Ideas - Hope lies in knowing that "we've changed the world before”

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

Political analyst Rachel Maddow and author/activist Rebecca Solnit are sharp observers of Trump 2.0. They both share a common ground: opposition to anti-democratic actions taken by the second administration of U.S. President Trump, and where those actions are taking America, if not the world. The two American writers spoke with Nahlah Ayed about the existential issues of this American moment, a public conversation hosted by the International Festival of Authors and PEN Canada. The onstage event, in front of a Toronto audience, was part of the 5th annual Graeme Gibson Talk in Toronto.

This program is brought to you in part by Spex Savers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Spec Savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan.

Book at specksavers.cavers.caps are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. I'm Nala Ayed, host of Ideas, and I'm inviting you to a birthday party. Ours, because Ideas is turning 60. So we're having a celebration at the Isabel Bader Theater in Toronto on the evening of November 11th. Tickets are free, but you must have. register. Just visit cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. Ideas at 60. That's November 11th at the Isabel

Bader Theater in Toronto. See you there. Many Canadians find the unrelenting stream of news out of the U.S. these days a lot to take. So just imagine what it's like. like to live there. You know, you have a map and then there's an inset, which is a blown-up part of the map. It's like trying to look at the whole globe just through the inset scale. And it's hard to keep everything in frame. We live in a chaos of stories, and people need their compasses and maps to navigate. And that's one of the things stories, the good stories can provide.

Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. The 2025 Toronto International Festival of Authors hosted two American writers for an on-stage conversation, though they work in different areas. Their shared ground, opposition to anti-democratic actions taken by the second administration of U.S. President Trump and where those actions are taking America, if not the world. Rachel Maddo holds the powerful to account in her professional role

as a political commentator. For author and activist Rebecca Solnit, the opposition is a matter of deeply held principle. The two took to the stage in front of an enthusiastic full house at Toronto's Kerner Hall in October. The occasion was the fifth annual Graham Gibson Talk, a co-presentation of Penn Canada. Thank you all for being here. Each of our guests is an accomplished and prolific author, but they also wear other hats, and those hats, I suspect, will be worn tonight.

So in the interest of seeing those hats in action, I will keep our introductions short. Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, and activist. She's a contributor to the Guardian UK, and her latest book is No Straight Road Takes You There. Essays for Uneven Terrain. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you.

Rachel Maddo is a writer, producer, commentator, and host of the Rachel Maddo show on MSNBC, soon to be MS now. Her latest book is prequel, an American fight against fascism, and a fun fact. She may, in fact, secretly have a Blue Jays cap in her collection because your mother's side is Canadian. Indeed, indeed. Welcome back.

Thank you very much. Thank you so much for being here. You have both crossed a border to be here tonight. And I want to take advantage of that and ask you to kind of stand back, leave behind the turn of daily headlines to help explain the big picture of your nation to those of us outside of it.

And so, Rebecca, starting with you, if you had to put a name to what is happening politically in the United States, what would you call it? call it. I many things are happening in the United States, both authoritarianism and resistance. The long story for me is that decades ago, the Republican Party hit a fork in the road. The United States was becoming more progressive and less white, and they either had to adapt to the new majority, or they had to suppress it. They chose the path of trying to suppress democracy,

gerrymandering, suppressing the vote. And as this becomes less and less the country, they want it to be the country of white male, Protestant dominion, they have to become more and more extreme to achieve that, ergo, where we are now, where they understand they can't win elections fairly. They're wildly unpopular.

What they're doing in this crazy spiral, they're in, as they get more extreme, they get more unpopular as they get more unpopular they get more extreme where it ends is mostly up to the rest of the country and stay tuned this event is is being billed a has been billed as notes from the new america and if so rebecca staying with you if you had to choose one event from 2025 that tells you that your country is an unprecedented political era what would that be oh my gosh um Well, we just had the biggest demonstration in the country's history with at least seven million people in no kings. And my friend Erica Chenoweth, who's a great scholar at Harvard of how these protests are unfolding, says there's also unprecedented activity in counties that Trump won, in red places.

I think the pushback is really interesting, and a lot of it is taking place in ways that may be. be out of sight on the part of federal employees, including military people, acts of non-cooperation, non-resistance, also by state and local authorities. And it feels like it's also ramping up, so things are going to get spicy. Spicy, Rachel. How would you summarize the situation? I actually think that I really identify with some of how Rebecca just described this, in that I find the authoritarian project to be boring. In that it's very predictable. These guys are all the same.

They have different weird haircuts, but they all have weird haircuts. They all seek the mantle of emergency or wartime leader in order to justify the sort of extreme measures that they think that other leaders, have used in a minimal way, and they're going to use in a maximalist way, because they're never going to leave power. They just all do the same thing. And I do think that the most important and interesting question before us now is not what does Donald Trump want. What is Donald Trump

going to do, or what is the movement that has elevated him going to do? The most important question and the most fascinating thing to cover in the news business is what are the American people going to say about it. And they are not a majoritarian movement. They're a minority movement. And you're exactly right that as they become more extreme, they become less popular, and as they become less popular, they become more extreme.

And that decrescendo in terms of their electoral power is irreversible at this point. So as that happens, what takes up, I think, more and more of the center stage in terms of where the action is and what we need to be watching and what is most compelling and most unpredictable and most dramatic and beautiful

is the reaction of the people and the strategy that the people take to try to stop what they don't want to happen. And we'll talk about that in great detail in this conversation, but I was wondering, Rachel, that a lot of your work, including your book, prequel, is very much about connecting past America to what is going on in present America.

And I'm curious, are there things that we might think of as purely Trump-era events in America that actually have an echo in the past? Yes. I mean, and actually along the same lines that I was just speaking. The American people have also been here before. I mean, we fought a revolutionary war against a tyrant.

We thought a civil war against slavery. The civil rights movement was an emancipatory movement against the segregationists. In between there, we fought a sort of forgotten American fight against what was a surprisingly large fascist and pro-fascist movement ahead of World War II, a movement that wasn't just isolationist and didn't want us to fight World War II, but in fact wanted us to fight on the other side. And that's what my last book was about. So we've been engaged in some pretty epic battles in the past, and we've won those.

What's different now is that this isn't a movement that we're fighting, it's the president. And I also think that what's sort of unique now, even if everything about Trump, I do believe, fundamentally, is boring. He does have one new thing, which is that technology, the way that technology has evolved, he does effectively have the power to have almost perfect surveillance of the American people and his critics. And that is, authoritarian always surveil their people. Police state is a real thing. but to have the ability to have a spy not only in every workplace or on every block, but in everybody's pocket is new. I want to stay with you for a minute, Rachel, and ask you how you have deliberately changed your role as a public communicator in response to the second Trump administration. I stopped talking about alcohol on television. I used to do this cocktail moment on Friday nights, like, hey, we all made it to Friday.

I'll show you how to make a blah, blah, blah. Once we sort of entered the Trump era, I realized alcohol is still my friend, but it is not medicine. And we need to start thinking about our long-term health and sustainability, not only as individuals, but as a community who recognizes the horror of what this is. Can I just say the New York Times described you soon after the election as, quote, de facto TV therapists for liberals who cannot bring themselves to believe that Donald Trump is, once again the president. Is that a compliment? You get what you pay for. You should get a better therapist. I mean, I am trying to reflect back what I see. And I take sort of story selection very important in terms of what I talk about on TV. And I have the editorial freedom to do that. And

I am very grateful for it. And to the extent that people find that helpful, I'm glad and thank you for watching, but I'm not making anything any better. I'm just describing the work that other people are doing. Rebecca, equally, I was amused to see this description of your latest essay collection, No Straight Road, in which you were compared to a, quote, seasoned boxing coach tending to the spiritually and politically exhausted citizen flopped in the corner. Is that your audience, Is that their condition? Well, I truly believe people need encouragement, which is a word that literally means to instill courage,

you know, encourage. And there's so much that tries to do the opposite. I think the mainstream narrative most people get is that power resides in a very small elite, and the most you can do is kind of lay flowers at their feet and beseech them to give you some crumbs from the table. and part of my job and I think Rachel's job

is to remind people that in fact we are extremely powerful we have changed the world many times we've toppled many regimes I was actually encouraging Margaret and Rachel to watch Terminator 2 a movie to which I am deeply devoted whose sort of refrain

is no fate but what we make the sense that we make the future in the present because the future doesn't exist because we also get narratives across a political spectrum that are, whether they're cynical, optimistic, defeatist, climate, doomerism, et cetera, pretend the future has already been decided

and all we get to do is applaud or boo. But we're making the future in the present. Things are wildly destabilized. The administration's wildly unpopular, chaotic, trashing everything they touch, and what happens next is anybody's guess and ours to decide? The trashing.

Sorry, please, go ahead. Absolutely. Am I allowed to applaud from here? Because that was really, yes. One thing this administration loves to trash is the mainstream media. But the trashing also comes from other sides, especially during Trump 1.0, even from progressives, for so-called two-sidism, for normalizing the abnormal. What's your view, Rachel, of how the coverage is going these days in 2.0?

I think, you know, the media deserves all the scorn that is poured on us. I'm not going to defend us as a group. I will explain a little bit about why I think a lot of things that Trump does, that don't get a lot of attention, you can compare to, you know, you can do, oh, my God, can you imagine if Obama tore down the east wing of the White House? Like, right, can you imagine if Joe Biden on Air Force One started bragging about how great he's doing on all the dementia tests he's taking? I mean, like, I mean, yes, yes, right? But the problem is that he tore down the East Wing and bragged about his dementia tests on the same day.

And so there's a bandwidth issue in terms of covering, I mean, presidency ending. scandals. I mean, the pardon of the Binance guy, after what Binance did to enrich the Trump family is the worst presidential corruption scandal in the history of the U.S. presidency, as long as you don't count every other day that Donald Trump has been president in either of his terms. It's like trying to look at, you know, you have a map, and then there's an inset, which is a blown up part of the map. It's like trying to look at the whole globe just through the inset scale. And it's hard to keep everything in frame. That said, it's the job of those of us who tell stories about current events and who report the news and who contextualize the news and put it in paragraph form to talk about

when things are important and to keep things in perspective. It's just, it's hard when you've got somebody who is as transgressive and corrupt as this guy is on a more than once a news cycle basis. Rebecca, what are your thoughts on how the mainstream media is coping? I agree, it has a tendency to normalize and downplay. And there's a real tendency in mainstream journalism. And, you know, I mostly read print. I don't watch much. To think that somehow context is bias, and therefore you strip things of context.

And what I love about all the kind of editorial essayists, people doing alternative news in small newsletters, The New Republic, Heather Cox-Ritchardson, and what Rachel does live is to, add the context back and to not pretend that they're aspiring to some ridiculous form of objectivity, which is often chased so hard, it means abandoning the truth. For example, the media like to pretend, I think they're finally given up on it, that it's a both-sides thing. You know, Obama returned a library book late in middle school, and Donald Trump just killed 51 people in the Caribbean illegally. Like, they both have scandals. There's like a lot of making fun of it.

But I truly feel like a lot of why we're in this situation is the mainstream media, really, it's full of golden retrievers. I've been attacked for being mean to golden retrievers, but just in the sense who will chase anything you throw for them. The fact that people seem more worked up that a trans kid might play volleyball than that the climate crisis will destroy places, species. You know, so they really,

You know, I could talk all week, but we're not going to about all the ways I think that they really kind of buffer people from important realities while feeding them a lot of red meat about things that don't matter. But I think it's a lot of how we got into the situation we're in. And they really normalized Donald Trump all through the last. They didn't remind you of all the things he did was on trial for all the ties to Epstein, the January 6 attack on Congress, et cetera. And they let him lie. He had no connection to Project 25, which is being put into effect as an attempt to dismantle the federal government, although he very obviously did. And they continue also to let people, if you have enough status, they'll print your lies more or less as truth, even though you've been proven to lie hundreds or thousands of times before. So I hold them hugely responsible. But, you know, I feel the media is dead, long live the media, because there's also so much good. work being done, but it's less, it's not reaching people on the same scale. I also think that one of the things that we should have learned from the rise of Trump before he came back to the White House was that for all the things that he's bad at, one of the things he's really good at is getting

people in the press to cover topics that he wants them to cover. And so one of, I mean, it's, we definitely should have learned like Trump says thing is not a story. But Trump wants you to cover a thing. Trump says X is the news today should be reason for everybody to ring fence that and come back to it another day, not cover it today. There ought to be better antibodies in terms of recognizing the way he expertly manipulates the media into covering the stories he wants covered. And that is, like on my show when we're preparing the show, we call that yanking, yanking your chain. Like, don't yank my chain, don't tell me what to cover. If other people are covering it, A, I don't need to, but B, who wants us all to be covering?

it. And I just feel like we ought to have a, we ought to have better reflexes and antibodies against that because it's so transparently manipulative. How do you foster or encourage those antibodies? By talking about it. And I mean, as a boss of my show, by inculcating that as a value in terms of how we think about the work and what it means to be journalistically you're journalistically rigorous. I mean, once somebody has been jerking you around and getting you to cover stuff that ultimately isn't important

but does meet their needs. You know, it's kind of, you know, shame on them once, shame on you, if it happens twice. Part of the playbook, of course, I don't need to tell you, is this sort of slippery relationship with language. You know, definitions of free speech, truth, morality, and peace all seem to be kind of up for grabs. And so Rebecca, I know a few things

about you, but this I know for sure, because we talked about it previous to now, is you know a lot about George Orwell. You wrote a book, a wonderful book called Orwell's Roses. Orwell's most famous novel, of course, is 1984, which paints this totalitarian world where the meaning of language is reshaped by those in power. Do you see something Orwellian about what's going on? It is slippery, but a lot of it isn't. It's just bald lies. You know, of the war is peace. You know, slavery is freedom kind. In that there's, it's not, it's not subtle. It's not expert propaganda. They just say crazy shit that's not true. And, you know, no, I joke about my book, men explain things to me that men could make that book obsolete. And it would be very fun if 1984 was obsolete, but I don't know if it will ever be, in that there is a tremendous amount of manipulation of truth,

but it's not really coming primarily from politicians. It's coming primarily from Silicon Valley, which decided long ago to prioritize profit over everything else and to allow, for example, algorithms that push people towards extreme political views, usually extreme right-wing and hateful political views, because that's what fosters engagement. And I see people echoing Putin that Ukraine is Nazis and he's denotifying it.

Some guy I used to know in my punk rock days was saying that on social media. And I just kind of looked at it and was like, wow, you are just not equipped to sift through all the stuff that's coming at you. Rachel, is language chaos part of the reason that you advise your viewers to watch what they do, not what they say. Always, always, always. it that is one of our mantras um i stopped booking people on tv as guests who were speaking on behalf of trump or on behalf of the trump campaign and ultimately the trump administration because they were saying things as and and presenting them as factual assertions and they were not true and it was all the time and i've always believed that if i'm putting somebody on television i'm an audience is

there because you trust what I'm saying to you and I want to be worthy of that trust. But if I'm asking you to listen to somebody else who I'm also putting on TV, they essentially have my endorsement. And so if somebody I've brought on to TV to talk is now their telling lies, I've broken trust with you, the viewer. And so I definitely get criticism for not putting folks from the Trump side of the aisle on the air anymore. but their words were too often proven worthless.

I wonder for both of you a question. You know, I've been in places around the world where writing was the only tool with which, you know, authoritarian regimes are challenged and questioned, and, you know, sometimes it took decades, but the writing mattered. I have to say that it feels as though in this moment, in this particular case, writing isn't enough.

What do you say? So words matter, and they matter tremendously, and they motivate and inspire people. And can I actually tell a little anecdote? Absolutely. So my younger brother, David Solnit, makes a lot of the art for a lot of the protests in the Bay Area and has for a long time. And they sent 100 ICE or, you know, Border Patrol people to the Bay Area who were going to take action. And the official story is that powerful men told Trump not to. And so he called them off.

But I think it might have been the strength of the protests played a factor because immediately people showed up. They blockaded where the guys were from before dawn on Thursday. And my brother David was there silk screening these anti-ice posters, and I was doing a live event and was carrying one with me. And we agreed that I could put it on stage. But before then, I walked through a parking lot with a parking lot attendant who was a small brown-skinned guy,

and I don't know if he was Middle Eastern or Latino or what, but he saw me carrying this anti-ice poster, and he just was so joyful, and just those words, like, really moved that guy. The rest of the stories, I put the poster on stage. It got a much bigger round of applause than I and my friend Richard Misraq did. And then an immigration attorney came up to me and said,

I need that poster, you need to give me that poster. And he's kind of hanging in his office where all these terrified immigrants and refugees come. He's Latino and an immigrant himself. And I said, I'll give it to you if you promise to offer a free consultation to the first immigrant I come across who needs it. I have a friend who owns a fantastic restaurant. A lot of their employees are Latino,

and they have one in ICE detention. And carrying those words around, cheered up the guy in the parking lot and got the guy in detention, a really good lawyer. Words matter. American author, historian and activist Rebecca Solnit. You're listening to the fifth annual Penn Canada Graeme Gibson Talk, recorded in late October of 2025 at Kerner Hall in Toronto.

This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. is brought to you in part by spec savers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At spec savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at spec savers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cavents are provided. by independent optometrists.

Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. Hi, I'm Mike Figgis. I wrote and directed movies like leaving Las Vegas and time code. And recently, I was on the set of Francis Ford Coppola's infamous passion project, Megalopolis, making a fly-on-the-wall documentary. In Unfiltered, the Mike Figures podcast, I'll share stories of watching a mad genius at work. Get Unfiltered, the Mike Figures.

podcast, wherever you get podcasts. The anti-democratic policies of the Trump administration are having a profound effect inside U.S. borders, but also around the globe on issues ranging from European security to health in Africa. Here in Canada, the tariffs have had a tangible impact on people livelihoods and the stability of our economy. Cost of living issues are now hitting Americans, too. Several polls taken during the government shutdown in late October 25 suggested that Trump was losing popularity.

One from Reuters Ipsos noted that overall disapproval of Trump's performance as president had risen to 57%. So what forms of pushback are those Americans most effectively making, individually and collectively. That's what I ask about in the second half of my on-stage conversation with author and political commentator Rachel Maddow and writer activist Rebecca Solnit.

Here's part two of the Graham Gibson Talk, 2025, at the Toronto International Festival of Authors. What other forces do you see successfully countering the administration most effectively right now? echoing what Rebecca said about the largest day of protests that's ever happened, at least in the last 50 years, Earth Day might have been bigger, maybe. I don't know. Seven million people turning out for no kings. Five million people turned out for no kings before that. The hands-off protests in April had three million people at them. You might remember at the hands-off protests, one of the real focuses there was Tesla dealerships to say hello to Mr. Musk. Again, that was three million people.

those hands-off protests in April. In May, Elon Musk left the government. And we don't, even that, which is so recent, we don't tell that story frequently enough in terms of the consequences that the American people meet it out to a public-facing company that needs customers to have associated themselves with this totalitarian project.

And it forced Musk out of the government. it temporarily at least ended, and I think ultimately hamstrung permanently, the Doge effort, which has now had to morph into a whole different thing on a whole different legal basis. So I think you can look at something like that. I think also the feedback loop, it's easy to forget sometimes that what we're trying to save is democracy, and the way you save democracy is with democracy. and the ultimate goal of saving democracy is to have democracy, right? So what we're trying to get is a process that through fair means allows us to choose our leaders

in the direction of our society. And that can feel boring and that can feel small ball, but that ultimately is what we're after and the means by which we have to get there. And so to see the feedback loop, to my mind, come correct for Democratic politicians right now, is very positive. So I don't believe that there is a Democratic Party, you know, savior that's going to fix all of this. But I do think that the American people have changed the perceived incentives and the reward structure for Democratic politicians, that they all know now that caving to Trump and trying to be Trump light, and trying to work with him on stuff that he wants to work with you on and acceding to his demands or appearing with him

or showing him fealty in the Oval Office. I think there isn't a Democratic politician left in America who is under any illusion about whether or not that's going to be a good thing for their electoral fortunes. And so to see that incentive structure come correct where Democrats are now realizing that if they want a future in their party and if they want a future in American politics, they better figure out the strongest, best,

most creative, and most effective way to oppose Trump. That, to me, feels like building from the ground up, and that can go forever. I want to zoom out a little bit. Rachel, the first year, this first year of Trump 2.0 has seen a lot of international action, both, you know, peace initiatives and various forms of aggression, including in some places economic aggression.

Did you anticipate that from an America First president? Well, the America First idea was never that coherent, first time around, got to say. I don't think I understood that the transactional and pay-as-you-go nature of the Trump presidency would become something that Trump felt like he could just brag openly about rather than have to try to keep secret. So getting the Trump family, what are they, towers or resorts, Trump World, I don't know what they're called, these things that he builds, like getting a bunch of them in Saudi Arabia,

getting them in Qatar, getting them in Vietnam, getting them in Indonesia, the fact that those countries have provided this largesse to his family business as a reason for him then to take a certain U.S. government action toward that country. I just thought we'd have to dig that up. I didn't think that would just be volunteered, like from the White House podium. So that takes some adjusting just to do that. But also, you know, the fact that, the fact that fact that, like, the tariffs thing, can I do, one thing that I feel like is a little bit underappreciated with the tariffs thing. I, among many other people, noted that Trump

announced tariffs on uninhabited islands, with which we do not trade because penguins have no pockets. It was, it's not just you guys. But, like, there were no tariffs on Russia. Like, how is it? What's the, they explained it. Like some observers explained it away. It's like, oh, they fed it into chat GPT, said, give me a list of countries and randomly come up with a number between 9 and 17, and that'll be the tariff rate for all of those countries. There was a purported explanation for where he came up with that list. But even, there's no, like, chat GPT prompt that produces a list of countries that includes uninhabited islands and not Russia. And so I do feel like there is a flagrant clownishness to the corruption in bad

faith that, again, I thought we'd have to dig up. I just didn't think it would be there like on the poster board in the Rose Garden. But, you know, it sort of begs the question, at least here in Canada, that, you know, these tariffs, these economic sort of maneuvers impact other countries in big ways, including here in Canada. And we really seem to get under Trump's skin. Is that skin particularly thin, or is it just, or is economic chaos kind of a strategy? Does it feel random? Is it an, that's not really an either-or. The answer to so many either-or questions is yes. I would be interested actually to hear your take on, on, I'm throwing it back to you a little bit. On the next show, Rachel Maddo show, yes. Well, why, like, what is it

about Canada that Trump keeps going back to and back to and back to. Well, what is it? I mean, my theory, because I think the president has a form of cleverness, but I think he's pretty, he's sort of a simple machine. I think he keeps coming back to Canada because he keeps getting reminded that Canada exists. Because Canada's close, and there's the prime minister, or somebody asked him about Canada, or the Blue Jays are in the World Series. And so he's, oh, yeah, there's another country there.

I think he comes up ad hoc with what seems to him like flashes of brilliance in terms of how to treat other countries based on the fact that that country has crossed his line of vision. And I honestly, I think that President Scheinbaum in Mexico has done actually a very good job of just kind of laying low so that Trump doesn't think about her very often, so that Mexico doesn't get, it's, everything about its relationship of the United States subjected to one of those burps of policy. I don't think it's a

rational or like sort of Freudian obsession. I think it's squirrel. You know, squirrel. It leaves me wondering though, Rebecca, like, you know, all these things climate denial, tariffs,

shutting down scientific research, cutting international aid. You know, these aren't things that only affect other countries. They also have fallout in the U.S. itself. Is it your sense that the average Americans is absorbing that and taking that in? Taking in that it's also hurting us. I don't know if there is an average American and there's a lot of different kinds. I think a lot of people are very cognizant of it. I think at the same time, you know, it feels like what does the federal

government do? A lot of people on the left thought it did nothing but kind of military incursions and, you know, police state business. A lot of people on the right thought it only did welfare and foreign aid. Like that was the entire federal budget. We're about to find out what the federal government does because it stopped doing it, including all the people who are going to not get SNAP, which is a sort of successor to food stamps, food benefits, but also a lot of things national parks among them are seizing to function effectively, weather service, et cetera. I think other things as well. I think that at the heart of it is the philosophy, nothing is connected to anything else. Non-white people are not connected to white people. Other countries

are not connected to America. Nature is not connected to our business plan, et cetera. There's this constant kind of disassociation and disconnection. And there's an old saying that Americans, wars, how Americans learn geography. And I kind of feel like civil wars, how Americans learn sociology. And there's going to be an exciting learning curve for people who didn't already know like why what USAID did was really valuable, even from a self-interested perspective. Back to language for a moment. you know, words like equality and freedom for all, ideas like independence of thought,

my sense is that Americans traditionally see these as, you know, values that are intrinsic to being an American. Those values, though, have been pressed in the service of authoritarian government, xenophobic policies. Do you have faith that more Americans will sort of see the contradiction between those two things? And something I want to say earlier about all the propaganda and lies is something I learned from writing about George Orwell is that authoritarians don't just see all the things we normally think of as rival powers as something to suppress and destroy. They see truth, fact, history, science, as rival powers. They want the only source of information of truth to be themselves, which is why they have to dismantle. the deeply democratic nature of fact, truth, history, and science. And so that's part of what's going on. But hope for me has never been optimism.

Optimism is everything will be fine, which invites people to kick back and wait for fine to arrive of its own accord. Hope for me is always that there are possibilities and that because there are, we have a responsibility to try to realize them and to not realize the worst possibilities. and this is the future is being made in the present. And so hope for me is not about prophesing a future that everything will be fine.

It's reminding people that we've changed the world before we can again. We know how it works. You know, in a crisis like this, we better get on with it. And on that point, Rachel, in the introduction to your book, you talk about the past and what's been done in the past, exactly what Rebecca was just talking about. And you say you hope that readers will find that this history would bolster your confidence in your ability to win our modern iterations

of those same recurring fights. Can you give an example? Yeah. I mean, some of it is what we've already talked about tonight. One of the things about having a sort of antagonist in this fight, who is a bit of a simple machine, is that simple machines like to go downhill, not uphill. They prefer easy things to heart. things. And so while I think a lot of the mythology and the dramatization of fighting an authoritarian force is that the authoritarian reacts to resistance by becoming angered and increasingly repressive and increasingly destructive, what we are living through does not show that, actually. That where there is resistance, there is often victory. Because this is a relatively

incoherent storm of an authoritarian movement. It's messy. And it loses momentum and it bounces off things and goes to other things and it has a really wide agenda. And that means that if you can create enough discomfort for them in any one area where they're trying to incur, where they're trying an incursion under your rights, they'll go somewhere else. And the challenge is to continue broadening the movement, both geographically, which I think is important, physical place matters, but also ideologically and just in terms of the size of the movement that's pushing back so that ultimately there's no place for them to comfortably make an incursion. I just think we're seeing that already.

And you see it in them withdrawing nominees, you see it in them for whatever reason deciding not to show up in the San Francisco Bay Area with their troops. Not to invade Canada after all. Yeah, it turns out Canadians maybe made Trump think that wouldn't be a good idea. Good job Canadians. It's still, I just like the way you make them sound a lot like a robot vacuum cleaner, a Roomba. You know, it's like, oh, there's a wall, let's go here. Yeah, you try a couple times, and then you realize like, oh, that's not a big hairball, that's a wall,

going to go over here. That's, that's, be the big hairball. That's the lesson of this hour. It's a perfect moment to ask you for your advice, actually. You know, history and current reality shows that self-serving governments and tyrannical leaders can gain a foothold absolutely anywhere, even in democracies. And in a really kind of divided, polarized time, citizens can have radically different definitions of self-serving and tyrannical.

So out of your own work, each of you, and experience, what's your advice to Canadians? Rebecca. Oh, my God. I feel like as a country that's in utter turmoil would be really a modest of us to give advice to Canadians. that's the least American thing that anybody has ever said perfect you know you're supposed to give advice to people who aren't doing as well as you so like you know Rachel um I mean I def I that is perfect advice like who are we to say honestly you guys are doing better than us don't be like us don't be like us don't be like us

I mean you guys have your own copycats right I mean when I said that these guys are boring I didn't mean that Trump is particularly boring they're all boring I mean Berlusconi is boring Putin is boring Orbán is boring Duterte is boring these guys are all the same person it's just different degrees of shirtlessness and like whatever their sport is it's all they all want to do the same thing and so there's nothing about Canada that precludes the rise of your own little Orban or whatever. And so I don't think there is anything that makes any country immune to the rise of a purported leader of this style. But I take absolute heart in what Rebecca is saying here, which is

that what somebody wants to do to you is not what happens. What somebody wants to do to you is a cue to you to decide what is going to happen to you. And there's no getting around that. To end off, like this event's co-founder, Margaret Atwood, each of you has been credited with oracular powers of foresight. So I wanted to just ask each of you to kind of project into the future, starting with you, Rachel, where do you see the U.S. in the next, or after five years? I mean, I think this has been a relatively optimistic discussion.

I will tell you that I am very, very worried about our next round of elections. The steps that can be taken to undercut the technical aspects of our democracy, which is literally people choosing their leaders at the ballot box, a lot of steps to undermine our 2026 election are underway. And we think of the 2028 one is the big one, but if 2026 doesn't happen, then we're already there. So if we cannot protect 2026 now, I think in five years we will be trying to rebuild a democracy almost from scratch

because I think we will be in a no elections or no real elections, autocratic system that is set on permanent control. That said, we'll know soon enough if we can protect 2026, I think there's no stopping the American people and having had a taste of what an autocracy would be like, having had a little taste of what an autocratic leader wants to do to us. I think if we can turn it back in 2026, then five years from now will be better off than we've been at any time in my lifetime. Please.

What I hear the right, the far rights saying, and not just in the U.S., but globally, is they're saying, you all have been very powerful. You've changed the world profoundly. You queer rights people. You're feminists, you anti-racist, you indigenous rights, environmentalist, climate people.

All you people who dismantled what was once the normal, structures of authoritarianism of parents over children, husbands over wives, elites over the rest of us, bosses over employees, teachers, over students. Like, you all have actually been very powerful and very successfully. You change the world profoundly. That's the fun thing that they're actually secretly telling us. But what we mostly hear from them is we hate it and we want to change it back. And they essentially want to hit rewind on what they see us because they're mostly old white guys, the VCR of history, which you never go back. You can go forward into better and into worse places, but we're not going to think about sexuality and sexual orientation

the way we did in 1954. I was saying backstage that I've always heard Make America great again as really Make America in 1958 again, which was the last time Trump was probably happy. You know, I write about Rachel Carson a bunch and to look at how not indigenous and close to the land people but other people were so oblivious to the intricate natural systems

from which we were never separate and never will be. Like the mechanistic thinking that was part of kind of settler, colonial, industrial capital, whatever, we have changed so profoundly. Women are never going to

accept being who we were in 1958. People of color are not excited to go back to Jim Crow in the American South or all the rest of it. And so they cannot make it run backwards. How it will run forwards, again, is something we're deciding all over the world, not just in the U.S. All over the world, you know, we're seeing a kind of new, enraged, paranoid right that is promising that you can subjugate women, people of color, queer people, trans people, you can forget about nature, you can just destroy it wholeheartedly. It never worked well. It definitely doesn't work, and it's definitely not what the majority believes. As we chant a lot in the U.S., we are not going back. And we do not know what we're going forward into, but we are not going back.

A final round, if you don't mind, we've talked about hope, we've talked about history. Can you each give an idea what role writing about those two things will have in the next few years as you continue facing these challenges, Rebecca? I feel like we're in a golden age of literature, whether it's fiction, nonfiction, etc. I'm really, and the piece I keep meaning to write is like, you know, journalism is dead, long-lived journalism. I see a lot of the corporate bamoths as kind of dinosaurs lumbering into their respective tar pits to be fossilized and studied by. But I see all this incredibly good journalism being done in independent newsletters, smaller publications in the U.S. Wired Rolling Stone. The New Republic are three of the ones I follow really closely.

The New Yorker continues to do spectacular reporting and analysis. I, my friend Bill McKibbin's Climate Newsletters, one I'd name, and there's so much good stuff being done, so many good things out there. And it never wasn't important to tell the truth. It's harder to tell it with all the lies we're surrounded by, Enceladon Valley.

Not only will spread lies in language, but will spread deep, fake videos. AI makes them much easier and more possible. We'll corrupt truth in every possible way. So I think it's more urgent to tell the truth, to write, and for people as educators, as parents, as friends in conversation, to equip each other to understand how to analyze, how to sift through, how to fact check, how to be careful about your sources, where to go to understand the world. And we're in a truth battle now on Silicon Valley and a lot of the corporate institutions are really smothering us in often really comforting disinformation and misinformation or just encouraging us to not feel the need to be informed to distract ourselves to death. So radical American poet Muriel Rue Kaiser once said, the world is not made out of atoms, it's made out of stories. We live and die by stories.

You know, stories that liberate us, stories that imprison us, stories that encourage cruelty, stories that encourage kindness, stories that make us understand how inseparable we are from nature, stories that deny it. And we live in a chaos of stories, and people need their compasses and maps to navigate. And that's one of the things stories, the good stories can provide. Beautiful. Thank you.

And stories from the past? And stories from the past. I think part of what Silicon Valley is feeding us is an illiteracy and an interest in pictures and moving pictures. And now with generative AI, that's all almost instantly useless slop. And so that means, I think, they sort of softened the field for us in terms of what we were willing to read and take in. And now they've ruined it. and it makes me think that maybe the future is analog. That there is going to be a premium,

both in terms of its effectiveness and in terms of its value, on the written word as created alone by human hands. And it's irreplaceable, and what they are putting out there to compete with it, has quickly eaten itself and turned itself into garbage. So I just think people like Rebecca Solnett, who can tell us stories about our past and about our future and guide us

toward thinking about things in a way that makes us feel more connected and not less connected to those around us. I mean, that's the way out. That's the trap door that gets us out of this scary play. You know, a headline in the... Toronto Star today, one of Canada's largest papers ran this way. It said the majority of Canadians no longer see America as a friend, but you certainly have a lot of friends in this audience tonight.

Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for your insights. Thank you. Thank you. You've been listening to Notes on the New America, the fifth annual Penn Canada, Graham Gibson Talk, recorded October 28th, 2025 at Toronto's Kerner Hall, part of Toronto's International Festival of Authors. The speakers were political commentator, podcaster, and writer, Rachel Maddo. Her latest book is called Prequel, An American Fight Against Fascism, and author, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit.

Her essay collection is called No Straight Road Takes You There. Thanks to Penn Canada, Toronto International Festival of Authors, the staff of Kerner Hall and Josh Nellman. Special thanks to Margaret Atwood. The Graeme Gibson Talk is named in honor of her late partner. The two writers were co-founders of Penn Canada, which fights for literary freedom. Graham knew how challenging it was for writers to deal with

censors and book banners, in some countries, to stay out of prison and keep your head on your shoulders if you write things that offend tyrants. This episode was produced by Lisa Godfrey. Web producer for ideas is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Will Yard and Sam McNulty. Senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyed.