Hi there! Welcome to Easy A–Your go-to source for quick and easy actions you can take in five minutes or less about the issues you care about.
Are you a busy mom? Or maybe your work is so hectic you can’t think about anything else during the day? A lot of us are also taking care of parents or other loved ones too, leaving little time for anything else.
The good news is that these are things you can do while you’re waiting in the school pick up line, on your lunch break, or even at your kid’s soccer practice – anywhere you happen to be! And you can easily share Easy A with your friends so they can be in the know, too! We’ll send you a new action to take every week–just one, we promise –and it will always be something you can do in five minutes or less. Ready to get started? Let’s go!
Watch This: 5 Easy Ways to Check a News Source
It’s National News Literacy Week!
Led by the News Literacy Project, this week highlights the need to restore trust in news journalism, improve media literacy, and keep us all grounded in facts.
News Literacy Week’s website provides tools and resources for parents, teachers, and other concerned adults in order to help kids and teens – and ourselves – navigate today’s media environment, and we’re joining in.
Earn your Easy A this week by watching this short video with 5 Easy Ways to Check a News Source:
Understanding and modeling news literacy like this for our kids and teens is important. Next week, we’ll take one more action as part of National News Literacy Week – see you then!
Read This: Get Ready For National News Literacy Week
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Having independent journalists reporting facts and holding people and institutions accountable is a hallmark of our democracy. That’s why next week, we’re celebrating National News Literacy Week.
What is National News Literacy Week?
National News Literacy Week is organized by our friends at the News Literacy Project, The E.W. Scripps Company (that’s right, the folks who do the National Spelling Bee!), USA Today, and the USA Today Network. It’s a week for teachers, families, and other caring adults to help kids and teens learn how to navigate today’s news and media environment. (And let’s be honest, a lot of adults need to learn these skills too!)
This year’s News Literacy Week is focusing on staying grounded with facts and on rebuilding trust in credible news sources. This is important as we all navigate media ecosystems where algorithms determine what we see, and where artificial intelligence (AI) is flooding the zone with fake photos and videos that are looking more and more real every day.
In a recent survey, the News Literacy Project found that U.S. teens are increasingly distrusting of the information they consume. Their suspicion may come in handy, given that separate research found that 15 out of 20 videos on Instagram Reels are AI slop! (“Slop” is a term used for low-quality content that is usually generated just to feed social media algorithms, keep people scrolling, and generate advertising income.)
No wonder that the News Literacy Project also found that 84% of U.S. teens have negative views of the news media and journalists. This isn’t surprising since we live in a time when politicians frequently label anything they don’t like as “fake news” or “alternative facts,” but if a healthy democracy needs a free and functioning press, it also needs its people to trust them!
What is news literacy?
News literacy is:
- Understanding why the freedom of press is an important part of our Constitution.
- Learning the values of professional, ethical, and credible journalism: commitment to accuracy, fairness, independence, and accountability.
- Recognizing our own biases as well as biases we see in reporting.
- Putting all these skills together in order to assess news sources for accuracy and reliability.
- Using the trustworthy sources we identify to inform our civic decisions like voting.
The News Literacy Project provides resources for teachers to use in classrooms and for parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and other mentors to use at home and at work – or to just learn for ourselves!
In our rapidly changing information environment, we need to be able to separate fact from fiction and truth from lies. Now that we can all freely share news and information with each other, bad information can go viral quickly, causing lasting damage.
Our kids and teens are smart to have a healthy level of skepticism, but let’s make sure they also know which news sources to trust so that our free press can continue to provide truth and accountability to serve us all for the greater good.
News Literacy Week kicks off on Monday, February 2. In next Thursday’s Easy A, we’ll learn how to assess news sources for credibility.
Do This: Name your 2026 Priority
The Heritage Foundation is the extremist architect of Project 2025, and they’ve made their priorities known for 2026. They’ve given us a glimpse at what harmful policies they want the Trump administration to enact this year, so now it’s time to set your priorities, too.
Your easy action is simple – and highly personal – this week: identify which issue concerns and moves you to action the most.
Here’s some tips on how to do that:
- Take a minute to reflect on what you read about Project 2026 two weeks ago.
- Give our Project 2025 Tracker a quick scroll.
- Pay attention to what made your heart sink or felt like a gut punch – what gave you the strongest reaction when you learned about it, like we discussed on the RWB podcast recently?
Identify the most important area for you to personally make a difference this year, and then let us know below. We’ll be sure to let you know when there are future easy actions to take in your area of interest.
Watch This: What You Can Do About Project 2026
About half of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has been implemented. It can be easy to feel overwhelmed when you see all the ways it’s harming Americans, especially when you see it all in one place (which you can do in our Project 2025 Tracker).
And now that they’ve told us what their priorities are for 2026, a lot of us are wondering, how do we stop them from accomplishing it all?
We explored this question on last week’s episode of the Red Wine & Blue podcast: How to Not Lose Your Sh!t. Take a minute to watch this short clip from that conversation.
So, don’t lose your sh!t – we’ve got this! We’ll keep bringing you the information you need and the easy actions you can take to make a difference wherever you are most called.
Read This: What Happens to Project 2025 in 2026?
By now, you’re probably familiar with Project 2025, the extreme-right plan created for Donald Trump by the Heritage Foundation to enact their white Christian Nationalist agenda in all areas of the federal government. We’ve written about it in Easy A before, and we’ve been tracking its implementation on our website since Day One of the second Trump administration.
So where does Project 2025 stand?
Most people and organizations who are tracking Project 2025 agree that about half of its goals were implemented last year. More than 60% of the specific goals we’re tracking have been completed. The impact of these harmful policies are being felt by all of us in our schools and healthcare, on the environment, in our bank accounts, and through the loss of our civil rights, reproductive rights, and voting rights.
Many of these goals were accomplished in 2025 by Trump’s sweeping executive orders, massive budget cuts and federal layoffs made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (aka DOGE), and through Trump’s big budget bill passed by Republicans in Congress last July.
But many of their efforts have also been stopped. They’ve been blocked by the courts through legal action because so much of what they are trying to do is illegal and unconstitutional. We can keep this guardrail of protection in place by electing commonsense judges everywhere they are on the ballot in 2026!
What happens to the rest of Project 2025 now that it’s 2026?
Project 2025 will not go away. It remains the blueprint for the Trump administration to continue to enact their extremist agenda. But now, the Heritage Foundation has also released an update for 2026 – what they call, “Restoring America’s Promise, 2025-2026 Policy Priorities” – with nine specific priorities they want emphasized this year. Some people are calling this their Project 2026.
These priorities mostly re-emphasize goals they already laid out in Project 2025, but they also outline new strategies for how they want to get them done.
What’s in Project 2026?
Here are some of the plans they have for 2026:
- Reforming elections at the state and federal levels, including requiring proof of U.S. citizenship to vote, and ending ranked-choice voting in states where it exists.
- Continuing attacks on reproductive rights and abortion access at the state and federal levels.
- More crackdowns on immigration at the state and federal levels.
- Reversing the progress made by the Inflation Reduction Act on fighting climate change and protecting the environment by reducing solar and wind energy projects and increasing harmful oil and natural gas production.
- Eliminating the Department of Education and expanding school voucher programs, diverting public money away from our public schools and into private and religious schools.
- Enforcing the Christian Nationalist definition of family – that of a married mother and father – which can be seen as a threat to same-sex marriage and the LGBTQ+ community.
- Reducing the size of the federal government, likely through continued layoffs and cuts to important social programs, while also reducing independent agencies and increasing the President’s control over the separate branches of government.
For many of these priorities, their new strategies are at the state level, which will make Red Wine & Blue’s “Go Local” efforts even more important in 2026!
Whatever their agenda is called – Project 2025 or Project 2026 – these policies hurt our communities and are not what most Americans want for our future. Stay tuned for some easy actions you can take in the coming weeks to keep pushing back in 2026.
Take Our Community Survey
Happy New Year!
We’re heading into 2026 with restored energy and big plans, and we want to make sure we’re making Red Wine & Blue even better for YOU!
While we’re all ready to move on from last year, please take five minutes (or less!) today to give us your feedback on our work. It only takes a few minutes of your time, but the feedback we receive from you and the rest of our community members guides us all year long.
We’ll report back the results and you’ll see them in the work we do together. We look forward to another year of easy actions with you!
Do This: Support the Women of Red Wine & Blue
As part of our Dear 2026 celebrations, we’ve been highlighting the extraordinary work of our members and TroubleNation groups this year.
Our community continues to grow and our Troublemakers have stayed active through banned book clubs, advocacy at state legislatures, rallies, craftivism, local volunteer projects, trainings, and get-out-the-vote efforts. Their hard work and actions have paid off with great electoral wins in November.
But we get that not everyone has enough free time to participate in these activities, and since you’re an Easy A subscriber, that very likely includes you. That’s ok! We can’t all do all the things.
The giving of our treasure is just as valuable as the giving of our time. Historian Timothy Snyder even includes “contribute to good causes” as one of his 20 lessons on how to fight extremism in his book, On Tyranny. He writes that donating to an organization that shares your values, “supports civil society and helps others to do good.”
We can’t do this without you – and wouldn’t want to! – so thank you for your support!
Watch This: How RWB Women Found Joy in 2025
As we reflect on 2025, we’re in awe of how much the women of Red Wine & Blue accomplished. It’s beautiful to see that even while facing the rise in extremism, we’re still able to find joy in our work together.
See for yourself! Take a minute to watch this video recap of our year. It’s hard not to feel the love and good vibes that come hand-in-hand with making positive change in our communities.
In 2025, Red Wine & Blue and our TroubleNation groups held a staggering 4,212 events that were attended by 83,443 people. This video gives just a hint of what it was like to be there.
Craftivism gatherings. Banned Book Club meetings. Advocacy Days at state legislatures. Troublemaker Trainings on how to protect democracy. No Kings rallies. Our Inaugural TroubleNation summit. Rally Together outreach to get friends and family ready to vote. And so much more.
Being together in these ways and seeing the impact of our work (remember all these wins?) helped us stay energized and hopeful in 2025. We can’t wait to do even more of this in 2026!
Read This: Dear 2026
The end of 2025 is in sight, and for a lot of us, that is cause for celebration!
The year started with the inauguration of the Trump administration, and from day one, they took actions that harmed average Americans. From dismantling the Department of Education, to enacting tariffs that raised the prices of our everyday goods, to shutting down diversity and inclusion efforts everywhere, to snatching our neighbors right out of their homes and workplaces – they made much of 2025 a total dumpster fire.
So maybe you’re celebrating the END of this painful year, but believe it or not, there are also some good things that happened. We want to celebrate those, too.
It would’ve been easy to give up in January and just try to get by, but we refused. Instead, we started the year with our historian friends Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder who inspired us to not give in to extremism, and to go local to protect democracy instead. In doing so, we accomplished some pretty amazing things:
- Our membership grew by over 190,000 people!
- TroubleNation exploded to more than 800 local groups!
- We launched our new RWB App and more than 29,000 of you are already using it!
- We celebrated incredible election wins in November that set the stage for an even better 2026.
So if we take away one main lesson from 2025, it’s that if we stick together, hold onto hope and joy, and keep going, we can do great things!
Now we’re kicking off our most fun and forward-looking year-end celebration ever, and for the next few weeks, we want you to join us!
We’re not just saying “good riddance” to a year filled with mostly crappy things, we’re celebrating how we turned it around and have lots to look forward to in 2026.
A new year offers us endless possibilities. We’re taking this time to reflect and plan, and that’s where our Dear 2026 campaign comes in. We’re writing letters to our future selves, celebrating the work of intrepid women with our first ever Troubbies awards, and donating to support more women’s democracy-saving work next year.
But to kick things off, we’re starting with a little fun. We designed this special deck of tarot cards to give you some insight into what your 2026 with Red Wine & Blue holds. Give the deck a shuffle, pull the card you’re most drawn to, and see what special message you receive for 2026.
Then, if you have a little extra time, click here to head on over to our Dear 2026 campaign page to learn about the rest of our year-end celebrations and our intentions for an amazing year ahead. And feel free to share with friends!
*Note, this is all for fun and entertainment! We aren’t tarot experts and we can’t predict the future, but we know one thing’s for sure – we’ll keep fighting extremism in 2026 and we want you with us!
Do This: Join Us for Wins in 2026
We’re still riding the high of all the local election wins we celebrated earlier this month – not just because it feels good to win, but because it means common sense and human decency are leading the way again in so many of our communities.
Let’s take one more victory lap before the holidays! In the races that we backed this election cycle, we won:
- 72% of the school board seats
- 78% of the Michigan school bonds and millages
- 81% of the Virginia House of Delegate seats
- 100% of Pennsylvania’s statewide judicial seats
With these wins, we protected students, public education, reproductive rights, voting rights, and democracy itself. And make no mistake, going local made this happen. Our members made this happen.
Do you want to be a part of all this winning in 2026?
No other organization has a community quite like ours. Our members are deeply connected where they live, which means we have local information that no other organizations have, and we can connect with voters like no other organization can. Just consider that our members contacted 106,000 of their friends and family and turned them into voters this year to get these wins!
What we’re learning from these 2025 local elections is already helping us prepare for the 2026 midterm elections. The work starts now, and it’s easy when you do it with friends and neighbors! So easy, it’s your Easy A this week!
Watch This: Celebrating 2025 School Board Election Wins
Last week’s elections gave us a lot to celebrate.
We’ve already highlighted some exciting statewide and municipal wins. Now let’s take three minutes to watch a round-up of inspiring school board victories:
This is exactly what we mean when we say “going local” matters. Candidates winning by 7 votes! Write-in candidates winning! Even in counties in Virginia and Pennsylvania that were the heart of the culture wars started by Moms for Liberty – boards were flipped and extremists were sent packing.
Voters proved that anything is possible when we pay attention locally and show up. We overwhelmingly voted for common sense, not division. In doing so, we protected our kids and their education. Next week we’ll show you an easy way to build on this momentum in your community.