Thomas VanCott compares his son Jake’s experience with autism to life on a tightrope. Upset the delicate balance and Jake, 18, plunges into frustration, slapping himself and twisting his neck in seemingly painful ways.

Like many families with children on the autism spectrum, Jake’s parents sought treatments beyond traditional speech and behavioral therapies.

One that seemed promising was magnetic e-resonance therapy, or MERT, a magnetic brain stimulation therapy trademarked in 2016 by a Newport Beach-based company called Wave Neuroscience.

The company licensed MERT to private clinics across the country that offered it as a therapy for conditions including depression, PTSD and autism.

Those clinics described MERT as a noninvasive innovation that could improve an autistic child’s sleep, social skills and — most attractive to the VanCott family — speech. Jake is minimally verbal.

It was expensive — $9,000 — and not covered by insurance. “It’s too much for most things,” VanCott said, “but not for the potential of my child speaking.”

After raising money through GoFundMe, VanCott met with a doctor at a New Jersey clinic who described how MERT would reorganize Jake’s brain waves. VanCott does not have a scientific background, and the technical details went over his head. What he had was a severely disabled son he was desperate to help.

The doctor “seemed pretty confident. And his confidence gave me confidence,” VanCott said. “It made me think, tomorrow Jake’s gonna wake up and say a sentence.”

Autism diagnoses in children have risen steadily since 2000, in part due to increased awareness and screening. As the number of people living with autism has grown, so have alternative therapies promising to alleviate or even reverse its associated behaviors.

“There’s also a lot of pressure put on parents,” said Zoe Gross, a director at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, a nonprofit group run by and for autistic adults. “People will be saying things like, ‘Time’s ticking, your kid’s missing milestones … you have to fix it now.’”

One therapy that often surfaces in Google searches, social media groups and word-of-mouth discussions is MERT, which is based on a brain stimulation therapy approved by the Food and Drug Administration for depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Clinics offering MERT sell it as a “safe and effective treatment for autism” that yields “miraculous results” for kids on the spectrum.

Most compelling to many families is an oft-cited marketing claim that research has shown MERT to improve speech and eye contact in a majority of autistic patients, research that several clinics attributed to Wave.

The Times spoke to parents who said MERT caused positive, lasting changes in their autistic children’s sleep, communication and concentration.

Other parents told The Times they saw only minimal changes in their children’s behavior. Many, including Thomas VanCott, saw no changes at all. “It just did nothing,” VanCott said. And a few saw worrying behavioral regressions that persisted long after the therapy ended.

All remember being told by MERT providers that while results weren’t guaranteed, many patients saw positive results. When the dramatic changes they hoped for didn’t happen, these families left believing they were unlucky. Without quality data, it’s impossible to know if any of these outcomes are outliers or typical patient experiences.

Wave has not conducted any studies on whether its signature product works for autism. A Wave executive argued that the need for new autism therapies is strong enough to justify moving forward with commercial solutions before rock-solid evidence is available.

“Academics pointing towards insufficient evidence for clinical adoption may not represent a true reflection of clinical utility in a population where there are very few therapeutic options, great suffering, and a willingness of physicians and patients to seek innovative treatment choices with diligent clinical care and oversight,” said Dr. Erik Won, Wave’s chief medical officer.

For many parents, even a small possibility of a life-changing breakthrough is worth any price. Although some families have reported benefits from the treatment, no large scientific studies exist that show MERT is significantly better than a placebo, according to nine psychiatrists, psychologists and neuroscientists with expertise in brain stimulation and autism.

MERT is Wave’s trademarked version of a therapy called transcranial magnetic stimulation. The product of decades of research, TMS is approved by the FDA to treat major depression, OCD and cigarette addiction.

It is also used to treat conditions for which it is not FDA-approved, in what’s known as “off-label” prescribing. Off-label use of drugs and devices is a common practice in medicine.

Clinics offering cash-pay TMS for a variety of off-label conditions, including autism, have proliferated in recent years. MERT in particular has become especially popular among families with autistic children.

Autism spectrum disorder is a complex neurological and developmental condition that manifests differently in nearly every individual who has it. Symptoms cluster around difficulties in communication, social interaction and sensory processing.

Many autistic people need minimal support to live, work and thrive independently, while others require intense daily care and are unable to express themselves verbally. There are few evidence-based interventions to alleviate the disorder’s most profoundly disabling traits.

MERT providers first use EEG, a common brain scan, to assess patients. Wave’s proprietary technology, photographed at a Newport Beach clinic, then determines which areas of the brain to target for treatment. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

During treatment, a magnetic coil is placed against the patient’s scalp. Each session of gentle electromagnetic pulses lasts about 30 minutes.

(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

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A MERT patient first sits for a 10-minute quantitative electroencephalogram, a noninvasive test that measures the brain’s electrical activity, and an electrocardiogram, which gauges electrical activity in the heart.

Results are then analyzed by Wave’s proprietary software. If its algorithm identifies “areas of the brain that are not functioning properly,” clinic providers will recommend a protocol of TMS-style treatments. In these sessions, the provider places a magnetic coil against the patient’s scalp that emits a gentle electromagnetic pulse. Sessions typically last about 30 minutes and are administered five days a week, for two to six weeks.

Won, Wave’s president and chief medical officer, said the goal is “to help the brain function most efficiently as an organ. And the hypothesis was, if we improve the metabolic efficiency of the brain, would we see some changes in a variety of different medical conditions?

“As we sort of tested this, there was a realization: Wow, we can do something pretty special for autism,” he said.

A six-week course of MERT — the standard protocol Wave recommends for autistic patients — typically costs $9,000 to $12,000, families and clinic owners said, and is not covered by insurance.

MERT was originally developed as a therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. Since Wave’s inception in 2019, it has described military veterans as its primary patient demographic.

Wave is in Phase II of a clinical trial to test MERT for PTSD, Won said. The company has not conducted any clinical trials on autism.

“The strategic decision to focus on PTSD was largely dictated by market factors,” Won said. He added that his company is dedicated to helping those with autism and is working to obtain funding “for further studies and ultimately an FDA indication.”

Dr. Andrew Leuchter is the director of UCLA’s TMS Clinical and Research Service, which has provided FDA-approved and off-label treatments to more than 1,000 patients.

Given its solid safety profile and effectiveness at treating other complex brain-based disorders, Leuchter said that he and many other TMS clinicians believe the therapy could have benefits for conditions other than the few for which it is FDA-approved.

When a patient approaches the clinic seeking treatment for an off-label condition Leuchter believes could be helped by TMS, the psychiatrist reviews the case with his colleagues. If they decide to proceed, he explains to the patient that the efficacy of TMS for their condition isn’t proven, though there is reason to believe it is safe and effective.

But when parents call asking whether he can treat autistic characteristics such as sensory challenges, minimal speech or lack of eye contact, Leuchter says no.

“Off-label treatment can be just fine so long as there’s data to support this and the risks are low,” he said. For autism, he said, “the evidence base is not very strong. … And I don’t think that there is sufficient evidence to recommend the use of TMS for the treatment specifically of autism.”

Multiple researchers are currently examining whether TMS could improve certain symptoms of autism. But eight researchers interviewed for this article said there isn’t yet enough evidence to recommend TMS as an autism therapy, or to say with confidence that it works for that condition.

Lindsay Oberman, director of the Neurostimulation Research Program at the National Institute of Mental Health, published a paper last year summarizing the current state of research on TMS and autistic children. Nearly all published studies on the treatment to date have been very small, open-label (meaning both patients and providers knew which treatment they were receiving) or focused on a very specific subgroup, she and her co-authors wrote.

Without large, randomized controlled trials — the gold standard in medicine — “broad off-label use of these techniques in this population is not supported by currently available evidence,” the paper concluded.

Won acknowledged that the company has so far not pursued such research on MERT and autism.

“We owe the community some academically rigorous science,” he said. “This is not going to be a panacea. I don’t want to misrepresent anything to the parents who are making these difficult decisions. But for a subgroup, this is clearly something that’s leading to a response.”

Medical research moves far more slowly than most patients and their families would like, and many are willing to try experimental therapies long before researchers and regulators are ready to sign off on them.

“When you’re a parent of a child and you think that this can help, it’s like, FDA be damned, right?” VanCott said. “If I think it’s gonna help my kid, I want to do it.”

Wave’s provider directory now lists more than 60 U.S. licensees and an additional 18 internationally. More than 400,000 MERT sessions have been administered to more than 20,000 people, according to the company.

Won said Wave does not maintain comprehensive data on patients treated at licensee clinics. In an interview, he estimated that about half of these patients were seeking treatment for autism. He later said that 20% to 30% was a better estimate.

Although some clinic owners said they treat few autistic children, staffers at multiple facilities told The Times that most or all of their patients were autistic.

To pay for the procedure, families have used savings or turned to crowdfunding. Others placed the treatment on credit cards. Their experiences vary widely.

Though initially skeptical, Joo Flood booked a six-week course of treatment at a Dallas clinic in 2022 for her minimally verbal son Max, then almost 5. They returned for another round in May 2023.

Max now responds far more often to his name, makes regular eye contact and has an easier time following directions, his mother said.

“If I didn’t do the MERT, I’m not sure Max can be at this level,” she said.

Yestel Concepcion and her husband sought MERT for her stepson after hearing about it on a talk show.

The New Jersey couple scraped together savings and gratefully accepted donations from friends and family for the $10,000 cost. They spent nearly $5,000 more relocating the family to Maryland during the monthlong treatment.

Apart from an increase in the boy’s hyperactivity, the couple saw “no result whatsoever,” Concepcion said. The clinic suggested more sessions, at an additional cost. But their money and trust had run out.

Most parents who spoke to The Times about their children’s MERT treatments said the possibility of speech for their nonverbal or minimally verbal children was the primary reason they pursued it, even if it meant taking on debt.

Until recently, more than a dozen MERT clinics around the country, under the headline “Results that ‘Speak,’” cited an “internal double-blind randomized control trial” that had produced striking results: Two out of three patients who had difficulties with verbal and nonverbal communications “experienced improvement” after MERT. In the same trial, the ad copy read, 70% of patients who had trouble maintaining eye contact saw “improved eye contact behavior.”

Four clinics attributed those statistics to Wave.

According to Wave, the source of that claim is a small study of 28 patients that was conducted around 2017 by the Newport Brain Research Laboratory. It has not been published nor vetted by independent scientists. The study was among assets of the now-defunct laboratory that Wave purchased in 2019.

The only part of this work available to the public is an undated poster presentation that roughly outlines the study.

Wave declined to release details of the study or name its authors, but Won described the results. He said 71% of subjects in the group of 14 patients that received MERT instead of a placebo had positive changes in their visual response afterward, and 67% of subjects had positive changes in their verbal communication, according to their parents’ responses on the Childhood Autism Rating Scale, known as CARS.

“I never put much weight into the findings I see in a poster or talk, especially if it isn’t followed by a later peer-reviewed publication,” said Christine Conelea, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School who runs the university’s Non-Invasive Neuromodulation Laboratories.

“Small samples like this aren’t good for establishing the benefits of a treatment, conclusively showing safety or demonstrating that an investigational treatment is better than placebo,” Conelea said.

Statistics taken from the unpublished study have featured prominently on the websites of at least 17 MERT clinics, as well as the primary website for the Brain Treatment Center, a trademark owned by Wave under which many MERT clinics do business.

Won said he was not aware that so many clinics were using the study’s conclusions as a marketing tool. Shortly after The Times asked Wave about the statistics, almost all of those clinics took them down.

“I don’t feel good about it,” he said. “A lot of families benefited from it [MERT], and their children are doing better, and that’s wonderful. But I don’t want to misrepresent or overrepresent things. … I would always want there to be published, peer-reviewed, academically rigorous science to back up a claim.”

Following The Times’ questions, Won said that Wave contacted the study authors and requested that they expedite the preparation and submission of a research paper containing the study results to a peer-reviewed journal. The company has also asked the authors to release the manuscript on a preprint server, a website where scientists can post preliminary findings.

“We need to get that publication out so that people can make informed decisions,” he said. “It would be easier if it’s in the public domain, and other people can critique it and break it down and take it for what it’s worth.”

Manuel Casanova, a retired University of South Carolina professor who spent years studying TMS as a potential autism therapy, questioned why MERT providers had so little empirical data to share after administering the treatment to thousands of autistic patients — a gap, he said, that “raises a red flag as to the therapeutic benefits of the technique.”

MERT providers operate in an “ethical gray area,” said Anna Wexler, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the ethics of emerging technologies.

Doctors can use approved therapies to treat any condition they deem appropriate, Wexler said. But if the condition being treated isn’t the same one for which the therapy has been cleared, providers must be “as transparent as possible” about the evidence they’re relying on, she said. If there is little or no evidence to support MERT’s efficacy for a given condition, she said, “it is unethical for providers to advertise that it is effective.”

“If someone opts for an experimental therapy, that in itself is not problematic,” Wexler said. “What is problematic is if they are making that decision based on erroneous or incorrect beliefs about efficacy.”

Won did not respond to a question about Wexler’s critique.

Nine psychiatrists, psychologists and neurologists with expertise in transcranial magnetic stimulation say there is to date no evidence to suggest this kind of therapy can reliably prompt a nonverbal autistic child to develop speech, or to significantly alter an autistic child’s sensory and communication abilities.

“The plain English is that it’s not there yet, and I have not seen it working convincingly outside of a strong placebo effect,” said Dr. Alexander Rotenberg, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and director of Boston Children’s Hospital’s Neuromodulation Program.

Peter Enticott, a psychologist at Australia’s Deakin University, is leading a multisite trial of TMS for autism funded by the Australian government. Enticott has spoken with families whose children received MERT from Wave licensees in Australia and were thrilled with the outcomes. But for a scientist, uplifting anecdotes are not a substitute for data.

“It’s too early,” he said. “And I think it’s particularly problematic given that they are charging large amounts of money for an unverified therapy.”

Criticisms of the treatment’s pricing were “not a reflection of Wave Neuroscience,” Won said. “The comments seem to be objecting to the realities of the healthcare market.”

Scientists consulted by The Times said they would encourage families interested in TMS and autism to look for a clinical trial that would provide the treatment free of charge in exchange for using the patient’s data in a study.

“I would consider this something that should be researched, but nobody should be paying $5,000 to $10,000 out of pocket for this,” said Alycia Halladay, chief science officer at the Autism Science Foundation, one of five autism advocacy groups The Times consulted that said there is not enough evidence for them to recommend MERT.

Despite his disappointment, VanCott does not regret his decision. Had he not pursued the treatment, he would always have wondered whether he had turned down something that could have helped his son — no matter how high the cost, no matter how slim the chance.

“I mean, being able to sleep at night?” he said. “What’s that worth?”

Thomas VanCott said he signed up son Jake for MERT sessions because he did not want to be wondering whether he turned down something that could have helped his child.

(Claudia Paul / For The Times)

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These days, there’s no surer way to start a fight than to talk politics with someone who disagrees with you. And with election day drawing near, political conversations are increasingly difficult to avoid.

You could muddle your way through the next two months and hope for the best. Or you could take Tania Israel‘s advice and embrace the opportunity to help bridge America’s political divide.

Israel, a professor in the Department of Counseling, Clinical and School Psychology at UC Santa Barbara, has been facilitating difficult conversations since the 1990s, when she brought together people on opposite sides of the abortion debate.

“It was a transformational experience for me,” Israel recalled. “It didn’t change anything about how I felt about reproductive rights, but it changed so much about how I felt about people who disagreed with me.”

In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, she stepped up her efforts to connect with people outside her bubble and wrote a book to guide others willing to do the same. “Facing the Fracture: How to Navigate the Challenges of Living in a Divided Nation,” inspires readers to listen to their fellow Americans rather than debate them.

Israel spoke to The Times about how individual conversations can help the country heal. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Why does it seem like there’s more political conflict than there used to be?

People are struggling not just with arguments with their uncle, but arguments with their phone, with the news, and in their own heads. All of that makes us very emotionally activated, which is part of the reason stress-related political conflict is on the rise and keeps going up.

It’s not healthy for us, it’s also not healthy for our relationships, and it’s not healthy for our democracy.

Is it good to try to bridge the divide, or is it better for your mental health to steer clear?

I think what’s best for people is to build the capacity to be able to do both — to be able to have those conversations, and also to be able to know when it’s best not to.

What motivates people to engage with someone from the other side?

Some people say, “I want to maintain a relationship with somebody in my life and we’re having trouble doing that because of political conflict.”

Some people say they want to persuade or convince someone else.

Some people say they want to find common ground or heal the divide.

And then some people say, “I simply cannot fathom how people can think or act or vote like they do,” and they’re looking for some insight.

Are we so used to being on our phones and that makes it hard to deal with people in real life?

It’s much easier to have stereotypes of people when we’re engaging with them only as social media accounts. It distorts our understanding of who other people are.

Are stereotypes the only problem?

As humans, we have these cognitive biases where we see ourselves as being very rational, basing our ideas on solid information. But we see people on the other side as being irrational, illogical, and being brainwashed by misinformation. Both sides are seeing things this way.

My favorite cognitive bias is called motive attribution asymmetry, where we see ourselves as being motivated by protective, caring motives, and we see the other side as being driven by selfishness and by hostility.

How can we correct our cognitive biases?

Recognizing them is probably the most important thing.

We can recognize the other side’s biases. If we just recognize that we are susceptible to all of those same things, that can help us to have that curiosity to correct them.

If you find yourself in the middle of a polarizing argument, how can you turn things around?

The best thing we can do if we’re trying to find common ground, persuade somebody, or gain insight is to try to understand them better.

The way we do that is we listen. We encourage people to elaborate. We manage our own emotions. And when we do share with people, we share stories instead of statistics and slogans.

That’s not what people think they’re supposed to be doing. They think they’re supposed to be having a debate, where they’re bringing in all the information and the stats and the rationale.

Why are stories better than statistics?

When we’re using stats and arguments, we’re drawing those from our trusted sources, which are very often not the same as the trusted sources of the person that we‘re talking to.

Confirmation bias causes us to accept information that supports what we already believe to be true, and ignore or dismiss information that conflicts with our beliefs. So when we’re telling people things that are in conflict with what they believe, they are more likely to dismiss what we’re saying — and frankly, to dismiss us as a trusted source.

When we embed information in stories, people remember it better and they accept it more. It’s also how humans relate to each other. Not only is it more effective, it’s a more interesting conversation.

Scientists will say an anecdote is not data. But you’re saying an anecdote is better than data.

Right. We can have all of the information, but when we’ve got another human being involved, it turns out that just telling them all the information doesn’t help.

If we believe in science, we also need to believe in the science that says that’s not the way you get someone to change their behavior.

Why would someone who doesn’t trust your facts trust your story?

Stories feel more true. And you can’t argue with stories, you know? “Here’s my story of my life.” You can’t argue with my story of my life. Also, if there’s some emotion in the story, people connect with that.

We often put our ideas out there to say, “Here are my ideas. This is why you should believe it.” Or to say, “Here are my ideas. This is why this justifies what I think or do.” We very rarely put our ideas out there to say, “Here are my ideas. Here are the limits of my understanding of this. What am I missing?”

That is a completely disarming approach because it brings intellectual humility into it. We can have very strong beliefs but still have curiosity about and respect for views that might be different from our own. That’s going to help to broaden our understanding.

It seems like you’d have to be in the right mindset to want to talk with someone you’re used to disagreeing with, no?

We have to work up the capacity to do this. There are habits we need to form and habits we need to reform. All of that training is going to help us be able to face political division, as well as other challenges in our lives.

What’s involved with that training?

The first step is to reduce polarizing input. We can consume news more wisely, use social media more intentionally and correct our cognitive biases. That’s going to help us be in a space of equilibrium.

Next is building our individual capacity through emotional resilience. That’s being able to face a person or a lawn sign and not completely melt down.

Intellectual humility helps us broaden our minds, and you’re absolutely right that you have to want to do that. It’s about having the curiosity to recognize that you might not have the full story and that there’s something more you can learn.

And then there’s compassion. You’ve got to take all these steps before you can even get to building empathy and compassion.

Once you’ve done all of that, now you’re ready to strengthen connections.

How?

If you want to engage across the divide, you want to do so effectively — listening to others, telling stories, all of that.

It’s also engaging with our communities and our country. Civic engagement is a really important activity. Do something meaningful to support the causes that you care about. Volunteering not only benefits us as society, it also benefits our mental health.

Posting something on social media is not a very effective form of advocacy. Turning away from our screens and engaging with other three-dimensional human beings is probably the best thing we can do for any of these issues.

There’s also this thing most people have never heard of, which is the bridging movement.

What’s that?

There are over 500 organizations that are working on bridging divides and strengthening our democracy. If people join that movement, it’s great. But just knowing that that’s happening can make people more optimistic about their fellow Americans, and about the future of our country.

Aru Shiney-Ajay’s awakening to the climate crisis began in her late teens. On visits to family in India, she watched in horror as loved ones endured one disaster after another: deadly floods in her parents’ home state of Kerala and record-shattering air pollution in Delhi among them.

Aru Shiney-Ajay is arrested along with other Sunrise Movement members as they protest in July outside the Washington office of Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, who has since become the Republican vice presidential nominee.

(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)

“The climate crisis was not just something in the background, but something that was already here,” she said. “That’s really what drove me to get involved in Sunrise.”

The Sunrise Movement was founded in 2017 by young climate activists frustrated by the mismatch between an accelerating global disaster and the staid pace of existing environmental organizations.

Theirs would be different: a movement organized for and by young people that would be unafraid of confronting powerful figures directly and dramatically.

They broke onto the national stage just a year later, when some 150 members staged a sit-in at the office of incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) to demand that the newly elected Democratic majority commit to a Green New Deal.

In September 2020, members of Sunrise L.A. Youth protested at CNN’s L.A. office to “demand that they connect the climate crisis with the wildfires, with the hurricanes.”

(Sunrise Movement)

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Then a Swarthmore College student and volunteer trainer, Shiney-Ajay had helped coordinate the highly publicized action on Capitol Hill. After its success, she made the decision to leave college and work for Sunrise full time.

Last October, after a months-long search and a 95% confirmation vote from Sunrise’s volunteer delegates, Shiney-Ajay was named the organization’s executive director.

She is only the second person to lead the organization, which is based in Washington, D.C., and has thousands of members in 118 hubs in cities, towns and campuses across the U.S. There are 15 hubs in California alone.

“She is one of the sharpest and most compassionate leaders I have ever met,” founding director Varshini Prakash said in a statement last year. “I’m confident that under her leadership, Sunrise will reach new heights.”

Shiney-Ajay, 26, assumed leadership at a highly charged moment in U.S. politics. While the Democratic ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has energized young progressive voters who were deeply skeptical of both President Biden and former President Trump, the outcome of November’s election remains a toss-up. Protests over the violence in Gaza and Israel have electrified university campuses. All the while, temperatures soar and acres burn, and the time left to save a sweltering planet seems to tick closer to zero.

The Times spoke with Shiney-Ajay this summer. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What does it feel like to lead Sunrise after having come up as a volunteer?

I feel like I get to live out my purpose in life. It’s given me a lot of meaning and energy to face down some of the greatest crises that humanity has ever seen, and do it with hope and determination, with people who I trust at my side. Sunrise gave me that when I was a member, and it feels like a privilege to be able to give that back to thousands more people.

What appealed to you about Sunrise as a new member?

I’d never seen an organization that had so much vision for what is needed to stop the climate crisis, and also so much seriousness about the power it took to get there.

They were like, “OK, the way that we’re going to do it is we’re going to push the Democratic Party to see the urgency of the climate crisis. We’re going to expose the corrupting influence of fossil fuel billionaires on our politics. We’re going to tie the issue of good, green, union jobs to climate change, to make it clear that it’s not a choice between jobs and climate.”

Lynn Wang with Sunrise Movement L.A., left, addresses a coalition of environmental groups as they stage a protest at LADWP headquarters downtown in November 2019.

(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

Those were really clear interventions that opened up a whole new arena of possibility.

What does Sunrise mean when you say you want a Green New Deal?

The easiest way is to think about the New Deal, which was not just one bill but a series of bills, executive actions and local rulings that happened over multiple years [during the Great Depression]. It changed the legislative landscape, and the economic and cultural landscape of society too.

That is what we need in order to stop the climate crisis. It’s legislation at every level of government, change in every sector of society. That’s what the Green New Deal is about.

What era is Sunrise in now? What are your priorities at this point?

After [Congress passed] the Inflation Reduction Act, we decided that it was time for us to take some of those wins and start racking them up locally. So that’s how we launched the Green New Deal for Schools and the Green New Deal for Communities.

It was a way for us to win things locally, but also to develop our leaders and build our base. We’ve been doing that for the last couple years.

No matter what happens with the election this year, we’re really shoring ourselves up to take the fight back to the federal level. We’re starting to do that this year with the Climate Emergency Campaign.

What’s that?

It’s a campaign to get President Biden to declare a climate emergency, which basically unlocks a lot of different executive action powers. We are facing record-breaking temperatures, floods, fires, hurricanes. This is a state of emergency, and we need to use the full might of the federal government to do everything we can to stop it.

A Sunrise Movement protester outside Kamala Harris’ Brentwood home in April.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

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What do people misunderstand about your organization and the people it represents?

What we are asking for is not unreasonable. It’s not impractical. It’s actually the thing that is most in line with the physical realities of the world. As you get older, I think you start to think within the limitations of the political imagination, rather than the limitations of what literally must be done to keep millions of people alive.

People sometimes think of the Green New Deal as idealistic or impractical. Actually, I think it is the politicians who are being impractical about the reality of our situation.

Sunrise is explicitly for young people. Do members have to pack up and leave once they hit 35?

As long as young people are leading, then we welcome all the hands we can get. There’s been a lot of over-35 people in hubs who help us run logistics for training or give us their wisdom on how to plan actions or pass legislation in their city.

What does this generation understand that previous ones do not?

This generation grew up with the effects of the climate crisis being told to us since we were in elementary school, and so we know that this is an existential threat.

I also think this generation is just really oriented to justice and equality. And we’re not quite single-issue voters in the way that people maybe thought about voters 15 or 20 years ago.

When we spoke earlier this year, before President Biden withdrew from the race, you said your membership was deeply discouraged by the prospect of a Biden-Trump rematch. What’s your position on the election now?

Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy and to our climate. Losing four more years to a president who actively promises to drill more fossil fuels would be planetary suicide. That’s why Sunrise will be doing everything we can to stop him from getting elected.

Vice President Harris’ record on climate is much more promising. As attorney general in California, she prosecuted oil and gas companies for pollution and sued the Obama administration for fracking. As vice president, she cast the tiebreaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, the country’s most significant climate legislation to date. With her in office, we actually have a chance at winning bold legislation that can tackle the climate crisis.

What is your message to young voters?

Our generation can turn the tide of politics. When we protested, voted and walked out in mass numbers, we won the climate legislation, an office of gun violence prevention, student debt relief, and a cap on prescription drug prices. If we vote for Harris this November, and then rally, protest and call for the scale of legislation we need, we will win the world we deserve.

Why has Gaza become an important part of Sunrise’s messaging?

We are a movement of young people, and the reality is that huge amounts of young people right now are speaking out against the war on Gaza. We think that it’s important to understand this as an election issue, alongside climate. The scale of death and destruction has been huge, and that has propelled it to a major issue for a lot of young people.

What are some of the harder decisions you see yourself having to make as a leader?

When legislation passes, there’s always a decision of how much to say, “That is not enough,” and how much to say, “I’m glad you did that.” It’s a strategic calculation every time.

One of the strengths of young people is that we are able to demand the biggest, boldest thing. But if you only ever demand the biggest, boldest thing, then it’s sometimes hard to ever feel like you’re winning, and people end up leaving because they feel like you haven’t won anything ever.

How have you evolved as an activist? Would anything about 2024 Aru surprise 2017 Aru?

I think I’ve gotten a lot better at being really disciplined about hope. It’s easy to feel like everything is falling apart when you look at the world. Something that Sunrise has taught me, and that I’ve learned from the world around me, is that hope comes through collective action but is also something that you need to practice. You don’t even know what spark will set something aflame. Just holding that hope within yourself can ignite that in other people.