The Guardline
The youth-led climate activist group Sunrise Movement is expanding its mission to battle “authoritarianism” as the Trump administration targets left-leaning organizations and puts one of the group’s major funders in the crosshairs.
“There is no serious way to think about stopping the climate crisis under a fascist government,” Sunrise executive director Aru Shiney-Ajay told The Intercept. “The path to climate lies through getting rid of the authoritarian government we’re in.”
The move comes as President Donald Trump furiously dismantles the green energy initiatives that Sunrise fought to see enshrined in President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Recovery Act. In a striking success for the climate group, the law contained parts of Sunrise’s top priority: the Green New Deal.
The group, now eight years old, has decided that it cannot continue to fight climate change without fighting Trump, Shiney-Ajay told The Intercept. Delegates from the nonprofit’s more than 100 local hubs voted by a wide margin last month approve its expanded mission, Sunrise announced Thursday.
Sunrise is making the change public just a week after Trump sent a chilling message to activists who oppose him: In a memo, he directed cabinet officials to investigate nonprofits and their funders for supposed links to terrorism.
In the Crosshairs
While the Sunrise Movement has received no official word that it is under investigation, the group has ample reason to believe that it may be targeted.
The Justice Department has directed local prosecutors to investigate billionaire financier George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, which gave $2 million to Sunrise between 2019 and 2013, according to a grant database. In doing so, the Justice Department cited the right-wing Capital Research Center, which recently published a report claiming that the Sunrise Movement supports “Antifa-associated anarchist terrorists.”
That report is fashioned as a road map for Trump officials as they follow through on the crackdown he promised after the September 10 assassination of Charlie Kirk. The day he released his domestic terror memorandum, Trump called Soros a “likely candidate” for prosecution.
The Open Society Foundations and the Sunrise Movement both say they reject violence. The Capital Research Center report focuses on Sunrise’s support for a legal defense fund associated with Stop Cop City, a decentralized effort to halt the construction of an Atlanta police training facility inside a forest.
The prosecution’s case against dozens of Stop Cop City protesters collapsed last month when a judge dismissed most of the charges against them. While she stands by her group’s support of the bail fund, Shiney-Ajay said that it was limited in practice.
“When I look at that report, what I see is a desperate attempt to paint what is ultimately a large youth protest movement in negative terms, because they are really looking to villainize and crack down on protests,” Shiney-Ajay said. “That is a strategy with authoritarians.”
Work in Progress
Standing up to elected officials is nothing new for members of the Sunrise Movement — but for years, they focused more on embarrassing Democrats into action.
The group, which restricts membership to people under the age of 35, became famous for acts of political theater such as storming former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office in 2018 to pressure her on climate change. An appearance from then Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez helped catapult the New York Democrat to national prominence.
Sunrise’s decentralized structure has sometimes led to fractures between national and local leaders, but it remained a force in progressive politics after Biden’s election. The group’s relationship with the White House alternated between productive and contentious before its members soured on him over Israel’s war on Gaza. It was the first major environmental group to call on Biden to quit last year’s election.
Sunrise’s latest pivot, which 74 percent of delegates approved in a September 5 vote, is a work in progress.
The group has already organized a walkout of Washington, D.C., university students in response to Trump’s military crackdown. New projects could include responses from local chapters to deployments of the National Guard or Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents, municipal campaigns to support mayors standing up to Trump, and pushback against university administrators rolling over for the White House, Shiney-Ajay said. At the national level, the organization hopes to furnish anti-authoritarianism training to tens of thousands of people.
While one long-standing critique of Sunrise is that it has been distracted by “diffuse non-climate causes of the activist left,” in the words of a 2021 Politico article, Shiney-Ajay said she isn’t worried about mission creep.
“We are pretty clear that we are doing this so that we can get on track to win federal climate legislation. That has always been the mission of Sunrise,” she said. “The reason I joined Sunrise in the first place is because it felt like Sunrise was one of the very few organizations that was honest about the conditions of the world, and had a plan to meet the conditions of this world.”
