What 2025 asked of us—and what a decade of narrative power building is teaching us about the road ahead.
Read More
On the final day of the Summit, as the ballroom buzzed with the new tools and connections for the road ahead, RadComms Founder Shanelle Matthews delivered a closing speech that serves as both a battle cry and a strategic blueprint for progressive organizers, strategists and communicators.
The Narrative Power Summit was a call to move ourselves into community and engage in a collective reckoning with the terrain we must navigate and win, together. On the final day of the Summit, as the ballroom buzzed with the new tools and connections for the road ahead, RadComms Founder Shanelle Matthews delivered a closing speech that serves as both a battle cry and a strategic blueprint for progressive organizers, strategists and communicators. What follows are Shanelle’s full closing remarks. Her words remind us of what is at stake and the charge we must take to move forward with courage, purpose, and tenacity for the work ahead.
To see how this charge shaped the rest of the Summit, read the full recap blog here.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Communicators, we are here because the social movement left has an opportunity. An opportunity to define a compelling and materially grounded story that moves beyond resistance and sets the terms of what comes next and distinguishes us from the Democratic Party and the broader political establishment. Yet we must confront the sober reality. The Left has suffered a significant defeat. We have been outmaneuvered and outresourced. We have been forced into a defensive position as oppositional forces often rapidly and unconstitutionally advance a fascist agenda. The consequence is political loss and material harm to millions of people. In this crisis, we must ask ourselves, what story does the social movement left need to tell right now?
How do we situate ourselves within this historical moment with clarity and with purpose? How do we mobilize a broad base with messaging that is visionary and materially grounded, one that inspires but also builds power at scale? Fashion offers a clear, emotionally compelling narrative, a return to law and order, a scapegoat for every crisis – a vision of power and domination. As we know, the left, in contrast, often struggles to articulate a bold unified alternative, falling into reactive, defensive, or utopian messaging that fails to connect with the daily struggles of working-class people. We cannot afford to remain on the defensive. Too often, we face a false choice between pragmatism and radicalism, between incremental wins and transformative demands. We must reject this binary. Our task is not to water down our vision, but to make it irresistible.
Since the November elections, the noise has been loud. The left is under the microscope. Some say we are siloed, elitist and navel-gazing. Others argue we should mirror the right, vertically integrated, ideologically aligned. Still, we won't critique our organizing reach, our digital presence, or our lack of ground game. These critiques are not without merit. Honest self-assessment is vital, and we can chew gum and walk at the same time. The two must live alongside strategy. That's why we are here, not just to diagnose, but to build, because the truth is, we have receipts.
For decades, we haven't just resisted, we've reoffered reality. We've exposed the war on terror as a racist machine of surveillance and control, and we've linked it to the occupation of Palestine, building solidarity from Gaza to Guantanamo. We've insisted the violence isn't coming from our communities. It's coming from the state. We've made the case that environmental justice is racial justice, that reparations are not charity, that indigenous sovereignty is law. We've reimagined survivor justice beyond carceral logic. We've fought anti-trans legislation with unapologetic truth-telling. We've said, relief must include all of us or none of us. We've moved the healthcare debate from who deserves care to care is a right. We've made fat liberation, long COVID, and HIV visibility, not just health issues, but rather narrative terrain. We shifted abortion from shame to power, from legality to love. We brought Wall Street to its knees and made the fight for 15 a household phrase. We've redefined what democracy could look like, then pushed policy. We've turned policy, data, and organizing to make it real.
We've turned visuals into weapons, made culture irresistible, turned influencers into organizers, and vice versa. We've occupied streets from Lagos to Liverpool to São Paulo, knowing that fascism is global, and so is our hype. This is not the story of failure. It's the story of strategic, intentional disruption, and it is still unfolding.
But the terrain is shifting fast, communicators. We are living through the end of US unipolar dominance. A multipolar world is emerging, one where China and other BRIC nations are challenging US supremacy. Neoliberalism is hemorrhaging legitimacy, and younger generations are not fulfilled by its promises. We are in a moment of imperial decline, but empire does not fall quietly. It lashes out through book bans, surveillance, censorship, manufacture of cultural worlds, and open repression. This is the terrain of reactionary politics.
Reactionary politics is a political stance that seeks to return society to a previous state often idealized and mythologized as a way to resist or reverse progressive change. It is fundamentally backward-looking, opposing movements that expand rights, democratize power, or challenge existing hierarchies. Reactionaries often support authoritarian leadership to, quote, restore order and preserve traditional structures of dominance, such as white supremacy and patriarchy and nationalism. They frequently use cultural nostalgia, like calls to make things great again, to justify exclusionary oppressive policies. From post-civil rights Jim Crow laws to today's efforts to ban books, restrict gender-affirming care, or criminalize protests, reactionary politics relies on fear, repression, and a romanticized past to maintain power in the face of social transformation.
Because of those reactionary politics, we are living in a time of rupture. For those of us committed to narrative power, that rupture is not unexpected. It is what happens when old myths crack under the weight of their own lies. The stories we were taught about who deserves dignity, about what counts as violence, about whose futures matter, are collapsing. Here's the thing. Collapse alone doesn't guarantee freedom. It just guarantees possibility. What comes next will depend on who is ready to narrate it. That's why narrative power today for a Radical Tomorrow isn't just a conference, it's a mandate. Because the future will be fought for on the terrain of meaning and radical communicators on the front lines of that fight.
Our movements are waiting for permission. We are asking institutions to validate them. We are building new common sense in real time. Palestinian resistance is shaping the global moral horizon, defying corporate media narratives and state-sponsored disinformation. Organizers are taking local struggle and scaling it to global urgency through disciplined narrative escalation. Mutual aid collectives continue to rewrite what public safety and community even mean. Our movements are not just resisting systems. We are rehearsing new worlds. We are decentralized but deeply aligned. We are youth-led, elder-guided, and ancestor-backed. And central to this is something radical communicators have always believed, that narrative is not a byproduct of movement. It is a precondition for it.
Resistance today isn't isolated, it's interwoven, because our conditions are linked. Climate collapse is linked to militarism. Migration is linked to colonialism. Gender violence is linked to racial capitalism. Our responses must be, too. You see it in Black and Palestinian liberation movements, cross-training and messaging in global solidarity. You see it in Indigenous climate defenders, building transnational campaigns that connect land defense to cultural survival. You see it in feminists, abolitionists, movements challenging borders, both physical and ideological. Global resistance today is about more than aligning hashtags. It's about building shared narrative infrastructure so our stories reinforce each other rather than compete for air time. Narrative workers are uniquely positioned to help to weave those stories together, not just to be heard, but to reorient the whole conversation about what freedom actually means.
We are in an ideological contest for the future. The Internet made it easier for us to publish, but also easier for disinformation to spread, for propaganda to flourish, for realities to fragment. While our opponents are building disinformation ecosystems, too often, our movements are still treating comms like an afterthought. But if narrative power is today's battlefield, radical communicators must be today's strategists. Because narrative isn't just how people interpret events, it's how they interpret themselves. If we don't provide a story that makes meaning of this collapse, someone else will. Someone will sell them fear instead of freedom.
Movements that last don't just win headlines, they win hearts, they win history, they win horizons. We know what sustains us. Political education that roots our people in power analysis, not just outreach. Narrative discipline that clarifies rather than flattens our differences. Cultural strategy that moves emotions faster than policy memos ever could. Story arcs that reach beyond the urgency of now and offer a glimpse into a livable tomorrow. From the Maroon communities that defied empire to the activists who reframed public health, to the Movement for Black Lives, redefining Black power in life, movements have taught us that the future belongs to those who narrate it.
Building a radical tomorrow means investing in narrative power today. That means training radical communicators like we train organizers, building independent media and cultural ecosystems, not just reacting to dominant media, and treating narrative work not as messaging, but as movement strategy. The stories we tell today determine what is imaginable tomorrow. That's why we're not here to win the next news cycle. We're here to shape the next century.
But you might ask, what does it mean to be a radical communicator? I'm going to borrow from our brilliant comrades, Malkia Devich-Cyril and Jennifer Soriano, who wrote the foreword for Liberation's stories. And in it, they assert, We are the orators, the griots, the futurists who breathe life into new ways of being, leading, and loving. We recognize polarization as a consequence of widening social and economic inequalities, only made worse by intensifying climate change. We understand that these inequalities can only be addressed by building power to shift conditions towards equality and transformative democracy. We refuse to surrender to policies and practices that shift conditions towards authoritarianism. We grow our ranks, expose dominant power, and engage people through vision and hope.
We build the infrastructure necessary to move narratives from marginal to mass line, which means contending and competing with corporate and elite power in a digital age. We are the meaning makers who promote agency, protagonism, and connection in a time of manufactured isolation and fear. Radical communicators, we are the narrators of this era. We are the architects of new mythologies. We are the stewards of political memory and collective imagination. The future isn't just something that's happening to us. It's something that we are narrating into existence.
Resistance.
The empire will try to write the ending, and we are here to make sure that they do not get the last word. Let's build the radical tomorrow by widening our narrative power today.
Thank you.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
This speech was delivered at the RadComms and ReFrame 2025 Narrative Power Summit in New Orleans. For more information about RadComms and their work building narrative power for progressive movements, visit their website.
On day one of Narrative Power Summit 2025, ReFrame Executive Director hermelinda cortés opened with a charge to the field — a grounding in grief, strategy, and the responsibility of narrative work in a time of rising authoritarianism.
On May 8, 2025, as the halls of the Royal Sonesta buzzed with comrades reunited and new faces meeting for the first time, ReFrame Executive Director hermelinda cortés prepared to open one of the most vital gatherings our movement holds. The Narrative Power Summit was a calling to move ourselves into community and a collective reckoning with the terrain we must navigate together. What follows are hermelinda’s full opening remarks, grounding us in what is at stake and what it will take to move forward with courage and purpose.
To see how this charge shaped the rest of the Summit, read the full recap blog here.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Good morning, Narrative Power Summit!
Whether you’ve been doing narrative work for one week or thirty years, we are so excited to have you here in New Orleans, a place of contending for power and of grief but also great narrative power, resistance and joy.
Thank you to the locals for having us in your hometown.
As you’ve heard all through the morning, we are in times that are asking the most of us and a lot of us are already giving most of what we’ve got.
On behalf of ReFrame and RadComms, we want to thank you all for trusting us with your time and your resources, given all the work that we are holding while caring for our spirits and our communities as we move to combat authoritarianism taking hold for the next 20-30 years.
The authoritarian playbook is in full force. This is not hyperbole. I say this explicitly because there is danger in not clearly understanding the terrain we are on.
We are not living in a moment where we are waiting for authoritarianism to arrive. We are amidst its grasp, and it is moving quickly, attempting to squeeze us for everything we are and have.
Scholars and our international comrades around the world tell us we have 12-18 months to interrupt an authoritarian coup and to prevent the full consolidation of authoritarianism for a generation. The playbook is in full force.
Comrade, Jiva reminded me yesterday that 70 percent of the globe is living under some sort of authoritarianism.
This is not to alarm or panic us, but to center and to ground ourselves. To link arms and to answer the call to the charge at hand. To do everything we can to fully stop the intimidation, violence, defunding, and silencing of millions of people - the ongoing aim to annihilate immigrants, Black people, people with disabilities and trans folks.
The charge at hand is not just resisting power but preparing to win it.
As narrative workers, we are a robust web that ties culture, organizing, policy, litigation, protest, direct action and more.
We make meaning.
And so, we must make meaning of this time for the masses, not just the toiling required and sounding the alarm, but the hope, rigor and care required to build and enact a compelling future. A future where we all have what we need, a future of joy, where our lives are celebrated.
It is part of our work to remind our people not to do the work of those who would prefer we be eliminated from the planet. As Daniel Hunter told us, do not obey in advance.
Here is what we must do: disrupt, delegitimize, defect and disseminate
We must do this with every sector of society, from teachers and nurses to postal workers and grocery clerks, with scriptwriters and musicians, with journalists and academics and the millions of workers who make this country run.
As you can see, I want to ask you to close your eyes or find a focal point. Plant your feet or find your center. Locate your heart - feel it. Drop your shoulders from your ears, as comrade Anna Castro always reminds us, and take a deep breath.
I want you to remember a moment, scan for it, that compelled you to join the call to be in motion for liberation and freedom.
For many of us, there is not just one moment but many - a series of unfortunate events, often traumatic ones, that made a voice inside of us say - something ain’t right.
I want you to remember what gave you permission to stand in your power, your agency and that you could do something about it. Maybe it was a poster, a film, a march, someone knocking on your door, or phone banking you. Maybe it was a mentor or a stranger.
Come back to the room and take another breath.
For me, narrative entry points helped me find my call to do something about the despair around me as a young, angry, country southern queer, child of immigrants, factory workers, farmers and trailer parks – it was a crime think poster, a radio station I DJed with incarcerated folks in rural VA, direct action to stop mountain top removal with poor white Appalachians, deportation defense for my loved ones, an anti-war march, it was Suzanne Pharr and Kai Lumumba Barrow and Paulina helm Hernandez. And it was the thousands of strangers I talked to across the South who fed me and welcomed me into their homes as a young organizer.
Narrative is a team sport. It’s time for us to coalesce. It is time for us to be greater than the sum of our parts. So here is your call to action.
Do not ignore your rage, fear and grief but channel it.
In the 1950s, during the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, leaders like MLK went into hiding after white supremacist and police threats. But the southern Black gay organizer Bayard Rustin organized them to channel their fear. They came out of hiding and moved right on down to the police station and demanded to be arrested. They made a spectacle of repression and violence to reclaim their power.
Over the coming weeks and months, RadComms and ReFrame will make another ask and invitation for you to get real with us about building narrative power to channel our rage, grief and fear, to leverage our hope and our joy.
As they say, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
Look to your left and right, look around this room, find your comrades and build new ones. We are going to need each other. Remember what Wendi Moore O’Neal called upon us to remember, how far we’ve come and that we believe.
Let us together build a cacophony of joyful resistance, one rooted in narrative power and solidarity, of bridges and wedges, one calling for a future that is irresistible to join.
Let’s do this y’all! The right is rising but so are we!
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Applications close February 2nd—don’t miss your shot!
Fam, the 2025 Narrative Power Summit (NPS) is coming in hot, and we want you in the room. Join us and our co-host RadComms in New Orleans May 7-10, 2025— the city where culture, resistance, and storytelling collide—to build the narrative power our movements need to win.
If you’ve been searching for a space to sharpen your skills, collaborate with bold thinkers, and level up your narrative game, this is it! Whether you’re an organizer, a cultural worker, or a comms strategist, NPS is where you’ll find your people and the tools to amplify our collective power.
NPS isn’t your typical conference. It’s a three-day hands-on experience where you won’t just sit and listen—you’ll strategize, experiment, and build alongside a room full of values-aligned comrades. Here’s a taste of what’s in store:
NPS isn’t just a summit—it’s a space where our movements come together to dream, create, and build toward a better world.
We’re looking for narrative power-builders across social justice movements—organizers, communicators, cultural strategists, and anyone deeply rooted in the fight for justice. If you’ve been a part of ReFrame’s clinics, academies, or other programs, you already know the kind of transformative magic that happens when we gather.
NPS is the next level.
The deadline to apply is February 2 at 11:59 PM, and spots are filling fast. So, don’t sleep on this opportunity—get your application in today!
The power of multigenerational and regional narratives, intersectionality, and digital strategy will help us shape just futures.
On January 23, 2025, over 200 organizers, communicators and strategists joined ReFrame for our 2025 Narrative Predictions Townhall to discuss The Great Transition. We explored enduring narratives and emergent story trends and reflected on current social, political and cultural upheavals in play in the current narrative landscape. Our annual narrative predictions help you make sense of the changing social and political conditions likely to unfold in the new year while providing critical insights for crafting communications and organizing strategies. We highlighted three strategists who shared their experiences of making practical use of the predictions—seeding just narratives, uprooting harmful ones and scenario planning.
We focused on building narratives that connect generations, regions and identities and discussed tactics to adapt to the ever-shifting digital landscape. These themes came alive through real-world insights shared by our featured leaders including:
What Comes Next? We’re excited to offer opportunities to collectively strategize with these in-person offerings:
2024 was the year we leveled up, broke barriers and built power together. Let's talk about it!
2024 was the year we leveled up, broke barriers and built power together. Let's talk about it!
ReFrame kicked off 2024 with clarity and vision. Our 2024 Annual Narrative Predictions dropped in January and became the anchor for movements navigating a complex year. The report hit some major themes — economic narratives, labor struggles, the gerontocracy and cultural reckonings — and found its way into the hands of 14,000+ organizers and strategists, helping them sharpen the tools in their toolboxes. Over 300 organizers and communicators gathered to dissect the report at the 2024 Predictions Town Hall to ask questions, share musings, and strategize for the year ahead.
Now, we’re inviting you to join us again — The Great Transition: ReFrame’s 2025 Narrative Predictions report is live with insights for the coming year! These predictions are not just analyses but call to action for anyone ready to build new narratives and build the infrastructure needed to score some wins.
Mark your calendars for the 2025 Predictions Town Hall on January 23, 2025, to connect, strategize, and prepare for the year ahead. Register here.
In 2024, we wrapped up our inaugural Narrative Nexus: Power and Philanthropy program! Co-sponsored by The California Endowment and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, with support from the Melville Charitable Trust, the series connected funders to the critical role of narrative in shaping movements and driving change. The six-part series, designed for 34 leaders across philanthropy, offered a deep dive into narrative power and infrastructure building, blending five virtual sessions with a final in-person convening. Facilitated by hermelinda cortés, Jung Hee Choi, and Joseph Phelan, Narrative Nexus became a space for big questions, bold ideas, and practical strategies—offering participants the tools to reimagine how philanthropy can support transformative narrative work. Keep an eye out in 2025 for recommendations for what philanthropy can do to support narrative power building sustainably!
This series is proof of what’s possible when we invest in building narrative power at every level of our movements. With your support, we can expand opportunities like Narrative Nexus, equipping even more leaders to amplify stories of justice and liberation. Donate today to help sustain and grow programs that connect philanthropy with the work of shaping narratives for lasting change.
Narrative power must reflect the diversity of our movements. This October, we launched our first-ever Spanish-First Training pilots, a project born from years of dreaming and scheming. Over the course of two trainings and feedback sessions, 17 organizations joined us to sharpen their narrative strategies and build tools in a space designed specifically for Spanish-speaking organizers and communicators.
The pilot was also a space of affirmation. Participants shared that for the first time, they felt fully seen in a space dedicated to shoring up core narrative strategy and tactics to apply to their work. Real-time feedback is already helping us refine the curriculum and in 2025, we’re excited to expand this work even further.
ReFrame’s Spanish First pilot program marked a pivotal moment for narrative infrastructure building, and we’re just getting started. With your support, we can keep building on this foundation and ensure these tools reach even more movement organizers.
When it comes to building power, California has always been a bellwether, and the MVP Echos Academy is proof of that. In May, we launched this seven-month program in partnership with the Million Voters Project, bringing together 38 narrative practitioners in 19 organizations to align around shared goals: building multiracial democracy, advancing care and inclusion, and holding corporations accountable.
The work started in Costa Mesa, where strategy sessions unfolded under the California sun. Late-night brainstorms, fireside conversations, and real-world planning sessions set the stage for weekly virtual programming from June through November. These sessions became a testing ground for bold narrative experiments across the state. Echos launched 13 public education narrative projects by year's end to tackle urgent issues like climate justice, economic inequality, and immigrant rights. Supported by $334K in microgrants, these projects seeded narrative shifts in communities across the state.
When we invest in people and their moonshot ideas, we can build a narrative infrastructure that lasts. Your contributions make initiatives like this possible, and with your help, we’re ready to expand these efforts in the coming years.
We did our big one! In September, ReFrame officially became an independent organization with its own bylaws, infrastructure, and vision. But let’s be real: this was more than just an operational shift; it was about fully stepping into our power as a movement organization and network utility.
To mark the occasion, we brought the team together for a staff retreat where we reflected on the journey and dreamed about what’s next. Using an almost comical number of sticky notes and notes in an endless Google doc, we mapped out the experiments and milestones that led us here and charted the ones we’re making big bets on in the future.
With your support, we’re entering this next decade stronger, bolder, and more committed than ever to building the narrative power movements need to win.
Early in 2024, we launched the Narrative Salon Series, a laboratory for experimentation where informal yet rigorous strategy spaces took shape. These salons became a launchpad for our 2024 and 2025 Narrative Integration and Action work, offering movement leaders a space to workshop bold ideas and collaborate on narrative strategies that drive impact in the field.
Building from insights and practices developed in these salons, ReFrame’s Narrative Command Center served as a nerve center during the election season. Leveraging our weather station, the narrative research and action team published weekly blogs packed with insights and recommendations to help organizers and communicators cut through the noise.
The Command Center’s Signals in the Noise: Election Edition Strategy Clinics translated this research into action. With the expertise of narrative strategists nationwide, these clinics helped organizers break down the tactics behind anti-democratic narratives and mis- and disinformation, equipping them with stories rooted in hope, dignity, and collective power.”
The elections are over, but the work doesn’t stop here. These salons and strategy clinics have set the stage for the next phase of our Narrative Integration and Action efforts, ensuring that our movements stay ahead in a constantly shifting narrative landscape.
Help us keep this critical work going. Donate today to sustain the Narrative Command Center and support the next wave of narrative innovation. Together, we’re not just responding to the moment—we’re shaping it.
Our Narrative Research and Action team had a full plate this year, tackling some of the most polarized narrative terrains of our time. With support from the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, we explored the story trends, narratives, and values shaping the United Auto Workers union drives in Tennessee and Alabama. Meanwhile, in partnership with the Energy Foundation, we dove into the evolving and contested narratives surrounding electric vehicles as a vector for mis-and disinformation. Set to publish in early 2025; these reports will offer organizers and movement leaders the insights needed to navigate and shift the narrative landscapes around labor, unions, transportation alternatives and climate justice.
With your support, we can continue producing cutting-edge research that informs strategy and drives impact. Donate today to help sustain this critical work and ensure these reports reach the most needed movements.
As we look ahead to 2025 — and our 10th anniversary — we’re celebrating the incredible work we’ve done together and dreaming bigger than ever.
With your support, we can:
Your contributions fuel this work. Every dollar supports our vision of a world where narrative power builds freedom, justice, and liberation for all.
Thank you for being part of this journey.
ReFrame's 2025 Predictions are here! Before we enter the new year let's look at the dominant and emergent narratives from 2022 to now.
To look forward, we must look back. For this reason, we have examined our past predictions to help us ground ourselves before we enter the portal of 2025 and strategize for the challenging years ahead. We aim to highlight narrative predictions and offer concrete recommendations to shape compelling narrative and organizing strategies. While our predictions have been remarkably accurate, we anticipate the same narratives will inform new story trends as the narrative landscape responds to larger cultural, social and political currents. Nonetheless, we hope you find inspiration to strategize, organize and communicate more powerfully, with renewal and sustainability for the long haul. And as you read, we invite you to remember and reflect on grief beyond the individual experience into a collective endeavor.
ReFrame’s Narrative Predictions reports Through the Looking Glass (2022), Catalyzing Ripples (2023) and Vertigo Variations (2024) have helped us study dominant narratives and values that have endured since 2020. We have a strong track record of accurately forecasting narrative trends. In Through the Looking Glass, we anticipated the erosion of public trust in institutions, which became increasingly evident in pandemic-related misinformation and health inequities. Catalyzing Ripples clocked identity as a key battleground, a prediction realized in 2024 through the cultural and legislative fights over transgender rights and racial justice. Vertigo Variations highlighted the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) narratives, accurately predicting the heated debates over authorship and authenticity sparked by AI-generated art and storytelling. Here is our top-line summary of the narrative and story trends from our last three Narrative Prediction reports, which helped inform our 2025 predictions.
From majority to minority rule to debates about what America is and whom the country was built for, democracy and governance have been in the balance for years, undergoing pushes and pulls in different directions. The political fatigue felt during the 2022 midterm election season — along with failures of neoliberal governance, scandals and felony investigations and the testing (and breaking) of democratic norms — brought us closer to the precipice of authoritarianism and the normalization of fascism. Debates about power, leadership and legitimacy related to identity, perceived social position, religious affiliation and demographic change have influenced our current conditions, coming to a head during the 2024 election cycle.
In many ways, U.S. President-Elect Donald J. Trump spoke directly to the existential crises of many. He cast himself as a messianic hero who would restore America to wholeness. He filled up a spiritual vacuum for his followers and persuadable voters, appealing to their values, beliefs and worldviews. Trump promised to assuage their grief and grievances socially and economically. By going on the attack against the villains in his story — Biden, the Democrats, the “deep state,” and China as well as immigrants from Global Majority nations — Trump vindicated his base and, in the process, himself. Pro-Trump stories and messages were tested and refined throughout the entirety of the Biden administration, winning him a ticket back to the White House where he — and, by extension, his supporters — can govern in alignment with their values and worldview.
Throughout our 2022–2024 predictions research, dominant narratives in conversations about democracy and governance included:
While not as loud, these were narratives contesting for dominance:
Growing economic disparities have shaped the narrative landscape on the economy and labor, presenting plenty of opportunities to advocate for alternate economic systems beyond extractive capitalism. As elevated in our predictions from 2022, 2023 and 2024, economic trends highlighted a gradual recovery from the pandemic, supply chain woes, inflation, stock market growth and a massive wealth transfer benefiting economic elites. The story of American progress was about low unemployment rates and a healthy economy. Still, it stood in stark contradiction to the experiences that poor and working-class families were having. Legacy media propagated stories gaslighting Americans over their economic challenges, and elected officials echoed these messages, individualizing the problem instead of pointing the finger at disinvestment and corporate greed. Stories about the economy also elevated the ultra-wealthy and corporations as heroes for their record profits and performance in the stock market. In contrast, pro-worker narratives moved stories highlighting labor exploitation from legacy media’s “hero” figures. These stories contributed to the growing positive outlook on unions as an institution that promotes economic equality and helps build worker power. Since 2020, unionizing efforts have boomed, providing working-class people the tools and infrastructure to demand corporations give their fair share.
Throughout our 2022–2024 predictions research, dominant narratives in conversations about the economy and labor included:
While not as loud, these were narratives contesting for dominance:
The reactionary legislative agenda we have faced is the result of a repressive political strategy targeting queer and trans people and bodily autonomy. The loss of national abortion protection and attacks on the transgender, gender nonconforming and nonbinary communities have caused significant grief over bodily autonomy. However, voters transformed it into victories across downballot races and referendums during the 2022 midterms and 2024 elections. For the past nine years, there have been countless images of gender expansive people who have taken to the streets, For You Pages, podcasts and traditional media outlets to air their grievances and build cultural power. Popular content features their pain points, highlighting the denial of essential services like gender-affirming care and critical gynecological procedures for themselves and their loved ones. Content and conversations also highlighted the intersections of race, class, disability, gender and sexual orientation.
Throughout our 2022–2024 predictions research, dominant narratives in conversations about gender and the body included:
While not as loud, these narratives were vying for dominance in the narrative landscape:
We have yet to fully understand the level of collective grief we hold in the wake of devastating wildfires, hurricanes and subsequent mudslides that have resulted in loss of life and property. Still, key moments give us a good idea of where we can make narrative interventions. Conversations that linked environmentalism to equity drove popular content about the climate, especially when paired with demands for meaningful change over sustainability. With the upward trend of catastrophic superstorms came an unavoidable growing awareness of climate issues and their impacts on infrastructure, promoting narratives of safety and preparedness. Despite the state’s constant threats, activists, climate justice organizations and land defenders utilized viral moments (ex., hurricane Helene TikToks from an influencer’s POV) to combine their demands for accountability and reparations from corporations, fossil fuel beneficiaries and government institutions.
Throughout our 2022–2024 predictions research, dominant narratives in conversations about the climate included:
While not as loud, these were narratives contesting for dominance:
We understand the narrative landscape as an uneven playing field. As we prepare to release our 2025 Narrative Predictions and prepare for a second Trump administration, it remains clear we will need fortified organizers, communicators, influencers and practitioners for the long haul, and that requires our sustained vision, collective power and unyielding determination. We must continue to fortify our numbers and grow movement communications and narrative infrastructure for the long haul. The stories, messages and narratives we have elevated over the years will endure into 2025 and beyond. Team ReFrame will be there every step of the way, rigorously assessing the data, applying visionary thinking in our interventions and continuing to build the narrative North Stars that we need to win.
✨🪞 CLICK HERE TO READ THE GREAT TRANSITION: REFRAME'S 2025 NARRATIVE PREDICTIONS 🪞✨
