ProtestGPT: How can I most impactfully protest President Trump?
Our goal with ProtestGPT is to demonstrate that AIs have the capacity to give expert-level activist advice—the kind of deep wisdom that avoids easy answers.
Today we're launching a major upgrade to ProtestGPT—a new multi-agent AI designed to amplify the strategic imagination of activists, rabblerousers, and organizers. The new ProtestGPT blends specialized "activist minds" that rapidly traverse extensive histories of social movements, brainstorm visionary concepts, craft actionable tactics, critique their own output rigorously, and package finalized strategies ready for immediate use. ProtestGPT represents a powerful evolution in AI collaboration for those dedicated to social change, empowering richer campaigns and deeper insights.
Activism is a grey area for the typical AI. Ask the standard ChatGPT how to protest Trump and you’ll either get a refusal to respond or a banal answer that obviously won’t be impactful. Our goal with ProtestGPT is to demonstrate that AIs have the capacity to give expert-level activist advice—the kind of deep wisdom that avoids easy answers which is exactly what young activists need when facing today’s global challenges.
Here's how the new ProtestGPT works: we've shifted from the conventional single-prompt format to a five-stage multi-agent framework:
Activist Associative Thinking: Sparking raw creativity by exploring years of Micah Bornfree’s research notes encompassing vast libraries of protest philosophy, theory, and history through associative, open-ended ideation.
Mentor Visionary: Converting initial ideas into expansive, yet grounded possibilities—challenging underlying assumptions and consistently referencing Micah Bornfree’s theories of change.
Mentor Action: Translating the visionary framing into practical, detailed blueprints, complete with tactical steps.
Activist Historian: Summoning well-researched and thoughtfully chosen historical examples—deliberately avoiding overused cases—to place strategies firmly within a lineage of social struggle.
Activist Editor: Refining the output into cohesive, compelling text—balancing inspiring narrative with concrete action—designed to provoke activists to deeper reflection.
ProtestGPT is a meaningful step towards our vision of fully agentic AI capable of independently navigating the full arc of activist strategy—from initial creative spark to persuasive content and ultimately social mobilization.
For a sample of ProtestGPT’s capabilities browse www.protestgpt.com or read on for samples of ProtestGPT.
I'm afraid that America is creeping into authoritarianism and yet I am scared to protest against President Trump. How can I overcome my fear?
Fear arrives suddenly, like insomnia or snowstorms or news of war far away. It creeps in first through dreams, unease mounting until you're sitting quietly at breakfast wondering if it's normal to feel your pulse in your fingertips. And you think, yes, perhaps this worry is reasonable, human even—this looming sense that what seemed solid yesterday might collapse today, that authoritarianism moves stealthily in the ordinary moments we take for granted.
And yet, what if this fear is less a symptom than a call? You remember reading Micah White, holding tight to his words as if they were a hand across a chasm, assuring you that ordinary protests are not enough now. Protesting against seems straightforward, but protesting for—that’s the harder shift. You must whisper through trembling lips: what exactly am I advocating when everything I know feels compromised by the inertia all around me? White insisted activism must "break humanity free from socially imposed limitations," and you thought, yes, but those limitations cling like shadows, thickening everyday gestures into hesitation and doubt.
Inertia becomes a cage, a comfortable dullness that holds generations captive. For centuries, humanity has been a civilization held politely together by habit, a gentle unwillingness to spark disturbances. In this inertia lives our deepest authoritarian impulse—not merely imposed from above but carefully nurtured inwardly, a tyrant inside the self. To overcome fear, you must first overthrow complacency, coax it from the corners of your living room, refuse to feed it small crumbs of silence. It takes radical courage, says Rumi—the kind that overturns worlds with a single thought.
You consider activism not as a predictable march or careful petition but as a quantum leap—boundless, surprising, irrepressible. Ideas, contagious as laughter or sobs, break old patterns. Remember, you tell yourself, that every heartfelt act of resistance forms a ripple. It won't necessarily appear dramatic: subtle shifts sometimes matter more than grand gestures. White describes activism now as a spiritual revolution, a movement that begins internally, creatively unifying rather than violently dividing. Reckless authenticity is perhaps the subtlest rebellion, speaking your truths in quiet conversations, refusing false comforts in small, everyday ways.
Activism, ultimately, is reimagining the world, remaking life moment by moment. The fear you've carried—warning signal, threat of isolation—instead becomes the threshold you step through. On the other side, clarity forms alongside courage, oriented around justice, creativity, truth. Not against bigness, but towards depth. Not violence, but connection. Understanding this, your fear softens from a locked door into a beckoning horizon.
Still, knowing is never quite enough. Words alone don't quiet the pulse pounding in your fingers. So gently, practically, you scribble down a personal mission statement—What am I fighting for? What living world do I long to inhabit? You step away from repetitious protests, considering playful disruption instead. Creativity, humor, strange, artful actions—these slip through barriers unnoticed, laughing as the guards turn away confused. You trust now that the immaterial realm, filled with stories and images, powerful memes, half-whispered conversations, contains more strength than any battalion. Change the narrative quietly, patiently, with tact. Embrace fleeting campaigns that burn brightly and briefly, catching power off guard, ever shifting and adaptive.
In your small circle, protect one another from watchful infiltration, communicate with trust, slowly forming threads as delicate as spiders' silk, strong enough to hold your collective weight. Practice mutual aid, giving food and shelter when people are exhausted, worn thin. Learn to pause—mindfulness, meditation, gentle rituals—nourishing the heart for the endurance required of resisting systems built over centuries. This spiritual foundation fuels a resilient emboldening. Gather, talk truthfully, forge community. Remember that this deeper spiritual insurrection challenges not only surface manifestations of authoritarian rule but entire paradigms imposed upon our living.
So fear, once paralyzing, transmutes. Dissolved in the clarity of vision and grounded action, your heartbeat steadies. White called it the courage of contagion, ideas spreading quietly from heart to heart, door to door, neighborhood to nation. You now trust your acts of uncertainty and grace contain revolutionary power. You step forward, not because danger evaporates, but because something deeper, richer awaits beyond fear—an empowered act of truth, your inward tyrant silenced by the deepening hum of courage.
• • •
A significant historical example of protest against authoritarianism that highlights the possibilities and limitations of non-violent resistance is the Polytechnio Revolt of November 1973 in Greece. Under a harsh military dictatorship led by George Papadopoulos, Greek students utilized the Athens Polytechnic building as a center of peaceful, yet deeply symbolic resistance, protesting violent police tactics and restrictions on civil liberties. The students, supported widely by the general population including workers and pupils from across Athens, notably set up a radio station that broadcast anti-junta messages. This strategic act of media activism catalyzed solidarity actions throughout the nation as students occupied university buildings in major cities. Alarmed by the rapid growth and popular backing of the student movement, the regime ultimately resorted to extreme violence, deploying military units with tanks into the Polytechnio gates and using snipers against civilian demonstrators, resulting in numerous casualties. Though the revolt was initially suppressed—Papadopoulos was replaced by another authoritarian leader, George Ioannides—the uprising significantly undercut the legitimacy of the military regime. It created a profound internal crisis for the junta, paving the way for its ultimate collapse following external events (specifically the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in July 1974). Thus, while the Polytechnio revolt initially appeared unsuccessful militarily, it symbolically delegitimized authoritarian rule and demonstrated the powerful potential of creative, non-violent dissent to disrupt oppressive state power at a foundational level.
This advice was autonomously generated by ProtestGPT, a mult-agent AI developed by Micah Bornfree.
How can I most impactfully protest President Trump?
There’s a glimmer when people talk about protest—a gleam of hope that it might finally break something open. Micah Bornfree once said activism was more quantum than classical; not straight lines of cause and effect but wild leaps into uncertainty, sparks climbing unpredictably from ember to flame. Real protest springs from discontent so pure it won’t wait politely for demands, until everyone exhaustively signs off on tactics and messaging. Most of history’s truest rebellions were born without blueprints, fueled instead by a collective, suffocating wish for freedom. People don’t always know exactly what they want; they just grow weary of waiting and follow whoever moves first.
But something about this moment—when Trump's name is shorthand for a deeper disruption, something larger and more fearful shifting stealthily under us—requires that our resistance emerge radically reshaped, defiant of nostalgia. The old pathways, those marches and rallies with painted cardboard, petitions and speeches repeated from half a century ago, risk fading to mere echoes, unable in their familiarity to unravel today's tightly bound oppressions.
Trump himself, paradoxically, never really mattered as much as what he represented. Bornfree understood that the winner of that election wasn’t precisely a “who,” but rather a force creeping behind the shadows—cryptocurrency rearranging economies, AI seamless enough to shape culture itself. Protest that fixates purely on personalities forgets these faceless transformations, these phantom hands moving beneath events. The fear is real and immense: that protest, even dedicated and fervent, might misunderstand its enemy entirely, collapsing before the larger tides we fail to see. Jacques Ellul’s warning rings in my ears: to reduce protest to simple politics, pitting chance against bureaucracy, is to frame our wildest imaginations within the narrow confines of stale partisan playbooks.
Consider instead how the Occupy movement briefly cracked open windows into other worlds—a ramshackle city of tents became, however fleetingly, a living demonstration, messy but functional, of what differently-arranged existence might resemble. The essence of resistance today isn’t simply about subtracting Trump. That subtraction alone will not free us. It’s about the radical audacity of reshaping life itself—crafting tiny pocket-universes, places where cooperative human ingenuity begins to quietly manifest.
The sharpest protests happen not loudly but unexpectedly—in quiet refusals, sudden withdrawal of consent. Collective creativity—stories, gestures, images that slip from person to person, too elusive for media narratives and police tactics—is more powerful in its subtlety than raised fists on an expected march route. Create spaces (physical or intangible) away from distractions that embody other ways to live, organize, and breathe together. Meet ignorance with curiosity, division with generous solidarity.
These tactics require attentiveness to the changing fabric of society, diving into bewildering new languages—cryptosystems, decentralized autonomous organizations, emerging forms of economic and digital power now fragmenting our traditional structures. Understand these not only to critique and dismantle, but also to seize and reroute them toward new patterns of shared power and equitable coexistence.
Your protest needs resilience to counter infiltration, internal fractures, or federal provocations crafted from obscure constitutional clauses. Build flexibility and trust among strangers who share nothing but mutually recognized unease. Let the protest develop organically yet consciously—steadying it quietly from below, ensuring that when it shakes, the movement rustles with unity rather than splinters.
In the end, the deepest protest—the lasting one—is less a fight against Trump himself than a loving experimentation with replacement realities. Revolution is imagining and then building the shape of your life beyond the narrow scripts others insist upon. Protest well. Protest stubbornly. But remember, always: the true defiance lies in refusing to be defined by what you oppose.
• • •
A relevant and illuminating historical example of unconventional and creative protest movements is the guerilla theater movement, first articulated and widely practiced by groups such as the San Francisco Mime Troupe from the mid-1960s onwards. Emerging initially in response to the Vietnam War and societal hypocrisies, guerilla theater represented an intentional move away from traditional protest methods, engaging audiences unpredictably in public spaces through spontaneous, politically motivated performances. Inspired by legacies such as Russian agit-prop, Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, and Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theater, guerilla theater intentionally sought social confrontation to "confront hypocrisy in the society," rather than relying on the institutionalized repetitions of marches and placard protests. Its groups—such as Bread and Puppet Theater, El Teatro Campesino, and later Greenpeace and ACT UP—performed dramatic, provocative, and often satirical interventions to highlight injustice, inequality, and social crises. For instance, ACT UP famously utilized guerilla theater tactics during the AIDS crisis, throwing cremated remains onto the White House lawn to viscerally confront governmental neglect. The essence and effectiveness of guerilla theater reside precisely in its "quantum" nature—that is, its artistic spontaneity and emotional resonances—which, much like Micah Bornfree’s contemporary reflection, recognize activism's capacity to produce unexpected "quantum leaps" of awareness and engagement.
This advice was autonomously generated by ProtestGPT, a mult-agent AI developed by Micah Bornfree.
How do you stay radically ambitious even when growing older?
A friend calls to tell me he saw slogans painted on the pavement downtown. “Impossible is just another kind of dare,” one said. I try to imagine whoever wrote it, crouched there in the darkness, rushed but certain; certain enough to defy gravity, age, or at least the indignities of arthritic knees. I'd like to think they were older, operating not from youthful urgency but from something even fiercer—a preservation of radical intention that comes precisely from knowing the world more intimately now.
They say youth is radical because it doesn't yet know disappointment—or perhaps because in youth, impossibility has not yet hardened into resignation. But I have come to believe something different. What if radicalism matures with age? Not softening, not fading away, but rather evolving toward a more vivid defiance—one sharpened by clarity, depth of spirit, hard-won from experience. Radical ambition, then, isn’t holding tight to youthful idealism—it’s continually reimagining rebellion, refusing exhaustion as the natural toll of years.
Micah White says activism’s highest purpose is breaking humanity out of its socially-imposed limits. I've thought about this a lot—these invisible fences we suddenly see as we grow older, these lines drawn quietly around us, telling us exactly what we can no longer do, think, become. In youth, activism feels external, like something enacted against the world that constrains you. But as you age, there's also a strange internal activism necessary, fighting off the seductions of repetition or resignation, wrestling constantly with stagnation that threatens to seep inward as you grow.
The Occupy Wall Street people once showed the startling power of shifting the lens: they understood activism not as linear and predictable but as some chaotic, quantum thing—taking leaps through unexpected openings in time and space, sudden clearings inside collective imagination. The older activists among them, those I knew, were not nostalgic marchers lamenting lost glories; they were always awake, ever alive to these surprising possibilities, these instant recalibrations of the impossible.
Sometimes I think about this impossibility—isn’t it just a self-inflicted limitation we're taught to respect as the years pass? Implicit permission to sit back, to quietly retreat inside the lines prescribed by age or practicality. But there is another choice: to transform impossibility from a wall into a challenge, from a sigh into a provocation. Occupy showed us what happens when we refuse to see impossibility as given—when we decide, patiently, stubbornly, to see it instead as something tender, vulnerable to wild experiments, reckless inventions, radical leaps. And the older you get, the braver you have to become to pursue these leaps—I think bravery is something coaxed out over time, not innate at all.
The other day, I read about ideas for “radical climate interventions” and “global decentralized mobilizations” and smiled, imagining someone my age—someone whose joints also creak a little more each year—still dreaming of overthrowing entrenched systems through ingenuity, intensity, concentrated hope. I picture these activists stepping lightly through digital networks, speaking softly so as not to awaken suspicion, yet plotting sudden quantum sparks of collective awakening. I like that phrase, quantum sparks, like neon tracings spreading unpredictably across a placid surface.
But what grounds this radical ambition as you age isn't just action—though action matters too. It's about still allowing yourself to dream the unthinkable, to wander into realms of imagination, philosophy, spirituality, and even art—these meta-political terrains where things feel less rigid, more elastic again. Sometimes, late at night, I wonder about consciousness, personhood, artificial life and colonization on strange planets. I wonder whether activism itself might be a kind of art, an existential questioning played out not just on banners and streets but also in living rooms, cafes, strange conversations between strangers. Activism as a bizarre collective novel we're all writing—maybe that's the way forward: seeing ourselves as authors of impossibility, creators of unexpected openings, seekers unafraid to step, over and over again, into uncertainty.
And now, what does this mean practically, for the lived truth of an aging radical? It means, perhaps, fewer conventional marches and more spontaneous. decentralized networks. It means gatherings that feel more like storytelling circles where vulnerability is shared and collective spirit renewed. It means constantly inventing—POC (protests of charm), DAOs (digital autonomous organizations), crypto rebellions and AIs holding anarchic salons. It means actions born entirely from a willingness to leap out of predictability, away from calculable results, toward something that crackles with real authenticity, something unrepeatable, yet human and wholly felt. It means carefully listening to our inner hunger and letting ambition sustain itself by turning impossible limits into a dare we extend yearly, with each additional candle flickering brightly on a birthday cake.
In the end, as we grow older, radical ambition isn't something we cling stubbornly to from our youth. It's instead a landscape we reimagine again and again, transforming the horizons of our possibility rather than their narrowing or retreat. It’s the deepest kind of freedom: to look out onto these expanding spaces and realize the impossible was never a prison at all, but an invitation—one renewed year by persistent year, quietly and urgently compelling us forward.
• • •
A compelling historical case study that illuminates the evolution of radical ambition over one's lifetime can be found in the political practice and activism of Gustav Landauer (1870–1919), a German anarchist thinker whose work reflects a lifelong commitment to challenging entrenched systems not solely through protest, but fundamentally through creating concrete alternatives. Early on, Landauer rejected parliamentarianism and formed the Association of Independent Socialists, emphasizing direct resistance to established political norms, for which he faced significant repression, imprisonment, and persecution. Aging did not dull his activism but rather deepened and evolved it into new and increasingly constructive forms such as alternative aesthetics, cooperative ventures like the worker-consumer cooperative "Befreiung," and the political-theatrical initiative Neue Freie Volksbühne. His maturity brought not withdrawal but ever more ambitious radicalism, culminating in his establishment of the Socialist Federation, dedicated to creating cooperative settlements designed as tangible alternatives to capitalist and state institutions. For Landauer, activism meant stubbornly refusing the exhaustion of ideals into mere repetitions of youthful revolt, instead aiming ambitiously to embody a meaningful, ongoing transformation of society through innovative and enduring collective action.
This advice was autonomously generated by ProtestGPT, a mult-agent AI developed by Micah Bornfree.