Indivisible’s weekly newsletter for December 15-21, 2025
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Hi friends. We’ve got an upbeat intro section from co-founder Leah Greenberg this week, and we’re glad for that after the horrors of the weekend.
But before we dive into the newsletter, we want to acknowledge those events, and send love and solidarity to everyone impacted, directly or indirectly, by the tragedies in Rhode Island and Australia.
We went to sleep Saturday night to news of a mass shooting at Brown University, the 389th of the year. We woke up on Sunday to news of an antisemitic massacre at a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney. As many of us were lighting our menorahs last night, we were receiving alerts that the death toll had risen.
In Sydney, a Holocaust survivor was murdered in an attack targeting Jews. Among the survivors at Brown, there were multiple students who’d already lived through another school shooting.
Those truths are enough to make anyone feel numb, like the problems with this world are too great to overcome. We wish we had something more profound to offer you in this moment, but what we have is this: Our thanks. We can’t tell you how grateful we are for this movement of incredible people who refuse to give up, who rise each day and take action to combat hatred, make our communities safer, our society more just, and keep the faith that we can build a world where all can learn, worship, vote, organize, and live authentically and without fear.
Within the devastation there is also hope, kindness, courage. As Hanukkah reminds us, there is always light in the darkness. An unarmed Muslim man, Ahmed al Ahmed, risked his own life to disarm one of the Sydney shooters. Wherever we see horrors like campus shootings, we see students helping each other.
Every day, we choose this fight, because we believe not just in its urgency, but in each other.
Yours in the fight for a better world,
Indivisible Team
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Indivisibles,
Leah here, stepping in for Ezra, who’s out this week.
I want to talk about a win that might have flown under your radar last week: the failure of Trump’s gerrymandering push in Indiana.
The backstory
Donald Trump knows that in 2026 he’s going to face an electoral wipeout. So he’s spent the last six months doing everything he can to rig the rules. He leaned on Texas, North Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri Republicans to initiate mid-decade redistricting designed to maximize Republican seats -- in other words, to dramatically gerrymander them -- and in each of those cases, the Republican legislators did his bidding.
For the last few months, he’s been putting the same heat on Indiana. He sweet-talked legislators. He promised rewards. He sent JD Vance to visit and lobby in person. He (reportedly) threatened to cut all funding from the state if they didn’t fulfill his demand.
And it was all to no avail. On Wednesday, the Indiana Senate said no, by a vote of 31-19, including the majority of the Senate Republican Caucus. The gerrymandering plan is dead.
Trump threw everything he had at Indiana -- and he failed.
Why this is enormous
Sure, every seat matters in 2026, and this outcome leaves us in a slightly better position than if Trump had successfully bullied the state. But the significance goes way beyond one state’s congressional map.
Authoritarian politics runs on a simple logic: If you can convince enough people that you’re going to consolidate power -- and use it ruthlessly to reward allies and punish enemies -- they start falling in line preemptively. That’s anticipatory obedience. And this year, it worked frighteningly well. Across politics, business, academia, and the media, powerful people bowed their heads and complied.
The opposite is just as important, though: If you overreach, if you start to flail, if people begin to see that you’re losing ground and heading toward lame-duck irrelevance? They stop obeying. And that’s exactly what a whole bunch of Republican state legislators in Indiana just did.
Credit where it’s due
Many individual legislators showed real courage, and they deserve recognition.
But none of this would have happened without Indiana’s civil rights leaders and grassroots organizers. They ran a pedal-to-the-metal campaign that drove massive popular outrage -- flooding legislators with calls, filling the statehouse, and refusing to be ignored. And that’s after building grassroots power for years under some of the toughest conditions out there. Indiana Indivisibles: TAKE A BOW.
Why it happened now
Let's be clear: This sweeping repudiation of Trump by his own party didn’t come out of nowhere.
It wouldn’t have happened back in February or June, when Trump’s approval ratings were still hovering in the 40s. It wouldn’t have happened before the massive No Kings rallies, including in Indiana. It wouldn’t have happened before the MAGA coalition cracked over Epstein, before the shutdown cratered Trump’s approval numbers, or before the 2025 off-year elections and TN-07 scared the crap out of Republican legislators everywhere. Nationwide defiance laid the foundation for last Wednesday in Indiana.
This is what it looks like when a would-be dictator tries to bully his way into power -- and fails. It’s a sign that rule-by-fear is breaking down. It’s a flashing warning light that the wheels are coming off the fascism bus.
What comes next
We should also be clear that a wounded authoritarian is incredibly dangerous. We know more harm and more horror are coming. No one can afford to ease up.
But wins don’t come often these days, and we have to celebrate them. Because these moments prove that what we’re doing matters.
We started this year understanding that Trump, Stephen Miller, and the MAGA machine would sprint to consolidate power -- over their party, the courts, business, civil society, and the media. And that our job was to hold them off, drive down their popularity, and build a pro-democracy coalition strong enough to make consolidation impossible.
We’re nowhere near finished.
But damn, last week was a big step forward.
In solidarity,
Leah Greenberg
Co-Executive Director, Indivisible
Your weekly to-dos
- Tell Congress to block Trump’s march to war with Venezuela. Donald Trump, winner of the FIFA Peace Prize, continues amassing warships in the Caribbean while bombing small vessels without any legal justification and threatening a full on invasion of Venezuela. We expect a vote in the House this week, and the Senate soon after, on legislation to block the regime from committing US forces to an illegal Venezuelan war. Use our email tool to urge your Members of Congress to vote YES.
- Email your Members of Congress to demand investigations into Hegseth’s murderous strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific. It appears increasingly likely that Pete Hegseth oversaw war crimes in the regime’s illegal bombings of small boats in the Caribbean. Congress has a duty to launch investigations into these strikes, which have killed over 87 people thus far. Email your Members of Congress and demand they haul Pete Hegseth into public hearings on these ongoing extrajudicial murders.
- We’re stronger when we organize together. Join a local Indivisible group today. It’s resolution season, and if one of your goals for the new year is becoming more engaged in your community and doing more to save democracy, it might be time to connect with an Indivisible group near you.
- Please consider supporting your local food pantry this holiday season. This is the busiest time of the year for food pantries, and the combination of federal funding cuts and rising prices are making it difficult for many pantries to meet rising needs. We’re dropping our usual fundraising ask this week and encouraging everyone to support these lifelines in your community. Food donations are appreciated, but to offer meals at scale in addition to other services, donations are preferred. Use the link above or just google ‘food pantries near me’ to find your closest site and make a donation.
What’s the Plan with Leah and Ezra: New year, new link
Our weekly What’s the Plan (WTP) virtual chats with Indivisible co-founders and co-executive directors Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin were a 2025 innovation and we've found that the regular, live Q&A with supporters has been a great way to share our thinking about news of the day and honestly assess our strategies and tactics going forward.
Our final chat of the year is this Thursday at 3pm ET/ 12pm PT, and then, good news: We’re going to keep these going in 2026. But if you want to keep joining us (or join us for the first time) in the new year, you’ll need to use this new link.
Just to repeat that -- the link people have used for all this year’s Zooms (including this Thursday’s) will not sign you up or ensure reminders for next year’s Zooms. Please use this new WTP link to join the weekly chats in 2026.
And if you aren’t signed up for this Thursday’s chat, you can do that here.
IndivisiWIN of the week
Every Saturday (including last Saturday, when temps were well below frigid), members of Indivisible Central Michigan rally on a corner in the town of Mt. Pleasant. Many drive some distance to be there, most come with signs, and everyone shows up with a fire in their belly. Focused on strengthening local political engagement, these Indivisibles are doing the work to ensure that their communities know not just what the regime is doing, but that their neighbors are fighting back.
Indivisible groups everywhere are making sure their communities are informed, organized, and ready to fight; it's this kind of commitment that led to the success we saw against Trump in Indiana this week. Want to be part of this work? The best way in is to join your local Indivisible group!
Follow us on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads to keep up on the latest information, and text “INDIVISIBLE” to 59798 to opt-in to our text messaging program, where we send rapid response actions a few times a month. 
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