In the words of Zora Neale Hurston, "There are years that ask questions, and years that answer."

This year does not allow for abstraction. 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the "founding" of the so-called United States: while the political elite prepare to laud American empire and its imagined future glories, we are living in a moment where the state's very foundations appear to be crumbling under our feet. What are we building that can hold us through? The era we're entering asks us what we are committed to building when exhaustion is systemic, dissent is silenced, and a compassionate heart is treated with suspicion. The coming years will insist on not only answers for the past two and a half centuries of exploitation and bloodshed here in this illegitimate empire, but also on steadfast action, strategy, creative solutions, and deliberate presence.

Right now, the act of learning itself is under attack. Political education, organizing, and truth-telling are being criminalized and censored. The Trump administration has started its second term, intentionally targeting and attempting to neutralize the power of any sphere that might influence and build liberatory movements. Universities, media outlets, and community organizations are being sanctioned, surveilled, and suppressed. Movements for Palestinian solidarity, trans liberation, and anti-fascist resistance are all being labeled as threats to public safety. The U.S. war machine is escalating and launching new campaigns of aggression from Venezuela to Iran. This isn't a moment for emotional bypassing and numbness: we must be active participants in our collective future and be rooted in the knowledge that we've been here before. The seeds planted by those who came before us — and the history of this Land shaped by both destructive extraction and an indomitable radical tradition — remind us how to survive when worlds end.

The ability to think critically, feel deeply, and act collectively is fundamental to a living toolkit for surviving and connecting in this time of suppression. In times of censorship, mass disinformation, and fear, learning must be rooted in curiosity, care, and connection: cultivating spaces where people can question and reimagine power together. Rooted: A Living Toolkit in the Face of State Repression is a collaborative, three-part virtual course from the Center for Constitutional Rights and Into the Treehouse exploring the political landscape that impacts us.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has journeyed alongside generations of organizers, cultural workers, public intellectuals, and front-line communities resisting repression and refusing erasure, who have taught us how to fight and build in the bleakest of moments. For 60 years, the movements, individuals, and communities we're accountable to — those at the margins, those pushed out of the frame, those insisting that the world should be different and more just — have guided our actions, have called us in, and have charted the future we are pursuing. With our co-conspirators, we ask, how can we build, disrupt, and shift power? What is our highest contribution? What does the moment require? The Center for Constitutional Rights is as much a political organization as it is a legal-advocacy one, and engaging in educational interventions like Rooted is a mandate. We must take the time to tend to our spirits, make grounded assessments, refine our capacities to discern threats, uproot mythologies, and develop our arsenal of tactics.

In a moment of ongoing U.S.-aided genocides, from Palestine to Sudan to Congo, as well as the escalating violence here at home of government agencies like ICE, it is critical that we examine the centuries of impunity for anti-Black and anti-Indigenous killings in this settler colony that have cleared the path for what we witness today. When the intentional abandonment of our people by the state is so explicit and devastating, we ought to turn toward each other and build alternative, life-affirming networks. Rooted is for those who love their people and their community and want to be ready for the moment ahead.

Into the Treehouse emerges not as an escape from our current reality, but as a response to it. Empire depends on generational severance, where elders are treated as obsolete and youth as disposable. Into the Treehouse re-stitches these timelines. Intergenerational practice is how we remember what we already know. It is a site where memory, imagination, and care are allowed to coexist. We are practicing the inalienable skills that no institution can permit us to use. When we remember that we're agents of our own freedom, we expand our capacity, reintroduce choice, and recognize ourselves as more than reactive bodies. By remembering and reclaiming ancestral wisdom, wonder, and our inherent right and aptitude for joy, we align ourselves to the future that we are actively reaching toward. In Rooted, curiosity becomes essential technology for staying human: one where learning is embodied and care is reciprocal rather than extractive.

While these are critical times that demand our tenacity, discipline, rigor, and principled action, we recognize that this work also requires us to commit to the fullness of the human experience that relationship building requires. We commit to this work, to each other, and to ourselves because we believe in the dignity of all collective life on this planet and in the possibility of the world we're creating. We know that the stakes are high, and this work is to orient us toward building the structures we need in opposition to the polycrisis. We encourage you to commit to the long arc of transformative struggle, building right where you are and right now. Resistance is successful when it has a foundation of relationships; relationships aren't built in crisis, they're built to withstand crisis.

Rooted: A Living Toolkit in the Face of State Repression is a return to foundational practices that have sustained communities through violence, displacement, and terror for generations. 2026 is forcing a reckoning, and this living toolkit is both an offering and an invitation to ask questions and demand answers. Together.