Truth Brigade Update: Safety, Not Scapegoats!
An Update From the Indivisible Truth Brigade Program
At our October 8th Big Truths Webinar, we faced an intense topic head-on — the administration’s lies about crime and immigrants, and how those falsehoods are being used to justify increasingly authoritarian control over local policing. As always, the Truth Brigade community showed resilience and heart: even amid difficult discussions, there was honesty, compassion, and focus.
After introductions and updates, Kelsey Suter of Upswing Research shared insights into the latest disinformation trends — including how fear-based narratives are spreading across social media and being echoed by major news outlets. Her research helped set the stage for our urgent new campaign.
Our guest speaker, Vanessa Cárdenas of America’s Voice, then connected the dots between those narratives and their devastating real-world impact. She described how manipulated crime data and dehumanizing rhetoric are being used to justify the administration’s alarming deployment of the National Guard into major U.S. cities — often without local consent or clear legal authority. These troops are intimidating and arresting immigrants, while diverting resources away from addressing genuine public safety issues like domestic violence and child abuse.
This month’s campaign theme, Safety, Not Scapegoats!, takes aim at those manufactured lies and helps us tell a different story — one grounded in truth, empathy, and community well-being. Across the country, our Truth Brigade network is uniting to expose how these tactics of fear are being weaponized to divide us, and to uplift messages that remind people what real safety looks like: trust, accountability, and care for one another.
Let’s keep standing strong and connected — together, we’re proving that truth, empathy, and courage are stronger than fear and manipulation.
Here’s how we can join in on the action:
Share your own version of our Disinfo Buster which can be found here!
Use this one-click sharing tool to try a redraft and share a message of your own on social media!
Join our private Facebook grouproups/indivisibletruthbrigade and share a message from that page
Click here to find detailed instructions and fabulous resources!
A few graphics for your posts
Countering Misinformation in the Media: What You Can Do
How can you help?
You can take action to counter misinformation in the media. Programs like Indivisible’s Truth Brigade and the Media and Democracy Project monitor and summarize right-wing and mainstream social and traditional media content so that the public can know what they are conveying. Recent themes are the shuttering of federal government data collection and scientific analysis programs, the blaming of “migrant crime” for the militarization of peaceful cities, and the promotion of scientifically unsupported causes, like circumcision, for autism. Information control and disinformation – the intentional dissemination of false content – becomes harder to address as government scientists are fired, university scientists are defunded, and more media outlets fall under right-wing control. But the disseminators of misinformation, who inadvertently share inaccurate stories in social media and in person, may be more amenable to a rethink. The Indivisible’s Truth Brigade’s method is more likely to reach this segment of society.
What can you do?
If you want to do something about the information environment, join the Indivisible Truth Brigade. The Truth Brigade teaches the “truth sandwich”, a research-backed method for responding to malicious media content. A monthly campaign provides social media truth sandwiches-to-go on a salient issue and explainers for background. The September campaign, “Liar, Liar, Planet on Fire”, addresses climate disinformation. The October campaign, “Safety, Not Scapegoats”, targets the militarization of domestic law enforcement.
The Truth Brigade’s social sharing platform provides editable Truth Sandwiches pre-formatted for different social media for these as well as earlier campaigns. And in the Truth Brigade Slack, once you’ve joined, you can receive advice on your original draft posts and proofreading support for long-form communications such as letters to editors of local media outlets. If you like to put the “social” in social media, you can join in monthly “storms” where Truth Brigade practitioners meet virtually to share and post their work products simultaneously.
To delve deeper into the weeds of today’s information environment, dig into the Media and Democracy Project (MAD). MAD provides a monthly overview of the current media economy and what activists can do to “Fix Media Now” on the third Monday at 4PM Pacific and a monthly long-form media writers’ workshop on (usually) the second Thursday at 5PM Pacific.