They Starved the System — And It Worked

Nov 16, 2025

Hello, and welcome to the latest edition of our 50501 CO newsletter!

In this newsletter, we discuss the impact of the ending of the government shutdown. In addition, you’ll find information on upcoming activities from the 50501 calendar, actions you can take outside of protesting, and also find out about additional ways to connect with us.

See you on the streets! ✊✊✊

Actions and Activities

(The below list contains details on all actions this week and next week which have been submitted to our 50501 CO calendar; click the link above for more details and the full calendar)

Arvada

11/18: 3:00 - 4:30pm - Visibility Brigade (26th St Pedpass over I-70, GPS: 2650 Alkire St.)
11/23: 11:00am - 12:00pm - Pop Up Rally (Safeway at 80th and Wadsworth in Arvada)
11/25: 3:00 - 4:30pm - Visibility Brigade (26th St Pedpass over I-70, GPS: 2650 Alkire St.)

Denver

11/18: 4:00 - 6:00pm - Just Say NO to Fracking Near the Aurora Reservoir (1120 Lincoln St, Denver, CO 80203)

Littleton

11/22: 11:00 - 1:00pm - Protest Against Tyranny (5700 South Broadway)
11/29: 11:00 - 1:00pm - Protest Against Tyranny (5700 South Broadway)

Loveland

11/22: 12:00 - 2:00pm - Hands Off (US 287 from US34/Sprouts to Tesla)
11/29: 12:00 - 2:00pm - Hands Off (US 287 from US34/Sprouts to Tesla)

Superior

11/22: 10:30am - 12:00pm - Weekly Rally in Superior (2 S Marshall Rd)
11/29: 10:30am - 12:00pm - Weekly Rally in Superior (2 S Marshall Rd)

Thornton

11/28: 4:00 - 6:00pm - 4th Friday Intersection protest (112th avenue and Colorado Boulevard)

They Starved the System — And It Worked

The shutdown didn’t end because Washington stumbled into bipartisanship. It ended because the executive branch proved it could use hunger as leverage — and win.

For weeks, the administration insisted the nation could withstand an extended shutdown. Agencies bled staff. Federal courts slowed to a crawl. Basic services froze in place. Hundreds of thousands of workers lived without paychecks. But the clearest sign of what this moment really was — a stress test of how far cruelty can be used to coerce political outcomes — came when the White House asked the Supreme Court to block emergency SNAP funding.

They didn’t argue the money was gone. They argued they needed the power to let people go hungry.

SNAP benefits became the pressure point. Families were depending on those benefits heading into the holidays, and the administration understood exactly how much pain that would create. They knew Democrats were holding firm on protecting healthcare funding. They also knew something uglier: compassion is predictable. If the suffering gets bad enough, someone will break.

And that’s exactly what happened. The shutdown ended when Democrats faced an engineered moral dilemma: either continue fighting for healthcare protections or let millions of people lose food assistance. Republicans weren’t moving on healthcare. They’ve signaled that for months. Which meant Democrats weren’t choosing between competing priorities — they were choosing between food and healthcare, because the regime made it impossible to protect both.

Healthcare was sacrificed so people could eat. That wasn’t a policy outcome. It was a forced concession.

This is the lesson the administration walks away with: mass suffering works. Hunger works. Weaponized deprivation works. You can hold the country hostage, create pain on purpose, and bend your opponents by targeting the people they’re trying to protect.

Shutdowns used to be signs of failed governance. This one was a tool. An experiment. A live-fire drill for authoritarian strategy. The executive didn’t simply tolerate the damage — it curated it, framing every shuttered agency and frozen program as someone else’s fault. The cruelty wasn’t a glitch. It was the mechanism.

This is the fourth stage of authoritarian drift: using the law to break the law. When opponents hold the line, you use suffering — real, physical, public suffering — to make their resistance feel negligent. The regime didn’t have to out-argue anyone on healthcare. It just had to raise the stakes until decency turned into political liability.

And now they know it works.

They know the Supreme Court won’t hesitate to intervene when lower courts block them. They know the public adapts quickly to escalating harm, especially when headlines move fast. They know Democrats fracture when forced into a binary between moral priorities. They know that if the government can survive a weeks-long shutdown without the nation erupting, the next one can run even longer.

That’s the part we can’t afford to normalize. Because if hunger is fair game, what isn’t? If SNAP can be held hostage, why not Medicaid? Why not veterans’ benefits? Why not Social Security? Once you discover a pressure point that reliably cracks the opposition, it becomes a blueprint, not a one-off.

So, the real question isn’t how the shutdown ended. It’s what the administration learned from ending it this way.

We can’t treat this like ordinary brinkmanship. It was something colder: a proof of concept for governing by coercion. A demonstration that suffering can be manufactured and weaponized until the opposition caves. A reminder that decency, in an authoritarian environment, becomes a vulnerability — because one side still feels the human cost, and the other side is counting on exactly that.

The shutdown didn’t reveal a broken system. It revealed a government willing to break the public to win.

And unless we confront that reality clearly, publicly, relentlessly, this won’t be the last time they try it.

Non-Protest Actions Bingo

The below bingo card contains a list of actions you can take (other than protesting) to help further the cause. If you get a bingo, tag us on social media to let us know!