They Can’t Subpoena Joy

The FBI wanted Ohio to be afraid. Ohio answered with a block party.

So there’s a bit of a pattern in this newsletter: I spend several pages telling you how utterly horrid things are, then—at the bitter end—I tack on a line or two line about people power and resilience.

Not today! Today we’re doubling down on joy the whole way through.

The week after more than a hundred federal agents descended on the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, did the OOC go quiet? No. They threw a block party.

Agents had searched the group’s offices, followed canvassers’ kids to school drop-off, and seized phones from volunteers. The OOC’s answer was to gather and get back to work, and the entire pro-democracy movement stood up to rally around them.

On June 18, OOC organizers held a Freedom Summer Kickoff in Cleveland. They seized on a moment built to scare people and transformed it into a day of action: doing the exact same voter registration work in Black communities that the FBI’s raid was designed to stop. The lineup wasn’t lawyers and grim press statements. It was college students and senior citizens, faith leaders and workers and neighbors. The “everyday Ohioans” the OOC has spent nearly two decades organizing, standing in the sun, proclaiming joy and justice out loud.

That’s the part the intimidation playbook never accounts for. You can seize a laptop. You cannot seize our entire block party.

The OOC wasn’t standing alone. Within days, the response grew into something bigger than any one organization. The Ohio Democracy Defense Coalition launched #HandsOffOhio. The incredible organizers at People’s Action stood up in solidarity. Labor unions spoke out. The Brennan Center, Nonprofits Together, and the Leadership Conference ran know-your-rights trainings, so the next group facing a knock at the door would already know its footing.

Fear is designed to isolate people. The FBI raid achieved the opposite.

Then the OOC said it best themselves. In an open letter, executive director Molly Shack Strickland and board chair Rev. Michael Harrison Sr. wrote: “We have done nothing wrong. We are proud of our work… and will not be deterred from carrying out our vital mission.”

They named the tactic for exactly what it is: “For groups that have done nothing wrong,” they wrote, “the intrusive investigative process is the punishment.”

As organizer Amy Pritchard put it, this crackdown isn’t aimed at famous names with the platforms to fight back. It targets “the unglamorous, under-the-radar organizations doing the daily work of democracy.” Crowds gather and disperse. What scares those in power is when people keep showing up after the cameras leave. Pritchard says it best:

They want to bury us. They don’t know we are seeds.

This isn’t only an Ohio story. Amanda Litman has been tracking a vibe shift: the backlash to this administration is turning into a growing public hunger for its opposite, for warmth, joy, and a sense of looking out for one another.

From Zohran Mamdani’s win, to Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl, to the neighbors who faced down ICE in Minneapolis, to the World Cup: people keep reaching for joy as the answer to a political culture that runs on fear. A Freedom Summer block party in Cleveland is that same instinct, the same page from the People’s Playbook. As Litman puts it, good vibes won’t save democracy on their own, but they are “a necessary prerequisite for us to do the work.”

---

The resistance isn’t a goal, it’s a thing that’s happening right now: in a Cleveland parking lot, on a voter registration clipboard, in an open letter signed “Stay strong.” OOC leader Prentiss Haney framed this moment not as one of mere survival, but as the possibility of a just and joyful future:

“When we fight, we win. And what we’re fighting for right now is not to get back to what was. It’s to get the opportunity to build anew.”

“When we fight, we win. And what we’re fighting for right now is not to get back to what was. It’s to get the opportunity to build anew.”

If you want to feel that for yourself, read it in the OOC’s own words. This is what powerful, joyful resistance sounds like from the people who weathered the raid:

👉 Read the Ohio Organizing Collaborative’s open letter →

Trump’s FBI wanted Ohio afraid, overwhelmed, and isolated. Ohio answered with a block party.

Go find your people, and let’s keep that joy going.