By showcasing victories in Tennessee and Florida, this piece offers a concrete blueprint for building narrative power, showing that the antidote to fascist distraction is seizing the moral high ground and making narrative “everybody’s job” within a coalition.
In 2018, Steve Bannon said: “All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day, we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never be able to recover, but we got to start with muzzle velocities.”
This has been the defining strategy of fascists across the globe. They relentlessly attack immigrants, Black people, transgender people, or the “woke” elite in order to divide and distract us while they take over our democracy and rig the rules of our economy to line their pockets.
Too often, we are forced into defense mode, reacting to their every attack. When we do this, we run the risk of unintentionally reinforcing their harmful narratives about who belongs in our society, who is at fault for the problems we face, and what the role of government is.
At We Make The Future Action, an organization that we founded and currently lead, we’ve seen how state-based community organizations and leaders across the country are refusing to take the bait. Instead, they are getting louder with proactive, race-explicit, and research-backed narratives that tell a bigger story about who we are, what we’re for, and how we can get there.
Here we share two stories from Tennessee and Florida, where organizers and leaders have been working in hostile political environments for years. Their energy, work, and persistence impart lessons about how we can use narrative to build power when the odds are stacked against us.
Lesson 1: Seize the Moral High Ground
In Tennessee this year, when Republican House Majority Leader William Lamberth introduced a bill to bar the children of immigrant families from public schools, we saw how the Tennessee Immigrant Rights & Refugee Coalition (TIRRC) led the effort to beat back this legislation.
Together with more than 60 organizations and crucial support from Forward Tennessee, they launched the Education for All Tennessee campaign, leading with a proactive, values-based narrative about the right to public education for every child, no matter who they are or where they were born.
Through the campaign, they organized hundreds of volunteers to join multiple days of actions, collecting more than 50 personal stories, and coordinating a dozen phone banks within a few weeks to urge constituents in target districts to call their state legislator opposing the bill. Children, parents, faith leaders, and small business owners mobilized, coordinating rallies, making statements, and disrupting committee sessions. In the span of weeks, the legislation was dead in the water.
Lisa Sherman Luna, Executive Director at TIRRC, shared with us that, “the narrative we led with, combined with our collective organizing tactics, was why we won this fight.”
This proactive narrative allowed them to do three crucial things:
- Seize the moral high ground: To TIRRC, the fight wasn’t just about immigrant children; it was about all of us. They cast everyday Tennesseans as the heroes and self-interested politicians who try to divide us as the villains. Instead of giving more airtime to their opposition’s dog-whistles and fake information—namely, that undocumented immigrants are “taking something away” from the rest of us—they got louder on what they believe to be true: Education should be for all children, no matter who they are or where they’re from. Their message energized their support base to call their representatives, share their own stories, and attend actions.
- Create a big tent: Their narrative was big enough to invite Tennesseans of all races, faiths, and backgrounds to act in solidarity with immigrant children. Though Lamberth’s bill targeted immigrant children, the narrative tapped into Tennesseans’ shared interest in ensuring that all children have the chance to attend a great public school. It allowed for evocative moments, like when a 10-year-old interrupted a committee with a sign that said, “Stop attacking my friends.” Actions like this show what solidarity looks like and are a powerful motivator for people who are not activists or advocates to join the cause.
Local coverage of a young protester at the Tennessee House Education Committee - Sow the seeds for future fights: The attacks on immigrant children have not and will not be the only attacks against the children of Tennessee. The Equity Alliance Fund has been fighting against the state’s takeover of Memphis public schools, which, because of state-sanctioned racial segregation, predominantly serve Black and brown children. Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment (SOCM), another coalition member, has been fighting for fully funded public schools through their #PublicSchoolStrongTN campaign to counter a wave of school voucher legislation. By repeating their narrative loudly—education for all, no matter who you are or where you’re from—the Tennessee coalition is sowing the seeds for future fights. They’re also driving certain Tennessee legislators to play defense against their narrative, forcing them to justify their attempts to defund public schools and block efforts to make them more equitable and racially just.
This victory was seeded through years of collaboration. Last year in particular was a catalytic moment for many of these organizations as they came together to get out the vote in key Tennessee districts using an aligned narrative strategy. They had both the in-state relationships and the narrative research and communications tools to move quickly when the legislation was introduced.
Moving forward, groups like TIRRC and Forward Tennessee are working with other state partners to design and test a statewide narrative that is rooted in organizing so they are ready to fight back for what our families deserve during the 2026 Tennessee legislative session and mid-terms.
Lesson 2: Narrative Is Everybody’s Job
Today, fascists are making Project 2025 a reality. But in states like Florida, state legislators—in the pocket of big business—have already been testing those policies for years, employing a divide-and-conquer narrative strategy they’ve honed over decades.
At the same time, Florida organizations like Florida Rising, the Florida Immigrant Coalition, Dream Defenders, Faith in Florida, Central Florida Jobs with Justice, and SEIU Florida have been organizing Floridians to fight back and win the future we deserve.
In 2016, they decided to come together as a coalition under the banner of Florida For All (FFA). For years, the staff, members, and leaders of the coalition did the slow work of building trust and showing up for one another in their campaigns.
It was this slow work that was foundational to weaving together a shared narrative that multiple organizations in the coalition could adapt and echo.
Nadeska Concha, Director of Communications at FFA, shares, “no one can just come in from the outside and say ‘this is the narrative we’re going to use.’ You really have to do work alongside one another, understand each other’s priorities, and lead with the question, ‘How can I be of value to you?’ Only by doing work with one another can you begin to surface the points of connection across all our fights and how narrative can help the people we are organizing to see those connections.”
As a result of that work, two broad narrative elements have surfaced:
- Multiracial, working-class solidarity: The coalition consistently elevates how all Floridians—Black, white, or brown; native or newcomer—belong in Florida, and when they come together across their differences, they can win the freedom to thrive. This narrative is a powerful rebuke to the divide-and-conquer tactics of their opposition and helps build a multiracial base to show up for one another.
- Corporate accountability: The coalition routinely calls out billionaires, greedy corporations, and the government leaders they bankroll as the reason Floridians don’t have the freedom to thrive. This narrative is the thread that connects all the different issues their coalition works on—from housing to climate to immigration. By repeating it, they are reinforcing their shared political analysis across members of the coalition and to the base and persuadable audiences they are mobilizing.
They also make sure that these elements don’t just exist in their communications but are closely tied to all of their organizing. As Nadeska shares, “narrative needs to be heard by people. That’s not just a communications activity; it’s fundamentally about organizing. That’s why it makes sense for organizers to weave narrative into their work and for narrative practitioners to do organizing. There’s a feedback loop that’s necessary.”
It’s this slow work of building relationships and integrating narrative across all facets of their work that has allowed the coalition to stem the tide of fascist policies from the Florida Legislature.
Last year, despite a landscape saturated with corporate money and disinformation, the coalition managed to defeat two ballot initiatives in the 2024 Florida General Election. One of these initiatives would have increased partisan influence on the state’s education system and the other which would have made it harder for working-class candidates to run for office. They also nearly won their campaign to pass Amendment 4 and stop government interference with abortion, securing 57% in favor—just shy of the 60% required for an Amendment to pass.
And in places where they focused both organizing and communications tactics to create a narrative echo chamber—like in Alachua County, Florida—they saw a 100% success rate across all of their ballot initiative campaigns.
As we write this, the coalition is coming together, following the lead of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, to counter the new federal detention camp operating in the Florida Everglades, lifting up the importance of solidarity in this moment and calling out those who target immigrants to enact their own agenda to gain power and hoard wealth for themselves.
Moving Forward:
We know that the conditions we’re fighting today aren’t permanent. Even in these times, we have the power to change them.
To change conditions, we need a plan for telling a consistent story of who we are and what we value—loudly, clearly, over and over again—so we can change what the public hears, affect what they believe, and mobilize them to take action. This is at the heart of narrative strategy that builds power.
The good thing is that we don’t have to look far.
Community organizations and leaders in states like Tennessee and Florida show us what building narrative power—power that can seed the changes we need to fully thrive—looks like.
- They show us what is possible when we are proactive with a values-based narrative that allows people and organizations to come together and set the terms of the debate rather than react to it.
- They show us that the slow work of building trust across organizations and constituencies—and making sure narrative is not just the role of communicators, but leaders and organizers—is the foundation of building long-term narrative power.
Let’s follow their lead.
