#1698 Resistance is Not Futile: Support the collective revolt against Trumpism (Special Podcasthon!)

As always, get involved in your local community however possible. First up, the March Congressional Recess Week ends on the 23rd, so get in touch with your local Indivisible group, go to town halls, badger your members of Congress to host town halls, and or hold an empty chair town hall to shame the no-shows. FYI, there are also Democrats offering to show up at empty chair town halls in Republican districts.

Later this month, on and around March 31st, plan to uplift and celebrate the annual Trans Day of Visibility. You can show your support in a wide variety of ways, but check your local LGBTQ organizations for resources to share and advocacy opportunities. In particular, support Advocates for Trans Equality's Freedom to Fly action to protect trans passport access. The State Department has opened comments on three discriminatory passport application changes.

Two out of the three comment periods close on Thursday, March 20th. We also want to remind you about the important elections in Florida and Wisconsin in early April. Florida will have special elections for their 1st and 6th districts on April 1st. Look up candidates Gay Valimont and Josh Weil—that's W-E-I-L—to get involved in the get out the vote efforts.

Then on April 4th, Wisconsin will hold its election for a Supreme Court judge seat, which will once again dictate control of the state's highest court. Musk has targeted this race with millions of dollars. So anyway you can support the ground game for the Democrat backed Susan Crawford is helpful. And finally, on Saturday, April 5th, it's finally happening. The big nationwide protest you've been waiting for.

Indivisible, 50/51, Women's March, and more have teamed up to organize this National Day of Action under the banner Hands Off. You can find your local event and check out their social toolkit at handsoff2025.com. Just a reminder that a core principle of the hands off mobilization is a commitment to non-violent action. The organizers "expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values".

Remember that no one can do everything, but everyone can do something. Finding community and taking action are truly the best ways to deal with everything being thrown at us. We don't get to choose the times we live in. So we need everyone to act like everything's on the line. Because it is. I'm trying to figure out what leverage we actually have. What leverage do we have? They control the House, the Senate and the presidency. It's their government. What leverage do we have?

Inspiring words from minority leader Hakeem Jeffries there. Now, maybe he got -- this was a month ago -- maybe he got a big reaction to how ridiculous it is to lay down and do nothing, that he thought this time, all right, you know what? I'm gonna stand up for my constituents. I'm gonna stand up for human rights for voters, and we are going to do something to defy Trump. Except he cracked down on speech disruptions. So, writing here -- it's from Axios -- "that quote could be a sign, it could be

a shirt, it could be many things, the lawmaker said." So this is somebody who wanted to do something. "But our House Democrats closed our caucus meeting Tuesday morning. Jefferies and others in leadership discouraged the use of such props, according to multiple lawmakers who were present." Not even supporting props, which I gotta say is really doing nothing, but to not even allow the bare minimum is a little ridiculous.

Despite that, there were some in the in the crowd there that did wear some props. So some Democrats wore a shirt with "Resist" on it. Again, how you feel about this is up to you. I feel like this doesn't really do anything. But some others held up signs that said things like Musk Steals, Save Medicaid, Protect Veterans. All right. Okay. Colbert made fun of how ridiculous all of this was with his sign, Try Doing Something. Very nice. But there was one!

One man last night that actually did something, Al Green. This is a representative from Texas who stood up in defiance screaming out during the early part in Trump's speech. This is a great photo. I wish I knew who took it. I have not been able to find the photo credit, but if I can find it, I will link to them below the video. Great photo here of Al Green.

Lemme get to the disruption, him being kicked out, and then afterwards what he said to reporters about what he was saying there and why he did it. Mr. Green, take your seat. Take your seat sir. Take your seat. Finding that members continue to engage in willful and concerted disruption of proper decorum, the chair now directs the Sergeant at Arms to restore order. Remove this gentleman from the chamber. Now, while we were watching this live last night, we expected this to continue happening.

I know maybe we expect too much, but I thought this was gonna be like the beginning of constant interruptions by Democrats. That would've been a way to really get under Trump's skin, as well as just be a clear protest of everything Trump is doing. But no. Al Green was the only one. And then he left. So let me get to what he told reporters about what he was saying there and why he stood up. So what were you shouting to the president?

The president said he had a mandate and I was making it clear to the president that he has no mandate to cut Medicaid. I have people who are very fearful. These are poor people and they have only Medicaid in their lives when it comes to their healthcare. And I want him to know that his budget calls for deep cuts in Medicaid. He needs to save Medicaid, protect it. We need to raise the cap on Social Security. There's a possibility that it's going to be hurt. And we've gotta protect Medicare.

These are the safety net programs that people in my congressional district depend on. And this president seems to care less about them and more about the number of people that he can remove from the various programs that have been so helpful to so many people. Is yelling during speech the best way to get that across? It is. It is the best way to get it across to a person who uses his incivility, who uses his incivility against our civility.

He is a person who has consistently used incivility against civility. [Garbled] Is that what you said? Well, look, I'm willing to suffer whatever punishment is available to me. I didn't say to anyone, don't punish me. I've said I'll accept a punishment. But it's worth it to let people know that there are some of us who are going to stand up against this president's desire to cut Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. So were you saying you have no mandate? Is that what you [garbled]?

That's what I -- he has no mandate to cut Medicaid. None. Is that is the only punishment, that you were kicked out, sir? Is there something else? I don't know, whatever the punishment is, I'm not fighting the punishment. This is about the people who are being punished by virtue of losing their healthcare. This is the richest country in the world and we have people who don't have good healthcare. We've gotta do better. And now we are about to cut Medicaid, which is for poor people.

Healthcare has become wealth care for many people, and we can't afford to let that happen. Is that the only thing that you're protesting? No, I have other things I'm protesting. And I'm also working on my articles of impeachment. This president is unfit, he should not hold the office. 34 felony convictions, two times impeached.

So, because Al Green was willing to stand up and protest, he's been getting now media coverage about what that protest was about, which now has a greater focus on the fact that Trump's budget includes cuts to healthcare. This is why it's important for Democrats to make a noise, even if you feel like you have no power, you have power in terms of setting a narrative and talking in media.

If you're able to set the narrative the way that Republicans have for decades, where Democrats are always on the defense and having to react to what Republicans are saying, if you instead are able to set that narrative, then you force Republicans to react to you. The distractor-in-chief is unleashing a war of attrition on reason and good taste, the likes of which we've never experienced. For anyone who claims that Trump's faculties are diminished, think again.

He is at the height of his powers right now. And even though it's only been a couple of weeks, he is wearing us down. And that's the plan. So here's our plan. It's impossible to look away, so don't. Take it all in and let it fuel your disgust and give you a sense of purpose. And that purpose is, first, the midterms, and then 2028.

What if he dismantles the Department of Education? Well, he's gonna try. What if he doesn't leave? He might try and stay. The what ifs are all very much possible, and they range from bizarre to downright dystopian. The point of this onslaught is to keep us off balance. So that's why I'm focused on the fundamentals right now. You might think that this is just rearranging deck chairs in the Titanic, but there is important work to be done, right now.

And it starts with taking back the narrative of the left, by establishing what it means to be on the left. See, right now, we're being blamed for everything this administration is doing and for the reason that they got there. We are the "woke mob," the unpatriotic heathens who want to give everything away, live off welfare, open the borders, and promote unqualified people into positions of power. As long as we focus our narrative on counterattacks, we're playing into their hands.

So what exactly does this mean? Well, here's my contribution. I'm finishing up our third episode on a series centered on five non-negotiables of the left, so it's my way of helping to reclaim the narrative and get the left aligned on certain fundamental principles to mount an offensive instead of trying to fight off the back foot and respond to every body blow and flurry from the orange nugget in the Oval Office.

When all is said and done, this is the primary critique of the Democratic establishment and why we're in this position: They stood -- and still stand -- for nothing. They offer nothing. They allowed themselves to be defined by the opposition and not by responding with alternative plans in a clear vision for the future. The Republicans just won by default. But articulating a vision is actually more difficult than it seems. And that's why narratives matter.

By coalescing around firm principles and speaking with one voice, we can help shift the narrative among the left and sympathetic liberal core of the Democratic Party. Now, I've offered my thoughts previously on efforts to build viable third parties, and I'm with you, in the long run. But the deck is stacked against us today because of institutional rot and Citizens United. In order to change the political dynamics of the nation, we're gonna have to seize the levers of power.

And guess who's gonna give us the opportunity to do just that? That's right. The guy currently flooding the zone. Hopefully, in tearing down the administrative state and putting the US economy in a precarious position, it will only serve to hasten the economic decline in this country and disengage him from his base of support outside of the cult of MAGA at least. And its simple math. When it comes crashing down, clarity of purpose and vision wins.

So our moment, in my belief, is that it's closer than you think, and the opportunity is greater than it would've been had someone like Kamala Harris overseen the next phase of capitalism's decline. But if you survey non-Republicans in this moment, what you'll discover is a stunning lack of clarity. We don't even know what to ask for. We're as disorganized as we've ever been. So here's the assignment: Get focused on certain talking points.

The ones I'm offering are pretty straightforward, and there's a rhyme and a reason behind what they are and the order in which we're putting them out there. And for that, you'll have to watch the entire series to understand.

But on the top level, they're housing first -- which is the right to shelter; a civilian labor corps -- the right to meaningful work; Medicare For All -- the right to healthcare; campaign finance reform -- the right to live in a proper democracy; and climate scoring in legislation -- the right to inhabit a livable planet. Again, there's a rationale to this that I hope you'll take the time to consider.

But getting these issues down and creating a narrative framework that informs a true leftist platform, one that meets the moment and builds a bridge toward an evolutionary system that looks like democratic socialism but for the modern era, is only the beginning. The hard part is amplifying our message and bringing it out to the masses, knowing that we don't find favor in the mainstream.

And that's where we have to be clever and outwork them by using the tools the tech oligarchs have supplied to us. So if you have Google Meet or Zoom or any other platform that allows you to confer with people you trust, you have the ability to build an untrackable hive of knowledge and advocacy. It's time to go underground to spread the word. Now, I've often referred to this point as the Empire Strikes Back phase, and we're the Rebel Alliance.

But small groups can do big things if we can win over hearts and minds by educating and empowering. So I'm working on a few curriculum ideas to give away and to help guide conversations, but there's no reason to wait. You can start your own hive. Find 3, 4, 5 people that are scared and interested in, quote, "doing the work." My suggestion is to start a weekly hive meeting, couple of hours, with a select group of people that you know. It can be online or it can be in person.

And the best way to start is to "know thy enemy." Not the screaming MAGA base; they've been poisoned, and they'll be the last to turn away from their dear leader. But focus on who's behind these movements. Here are three suggestions to get started, and yes, I am suggesting that the way to get started on your radical journey is by starting a small book club. Now over time it will evolve, but we gotta go back to basics.

And I'll leave the links in the notes below to our bookshop to help us get started. So the first one is How The Heartland Went Red by Stephanie Ternullo. The second one is The Far Right Today by Cas Mudde, which provides an overview of the fourth wave of post-war far right politics and explains the far right renaissance. And lastly, one of my faves, is Democracy In Chains.

So it is a personal favorite that I've talked about a lot on the show because it details the radical right's stealth and long-term agenda to take over America. And there's nuggets in there that even I didn't know about having studied neoliberalism for, years and years. So choose one, dig in. And just get started. The key is to read it aloud together and discuss each chapter. And as we go, I'll help build out a syllabus for us to follow.

And the only thing that I ask is that you tell me the name of your hive -- and try to be creative -- but no other details. That way I can call out your hive name on the show, but you and your co-conspirators can maintain the underground nature of our work. We'll scaffold the effort properly in the coming months, but it is good to get started. And one thing I wanna leave you with is this thought from Twitch streamer and darling of the left, Hasan Piker.

Being a leftist is being on the right side of history; being correct, but too early; and also constantly getting yelled at, constantly talking about things that are directly at odds with the powers, with the pre-existing hierarchy. You're gonna lose a lot. Okay, that's it. So get ready for it.

Just as long as you know that your moral compass is correct and you don't lose yourself to the whims of, I don't know, wanting a tiny bit of victory in the short term, you just have to keep putting your best foot forward with the knowledge that you're doing the right thing and you're doing right by others. He's right. We're gonna lose more than we win.

And people will think you're nuts, that you're tilting at windmills... until the shit hits the fan, at which time you'll be left standing as the reasonable one with the answers to how we got here and where we ought to go. We have an opportunity for the first time in a very long time. Actually, we had it during Covid and I would argue that we squandered it.

This is a moment of extraordinary rupture and in moments of extraordinary rupture people suspend their known ideas, their calcified beliefs at an unconscious level, and they are looking to make meaning. They're looking to make meaning of what is happening, why is it happening, what should happen next? Who could do it?

And so in this moment of extraordinary rupture, we have the opportunity to actually tell a very different story about government in the form of these federal workers that we're seeing, for example, hang the upside down flag from my own home state here in Yosemite, one of California's fantastic national parks.

We have federal workers talking about how much their jobs mean, how much they're serving the American public, doing this sort of proud to be public fork in the road protests, and that would allow us to shine a very clear and present light on, actually, would you like to know what government is? What's going on over there in the White House and surrounding the broligarchy, that's the regime. That's the ruling regime. That is not the administration. Let us not credit them with that word.

Because the administration implies continuity. It implies the administrative state, which in fact, they're trying to destroy and gut and bend to their own personal will. The government is the money that we collectively pull together in order to be able to go to Yosemite, in order to have toilets that flush and have the stuff go away, in order to send our kid off to school and have a teacher who knows their name is excited to see them.

And so the opportunity, if we were to seize it, is a recognition that the only thing that has actually toppled autocracy, I would argue both in the US past and also most certainly in other countries, is civil resistance, is a sustained, unrelenting group of people showing, not telling, being out in the world, demonstrating their resistance, their refusal, and their ridicule. All three of those Rs are essential. Yes, it is protest. Yes, it is boycotting.

Yes, it is getting farmers to paint the side of their barn saying 'We don't fuck with fascists'. Hopefully I'm allowed to say that word on here. Probably should ask first. That's my own refusal. And it also takes ridicule. What the strong man—and that is the vein in which Trump is attempting to govern and Musk as well—requires is this belief in his, usually his, infallibility and he cannot be challenged. And that's where that cynicism that you rightly raised comes up.

that's nothing that we can do. This is a fait accompli. In fact, this is the very definition of a paper tiger. This man is the great and powerful oz. He is a bully, not a leader, and we just have to pull his bluff by ridiculing him and by just refusing to comply.

And when the people recognize, because they see other people doing it, that, oh, actually you could just not go along, oh, actually the future is still made of the decisions that we take together, that is what makes the whole thing crumble. And the possibility, not the inevitability, but the possibility of a very different kind of governing regime.

You've written about the need for protests in this moment, and there's a movement making the rounds on social media and group chats about an economic blackout day later this week, which is a grassroots movement targeting economic resistance, government accountability, and corporate reform. Do you think this kind of collective action can be successful? Yeah. We have examples in our own history, obviously much, more localized, but the kind of marquee one is of course the Montgomery bus boycott.

Imagine just for a moment, if you will, the folks in Montgomery who were being subjected to these absolutely horrific, very, very racist, obviously, policies, thinking, you know what we're gonna do here's how we're gonna sort this out, friends. We're gonna ask the Democrats if they would pretty, pretty please acquire themselves a vertebra, let alone a backbone.

Imagine the folks in the throes of the HIV-AIDS crisis dying of prolonged horrific illness from this kind of new thing that seemed to have swept out of nowhere thinking, ya know what we're gonna do? We should ask the Democrats if they would pretty, pretty please.

No. In both cases, they recognize that their own power existed within taking collective action in the Montgomery bus boycott case, of course, economic power; in the Act Up case, doing things like breaking into the stock market and getting arrested and doing die-ins, and putting the focus front and center on the people who, as Sunjeev, rightly lifted up, are actually in charge. Right?

Government, these elected officials, they're a veneer over the people who actually pay to put them into power, and that veneer is getting thinner and thinner and thinner now that we have this oligarchy. And so do I think that it can work? It has worked. Is it very, very difficult to pull off? Absolutely. Do we need to let a thousand flowers bloom? Yes. Do we need to be pulling all levers?

Yes. I'll jump into and just offer that I think that an economic blackout can be powerful if it's the first step. Because that sort of a blanket withdrawal of participation from the economy I think ideally should be followed by convening people to target specific entities in different ways, right? We want to put pressure on the oligarchy, the oligarchs themselves, as well as the Trump administration. and that means mobilizing in very specific ways to oppose them.

We've seen town hall meetings where Republican members of Congress have faced very tough questions from the public. And have been scared and embarrassed by that. That has been a powerful example. I also personally think that the Democrats who aren't doing enough or who are talking about working with Trump or any of this nonsense, they also need to face pressure and protest from the base. Anat mentioned, HIV-AIDS protestors historically pushing the government, pushing for changes.

I remember when Al Gore first ran for president. When he ran for president early on in his presidential campaign, HIV-AIDS activists disrupted his presidential campaign events because he was on the wrong side of a pharma issue with regards to access to AIDS drugs. And because of their protests, he shifted posture immediately in his presidential campaign at the beginning of his race.

That's the sort of thing that Democrats also need to face, in addition to a primary focus on the Trump regime's attempts to destroy our social welfare safety net and transfer all that money to Elon Musk and his buddies. I'm glad you mentioned that, Sanjeev, because you recently wrote a piece about how Senate Democrats could push Elon Musk out of politics. So, how could that be accomplished? And for both of you, what are the other strategies you would like to see from this opposition party?

Just to that point, I'll say that it is astonishing to me that you have somebody you know conducting a slash and burn campaign against the very source of his wealth. And that is Elon Musk. He's doing a slash and burn campaign against the federal government while simultaneously having profited enormously—enormously—thanks to the federal government. SpaceX, from my understanding, is the biggest startup in the world. And, who is SpaceX's biggest customer? The American people.

The American people provide SpaceX with billions of dollars. And so it's time for senators to take a stand against the government contracts that are enabling the chief arson, who with the backing of Trump is destroying our federal government. And that's Elon Musk. But for senators to do that, they need to face pressure from the public. They need to know that their old way of doing things, is not gonna work anymore.

And we've seen some senators play a leadership role in trying to push for a broader shift in posture. We've obviously seen Senator Bernie Sanders with his major rallies, Senator Chris Murphy. But more need to be pushed. And if that comes from the community, they'll get the message. According to the Wall Street Journal's Olivia Beavers, NRCC Chair, Richard Hudson, just very dramatically told members to put down their phones and listen. He said, no one should be doing town halls.

Likened it to 2017, said the protests at town halls and district offices are going to get even worse. Another congresswoman got up and complained that they've been picketing at her house and targeting her kid, the sources says. No one should be doing town halls. In other words, Republican members should not have to face their own voters, their bosses. Instead, they should just barrel ahead completely unaccountable to anyone other than, of course, the God king Donald Trump.

Because God forbid these Republicans forget who they're really there to serve. But I want you to pay particularly close attention to what Richard Hudson said about 2017. In 2017, after Republicans began their assault on the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, it's true that Republicans across the country were forced to suffer the indignity of having to face their own voters.

And of course it was a disaster because, surprise, surprise, stripping away healthcare from Americans is aggressively unpopular. And importantly, that culminated into Republicans losing the house in 2018 by the biggest margin in modern American history. Republicans can very clearly see what's on the horizon and they're not happy about it. Now, there's something called the Streisand Effect, where trying to prevent someone from seeing something only shines a brighter spotlight on that thing.

So, if Republicans are so hellbent on making sure that no one sees what's happening at their town halls, then hey, I'll use this opportunity to make sure that everyone watching can see what those town halls actually look like. When will you stand up to them and say, that is enough?

But what is going on right now today is the House of Representatives and the Senate are totally abdicated their responsibility... [applause] You stand there and say, I'm not sure about that, or I'm not sure about that. You put up, frankly, some of these slides are very misleading. Let's talk about the Trump tax cut. How much of that deficit in that jump from 22 up was the tax cuts to the incredibly rich people of the world who are now in our White House and dismantling our government?

You are an attorney. You are an officer of the court, in addition to swearing in oath for our Constitution, and yet, while you and so many of your colleagues are just sitting around watching, well, I don't know. We'll see what happens next month. Here's a particularly telling one where Roger Marshall straight up bails rather than be forced to confront the reality of what his own party is doing to veterans.

Right now as far as cutting out those jobs, a huge percentage of those people, and I even know what you care about, the veterans. For veterans. Yes. Mm-hmm. And that is a damn shame. Yes. Yeah. That is a damn shame. Yes. I'm not a Democrat, but I'm worried about the veterans, man. Alright, well, I yield it to one of my elders and I appreciate his comments. I think it's a great, I'm not gonna, we don't have everyone to stand up. I do got two more commitments today.

Appreciate everybody making the drive out and God bless America. Thank you.

Vice President JD Vance is vacationing in a remote ski town in Vermont, and we did see some protests today lining the streets, including one protestor who held a sign that said, go ski in Russia, traitor. There's some new video now we have showing the vice president being greeted by protestors, holding anti-Vance, pro-Ukraine signs as he makes his way there to Vermont for a ski resort vacation.

More protestors met the Vance family outside of the resort, and the family ultimately had to move to an undisclosed location. And let's be clear, Republicans are taking notice. Here's what Trump had to say about these town halls in an effort to try and reassure his party to not abandon his unpopular agenda, despite the outrage that we're seeing across the entire country.

"Paid troublemakers are attending Republican town hall meetings. It's all part of the game for the Democrats, but just like our big landslide election, it's not going to work for them". You know they're getting nervous when they start just accusing everybody of being paid. And speaking of nervous, here's Republican representative Lisa McClain attacking voters for quote hijacking Republican town halls to share their "sob stories" about how Trump's policies are hurting them.

So, good morning everyone. I wanna start with last week, videos of protestors yelling at members of Congress went viral, right? But the content focused on the confrontation, not the why. Some of the people that hijacked those town halls are happy with the bloated status quo. They want the bloated status quo to continue. They don't want to get our country back on track. Yet Democrats are soliciting sob stories from bloated bureaucrats with six figure salaries. Gimme a break. Right, sob stories.

I'd love to see her say that to the face of one of her own constituents, but of course she won't because, well, no more town halls. God forbid, Republicans have to take accountability for their own actions. Phew! Despite Republican claims to the contrary, these are not sob stories. These are not paid actors. These are not Democratic operatives. These are nurses and teachers and retirees and veterans and healthcare workers.

These are everyday Americans who are seeing prices go up under Donald Trump, the economy slowing under Trump, their neighbors being fired without cause, and America retreating around the world and they want answers. And as Americans who still live in what remains a democracy, at least for now, that is exactly what we should be doing. The reality is that Republicans are feeling the heat as well they should be. The answer then is to not let up.

If you live in a district with a Republican lawmaker or a state with a Republican senator, call them, show up to their field offices, show up to their DC offices. Do not let them get away with this because they've decided that they don't have to be accountable to anybody. They're hoping to get a free pass. We are here to show them that there is no such thing. How can the left go from being small, weak, and divided to being large, strong, and united? I believe the answer is coalition building.

The left needs people who can bridge the gaps between the labor, anti-racist, environmentalist, and Palestinian movements among others. But I'm not the one who came up with the idea of a united front. In an American context, this method was pioneered by Fred Hampton. Under his leadership, the Black Panthers formed what became known as the Rainbow Coalition.

Hampton realized that these fragmented, individually weak movements could only exercise, credible, social, economic, and political power if they work together. So that's step one: growing by organizing the forces we already have. Once we do that, we can move on to step two, and our coalition can take on a broad variety of work. In particular, I'm thinking about three strategies, each of which I'd like to go more into detail in. Elections, messaging, and humanitarianism.

The benefit of elections is that they give us a much more official platform on which we can discuss our ideas, and particularly at the local level, they can be successful. That being said, while elections might be strategically useful in some cases, they need to be part of a broader strategy, especially considering the resource constraints that we're facing. Here's the harsh reality. Party politics can never be a viable option without substantial electoral reform in this country.

We need to abolish the electoral college. We need proportional representation in the legislature. We need rank choice voting. If we do that, third parties become viable. Of course, the establishment would never do that unless they were facing overwhelming public pressure. Which brings me to my second point messaging. We need to make electoral reform a hot button issue, and the best way to do that is to hammer on the brokenness of the two party system. Think about it.

Everyone in your life kind of knows our system is rigged, right? They understand that ordinary citizens are pretty powerless to change the status quo. There is genuine frustration here, and the most effective messaging simply lets people understand the source of the frustration they are already feeling. Believe me, everyone feels the malaise of the current system. We just need to give it a name.

Now, naturally you'll be wondering what should this messaging look like from personal experience, and of course I'm biased, I'd say short form video is our best friend. I'm no communications expert. I'm no genius. I don't have a team behind me. But in just a couple short years, I was able to reach quite literally millions of people on TikTok, and I know for a fact that I've been responsible for hundreds, if not thousands, of people starting to question the propaganda they've been fed.

So, why is short form so powerful? Well, I think there's a couple reasons for that. First, anyone with a phone can do it. You don't need lighting. You don't need to know how to edit like I do. Second, these platforms have millions of users and it is really easy to reach them. Because of the way the algorithms work, you can go viral even if you don't have many followers, provided you make a catchy video. Third, it's easier to get across to people on a human level.

Some of these videos I've seen from just normal people sharing their experiences with, for example, the healthcare system or talking about climate change, are really impactful because it's, just, it's another person. TikTok feels like you're taking a FaceTime video from your friend. That's pretty powerful, and you don't get that on a more impersonal platform such as Twitter, and that personal sort of connection can start that spark of solidarity.

This recognition that, hey, we're all going through the same thing. We're all suffering in the same ways. That's the beginning of class consciousness. Follow other creators whose messaging you admire. Tell your own story. Confidently and clearly explain why the current system cannot be reformed and needs to be replaced. Again, public discontent with the polarized two party system is our highest point of leverage because basically everybody resents the status quo.

If we can focus that discontent, allow people to realize it's true source, and then present them with a realistic alternative, that's lightning in a bottle. The goal is to make it so that every time somebody thinks about how broken the political system is, they immediately think of our solution, which is that electoral reform platform I just mentioned. If we can connect up these two things, we're golden.

Now, for the fun part, this is where a true left wing coalition differentiates itself from political elites—Democrats—by improving people's lives. I think our priority in the near term needs to be outreach programs such as school lunch drives, tenant and union organizing, infrastructure redevelopment, housing construction, legal defense, establishing community gardens, winter clothing drives, and whatever else our communities need.

We need to show the people who are neglected and exploited under the current system that we are willing to fight for them. Again, this is something that the Black Panthers did incredibly well. Of course, this work will most likely start in cities, but over time, we can and must reach out to rural communities. A fantastic example of this is the Middle Tennessee chapter of DSA, which recently raised the money to erase over two and a half million dollars worth of medical debt. Let me repeat myself.

$2.6 million. Imagine how much respect and loyalty we would gain from the American people if we were to do this on a nationwide scale. Imagine if socialists were the most active members of our communities. That would go so far encountering the decades of red scare propaganda that Americans have been subject to. Plus working together is how we actually build those coalitions I was talking about. The ruling class wants us divided and siloed, but when we work together, we build real solidarity.

A strategy that focuses just on elections could never do this. We need less talking and more doing. Okay, so here's the strategy up to this point. We build a coalition from the broad spectrum of left wing groups operating in this country already. Second, we go to work serving our communities and building trust with the American people. And that brings me to step three, the end game. Over time I foresee these coalitions becoming quite powerful and autonomous, if we are successful.

I foresee a world where membership means your legal fees are paid if needed. You have help covering rent if needed. You have help organizing your workplace if needed. I foresee organizations that are robust enough to feed the hungry, to house the homeless, to care for the sick. I foresee great festivals and gatherings full of music and art, full of freedom, freedom that prefigures the society that we are working to create.

Then once we're strong enough, we can apply pressure for electoral reforms through protests, strikes, encampments and, most importantly, the discipline to withhold votes from politicians who won't work with us. So, there's the actual three step framework. Rally our allies, win over the American people, and then use that mass movement to put pressure on the state.

I don't want to give you false hope, but despite strong headwinds, I seriously believe that we have a massive opportunity for movement building right now. The genocide in Gaza and the brutal crackdown on people protesting that genocide at home has woken up a lot of people to the harsh reality of our system. The climate crisis is only just beginning. The cost of living continues to rise, establishment politics are as ineffective as they've ever been.

The public is primed to look for an alternative. We need to rally our allies. We need to go where the fight is. This is how we win. I've been reflecting these last four weeks on two important parts of my life. My work, helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum, and the two times that I've had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor. As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world.

In 1978, Nazis decided that they wanted to march there. The leaders of that march knew that the images of swastika-clad young men, goosestepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population, so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps. The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court.

It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis, contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the First Amendment. As an American and as a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case, but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act.

They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and build the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981, a small but important forerunner to the one I helped to build 30 years later here. I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly, but I know the history intimately and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here's what I've learned.

The root that tears apart your house's foundation begins as a seed, a seed of distrust and hate and blame. The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn't arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame. I'm watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now.

A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac and suggests without facts or findings that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too female and non-White. The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here. They point to a group of people who don't look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems. I just have one question.

What comes next? After we've discriminated against deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities, once we've ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends, after that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face, what comes next? All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question.

And if we don't want to repeat history, then for God's sake in this moment, we better be strong enough to learn from it. I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln's Bible. 'I do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the Office of Governor according to the best of my ability'. My oath is to the constitution of our state and of our country.

We don't have kings in America, and I don't intend to bend the need to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions, but in deference to my obligations. If you think I'm overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this: it took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and forty minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic.

And all I'm saying is that when the five alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control. Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978, just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only 20 of them showed up, but 2000 people came to counter protest.

The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the rally sputtered to an unspectacular end. After 10 minutes, it was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame. Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the tragic spirit of despair overcome us when our country needs us the most.

We've just heard clips starting with The Rational National contrasting feckless Democrats with those willing to take a stand. Unf*ing The Republic laid out core principles for the left to rally around. The Intercept Briefing highlighted the possibility of transformative change during social rupture. Brian Tyler Cohen discussed the Republican plan to avoid talking to constituents. Harper O'Conner argued for coalition building among the left.

And NBC Chicago played a speech from Illinois Governor JB Pritzker. And those were just the Top Takes; there's a lot more in the Deeper Dive sections. But first, a reminder that this show is produced with the support of our members who get access to bonus episodes featuring our team of producers and enjoy all of our shows without ads. To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support

the show at BestOfTheLeft.Com/Support (there's a link in the show notes), through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. And as always, if regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.

If you have questions or would like your comments included in the show, our upcoming topics that you can chime in on include the assault on LGBTQ rights, and a deep dive into the shifting internal dynamics of the Democratic Party. So get your comments or questions in now for those topics or anything else, you can leave us a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991.

We're also findable on the privacy-focused messaging app Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01, or you can simply email me to [email protected]. Now, as for today, as I mentioned at the top of the show, we are taking part in the Podcasthon Week of Action, which just means that we, along with thousands of other podcasts, are taking the opportunity to support an organization of our choice.

And we chose Indivisible, because thoughtful and well-organized grassroots action is exactly what's called for in this political moment. It's not enough to just send money and then tune out, hoping someone else will take care of it. It's time to donate, yes, to support the infrastructure, but also to sign up and get engaged in the real world, whether that's by calling Congress or showing up at a town hall meeting, to join the chorus of dissent.

Go to Indivisible.org to yes, make a donation, but also to join your local Indivisible chapter to keep you in the loop as the political ground shifts underneath us and opportunities for calls to action are coming at us fast and furious. And speaking of ongoing action, there's a lot more in the show, so stay tuned. Now we're gonna continue to dive deeper on six topics.

Next up, section A, strategy and goals, followed by section B, humor as a tactic, section C, protest, section D, boycott, section E resources and Section F power structures. Many on the left have abandoned the Democratic Party because the Democratic party abandoned them and we're living in this new reality. This leads many to believe that both major parties are so wholly corrupt that only a third party can restore true liberalism in our system.

But as I've tried to demonstrate this is magical thinking. The supposition is correct. Both parties have been corrupted by big money. Donors are subject today, but the conclusion they've drawn is incorrect for the same reason. The major parties have handed the keys to the donor class, and together they have erected barriers to entry for any third party.

That's why, as we pointed out in our prior episode, the Libertarian Party, which has been around for more than 50 years, and the Green Party itself now 41 years old, have exactly zero representation in Congress. 90 plus years collectively and nothing to show for it. Why? Because it costs too much money to build the kind of infrastructure the major parties have already achieved. Not to mention from a historical perspective, we've had a two party system since the earliest days of our founding.

When we were divided into Federalists and anti-Federalists, the two sides formalized their opposition to one another in the form of parties, the Democrats and the wis who eventually became Republicans. So this is how it's always been. And yet major reforms and strides were made under these systems. Now granted, some took hundreds of years, but others took far less. The point is it's possible to create meaningful reform under a two party system.

The problem today isn't that we only have two parties. It's where their bread is buttered and who's doing the buttery? Get money out of politics and you can change the entire apparatus. Don't. And we'll ride this thing to its inevitable conclusion. Oligarchy, tethering ourselves to five non-negotiables. Doesn't mean these are the ends. On the contrary, they're the means. A population that doesn't live in economic precarity makes better decisions. Fascism rises in uncertainty and praise on fear.

Eliminate these fears and fascism lies dormant and undisturbed until the whole cycle continues again. Okay, cool. Now can you just sum all that up, please? In English, imagine you only have time to produce a TikTok and not a three hour podcast. Okay. Think of it as a board game. Beat the Republicans by using the weapons at our disposal. Currently, the Democratic Party has them locked in an armory, so we'll have to use theirs in order to gain access to their weapons.

We'll need to install our own people inside and on the perimeter. We'll do it by holding our votes as ransom unless specific demands are met, shelter, work, and healthcare. And once we're inside, we'll transform the system and open the doors to allow more people and parties into the castle. But to do that, we'll have to cut off everyone's funding. The only way to do that is to win over even more people throughout the kingdom.

We'll need 67 senators, 290 representatives, and 38 states to go along with us, which means we'll need really happy subjects throughout the whole kingdom who are pleased with the way things are going. And the only way to do that is to make sure they have a roof over their heads, a job they feel good about and access to healthcare that won't force them into bankruptcy. Ultimately, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Deliver good services and we'll deliver a good government.

We have a deep and powerful tradition of righteous American protest right here in the us. One that has chiefly been led by Native Americans and black people and other minority groups. I. These protests were rarely spontaneous.

They were often done strategically with a lot of education and with specific goals in mind, and what's happening with the protests, like Monday's gathering around the country i. Are kind of a way to put down a marker to let people see that there are others like them out there who are unhappy with what's going on. But to grow to a size that can make real demands, a lot more people are going to need to reach out and connect with communities of those disaffected people. We are gonna need teach-ins.

Some of them will be high profile ones, such as the ones that politics and prose are setting up as part of a new series. There'll be one on March 7th that includes David Cole, who's done tremendous work on civil liberties in the us. Kelly Robinson, the head of human rights campaign, Jamie Raskin, the Congressman, uh, locally here, lawyer Ali Cole and Sky Perryman, who is President of Democracy Forward.

Which is leading some of the court battles that are currently happening, fighting the new administration. That's a start, but we're gonna need even more teach-ins from career community organizers like Maryam Kaba and Kelly Hayes. I'll put a link to some of their organizing materials and to the politics and prose virtual broadcast in this week's Friday Roundup. I'm telling you, it matters.

We are in the Wizard of Oz. They want you to think that it's this big green floating head that is too big to confront when they are little, little, little, little men with little, little, little, fragile, fragile, fragile, rather big. Big, fragile egos. Just like every exercise of judicial independence is useful, whether it's making a tremendous difference yet or not. Every public action of citizens and residents exercising the right to express and work.

For the kind of society they want to build is a step forward. If the threat gets you to comply. If you are afraid of martial law such that you choose not to exercise your rights in a situation where your life and your liberty are on the line, then we already have martial law. It helps to stop the erosion of rights and preemptive clamp down. It will make those in power more nervous about actually asserting themselves against civilian demonstrations later, and these small steps are necessary.

Relationship building is as important as any other action. Most people feel better after doing something anything than doing nothing. And I'm thinking back to my days teaching karate when people are just learning to do pushups. Sometimes even one is impossible, but you break it down into smaller pieces, they do smaller parts, and almost everybody gets stronger in predictable ways over time.

As I saw on Monday, some protestors were just stunned, fired federal employees looking for a public outlet for grief over the losses of their jobs and whole ecosystems of government service. Others were moved by Musk egregious role in destroying a government. He clearly doesn't understand on any level I am become meme. Yeah, pretty much. I'm just, I was living the meme. It is like there's living the dream and there's living the meme and it's pretty much what's happening. You know?

You like, I think you're bigger. I mean, do started out as a meme. Think about it now it's real. Some felt moved by simple patriotism at odds with everything that seemed to be happening since January 20th. Julia Korff brought her guitar and sang a version of the Star-Spangled Banner that ended unconventionally I asked a woman with a sign that was decrying dictators, why she'd come out and she said, because I'm an American.

This particular protest had a generic rallying cry against executive overreach against kings. Some on social media have called these kinds of protests. Boomer cringe. What did they think they were doing? What could possibly be accomplished? But were only at the beginning for now, especially for those who may not have experience showing up is a lot. I'm telling you, it matters. Later demands will become more specific.

Danger will likely increase, but often in history, defiance of unjust government starts with saying not this. Saying no is a first step, even if it's just the first of many. One of the key reasons that legislators are unable or unwilling to do as much as people would like is that the same system that elected Donald Trump elected them just as legacy newspapers are bound to the current US political and economic systems in ways that make it difficult for them to report in unusual times.

Current elected legislators are by and large bound to the current models of politics in ways that make it difficult for them to work against the current administration. They do have an important role to play right now, but few of them will choose to play it or even understand how to. Which isn't to say that the public shouldn't keep pressuring them to act. It's just to say that we shouldn't wait on them if they don't lead the way.

In the end, whatever salvation we see is likely to come from courts saying no and specifying remedies and the people saying no and making demands about how they're ruled. This idea of bridge building, which our listeners are likely familiar with. It is, I think often talked about it in a more political context, like bridging partisan divides. And there's a whole field of organizations that do this work.

But that seems to me that that is, I don't know if it's like all peace building is bridge building, but not all peace building is bridge building, like one of those kinds of things, I guess. How do you think about the the relationship between those two? So I was careful to avoid the the term peace building in this because, again, like my exposure to peace coming in the context of war, peace building is often the way people talk about post war situations.

And so when I think of peace building, I think of some strategy, like a grand strategy. I think of it as responsive to a particular set of needs in a post war, post conflict scenario that it just has more boundaries around it, even, like, temporally, right? Like we're gonna, we did war fighting, and now we're gonna do peace building. And I mean, I guess, to answer your question, I think that bridge building is a is a part of peace building. But again, like, even with you.

Bridges that keeps us on either side of the river right, and we're gonna come together in the middle, and we're gonna do this thing. But what if, like, the writing that I've done alongside this book is like, what if we don't want to set our differences aside? What if we don't want to forgive and forget? What like? Is there something we can do? How do we build coalitions? And coalition is the term that I like, I think, more than bridge building.

How do we build coalitions across difference that sees our difference as an asset, as opposed to like trying to transcend difference. And I think that that's something cool that lent observed is that it wasn't that these folks are like, coming together and singing Kumbaya and being like, let's let bygones be bygones. They aren't. They're just they're still different, and that's okay, that they can, they can coalesce in the community without giving up that part of themselves.

And this is where I take this ancient Greek concept of phronesis, and I look at it through the lens of intersectionality, which is like the language that was a gift to us from black feminist scholars that recognizes that we are all this constellation of identities related to power and privilege, and so then the work becomes not, how do we set aside those differences, or imagine that we all are one or have This like, same identity, but like, how do we align ourselves in

a way that disperses or diffuses power structures so it accepts like we have to work within the existing power dynamics? How can we diffuse?

How can we co align ourselves in ways that diffuse some of that power, redistribute that power, and so that's kind of why I balk at bridge building as a metaphor, because I just think we've been talking about that for a long time, and I haven't really seen it like a temporary outside of a temporary, goal oriented thing, whereas, like the piece that I'm talking about is just, it's more open, is less in response to a particular situation. It's just a way of being in the world.

As people are listening to this, I'm sure they're thinking, Oh, well, I would like to get involved in in one of these kinds of things, if not, maybe start something myself in my community, or maybe join up with something that that's already there. So I have a couple questions for you in that realm, like, what are some of the things that prevent people from engaging in this kind of work?

I don't know if I have a good answer for that, in part because there are a lot of answers, fear, laziness, lack of imagination. Um, I, I think that's why I have risk in the subtitle. It's called piece by piece, risking public action, creating social changes, because it is a risk. What the folks in this book are doing is irrational. It's hard to explain. It's not lucrative. And so like we, especially in the United States, have such a distorted idea about success.

And so I think, you know, when people think about doing something like this. They're thinking not from like, is this the right thing to do? They're thinking of like, well, how will others perceive what I'm doing? How will I explain this to my parents or my friends or loved ones? But if you can kind of just let that part go and just do the next right thing, even if it seems impractical. I think that's how you start.

In America if there's this tradition or this movement of bridge building, which is bringing people together explicitly across lines of a political division, as opposed to, you know, a business league or sports or a church or some other way that that people come together. I wonder how, if at all, you see that work of, you know, bringing people together for the purpose of talking across political divisions fitting into this picture.

And what we see in a lot of places is there are different reasons why people come together. Some people are coming together to solve joint problems within their community, and so they're coming across different faith lines or political lines because they need to build a park in their town, or they need to deal with an education problem in their town.

And I think for many people who are most focused on those local areas, that is where you see those bridges being built across lines when they actually just have to get stuff done. And that's where there is sometimes a very big disconnect between what's happening at the national level, where it's a lot of rhetoric and the local level where things are being done, I think we're also seeing a lot of places where people are coming together just to talk about being in conversation with difference.

And what that is, it's an opportunity to also talk about what binds us together, which most often is the democratic experiment that we're all part of, of just saying, okay, part of what we are doing is committing to be in conversation about our differences and not necessarily end the differences, but it is a way that people are practicing a muscle that, in some places, has either never been developed or never been used, which is that muscle to say, I can come together with someone

have radical different disagreements on one or a million things and Then just engage them peaceably and then go on with the rest of my with the rest of my life. And I think that's the thing which we're seeing now, and when we have a real opportunity in the United States, where that has been the practice in many places, but we have to utilize that and recognize what's at risk if we are not building or practicing that muscle.

The alternative, really is that we can move quickly into political violence or increase polarization that makes us vulnerable to those toxic readers. So the last thing I want to ask about is this idea of of incentives and political structures. We touched on this a little bit earlier.

But you know, the other headline in the democracy space, at least from this, this most recent US election, was that voters, by and large, rejected some of the things that would have changed political structures, things like open primaries and ranked choice voting, and the things that are often pointed to as ways to fix the system or decrease the influence that that the two parties have, at least here, here in the US.

So I wonder what, what the two of you make of of that, and if there are other, perhaps prospects for structural reform that that you're looking at moving forward.

I think that we're seeing, we're seeing places where that structural reform has really worked, particularly ranked choice voting, and we've seen it work well in Alaska and a number of other places where having a having a system in which it is not winner take all, and some of the current primary processes which push people into Much more polarized situation, you have far fewer people coming to the ballot box in primaries. I think we're seeing success in that.

I also think we're seeing in some places. In the debate here in Washington has been it's sort of a confusing system. We're just going to stick with what we've got. We know it better, and we don't need to have reforms.

And so I think we do have a challenge, really, to explain to the American people, at a very grassroots level of why some of these changes are needed, and they will actually reinforce, make us less polarized, and reinforce choice among people, as opposed to, I think, some of the perceptions which they which are that they are not allowing people to get the candidates that they want. I would say the United States has kind of a triple whammy in terms of our institutional design.

We know that winner take all systems are particularly given to to political violence if there are strong ethnic divisions or racial divisions or what have you. Larry diamond has written about that on a whole general study of democracy, that that's the one kind of generalizable thing you can say about institutional design is if you have a country with deep fissures, don't have a winner take all system. We also know that two party systems are given to polarization for obvious reasons.

It's easier to create an Asana to them when you only got two choices. And then we know presidential design systems. Juan Linz, you know, the great democracy scholar that I got to study under, writes about how few presidential systems survive more than a few decades. Really, America stands in a very small group that has survived, and that's because of the sort of inherent structural tension between a president and a legislature that are of different parties and so on.

So the United States has all three, and that is probably not the strongest place to stand on. And for a long time, people said, well, you know, we're doing fine, so maybe none of these things are so bad. And I would just argue that America had a very, very deep civic culture of democracy, and that civic culture has been eroding. You know, Robert Putnam writes about this with Bowling Alone and so on. That culture is not static, and it does change.

And we've seen much less people joining things, much less people speaking across difference, much less people even being willing to engage across difference, not only political difference, but just in general, dealing with social friction to get things done. And as we lose those norms, then laws and design of the institutions becomes much more important. When the norms hold sway. They're much stronger than the laws in the institutional design.

But as they weaken those other things come to the fore, and the United States is being hit with this triple problem. Now, voters just rejected that whole argument. I think it's a little wonky.

It also ran into the headwinds of institutional parties, where you got Michael Bennett in Colorado and other sitting leaders really speaking against these changes, and that's because, you know, whatever they might do for democracy, people who won in a system like that system, because they know how to win in it. So if you're a campaigner or a politician who's been elected from either party, it's not really partisan. They tend to prefer to keep their system. Now, what we do about it?

You know, I think there will be a lot of regrouping and a lot of thinking about, how do we help the United States connect the dots between the system that they have and these things that they say they don't like, about gridlock and extremism and so on. And that's a real messaging challenge.

And I think a lot of folks need to maybe get out of the rooms that they're usually in talking to one another and start reaching out to voters on the ground and seeing how they experience these different systems. And I should add, none of them are silver bullets. You know, institutional design can help or hinder a good democracy, but it's not going to decide the issue for you. You people have to do the work of changing their civic culture as well.

When I was 19, which was about the age when I got engaged in activism, I was actually anti activist. I thought that activism is for old ladies, uh, who are fighting for dogs rights or some bizarre thing, uh, like that. Uh, but then we had this very bad guy called Vic, uh, coming to power. And within a few years, the country fell apart. We moved from Yugoslavia to six small ridiculous countries. Uh, the high inflation kicked in.

My brother had to leave the country together with hundreds of thousands of, of young people. And, uh, basically everything I knew as a normal world fell apart. Uh, faced with that as a young person, you have. Two choices. You can fight or you can flee. And such are stubborn people. So we stand, uh, stand back and fight.

Uh, fast forward within six or seven years, I went from a street organizer to somebody running the student movement, somebody running from a, from a city office all the way to illegal movement, coth, which was officially proclaimed by the Serbian government as a terrorist organization, uh, which was basically labeled for everybody who was anti. Mil at the time, we grew from 11 people to 20,000 people.

Uh, we had this very interesting strategy of mobilizing youth and being cool and cocky in the same time, and that really worked. And we grew to 20,000. Eventually. In 2000. Uh, we mobilized, uh, people to elections. We persuade opposition to run together. Finally, Milic was defeated late 2000, so that was a. Well, kind of instant eight years of my life at, at one point. But, uh, the basic is yes, you can do it.

And we figure out we will do it, uh, when we figure out that there is nobody else to do it for us. What I, I think what I love about your story is not only that sort of persistence and that like we can do it, but you found these incredibly unconventional tactics that you use to make this happen. Um, can you talk about some of the approaches you found in that time? Uh, well, first of all, Serbs are not really serious people.

So, you know, trying to be witted, trying to be humorous, trying to mock everything is a kind of our national mentality. And that works great. Uh, within the world of the activism, uh, we were facing, uh. Somebody who is kind of what we would be, be probably categorizing. Today as a dictator light or diet dictator, kind of that category where, you know, you would arrest people but he'll release people.

He was not really a sad, you know, putting people in a mass graves, but as he was losing support, he was growing more out authoritarian. Eventually he arrested 2,500 members of my movement only in year 2000. Uh, so, uh, he was also kind of this, this gray bureaucrat. And because they were so boring and so serious and their language smelled like that, uh, we figured out, oh, we wanna be different. We wanna be witty. And because of our age, it was kind of very appropriate.

We were also very much rock and roll movements. So what we were, we were doing a lot was experimenting with different tactics, arranging from graffiti slogans. Eventually ending in, in understanding this pattern in which if you do something witty and you hit the right target, then your opponent will respond and then they will become the part of the show.

And this thing which we layer labeled as a dilemma action and build the whole research on, uh, on a website called Tactics for Change, uh, which is we are very passionate now to figure out how it works in different other countries. But understanding that you can be wit and you can do something really. Humorous, like making a cake for President's birthday and then, you know, make a big mock out of it and invite journalists and then the police arrives.

Uh, put the face of Mr. President on a petro barrel. Invite people to hit him with a baseball bat and pay 25 cents in Serbian dinners to do it, and then see what is going to happen. A lot of this was experimentation and it contain this amazing part of dilemma where your opponent has only two bad choices. Uh, if they react to your prank and, uh, do something inappropriate as arresting the petrol barrel and taking it to the police station, which actually happened in a real world. Wait so slow.

Slow that down. You mean, you mean that you literally just have a barrel? Yeah. Yeah. We were, we were pretty, we were pretty, we were pretty poor at the time. We were a group of 15 people, so we, we got the old petrol barrel or gas barrel or oil barrel. I don't remember what was originally in it. And we had this artist who made a amazing face of Vic on it, and then there was a hole on the top.

So like in a pinball game, and I know your, your listeners remember, but they were actually video games where you put, uh, a coin and you can play a video game. So it was very much along, along the line of that. So you kind of earn your, your three hits, like the three balls in the pimble. So you put the, the coin in it, and immediately you gain rights, do boom, boom, and boom. Like three times, you hit the face and express your love for Mr. President.

And amazingly, we put this in a, in a main pedestrian zone. I think that was the, the coolest part of it was that we invited non-political people to deal with it. So this was not us doing it. It was not opposition activists doing it. It was like just this little great experiment, but you really, you know, check what people will do with it. So you're saying the police. Arrested the barrel, is that what you're saying? Like they Oh, yeah.

What actually happened was that we put this barrel in a, in a Belgrade version of Fifth Avenue, and basically the idea was to see what the police will do. And the funny part was when they arrived, they, they were looking for us, but they were nowhere around. And then they were looking at the barrel and there's this mutilated face of president getting swollen more and more after a lot of these beating. And eventually, because they got the command to stop this thing, they had to rest the battle.

So they. Drag the barrel into the police car. And of course, everybody pulled the camera out and start taping them, and they become a punchline. But the genius behind it is the thing that we figured out. By being creative, you are making your open and strength working against him or herself. And in this case, police, uh, was the most important part of the mil oppressive machine. And making them look ridiculous, uh, carried an extra value for itself.

John Stewart went from skewering politicians to becoming an earnest advocate. There is not an empty chair on that stage. That didn't tweet out. Never forget the heroes of nine 11. Never forget their bravery. Never forget what they did, what they gave to this country. Well, here they are. Vladimir Zelensky, a comic, played a president on television, then became a president. In addition to his role on that satirical TV show, Zelensky made a name for himself in Ukraine as an actor and entertainer.

He won Dancing with the Stars in 2006, and he was the voice of Ukrainian Paddington Donald Trump. The politician won on the basis of an imaginary persona invented by others. It's important to remember that when the Apprentice Premier back in 2004, Donald Trump was a bankrupt punchline in the New York tabloids, a guy who inherited a real estate empire from Daddy and then managed to lose it all. And that is until he was cast in the Apprentice by the producer of Survivor.

All around reality TV savant Mark Burnett, according to a fantastic new profile, Burnett New Yorker, whereas others had seen in Trump only a tattered celebrity of the eighties, Burnett had glimpsed a feral charisma. Sylvi Berlusconi in Italy dominated media as an owner before taking control of Italy itself as Prime Minister.

While Trump was born into a family that was already immensely wealthy, Berlusconi was born into a middle class family in Milan, normal parents, normal education, and a normal life. However, Berlusconi had something special. He was fascinated by show business and was the best salesman you could find. In fact, Berlusconi's beginnings were as a singer. That's right. Scon started his career as a crooner who entertained parties on cruise ships in the lake.

Vladimir Putin stages, buffoonish showings of himself shirtless on horseback or camping. Like some aging film star chasing his last bit at a Rocky sequel, a shirtless Putin brave of the cold waters of a mountain lake and the Siberian wilderness. Didn't you wanna see that? If everything becomes a show like this, then nothing is real.

Entertainment has eaten politics and humor is just a branch of entertainment, which is not to say that humor doesn't still have a role in opposing oppression and overwhelmingly. The authoritarian and the right in general are terrible at using humor as an art. My pronouns are USA. My pronouns are USA. How about it? Huh? My pronouns are Kiss my Ass. My personal preferred pronouns are fried chicken and collared greens. My pronouns are patriot and ass Kicker is a American. My pronouns are I won.

Please don't shoot. I'm a they. It might not seem fair because if you're against Trump, you sit and see Trump and his associates all the time using humor in horrific and derogatory ways that not only, don't bring us together, but actively demonize vulnerable groups. I don't know if you guys know this, but there's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it's called Puerto Rico. But power has gotten more proficient at stealing and suffocating.

Its opponent's humorous resistance. So in Serbia during the late 1990s, a pro-democracy group called UP Tour Put a poster of President Laban Ovitz face. On an oil barrel, and they left a large stick near it in a shopping district. The fun that shoppers had while waiting in line eventually brought police who arrested the barrel and they couldn't arrest the people standing around. They didn't know who to put it there, so they took the barrel and that went viral.

A group that started with only 20 members became a movement of 70,000 people, tremendously expanding what they were able to accomplish. And the group embraced this idea that has since come to be called Lism. The purpose of humor in, uh, in this sort of street, uh, protest action is to, uh, show that, that the regime has no legitimacy. It shows the funny face of the regime, et cetera, et cetera. But at the same time, it also shows people that you can do something. And, uh, get away with it.

Which is using humor as a part of a larger nonviolent strategy to break the hold of political repression. And this kind of physical action used to humorous ends can be really effective. In 1983 after a strike in Chile where minors were surrounded by police and violence was eminent. It was clear. The government wanted to unleash bloodshed, and so the strikers called for a different kind of demonstration in which people on an assigned day walked or drove. Half speed.

This was a form of protest by which people could join in solidarity, realize their strengths. Have little or no risk of arrest. I love that example. Beneath the mountains in the plus outskirts of Santiago, despite the vast national debt, the general is building himself a new bunker. It remains an open question whether he'll ever live in it.

Another one that it was really powerful that was a televised version, was that two Italian satirists wound up blackballed from state programming leading Nobel Prize winner, Dario Foe to condemn censorship. In 2003, foe and his wife Fran Rame, put together a vicious, hilarious performance that mocked Berlusconi directly a kind of a puppet show, telling a tale where the Prime Minister through a horrible accident ends up with part of Putin's braid when Putin is assassinated by terrorists.

Humor allows the powerful to level the playing field. Opt founder, Sergio Popovic, said an interview about what's happening more recently in Syria that fighting Assad is like boxing. Mike Tyson, you don't want to box Mike Tyson. Even the Mike Tyson that fought recently You don't wanna box him. You wanna challenge him at chess? What does this translate to for Americans? It's not enough to make Trump ridiculous. He makes himself outlandish daily and thrives on both outrage and detention.

It's really about the thrill of the spectacle and defying common decency for him. Trump grows on hate from the left when it binds his followers closer to him. Even Belu in Italy was eventually tarnished by the stories of those infamous Bunga Bunga parties, uh, that Bescon used to throw in an underage girl. His political career only ended with his death in 2023. Think about it. Berlusconi died on the 12th of June at the age of 86. He was an old man.

Well, last year he appeared on TikTok with this video. TikTok, we're not gonna go into what he's actually saying in the message of this video, but what I want to emphasize here is that the man you just saw was an 85-year-old man when this recording was made, when he was running again in an election in which he had a real chance of winning.

So Trump has to be wounded in ways that unsettle him and tarnish his impunity and his defiance of the laws in the eyes of his followers, the people who admire him for his willingness to embrace corruption and trash norms. The harms, his policies do. Has to be made apparent in comic ways that might resonate even with the apolitical. If you think about it, the concept that you could use humor for significant social change just goes against your gut instinct. You think, Hey, this is serious.

I need people to take this very seriously. So how could humor help that? And the answer there is that when you have any sort of particular activist, um, action, you have four. Constituencies. You have the activists themselves, you have your target, you have the general public observing, and you have the security forces. And what Liv does is it changes the entire dynamics of all of those structures.

So we know that activists are typically portrayed as troublemakers, as disruptors, as a problem, but when the activists incorporate humor, they suddenly aren't scary. Right there is a huge deal and changes it. Then public perceptions that usually look at activists like, oh, these people are annoying. They're, it's either annoying or even worse, right? And now the public is laughing with the activists. So it's creating a bond and a connection and building a movement and making it bigger.

So then you also have your target. Typically, your target wants to hold onto power, right? It doesn't wanna allow you to define it, but humor allows for this space. So with the example of Milovich, if Milovich is per portraying himself as powerful, and now you use humor to sort of make fun of him, his whole image gets restructured, where you reframe the narrative through this fund. And then of course, the last piece is the security forces. What are they gonna do?

When you show up at a protest and you know that they're planning to water cannon you, and you're bringing pool toys and dressed in a bathing suit, the security forces look like idiots when they're gonna water cannon you. And so we are studying all of the ways in which humor is disruption, and so it's disruption of these status quo narratives in ways that are particularly powerful. That is so powerful, as you just said.

And I'm curious to transition into dilemma actions because I know that this is like the bread and butter for people who are pursuing change when we're, when we're planning campaigns and things like that. Could you talk a bit about what dilemma actions are and how humor helps create that dilemma? Um, while I'm saying that, I also failed to mention in the intro that, uh, you two co-wrote one of my favorite little, little booklets about this called Pranksters versus Autocrats.

Great title by the way. It's super intriguing. So could you talk a bit about dilemma actions, how humor factors in. So we had data on how nonviolent movements are more effective than violent so that we knew. As a baseline. Uh, the question was were there particular types of tactics that nonviolent groups could use that would elevate and effectively make things just, you know, uh, more likely to yield the concessions they wanted?

You might think in recent US history of how much energy we've mobile mobilized around particular protests that didn't quite get what we wanted. So one of the things I'm interested in as a scholar is you're getting people in the street, you're getting people out there to do things and they show up, but we don't get any outcome. So the dilemma action is designed to require your opponent, your target, to have to have some reputational cost.

So either they do nothing and look bad, or they do something and look bad. So one example is, uh, you're not allowed to protest in Russia, so you are going to now set up Lego toys to do the protest for, for you and hold the signs you wish you could hold. And so now the question is, do the toys get to stay and make their protest or do they get taken away? And so either option is going to make the target look bad.

So what you're really trying to do is to get your activists to think the three steps ahead. What can poke. At the results you want. And so what we decided to do was not just, again, take all of the years of experience of Canvas, but really measure this. So we measured inside an existing data set, and we were able to prove conclusively that these types of tactics have a measurable success rate that's better than tra traditional conventional protest tactics. You've reached Section C protest.

Last time around, there was a women's march. The women's march was huge and amazing. We had a people's march this time around where we had smaller numbers, but there were hundreds of thousands of people out in the streets, across the country, two days before the inauguration this time around. Okay. And, um, since then, now, after the first women's march, what happened was people kind of went back to their homes. A lot of them formed, you know, chapters of Indivisible.

They formed, what do they call them? Huddles of the Women's March. Um, other groups were formed 10 days after the first women's march. There was the travel ban, and people got riled up and started to mobilize, and they started to go to town hall meetings. They started to cause trouble and pushed back against their elected officials in their communities. We're starting to see something similar 10 days after the people's march. There was the federal freeze, right?

Yeah. And all of a sudden we did see, we've seen a lot of similar pushback as we did to the travel ban since then. We did not have a women's march. We did not have that big day in the streets. Although, to be honest, like the point of those types of big days in the street are all about giving people a sense to have like a collective grieving, a collective moment of identity formation. I don't know that we need that this time around, to be honest with you.

The thing that I'm really afraid of is that a lot of people are feeling so personally attacked because they have, you know, trans kids who are losing their gender affirming medicine because they are being, you know, fired from the federal government because. You know, all of these different policies are being pushed back. Mean because they work in DEI, right? Yeah. I mean like the list goes on and on.

Or they're a person of color who works for an organization that suddenly had its DEI department acts. Right? Or they're, or they're, you know, a recent arrival in the United States who came here because you know, we're supposed to be this great melting pot. And instead, even though they have citizenship, they're being told that they are basically not having their citizenship honored. How about that one? Yeah. Or they have family members.

I mean, I have so many people I know who have family members who they're worried are gonna be deported. Yeah. I mean, all of these people are terrified and all of them are being affected in ways that are really different from 2017. I think that what we're going to see is people working together in a really different way. But one of the things that my research has shown is that it's not necessarily gonna be peaceful, and it's certainly not gonna be electorally focused like last time around.

Mm-hmm. Because last time around, the resistance really held the line and was like, it's all about the elections. It's all about the blue wave. Right? Well we got a blue wave. Yeah. And then we got Joe Biden, and here we are again. Yeah. So it's not like it was a mistake that Trump won the first time around. It was just, it was, it was a warning. Yeah. And we didn't really heed the warning as well as we should have. So now this is a bigger warning. But it still feels that the response, I mean.

If you're saying that the protests that we're having now are, hey, they're sizable. Mm-hmm. The, the Women's March was successful to some degree. I mean, but it still brought us to this point. Like, why would we think that the amount of protests and resistance that we're seeing now would be any more effective than what happened in 2017? Oh no, I'm saying that this is just the beginning. Mm-hmm. I think we are, but I'm saying that there are people who are already protesting.

I think that we are gonna see floods of people in the streets, and I also think that we're gonna see mass strikes, which is really what we need. Right. Because the, the only way to push that back against authoritarianism is like pushing back with power of people we're pushing back with violence and, you know, I'm really hoping we're not gonna see violence.

But I mean, one of the things that, um, that I did at the People's March is I surveyed the people in the streets and I ask these people, and these are again, these are like, you know, your middle aged, you know, engaged people, most of them, and I'm highly educated. And I asked them, you know, this question that we adapted from a, a national survey. And the question was, um.

To what degree do you agree or disagree with his statement, um, that political violence may be necessary to protect democracy. And a third of the people at the People's March said they agreed or strongly agreed with that statement, which is a huge shift. Wow. From what we have seen back during the American Values Survey, the last time they feel that it was only 8% of Democrats, and lemme just say it, the people's March, it was 93% of the people in the crowds voted for Kamala Harris.

Mm-hmm. So these are Democrats. Yeah. And they are starting to shift their opinion. So that's the thing I'm worried about. But I'm not saying we have enough people in the streets right now. I'm saying there are enough people who are starting to feel threatened that they're gonna push back. And you know, what we can hope for is they push back in a peaceful way.

But one of the things that I would just say for anybody who's feeling like they're alone and their only one under attack, they need to look to their left and look to their right. Yeah. Because so many people. Feeling isolated and afraid right now. And like we talked about last time, the best thing you can do in that moment is get angry. Yeah. Because anger helps to unify our energy and help us to think through how we push back. Or get angry with other people. Don't get angry by yourself. Right.

Scrolling. Yeah. Well, if you turn into Luigi, and that's not that we don't, nobody wants that. Well, well, let's just say that some, some people do want that. I mean, you're talking about the rise of political violence Oh yeah. In America. And like, you know, that killing was an act of political violence. Oh, for It was. Oh, for sure. Explicitly, uh, political assassination. Well, I mean, and at the people's march, I can't tell you how many signs, pink glitter signs that said Free Luigi.

That we see in the crowd. Yeah. It was. Really surprising. I mean, I did not expect that. Right. I expected the hats, I figured the hats would be back. But, you know, I I, you should have expected the free Luigi signs. I mean, the man became a, a folk hero to, I mean, the comments of this video are gonna be like, I love Luigi. Feel free to pop. Literally, like, if you can give money to him now, apparently he's taking donations while he's in jail.

I, I mean, it, it, that is, that says so much about the mood in America, and that's not a mood I'm gonna gonna contradict. That's people's actual feeling. Right? Right. Yeah. Um, but what do you credit to, you know, average folks saying no political violence might be necessary on a large scale. Why would that shift happen? I think it's happening because people don't believe in the elections anymore. I mean, first of all, yeah.

I think that during the first Trump administration, lots of people were feeling really uncomfortable. And there were all these discussions in the media, oh, why aren't people having a general strike? Why aren't people getting violent in the streets? I mean, and it was like Maddie Glaces was saying it. Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times was saying it. And you know, I was the person who was like collecting the data in the streets. So I always was called to say, what do you think, Dana?

And I was like, well, I think that people are really like laser focused on the elections. Well, we have now a person in the White House who said that the last election in 2024 was the last election that anybody had to vote in, right? Mm-hmm. And we know that, um, kind of our democratic elections are, you know, fraught. And we know a lot of people are losing their jobs and losing their livelihoods. And the idea that they're gonna be like, oh, I'll just wait until 2026. It'll all be okay.

I can just hold my breath. My kids don't need to eat till then. That's like unfathomable. Yeah. So this shift towards violence makes sense because we know from research that when people feel like they have no other choice, that's when they get violent. That's when they get aggressive, that's when they get really confrontational. What my hope is that people choose like a more confrontational but peaceful option. Nonviolent civil disobedience. Let's give it all a try. Let's go there first. Right?

But there are a lot of guns in our country and that's concern worthy. JD Vance talked about this fascinatingly saying, Christianity is about loving your family first and then the next level out your community and then your town, and only them whatever's left over for the rest of the world. This idea of a kind of qualified Christian Love to me is very different from what I learned at school about universalism and it's creating.

A different world in their image, and I think we are all slightly being dragged along behind at the moment. Well, that's the point. Should we allow ourselves to be dragged? That's exactly the point, Tom. That is where resistance comes. I. If we allow ourselves to be dragged through and everyone that we know, then we are capitulating to this totally responsibility. That is where I draw the line. And Tom, you said they're doing all of these things.

I I, I'm just gonna draw your attention to the fact that they're trying to do all of these things, right? It's a good point. And some of them, they may be able to do, and many of them, they're not gonna be able to do. And, and Drudges have been saying, no, you can't do this, and you can't do that. And there's this new narrative saying, well. We're not gonna respect the rule of law anymore. Look, I I think that people need to focus on the level of corruption going on here.

You know, the, uh, the Trump meme coin, you know, when it was launched just before the election, it raised about 14 billion. You know, anyone can pay Trump for anything. These are obscene levels of corruption. One thing I wanna draw attention to. A lot of people who should know better are sort of saying, oh, well, there's been a change in the mood. You know, and I think, you know, we've probably gone a bit too far on DEI and, and climate and trans values, and I'm like, wait a minute.

What's DEI, Paul? Uh, diversity, equity and Inclusion. Thank you for the acronyms episode. But I'm, I'm, I've seen climate combined with, um, Marxism. And transgender rights. There's a real effort to try and, uh, mix things up and confuse, but I, I just want to, I just want to warn I think major corporations, major investors don't get so excited that there's some sort of marvelous new, uh, recovery of, of animal spirits, of capitalism in the USA.

There may well be, uh, over the months and years ahead, the exposure of the most phenomenal corruption. And, you know, you don't wanna be on the wrong side of history here because this stuff is serious and people will be taking it very seriously for a long time. The obscenity of people who profess themselves is religious thinking that there's something smart about depriving the, the poor of, or, or, or the vulnerable or the.

Ill of what they need to stay alive from the largest economy in the world. Who should be able to afford a little bit of aid. I dunno if anyone saw the obscene X or Tweet or whatever from Musk who said, you know, I could have gone to some cool parties, but I put the US A ID in in the wood chipper at the weekend. I mean, it's clear that people all over the world are going to die as a result of these cuts, and I do hope Elon Musk has time to reflect upon the severity of that.

Well, we promised listeners at the beginning of this episode that we wouldn't only go down this difficult, challenging route. You know, there is a lot that can be done. We are not beholden only to waiting for governments to kind of come down from on high and solve complicated problems for us. And actually, as we know, having spent years in the climate space, governments are often the last to move.

They often shore up the progress that is made by corporations, investors, citizens, legal process, and other different elements. So. Given that the world is facing all of these difficult challenges right now with government progress, and I agree Christiana, that we've been talking about Trump, which is us, but it is having a chilling effect around the world.

Although we hope that other countries will still maintain their leadership, but nevertheless, there are an enormous number of leavers of change. There's technology, there's businesses, there's mass engagement of citizens as litigation. We had a conversation about this when we were all together a few weeks ago, and I started by asking Paul which lever he wanted to kick off with. This is kind of like the craziest subject because the extent of investment in so to say clean energy is extraordinary.

I mean, in fact, VIR at the IEA, perhaps the most authoritative figure in the world on this, the International Energy Agency says we are kind of spending about $2 on clean energy for every $1 on fossil fuels. Hmm. But that's an extraordinary number. You've got renewable energy, you've got the investment in grids, you've got the investment in storage. And you've got the investment in efficiency.

A lot of people, uh, miss efficiency, but it, it has often been called the first fuel and it, you know, it's absolutely extraordinary to consider the capacity for us to just simply redesign systems to, to make them more efficient. This is a podcast, so we are denied these extraordinary graphs I'm looking at for wind generation, for solar generation, for electric car fleets, for battery storage. But they are all exponential.

I mean, wind and to some extent solar growth, slightly slower wind because it's so big. But the electric car fleets and the battery storage really are doubling each year. I mean, let's just reflect on that doubling each year. That's an astonishing statistic. And you think, and you might start from a small base, like one to two, two to four, but then once you start going four to eight, 16, you've done it basically. It doesn't take long.

And I mean, there's a meta concept here, which, which you, you've heard me talk about before, which I think is incredibly important. This energy's free, you know, energy from the sun. This is what you taught me, Christiana. The sun doesn't send you a bill, the wind doesn't send you a bill. You know that that can cost more to install this material. And then you have to deal with intermittency. You have to have smart grids and storage. But once you've made the investment, the energy's free Now.

Who are gonna be the free energy superpowers, who are gonna be the leaders of the free energy world. I think China will and, and is extraordinary in its capacity to do this. But we see so many opportunities for combinations of things like grid, liberalization, uh, energy policy regulations, but when they come together. Extraordinary things can be achieved. And that's why we're peaking fossil fuel consumption because so much of this other stuff is working all right.

Technology, I mean, a hundred percent. That's, and that's often what drives policy as well. The Huntington Beach City Council has been messing with the library for at least like two years, two and a half years now. And, um, it originally started with a book ban. Uh, they wanted to ban a bunch of books from the children's section, uh, primarily L-G-B-T-Q books. And so that's like, I, I was speaking out at that point 'cause I'm like, Hey, this is not okay.

Like this is, this is a First Amendment violation. Um, and then it proceeded from there to where they got huge community pushback. So like, okay, well we're gonna establish like a, a 23 person panel that will review all the books in the library and determine where they go. And, and the bad books will go into special, like, adults only section. It's just like, but that's just a book band, right? That's, that's, that's the exact same thing. So there was huge community pushback on that.

And 'cause, 'cause they actually established the panel. So in response, a group called, uh, protect hp, they, they've been fighting to, you know, keep them the, from, from fucking with the library. They're like, we're going to start a petition to where you are gonna have to dissolve this panel. Because they're like, we think there's enough residents in this city that don't like what you're doing. And yeah, sure enough, they got more than enough signatures.

And um, that was actually one of the things also on the agenda for that meeting. I didn't, I didn't get to see it 'cause I was in jail at that point. But, but yeah. So anyways, so, um, the panel was established. Then the next thing they tried to do is privatize the library. 'cause they're like, Hey, you know, we don't like the way the library is run because it's free and open and like actually treating people with dignity. We wanna sell it off and scrap it for parts. And so again, huge pushback.

Another petition that was also on the agenda last week or this week. So finally we get to the MAGA plaque, which is just like. Say those words again. The MAGA plaque, did you say? Yeah. Yeah, the MAGA plaque. So, so there was a, so Protect, HP sent out this email saying, Hey, there's a library commission meeting where, you know, they, they, they've come up with a plaque to honor the 50th anniversary of the library. It was like, great, you know, we should honor our library.

It's a fantastic library. It's a crown jewel of Huntington Beach. Like people come from cities all around to go to this library. Um, but the plaque that they had proposed was this hideous, like black and gold monstrosity, I'm sure coincidentally in Proud Boycots. Like I'm, I'm sure that was just a happy accident. Um, and. It had an acronym or an acrostic in, in the middle of the plaque, like fully displayed. That spelled out MAGA going down.

And then I think it was like magical, alluring, galvanizing, and adventurous where that were the actual words. I don't know about you, but when I think of a library, I. Alluring is not the first word I wanna associate with it. Yeah. That gives me some skeevy vibes. Totally, totally may Maybe for the adult section, right? Yeah, you gotta, you gotta take your books out in a brown paper bag, so, so anyway, so this library commission meeting like it is, I was there for that one too.

Uh, over 90% of the people speaking were, and, and I mean, there, there was at least like 30 or 40 people speaking, you know, which is for a library commission meeting, like that's a big turnout. Mm-hmm. And, and over 90% of the people speaking were like. Yeah, no, don't, don't do this. This, this is terrible. This is really bad. And the library commission rubber stamped it.

Um, they, they sent it to the council and like, not even any debate around it or anything, they're just like, yeah, no, we approve the plaque. And so the, the council meeting this week was about like actually adopting the plaque for the library. And at that point, um, based on my previous interactions with this city council, like, it, it, it had become super clear. They do not care about the community. They don't, they don't care what the community actually wants.

They're only in office to try to get more power and to try to rise higher into Trump's orbit. And, and, and it's illustrated really clearly by our, our previous, um, uh, city attorney, uh, who just left us, Michael Gates. Um, he has wasted hundreds of thousands of our taxpayer dollars. Um, trying to defend frivolous lawsuits, keeping the city from building housing that's required by the state of California. Like there, there's no way these suits are gonna win in court, like absolutely no way.

But he keeps fighting them because he know Trump's Li, he know, he knows Trump likes that kind of thing. And sure enough, now he's in Trump's administration, and, and, and then the council gave him a rousing sendoff. It's like he's doing great work. So yeah, this, this is what they all want. They, they want to springboard from their position to hire up in the Trump administration and, and it's just a naked grab for power. Like they, they really don't care about the community.

And so when I, when I saw, you know, the plaque issue, sorry, go ahead. Oh no, please. You finish, please. Yep. Yeah, so, so, so when I saw that the plaque was, you know, gonna be on the, on the agenda for, for this week, I was like, okay, well I guess like it's, it's time to actually like do something. 'cause you know, they're not gonna listen. They've shown they're not gonna listen.

People know they're not gonna listen and, and there's this sense of resigned frustration when people talk and give public comment in, in that. They, they, they're angry because they want to make their voices heard, but they know at the end of the day that the council isn't even going to debate the issue. Like they're not even gonna bring up the fact that so many people are speaking out against it. They're just gonna be like, Nope, we do what we want. Fuck you.

And so that was when I was like, okay, well I, I guess I'm gonna have to make them listen this time. And then, yeah. So I, I came up with the, you know, with my speech, which, which I, I posted the full three minute one online. Um, 'cause normally you're supposed to get three minutes for public content. Uh, public comment. Um, our, our. Current mayor, uh, Mr. Burns, um, no relation to the Simpson's character.

Uh, he, he chopped it down to one minute, um, at the, at the start of, of session, which again made it clear they really weren't interested in listening to the community. And so I was like, okay, well I'll, you know, cut out certain parts to, you know, to make a fit. But the, but at the end I knew, okay, I'm, I'm gonna go protest. Like, I'm, I'm gonna go up on the, on the dais and, and force them to arrest me because this is not okay. Like it, it's.

Someone, someone has to take a stand at some point and, and if our elected officials aren't gonna do it, I guess, fuck, I guess I gotta do it. This is Section D boycott. If you build scale, that you drive down the cost, right? And so if you drive down the cost, you broaden the market, right? Sort of like what you're supposed to be doing with EVs. But the problem is, is that the Falcon nine did drive down the cost of launch, at least in theory, but it didn't create enough demand for it.

And so they have like 80% of the launch market, and yet half of their launches are launching their own starlink satellites. Because they can't find paying customers for it, and that starlink loses money. So it's like saying, well, if I have a car business and I make 500,000 units, you know, I can sell 'em at this price. If I make a million units, I can sell 'em lower and the market will be bigger.

But you build that factory for a million units and people aren't buying them at the lower price, and so you have to sell 'em to yourself to a rental fleet that loses money. This is not a sustainable business. That's essentially what I think is happening at SpaceX. Yeah, we don't know because it's private back on track. Tesla, it's only half of his wealth on paper. But it's really the only place he has of getting cash, and he has two ways of doing it. He can sell the stock.

He did a little bit to fund the Twitter deal, but if he does more than that, it's like a monkey trap, where as long as he owns a big chunk of Tesla, he's associated with Tesla and people buy it because he's involved. If he starts to sell it signals, he's not confident in it. And a lot of people are gonna take that signal and sell as a result of it. So he can't really sell. Plus you'd have to pay taxes. And so what he does is he pledges those shares.

To get loans from Big Wall Street Banks, Morgan Stanley, kind of being the big one. What that means is that a. He only can get so much cash out of it. It's not one-to-one, right? You have to pledge like any other loan. You have to pledge a good amount of collateral for the loan. And what it also means is that if the stock starts to go down, his collateral, the value of his collateral goes down. And if he has cash out from those loans, he has to put, he.

Collateral back in this is what's called a margin call, right? And so what happens if the stock goes below the level that he needs it to be at? He gets margin called. He has to, in very short notice, put more stock or cash into this. So what will happen is he'll have to sell the stock, which will drive the price down, which will continue to trigger margin calls while also signaling to everyone else that he's on his way out and that they need to get out while they can. It switches the dynamic.

From greed to fear. People don't understand. They look at the number on his wealth and they assume A, that he can pull all that out in cash and throw out at elections and throw out everything else. He can't, the cash that he pulls out through these loans, he has like three private jets like his, his lifestyle is not cheap.

So not only can he not pull the cash out, but if that stock starts to go down, if we trigger this fear cycle instead of a greed cycle, there are these traps built in and because of his loans, that will then create this like death spiral. And so one of the things that I'm really trying to get people to understand is, again. A, on the rhetorical level, he's not good at business, but B, the big numbers, those are actually the vulnerability, not his strength. That's what makes him vulnerable.

There is a real scenario where in theory, we could wipe out his wealth in a matter of days or weeks if the right dynamic takes hold. And so then what do you see as the opportunities to really hurt Tesla and by extension Elon Musk in that way? What are the actions that people can take, or what needs to be done to kind of sap this confidence in Tesla so that you kind of scare. The market and investors away from it.

The important thing for me is that people just understand that that is a viable strategy. What I want is to see people understand that strategy and start to align around it. The tactical level of how you implement that. I think there's a million ways it shouldn't be up to me. You know what I mean? I, I have a book to write. I got other things going on. I'm happy to explain the strategy of this, but I really think that Tesla take down, by the way, check out the.

Hashtag Tesla takedown, you'll get plugged into the community that that's already opening their eyes to this and starting to work on this. What I wanna make clear is we can start with protests.

We can start every Saturday at 11:00 AM We can go down to our local Tesla store and we can go out there and we can let our friends and neighbors know that I. Anything you do that puts a dollar into this company is directly supporting Elon Musk and that if we starve this company of its revenue, and again, this is sales of new cars servicing existing cars, and this is charging at Superchargers, all of these things support this company. Every dollar that we take outta their revenue.

Drives down the core fundamentals of their business. Even worse, and this is the important thing, right? Boycotts have been done before. Frankly, the record in this country, in the US in particular is not that great, unfortunately. And, and, and I'm aware of that, but this is different because we haven't had a boycott of a company that is this precarious before. And so part of it is this overvalued stock. That's built on fraud and that we can switch from, it's only psychology keeping it up.

There is no fundamental economics keeping this up. That's the important thing to understand. The other thing is sales. Uh, were down like 11% in China and whatever sales they're getting, their competition is so tough. They're basically not making any money. Sales are down huge in Europe, like 40, 50% in some of those European markets, right? Huge. So US is it, this is the last place. If we can drive down the sales here. The core fundamentals of that business fall apart.

Elon doesn't have anything to get investors to believe that the core business will improve for years. He can show a new car tomorrow. It'll be two years, at least before that, that is actually generating real like meaningful cash flow or profit for the company. And so anything that starves Tesla of money that makes the brand toxic, that lets people know that Elon Musk is vulnerable, is aligned with the cause. And again, I don't want to tell people what to do.

Whatever it is, whatever you want to do, you know, if you want to go out on the street and protest. Do that. If you think that's Boomer cringe and you wanna do some kind of online advocacy, you wanna leave bad reviews. You, I mean, there's again, I don't even want to tell people what to do because use your imagination. People know how to fuck shit up. All I'm saying is, is that this opportunity exists. We don't get to vote for two years at all at the federal level.

We didn't get to vote for Elon in the first place anyway. Our choices are literally doom, scroll and feel helpless. And fantasize about someone else taking care of this for us, or we can do something ourselves. And I'll tell you, you know, I had my eyes open in 2015 about this. For the longest time I. I thought, oh, I'm just a little blogger. All I have to do is sort of, I think we talked about this on the show, you know, before, in a past episode, put up the flare.

Let people know, Hey, there's frog going on here. There's bad things going on here. The cavalry's gonna arrive, the grownups will will show up and take care of this. And it hasn't happened. It hasn't happened. Take it for me. I've been running that experiment for a decade, right? I have the data. It doesn't work. There is no cavalry, no one's coming to rescue us. We do have this opportunity, frankly, you know, if people have other ideas, I'm all open to them.

But strategically, I think this is the only way we do something about this, and there's a million ways that we can affect. That. Right. And again, it can be art, it can be protest, it can be online activism, it can be organizing. It can be just getting the word out and just be talking to your neighbors about why they should sell the car. I think it's really important to say Canadians don't wear our patriotism on our sleeve. We don't like talking about our flag.

You know, we got American neighbors and we just don't do that thing. Uh, we love our veterans. Our people went and fought in every dirty hole fighting Nazis, but when they came home. They just went about their lives. It's something Canadians compartmentalize, so we're not used to this sort of rah rah flag waving.

But what Donald Trump did when he got elected was he began to make an attack on our sovereignty on our nation, saying that we didn't deserve to be a country and that we were gonna have to kiss his ring or he was gonna cause unprecedented economic harm. That changed everything. Canadians said, you're gonna take our nation from us. I don't think so. So the resistance began there and my role in the resistance was the morning after the Trump election.

I woke up like everyone else, with the worst hangover on the planet. I didn't want to get outta bed. My wife, who's smarter than me, said, you haven't posted anything. And I said, what's her to post? She said, I don't care. You gotta start rallying people. And I was really thinking of Antonio Graham. She's line that we are now in the time of monsters and that we needed language to talk about the threat to democracy.

That this isn't, this isn't just disinformation, this isn't just the right owning the libs. This is something much darker and more dangerous to democracy. So I've been writing about that, speaking in parliament, trying to frame it. And then when we saw his actions on January 6th, his threat against Denmark, uh, Greenland, his threats against Canada. For some reason people turned to me and said, you've got the language. So the resistance began there.

I started calling my page the resistance, because we are in this not to win this trade war. We're in this to defeat fascist tyranny. Um, the United States will either go down in the darkness at this time or it will come out, I don't know as a Canadian, but I sure as hell know that my country's not gonna go down that hole with it. That's brilliant. And of course it's really interesting that, you know, when Trump, first of all, this is all illegal. We know that.

And, and there's resistance not just in Canada, but in the United States, and there's gonna be a big day of action. But it seems that what he really wants is, you know, I. Rare earth minerals, all of that kind of thing. So it's, it's got an economic, uh, definitely, you know, some sort of way of enriching Donald Trump even more. And Musk as well. But maybe you could like talk a little bit more about what tariffs would mean in Canada and especially like in the different regions.

I mentioned that Ontario is gigantic, but what about other provinces like say Alberta. It's really important to know that one of the reasons that Ontario has such a massive manufacturing economy is because of this whole notion of just in time delivery. So Toledo, Ohio needs something for their auto plant. They're getting it from Kitchen Ontario. Kitchen Ontario needs something to get a vehicle off the assembly line. They're getting it from Buffalo. This is the integrated system.

So. If Donald Trump throws massive tariffs on the auto sector, even if it's one sided, but we've been talking to auto experts who'll say like, within a week bowling green goes down, Arlington goes down. Definitely Toledo and Michigan plants go down because the system isn't built.

I to throw tariff walls up because we decided, and I don't know if it was a good idea, maybe back in the day, we should have kept our plants and their plants, but we all went along with Reagan saying this was a great idea. Yeah. So there will be havoc and we know if they throw 25% across the board, it's going to cause havoc for us. But he gave us no choice. He said, I'm going to put havoc on you. You're gonna break as a nation and become a state, well, we will suffer any loss rather than that.

So what's happening now is in the last Showdown, Kentucky Bourbon, their main market is Ontario. Every bottle of Kentucky Bourbon was to pull it off the shelves. Every bottle in my little town, 5,000 people, I'm not gonna say how much people drink, but it's working class. Took five hours of pulling all that Kentucky bourbon off the shelves, and they said, we've got all the crates. We're ready. To pack it up and send it back to Kentucky. So now the governor of Kentucky's speaking up.

So there the implications are, are very serious. And then the grassroots started, ordinary people started canceling trips and started sending messages. And that's where I began to start reaching out to people. And what I was amazed at is this is way across traditional party lines. I mean, when a woman reaches out to me and said she's canceled an eight person golf tournament in Arizona. I don't think she probably votes new Democrat.

Maybe she does, but for the love of her country, she's not going to Arizona. You know, all our snowbirds in Florida, 38% of Florida's money is Canadian. I've got people saying, I lost my deposit, I lost the flights, but I would rather eat that than give Donald Trump a dollar. So. The numbers we're hearing is a potential loss of 140,000 jobs in the US if just 10% of Canadians hold the boycott. And right now, from what we're seeing, it's much higher. People are really animated.

They're not buying anything on the, in the stores that are American. They're insisting that we hold the line. And this isn't just, if Donald Trump backs down, people think we've gotta go the whole way until this regime. Is ended because they represent a fundamental threat to our values as a nation. I'm so glad you said that. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, the sort of grassroots nature of this boycott?

You've just mentioned that it includes Canadians across the political spectrum, and in a way, I guess you can think, this is probably the wrong word, Trump must, for unifying Canadians at least on this issue, but did it just come about spontaneously? Is there, are there actions like days of actions planned or No have taken place? Um. The political left didn't see this coming.

I saw it because people started reaching out to me because I was posting messages about Canada and messages about our values, messages about, you know, our grandfathers and our uncles who lie and all the, the World War II battlefields all over Europe fighting Nazis. And I said, do you think that our uncles fought and died? So that we'd sell our country out and people started sending me pictures of their great uncle where their dad is buried.

Like it was very emotional and I was realizing, I was talking to people who come from veterans, families who come from rural Canada, and it's a really unique thing. And I just wanna say, Canadians, our main focus other than hockey is fighting with each other. We love to squabble French versus English, north versus south, east versus west, indigenous, indigenous versus settler.

We love to whine and blame the others and urban versus rural, but when you threaten our nation, suddenly everything changed. And so suddenly everybody was on the same page and. I was a bit naive at first. I remember being in a little coffee shop and I live in very, very working class, you know, mining town, and the women were sitting there, they were like, right on, Charlie, we're we got your back. And I said, Hey ladies, you know you're not supposed to buy.

And they said, don't talk to us about that. We've been doing that for weeks. I was like, yeah, you have been. I just realized, and you've already been doing that. So it's in a really unique, uh, moment of social action where it's not being run by a group of organizers, planners. It's super, super, super grassroots and that's what's going to make it indestructible. Can we start with today's economic blackout?

Can you explain who got this going and how you understand the actual goals of today in particular? Sure. The blackout, as you well explained in your intro, has been driven by a group called People's Union and has gained, I think, a significant number of supporters today. If you go on social media, you're going to see rock bands like Pearl Jam, and activists, actors, others, stepping up and saying, I'm not doing any business today or we're not selling things today, or whatever.

I think it's gotten at least a baseline of support. It comes in the context, Brian, of a broader boycott movement. I know we'll talk about all sorts of other things in a moment, but it's very important to understand that we've had some boycott actions going now for the better part of a month. Nina Turner, the activist, launched a boycott that said some gotten some note against Target when it dropped some of its DEI programs.

Reverend Al Sharpton has also been looking at boycotts and actual other actions related to dropping DEI. There's roots there that go back a bit. Just to let you know, obviously, we're talking today about this boycott, but there's an Amazon boycott, a Nestle's boycott, a Walmart boycott, another economic blackout, and a General Mills boycott, scheduled for the next month and a half.

A lot of people are kind of returning to this notion of a boycott as a tool to pressure corporations with the notion that doing so might actually influence some of the broader actions of the Democratic Party, the Republican Party. A final thing I'll note is there's an action called Tesla Takedown, which has been organized by a number of folks, and it's actually been quite notable. These are weekend protests at Tesla dealers and in other spaces related to Elon Musk.

If anything, that initiative seems to have gotten a particular amount of traction in many parts of the country. Can you explain how participants hope that boycotting private sector retailers of any kind might help fight what they see as Trump and Musk trashing the rule of law, being bullies on behalf of billionaires, establishing an authoritarian United States government, little things like that? How does that trickle up in theory or in practice?

Well, there is a sense that CEOs and billionaires and such talk to each other and that they take note of pressures that one might feel, and particularly if that one happens to be in the government, like Elon Musk. This is a way to speak to them in the language that they understand, which is money, that the accumulation of money or difficulty in accumulating money.

I think, again, that's why a group like the Tesla Takedown folks have really focused on, literally, I think in their messaging saying, "Sell your Tesla, sell your Tesla, sell your stock, get away from this," as a way of sending a signal. Now, when you talk in the broader economy, that's a complexity.

It is not necessarily an easy way to speak to power unless it gets very large, and you get to a point where-- I'm not sure today will be that day, but if it's an ongoing effort and you Keep building energy, building strength, till you get to a day where there really is a very notable across-the-board impact on the economy.

Look, I've covered politics for way too long, and I can tell you when the economy gets shaky, even in these recent days, when we've seen the stock market having a little bit of instability, that is when a lot of people in power, both in economics and in politics, take notice. Next up Section E Resources.

While I was reading Rebecca Solnit's blog, meditations in an emergency, she referred to a resistance list on Choose Democracy, us, and of course I had to check it out immediately and what I found was an up-to-date database filled with stories of people's non-cooperation against Trump's coup. And it included links to databases of non-cooperation as well as trackers of the litigation and impact of the litigation against Trump's current infractions.

It's a great place to hope, scroll, and to look for some resources and stories of people's non-cooperation that can ideally inspire your own if you're able. So of course, I'll include it in the show notes. But instead of reading from that thread, I decided to click around on the Choose Democracy US website.

Again, I've been there before, but I wanted to see how updated it was since the last time I had checked it out, and there were some incredibly valuable resources within the website, specifically on the page that says, what can I do to fight this coup? It says, quote, if you look, there are people resisting at every level. Blockades of freeways. American Bar Association, urging to end illegal orders.

Past Inspector Generals penning op-eds all while the current inspector General refuses to accept her illegal firing. And don't forget the Pope slamming VP Vance's Theology. We can't put everything that you could do in this document, but they've included some potential starting points on how to orient and help fight the coup, and it felt really relevant considering the last couple of documents I've shared about the subject. The first thing they suggest is to get with others to act.

They say when you're alone, it's too easy to freeze. While keyboard warriors and protest attenders are important, you'll feel the greatest strength if you gather with others semi-regularly. To plan together, to share together, and to act together. This might mean creating an affinity group and a true affinity group is a small group of people who come together to prepare for and take direct action. They make decisions together and support each other during and after the action.

Sometimes these groups are formed just for one action, but often they are ongoing groups that organize and take part in actions over a number of years. The affinity between people in the group is something that they have in common. In general, people in an affinity group will be focused on taking action on the same issues. They'll share aims and tactics.

Some affinity groups may also be structured around something else you have in common, such as living in the same area or sharing a particular skill. The key to affinity groups is that they're organized along the principles of non hierarchy and autonomy. This means that decisions are made directly within the group by all members, and responsibility and power is shared so that everyone can have an equal voice. I've included a link from Seeds for change.org.uk about affinity groups.

That includes not only definitions for and ways to take action, but also a guide for how to sustain the group and how to deal with common issues. But if curating an entire group around a shared goal just isn't accessible to you right now. Maybe you could just set up a food date with friends, plan a potluck, and consider having planned actions then like writing letters or postcards, or calling your local representatives with notes.

Or maybe you just organize weekly study groups or care calls to check in on your neighbors. The second suggestion from Choose Democracy US is to pressure a pillar of support to defect. Coups are only successful when society bows to the orders of the autocrat. These pillars of support are military, the media, and corporations. So pick a pillar you want to pressure, and every day do at least one small thing to get them to defect.

Whether that's sharing articles about companies trying to exploit the coup, or filing a formal complaint to the treasury about Musks. Theft of our information. I recently left a very nasty review on Google Maps about them changing the name of Gulf of Mexico, and that tiny glimmer of catharsis only took me like 30 seconds to do. I also want to re encourage you to join boycotts called by reputable groups so that we can make a boycott meaningful.

Boycotting target has been really successful where Walmart is the next target, and of course, they suggest to organize within your workplace. Plan, strikes and shutdowns. Set up picket lines outside of stores. Do actions dedicated to the CEOs, the executives, and the board members, and focus on growing these boycotts in size. If you're the chronically online type, maybe you can become a meme machine about Elon Musk in his takeover of government, or you can flood the DEI snitch line.

If you're a federal worker, don't quit. Stay inside and gum up the machine. So if you are a federal worker or you know someone who is, you can share a resource that I've included in the show notes that is specifically written for feds that is both current and thorough and incredibly insightful for anyone going through whistle blowing or losing their job or needing legal support. Or looking into other career opportunities or contacting the press.

So if you know someone who works in the federal government and aligns with a lot of your values or is confused on what to do, share this document with them. Also, if you know anyone in the military remind them of their constitutional obligation to refuse unconstitutional orders, I've also included. An incredible resource for members of security forces that can serve as a guide to supporting pro-democracy movements from within.

If you are interested in protesting specifically, you can go to build the resistance.org/actions, or the link in the show notes to the same website. To see if there are any protests or actions near you that you can get involved in, or if you want something you could do very quickly today. You can use five calls.org to call your elected officials and tell them that you, their constituent is demanding. They do something to stop Musk's coup.

Or if you're like me, a blue.in a red state, you can put up political signs in your yard or in your window. Indivisible. DOT org has done a great job at organizing some campaigns, and they've also offered us a guide for pressuring your elected officials. I've included links to that guide in the show notes as well. And if you've got extra money, donate to places like Democracy Forward and the A CLU or Mutual Aid or bail funds.

Or of course, you can pick a more long-term path like we discussed yesterday through protecting people. Or defending civic institutions or disrupting and disobeying or building alternatives. The key is not to focus on everything at once, but instead to focus on something you can do to build more confidence and momentum so that you can continue to do the next right thing. As Timothy Snyder, the author of On Tyranny, reminds us, make sure you are talking to people and doing something.

The logic of move fast and break things, like the logic of all coups is to gain quick, dramatic successes that deter and demoralize and create the impression of inevitability, but nothing is inevitable. Do not be alone and do not be dismayed. Find someone who is doing something you admire and join them. Jordan, you were talking about how Gramsci paid a big price for rejecting this dogmatic notion of, uh, how economic crises are supposed to.

You know, in a sense, almost a caricature of Marxist thinking that they lead to the, you know, sudden enlightenment of the masses who then pick up the red flag and march off into the glorious future. And that notion that a crisis is always going to be this incredibly propitious opportunity for. The radical left may not be the case, and certainly led to incredible sectarianism in Germany by the German Communist Party in the lead up to, um, Hitler's ascendancy. Given Thatchy had.

Had a different understanding of crises and what they could do. Can you tell us about how he saw them in relationship to the rise of reactionary forces, which of of course is something that we are seeing now and we'll talk about later in the program. Out of the global economic crisis in a pandemic, we have also seen reactionary forces arise. How did GCI understand crises as this? Highly complicated moment of both promise, but also great peril.

I think that one of the reasons that the late great gr she and scholar Joseph Buttigieg argued that, uh, gr she was a non-dogmatic, uh, democratic thinker for our times was precisely for his refusal to embrace the vacuous leftist sectarianism that you described, which had failed to, you know, develop an adequate theory and practice to confront fascism. It really distinguishes him, and it's particularly his approach to his method. Um, I'll say more about this.

Let, let me just say this, you know, the last time I was, uh, speaking with you on the show at least, was in June, 2020. And you asked me these really astute questions about how the cycle of rebellions that had been sparked by the murder of George Floyd, the COVID-19 pandemic, the crisis of global capitalism on a scale we hadn't seen since the thirties was taking shape.

And as I was preparing for this, I was thinking about it, you know, this is a, a turning point in the history of global capitalism and an intensification of global social conflict. That has to be thought about in relationship to this resurgence of the far right, though it has much deeper roots and so on and so forth.

It did jump scales I think in, in different ways in this moment and over the last few years I've been trying to draw on Chy and Stewart Hall and and WB Du Bois's and, and Ani Bje and Angela Davis and other people's writings.

To really understand these dynamics because as you say in the question, you know, Gramsci saw the rise of the fascist far right as kind of the central challenge of, you know, the post World War I or into war conjuncture and he theorizes, you know, the fascist far right or or fascism as a form of Caesars, which is kind of short for the Roman dictator, you know, Julius Caesar and.

He was using this as in a way, and he thought his audiences, at least in the Italian context, would've understood that reference. But he was, he was obviously also following the lead of, of, of Karl Marx who had written this important book on the 18th Bruer. And, you know, looking at Marx's writings on, you know.

The Partisanism and, uh, authoritarianism in the 19th century that had modeled for gramsci how to look at the balance of forces, the political, the economic in a concrete historicized way. So Marxist conjunction analysis. Monoism became a kind of model for what, for what Gramsci was doing to understand the rise of fascism.

And, you know, this was, again, you know, I had said in my answer to your previous, um, question that the Marxist Leninist parties had, you know, kinda reduced fascism to the dominance of the most reactionary forms of, of finance capital. Argued that fascist ideology was homogenous and kind of solidly formed, and therefore, for the most part, um, and not exclusively, I, I don't mean to caricature people, there were some complicated thinkers, but again, these are lines that people were following.

Um, and there were lines that Ingram, she's judgment, failed to consider how it was that fascism had been able to shore up a certain popular. Consent to a capitalist resolution of a structural crisis. Right. And I mean, you know, there was pandemic, there was capitalist crisis, there was war, there was civil war.

And we have to understand that it was in that context that, that this failure, that motivated grime, she to explore how the fascist far right had taken shape in response to what he described as a crisis of hegemony. A crisis of authority that followed World War I, by which he meant a kind of, um, legitimacy crisis, uh, for capital in the state where the, you know, the masses no longer, you know, believe what they used to.

And he was also concerned with how Mussolini and the fascist right, have been able to absorb elements of the last focus on workers into the program of the right. We should go back and think about that, right? I mean, Mussolini had come outta the socialist movement. He's appropriating this discourse.

You know, this I think made Gramsci observe that, you know, the social basis though, for the fascist far right was the petty bourgeoisie who had formed the core membership of the National Fascist Party. And so I think this is really important to understand that this kind of crisis of liberalism.

Had led many Italians to give up on democracy and to live kind of vicariously through authoritarian demagogues like Mussolini, who are these strong men like Caesar, uh, who, you know, promoted a kind of contempt for workers and democracy as as common sense. And this is what was leading, you know, gramsci to, you know, focus on precisely what the right was up to ideologically, politically, and economically, and offer a kind of non reductionist, non-dogmatic method for doing so.

A while back I stumbled upon a Google Doc titled, looking for What to Do, some Actions to Stop Authoritarianism. In it, it says, maybe you're wondering, what should I do In these times, what we have put down here are some meaningful places to start. Doable, local, impactful, and important. It's not intended to be inclusive of all options. It's not a place for the up to the minute protests. We're trying to offer places.

We see people making impacts and avenues that as experienced organizers thinking about these times, we see as worth doing. Where possible we'll offer names of groups who are organizing such things and can help you plug into their strategy no matter where you come from. Here are some ideas. If you wanna help stand for a world with tolerance and love, racial justice and acceptance of all people. They've also included a link to choose democracy us.

What can I do where you can sign up for up-to-date newsletters as well as another outline of things you can do to get involved. I'll be linking both in the show notes if you're interested. But back at the Google Doc, the first suggestion is to find a path that speaks to you, and then it offers us Daniel Hunter's categorization from 10 ways to be prepared and grounded now that Trump has won. Which I did refer to in a past episode, but it's valuable and helpful, and so I wanted to reread it.

And in the various ways to take action as outlined by Daniel Hunter, there are four paths in which you can take. You can protect people, you can defend civic institutions, you can disrupt and disobey, or you can build alternatives. Protecting people, of course, focuses on harm reduction. And will include the people surviving and protecting our own, especially focusing on the protection of those directly targeted such as trans folks, folks in need of abortions and immigrants.

The next is to defend civic institutions by safeguarding democratic institutions like the elections or the Environmental Protection Agency. We can create pushback for an administration that wants these systems to crumble so they can exert greater control over our lives. The next potential path is to disrupt and disobey, which includes strategizing acts to support disobedience and protest policy.

Does go beyond protesting for better policies and instead goes into the territory of people intervening to stop bad policies or just generally putting up resistance to the fascist regime. And the final potential path is to build alternatives, whether this be parallel institutions. Or alternative party platforms or just creating a new culture around the democracy, because we cannot and should not just be stuck reacting to and stopping the bad.

We have to have a vision for the good and the future that we could have. This is the slow growth work of building alternative ways that are more democratic, accessible and equitable. Once you've chosen a path for you. It doesn't have to be your forever path, but a path for right now. Then you can pick your degree of difficulty based on how much challenge you're up for, given your skills, your time, and your current life circumstances.

I. Easy actions, according to this document, can typically be done alone and with less time while we've categorized harder actions as those that require more time, more people skills, and often a small group to launch with. So once you've chosen your path and your degree of difficulty, then you can connect with a group if applicable. This document whenever possible, has tried to identify groups that can plug you in.

But because this is a big, broad list, it's often national groups, but they encourage you to connect with local groups whenever possible. And the final step is to just do it. You can plan all you want, but that planning will mean nothing if you never take action. Now this document is broken up into specific examples within each pathway. The first being protecting people. So we'll start there. Quote, autocrats, don't want us standing up for each other.

And an easy way to disobey is by sending signals into your community that you care that you publicly stand with targeted communities. And so here are some examples, starting with the easier things to do. You can partner with a local pride group and ask local businesses to put up signs, acknowledging that all folks are welcome in their stores.

The Welcoming Project, which I've linked in the show notes, provides free signs and FAQ resources to encourage businesses, healthcare service providers, organizations, and congregations to display welcoming signs. And then you can ask locations that you go to to put up a sign if they don't already have one shop, and then ask, attend a workshop somewhere and ask them. If you take your kids to practices or classes, you can ask there.

The medium suggestion for protecting people is to partner with a hospital or clinic to start an abortion support fund. Specifically for folks seeking out-of-state medical care. I. You can find a local abortion support fund to support or create on the national map hosted by the National Network of Abortion Funds, which I've also linked in the show notes. The next suggestion is to build a bipartisan coalition to research, expose, and educate the community about white nationalist threats.

They did this recently in Idaho when Leaders United called out the extremist culture of permission. I've included a news article with that example in the show notes if you're interested. The next suggestion is to get your school board or city council, or hospital commission, or any government agency to affirm that they are a welcoming community to all people. There is a network called the Welcoming Network with over 300 communities that welcome immigrants publicly.

Ideally, you can get your community to join them. The next is to get your religious group, school, or little league to make a resolution in support of targeted folks. For example, why vaccinations are good practice or why everyone deserves to play sports, regardless of what gender was assigned at birth.

Or talk to your faith leaders and see if your faith institutions can stretch the limits and see if police departments or local officials are willing to inform them in advance what communities and what community members might be in danger of being snatched for deportation so they can move to protect them. The harder to do section includes things like training volunteers in your city and state based on safety skills that could be used as white nationalist violence ramps up.

I'll include some links in the show notes with some training support on action safety if you're interested. I. You can run support or get involved by connecting with Run for Something, which is also linked in the show notes. And the final suggestion is to campaign against book bans in your state or town, even before they're proposed. Join Penn America's book bans campaign, which is, you guessed it, linked in the show notes.

The next pathway where they've offered us suggestions is to defend civic institutions. Autocrats love weak institutions because they can twist them to their personal goals. Institutional ethics and values and bureaucracy can all be used to resist these efforts. We may often think of federal institutions like the military, but a lot of these institutions are really local.

Health commissioners, local scientists, schools, election officials, we can seek to defend local civic institutions, particularly when they are doing their job and refusing to engage in immoral or unsavory acts. The easier to do things for civil servants specifically is to download and read, serve the People, a Civil Servants Guide to 2024 and beyond . In it, you can ideally learn some strategies for what to do in the future. And finally, section F Power Structures.

I wanna, um, just commend to people because there's such a huge number of lawsuits, as you said, more coming every day. I, I wanna just tell people to keep, uh, an open tab. You can use just securities litigation tracker. Democracy 2025 has a good one. Court watch news has a good one. But I wonder, judge, if you would just take a minute and pan back and just help us make sense of the sort of various columns of lawsuits that are happening right now.

We've mentioned, uh, the impoundment, we've mentioned birthright, citizenship. Can you give us like the very, very, very 40,000 feet view of the big buckets of actions that are being challenged? Well, there are issues with respect to immigration. A bunch of executive orders like the order on birthright citizenship. There are orders purporting to end sanctuary city policies. Very vague. Who knows what they're talking about? And that has its own constitutional issues.

There are a bunch of issues about getting access to immigrants and detention. So there's a bucket that is immigration related, which is what we anticipated. There's no question about it. And then there's a bucket that has to do with executive action, which is first is lawsuits challenging the reinstatement of Schedule F for career employees. Schedule F was something that Trump tried before that would reclassify.

People protected by civil service to political appointees to make it easier, no doubt for him to fire and replace them. What's of course interesting is that with respect to the FBI officials, they're not waiting for Schedule F, the FBI officials. That they are going after our career. Employees who are protected by civil service from being wrongfully discharged or discharged on a political basis. And then there are the various lawsuits that came out of Doge.

Uh, I sort of wanna have a Star Trek screen when I say this, you know, um, which has to do with Elon Musk and his band of renowned trying to get access to various OMB, the Office of Management and Budget. We've heard that he's trying to get access to Noah, the National Oceanic and uh, uh, administration. There's a lawsuit having to do with the disclosure of people's personnel records to Doge. So access to information is the second big bucket. So there's immigration.

Access to information by Elon Musk. And then there's a removal of the firing of individuals, one of which is the likely firing of the FBI officials. There are challenges to the pause quote called temporary pause of grants and, and loans. Those are the buckets. I don't, for the life of me know what hasn't been challenged, but once it's announced, there is a mobilization of lawyers to go into court, because this is more than your question, but I'm happy to go there.

There are three explanations for what they're doing. One explanation is, is that they don't even realize that it's illegal. That's hard to believe. That's hard to believe. The other is that they know it's illegal and they're likely to lose in court on the illegal actions, but they basically wanna scare the hell out of government employees. So they leave. And the third bucket is that they know it's illegal and this is the scary one, and they don't care and they don't.

Care and that they will therefore barrel on through knowing that it's illegal. That third alternative should chill all of us. This is a government intentionally acting lawlessly, and as I said, it's possible they don't know. That doesn't make any sense. It's possible that they'll go, whoops. Frankly, as they did with the impoundment issue, right? They tried to impound funds. A court said, you can't do that, or with birthright citizenship, you can't do that. They go, whoops.

But they have scared the hell out of people in the interim or the third bucket is that they are intentionally violating the law and court orders will not matter. Then we have full fledged coup. Your response to Edelman and the larger picture, uh, of the question of what fights to pick in the Trump era kind of struck a chord with me, as maybe you can tell, uh, for a number of reasons. But first, focusing on just the Gulf of Mexico, the, the so-called fight.

Why is that a fight worth picking as you see it? I mean, I actually come at this from a little bit different perspective. Mm-hmm. Which is, which is right now, I think the, the nature of, um, the situation that we're in and the, the breadth and depth of the ways that we're in trouble. Mm-hmm. And things are stacked against us. And an an autocratic movement has control of our entire government.

Much of the news media, um, much of the ways that people get information, uh, online things are really stacked against us. We are not in a situation in which there are obvious, clear, easily discernible, winnable fights that we can choose. Mm-hmm. And so this idea that, you know, people should, should only choose, you know, fights that they can win, I, I actually think people should choose the fights that that feel.

I. Right to them in the moment and that they can get, uh, something out of, and we should, we should all be doing, uh, a little less trying to police what fights other people are choosing. Mm-hmm. Uh, to engage in and more just finding a place we can stand up. Um, and, and, and. And pick a fight where we can, and we will probably lose it because we will probably lose most of them. Mm-hmm. But sometimes in the loss, there's some value. And in this one, there's some value.

There's some value in saying, look, we can't stop Donald Trump from ordering his government to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Mm-hmm. But we can say we are not going along with that. It is racist and dumb and he can't make us say it.

And there's, there's value in, in saying that to ourselves in, in not giving into his control of the English language or his attempt to, and there's value in, in showing our fellow, uh, you know, our fellow Americans that we're not going along with that. And that there's, there, there can be a, a, some solidarity in that, that I think is really valuable. Again, kind of particularly for the people who are the targets of. What again, is this very racist move.

He's not trying to rename, um, you know, the Gulf of Mexico by accident. It's, it's specifically because it's the Gulf of Mexico that he's chosen it. I, and I agree with that in general actually. I agree with that in whole, but there is. Uh, and I wanna talk more about that in a second. But there is really some very specific First Amendment implications here.

You know, this comes on a day that, um, Trump loyalist and MAGA merchandiser, cash Patel has been confirmed as the new director of the FBI after recently declaring he would go after media outlets that he didn't like. So here you have. The Associated Press saying, look, uh, we know it's a simple thing. You're locking us out of the, uh, oval Office because you don't like what we said. But that's actually a First Amendment, uh, issue that kind of seems like it needs to be stood up for here.

And I don't know, I was kinda surprised that the, uh, senior editor of the Atlantic didn't even seem to address that. Yeah, he, he seemed pretty confused overall about what his position even was. I mean, as you noted, he concluded his piece by acknowledging that Donald Trump doesn't control the English language and people can decide for themselves what to call the Gulf of Mexico. I. That's all the Associated Press did. Right?

Um, and, and so Donald Trump and his administration trying to respond to that by punishing the Associated Press for doing nothing more than calling the Gulf of Mexico, what it has always been called Um, is, is pretty outrageous. You know, Trump's Trump's renaming of the Gulf of Mexico only applies to how the government refers to it. Mm-hmm. He has no legal authority to mandate how the rest of us talk about it, including the Associated Press.

So there clearly is a, a First Amendment issue there and a Freedom speech issue. And yes, I take your point that it is bizarre for a member of the news media, um, writing in the Atlantic to, to, to say that that's, that's something that's not worth. Standing up for, and lemme go a little bit further.

Uh, there, the White House Correspondence Association, as far as I know, uh, you know, some of us have called for them to, again, not the great largest issue in the world, but I think it, you know, if you let this one go, there's a lot more coming. So, uh, you know, I've called for the White House Correspondence Association to back up AP in this fight. Some have called for, uh.

For them to, you know, have their affiliates boycott White House press avails, uh, in, in, in response until AP is allowed back in, into the room. If they have done that, I haven't heard about it. Should they? And, and if they have, if they have not, why wouldn't they? My understanding and, and all I know is from what I've, what I've read in some of the reporting mm-hmm.

But is that they're, they're trying to work behind the scenes to push back on this thinking that if they pick, uh, the correspondence association, that is, if they pick a very public fight over this, uh, d Trump administration won't only harden its position, but if they can perhaps behind the scenes negotiate some sort of. Satisfying resolution that might be the best outcome. I, I'm willing to defer to their judgment on that. They know better than I do what conversations they're having.

Um, but to go back to a point you made a minute ago, um. You know, about what, what happens if we back down on this? I think that actually is a really good argument for standing firm on things like this. Mm-hmm. Like this is a relatively, um, low stakes fight in, in, in re, you know, relative to some of the other things this administration is going to do. Mm-hmm. Like illegally deporting people, um, illegally harassing people via the IRS. Right.

Uh, what happens if the Trump administration sees that people won't take even a low effort? Low consequence stand against their dumbest and most unnecessary actions. That's just an invitation to roll over a on everything else. This is literally just a matter of people using the phrase Gulf of Mexico I tell folks all the time, you know, the press we're not the enemy of the people, we're defenders of the people and we're, we're here to hold their feet to the fire.

And one of the reasons why Donald Trump behaves that way, he's still behaving that way, is because, uh, one, he can't handle the hard questions. And two, there's just a part of him that thinks. We, the people don't have the right to ask these kinds of questions, and he's, and he's just wrong on both counts. Um, and Ally, you've been doing this for a long time. Um, you, you know what, what we have to do, we have a job to do and, and we're gonna continue to do it.

And for the folks over at the White House right now, uh, doing what we do for a living, my advice to them is to stand firm. Stand your ground. Yeah. You were writing about this exclusion of certain people from the pool and, and most regular Americans are not.

Not really clear on what the pool does, why it's important, but it's this, you know, when you gotta go into a small space like an airplane, or you're traveling with the president or the Oval Office where all the reporters can't come in, um, we rely on these people. They're from different news, uh, organizations. You may not watch them on a regular basis.

M-S-N-B-C viewers get information from, uh, a Fox reporter who's in the pool because there's an agreement amongst you reporters that you will report the information accurately if you're part of that pool. When you remove people from that, you're taking control of something the state shouldn't have control over. Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, look at what happened to me after that exchange you just played back in 2018.

The White House at that time took my press pass away and we had to take Donald Trump to court to get it back. And it was a Trump appointed judge, uh, who gave it back to me. And you know, I think that you might see the same sort of thing this time around. I mean, first of all, we have to say. You know, we're not the most popular people in the world, as you said. Pain in the ass. I've been called lots of things. Ally, I'm sure you have as well. Um, it goes with the territory.

If you wanna be liked, go be a veterinarian, as I like to tell folks. Uh, but, you know, listen, I, the press pool is a very important institution. I. Um, over at the White House, you have the networks, uh, the television networks, trading places every day as to who's gonna be in the Oval Office, who's gonna be on Air Force, one with the president. You have print outlets like the New York Times and The Washington Post.

And then you have important institutions like the Associated Press, who have been kicked out of the Oval Office, kicked off of Air Force One because they won't do something as silly as referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Something that Donald Trump just made up off the top of his head. I mean, I, you know, to me, we just shouldn't be in a situation where.

We're kicked out of the press pool because we won't, uh, succumb to the warped imagination of the, uh, want tobe autocrat in the Oval Office. And I, I was glad to see the Associated Press take him to court. And my guess is in time when this, uh, makes its way through the process, a judge, and perhaps it'll be a, a Trump appointed judge, we'll say that the White House can't get away with this. Uh, the, a lot of people get their news from sources that they don't know they're getting it from.

So you just mentioned the wire services, Bloomberg, Reuters Associated Press. Putting aside the fact that many of us as journalists use the Associated Press style guides for how we determine how we say things or what we put on the screen. Um, but, but, but that stuff makes it into your local coverage without you actually knowing what the source of that reporting was. That's the danger here.

It's not, it's not Donald Trump calling you and Peter Alexander rude and things like that, because at least that's out there in the open. It's this. Insidious removal of, of press passes of, of, uh, access to, to the presidency. Uh, that's, I think the, the more dangerous part. At least your stuff plays out in real life. When people get to opine about whether they think Jim Acosta should get his press pass or not, you're gonna just see coverage disappear. Yeah. No, there's no question about it.

And, and listen, Ali, you and I both know all too, all too well, the ap, um, is a critical, uh, part of the free flow of information in American society. They have reporters in, I think all 50 states. Uh, they have reporters in some hundred countries around the world. I think billions of people see their, uh, product and, and they're a cooperative. It's not like they're out there. Making tons of money. They're, they're here for the journalism.

And keep in mind what took place the other day we're at the White House Ally. Um, according to Andrew Feinberg of the Independent, uh, the White House almost let a representative from the ta, Russian State Media News Agency, um, into the pool spray and not the Associated Press or Reuters. And that was also confirmed by a Reuters reporter. Over there at the White House.

And so what are we doing here in this country where you have the White House, you have press officials whose salaries are paid for with our tax dollars. They're letting in tasks, they're letting in the Russian media agency, uh, but not, uh. The Associated Press. I mean, this is just lunacy and it just goes back to, uh, you know, Donald Trump just having incredibly thin skin when it comes to taking the hard questions. He's just never been very good at it.

Ally, and I think you and I are both, are long time observers of this. I, I think he wants the press to sort of function in the way that the Tablos did in New York when he was a real estate magnet in, uh, in Manhattan. And that's just not how it works in Washington. We're here to dig. We're here to get information. We're here to ask the hard questions. And, and, and honestly, it's why the First Amendment is there. And, and he can't just throw that out the window willy-nilly.

Um, and, and have just, you know, fawning, propagandists and sycophants in the Oval Office with him. I mean, imagine if you just had a bunch of people in the Oval Office with him asking questions like the guy the other day who was saying suit to President. Zel, why didn't you wear a suit? Yeah, imagine. Yeah. Imagine if you just had a, a handful of people doing that sort of thing. What would be the reaction from the American people?

Yeah. They would think this is like the Muppet show or something. They, they would just find it to be sheer lunacy or it just wouldn't make any sense, or they get used to it over time. That's the danger, right? Because, because there are governments who do this, and then you get used to the idea that, uh, it, that the, these press conferences not press conferences. They're a parade of the.

You know, the ac achievements and accomplishments of the dear leader, Jim, let's talk about Friday and what happened in the White House with Zelinsky. Ironically, you're one of those people who've been the subject of a very public thing in which Donald Trump decides that he's just gonna go after someone in the way that he does. Uh, however, uh, like you zelinsky, uh. Didn't seem to flinch much.

Uh, the guy's been at war for three years, so I don't know that Donald Trump yelling at him is, or JD Vance yelling at him is the biggest deal. But experts tell me this may be an irreparable breach, that what is, what happened on Friday is a, is a rupture in a world order that we've been familiar with for 80 years. Yeah, I mean, I, I did a, uh, podcast on this, on Substack on Friday, wrote a piece about it over the weekend. I mean, ally, you know, I think.

Watching what unfolded on Friday, um, wa was, was a difficult moment, I think, for a lot of Americans. And because it's just not who we are. Uh, we're, we're not the kind of country that turns its back on, on friends, uh, turns. Its back on countries fighting for democratic, uh, freedoms and that's exactly what. Took place in the Oval Office on Friday to see Donald Trump and JD Vance berating velo, Zelinsky and accusing him of not thanking the United States, which hello, fact check.

Um, he's thanked the United States dozens of times all the time. He's done all the time publicly, over and over again. And so, I mean, but it, but it, it was almost like, and we're seeing this a lot. Uh, during these early weeks of the second Trump administration, almost everything the president says, or the vice president says, or top administration officials say, sounds like talking points over on Fox.

It just comes out of the conservative conspiracy theory, latent ecosphere, I. That just leads them down the path of sort of Alice Wonderland stuff and, you know, and it just felt like, you know, Velo Mer Zelinsky was, was pulled into that. He went down the rabbit hole with Trump and, and JD Vance. And this is somebody who has been courageously leading his country, um, after was invaded by the Russians. Yes. It was invaded by the Russians three years ago.

And it, it, you know, I, I, that's what pained me almost the most in hearing that reporter asking Zelensky. You know why he wasn't wearing a suit? Like, hello, have you, have you seen Elon Musk wearing his dark MAGA hat in the Oval Office? Did anybody have any questions about that? You know, this is serious stuff and you need serious people in the room asking real questions.

Republicans plan to give the Riched Americans a fresh round of individual tax breaks slash the corporate tax rate yet again and cut tax on capital gains and dividends, which would let their Wall Street friends keep even more of their winnings when they sell a stock or are shower with dividends. I don't understand how empty you have to be as a person. For this to drive you.

Imagine already having all the money in the world, all the money you could, you wouldn't be able to even spend it in a lifetime, in a, in, in a hundred million lifetimes. But you want to continue doing it again. You need more and more and more and more. While on the other side of that budget cuts for programs that Americans who are nowhere near your sort of wealth and power and privilege. You want to cut programs that they need to survive.

So of course, including things like Medicaid and snap, which helps more than 42 million families afford the groceries. This gets to, uh, Bernie Sanders, why he's here, and what he wants voters specifically in these areas to do. So what we got right now is Republican leadership as we speak, are working on this bill. Massive tax breaks for the rich. Paid for by cuts to Medicaid education, housing, and the programs that working people need.

Now, it turns out that in the House of Representatives, there is right now a reality where Republicans have a very, very slim majority. Republicans have, as I recall, 218 members. Democrats have 215, have a three vote majority. That is not much. If two Republicans go to the Speaker of the house and say, Mr. Speaker, no way am I gonna betray my constituents. No way am I gonna make massive cuts in Medicaid and other programs to give tax breaks to billionaires, if two Republicans do it, that.

Terrible Bill is defeated and what I am asking you to do is make sure that your congressman, Mr. Bacon, is one of those two Republicans. This is the point of the specific. Events is to target these voters in these Republican districts to put pressure on their representatives. So one of them mentioned there was, uh, bacon, representative Bacon, the other is, uh, representative Miller Meeks. And the intention is to ensure this bill doesn't go through.

Now, they're gonna have to contend with the fact that, uh, Charles Koch has launched a $20 million campaign backing Trump's tax, Bri tax breaks. So they're going to try and argue that this is actually good for people that. It's great to give even more money to massive corporations and billionaires and cut programs that people, that regular people are using. It's a great idea. So, uh, and this is how they fool people for, for decades at this point.

I mean, the amount of money and time through avenues like Fox News Am Radio, since, you know, the, the 1980s, this is what has slowly turned people. Turned, uh, conservatives into these complete lunatics who have a hard time even understanding what reality is because they have been so conditioned to believe this trash, that at some point, at some point these billionaires are gonna help us.

And oh yeah, it's the Democrats that are the elites, only them not, you know, the billionaire cabinet that Trump has. It is just, uh, insane, but. These are the two links that Trump goes on to, um, mention in his speeches. So the one for Omaha, it's bernie sanders.com/nebraska and he encourages you to call your representative, but something worth mentioning here as well. Uh, I will attend an organized training. I will host a meeting house party.

There's an attempt here to not just put pressure on representatives, but also try and build some sort of organizing apparatus, at least specifically in these, these areas. And I'm sure he is gonna have, you know, more speeches in, in other districts. And there seems to be an attempt here to try and really organize people in these areas and how he's going to, you know, maybe utilize that in the future in some way. It remains to be seen, but this is the start.

Knowing who your neighbors are, organizing with them, understand that there is a, a, a collective, uh, goal here. And this is how eventually, uh, the people win. It takes time, it takes organizing, it takes, uh, people power, but it can't eventually happen. And here's the other link, the one for, uh, Iowa. This one, Bernie sanders.com/iowa. So same thing here, but just different representatives. Very, uh, interesting start here. So I assume he's gonna continue this.

Bernie Sanders is one of the few people in Congress who's able to, I say few people. I think the only person really that is able to get these sorts of crowds for an event that isn't a campaign or a primary event. Like it is wild to see these crowds. So it's good to see him utilizing his power in a way that organizes people and isn't just about, a vote. That's going to be it for today.

Thanks to Podcasthon.org for their efforts inspiring collective action for good causes this week, and thanks to Indivisible.org for their efforts to help save our democracy. Don't forget to get involved any way you can. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or our upcoming topics, which include the assault on LGBTQ rights, and a deep dive into the shifting internal politics of the Democratic Party.

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The additional sections of the show included clips from Unf*ing The Republic, What Comes Next?, Democracy Works, Your Undivided Attention, Hope and Hard Pills, Factually with Adam Conover, Outrage and Optimism, The Climate Podcast, Edge of Sports, Tech Won't Save Us, Jacobin Radio, The Brian Lehrer Show, Make Your Damn Bed, Against the Grain, Amicus, The BradCast, Velshi, and The Rational National. Further details are in the show notes. Thanks to everyone for listening.

Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show, and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist trio, Ken, Brian and Ben for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships.

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