Building the Resistance, One Circle of Trust at a Time
Toby Sackton at First Parish Wayland: Why Movements Are Built on Trust, Not Leaders.
In a talk at First Parish in Wayland in March, Toby Sackton gave what might be the most complete account yet of why this moment demands something different from conventional politics and what Lexington Alarm has been building since Patriots Day 2025.
The talk, titled “Building Effective Resistance,” was part history, part organizing theory, part urgent call to action. Sackton began with the personal. “I have been an activist since the 1960s,” he told the room. “When the war in Ukraine started, I was glued to the news every day. Gaza was worse. When Trump was reelected, it was another shock. Truly, the world was coming apart. I doom scrolled. I read every atrocity from doge, the attack on science every firing, every attack on immigrants and Black people.”
What broke the spiral, he said, was not a policy win or an electoral outcome it was human connection. “When a group of us founded Lexington Alarm one year ago, for the first time since the Vietnam era, I felt part of this broad network of people, a movement, that had majority support, all working towards a rough common vision grounded in the ideas of equality and the promise of what America could be.”
Sackton started with a diagnosis. “Since the beginning of 2025, the laws and traditions that have shaped the last hundred years of our history have been violently attacked. Our press is intimidated, silenced, and economically attacked. At home, whole communities are living in fear with parents afraid to send children to school, go to their jobs, or simply go out to a public park.” This is not a problem that elected officials can solve on their own. “No matter how much Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren rail against the abuses of ICE, they can’t stop them. They can help, they can channel anger, they can cut funds but ultimately their power comes from the activism of the people behind them.”
“Fear is the weapon of the authoritarians and those who profit by them,” he said. “Trust is the weapon of the resistance. The only way to build this trust is to be connected with other people who take actions, large and small, to protect our ideals.”
The antidote to fear is connection with people you trust and with whom you can take action. “If you are simply angry, yelling at each new abuse alone in isolation, the window of what is possible shrinks and shrinks until suddenly few options are left and you wake up in an oligarchic dictatorship like Russia.” But trust builds strength for actions. “When you have a trusted companion to do something with you, it’s much more likely to happen.”
The talk ranged across Lexington Alarm’s first year. We started with the No King, No Tyranny yard signs that appeared on streets throughout Lexington, and made neighbors feel “they could too, be part of the resistance. Lexington alarm’s No Kings rallies and standouts that grew from 2,200 to 6,000 people. The group formed an ICE task force to work both with Bearing Witness in Burlington, including weekly information tables, and to shut down ICE flights at Hanscom by pressuring Massport. But Sackton kept returning to something harder to quantify: the power of small circles of people who show up for each other.
He described a small resistance group at Fallen Church, his UU congregation, that began practicing “sacred listening” where each person can speak their fears without judgment, then discuss concrete actions people might take in two’s and threes. That group eventually found its way to LUCE, the Massachusetts immigrant justice network, where members went through intake, training, and chose roles they were genuinely comfortable with.
His assessment of where the resistance stands is not optimistic about a return to the status quo. “What we are fighting for is not restoration. It is a birth. A country of all of us, immigrant and native-born alike, equal not by accident of birth but by our shared belief in human rights and liberty.” The leaders who will matter, he said, are “not the ones managing incremental gains. They are the ones with a vision, building power community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood and state by state.”
He closed quoting Lincoln at Gettysburg. “This nation shall have a new birth of freedom and t government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth. This is our great task. ”
