Government · Utica, NY Metro · October 9, 2026
NY Fines Amish Schools $118K Over Vaccine Mandate, Families Weigh Leaving State
What Alinsky tactic is being used
3 of the thirteen rules are in play here — campaigns rarely run just one.
Rule 13
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
The enforcement action is aimed at three named, tiny one-room schoolhouses — Dygert Road, Pleasant View in Heuvelton, and Shady Lane in Clymer — carrying $118,000 in fines among them, against a New York Amish population of roughly 25,000 people with no lobby, no media presence, and a religious objection to public self-defense. A target that small and that isolated absorbs the full weight of a statewide rule while the rule itself is never tested against a constituency that could fight back. The framing of the dispute as three noncompliant schools rather than as a question about the 2019 repeal of the religious exemption is the freezing and personalizing step.
Counter-Rule 13 · Radical Solidarity
Stand publicly with whoever has been singled out. Isolation is the whole mechanism; refusing it disarms the tactic.
Refuse the isolation in writing this month: send a short letter of support to First Liberty Institute's New York Amish clients, and name the three schools out loud in your own congregation's prayer and announcements so the case stops being anonymous. If you are in New York, write your own state senator and assembly member asking, as a constituent and not as an Amish person, what the Department of Health's standard is for assessing fines against private religious schools and whether any are currently pending. Solidarity here means a non-Amish neighbor putting his name next to theirs.
Rule 10
“The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.”
The pressure here is attritional rather than dramatic: fines first levied in 2022 have accumulated for four years while the case moved from the Western District of New York to the Second Circuit, to the Supreme Court for a GVR in December 2025, back to the Second Circuit for a second affirmance on June 30, 2026, and now to a second cert petition. Nobody has to win a decisive battle; the families simply have to run out of money, patience, or willingness to stay, which is exactly why the story is about whether they leave the state. The reported talk of exodus and of fathers going to jail is what sustained cost does to a community, not what a single ruling did.
Counter-Rule 10 · The Long Game
Plan in decades against a campaign built on attrition. Succession and endurance beat any single victory.
Plan on the same timescale the state is working on. Put a recurring line in your household or church benevolence budget for legal-defense support rather than a one-time collection, and ask your church treasurer to report it annually so it survives a change of pastor. Set a calendar reminder to check the Supreme Court docket for Miller v. McDonald each quarter, and tell one other family about the case so the knowledge outlives your own interest in it.
Rule 4
“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
The whole legal fight turns on holding the state to its own structure: New York kept a medical exemption while deleting the religious one in 2019, and the plaintiffs argue that an individualized exemption system cannot be called neutral and generally applicable. The Second Circuit closed that gap by ruling the law neutral and generally applicable and applying rational-basis review, and by saying the mandate does not regulate what children are taught. The tactic only bites where a gap between stated rule and actual practice is real — and courts are now being asked to decide whether this one is.
Counter-Rule 4 · Radical Integrity
Close the gap between stated values and actual practice before anyone else finds it. This tactic only works where the gap is real.
The same test runs the other way, so close your own gap first. If your church or school says it supports religious exemptions, make sure there is an actual adopted written policy with a date and a minute reference, consistently applied to every family — not an informal letter the pastor signs on request. Before anyone claims a conscience exemption in your state, read your own denomination's or school's immunization language and ask the board to reconcile it with what the office actually does.
Chapter 3 sets out the rules; Chapter 15 answers each of them in turn. This is that pairing applied to this story.
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