Block & Build

Last week’s midterm election results were a massive swing toward Democrats across the country. The Republican trifecta in the federal government has now been broken, creating opportunities to change policies and seek accountability for some of the worst harms of the last 2 years. Meanwhile, direct ballot measures on issues like trans and abortion rights, billionaire taxes, redistricting, and voter...

Over the past few months Convergence has been discussing the many different ways people are organizing around the country to ensure the integrity of the midterm elections . We’ve also covered the myriad ways the Trump administration has signaled their intent to disrupt election results, refute them, and generally sow chaos, such as the raid on the Ohio Organizing Collaborative back in June or the...

In 1992, the state of Colorado let voters decide to whether to discriminate against LGBTQ individuals by proposing Amendment 2, a law that would prohibit the state from enforcing anti-discrimination protections on the basis of sexual orientation. Voters passed it and earned Colorado the moniker "hate state" in certain circles. More than 30 years later, hate is back on the ballot in Colorado. Voter...

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 Multimed...

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...

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...

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...

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 ma...

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 tryi...

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...

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 u...

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 te...

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 abo...

The Joe Rogan Experience. Modern Family. The Daily Show. Needless to say, the audiences of these types of content are usually on different political wavelengths. A new project from The Radical Communicators Network (or RadComms) and Rising Majority says that in order to build a stronger force willing to fight back against authoritarianism, we need to understand how different kinds of stories and c...

When people outside the state think of Florida politics, they often think of the de-facto MAGA headquarters that is Mar-a-Lago or the reactionary policies of Ron DeSantis–things like book bans, LGBTQ discrimination, climate change denial, and more. In other words? A lost cause for any sort of progressive movement. But in reality, Floridians have long been part of a powerful and unique fascism-figh...

On June 11th, staff members of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative watched as over one hundred FBI agents entered and raided their offices, questioning workers, and seizing computer files and documents. Agents also reportedly fanned out to homes of volunteers, board members, and staff–fishing for information and electronic devices. The agents were said to have been investigating voter fraud allegati...

This week we are building July's Attention Economy Navigator , 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 is comedian and host of The Bitchuation Room , Francesca Fiorentini. We are also joined this week by...

This episode’s guests found themselves in a position many long-time political organizers and activists were in back in 2016 following the first election of Donald Trump–family, friends, comrades and more all coming to them and asking “what do we do?” This familiar experience was the catalyst which resulted ten years later in the publication of their book Remaking Democracy: How We Make the Worlds...

This week on the show, we’re sharing the recording of the plenary panel Cayden presented on at MediaJustice and Mijente’s Take Back Tech III . Moderated by Tech Policy Press ’s Justin Hendrix, Cayden is joined by Associate Professor of Black Digital Media at Georgia Tech, Andre Brock , and independent tech journalist Ariella Steinhorn, who has worked with whistleblowers across the tech industry. T...

This week we are building June's Attention Economy Navigator , 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 is cofounder, CEO, and writer at techpolicy.press , Justin Hendrix. We are also joined this week by...

While we hear plenty of gloomy predictions about how the adoption of AI technologies will take away millions of jobs in the future, it’s already gutting labor rights and alienating workers right now . Alexandra Mateescu and Aiha Nguyen are two of the researchers behind a new report on this matter, “ Last Place in the AI-First Economy: How the AI Industry Relies on Worker Disempowerment .” The repo...

It was a chilly day in Minneapolis in 2013 when Yotam Marom was first told he was “invisible.” He was told this by a team member and close colleague, while working with a tenant organizing group which had emerged from the recent Occupy Movement. His role that week was to facilitate and train leaders in the organization. While Yotam was doing his job well enough – participating and planning activit...

We are joined by New York City tenant organizer and communications expert, Ritti Singh, who recently published an article with Convergence , covering a strategy – which has been implemented in NYC tenant organizing – she calls “surround sound” communications. Then, in early 2025, a group of tenant organizers in New York City began a campaign to Freeze the Rent . The language and values of this cam...

This week we are building May's Attention Economy Navigator, 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 cultural studies professor, writer, and founder of Pop Smart Media , Dr. Shannon Mancus (AKA Dr. S...

Last fall a group of gamers joined up for an event in the wildly popular online video game Fortnite . (If you’re not familiar, just ask your kids.) The purpose of the event was to train players on how to respond to real-life encounters with ICE agents, followed by role-playing encounters within the safety of the game world. This is just one of the many ways the group known as New Save Collective i...