Gathered in the Manhattan home of a man who stands as a monument to what happens when you win too well against power, guests assembled like a gathering storm. They were plotting, but also performing a kind of political séance, trying to summon the ghost of a future that hasn’t been canceled yet.
At the home of Steven Donziger—the attorney who wrestled a Chevron-sized Goliath to the mat and then watched as referees in fine black robes declared the victory illegal and took his license to fight—the new resistance opened its coffers and bared its teeth.
The cast was a curator’s dream of modern dissent.
Michael Greenberg, the founder of Climate Defiance, with the weary fire of a man who has memorized the ceiling of a jail cell. Chi Osse, the city council prodigy. Lindsey Boylan.
They were joined by a satirist, Walter Masterson, whose laughter is a scalpel, and a university professor, Adam Brett Met, who also plucks the bass for a pop band and handed out copies of his book, Amplify, as if passing out tactical manuals before a hop over the trenches.
The assembled, a mosaic of nurses, teachers, and what the old guard might call “the usual suspects,” pledged north of $2,000 a month in support of Climate Defiance.
Correction: “Our Giving Tuesday event was selling out so we had to add an afterparty. Then that was selling out, too, so we had to add a third event in Brooklyn,” said Greenberg. “Over 100 supporters showed up in total. Brooklyn brownstones and Manhattan apartments packed shoulder-to-shoulder.”
“Adam Met from the AJR Band was there. The youngest NYC council member in history was there. The youngest woman ever elected to the state senate was there. Steven Donziger. Michael Mezz. Walter Masterson,” said Greenberg. “Folks discussed ways of getting involved and taking action – and gave a staggering $25,000 over 36 hrs.”
Climate Defiance is a group whose strategy is to be the inconvenient truth made flesh, to be the splash of cold water at the fossil fuel industry’s champagne luncheon.
From New Jersey, an uncompromising voice crackled as sharp as a shard of glacier ice: Lisa McCormick, a progressive Democrat who is mounting her second US Senate bid, did not offer the gentle, parsing endorsement of the cautious politician.
“I support the unyielding moral clarity invoked by Climate Defiance,” she said. “I am not running to make friends in the Democratic cloakroom. I will not compromise because the fossil fuel industry and their enablers in both parties have waged a war of delay and disinformation for profit. I am running to shut down the death machine.”
Her words were not a policy paper; they were a declaration of war on the very concept of compromise in the face of calibrated extinction.
But the heart of the matter, the real story humming beneath the fundraising figures and the bold quotes, was laid out by Greenberg himself.
From a rattling train, where a stranger dissected a chicken with a grim, utilitarian focus, he typed out the blueprint for an insurgency.
He announced a national tour—18 days, 10 cities, a caravan of discontent featuring sitting members of Congress, a Garden-selling musician, a mayor-elect, and influencers with the algorithmic might to move mountains.
“We’re not the New Kids on the Block anymore,” said Greenberg, with the pride of a general who has graduated from skirmishes to strategy. “We’re building a machine here—an operation that is at once professional and yet proudly not professionalized.”
This is the sharp, strange edge of the climate fight now. It is the meticulous logistics of 12 pairs of socks in a suitcase, paired with the planned chaos of blocking the Department of Energy.
It is the “slow and steady” building of 401k plans for revolutionaries, funded by the small donations of the desperate, while preparing “shock-and-awe tactics that make you spit out your coffee.”
Raising pledges for more than $2,000 at the first stop on his tour undoubtedly pleased Greenberg, but he knows that much more is required to finance his peaceful army of nuisances.
“There are perhaps 100 relationships we are cultivating – staff, photographers, videographers, comics, funders, graphic designers, volunteers, artists, lawyers,” said Greenberg. “This means when the opportunity arises, as it always does, we can spring into action with each person knowing their role.”
They speak of “mapping the struggle” and “crash courses in nonviolent de-escalation” in the same breath. They blockade the homes of deputies who approved oil projects, and when those deputies resign weeks later, they note the correlation without claiming the causation, letting the implication hang in the air like woodsmoke.
And now, they stare into the maw of a second Trump administration, a regime whose leader has reportedly asked why protesters can’t just be shot. The activists calculate their risks in colors: green for support, yellow for frontline, red for arrestable.
They write jail-support numbers on their arms like a sacrament. They wonder if they will be labeled “the enemy within,” and they wonder if that label will come with handcuffs or something worse. Yet, their analysis is cold, clear, and startling in its political calculus.
They argue that their unvarnished, confrontational authenticity—their willingness to name the corruption and scream the science—is not a turn-off to the alienated MAGA voter, but a potential bridge.
The enemy, they insist, is not the neighbor with a different flag, but the billionaire in the boardroom who owns both flags and is betting against the future.
So what we witnessed in that Manhattan home, and what is about to crisscross this anxious nation on a post-Thanksgiving tour, is something new being forged in the heat of a burning world.
It is part cause, part brand, part community, part commando unit. It is fueled by a righteous fury that has grown tired of its own placards and decided to become a problem that cannot be ignored, a spectacle that cannot be channel-surfed away.
They are done asking politely. They are done waiting. They are packaging their rebellion with the precision of a Silicon Valley startup and the moral fervor of an old-time revival. They are betting everything that in this era of polished lies, the most powerful thing you can be is authentically, disruptively, and professionally out of patience. The train has left the station, and it is headed for a cliff.
These people aren’t just warning us; they’re planning to lay new track, right in front of the wheels, and they’re asking you to come out, come through, and help them swing the hammer.