Two years ago students occupied buildings and colonized the quad. Now the same places are strangely silent.

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March 25, 2026 / Rose Horowitch / The Atlantic - The events of the past three months seem almost perfectly engineered to spark campus unrest. In January, mass-deportation operations led to the brazen killing of U.S. citizens at the hands of masked immigration agents. In February, the Environmental Protection Agency declared that it would no longer regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. A few weeks later, the Trump administration joined forces with Israel to launch an attack on Iran without congressional approval. One might expect left-leaning college students to have practically started a revolution.

But campuses across the country—places where, just two years ago, students occupied buildings and colonized the quad to protest Israel’s war against Hamas—are strangely silent. These days, those same students mostly head to class. The extent of the change is jarring. David Sengthay, a Stanford senior and the head of the undergraduate-student senate, told me that protests typified the university’s history, up to and including his first two years in Palo Alto. But by the time he returned as a junior, in fall 2024, something was different. “My class is the last class to really witness what happened at Stanford during its peak organizing,” he said. “People come to Stanford, these young students, and they don’t have access to what was promised to them. I know we’re not UC Berkeley, but, I mean, we still protested the Vietnam War.”

The Carceral State as a Front Line for Enlistment Pressure

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February 21, 2026 / NNOMY staff / National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth -  Across the United States, the military’s recruitment crisis is unfolding inside a much older story: the expansion of the carceral state. As the armed forces struggle to meet their personnel needs, they increasingly turn toward populations already entangled in policing, surveillance, and incarceration. For many young people—especially Black, Latino, Indigenous, migrant, and poor youth—the supposed “choice” to enlist is offered in a landscape where schools are militarized, neighborhoods are over‑policed, and the threat of criminalization is constant. In that context, recruitment is not simply an opportunity; it is a pressure point.

This is the reality of what we might call Prison Planet: a social order in which institutions of punishment, control, and war are tightly interwoven. The prison, the police station, the probation office, the alternative school, the recruiter’s office, and the digital ad in a teenager’s feed are not separate worlds. They are nodes in a single system that manages surplus populations and channels some of them into military service. For organizers, educators, and youth workers, understanding this carceral‑military nexus is essential to any serious counter‑recruitment strategy.

No Conclusive Proof of Direct Intelligence Surveillance of Counter‑Recruitment Groups, though Related Movements Have Been Monitored Historically

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February 21, 2026 / NNOMY staff / National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth -  The question of whether U.S. intelligence agencies have investigated or monitored civilian counter‑military‑recruitment activism requires an examination that moves beyond simple yes‑or‑no answers and into the deeper historical and institutional structures that shape domestic intelligence practices. Counter‑recruitment activism occupies a distinctive position in American civic life. It challenges the policies, narratives, and institutional mechanisms that sustain military enlistment, and it often does so in spaces—public schools, community centers, and digital platforms—that intersect with federal interests in military readiness and national security. This proximity raises legitimate questions about whether such activism has ever drawn the attention of intelligence agencies.

Based on currently available evidence, there is no public documentation demonstrating that U.S. intelligence agencies have directly targeted counter‑recruitment organizations for investigation. No declassified files, FOIA releases, or official reports identify counter‑recruitment groups as subjects of intelligence scrutiny. However, the absence of direct evidence does not exist in a vacuum. It must be understood within the broader historical context of U.S. domestic surveillance, which has repeatedly encompassed peace movements, anti‑war organizations, and other forms of dissent that challenge military or national‑security policy.