Blocking Authoritarianism: Steps Nonprofits and Foundations Must Take

In 2013, I was working with local Detroit organizers to protect essential community services during the city’s bankruptcy. When we sat down with the organizers, one of my mentors asked them, “Who are the people that can pick up the phone, call the governor, and know that, nine times out of ten, he will do whatever they ask?”

This may sound like a strange question to ask, but the reality—which too many don’t know and too many in power don’t want revealed—is that these people exist throughout our polity at the local, state, and national levels.

Until we are honest about who rules America, it is nearly impossible to build an effective movement of change.

They don’t just exist. They dominate, control, manipulate, and exploit communities for their own benefit and profit. Be it gambling in Nevada, Big Tech in the Bay Area, oil and gas in Texas, or insurance in Connecticut, big players in these powerful industries are our local oligarchs. They get what they want regardless of which party is in power because both parties are beholden to them.

But why is my mentor’s question so important? Because to have any chance of getting elected officials to show fidelity to the people instead of the oligarchs and stop the nation’s slide into racist authoritarianism, this is where it starts.

Answering this question is the first step in building a power analysis based in reality instead of mythology. Until we are honest about who rules America, it is nearly impossible to build an effective movement of change capable of taking on the entrenched power dynamics that are destroying communities across the country.

Any act of real resistance and change must start with a real and true power analysis. Frighteningly, too many lack that framework. But that can be changed.

Understanding Current Power Dynamics

I live in Chicago, a city that’s under siege. Every day, neighbors are kidnapped in broad daylight by unidentifiable masked men who are deputized by the government and funded by public tax dollars. Families are living in fear, afraid to step outside while ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is taking an abduct first, ask questions later approach. The city is locked in a legal battle with the Trump administration over the deployment of the National Guard. Trump wants to use terror to provoke a response that he can use as pretense for an authoritarian takeover. And he’s invoking racialized tropes about lawlessness and crime to target Black-led cities and immigrant neighborhoods with this violence.

So, let’s return to the question: Who are the people who can pick up the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) phone and call Trump?

What’s different during Trump’s second term is that [tech] billionaires…have calculated that they can weaponize Trump’s steamroller approach.

Right now, it’s a group of billionaire tech bros. People like Peter Thiel and Alex Karp from Palantir; Antonio Gracias from Valor Equity Partners, who was, until this summer, head of DOGE (the so-called Department of Government Efficiency) Immigration Task Force; Jeff Yass from Susquehanna International Group, a key TikTok investor and one of the largest donors to Trump’s super PAC so far this year; Joe Gebbia from Airbnb, whom Trump has designated the “Chief Design Officer” of the United States; Marc Benioff from Salesforce and Jensen Huang from Nvidia, whom Trump credits with convincing him not to deploy the National Guard to San Francisco; and, yes, Elon Musk.

From the immigration raids to the shredding of the social safety net to the attacks on the civil service, these tech billionaires and their lackeys are playing key roles. Most big tech billionaires didn’t initially support Trump in 2016 but once he became the Republican nominee, some of them fell in line.

What’s different during Trump’s second term is that these billionaires, heavily concentrated in the tech sector, have calculated that they can weaponize Trump’s steamroller approach to turn the country into a technocratic oligarchy that they control. They seem to have decided they can tolerate Trump’s volatility, bluster, and bravado, as long as they can use him as a cudgel to actualize their deeply unpopular and undemocratic vision.

For people pinning their hopes on the 2026 midterm elections, I have two questions:

• First, do you believe the nation will have free and fair elections next year?
• Second, if that does happen, do you think Trump and his allies will honor the results—or will they refuse to seat the victors, like they did for seven weeks with Democratic Representative Adelita Grijalva of Arizona?

The answers may be disheartening but there absolutely is a way to disrupt authoritarianism at every level and fight for a future where freedom and justice can flourish. By having an accurate power analysis of the current moment, it becomes possible to organize effectively against authoritarianism and technofascism.

What Social Justice Organizations Must Do

Now is the time for leaders of social justice nonprofits to mobilize their full institutional power to confront the very real authoritarian threats the nation is facing head-on. This can be scary. Trump is actively targeting progressive organizations, leading many nonprofit executives and board members to decide it’s better to fly under the radar rather than challenge the regime directly.

But that is the surest way to lose the fight against fascism. As Timothy Snyder wrote in On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century:

Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

If the very organizations that claim to be leaders in the fight for social justice pre-comply with the Trump regime out of fear, then we’re cooked.

What is the alternative? Social justice organizations must build broad-based, multiracial working-class solidarity. This means amassing collective people power and then directing that power at the oligarchs. This requires a two-pronged strategy that both opposes billionaire oligarchs and divides them from Trump.

The first strategy is to make the oligarchs’ political activities costly to their business interests. How does this work? One example from 2025: Due to global boycotts and Tesla Takedown protests, Elon Musk’s personal net worth took a big hit while he was running DOGE. This collective pushback cost his bottom line and, as a result, he decided leading DOGE was not good for business.

Two ways social justice organizations can help drive up the cost of authoritarianism are by divesting assets from oligarch business interests and by advocating for taxing the oligarchs and their businesses at the state and local levels to recoup the federal funds our communities are losing as a result of their efforts.

The Stop Funding Billionaires campaign offers a roadmap for pushing pension funds, nonprofit endowments (like those held by foundations, universities, and churches), and state and local governments to stop investing in or doing business with billionaires backing Trump. My organization, the Action Center on Race and the Economy, released a report last month called Pay Us What You Owe Us, which offers concrete revenue measures that state and local elected officials can enact to recover money from billionaire oligarchs.

While quite effective, this first strategy is less viable with billionaires who are ideologically motivated or don’t have consumer-facing businesses. For this group, a different strategy is required—namely, exposing how those billionaires are harming Trump’s own base. The truth is that Trump can’t placate both his voters and his billionaire buddies. The Make America Great Again (MAGA) base would abhor tech bros and what they were doing if they knew the scale of betrayal and its impact.

For social justice nonprofits, both strategies—making the billionaires’ political interests toxic to their financial interests and making themselves toxic to Trump’s base—start with organizing people around their lived experiences of the Trump regime, helping them connect the dots to the billionaires responsible, and then giving them concrete ways to channel their pain and anger.

Ordinary Americans already know that this country doesn’t work for them. Many are living paycheck to paycheck, with slim hopes of ever retiring, struggling to put food on the table, keep the lights on, and pay rent.

For many poor white folks, Trump is the only major politician they hear from offering narratives to make sense of why they’re hurting. But he uses racist and transphobic scapegoating as the explanation for this pain while his billionaire buddies continue to enrich themselves.

Progressives must affirm people’s pain and help them make sense of the real reasons why people’s lives continue to be hard, exposing the people and entities really responsible for so much collective and individual struggle.

It’s not undocumented immigrants or DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) or critical race theory. It’s the people upholding and profiting from this broken system, including many in President Trump’s inner circle.

Progressives also cannot afford to shy away from talking about race. It is vital that movement groups take on and confront the racist dog whistles head-on and organize poor white people around racial justice.

A working class fractured along racial lines will not be able to stop the march of authoritarianism. The only way to overcome the divide-and-conquer strategies being advanced by Trump and his allies is to build across our differences so that everyone understands that what unites people is greater than what divides us.

What Philanthropy Must Do

A power analysis of the social justice nonprofit sector reveals that a large percentage of sectoral power rests with philanthropy. The foundations and major donors who write the checks ultimately set organizational priorities. Strategic shifts from big funders can affect the work of nearly every major social justice nonprofit, either directly or indirectly.

Unfortunately, too many foundations are eager to obey in advance to avoid retaliation from the Trump regime and its authoritarian agenda. I’ve had conversations with program officers at foundations who have asked me to keep my head down because they’re afraid Trump will set his sights on them as one of our funders.

To them, I say the same thing that I’ve said to my staff and board: If our organization stops doing the work that matters because we are afraid it will put our organization in jeopardy, then why do we exist at all?

Anyone with the power to help stop an authoritarian takeover who shies away out of self-preservation should take a long look at the mirror. In the social justice sector, that power lies in large part in the hands of philanthropy. So, what does it look like for philanthropy to step up in this moment?

Foundations must invest in and prioritize the work that builds real power. That means investing heavily in base building organizations, especially ones explicitly working on racial justice. Building multiracial working-class power requires funding for that work, not just in purple states, but in every state.

Unfortunately, the field has seen multiple national community organizing networks lay off staff in the past two years. Social justice organizations can’t build power if philanthropy decides power building isn’t worth funding.

Philanthropy must also play a critical role in confronting the ultra-wealthy and megacorporations. Foundations and individual philanthropists can do that by ensuring their own investments are not supporting the business interests of the oligarchs and by funding social justice organizations running corporate campaigns. There is no legal mandate that requires foundation endowments to maximize their investment returns. Foundation executives and boards are free to decide to stop funding oligarchs and their businesses if they so choose.

But more is required. Foundations that have acquired wealth and power by investing in corporations upholding oppressive systems they claim to oppose must also fund campaigns to stop those corporations from harming communities. “Corporate campaign” often feels like a dirty term in philanthropy, but in a country where the ultra-wealthy and megacorporations hold more power than nearly every elected official, it’s impossible to fund systems change without funding campaigns to challenge corporations upholding the status quo.

Lastly, and maybe most importantly, stopping authoritarianism requires progressive institutions to avoid replicating the power dynamics they oppose. Foundations should democratize decision-making and give grantees and community stakeholders a real say in the big decisions that matter. They can do it by trusting their grantees and giving them room to fail. Foundations can and should dig deep into their endowments to make sure social justice organizations have the money they need to beat back attacks.

The Time to Act Is Now

Experts say that it often takes about 18 months for authoritarians to consolidate power and for a country to tip over into full-blown authoritarianism. It’s been 10 months since Trump took office the second time. We’re past the halfway mark.

The time to act is now. We cannot wait for our elected officials to “do the right thing.” From social justice organizers and grantmakers to community members, neighbors, family, and friends, we must come together urgently and boldly to take on billionaire oligarchs before it is too late.

Editors’ Note: While NPQ’s style is to capitalize “White” when referring to Caucasian people, we’re using lowercase in this article at the author’s request.