Yesterday, we spoke with one of the most brilliant minds in politics in America, and one of the most brilliant in the world: Anat Shenker-Osorio. She’s a messaging guru, who I met when I was reporting my book, The Persuaders — there’s a whole chapter about her in it — and ever since at The Ink we have often turned to her whenever we need the best advice.
But she’s so much more than a messaging guru. She’s a comedian. She is a person who, in spite of her messaging prowess, will always say something that really pokes and inflames people, but she does it intentionally, to provoke them into seeing what they might not otherwise have recognized. And in a moment when so many people do not know what to say, or how to say it — or seem to have lost the use of their vocal cords and spines — she is someone we can ask to tell people what they should be saying, because she knows just how to frame the most important questions of this time, and has answers for so many of them.
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For those who’ve been looking for leadership from above, she made it very clear that nicely asking Democrats to do something has never brought about real change. So stop doing that. Stop trying to get Chuck Schumer to do something.
This conversation is an incredibly practical guide to what you need to — and can — do. Anyone and everyone can lead: we make the future, and it’s time to do it by stepping up. If you want to, you are a leader!
Congrats! Sorry. But congrats!
You can start by creating social proof locally — which is to say, create a perception in your community that lots of people feel the way you feel. You might start with signs, hats, talking to people, or, as she put it, the painting of a barn. Just pick something, and get started. And soon enough you’ll be leading.
If you’re not sure where to jump in, Anat’s team keeps track of actions across the country, so visit her ever-evolving list of Ways to Resist. And read her Freedom over Fascism toolkit for tons of ideas and insight into how to communicate all of the ideas you’ll find below.
We know some of you prefer reading to watching, so we’re publishing text excerpts of the conversation below. If you missed our live conversation, we encourage you to watch the entire video above.
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I wanted to start maybe on a positive-ish note by asking you who is telling the right story right now? Who do you see in the pro-democracy movement? And I know that your answer to this may not take a lot of time because it may not be a very long list of people, but who is telling the right story?
Well, let’s start with a story that you helped bring to light, in your Live with Senator Chris Murphy. I thought he was absolutely spot-on in many ways. I don’t know whether we’ll come back to this, but I thought his response in particular when you held his feet somewhat to the fire about why other Democratic leaders are not stepping up. That was probably him at his most diplomatic. But I thought his description of reality was really spot on.
Unsurprisingly, he’s an MVP, is always there, always prescient, always saying the thing, speaking truth, not just to power, but ensuring we’re speaking truth to each other.
AOC, Jasmine Crockett, obviously. Governor Pritzker’s responses yesterday were extraordinary. Exactly what’s needed. And then outside of the elected official space, there’s a lot going on. There are burgeoning protest movements, both from known organizations like Indivisible and Move On and Working Families Party, but also from brand newbies that just self-assembled on Substack, like the 50501 movement, and the burgeoning general strike movement.
And because there’s no up without a down, as they say, who is getting it most dramatically and maybe for you infuriatingly wrong?
Do you want to open this Pandora’s box? You know, the list is very, very, very long.
One might say infinite.
Most infuriatingly, it’s the siren song of the authoritarian that they are fomenting a counterrevolution against a revolution that never occurred. This has always been their story, time and place immemorial, that you’re being attacked, you’re being put upon by some usurping minority, whether that be immigrants, whether that be Roma people in Hungary, whether that be people seeking asylum in Australia, whether that be Southern Europeans in the case of Brexit, whether that be trans people. It’s always some other who is coming to get you and they have amassed too much power.
And so I think what is most infuriating beyond just the absolute unwillingness to locate a single vertebra let alone a spine is the layering on of the misdiagnosis of why we are here when we blame when we make believe that the people with too much power in our society are undocumented immigrants and trans people. If it weren’t so pathetic and sad it would be funny. So I think that that is what is particularly infuriating.
Talk to me about specific moments in the last month where you’ve seen someone give a press conference, you’ve seen someone give a floor speech — give me the hall of shame because I consider you one of the only people, frankly, who I could ask to do that and you’ll just do it.
I mean, who am I most disappointed by? I think I’m extraordinarily disappointed by many of our senators. I’m thinking in particular, really sadly, because of all the extraordinary work that I know movement groups like Lucha in Arizona went to, putting him into power. But Ruben Gallego, not only refusing to stand up to this administration but also actively sponsoring the Laken Riley bill, which let’s not kid ourselves, is about eliminating due process rights. It is about creating an unjust — even more unjust — legal system in the name of genuflecting at the altar of immigrants are the problem.
I think that Amy Klobuchar has said things that are really infuriating and incensing. I think obviously Chuck Schumer’s stance of, “We’ll just rap about the price of eggs.” Hakeem Jeffries, in a very similar vein, and just a lot of, “Well, we can’t do anything. We don’t have any power.” Excuse making.
It’s so interesting when you see a lot of the folks on TV and when you’re under a Biden presidency or an Obama presidency maybe you don’t notice the mediocrity as much because it doesn’t like risk the republic — and now to see some of those same people, they’re not evil or awful the way that we’re talking about on the right, but they are so profoundly mediocre and not up to the task of responding to a once-in-a-century emergency.
You know, I referenced earlier before the conversation that you had with Senator Murphy and I was reflecting, because obviously I spend a lot of time listening to people because if you want to be decent at messaging, you have to spend a lot of time listening to people.
And by listening to people, I mean in focus groups where we are asking them deep questions, we are extracting metaphors, we are uncovering their underlying assumptions and beliefs about what is going on. What is the origin story behind it? What are their desired solutions?
And so I think a lot about what people’s underlying motivations are, and the psychology of how they came to be where they are and doing what they’re doing. And I think when I think about these folks who have risen to the halls of power, it kind of makes sense because to be honest, that they’re behaving in these milquetoast ways.
Is that what it takes to get there?
Well, partly it’s what it takes to get there, but also it is an accurate fact that that has worked for them. The things that they have done in their life have brought them to The New York Times newsroom, because — let’s just widen the net of culpability a little bit here — has brought them to the pinnacle of journalism, has brought them to the pinnacle of politics, has brought them to the pinnacle of whatever it is I assume they desired to do once they became old enough to have a thing that they really wanted to do.
And so… If taking certain steps and engaging in certain ways and refusing to upset people has been successful or at least successful within a trajectory that you define for yourself, then it actually kind of makes a lot of sense that random lady with big hair being like, “What the actual fuck are you doing? There’s a hostile takeover of our government happening on your watch, friend.”
It feels like, well, this has worked for me and it has achieved the things that I desire to achieve. So why would I change course?
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So here’s something I’m struggling with. I think part of what explains the election loss going back to November is this problem you and I have talked about before of a tendency to kind of misappraise what is really, really salient with people. And you are someone who studies this and measures it. There are things you and I are worried about. There are things you’ve been screaming about that it turns out, way more people should be worried about it than are.
If you were right about the election, if I was right about the election, a lot more people should have been concerned about things that, maybe did not reach the top rank.
And so even now, now that we’re in this presidency, I struggle with my own sense of how grave this is, how serious this is.
This is a coup. This is that. And then sometimes I just, I live in New York City. Like I’ve walked down the street. I see people living their lives. These are people, 90 percent of them vote for Democrats, but you can just tell, if you sit in a restaurant, you hear conversations or you watch a normal TV show, the Jennifer Hudson talk show, you see normal life. And normal people living their lives are not living as though, as Senator Murphy says, this is the most serious crisis since the civil war and we may be a few months from irreversibly losing democracy.
So my maybe difficult question for you is, is this thing that you and I share, this concern that everybody watching this shares. Is this concern out of touch in some way, maybe accurate, but is it out of sync with how regular people read things? Are we too ahead of the curve? Is it not landing with people?
Talk to me about that disconnect.
Yeah, it is not landing with people.
So I want to say two things about that. The first is that in the lead-up to the election, I coined this phrase, the credulity chasm. And what the credulity chasm means is that when we look at the fundamental attitude that was most predictive of voting for Harris versus doing something else, and by something else I mean voting for Trump, staying at home, voting third party, etc.
It wasn’t, “Wow, that Project 2025 agenda, that sounds real sweet. That’s like a Baskin Robbins tasty level of flavors. I’m excited.” It was whether or not people believed the agenda would come true. So this notion that the country has shifted rightwards is actually not supported by data.
What has actually happened — and what happened through the election — was what the people who got it were saying: “No, it’s for realsies. This is not hyperbolic. This threat is real. And all of this will come to pass and come to fruition.”
And in fact, there’s a Project 2025 tracker that shows that already within this first month of being in a hostile takeover, they have made good on one-third of the Project 2025 agenda. Just a little side note.
So that credulity chasm, which I would argue we are still in — it is a basic facet of human psychology, and we see this among respondents in many, many parts of the world.
This is not a uniquely U.S. phenomenon, but there’s a U.S. layer on top of it that John Jost, the psychologist at NYU, calls system justification theory. Basically, there’s kind of a fundamental human need to feel like I can predict what’s going to happen. Tomorrow is going to be somewhat like today. Things are more or less okay. Things happen for a reason. Good things happen to good people. Bad things happen to bad people. There’s a fundamental explanation for the universe because to question that and to really truly be living within that — the badness or the recognition of the badness, I should say — it requires a level of upset and a level of agitation and a level of awareness that is understandably very difficult for most people, because for most people, the basic facets of life, like being able to see a doctor, being able to help out your parents when their water heater breaks and being able to send your kid to university, et cetera, is pretty challenging.
And so to ask people to layer on another thing is a lot. And I think that what we are experiencing over and over again, and it’s been happening for a while. It’s the frogs in boiling water problem, where we truly think this is a hot tub. And a little toasty, get a little cozy. But, you know, it’s winter and a hot tub is nice and winter in most parts of the country. And I’m joking, but not by much.
Anticipating this is actually why it is absolutely so fundamental that we be crystal clear and that our leaders be crystal clear that what’s happening is in fact what’s happening because not every problem that is named can be faced, but zero problems that we refuse to name and refuse to recognize can actually be faced. And this is where I think the strategy of hat in hand, please, sir, may I have a tuppence begging Democrats to locate a spine is wrong. And we need to stop pushing in that direction.
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Okay, but I guess what I’m wondering is, and I wonder this very personally, because I’m afraid that I’m doing it wrong.
When I see Elon Musk shadow presidenting his way through these agencies. It basically gets rid of Congress. I mean, it’s as grave a series of things as you know. And I talk about Elon Musk’s anti-constitutional coup. I feel like I am describing reality as clearly as I can. I feel like I’m saying things that, given what I understand about this country and what people claim to care about, should be ringing bells.
And I also feel like I can almost hear with that double consciousness, people are not going to care about that. Everybody watching this is going to care about this, right? But not all the people not watching this, who actually outnumber the people watching this. And so, is that even just doing it wrong? Like, should it just be, “Your grandma’s social security check is in danger?” Like, just the practical things?
Because this kind of parallels the whole thing in the election about crime and eggs and democracy, all that stuff. Am I doing it wrong when I really fixate on the anti-constitutional coup by Elon Musk?
You’re right to fixate on it. You’re wrong in voter-facing and public-facing messaging to call it that. And it’s for the reasons you’ve already intuited. The Constitution is an abstraction, even though it is actually a physical document, I am aware. Whenever we are in the language of protecting institutions, protecting norms, protecting democracy — democracy never bought anyone dinner.
And in point of fact, the way that most people, the way that the average American thinks about democracy, if they think about it at all, is the system as it is presently construed. The thing that we have now. And by the way, the thing that we have now, I’m not loving. I’m not very fond of it.
So anytime our language, our messaging implies that what we are asking for is a return to January 19th, 2025, meaning right before inauguration, people weren’t psyched about that day either. And so the answer is, As you’ve already intuited, is how do we make it person-facing, voter-facing, American-facing? How do we make it tangible?
So what do we say? We say: “This is a government of the bullies for the billionaires.” Trump and the billionaires who bought him, Musk — you can name both of them, you can name either of them — are coming for your life and your livelihood. He is coming for your freedom. He is coming for your privacy. He is coming for your information. And he is conducting a hostile takeover of our government so he can take our money.”
That’s the simplest way of expressing it.
But do you think that is working? Right now?
It’s not happening enough. But, you know, I can tell you from experimentation, both within focus groups and within our own internal polling that we continuously do. Yes, the most the highest impact way that we can characterize what Musk is doing is, “a hostile takeover of our government and an armed robbery of our money and our and our very deliberate there.
But ultimately, there is absolutely nothing that we can say that will ever be as loud as what we can do.
Yes, we should be calling our representatives. And yes, we are rightly incensed about the fact that these people who purportedly have sworn an oath to govern in our name apparently can’t be bothered to work on Fridays and, you know, don’t want to use the mechanisms at their disposal to throw sand in the wheels of government in order to stop this hostile takeover.
Infuriating. Rightly so. Call them. Call the Republicans, too. But understand what has stopped autocracy in other places and within our own history, when we think about the civil rights movement, when we think about ACT UP, when we think about the movement to get the Americans with Disabilities Act, and women’s suffrage.
Imagine if the Montgomery bus boycott folks were like, “I know, here’s an idea. Let’s ask the Democrats if they would pretty please end this whole completely unjust, horrifying segregation thing.”
Or when folks newly in the throes of the HIV AIDS crisis, dying en masse from this disease that apparently came out of nowhere, watching their loved ones suffer and struggle, if they were like, “You know what we should do? We should ask the Democrats if they would pretty please do something about this.”
No, that isn’t what they did. They broke into the New York Stock Exchange, as you may know, and they hung a banner from where the bell gets rung saying, “Sell Burroughs Wellcome” which is the pharmaceutical corporation that was making AZT at the time.
And sure enough, by the end of the month, the price had dropped. And not that much later, there had been an appropriations bill, the Ryan White bill, to actually bring money into this fight and force research and so on.
And so what we do is so much louder than what we say, because what we do, people being out in the world saying, physically opposing this and speaking about it and writing songs about it and making parodies and making TikToks and painting “Fuck the Fascists” on the side of their barn.
That is actually what sways public opinion. What sways public opinion is what we call social proof. People do the things they think people like them do.
And so it’s this chicken-and-egg problem where you’re walking around New York or I’m walking around the Bay area or someone’s walking around in the middle of America and you don’t see anyone else freaking out. You don’t see anyone else angry. You don’t see anyone else upset. And so you’re like, I guess really nothing’s happening. And so it’s about the doing more than it is about the saying.
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This is so important what you’re saying. And it’s reframing something for me.
It’s almost like when we talk about protest, mass mobilization right now, resistance, I think the frame in people’s mind is, the object of that is the right. You’re protesting against the right, you’re resisting the right. And you’re hoping for maybe Democrats to be part of this. You’re the subject opposing that object and you’re kind of inviting them to be part of the subject.
And you’re reframing this like, no, no, no, the Democrats are like a second object. They’re not here. They’re there. They’re another thing you are mobilizing against for different reasons. It’s a different kind of mobilization. But you are mobilizing against their passivity and then against the things the right is doing.
Does that sound right?
I mean, yes and no. I think… and feel free to lob the charge of hypocrisy at me. Bring it on, because I’m about to perform a big old hypocrisy on you.
I’m obviously extraordinarily pissed off at Democrats. I have spent the last many years of my career helping elect Democrats. And so you can understand how it feels especially galling to me and many of you. However, it is the fact that when our public discourse — this is where you’re going to come at me, come at me because I’m guilty. Do as I say, not as I post, I would say.
When we are loudly saying, “Democrats aren’t doing this, Democrats aren’t doing that, Democrats are weak here, Democrats are weak there, Democrats refuse.” Then that is the narrative. That is the discourse that is in the public. And insofar as people continue to view the Democrats as the rightful centerpiece of the opposition — which is a reasonable conclusion, they’re purportedly the opposition party in a duopoly — it looks like the regime is unopposed. What the regime is doing is fine. People are largely O.K. with it.
And so because in life you cannot actually make other people do things — it is very, very unfortunate. It’s one of the hard lessons of parenting. You can’t actually physically make people do things. You can only really focus on what you’re doing.
I’m not saying stop pressuring them, but I’m saying what would actually cause a sea change among the calcified leadership — and yes, hashtag not all Democrats, there are extraordinary Democrats who are doing the right thing, as we said earlier — is when there is a mass movement.
Actually they’re not leaders, they don’t go first, literally, to lead means to go first. That’s really all it means. And so that means that every single one of you listening right now: If you want to, you’re a leader. If you want to, you’re a leader.
Let’s look, for example, at the Black Lives Matter resurgence that happened in 2020. During that protest, during that June, public opinion of BLM moved ahead by 12 points. It was only when the protests stopped And the right-wing coordinated backlash happened that opinion swayed back, which was an intentional thing.
The same thing with the Muslim ban. When Trump was first promising the Muslim ban during his first run, it polled popular.
But when it actually happened, and people took the extraordinary step of driving to the airport. And you live in New York. Nobody drives — your wife doesn’t drive you to the airport. I don’t know your business, but I’m telling you that. Who drives to LAX? Who drives to SFO? Nobody drives to these airports. That is not a thing that happens to everyday Americans.
It’s showing, not telling — showing, not telling — that they are against this. That is actually what altered people’s perceptions of whether or not the Muslim ban was okay or not.
So that’s really it. And that is what drags Democrats along. It’s ordinary people showing that they disagree.
So this is so helpful and you are always so helpful. Even though I’ve spent so long engaging with your work, there’s like a particular unlock here. And a lot of people are responding to that also. I’m just going to try to summarize.
I hear your point on managing the correct level of infighting or criticizing Dems. You talk about calling your representative, pressuring them to do things.
Your idea about painting the barn really struck me because a lot of people — everyone who subscribes to The Ink, all their comments are like, “I call everybody, I do this, nothing’s happening.”
And I don’t think a lot of people have thought of it as what you said, which is, yes, you’re trying to pressure some leaders, but a very tangible thing you can do is increase the perception of people around you about the number of people who feel this way.
Exactly. Because that is something you can do and you can measure. I’m not saying don’t do the calling your reps and stuff, but that stuff just feels so remote to people I know.
And people are so frustrated, like changing the perception about the number of people who feel that way around you. That is like a marching order.
And the other thing to recognize and to realize, and we have a running list that we just keep for ourselves for our team of the actions that are happening right now. It is by no means comprehensive. It couldn’t possibly be comprehensive — stuff is popping up everywhere. It’s just the stuff that comes across our radar.
Do you know how many people go to the average school board meeting in most towns? Do you know how quickly and easily you and two, three, four of your friends will be the only people at the school board meeting?
A lot of what has happened in our politics is that we actually stopped organizing. And a lot of the heroic, extraordinary, wonderful organizations that I admire and respect and like count as colleagues, we all became so fixated on channeling ourselves through the electoral process. And that means that instead of organizing, everybody moved to field and called it organizing. And by field, I mean getting people registered, getting people to vote. Fine, do that. I’m not knocking it.
But that’s not organizing. That is not organizing. And we need to stop kidding ourselves. Organizing is finding out who runs the PTA in your town? Who runs the biggest church? Who are the Boy Scout leaders? Who are the Girl Scout leaders? Are you actually talking to people and radicalizing them in the original definition? You know, radical just means “to the root,” right? Are you actually radicalizing them in a new political understanding of what is happening? Why is it happening? And what is the origin of it? Where does it come from?
So that they can withstand all of these constant right-wing drumbeats that say it’s the immigrants or it’s the Black people or it’s the trans people or it’s whomever, it’s the Muslims. So that they actually have an authentic consciousness and that they themselves then are talking to other people.
That’s organizing.
And so go local. I cannot emphasize enough, especially if you live in a smaller place, especially if you live in a red state, in a purple district, whatever.
You show up at your school board meeting and the two of you or the three of you or the four of you, you show up at your city council, you’re the only people there. These fascist policies, yes, they are being constructed at the national level. Of course, they are. But they have to be implemented at the local level. And it is at the local level.
Let’s just take, for instance, Aurora, Colorado. That is where they want to massively expand a detention facility. In order to continue with their evil draconian plan of concentration camps for people who happen to not have been born here and, you know, speak English with the wrong accent, apparently.
So Aurora is not Manhattan. It is not Los Angeles. It is not D.C. It is a particular town with a particular city council with a particular set of folks. And right now there is a battle going on to define Aurora, to massively expanded detention facility there.
People in that town and surrounding communities could go and say, “We are Aurora.” They could do food trucks of every ethnicity, and nationality. They could do giant dance parties saying, “We are Aurora. This is what we believe.”
I’m going to go to Aurora as they do all this. I mean, as God is my witness, I will. This is my pledge: I am going to make a 10,000 or however many food truck caravan from every contiguous state to D.C, in order to have the largest bhangra, K-pop, salsa, samba, polka — I’m not intentionally leaving out any kind of music fill in all the musics — dance party to show not tell that immigrants are awesome.
Because we can not live, we can not survive in a dual narrative or a three-part narrative in which immigrants are either villains, which is of course what the right says, or they’re victims, which is all too often, sadly, where we have been in advocacy. What I call the ay pobrecitos narrative. You know, with due respect to the Statue of Liberty, give me your tired or your poor. Most people feel tired and poor. They’re not really out seeking that. Or the third narrative, that being immigrants are our valets. You know, they do the jobs that no one wants. They help us.
Immigrants are awesome. Immigrants are joy. Immigrants are life. Immigrants are interesting. They’re entrepreneurs. You know, America is supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. And that’s a good thing. And so let’s make it that way, as you recently wrote.
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One of the only silver linings for me of this whole era is that the thing that I wrote about before I met you, before I did Persuaders, was a book about billionaires. And it was very difficult to convince people to care. A lot of liberal and even progressive people were like, “Why are you going after these people? Like, sure, they’re not the best, but like, really? These are your enemies? You know, Bill Gates or whoever?”
It was actually hard in 2018 when that book came out. It was hard. I was often on the back foot, right? I really had to make a case. People were very, very skeptical of why anyone would say anything negative about the ones who give money away and do all this stuff.
It is really different. Seven years later, like everybody gets it. Everybody understands what oligarchs are, you know?
Thanks to you.
Well, I don’t think that’s the case. It’s thanks to AOC and Bernie and Elizabeth Warren and others. But I wonder whether you think, again, with Elon, the oligarch frame, the warning of oligarchy — is this as salient and helpful with the mass public as we seem to think it is?
Having people truly understand that this is a government by the bullies for the billionaires, that concept.
I guess just the wrinkle is in a country where still a lot of people kind of want to be billionaires, is it as cool a message as I think it is?
Yeah.
It is, in fact, the case, as people often report, that in America, no one is poor. They’re just pre-rich, right? We’re all just temporarily embarrassed. You know, we just haven’t made our billions. Oprah hasn’t given us the car or whatever she’s supposed to give us. So there is still that very, very, very deep kind of yearning and with it an admiration and a cultishness around the extraordinarily wealthy.
But wow, are people pissed at the rich. I mean, that may be the only thing that has bipartisan agreement in this country is just how extraordinarily furious people are, because I think the fundamental difference is that in the olden times, this cult of people are rich because they’re made out of awesome, because they’re uniquely smart, because they’re uniquely capable and hardworking and so on. That’s largely been punctured. And people understand.
So it’s not just that they’re rich. It’s how they’re rich, why they’re rich. And the fact that the reason that they’re rich is because they’ve stolen from you. It’s that connection.
Because sure, people can aspire to have their own, you know, whatever their dream is. In my case, an extensive shoe collection. But, you know, you do you.
But the notion that the reason why people have so much money is because you don’t — that is increasingly salient. And that’s really the crux of it.
Now, where this gets hard — and this brings us back to the earlier conversation of you can’t just articulate the problem for people, although that is absolutely extraordinarily essential — they also have to feel that the articulation of the problem lends itself to something that they can do.
And so in the universe in which what people are “supposed to do” is petition their government in some way or another. And I say that broadly, right? So vote, register to vote, get other people to vote, call their member of Congress, ask for policy change.
It’s extraordinary the degree to which people, even low information, low engagement folks, think the jig is up on that particular theory of change.
And so I think we are now in a place in which people need to be directed, their anger and their ire need to be directed into what I am calling the “Mangione without murder” strategy. Without murder. Hear that whole phrase.
You really do know how to coin a phrase.
Yeah, we don’t need to be murdering people. I just want to say on the record here that I’m telling you. Anti-murder. I’m anti-murder, whatever you heard, whatever they told you. Sharp messages, no sharp weapons.
That’s right.
Imagine if we actually had people doing, you know, die-ins where corporate CEOs are. If we actually had people going to the places, it’s easy to look up. These motherfuckers are all hypocrites. They all go to church. Why aren’t we showing up in the parking lots of their churches? And this could both be MAGA Republicans and CEOs. Singing hymns that are actually about what Jesus preached. When they get out of church, say it to their faces.
And so I think that the challenge with the billionaire articulation is not that it is not landing. You are correct in your supposition that it is absolutely landing. It’s that it quickly becomes, well, every election is a contest between their billionaires and our billionaires. And so the solution, which presumably has been, well, that’s why you should vote for Democrats.
I know people are really responding to how clear your advice is. And I think it’s making a lot of people feel like they know what to do more clearly than they did before. So thank you. I want to go back to that and compile all of your advice. Let’s focus on marching orders for everybody here.
People are in agreement with you about how grave this is and how serious it is. People feel incredibly undefended by elected Democrats in general and are not expecting them to change very soon. People are doing things already, like calling Congress, but maybe don’t know the third, fourth, and fifth things to do.
Can you just give us some very, very, very tangible marching orders?
So the first thing I would say is in the preservation of your own mental health and wellbeing. Pick a thing that you care about and can be motivated to stay the course with.
For some folks, that’s going to be education. For some folks, that’s going to be immigrant rights. For some folks, that’s going to be policing, whatever. There are so many things happening at once that we can all become like cats with a laser pointer and make ourselves nuts.
So you pick the thing. You go as local as possible about that thing. And so if it is education, just take that for instance, then you decide with yourself and a handful of your friends, you have a potluck beforehand, you do you. Do something fun and entertaining and get together beforehand. You look up in the public record when the next school board meeting is in your local community. And you go there and you make statements about ensuring that all children have the freedom to learn the truth of our past, and that all children have the freedom to belong and be who they are within their schools. And you oppose any kind of effort to implement the draconian fascist agenda in your own community.
So that is one thing. You can do that within the context of immigrant rights. You can do that in the context of disability justice, racial justice, et cetera.
The next piece of advice is to wear your beliefs. Get yourself a “Fabulously Fighting Fascism” t-shirt. One of the things that is most important to the right and to any authoritarian force is to suck our joy, is to suck our uniqueness, is to suck our our being. I say all the time, put up a billboard in the middle of nowhere that shows people across the gender spectrum just having themselves the best possible time, and say “Fabulously fighting fascism.”
You will get so much local media and local attention, even if it’s in the middle of nowhere because it is a saucy message. Show, not tell that you do not agree with this, that you refuse it.
So I think the name of the game is really resistance. refusal, and ridicule. And ridicule is a key and essential element that I have danced around.
Join a union, if you can join a union. Support union efforts. That is a place where deep and authentic organizing actually happens and needs to happen much, much more expansively. One of the most important keys to fighting autocracy is a strong, integrated, active, in-your-face labor community.
Before we go, to leave people on a note of hope, in a lot of the messaging that you do and the formal proper messages you draft for TV ads or other communication, there’s a certain structure, which I wrote about in my book. It’s often the beginning and the end where more hope and uplift come in and in the middle is where you explain the obstructions to that promise
A lot of people really can’t see the after of this. It’s very hard to see anything. I find it very difficult to visualize 2026. I find it very, very difficult to visualize 2035. I could see a scenario where it’s totally fine, this thing blew over, it imploded, and my kids are just living a normal life, vaguely remembering this. And I could imagine a scenario in which most people I know don’t live in this country anymore. It’s so hard to picture the after.
Can you help us picture the after in a hopeful way if we get this right, if we do all the things you’re talking about?
The fact that you can’t picture 2026. I can’t either. And that is either extraordinarily terrifying or fantastic. The reason why it is potentially fantastic is because it takes a fundamental rupture, a big rupture that we think that we have already had, but we have not — because we are still waking up in the morning and going to the store and answering our telephones and checking our social and getting our kids to school and all the things that, of course, we need to continue to do.
That rupture has not happened for most people. And it is only in a fundamental rupture that we get a period — and obviously, the decimation of it is one of the most tragic and horrible things in American history. But Reconstruction wouldn’t have happened without the Civil War. The New Deal wouldn’t have happened without the decimation of the Gilded Age and God forbid, the Depression.
Moments of extraordinary rupture are moments of extraordinary possibility where, as my colleague, Mike Podhorzer points out, pre the Revolution, when people were hanging out in the colonies, and trying, you know, to do the Boston Tea Party and to petition the king, “Hey, yo, like, we’re not fond of this. We’re not keen.”
And I’m not discounting the fact that things were pretty bad for most people and enslavement and no women’s rights and so on. I’m not making believe that that period was a beautiful era in American history.
The only point that I’m making is that there has to be a rupture so fundamental that people are like, “Oh no, how about we just don’t have a king? How about we just don’t be a colony anymore? How about we decide that we are going to invent a new country from scratch?”
Obviously not really from scratch because of the destruction and usurpation and genocide of Native people — again, I am not trying to say this was like a beautiful era.
All I’m trying to say is that in the unknowing, in the what-the-fuck-is-going-to-come-next, is actually where invention comes. And it requires us recognizing that. To give you a tautology, the problem is made out of the problem, as we were discussing at the top of our conversation. To think that a system that is working largely as designed, to bring us representatives who, with notable and noteworthy and laudable exceptions, are not actually serving our interests and are not stepping up to the plate. To think that they would behave any differently is to not understand that the entire progressive movement is begging the master for money to buy tools to take down his house, and it always has been.
And because we’ve continued to limp along in this, “But maybe we’ll win this election, but maybe we’ll get people to vote, but maybe we’ll pass this one little policy,” is not to recognize the fact that actually within U.S. politics, there is no correlation between majority support for a policy and that policy passing. And so we have to stop thinking that tinkering at the edges of the old ways, as we have done, is going to yield a new result.
And I don’t know if this isn’t sounding hopeful, but to me, it is always the case. The most fundamental truth of life is that the future is made out of the decisions that we take collectively.
We make the future. What comes next will be decided on the basis of what we do. And that’s up to us.
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