“Trump is a lunatic!” / “Mount Sinai keep Palantir’s spyware out of our healthcare!”
Climate Week Civil Disobedience
Three actions, two arrests in two days. And that was just a glimpse.
Climate week, says Marcene Mitchell, “returns to New York alongside the high-level week of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) running from September 20 to 27. Last year was the largest Climate Week NYC ever, drawing more than 100,000 attendees across 1,000 events, and this year has been announced as the biggest one yet.”
Tuesday
I could not sleep the night before the Trump UN Civil Disobedience Tuesday. Trump was in town. My buddies in Rise and Resist would greet him with a jeer, letting the world know he does represent us, that many in the US oppose his isolationist, nationalist views, environmental disrepair, gutting safety net programs, and democracy itself, among any number of different reasons.
We met at at Grand Central Station at 745 AM, 8 AM, in the Lower Concourse, greeting each other, activists from act up and extinction rebellion, mostly the gray haired rise and resisters on hand, checking in about classes, how the trains worked, who was coming, who had gotten stuck. First Ryan, then I saw Ken and Zack, Kate speaking with Erik, a local politico, worried about missing the policy class he was teaching that morning. Lisa Fithian and I talked about the jitters, before such actions, or trainings, etc.
Jamie pulled everyone together and we walked through the concourse, out to the street, East on 43rd to 2nd Ave up, no police about us. With Trump on the way to the UN, a group of us stepped out with a green light and stayed, blocking traffic, chanting: “Trump Does Not Speak for Me.” “Trump Lies All the Time.” “Trump is a lunatic.” No chants planned, we screamed and screamed, one chant on top of the next, eventually sitting down, blocking almost all the lanes of traffic. Jamie sat in the bike lanes, where cops were moving, before police pulled them out.
“Don’t block the president’s motorcade,” said one of the cops later in the week. “You don’t want to. They won’t stop.”
Police did not seem to want to arrest us, giving us several warnings as the traffic filled up behind us.
And eventually, they pulled us away, taking us to a bus, turned into a police vehicle.
Inside, I sat across from Kate, talking about her visit to my trauma informed practice talk the week before.
Sitting behind me, Robert, a veteran activist with the Radical Faeries and Rise and Resist, who is not conducting an oral history of the group, recalled his arrest at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant blockade in 1981. Held for four days with other notables, including Starhawk, Andrew Boyd, who found the experience transformative. Also on hand was Wavy Gravy, who held a No Talent, Talent Show, to keep the spirits up and pass the time, in a "Tornado of Talent" .
Years ago, Starhawk told me her story of Diablo Canyon.
Starhawk described this feeling during the campaign to shut down the Diablo
“I think I felt that really way back in Diablo Canyon in the very first
nonviolent direct action, being encamped with people. Really, I think I
was down there for about three weeks, where decisions were made by
consensus; where there was this tremendous amount of care and good
vibes from people. It’s really transformative.”
On the bus, Officer Ho asked us if our handcuffs were too tight. Arriving at One Police Plaza, one of the police stood up, to tell us we were going to be processed and given summonses.
“Thank you for your cooperation,” he started to say, “for being like you are,”
We burst into cheers.
We’re all trying, connecting, hoping our gestures move the world somehow.
In the holding penn at One Police Plaza, my friend Zach, who I met in 2003 during the actions against the Iraq Invasion, told me, “I gotta feel like I did something. Maybe it's all just for me to soothe my conscience.”
Inside, we talked about previous actions and watched the police writing up our summonses.
“I have another action to go to,” one man from Extinction Rebellion told one of the cops.
He looked at him like he was crazy.
I asked about how to get a free rise and resist t shirt.
“No luck you have to pay,” they told me. “Thats our main way of fundraising.”
And we bantered away the afternoon, watching the police fill out the forms on the old side of the holding pens, three people working on the computers, another 12 to 16, standing about talking.
Eventually, they let us out, with court dates and disorderly conduct charges. I was the last name to be called, just in time to make my class on group work.
Checking my phone, Mom was in and out of the hospital. I ran to visit her and come back to the city for an action, the next day.
Wednesday
We met at the Fulton Street Art Wall by the Oculus in the financial district, for the Palantir out of Mt Sinai action.
Activists with ACT UP, People Over Profit (POP), Judson Church, Housing Works, Sunrise, Climate Defiance, etc, veterans and newbies to direct action, many familiar from the last few rounds of direct action.
By 8:30, we made our way to the World Trade Center, where the Newsweek AI Health Summit was taking place on the 72nd Floor of 1 World Trade Center. The Summit features panels like: how AI is increasing ROI (Return On Investment) for hospitals, how to reassure patients when critical decisions about their care are being made by algorithms, and how to implement ‘Hospital-at-Home’ models that push people out of hospital beds faster. The keynote speaker of this morning’s panel is Dr. Brendan Carr, CEO of Mount Sinai. In 2022 Mount Sinai signed a contract with surveillance and AI giant Palantir to handle their data analytics, which now covers everything from managing beds and hospital stays to “optimizing” nurses’ time at bedside. Palantir oversees 21% of hospital beds in the US— and Mount Sinai is their flagship contract. Palantir is a surveillance, data analytics, and military tech company founded by billionaires Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. They specialize in warfare, policing, human tracking, and immigration enforcement. Palantir is complicit in multiple human rights violations, including: - Mass deportations and detentions by ICE across the US - Surveilling and killing tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank - Guiding US military bombings of civilians and infrastructure in Iran - Training the NYPD to profile and track New Yorkers Palantir has received $287 Million in governmental contracts from ICE! Palantir has received $443 Million in governmental contracts from the CDC! Palantir has received $10 Billion in governmental contracts from the U.S. Army! A pro-war, profit-driven tech company does not belong in our hospitals and should not have access to our private medical records! Due to public pressure, NYC’s public healthcare system, NYC Health + Hospitals, decided not to renew their contract with Palantir last year. We call on Mount Sinai to do the same! ….tell Mount Sinai to keep Palantir’s spyware out of our healthcare!
Arriving at 1 WTC, Ryan and I unfolded the money for aids, not for war banners, and a dozen of us blocked the doors.
“AI OUT OF OUR HEALTHCARE!” we chanted.
“PALANTIR OUT OF MOUNT SINAI”
“We see you Mt Sinai,” we chanted.
“Healthcare over profit!”
"ACT UP, fight back, fight AIDS, fight fascism!”
"We will stay here till Mt Sinai cuts its ties with Palantir!”
"Panantir out of immigration, out of Mt Sinai, out of our government!!!”
"You betrayed trans kids you, Brendan Carr, shame on you!!!
"No justice, no peace, no healthcare, no peace!!!
"We’re here, we’re queer, get rid of Palantir!”
"Spyware out of healthcare. Palantir out of healthcare!”
Standing in front of the doors, the Port Authority Police watched us, their plastic handcuffs in hand. They seemed to be waiting us out, a few white shirts coming and doing. One policeman walked up and said they were happy to have us there, with our message, but please don’t block the doors. They would arrest us if we blocked the doors. So we blocked the doors. And then they walked away. ‘They want a photo op,’ said one cop to security, as Ken and I walked around the building. By 1015 am, people were leaving. We needed to regroup. Should we leave or up the anti, we murmured, an idea taking shape, several of us talking. Lets move. Yes, let's move. Pass it on. We got up and crossed into the street, blocking traffic on the West Side Highway. The Port Authority Police no longer in charge, the NYPD police moved, with a quick warning, before dragging us away in no time. Several of us were interviewed by the media as the police walked us to the police vans.
Inside the van, Officer Ho said ‘Long time no see,’ to one of the activists who’d been here the day before.
At the 7th Precinct, one cop asked if I had been here before. Then he laughed. Yes, I saw you yesterday. And I saw your rap sheet going back to the 1990s, he laughed.
As we sat in jail, Kate posted:
“Had to sit this one out because the spirit is willing but the body says no to two arrests in two days but ACT UP and various climate groups are zapping the AI meeting where the CEO of Mt Sinai is speaking. Mt Sinai contracts with the highly problematic Palantir (who also do surveillance and defense contracts). They also cancelled trans youth services and are part of some very shady business involving health care and oil in Guayana.”
Inside the holding cells, we talked about life in Brazil and the battle for gender inclusive care, ACT UP, friendships and trans healthcare and ways to think about activism, cohort after cohort. the histories of activism we see on these days, ever whirling forward, one memory, one story after another. After all, what is jail, but a time for storytelling.
We all went for burritos after we got out, chatting about the action, exchanging contacts, making plans to go dancing. Did we move the dial, what's next for act up, for our lives?
Out into the East Village, I strolled, thinking about the ways we are asked to accommodate technology and digital surveillance into our lives "The essence of technology is by no means anything technological," says Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher whose work was central to the development of phenomenology, in his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology." (first delivered as a lecture in 1953 and published in German as “Die Frage nach der Technik” in 1954, then translated into English in the 1977 collection The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays). Late in his career, he came to look at technology with skepticism, seeing a reifying function, in its ordering and re-ordering of our thinking, our minds, as all consuming force, a worldview that reduces everything—including human beings and our healthcare data—into commodities. The antidote, of course, is a meditative, even poetic approach to living and thinking, in which we read, we hike, we remember we are human, and still use technology, without letting it dominate us. (Source, Huttunen, R., & Kakkori, L. (2022). Heidegger’s critique of the technology and the educational ecological imperative. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 54(5), 630–642. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2021.1903436)
Is that possible?
In Surviving Patriarchy on Steroids, my friend Stephanie Davies talks about creating islands of sanity, in an insane world; dual power as the anarchists say. Is that possible with the ever expanding grasp of AIi, ever enveloping intellectual property rights, personal and healthcare data, tracking immigrants, ete. All the things Palantir does. Can teachers, can humans maintain control of our pedagogy? Can we elude the big surveillance state tracking our lectures on DEI and trans affirming care?
Later that night, my father in law asked about the actions, concerned that Trump and company were going to call for harder charges, given it was the UN session, etc.
“No it was not too bad,” I replied.
“I remember the RNC in 2004,” said Al, recalling me getting arrested before it started. It was like I disappeared. No one knew where I was, but someone at work in the Bronx saw me get picked up by the cops. I had been putting “Arrest BUSH!” stickers up everywhere. Apparently, the police had been tracking me for days, showing my lawyer Martin Stollar pictures of me posting the stickers in the subways.
Work called Caroline, who called Al, who called Judy.
He had his investigator, a former NYPD commander, at SONY look for me.
“Do you know anything about your son in law? Do you know what he does?” the investigator asked Al. “We know where your son in law is. Does he have a lawyer? He has a long rap sheet,” he replied.
Al’s sister, a prominent NY Judge, sent a lawyer to get me in the Tombs. By that time, the place was filled with activists, who had been arrested during the protests at the Republican National Convention. She got me out.
“They were ready to hold you for three days without a charge, which was legal after the Patriot Act,” recalled Al.
Multiple lawsuits and administrations later, this climate was different.
As Kate put it in her Observations of an Activist Blog.
Thursday
I did not have the energy to take a third bust of the week on Thursday. But I still found my way to the UN. "War criminals not welcome here," said one of the signs. "Arrest Netanyahu." The anti-Netanyahu protest march started at Bryant Park took Thursday, September 24, 2026, heading toward the United Nations Headquarters, where Bibi was speaking at the UN. Police, as usual, were blocking access for security reasons. Restricting speech. Still, protesters filled the streets with acts of mass civil disobedience around Netanyahu's brief visit. What a horror the history around his presence, really only there because assassins bullets took out Rabin over three decades ago. My friend BC Craig noted, "JVP, JFREJ, Adalah Justice Project, Palestinian Youth Movement, DSA, and elected leaders shut down the road outside the UN where Bibi is going to speak. We say no to genocide and to the whole world who is treating this as acceptable."
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