Factually! with Adam Conover - No one is coming to save us.

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

(In addition to your weekly Factually! episode, this week we're bringing you a monologue from Adam. This short, researched monologue originally aired on the Factually! YouTube page, but we are sharing audio versions of these monologues with our podcast audience as well. Please enjoy, and stay tuned for your regularly scheduled episode of Factually!)No one is coming to save us. We’re going to have to save ourselves. Here’s how.-Visit https://groundnews.com/factually to stay fully informed, see through biased media and get all sides of every story. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through my link. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. Get that Angel Reese special at McDonald's now. Let's break it down. My favorite barbecue sauce, American cheese, crispy bacon, pickles, onions, and a sesame seed bun, of course. And don't forget the fries and a drink. Sound good? I'm participating in restaurants for a limited time.

So, things are getting pretty f***ed up in America right now, and a lot of people are genuinely frightened about it. We have an unelected billionaire burning down the government like it's a cyber truck that caught fire after hitting a pothole. Our new Secretary of Health and Human Services is Beaselbub, the demon lord of pestilence. Excuse me, I mean it's Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the demon lord of pestilence. And then of course there's the ramping up of violent treatment of refugees and immigrants and the coordinated effort to remove trans people and people of color or even the discussion of them from public life. And the Democrats are like, what do we do? Do we

record a podcast about it? Do we send another fundraising text? Let's be really clear about what we're facing right now. Our government has been taken over by an anti-science, anti-democratic, overtly racist, authoritarian movement led by the richest and most powerful people in the world, and no one is doing shit about it. I mean, how does that make you feel? It makes me feel hopeless. Like, I should tune out, stop reading the news entirely, and go back to watching White Lotus.

Hey, at least on that show, the racist rich people are fictional. You know, I'm supposed to be the bright side, positive takeaway guy, and it's hard to find one here. Because it's true. Nobody is coming to save us. The brutal truth is, we are going to have to save ourselves, as depressing a prospect as that is.

And, you know, it may sound impossible, but I promise you that it is not. There are concrete ways that you can fight back, and none of them involve sending five bucks to a spineless dam or posting to your Instagram story or burying your head in the sand and protecting yourself by turtling up, as tempting as that may seem to be. There are things that you can do,

and you know what, people are already out there doing them them and they are starting to stem the tide a little bit in ways that you can be a part of. And on this episode, I'm going to tell you what they are and how you can join them. But first, real quick, I want to remind you that I'm on tour right now. If you want to come see me do stand up comedy in person, be around people. That might feel nice at a time like this. Well, I'm going to be in London on the 22nd, Amsterdam on the 26th. I'm looking forward to being out of the U.S. for a little bit. Then I'm headed back to the States to go to Providence, Rhode Island, Vancouver, and Eugene, Oregon. Later in the year, I'm even going to Tulsa and Oklahoma City. Head to AdamKonover.net for tickets and tour dates. And if you would like to support this channel directly and

all the videos we bring you week in, week out about all these important topics and what you can do about them, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. So let's recap just a tiny teaspoon of the avalanche of bullsh** we're facing. After taking office, Trump gave the keys to the federal government to the world's richest man and his band of horribly nicknamed teen hackers. I mean, there are just too many things to make fun of about this kid. Sweatshorts and a blazer, his nickname is Big Balls, and his grandpa apparently loved Putin. I can't even write jokes about him.

It's lib-comedy-hack. Send her The Daily Show. They'll make quick work of him there. So Big Balls has your social security number, and his babysitter, little Balls Elon, is busy gutting the exact agencies that were investigating his many potential crimes, such as the Department of Labor, which was investigating Musk's companies for racial and sexual harassment and retaliatory firings and even workplace electrocution, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was getting ready to regulate Exxon's mobile payment

service, the EPA, which is investigating supposedly environmentally friendly Tesla for violating the Clean Air Act and even the USDA which was investigating Elon's company Neuralink for animal abuse. You know, personally I can't think of anything more evil than destroying the federal government just so you can keep torturing animals, but I feel like Elon can top that by next Tuesday. The entire Trump administration seems intent on destroying only the good things that the government does while supersizing all of the bullsh**.

Just in the past few weeks, the Trump administration has fired thousands of nonpartisan civil servants who are in charge of things like life-saving research on cancer and heart disease, making schools safer, preventing bird flu, you know, in order to keep the price of those precious eggs low, and even guarding the guarding the fucking nukes. And yeah, they're now scrambling to get some of those people back, but they can't find them because Elon deleted their fucking emails. You know, I thought we all wanted to live in a country where cancer wasn't a death sentence, eggs aren't ten bucks a dozen, and nukes aren't regularly stolen by bandits.

But I guess I was wrong, that s*** is gonna happen now. And Elon isn't the only fail son lackey f***ing America up right now. RFK Jr. is already ordering the CDC to stop promoting life-saving vaccines. And you know, there can be a lot of misinformation around vaccines. So you know what I did? I used our sponsor, Ground News, to find this source. I was able to search the topic, RFK Jr., and scroll through a bunch of links to articles about him. Ground News even gives each publisher ratings for factuality and political bias, so I could find a headline that was rated as center and high factuality. And I was also able to scroll down and find similar articles from other sources.

Using Ground News really helps us research these videos, because it's easy to find a lot of different perspectives on big, complicated stories. And you can use ground news too. My viewers can get 40% off this amazing user funded service if you use my special code, just go to groundnews.com slash factually. And you know, having a way to sift through the news really helps because it just keeps getting fucking worse.

Especially for trans and queer Americans who have every reason to be really frightened right now, because they are being persecuted by their own federal government. Trans-americans have already reported having their gender markers being forcibly changed on federal documents like passports, which could prevent them from traveling or lead to harassment from officials. And schools are being investigated by Trump's Department of Education for the sin of having an all-gender restroom. Did you let a non-binary kid pee? You're going to jail in Trump's America! And Trump doesn't just hate pronouns.

He's banning the whole damn dictionary. Researchers at the National Science Foundation have been told by their government that they could lose funding and their jobs if they use words like black, equality, historically, political, and even women. Which isn't surprising because it's clear that none of these guys have studied any women lately. I mean, okay, that's an easy joke, but I don't really know what else to do but laugh at a time like this.

The Trump administration is literally spending their time stripping scientific data and entire government websites off the internet because they have the word gender in them. The Park Service site for the Stonewall National Monument was literally forced to remove the T from the acronym LGBT. First of all, who the hell ever heard of an LGBT flag? And second, don't they realize that by reducing the T, they actually made the page trans? That's gender-affirming code. And yes, I did ask my trans friend Sammy if that joke made sense, and they said, sort of. So the Trump administration is banning words and trying to erase people who they don't

like from existence. That's not just fascist, it's Orwellian in the purest sense. So who is coming to save us from this new dystopia? Well, definitely not the Democrats. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries made that very clear. I'm trying to figure out what leverage we actually have. What leverage do we have? Yeah, I don't know, man. Maybe trying isn't good enough when that's your entire f***ing

job. You've known Trump would be president for months. He even gave you an instruction manual for what he was planning to do. You are failing a f***ing open book test. How about the new chair of the DNC, Ken Martin? When confronted with the overwhelming evidence of the destructive power of billionaires over our democracy, does he pledge to fight back against them? Oh no no no, he's too busy writing fanfic about the good billionaires. There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats who share our values and we will take their money. You know, it was so considerate for Ken to use a sign language interpreter so that we could hear F*** YOU pores in two languages.

When will these idiots learn that there is no such thing as a good billionaire? You cannot amass a billion dollars by being a little sweetie pie! I mean, just four years ago, we were patting Bezos on the back for talking shit about Trump, but now that it's politically expedient, he's palling it up at Mar-a-Lago. At this point, I'm just waiting for George Soros to put on a MAGA hat and show up at a Ted Nugent concert. You know, the Democrats' main strategy seems to be to point out over and over again that what Trump is doing is unconstitutional. But hey, news flash, f***os, that doesn't matter if nobody is enforcing the Constitution.

The Constitution is not a set of magical laws that automatically bind our actions. It's just a goddamn piece of paper written by a bunch of dead dudes in wigs who naively thought that Congress would stop an out-of-control president to protect their own power. But you know what? They didn't anticipate that Congress would be so excited to be cucked. I've been asked so many times, aren't you uncomfortable with this? No, I'm not. Let me translate. That's Republican speak for, yes daddy, please f*** me harder. And that leaves, of course, our last resort, the courts. But I wouldn't count on them saving us either,

because even if the right-wing justices Trump jammed through somehow grow a spine and stand up for the Constitution, they have no way to enforce their rulings, because the law enforcement officers are, guess what, controlled by Trump. That means that Trump could simply ignore the court rulings, as Vance has already hinted he will, which means that the courts are incentivized not to rule against Trump at all, because

if they do and then he ignores them, it makes them look weak. Far better to keep pretending to be strong and do jack shit. Oh, look at you big strong boys, very important in your serious robes. So there is no other branch of government, no jacked billionaire zaddy, no political strongman coming to save us. We are going to have to save ourselves. And I know that sucks to hear because you got other shit to do. You have rent to pay and kids to raise and a Kendrick Drake feud that's way more fun to read about than this shit. And, because honestly, it seems overwhelming, doesn't it? I mean, the government is so f***ing big.

They're persecuting their enemies and they could squash you like a bug if they wanted, couldn't they? It's easy to let yourself get small when facing a threat like that, especially a threat that so many of your fellow citizens loudly and angrily support. But I want to speak directly to that feeling. If you are feeling small and sad and dejected, like America is over and all you can do is huddle up and keep safe, I'm here to tell you, buck the f*** up. Average people have been getting squashed by bullies like Trump and Musk since the founding of this country.

And the only way we ever stopped them was by kicking their asses. But we didn't do that by keeping small and staying safe and playing Stardew Valley while we waited for our next chance to vote in four years. We did it by f**king s**t up. You know, for far too long in America, we've believed the lie that the only way you could affect change in this country is to vote for the politicians and donate to their campaigns and post on one of the billionaires' dumbass websites. But they came up with that lie to distract us from the fact that we, the people, are political actors just like they are and that we have power. And that power lies in refusing to be quiet and instead being unignorably f***ing loud.

So, look, queer and trans people are facing threats to their safety. Yes, but not for the first time. For most of American history, they have faced immense discrimination, not just from the government, but from a bigoted public. But gay rights weren't won by being quiet and waiting for the storm to pass. They were won because queer people bravely risked their safety, their jobs, and their entire lives to come out and live as themselves with pride, and to turn that pride into a f**king parade long before it was socially acceptable enough to be sponsored by Chase

Bank. They refused to be quiet. Instead, they were themselves loudly and publicly, and they won. And those same tactics can win again, because those are the tactics that always win in this country. You know, as I covered in a past video on unions, working class people used to be worked to death in this country by the millionaires and billionaires who ran the economy. And they were literally shot in the street by their own government when they fought back. But they did not let that stop them. They fought together, collectively, they found their power,

and after decades of struggle they put in place the 40-hour work week and worker protections that all of us enjoy today. This is the same story time and time again for the women's rights movement, the African-American civil rights movement, people with less power banding together, being unignorable and forcing those with more power to bend to their will. Let me tell you just one more of these stories that I think should be told a lot more often. One of the greatest civil rights victories in American history was won by disabled activists who brought business to a grinding halt with a 25-day sit-in to force the Carter administration to sign Section 504, a law that protects disabled people's

rights to public education. Now imagine if you were one of those people. Do you think it wasn't f***ing scary to roll a wheelchair into a government building, one without a goddamn ramp and demand to be heard? No. These are people who were told by our entire society that they're weak, that they're powerless, that they had to hide themselves away. And they said, no, fuck that. Here we fucking are. We demand you give us what we want. And

they won. Winning comes from taking risks, from being loud, from being yourself, and by doing it together. And in fact, that is how the right wing has won all of their victories, by showing up en masse over and over again and screaming like f***ing assholes until they got what they wanted. And that is what you are going to do too. So here is how you are going to fight back.

First, you're going to find a group that you can join. It could be a church, it could be a rights organization, or it could be a local Magic the Gathering meetup that gets spicy about politics after one too many Mountain Dews. Get your ass to a meeting and talk with like-minded people about what you're going to do next, and then go with them together to a town hall meeting

or the steps of your senator's office or a street corner in the middle of your city and get fucking loud. And you know why I know this will work? Because it already is. Republicans across the country are confronting angry mobs at their own town halls. Republican Congressman Rich McCormick was recently confronted with this from average Georgians. Here in Los Angeles Trump's Department of Transportation Secretary and former Road Rules contestant Sean Duffy hoped to triumphantly announce how he was killing high-speed rail, but instead the good citizens of LA gave him this. Oh you do not want to get between a train fan and their transit access.

It gets ugly. I know, screaming at politicians seems simple, but it does in fact work. That's how the Tea Party did it in 2009, and that's how we're going to do it today. Here's another example. In Los Angeles, a children's hospital announced that it was going to ban gender-affirming care in deference to the Trump administration's bigotry. But after citizens and allies showed up and protested in front of the hospital over and over again, the hospital reversed its decision and is once again providing care.

And even federal workers, those mild-mannered civil servants that Musk has been trying to fire in massive numbers, they are fighting back too. They're hanging upside down flags at Yosemite to protest job cuts of park rangers. They're putting AI videos of Trump sucking Elon's toes on every screen at HUD headquarters. And they're getting organized to fight back in even more serious ways. If you'd like to join them, head to this URL. And look, we're just getting started. But all of this protest is already bearing fruit. Trump's poll numbers are going down.

Elon's are in the f***ing toilet. These two billionaires are never going to look more powerful than they have for the last month. But the power has always been with the people. And that is why they are doing everything they can to scare the s*** out of you. Because they depend on you being afraid, isolated, compliant, and quiet.

But you're not going to be. We're not going to be. We're going to raise our voices, we're going to raise each other up, and we are going to fuck some shit up. Because that is the only way that average Americans have ever won any victory in this country. And in fact, it's the American f***ing way.