler" Hilton Hotels over its alleged ties to immigration enforcement. Tactics listed include public boycotts, so-called “wide awake actions,” and coordinated booking and canceling of hotel reservations — designed to impose financial and reputational costs.
'Dawn' to 'Dusk'
The slides also lay out what the group calls its internal “culture” — a set of guiding principles members are expected to adopt. The language reads less like loose organizing advice and more like a shared creed: “Nothing about us without us,” “Motivate the base, isolate the opposition,” and “It is our duty to fight for our freedom, it is our duty to win.” The effect is to define not just tactics, but a common vocabulary and moral framework for participants.
Another section details a tiered membership structure, with clearly defined ranks — “Dawn,” “Morning,” “High Noon,” “Afternoon,” and “Dusk” — each tied to specific benchmarks: recruiting new members, completing actions, attending meetings, and undergoing training. Advancement comes with increasing responsibilities, access, and internal status.
Members also earn “rays” on a Sunrise patch as they progress through the ranks — a visible marker of participation and standing within the organization. The structure resembles a formal pipeline, designed to scale participation and develop organizers over time.
'Full Dictatorship'
The presentation outlines three possible futures, each portraying the current system as compromised and the stakes as existential — conditions that, in the materials’ framing, justify escalation.
The most extreme — “Full Dictatorship” — imagines Donald Trump consolidating power, using the military against opponents, and restricting speech.
The function is clear: Escalation isn’t optional. It’s required.
Defending Education
Defending Education, formerly Parents Defending Education, has focused on political activity in schools — curriculum, student protests, and institutional ties to advocacy groups.
Defending Education was founded in 2021 amid a surge of parental backlash to politicized curricula and school policies. The group uses public records requests, whistleblower tips, and document releases to surface what it describes as ideological activism inside education systems.
RELATED: Defending Education gives parents tools to fight leftist indoctrination
In recent years, it has zeroed in on the overlap between student organizing and outside advocacy groups — arguing that protests framed as grassroots are often supported and shaped by national networks. The Sunrise materials, it says, fit that pattern.
The Sunrise Movement has been linked to student walkouts, including protests tied to immigration enforcement. What the newly released slides add, Defending Education argues, is a clearer picture of how that organizing is structured and scaled.
“While calls for a ‘political revolution’ by left-wing activist groups are not unique, these coordinated plans to put economic and social pressure on universities … should raise serious concerns,” said Rhyen Staley, director of research at Defending Education.
“Our academic institutions should be places of higher learning … not weaponized or punished to achieve a ‘structural change’ to the political foundations of this country.”
Pushing left
Founded in 2017, the Sunrise Movement helped drive the Green New Deal into the political mainstream through protests, sit-ins, and youth mobilization.
The Sunrise Movement operates as a decentralized network of local “hubs,” many based on college and high school campuses. That structure has allowed it to scale quickly — turning student energy into coordinated national campaigns.
Since its founding, the Sunrise Movement has proven itself an effective pressure group within Democrat politics, helping push climate policy from the margins to the center of the party’s agenda. Its early backing of the Green New Deal helped turn what was once a fringe proposal into a defining litmus test for progressive candidates.
The group also played a visible role during the 2020 election cycle, applying sustained pressure on Joe Biden and his campaign to adopt more aggressive climate positions. While not all of its demands were met, Sunrise and allied activists helped shape the administration’s climate framework — demonstrating that its model of protest plus pressure can move policy, not just headlines.
Its strategy has consistently blended electoral pressure with direct action. What the newly released slides suggest is a continuation of that model, but with a more explicit emphasis on escalation and institutional leverage.
For a generation told that it is inheriting a world on the brink, the climate is the cause. For groups like Sunrise Movement, the target is something more immediate: the system itself.
What emerges is not just a campaign for the planet, but a bid to reshape political power around a broader program of systemic change.
Judge delivers bad news for ladies who sued to keep trans-identifying driver's licenses, use men's restrooms
A pair of trans-identifying women enjoying the support of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit last month in hopes of forcing Kansas to indulge their delusions by letting them use men's restrooms and false sex markers on state-issued IDs.
'This bill protects girls and women.'
Rather than oblige the plaintiffs in thwarting the will of voters as expressed by supermajorities in both chambers of the Kansas legislature, a state judge denied the women's most pressing request on Tuesday.
The bill, the veto, the law
Kansas Republicans passed a bill earlier this year requiring the designation of restrooms and locker rooms in public buildings for use by only one sex and mandating certain official state-issued documents to reflect the ID-holder's actual sex.
This, of course, enraged radical LGBT activists such as Kansas state Rep. Abi Boatman (D), a man pretending to be a woman, who suggested that the reality-affirming bill was dehumanizing; Human Rights Campaign president Kelley Robinson, who called the bill an act of "cruelty"; and Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly, who vetoed the bill last month.
Kelly's veto proved fruitless as the state Senate overrode it in a 31-9 vote on Feb. 17. Their Republican colleagues in the state House followed suit the next day in a decisive 87-37 vote.
The governor bemoaned the override, claiming that "this is a poorly drafted bill with significant, far-reaching consequences."
State Rep. Carolyn Caiharr (R), among those who voted to override the veto, stated, "Our young women deserve to have restrooms and locker rooms where they can undress without men in the room. This bill protects girls and women, the ones feminists used to claim to stand for," reported the Kansas Reflector.
Kansas House Speaker Dan Hawkins (R) stated, "This isn’t about scoring political points, but doing what’s right for women and girls across our communities."
The new law took effect once it was published in the register on Feb. 26, resulting in the invalidation of roughly 1,700 driver's licenses and 1,800 birth certificates.
The lawsuit
A pair of trans-identifying women represented by attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on Feb. 26, alleging that the law "violates the Kansas Constitution’s guarantees of personal autonomy, privacy, equality under the law, due process, and free expression. It also violates the Kansas Constitution’s single-subject and clear title requirements."
The lawsuit claimed that the two biological women, identified by the pseudonyms Daniel Doe and Matthew Moe, would suffer harm "because they will not be able to utilize a driver’s license with their correct gender marker or access public restrooms that accord with their gender identity."
The trans-identifying ladies requested that Douglas County District Judge James McCabria block and declare the new law both unconstitutional and unenforceable.
The response
Judge McCabria refused on Tuesday to grant the women a temporary restraining order against the law while their case proceeds, writing, "A court that is too quick to assume too much about the facts or possible impacts of a law risks the appearance of either political bias or a lack of appreciation for the value and importance of the full, fair deliberative process in such circumstances."
The judge apparently didn't buy the plaintiffs' claim that they may face "reprisal by employers and acquaintances that may not know their biological gender but learn of it by forced use of assigned restrooms or incidental disclosure by use of their identification documents."
McCabria declined "the invitation to presume" that every employer or acquaintance would in every instance respond to the discovery of the women's true sex with harassment or disfavor. He also rejected the assumption that "every restroom visit is fraught with the potential for violence or embarrassment if this law is not immediately suspended."
The judge directed the parties involved in the case to appear in court later this month.
Harper Seldin, an attorney for the ACLU's LGBTQ & HIV Project, stated, "This is a devastating, but hopefully temporary, setback for our clients and transgender people across the state of Kansas."
Although the law merely prevents individuals from carrying untruthful driver's licenses and invading private spaces intended for members of the opposite sex, Seldin claimed it threatens trans-identifying individuals' "ability to hold a job, go to school, or go about their daily lives."
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Conservative Law Firm Picks Up Dobbs Litigator To Fuel More Supreme Court Victories
A key member of the legal team that convinced the Supreme Court to overrule Roe v. Wade has joined a new law firm to pursue a broader range of appellate and Supreme Court victories. Erin Hawley told The Federalist in a Zoom call Tuesday she’s joining Lex Politica to chair its Supreme Court and appellate […]The Super Bowl now plays like America’s divorce proceedings
The Seattle Seahawks trampled the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LX, but the postgame chatter barely touched football. Fans and pundits argued about anthems, halftime, commercials, and what the whole spectacle “said” about America.
For better or worse, the Super Bowl serves as the premier civic liturgy of the American empire, a night when strangers share the same screens and offices share the same small talk. When that ritual becomes another front in the culture war, the country loses one more place to breathe.
Americans once used the game to share food, laugh at ads, and pretend for a night that they still belonged to one people. This year, the country used the game to rehearse separation.
Families fight. Politics intrudes. Resentments pile up. Holidays still force a pause. Thanksgiving and Christmas push people back to the same table, reminding them that the argument cannot become the relationship.
When even the ritual itself turns into the argument — when Thanksgiving and Christmas are no longer about gratitude or celebrating the birth of Christ but rather who can win a political debate — the family slides from conflict toward rupture. A nation works the same way. Shared ceremonies do not solve deep disagreements, but they keep disagreement from becoming total separation.
From national pastime to litmus test
Americans rarely stop living their separate lives to watch the same thing at the same time. Streaming splinters audiences. Social media isolates communities. Even big films and best-selling books now fall into ideological silos.
The Super Bowl remains one of the few national events that still compels common attention. People who hate sports tune in for the ads so they can follow the conversation at work the next day. A shared celebration, however frivolous, still binds people who otherwise share little else in common.
This year’s Super Bowl looked like a country at war with itself.
The broadcast opened with two national anthems: the familiar Francis Scott Key standard and the newer “black national anthem” that appears at more NFL events each season. The league has leaned hard into woke activism, from corporate rituals to social campaigns, and it rarely hides the moral it wants viewers to absorb. Two anthems signal two constituencies. Two constituencies begin to behave like two nations.
A cultural sorting mechanism
The halftime show sharpened that divide. The NFL chose Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican artist who performs almost entirely in Spanish, and the set centered on Hispanic identity. The stage recreated a bodega, complete with an “EBT welcome” neon sign. The performance leaned into sexual provocation, with dancers simulating sex acts and same-sex grinding played for shock and applause. The show ended with performers hoisting foreign flags, a tableau that read less like cultural flair and more like a victory lap.
RELATED: Bad Bunny preached in Spanish. The NFL hides behind tax perks in English.
A large portion of the audience did not buy what the league sold. Ratings suggested many viewers tuned out during the set. Some did so out of prudishness, others out of irritation at the message, others out of confusion. Either way, the halftime show did not function as a shared moment. It became a sorting mechanism.
Turning Point USA offered a competing halftime program featuring country artists singing about America and Jesus Christ. The stream broke records and reportedly became YouTube’s largest live broadcast. The accomplishment deserves credit. The need for it should worry anyone who wants a coherent nation. Instead of one shared celebration, Americans built parallel ceremonies, then congratulated themselves for avoiding each other.
Who is the customer here?
The commercials followed the same pattern. One spot from a mortgage lender portrayed a family of color moving into a mostly white neighborhood and encountering casual racism until they instructed the residents on diversity and inclusion. The ad did not wink. It preached.
Another strange commercial, backed by Patriots owner Robert Kraft, aimed to address rising anti-Semitism. It showed a Jewish student harassed in a school hallway as classmates mocked him and stuck a note reading “dirty Jew” to his backpack. The boy reached his locker, where a black student offered solidarity based on shared experience with hatred from whites. The ad then unveiled a “blue square” social media campaign modeled on the "black square" campaign that followed George Floyd’s death in 2020.
NFL owners did not back away from the woke script. They turned the dial higher.
Two different worlds
The next day I went to my barber, and he described the shift in real time. Small talk drives that job. For most of his life, the Monday after the Super Bowl brought lively chatter about the best plays and the funniest ads. This year, customers wanted to talk politics. They complained about the anthems, the halftime, the messaging, the moral scolding. The game itself barely came up. Friendly banter about the MVP and next season’s prospects gave way to arguments about what kind of country this still is.
That exchange captured the larger problem. Conservatives and liberals increasingly inhabit different worlds. They share geography, but they do not share premises. They do not share authorities. They do not share the same media diet, the same moral language, or the same sense of what counts as a fact. When they occupy the same room, they talk past each other. When they can avoid the room, they do.
RELATED: Americans aren’t arguing any more — we’re speaking different languages
The old American civic fracture ran along a map. The new fracture runs through families, workplaces, churches, and neighborhoods. The country did not divide into North and South. It divided into competing moral nations layered on top of the same territory. Each tribe builds its own institutions, its own entertainers, its own narratives, and, increasingly, its own rituals.
No stable regime can endure that kind of division indefinitely. One side will eventually impose cultural dominance on the other, with power used to punish dissent and enforce conformity. Or the country will choose some form of national divorce, formal or informal, with communities separating as much as law and logistics allow.
The Super Bowl did not create this crisis. It revealed it. A shared civic ritual lets people practice unity without requiring uniformity. Americans once used the game as a harmless excuse to share food, laugh at ads, and pretend for a night that they still belonged to one people. This year, the country used the game to rehearse separation.
A nation that cannot share a football game cannot share much else for long.
Vance refuses to throw Tucker Carlson under the bus, emphasizes America is a 'Christian nation'
Several speakers at Turning Point USA's AmericaFest offered competing and ostensibly irreconcilable views of the way forward for the MAGA coalition, in some cases identifying one another as cowards, saboteurs, or worse.
In his speech closing out the conference in Phoenix, Vice President JD Vance emphasized that "President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests."
'Do I have disagreements with Tucker Carlson? Sure. I have disagreements with most of my friends.'
Vance, the Republican front-runner going into 2028 whom TPUSA CEO Erika Kirk endorsed last week for president, faces mounting public pressure to throw Tucker Carlson under the bus over his criticism of Israel and perceived bigotry as well as to censure Nicholas Fuentes, the head of the so-called Groypers who has been particularly critical of the vice president.
Andrew Kolvet, executive producer of "The Charlie Kirk Show," told the Washington Post, "The reasonable actors can see that JD is being a reasonable arbiter of this debate, and that’s a really important signal to send out — that Israel is our ally. They're an important ally. They're not our only concern, though."
"I think JD understands the needs, wants, and concerns of young Americans as well, if not better than, any other leading politician in the country," added Kolvet.
"I didn't bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform," Vance told the crowd of thousands gathered on Sunday.
"We have far more important work to do than canceling each other."
The vice president underscored that the "America First movement" constitutes a big tent welcoming those who seek to make America "richer, stronger, safer, and prouder."
In a recent interview with Sohrab Ahmari, the U.S. editor of UnHerd, Vance provided some insights into why he refused to denounce Carlson or waste any time discussing Fuentes.
"Tucker's a friend of mine," he told Ahmari. "And do I have disagreements with Tucker Carlson? Sure. I have disagreements with most of my friends, especially those who work in politics. You know this. Most people who know me know this. I’m [also] a very loyal person, and I am not going to get into the business of throwing friends under the bus."
RELATED: Poll provides clear idea of who's poised to sweep 2028 Republican presidential primary
Vance noted further that "the idea that Tucker Carlson — who has one of the largest podcasts in the world, who has millions of listeners, who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election, who supported me in the 2024 election — the idea that his views are somehow completely anathema to conservatism, that he has no place in the conservative movement, is frankly absurd."
As for Fuentes, Vance intimated that a condemnation of the 27-year-old host of "America First" podcast wasn't worthwhile.
"[Fuentes'] influence within Donald Trump's administration, and within a whole host of institutions on the right, is vastly overstated, and frankly, it's overstated by people who want to avoid having a foreign-policy conversation about America's relationship with Israel," Vance said in the interview.
'Anyone who attacks my wife, whether their name is Jen Psaki or Nick Fuentes, can eat s**t.'
While the vice president maintains that Israel is an "important ally," he indicated that he welcomes substantive disagreements with the Middle Eastern nation as well as debates at home about American foreign policy.
Vance told Ahmari that anti-Semitism and all forms of ethnic hatred "have no place in the conservative movement" but noted that "if you believe racism is bad, Fuentes should occupy one second of your focus, and the people with actual political power who worked so hard to discriminate against white men should occupy many hours of it."
RELATED: DEI hustlers lash out after Trump official solicits discrimination complaints from white men
Although recognizing Fuentes as an apparent sideshow to an important conversation, Vance did make a point of telling Ahmari, "Anyone who attacks my wife, whether their name is [former Biden press secretary] Jen Psaki or Nick Fuentes, can eat s**t."
On the theme of America First's genuine spirit of inclusion, the vice president made clear in his AmericaFest speech that the Trump administration and the broader movement supporting it has "relegated DEI to the dustbin of history, which is exactly where it belongs."
"In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white any more. And if you're an Asian, you don't have to talk around your skin color when you're applying for college, because we judge people based on who they are, not on ethnicity and things they can't control," said Vance. "We don't persecute you for being male, for being straight, for being gay, for being anything. The only thing that we demand is that you be a great American patriot."
'It is better to die a patriot than live a coward.'
In addition to risking offense with his acknowledgement that white Americans needn't apologize for their pigmentation and with his refusal to betray a friend, Vance realized the fears articulated in recent years by liberals and anti-Christian activists by noting in his speech that "the only thing that has truly served as an anchor of the United States of America is that we have been, and by the grace of God, we always will be, a Christian nation."
For the benefit of those who might strategically misconstrue his meaning, Vance clarified that Americans don't have to be Christian but that "Christianity is America's creed," despite the decades-long campaign by the left to remove Christianity from public life.
"That creed motivated our understanding of natural law and rights, our sense of duty to one’s neighbor, the conviction that the strong must protect the weak, and the belief in individual conscience," continued the vice president. "Even our famously American idea of religious liberty is a Christian concept."
The vice president noted further that the "fruits of true Christianity" are good men like his murdered friend, Charlie Kirk.
"The fruits of true Christianity are good husbands, patient fathers, builders of great things, and slayers of dragons," said Vance. "And yes, men who are willing to die for a principle if that's what God asks them to do. Because so many of us recognize that it is better to die a patriot than live a coward."
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