Trump’s Crackdown on Environmental Nonprofits: Outrage, Nothingburger or Both?

Earth Day Stunt Expected. How Should We React?

Substacker

Bill McKibben

says Trump might yank the nonprofit status of green groups—an Earth Day stunt with all the subtlety of a middle finger. Horrifying? Yes. But not surprising. Because what’s more revealing than Trump’s cruelty is the system that makes this kind of silencing possible in the first place.

What does it say about our system that this kind of silencing is even possible? What does it say that green groups depend on a tax code written by a government that serves the very industries destroying the planet? What does it say that in “good times” we’re granted permission to plead politely for survival—and in “bad times,” we’re told to shut up entirely?

If this makes you angry, it should. But anger alone isn’t enough. We have to look at this moment for what it truly is: not just a political shift, but a revelation. A rupture that exposes the deeper sickness beneath the surface.

So let’s talk about that sickness. Let’s talk about a culture that defines “activism” as asking for permission, and “progress” as being slightly less doomed. Let’s talk about the system, the rules, and the rot they conceal. Let’s talk about what happens when the cancer isn’t just in the body—but in the hospital itself.

Working in a System Against People and Planet

Imagine someone you love is dying.

She’s in a hospital bed. Pale. Fragile. Tubes running from her arms. You sit by her side, listening to the soft, artificial beeping of machines, the buzz of fluorescent lights. The doctor knows what’s wrong. It’s cancer. A brutal, invasive kind. But there’s a problem. The doctor shrugs helplessly—he can only prescribe morphine, maybe some IV fluids, a multivitamin or two. The insurance company says that’s the extent of treatment. No surgery. No radiation. No aggressive chemo. No attempt to cure her. Just enough to dull the pain, to keep the death slow, bureaucratically tidy.

You raise hell. You say, this isn’t treatment, it’s hospice in disguise. The doctor nods but says his hands are tied. The system won’t allow more. “It’s better than nothing,” they say. “At least she’s not suffering too much.” But every day, you watch her fade.

That’s the world under Democrats. That’s the compromise green groups have embedded themselves in.

Now—imagine a change in leadership. New insurance executives take over. Different suits, same boardroom. Only now, it’s worse. They rewrite the rules. Now the doctors aren’t allowed to say the word cancer. Research into the disease? Forbidden. Diagnostics? Illegal. You scream in the hallway that your loved one is dying, but they call security. “There’s no cancer here,” they say. “Stop fearmongering. She’s just tired.” The morphine drip is removed. The IV bag is emptied. They draw the curtain.

That’s the world under Trump.

Both of these scenarios are unacceptable. Both are deadly. The first kills quietly, under a pretense of care. The second kills with cruelty, stripping even the dignity of naming the truth. One is a slow asphyxiation in a velvet-lined coffin. The other is being buried alive while the gravediggers laugh.

But here’s the part that should make your blood boil: No one—not the hospital, not the board of directors, not even the doctors—ever questions the legitimacy of a system that would allow the patient to go untreated. They all keep playing their roles. Following the rules. Administering death politely or savagely, but always obediently.

And that is the true sickness.

Because as long as the institution itself remains intact—as long as the operating logic is left unchallenged—then it doesn’t matter who’s in charge. The outcome is the same. The body dies. The forest burns. The rivers run dry. And we’re told to be patient. To follow procedure. To vote for slower decline.

We don’t need new managers. We need to burn down the goddamned hospital.

Power Never Concedes Without a Demand

Let’s be blunt: legal-only climate activism is a leash, a pacifier, a bureaucratic sedative custom-designed by the very systems destroying the planet. The state—essentially the executive committee of the ruling class—has no interest in saving the Earth. Its laws were written in the boardrooms of oil companies, its "green policies" are PR stunts soaked in the blood of ecosystems, and its notion of progress is built atop smoldering forests and collapsing ice shelves.

Why would we expect any different? Civilization, especially its industrial incarnation, is inherently violent. It cannot be reformed, only dismantled. To ask permission from a death cult to protect life is not only foolish—it’s suicidal.

Governments love legal activism. It’s slow. It’s easily ignored. It provides a useful illusion of participation while the machinery of destruction keeps humming. It lets activists feel like they're doing something while ensuring nothing foundational ever changes. Meanwhile, every legal "win" is reversible—Trump, Bolsonaro, the next sociopath with a megaphone and a flag proves it. Progress within the system is like trying to patch the Titanic with duct tape while the captain orders full steam ahead into the iceberg.

Legalism is a narcotic. It lets people sleep at night thinking they’ve done enough. But this culture is not sleepwalking—it’s sprinting toward ecological collapse. History is clear: no real change has ever occurred by asking nicely. Every inch of justice has been clawed from the fists of the powerful through resistance—not request.

If someone were invading your home, poisoning your food, killing your family—would you file a lawsuit? No. You would fight. But when it’s the Earth being murdered—our collective mother, our only home—we write polite letters and wait for court dates. It’s pathetic.

The comparison to a gangrenous finger is apt. Sometimes amputation is not cruelty, but necessity. The idea that nonviolence is the only moral path ignores this reality. Love does not imply pacifism. Sometimes love demands ferocity.

We have been duped by neoliberalism’s shiny lies—“freedom,” “choice,” “growth”—while our actual freedom, our actual life-support systems, are auctioned off for quarterly profits. Capitalism doesn’t just tolerate climate destruction—it demands it. Legal channels, being embedded in that logic, are structurally incapable of saving us.

The Earth is being killed. And we are asking the murderers for permission to intervene.

It’s time to stop asking. It’s time to resist.

And if you are interesting in learning how to resist, you’ve come to the right Substack.

Total Resistance: Why We Must Learn to Fight Back Now