Rachel Cohen picks her filming spots the way she picks her fights, with a reason ready. On a hot morning in late July, she sat for a long interview near the Art Institute of Chicago, a block from the Grant Park paths she walks most days and films on. Cohen is 31, a Harvard Law graduate who spent three years as a corporate finance associate in Skadden’s Chicago office and left in March 2025. What she does now resists a clean title. When people ask, she tells them she works for herself.
The consistent thread in her account is calculation. Cohen weighs risk and privilege before she moves, and discusses both on the record.
Raised by two military lawyers
Both of Cohen’s parents were military attorneys, and she grew up in suburbs around Dayton, Ohio, often near an Air Force base. The household was organized around public service and a works-based Christianity she credits with teaching her to care about other people. Her politics moved away from theirs, and toward a structural critique they do not fully share. She keeps using them anyway. Most of what appears on her feeds, she says, is a version of an argument she has already had with someone who loves her and disagrees. Her parents were moderate through her childhood and are not now.
That habit, testing a message on people who will push back before taking it public, shows up across her work. She treats persuasion as something practiced.
“Most of what you see on the internet is a microcosm of conversations I’ve had with people in my real life.”
A Providence classroom came first
Cohen taught non-native English speakers in Providence, Rhode Island, for four years before law school. Many of her students were undocumented or came from mixed-status families. A general sense that the system was unfair, she says, became specific when she watched a teenager support himself, attend school on an attorney’s advice, and work construction hours while his paperwork went nowhere. Effective allyship, in her framing, requires proximity: higher-income or white allies who do not have directly affected people they love tend to hold the issue at a theoretical distance.
Her move into law was a calculation she states plainly. A law degree preserved the widest set of options, and she is reluctant to close doors. The LSAT went well, and she chose the credential that kept the most paths open.
A test she applies to herself
Cohen frames her choices around a single rule. If a person never lives by their values while promising to do so at some more important moment, she argues, those may not be their values, a standard she applies to herself. She says she had accepted, well before the 2025 crisis, that her politics might one day cost her the job.
Within hours of the October 7, 2023 attacks, by her account, she posted a contextualizing take that framed the violence through occupation, and was surprised that a position she expected to be common on the left turned out to be a minority one. Her characterizations of the Israeli state as an apartheid system are her own, delivered without hedging.
“If we’re never living in accordance with our values and telling ourselves we’ll do it one day when it’s really important, then perhaps those just aren’t your values.”
The campaign against the law firms
In early 2025, President Trump signed a series of executive orders aimed at major law firms tied to his opponents. The orders stripped the firms’ security clearances and barred their lawyers from federal buildings, and, as CBS News reported, they threatened the government contracts held by the firms’ clients, the mechanism that made a targeted firm a liability to do business with. Cohen describes a White House strategy to puncture the norm that firms could back legal challenges to government action without it being treated as a partisan act. She attributes the approach to Boris Epshteyn and is careful to say she heard it secondhand and believes reporting later supported it.
Paul Weiss folded first. Within about a week of being hit with an order, the firm agreed to provide $40 million in pro bono work for causes the administration favored, and Trump rescinded the order. Cohen and other associates had been organizing an open letter urging firms to hold the line together. More than 600 lawyers signed it, anonymized because associates feared for their jobs. She resigned from Skadden, then claimed authorship of the effort in public because she judged the story needed a person attached to it. Skadden reached its own agreement about a week after she left, pledging roughly $100 million in pro bono work, as the ABA Journal reported.
The record has moved since. By CBS News’s count, nine firms cut deals and pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in free legal work combined. The firms that fought, Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Jenner & Block, and Susman Godfrey, won at the district court level, where judges found the orders unconstitutional. In March 2026, the Justice Department dropped its appeals, which made those rulings final, as NBC News reported.
There is a defense of the firms that settled, and it is not frivolous. They argued that they acted to protect clients and operations from retaliation, and some legal commentators have called the choice a rational reading of a firm’s duty to its clients under pressure. Cohen’s position is that a coordinated refusal would have held, and that each settlement ratified the pressure and invited the next order. The firms that litigated and won are the best evidence she has. The defense of settling rests on the exposure those fights carried, years of legal uncertainty that the settling firms paid to avoid. Which judgment ages better is still open.
Her consolidation argument
Cohen’s account of why the orders worked goes past the individual firms. Even a firm without government contracts, she says, serves a short list of clients who can afford its rates, the large conglomerates and investment funds that deal with the federal government constantly and can be slowed at many points. The executive branch decides approvals and antitrust questions for those clients, which hands it leverage over the firms that represent them, contracts or no contracts. She uses the government’s roughly 10 percent stake in Intel as her example, noting that Skadden represented Intel and that arrangements like it make the relationship between big firms and the executive branch, in her phrase, pay to play.
From there she draws a wider claim. Roughly a hundred firms do the same high-end work at the same rates, she says, and the campaign pushes that market toward a handful of favored players, a structure she compares to the way strongman states allocate advantage and calls, without softening it, very Putin Russia. She is not defending the arrangement that existed before 2025 and does not consider herself pro-capitalism. The consolidation, she argues, is hard to justify even on capitalism’s own terms, because it rewards proximity to power over the work. She develops this line more than any other in the conversation, drawing on the three years she spent inside the finance practice she is describing.
The privileges behind the model
Cohen has supported herself for a year and a half through freelance writing, paid commentary, and consulting, on short contracts she describes as unpredictable and inconsistent. She lists the privileges underneath. The platform rests, she says, on being white, Harvard-credentialed, without children, and able to call parents who could cover her $2,000 monthly loan payment if a contract fell through. Without the resignation that entered the public record when it did, she says, she could not do this full time, and could not have done it at all with children to support.
Her reach is real: roughly 358,000 followers on TikTok and about 278,000 on Instagram. Her first instrument was the written word, the resignation letter that traveled before any video did, and she still treats writing as the thing she does best.
The creator-organizer model draws skepticism on its own terms, and Cohen has heard both lines of it. One question is whether attention converts into people who show up. A second is whether money moving through political influencers gets disclosed with the rigor applied to campaigns, a concern that has surfaced across the progressive-creator space. Her answer runs back to proximity and to the argument rehearsed with people who disagree. She measures herself, in part, by whether her content moves someone who was not already convinced.
“I couldn’t do it if I had children. I couldn’t do it if I didn’t have parents I could call to help me pay my loans.”
A stated theory of risk
Cohen wants disruptive action that stays nonviolent and, by her own account, inside her tolerance for physical danger. She does not want to be unsafe, and builds her tactics around that limit. Her argument for escalation is blunt. If a movement cannot find enough people willing to accept arrest or the loss of a job, she says, it ends up needing people willing to be shot, and she would rather the cost stay in the first category. Her tax resistance, in her framing, is a way to inject a question into public conversation, not an efficient lever against the state.
The tax move is verified and specific. Cohen filed her 2025 federal return showing $8,830 owed and left it unpaid, moving the money into a savings account while paying her Illinois state taxes, as a protest against immigration detention and the U.S. strikes on Iran, which were carried out without congressional authorization, as CNBC reported. The tactic carries known consequences. Filing a return but withholding payment typically brings IRS notices, penalties, and interest, and can lead to levies on wages or bank accounts. The IRS has said that moral or political objection does not exempt a filer, and courts have consistently rejected such challenges. For a lawyer, the added exposure is professional discipline, a risk she acknowledges. The historical precedent is real. Vietnam-era resistance included a Chicago Catholic Worker campaign that urged people to refuse the telephone war tax.
Her figures land between the government’s tallies and independent estimates. Cohen cited roughly half a million forced deportations, about 19,000 to third countries, and millions more who left under threat. DHS put its removal count above 527,000 as of late October 2025 and has separately claimed that more than a million people self-deported, numbers her larger figures track. The Migration Policy Institute, working from the limited public data, estimated ICE deportations in the administration’s first year at about 396,000, with roughly 15,000 to third countries, most of them to Mexico. She attributed the self-deportation figure to the administration, which is how DHS frames it.
The wing she calls ascendant
Cohen describes herself as engaged electorally with what she calls the left ascendant wing of the Democratic Party, and she is not the only one reaching for that language. Candidates backed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and groups like the Democratic Socialists of America won 2026 primaries in New York, Colorado, and other states, and the DSA is on track to roughly double its seats in Congress, as Newsweek reported. Representative Ro Khanna used almost the same phrase, telling NBC News the progressives are the party’s ascendant wing. Her own vehicle fits the pattern. American Demands, the campaign she co-launched in October 2025, exists to push the Democratic Party toward a populist economic program from outside it.
Her choice not to run follows the same logic. She makes no decisions more than a year or two out, she says, and for someone with her platform a campaign would mostly rebuild reach she already has. She would consider it only if a larger progressive coalition formed and Congress looked able to use power. A year out, by her own account, is a dice roll.
The momentum has limits, and Cohen has stood near one. She criticized Graham Platner, the Bernie Sanders-backed Maine Senate candidate, only after Politico reported a sexual-assault allegation from a former partner, which Platner denied. She says she waited longer than she should have and is not proud of it, and she lost several hundred followers the day she spoke. Platner, a Marine veteran and oyster farmer, had already drawn scrutiny over a chest tattoo resembling an SS symbol and over deleted Reddit posts, and after winning the June 9, 2026 primary he suspended his campaign, with Cohen among those who worried the seat could revert to Susan Collins, as ABC News and NPR reported. The wider caution is on the record from the party’s center. Centrist Democrats won House primaries in states like California and Texas, the deep-blue districts driving the leftward wins are not the swing seats that decide majorities, and some strategists read 2026 as a possible replay of the 2010 Tea Party, when insurgent energy also produced nominees who lost races the party could have won, an analysis reflected at CNN and HuffPost. Which way it breaks in November is unsettled.
Whether it was worth it
Her answer to the closing question came fast. The work would have been worth it, she said, even if nothing had come of it, because her only test is whether an action aligns with her values. She pointed to a Black law student who told her she had not seen a white person show up for her community that way, and to her mother telling her she was getting to see her as the person other people see. People are starved, she said, for anyone with a measure of privilege willing to spend it.
Christopher Sweat covers Chicago and Illinois government from the public record, reporting local social and political dynamics for a national and international audience. He also reports on national security policy, intelligence oversight, public finance, and the defense technology sector. He is an analyst working across finance, technology, and politics, and CEO and Co-Founder of GrayStak.
GrayStak Media is independent field press: video journalism, photojournalism, and written reporting.
