The Bulwark Podcast - S2 Ep1038: Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin: The Power of 'No'

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

Protest is the new brunch again. We're witnessing historic levels of pro-democracy grassroots engagement across a broad-based movement of everyday people. The leaders of Indivisible join Tim to discuss how the movement needs to stay focused on what it agrees on— no kings—and to save ideological disputes for another day. Plus, it also needs to get more young people involved. But it definitely should keep ignoring political consultants who tell Dems not to talk about immigration— because it turns out that the federal government kidnapping people off the street is not popular. Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg join Tim Miller. show notes Indivisible's "No Kings" protest day

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is Thursday. Usually the next level pod is on Wednesday, but Sarah was traveling. So we did a late night episode that got pretty punchy. So if you're looking for politics and some bickering among friends, that is the place to go. That should be up by the time you hear this.

Check out the next level feed. On this show, we're getting earnest and activist-y, which you all know is a little bit out of my comfort zone, so I'm excited for it. They are the co-executive directors of Indivisible, the grassroots movement with thousands of local groups across the country. It's mission to elect progressive leaders, rebuild our democracy and defeat the Trump agenda. The Indivisible protests were the hands-off protests you saw a couple of weeks ago. Coming up, the next big one is Saturday, June 14th, where there will be no Kings rallies and marches on the day that Trump is throwing himself a birthday military parade.

It is Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin. Which one are we doing? Is it like Mark Levin, like the great one, or Ezra Levin, like Sandy Levin? You nailed it. First one, Levin. Levin, I got it right. I am so excited to do this. You guys were in a room together.

It was so cute. You're married and you started this together and we're going to do kind of like a kissing booth type podcast situation, but you know, for sound purposes, we've had to separate you and I'm just, I want to start before we get into the very important work you're doing. Give people the background. How did this happen? What is it like to work with one's spouse in a high stress environment like running protests?

Give us the origin story. So our background is that we both got our start as congressional staffers in the early Obama years on the Hill. Ezra worked for a member from Texas. I worked for a member from a deep red district in Virginia. We both- Perriello, I saw that. Tom Perriello, that's right.

I worked in that district back in the day. Oh, yeah. It's like- It's not going to age me. I was a Republican then too, so we're not going to talk about it. We could go into that at a different time. Yeah. Anyways, it was an education in a lot of ways, but the big one was that we interacted a lot with the Tea Party in our jobs. We saw them organize.

We disagreed enormously with their bigotry, their violence, but we also saw some very effective organizing tactics. Each of us moved on. We went on to do other things in our lives. I worked on human trafficking, Ezra worked on poverty policy. After Donald Trump was elected in 2016, we went back to that period in our lives and thought, hey, there's some lessons that we can learn from this. We're in this moment where everything that we care about is under attack.

We've actually just seen a model of what it looks like to organize locally in a way that puts pressure on your local elected officials and significantly impedes the agenda of the other party. And so we basically took all the lessons that we had learned watching the Tea Party operate. We turned it into a how-to guide to organizing locally to stop the Trump agenda.

And we put it out on the internet in December 2016. We thought our friends would read it. We thought they would maybe share it with their families when they went home over Christmas. We were not prepared at all for what happened next, which was that thousands of people started reading it and sharing it and using it as the basis of forming local groups. The title of the guide that we had put out was called Indivisible. Suddenly there were indivisible groups all over the country who were picking it up and gathering communities

and starting to organize and hold their elected officials accountable. And we found ourselves catapulted into this incredible grassroots movement of regular people who were not waiting for Washington to resist, to actually start fighting back and who were kicking both Democrats and Republicans into gear to push back against Trump.

So this is, we're Thanksgiving 2016 and you guys both have other jobs and you're married already or we just dated? We are married. We're married, okay. And we create a Google Doc. That's it? That's how it started? That's how it started.

Yeah. We did not think we were starting an organization. We mostly thought we were going to get fired. Fired from the jobs that you're in? What was in the Google Doc? What did it say? I mean, the Google Doc was 23 pages of how do you organize to- That is type A to start.

I mean, you just did a 23 page Google Doc just for shits? I thought it's not in my wheelhouse. I'm more of Twitter length writing. Tim, you've got to remember at the time in late 2016, this is Trump is coming in with a unified Republican Congress promising to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He had future appointees talking about the Japanese internment camps during World War II

as a model for what to do with Muslims and immigrants and refugees. People were scared. And there was this organic energy already building, right? And people were looking for, okay, how do we secure our devices? How do we, how do we push our elected officials? And Lee and I, being former congressional staffers and having, having seen the Tea Party in action, we thought, well, look, one thing you can do is get organized locally in a group, focus on your own elected officials and tell them to fight back if they're Democrats and

tell them to leave the MAGA coalition if they're Republicans and never give an inch. So the guide explicitly drew from the Tea Party. The first chapter is all about here are lessons from the Tea Party. Here's what we saw. We didn't agree with their bigotry, the races and their violence, but damn it, they knew how to organize locally and they knew how to focus on their elected officials and they didn't win everything, but they were able to stall some things and defeat other things. So look, I mean, we put the Google Doc out, it took off that night.

I remember Lee and I, we were like, we did a good thing. It's like people are reading this, this is cool. And then we started getting all these responses that all said the exact same thing, which is this guide that you put out is just absolutely chock full of typos. Because that's, it turns out when you put a document on what, that's what you get. But then as Leah said, what people started doing, they started picking it up and forming these groups. It was an incredible thing.

And we, at the bottom of the very first page at the end of his book, the original one, we said very explicitly, we're not selling t-shirts, we're not forming an organization, take this and run with it. Good luck to you. And then we formed an organization when there was this incredible outboard of movement energy. There were all these groups getting started in Tallahassee or in Austin or in Albany, and they were telling us, hey, we just got a group together in our living room. What do we do next?

Yeah, right. And so we started by just pulling volunteers together and saying, well, we've got to respond to all these people. And then that turned in to the Indivisible National Organization. So I mean, I've got listeners that are asking that same question right now. So, it's like you're forming groups, you're contacting members, you're showing up to town halls, like what else was in there? Jennifer Well, the basic idea is, you know, we exist in a limited but still real representative

democracy in some core ways, right? And so so your elected officials care about certain things. They care about getting reelected. They care about their future position. That means they are responsive to some kinds of incentives and not to others. They like good attention in their district. They want to maintain that coalition of 50% plus a little bit extra of people who will vote for them. They don't like surprises.

They don't like bad press or bad attention. They don't like to waste their time. You can kind of use the incentives to make them either listen to you and do more of what you want, or you can use those same tools to make them pay a political price for not doing so. And that's really the core, right? And then you just take the tactics, right? You show up at town halls, you make them answer questions about the things that they don't necessarily want to talk about. You try to shift attention to the issues that you know your fellow constituents are going to care about and respond to. It's all just about how do you systematically move the pieces so that your elected officials have the incentives to do what you want and do less of what you don't want. So talk about the parallels and

differences between that moment and now, right? Because it seems like in that moment, you're kind of like riding this tiger a little bit where there's just all of this outpouring and a lot of people that weren't even paying attention really to politics were, were wanting to protest and it caught everybody off guard, right? So there's this natural of kinetic energy out there. Not for me, I was hiding under the covers actually, but out there in the world, there are a lot of people that wanted to, I was like reading sad fiction. I was like, I need to check out.

But for a lot of other people, they wanted to get out. And this time, it does feel like there's been more of like a need to prod, right? Like there's people felt a little bit more beaten down. At least that's my perception from the outside. Why don't you guys talk about it, like actually talking to the types of folks that are showing up at these sorts of things. What I would say is really interesting about this moment is from our experience as people who were the place that you go when you want to do something and we have been in hyperdrive since November because people have been flooding in and getting organized. We broke the record for new groups in November of 2024 and then broke it again in December and then every month since then we've broken it again. There has been a steady build of people organizing on the ground. Now, that hadn't manifested in big protests,

the kinds of things that we traditionally associate with 2017. But from our perspective, the early signs of that are someone puts up a Facebook invitation for a meeting and they're expecting 20 people and they get 300. That stuff was happening as of January. What we saw was there was definitely a popular reaction that was building and that was forming with with some skepticism early on of kind of protest as the mechanism, but a lot of interest in organizing.

What was really different about this time was the degree of elite institutional and actor collapse that happened immediately after the election. Right. Because regular people were sad, but they were pretty clear that they were going to push back. What changed, what was different was corporations did not put out the statement saying, we stand in solidarity with democracy. Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos rushed to kind of reach an accommodation with the regime. Pete Slauson Like Zuckerberg had a struggle session in 2017, right? Like with the whole Facebook staff had to come and talk about their feelings and like they had a meet, you know what I mean?

Like compare that to giving a million dollars and sitting in the front row. Right, exactly. Well, and media institutions, you know, a lot of the corporate media institutions kind of moved very quickly into how do we accommodate, how do we comply, how do we avoid what's coming at us personally? Like what we saw in general was regular people were pretty clear that they were going to push back. It was actually the kinds of institutions that we think of as

like shaping meaning for society that folded very swiftly. A lot of what we've been trying to do over the last couple of months is really dispute the foundations that led to that happening and push as much as we can, the rest of society back into that posture of opposition. Yeah, I do wonder, Ezra, what do you think just, and add onto that anything, but just on one specific point, you know, look, like obviously, people that are really engaged, activists, news consumers, people that listen to political podcasts, right, like, have been engaged in showing up to these things. Like to me, I do wonder, and it's kind of hard, you know, like, I don't know, you're

at the events more than me, right? It's hard unless I'm like interviewing strangers at the events and be like, where, what's your story? It does feel like maybe there was a little bit of a gap between like engaged people who are opposed and want to do something versus like casuals, if you will. But maybe that's wrong. I don't know. What do you think?

That's always going to be true. That was true in 2016 too, Tim. versus like casuals, if you will. But maybe that's wrong. I don't know. What do you think? That's always going to be true. That was true in 2016 too, Tim. There were a lot of people who were hyper focused on politics who immediately after election were shocked, had wished they had done more. And so what they did in some cases were to form a local indivisible group, get their community together.

Like Leah said, you know, days after the election, we left our kids with my mom and then went to a cabin in West Virginia to write the new Indivisible Guide and then put it out the following week. We had tens of thousands of people join that call to find out what can I do in this moment. So there was a real gap between how the broader media was covering the reaction to Trump's reelection

and how a lot of folks on the ground were responding to it. Likely, look, we had more indivisible groups form in November than any month since 2017 when protests was the new brunch. We beat the November number in December, we beat the December number in January, we beat the combined number of new local indivisible groups from November, December, and January in February and then beat that number in March. So what we were witnessing as organizers on the ground were a lot of folks who were flipping out, but they weren't hiding. They were trying to grapple with the situation and what they were

doing was organizing on the ground. And they were responding to two things. One was the heinous Trump agenda and the promises that this administration and the Congress were making at the time and then proceeded to implement. But the other was the sense of fecklessness and leaderlessness at the national level from the Democratic Party. The sense that, wait a minute, we were campaigning against this guy's Mussolini for two years and suddenly after the election, you switch over and act like, oh, he's just another Republican and we're going to cut deals with him.

What the hell is this? So we saw Democratic leadership pivot and rank and file Democrats were like, absolutely not. We've got to organize against this guy. And I think those two features, which were somewhat similar to 2016, drove this wave of engagement that was largely behind the scenes up until February, because in February was congressional recess. And then suddenly in February, all the headlines were about where the hell did all these people come, they're in Republican districts and they're in Democratic districts and they're angry with Democrats for not fighting back.

And they're angry with Republicans for backing up Musk and Trump. This is amazing. I guess the resistance isn't dead, but for the month for November, December, and January, I can't tell you how many journalists I talked to were like, well, obviously the resistance is dead. There's not going to be any opposition and y'all screwed this up. So it's been an interesting journey these last six months, but we're a hell of a lot better off right now than we were six months ago. Yeah, this is usually a doomer pod, but I'm going to try to stay positive, we're going to say, because there are some positive things, right? Like,

and I'm curious what you guys see as successes, right? So if you look back on 2018, obviously, the Obamacare is a success, right? Stopping the Obamacare appeal. The child separation, I think, is one that stands up, is one that they had to pull back on. Looking at now, and this is more modest because it's early, but just listening to you, Democratic politicians are getting more backbone now in response to hearing from people, hearing from their own voters and realizing what they

want. So that's in some ways a success, right? Because that's what you want them to have more backbone. So what else are you seeing out there that is encouraging? Elon Musk is leaving the White House with his tail between his legs. We kicked his ass up and down Wisconsin in a Supreme Court race. Donald Trump's approval rating is at 40%. I mean, I don't know.

What we see is the wheels are coming off of this administration and maybe not fast enough. Look, we can be Doomer. We are in a dire position right now. We are in a constitutional crisis. We're in a dire position right now. We are in a constitutional crisis. We're in a period of authoritarian breakthrough. We haven't won yet, but the big bright silver lining out there is as institutions like media institutions or law firms or some universities are falling, we're seeing a historic level of pro-democracy grassroots engagement.

And when you listen to the experts in authoritarianism, what they tell you, you need as a bulwark for democracy. Sorry. So to speak. So to speak. You need people, normal everyday people organizing a broad-based, ideologically diverse, geographically distributed movement

of pro-democracy people organizing. That's what works. That's what saves democracy. There's no other silver bullet out there. So that's what should give us optimism. Not that Donald Trump is suddenly going to see the light of day or that a lot of Republicans are going to join you, Tim, but that normal people are organizing against

one of the most unpopular policy agendas and most aggressively anti-democracy administrations in American history. That's pretty cool. And if we can build that, that's the solution. Leah, you got anything to add to that? Well, I think there's a direct relationship or there's a complex but very interactive relationship

between kind of the mass opposition and these institutions, right? So one thing that I've heard from multiple people who are a part of the Harvard organizing efforts, efforts to try to make sure that Harvard was standing up and pushing back against the Trump administration's efforts to functionally take it over, was the environment changed dramatically after hands off. Big public shows of opposition helped to reinforce so many people who are organizing in places

that we don't necessarily have eyes into. We can't run the campaign, but they are either helped or hurt by the overall environment that we create. And fundamentally, we're in this moment that we describe as authoritarian breakthrough. It's a period where a regime tries to very rapidly push its powers to the max in order to consolidate and cow alternate sources of power into opposition.

And every other alternate source of power, businesses, higher education, media institutions, etc., they're making calculations based on whether they think this is the new normal or whether they think maybe this is a short-term emergency and democracy will reassert itself. And it's our job to introduce into their minds the very clear possibility that democracy will reassert itself, that there is going to be a massive popular reaction to this regime that ensures that it cannot consolidate power, that it cannot become the new normal, and that they have to make decisions about how they're going to go along with it or how they're going to push back, that they have to live with in

either situation, not just in the situation where Trump takes over, consolidates, and becomes the ultimate dictator. For the long time listeners, our adventure with Aretha, the neighborhood cat, who's become my part-time cat, continues. Thanks to our sponsor, Smalls. We were feeding the neighborhood cat some food, then the snowstorm, the 100-year snowstorm in New Orleans happened, and I was stuck in New York. My husband and child brought the cat inside

and the cat was inside a lot and the cat must like summer because summer happens. Now the cat likes to be outside. I gotta tell you, I don't hate that but you know, the cat's still coming yesterday, two days ago, whenever it was, during the nuggets game. I was yelping and it freaked out the cat so much that the only thing to get it to calm down was shaking the little bag of Smalls treats. If you want that experience for your cat, I'd recommend turning to Smalls as well. This podcast is sponsored by Smalls. If you're a listener of the show, you know that my cat cannot live without Smalls.

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So we're just spreading the love all around uptown. The neighborhood cats have never been better fed here in New Orleans. Smalls has a bunch of amazing treats and snacks you can add to your order. And the team at Smalls is so confident your cat will love their product that you can try it risk-free. That means they'll refund you if your cat won't eat their food. What are you waiting for? Give your cat the food they deserve for a limited time only because you are a Bulwark

listener. You can get 35% off Smalls plus an additional 50% off your first order by using my code theBulwark. That's an additional 50% off when you head to Smalls.com and use promo code TheBullwork. Again, that's promo code TheBullwork for an additional 50% off your first order plus free shipping at Smalls.com. I want to do one more positive on that front before I get to some of my concerns because we saw something, Simon and Louisiana, Leah and I were talking about why we're making

Ezra move to a different room. We had these like ballot initiatives that were on. I don't know if this was even on your radar, because it's like very local. And it was the governor here, who's a MAGA guy, was pushing these ballot initiatives that were kind of arcane really, and like what it was gonna do.

It was not like a easy to understand issue, like a minimum wage increase or something. It was like these changes with, you know, his control of the judiciary and the tax system. And what you saw was just like this grassroots outpouring against it. And you said two things happening at the same time, like which is massive turnout in big democratic areas. So like New Orleans turnout was like 62% or something and it was 27% the rest of the state.

And you saw just a shout out to my people, like the people that did leave the Republican Party that came to this are all hyper-engaged types. The New Democratic Coalition includes people who do show up to these off, off, off-year elections, random elections that folks aren't aware of unless you're really paying close attention. And I do think that you're seeing that that is something that can be catalyzed. And you have these sorts like random elections in a lot of places. And I just wonder what you guys are doing to kind of play off of that. Absolutely.

We have got a coalition that we've got work to do for the general elections. And also it is extremely well optimized to maximize gains in off year, special elections in midterms, et cetera, anytime when you're going to depend on a motivated voting base. So I think the big opportunity that's coming up is Virginia and New Jersey, right? We're going to have these elections in the fall. They're going to be the first pretty decisive opportunities to further repudiate Trumpism, to demonstrate that this doesn't play across the board. That's especially important because, you know, New Jersey got closer than people would have

liked to see in 2024, right? And so these are two states that are, you know, where the margins are going to matter for demonstrating for people exactly how much of a political penalty they're going to pay for continuing to be on board here. So we're working with our folks, we're organizing already. We tested in 2024 and are continuing to hone and roll out a technology that allows us to send folks to talk to their immediate neighbors. Low information or low turnout voters who we think will vote with us, if turned out literally within their neighborhood. We saw

that we've done that over a couple of cycles with some really exciting results. And so we're continuing to work on, you know, how do we make sure that we take the energy that we have from regular people and translate it into ways to reach people that break through the ads, that break through kind of the social media chaos, and actually reach them as regular human beings through relationships. Okay, so here's some things that to be, you know, concerned about. I'm interested in how you guys are, what you're saying. We'll talk about so many things we're concerned about. That's all right.

Good. I'm not covering, I'm not covering them all with you because you're activists. So we're not going to go over all the policy. I have a lot of policy concerns. Do you have any thoughts on the terrorists? The economic collapse and pending. We did that on Tuesday, the fear. So I was on a panel recently, I was getting questions.

There's a woman who raised her hand and says, my daughter is in college, I forgot where she's going. And her and her friends are kind of scared to protest. And they don't know if they've got friends who are here on a foreign visa, they don't wanna put their head up. And I'm just wondering, how much of that are you kind of seeing out there? Unfortunately, that's understandable.

This guy is not a normal Republican president. This administration is not leading like a normal conservative government. It's not just something that we disagree with ideologically on education and economic policy. There's an attack on the basic norms of liberal democracy right now. I would love to be able to tell everybody out there that, don't worry about it, it's not serious, you don't have to be concerned. But the whole idea of the authoritarian playbook is to attack dissent, is to marginalize it, is to make people fearful that if they

speak up, there might be consequences. There is no foolproof plan to address that on our side other than strength in numbers, other than getting as many people out to accept some level of risk personally and to stand up for democracy. I think this is not to get too schmaltzy about it, but it's one of the inspiring things that we experience every week working with Indivisible leaders. These are not hardened politicos. These aren't professional employed politicians. These are nurses and teachers and IT technicians. They're normal

everyday people out in blue, red, and purple states and rural communities and urban communities. And they see what's going on and they're deciding to take on risk in order to stand up for their values. And because they are doing it, other people see them do it and get the courage to do it too. The kind of the bumper sticker, courage is contagious is a bumper sticker,

but it's also true and it applies not just to individuals, it applies to institutions as Leo was talking about. Universities are looking left and right, law firms are looking left and right, politicians are looking left and right and trying to think, well, how safe is it for me to show up? Is my neighbor showing up? Are my constituents showing up? Are my constituents showing up? Are my students showing up?

Oh, okay, I guess I should show up. It's a classic collective action problem. You need a lot of people to act, and it's in everybody's individual interest to hide under the covers. And so our job is to try to make it as easy and as safe as we possibly can make it for more people to come up.

Because if they do, then it is safe. Then we are in the majority. Then they are marginalized. Then it is foreign and untenable for them to crack down on peaceful protest. But the fear is real. But that's the plan. That is their goal is to spread that fear. The fear is real. The risk is real, but that's the plan. That is their goal is to spread that fear. The fear is real, the risk is real,

but it's not evenly distributed. Like all of us are in fact under threat. I wanna be clear that we are indeed all under threat. We're not all under threat in the same ways at the same times. And so one of the things that I think I am seeing a lot of is people who are recognizing, you know, maybe that foreign student who's on a visa,

maybe they can't be the one leading the protest right now. That's why I, you know, I'm an older, white college educated person. I gotta show up. I gotta put myself on the line here. We've heard from a lot of people who understand that because they don't have quite as many risk factors

right now for themselves personally, it is more incumbent on them to step forward. And I think that's really important and powerful. I totally agree with that. And I try to spread that message as much as possible. I worry I'm going to give you guys a chance to critique us in the kind of anti-Trump media a little bit. I worry that the doomerism like has a negative effect on people actually showing up.

Like I get comments and questions are like, Tim, it's like, we're not even going to have elections in 2028 and like it's fucking over. And I worry about this, right? I think that that a lot of times we're covering things that are legitimate things to be concerned about. It's kind of hard in a media pundit space to like, to contextualize something that's a 15% risk, right? Like a 15% risk that we don't have an election in 2028 is really bad.

I mean, it's much higher than, you know, it was 0% my entire life, you know, and now it's 15%. But it's still only 15%, right? It's not like 85%, but the people listening. So I do kind of worry that like the bubble of anti-Trump media gets people into an unhealthy place. I don't know. What do you guys make of that?

I think it's only unhealthy if people's only experience with politics is as a consumer of political media. I think it's important to consume political media to become informed about the world. Like you wanna know what's going on, but what we advise people to do is not just be a consumer. Politics should not be something that you just treat as a TV show that you watch,

that you are not some sort of victim of world events. You are an active participant in it. And so by all means, listen to the bulwark, listen to Tim, you'll get informed, you'll learn about the world. That is great. But don't shut it off and then go to your next task. Think about what do you do with that information? And so for us, our unit of activism is not the individual. Our unit of activism is the local group.

We've got a couple thousand local indivisible groups spread across every congressional district in the country. And that's important because those groups foster action. They don't exist just to talk about political media. They exist to focus on where do we have leverage? Maybe our Republican Senator doesn't give a shit about us. Okay, we're not going to push them now, but maybe we've got a city councilperson or a state legislature or a US rep or a governor.

We can push there. Let's talk about how we collectively use our power. What's the next thing we're doing? Is there a march that we're showing up? Is there an op-ed that we can write? Is there a town hall we can go to? But taking that step from being informed to action, those two things go together. I don't want people taking action if they're not informed.

And I also don't want people to just be informed for the sake of being depressed about the state of the world. I'd also just add, I think we have this very tricky messaging balance to land all of us in media or advocacy, right? Because we kind of need people to live in two worlds at the same time. We need them to live in the world where normal advocacy, normal elections are real and are happening and matter and invest in that world and insist on that world, right?

Because a really, really bad outcome is one where everybody just kind of assumes that elections are off the table and won't happen anymore, right? If they do try to steal elections, we need people to be outraged as if it had never occurred to them that this was an option at all. So we need people to live in that normal world. And we also need them to live in a world where there is a regime that's rapidly trying

to consolidate power. And we have to look at like, what are the tactics? What are the ways in which you organize as a nonviolent social movement that's trying to prevent that consolidation of power. Some of those overlap and some of them are different. Can I just make a meta comment? We don't do a ton of interviews together and it's kind of funny because Lee and I play

very different roles in the organization. She's like the brilliant strategy and thinker and I'm like the enthusiast and I think it's on full display in this interview. It's so real. I'm like the enthusiast and I think it's on full display in this interview. That's so real. I'm loving it. I'm also noticing you guys, since you said that you do your little team meetings in the room together, we're just kind of looking at each other and now we've separated you and I kind of notice Ezra like looking over to be like, is this a you?

And it's like, wait a minute, we're not. We're normally like nudging each other, you know, like I want this question or you know, so now we have to like I want this question or yes. It is cute. Let's do strategy then. So we'll go to Leo to the strategist. One thing that I just wonder, and I was watching the hands off protest is like there is, it's like there's this balance, right? Like it's like, on the one hand, that's a vague big umbrella, right? That everybody can kind of feel like they fit under, whether they're a former Republican or a Communist, you know? On the other hand, like, if you look at protests that have been really catalyzing in the past, like, it's usually, like, about something, right? George Floyd, the Tea Party was kind of broad, but it was, like, ostensibly about spending, right?

You know, March for Our Lives, school shootings, right? How do you you guys balance that right now and how are you thinking about it? And are you thinking that you need to find a catalyzing event or that you're thinking you're trying to keep it as broad as possible? The answer is kind of yes and yes, both. Our initial assumption we had heading into this period was that protests would be more touched off by specific events, catalyzing events during this time. And what we've seen is that the speed at which they are moving, right?

They're doing this kind of warp speed, running through a bunch of very, very awful and unpopular things very swiftly, makes it hard for individual things that should be massive era defining developments to break through, right? You get rid of the Department of Education, that should be the only thing anyone talks about

for like a month. Had George Bush done that in 2001, you know, it'd be the only thing anyone talks about for like a month. Had George Bush done that in 2001, you know, it'd be the only thing that everybody's protesting on until 9-11 happened, I guess. But you know what I mean? Like in a different time, right? Exactly. So our strategy with Hands Off was to, you know, to articulate an emotion that everyone

was feeling regardless of what specific thing was bringing them to that moment, right? Whether it was the attack on social security that moment, whether it was the attack on social security and Medicare, whether it was an attack on our civil rights, whether it was the attack on immigrants in our communities, articulate that kind of collective sense of loss aversion and wed it to a story that could hold us all. They are out of control. They're wrecking the things we care about, and they are doing it to benefit themselves. And then push together.

And there may well be moments in the future that do breakthrough as that catalyzing moment, and then we're kind of in a rapid response mobilizing around that. But for now, what we're seeing is working, is giving people the container that holds the collective sense of chaos and harm and destruction and gives people a space for outrage and pushing

back. And we did that with, you know, that was the thinking behind the hands-off framing. That's the thinking behind the no-kings framing as well, right? We're creating a container that's big enough to hold anybody who's like, this guy has gone too far. We're not trying to say, you know, here's our entire issues platform, but we are saying, you know, we are all under attack and we're all showing up to push back on this autocratic, imperious, corrupto rule. Pete Yeah. And the Elon thing was maybe felt like for a moment that could be it,

but now maybe he's going back. I don't know. Ezra, what do you think about that? I know some of the No Kings, I wonder is like, will some people be like, well, he's not a king. You know, again, is this a play to just be able to really focus? I don't know. Ezra Look, there is such power in no, there is such power in no. And when you look across the world at creeping authoritarianism and the movements that pushed back successfully against them, they did not agree on what the ruling party should do after the authoritarian was taken down. They didn't.

And that's really important. We've got to recognize a hard political truth. We lost the White House. We lost the House. We lost the Senate. The orange guy with tiny hands sets the agenda every week. Whatever he posts on Truth Social, suddenly that's what we're talking about. That's the consequences of being wiped out in 2024 at the national level.

So we have the ability to respond. That's what we have the ability to do. We can respond to the agenda that's being put forward. And your response can be, well, let's see how we can cut some deals. Maybe we can work with them. Or it could be, fuck no, we're not going along with this guy.

We're not allowing him to concentrate power further in the White House. We are in the fuck no category. And we are trying to build a unified opposition party that says no. And that unified opposition party that says no. And that unified opposition party should include you, Tim. It should include the socialists in TSA. It should include Matt Ecclesius.

It should include liberals and shouldn't include progressives. We can all agree right now that the political question of the day, which is, do we want more authoritarianism or don't we? We can all have the same answer to that. And then we can fight it out in 2029 when we have a unified democratic control of the government. That's great. Let's fight then. But right now, to build a mass movement, being able to say,

do you want a king? Is a king something you want in America? Well, this guy is spending $50 million taxpayer dollars on a military parade on his birthday on June 14th. I'm going to put tanks through the street of D.C. Is that something you want while he comes after your Social Security, your Medicaid, your Medicare? Well, a very big coalition can say no to that,

and our plan is to have, I don't know, a thousand, two thousand protests around the world on that day everywhere but D.C. And it's gonna be driven by normal people who say, no, I don't want kings. I might not agree on economic policy. I might not agree on education policy, but you know what I do agree with these DSA folks on? I don't want kings. You know what I agree with Tim on? I don't want kings. That's great. Then we can fight it out after we actually have a liberal democracy that responds to the will of the people on what the future proactive policy agenda ought to be.

Yeah. I don't want any kings. I don't want this fucking king in particular. There we go. There we go. As well. We can start there. So, I do another show that's focused on getting Gen Z folks involved, is that we have only

Gen Z guests with Cam Caskey, who did March for Our Lives. And he's like, I didn't feel like my networks were very engaged on hands off on the first round, right? And I don't mean this as a criticism, it's just like kind of a reality. They're getting information differently. You look at the pictures from the protests and it does seem to be kind of a lot of more older folks, right? Which is a little different, right?

At least for, you know, that's not different throughout all of history, but it's different like through our lives, right? Like most of the big protests we've seen have kind of been, you know, that's not different throughout all of history, but it's different, like, through our lives, right? Like most of the big protests we've seen have kind of been, you know, it's been younger folks that have been driving them or the front faces of them, at least. Why do you think that is? Are you worried about it? Are you thinking about how to engage younger people differently? It's a great question. And we've seen the same pictures and, you know, it's a live conversation within our own network as well, right? Because we do tend to have folks who are millennial, who are baby boomer, who are Gen X as kind of our core organizing cadre.

And so how Gen Z moves into action is definitely a live question. And I do think that there's a bunch of complicated and intersecting stuff here, right? This is a generation whose formative years were derailed by COVID in a way that wasn't true for someone who was 30 or older when COVID hit. This is a generation that's been shaped by watching the catastrophic events unfold in the Middle East over the last couple of years

and by the Biden administration's response. And I think we've got to note that like the most visible mass demonstration of youth over the last couple of years has been the pro-Palestine movement, right, has been the anti-genocide movement. And so there are in fact young people who are out there and we actually, you know, figure this is again where we talk about like, what is the big 10, right? So I think there's a piece of this that's about, you know, how do you engage young people who have generally experienced the system as one that has not served them and so are not moved by appeals around institutions, are not moved by appeals around reclaiming and protecting a democracy that they perceive as not having worked for them. That's not unique to young people, right? That's the million dollar question

for a lot of voters who we lost in 2024, but I think it's particularly notable with them. I had one other element to that. I was wondering, I'm curious to your take on this. I'd say answer anything on that, but specifically on the Trump question, because it relates to the no-kings framing. I think part of it is just to like our age and up, he's more of an aberration, right? And so using him as the catalyst is going to work more. I don't know.

I was speaking to high school and my high school when I was home a couple of weeks ago, you know, the linear nature of time is confusing. And I was like talking about the 2016 campaign, you know, and like one of the kids raised their hand was asking like an obvious question about the 2016 campaign. I appreciate all obvious questions, but then I was like, wait a minute. So how old were you then? He was like seven, you know, and I'm going, oh, right. Like a sophomore in high school or a

freshman or a junior in high school, whatever, was seven during the 2016 campaign. And so they don't have any framework. So I do wonder if that is like part of the challenge, right? Like figuring out some other way that besides Trump bad, I don't know. What do you think about that?

God, that's so tragic, Tim. That just makes me sad that there's a generation of people who are growing up where Trump is normal, Trump is reality, and he defines a political era. We got to make it so that's not normal. We've got to get beyond this era. There has to be an era of accountability after this, where we make very clear that people who go along with the demolishing of our institutions face consequences and And that that is not something that we as a society accept.

God, that makes me so sad to think of young people growing up. Do you want to keep getting sad? His picture is going to be in the classroom two times when your kid goes to school. So anyway, just on the little president poster on the wall. Thanks for that, Tim. Yeah, yeah, that's my job here. That's my job here. Wow.

Wow. You guys are the earnest cheerleader. Let's go protest. I'm like, yeah, here we go. Here's a reality bomb. Our kids are two years old and four years old. So Zeke, the older one, was at the protest when we defeated Trump, which was glorious. And he only knows Trump as the bad guy who wants to take my toys.

And the younger, the two-year-old doesn't know anything. Yeah. And actually, an increasing number of Americans are knowing him as the bad guy he wants to take your deals, which is great. It's pretty accurate assessment and more accurate than- That's good. Maybe Jen Alfov will have a more coherent Trump as evil of world view than the Gen Zs.

Look, if we're successful, the story of this period is going to be that time when America faced some scary authoritarian threat, but ultimately we overcame it and we reasserted democracy. And that's the future that we're aiming for. I do think it is really important that we don't just get the merit garlands of the world in power again in 2029 and decline to actually prosecute these assholes who are demolishing our institutions. And I think it's actually important not just to have a democratic trifecta in 2029, but to start talking about an accountability agenda now, because we want those institutions and those leaders who are considering going along with this guy to think, oh no, if the Democrats

win and it looks like they're going to, I might face consequences. I might actually have to face a committee and talk about how I helped implement a deportation agenda that kidnapped Americans and sent them to a work camp in El Salvador. I want leaders making that choice. I want airplane pilots deciding whether or not to take off to be thinking about that when they choose whether

or not to help this authoritarian. But on Gen Z, the thing I was going to say, I think we suck at reaching Gen Z where they are. As a pro democracy movement at the Democratic Party, I think we're just getting our clock cleaned by the other side. I think that's what you need. But Charlie Kirk is just better at this. I hate to give Charlie Kirk a thousand percent.

I hate to give him credit, but it's like, you have to actually try. How did Charlie Kirk get better at it? He fucking tried. He did the same thing you guys did, but just with a focus on campus. And trying actually matters. So we just hired on somebody from NextGen, one of the lead youth organizers, to lead up our new media operations, specifically with an eye for, look, we don't know what the hell we're doing in this. We're not doing it well right now.

How can we do better? How can we actually reach out to different audiences? Because I love getting quoted in New York Times or Washington Post or in MSNBC. That's great. It's not enough to reach the populations we need to reach. We need to figure out how to reach out to new and emerging media. I totally agree with all that, especially the accountability part, which I didn't ask about, but you know how to pander to the podcast because I'm with you on that. A demigration thing. That's the other, I think it's a strategic question kind of right.

Cause this is the thing that pisses me off the most, right? Like it's the thing that gets my blood boiling. It's the fact that it's us, it's our government that has kidnapped people and put them in a fucking hole in El Salvador. It's our government that took a 19 year old who was came here when she was four, but she didn't commit any crimes consciously. And now she's shackled in a fucking cell in Georgia because she did a right on a no right turn traffic light that happened yesterday. So that's what pisses me off the most.

But like, I don't know, is it maybe not strategically right to get into just an immigration frame, you know, because of that broad tent, how can you take these horror stories and use them to appeal to a broader group and have it not just be a straight immigration protest. Do you guys think about that at all? Well, we think that it's a core part of the story, right? Because you can't separate this kind of escalation of a deportation agenda from the broader attack on democracy and civil rights, right? Like the same tools, the same vehicles, the same people are being used for both. The same threats are being applied to both.

When they take innocent people and consign them to a torture camp in El Salvador, they're trying to create the conditions that cause a lot of immigrants in this country to leave because that threat, that fear is so great. That is an intentional strategy to create fear amongst our immigrant neighbors. It's also an intentional strategy to create fear amongst our immigrant neighbors. It's also an intentional strategy to create fear

amongst the rest of us, right? Like the idea, the threat behind we might put American citizens in El Salvador is aimed at everyone who might oppose the regime in any possible way. And so I think that we have to fold these stories together and we have to recognize that the ways in which they are going after immigrant communities in this country are actually the preview and the same kind of coercive machinery that they intend to apply to the rest of us and that fighting back against these kinds of attacks

is actually core to what we are collectively doing. I don't think it's a matter of framing it as an immigration issue or a non-immigration issue. It's a matter of what are our values? What are our rights? What are our expectations for everybody who lives in this country? And are we gonna stand behind that and what kind of country are we gonna be? This pisses me off so much

because you can almost hear the Democratic political consultants talking to elected officials and saying, look, we pulled this issue and immigration is lower, therefore don't talk about immigration. And then you see it in their actions and their speeches. Not everybody, obviously there are a lot of, a lot of good ones, but look, Joe Rogan is pissed off about this.

There are plenty of Republicans and conservatives and, and, and non politicos who see this and say, wait, they're fucking kidnapping people. Are you kidding me? They're, they're just taking them off the street, not giving them any due process and sending them to a labor camp in El Salvador. This is wild. You know what? We don't have to agree on path to citizenship, on border security, on broader or comprehensive

immigration reform to say, hey, you know what? The federal government shouldn't be kidnapping people off of the street because if they can do that to somebody who's brown, they can do it to me too. Like that is crazy that any Democrat would say this is a losing position for us. They're thinking about it in these like 1990s political terms and we just live in a completely different environment now. I see a lot of fighters in the Democratic Party and we're trying to support those fighters.

I think it's the right thing to do because I don't think we should be terrorizing any populations in this country. But I also think it's a politically advantageous thing to do. Not kidnapping people is a pretty good political slogan. You can build a pretty broad-based constituency off of, let's not kidnap people. I'm trying to fit in with my new progressive friends. I'm snapping at you right now.

That's it. Thanks. That's great. You're doing a great job. All right, guys. Do you guys ever fight? All the time. You fight? I'm trying to think about doing something with my husband. Tell me a story about a bicker that you guys did.

Never write a book with your spouse. That was the most, that, we're both very opinionated writers. I write a lot and then Leah kills all of what I've written and it's just, it's traumatic. That's true. That's true. He writes a lot and I am the editor and then we get all of what I've written. He writes a lot and I am the editor. Is there ever a guest room sleeping situation during the editing process? This thing that happened in 2017-2018,

because I think it is a good representation of the roles that we play in the organization. We use like an internal communication Slack platform to talk internally with the team. And somebody proposed that we do something. I don't even remember what it was. It was a strategic play. Uh, and Leah and I both responded in at the same time and Leah wrote, yeah, Leah wrote maybe, but let's run the traps on this. And I wrote, fuck it. Let's do it and be legends.

And I think, I actually do think that healthy tension has been beneficial to the organization because you do need both of those impulses. Well, and I also think like, I'm not advocating that the future of nonprofit leadership is people who are married to each other running organizations, but there are actually real advantages. Being the head of an organization is,

it's hard and there's not enough hours in the day and it's lonely. And I don't really understand how anyone does it as an individual. And I also don't understand how co-executive directors can do it if they're not married to each other because you kind of need that foundation of unconditional love if you're gonna make it

through the moments that are tough. Are you ever like watching Severance and one of you is like bringing up a staffing issue and the other one's like, will you just shut the fuck up about this for a second? I'm trying to have 30 minutes of peace. We literally last night watching Yandere, literally that happened. This is true. This is true.

Okay, well good luck with that. I got to tell you, better you than me, I guess is all I'm saying. I'm in a very great marriage, but the separate roles and responsibilities are also important, but I'm happy it's working for you guys. I'm just so impressed with you. I'm so happy you all are doing it, and thank you for coming on the pod.

Folks can go check out the groups, Indivisible. It seems like you've got groups everywhere, but you know, we got a listener in a place where you don't have a group, they can start one. Please. Absolutely. And the King's Day, what what is it again June 14th? June 14th Donald Trump's birthday 79th birthday military parade in DC protests literally everywhere

else. All right I don't know where the hell I am June 14th wherever I am I'll be at one. There will be one near you I guarantee it. We can promise. I look forward to it and uh let's stay in touch all right. Thanks everybody else uh come back tomorrow for another edition of the Borg podcast it will be less earnest and I promise you there'll be more duemurism, and we'll see you all then. Peace. With a fight, you sing this song It's always a new day in heaven There's always a new way to heaven

You're like no other I'm really gonna miss you You and I, no You're gonna take me with you You and I, no Where do we stand in this land? We're invisible now Come and prepare to be led into visible

It's always forever in heaven We'll all be together in heaven You are my life I'm really gonna miss you You are my follow You're gonna take me with you We'll be together Now and forever We'll be together

Now and forever The Bulldog Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.