We covered:

• How taxes can be a mobilizing lever. Messaging tip: Instead of calling for billionaires to “pay their fair share,” say they should “pay what they owe.” Where “fair” is in the eye of the beholder, owing suggests they’re already behind in their payments, which is true!

• May Day Strong on May 1, when millions will walk out of school and work and opt out of shopping. It’s a day to flex our collective economic power and make it too costly for corporations to support the Trump regime and MAGA. It’s also a day to build organizing muscle and get more people mobilized to shut down cities in case Trump “goes nuclear” (either figuratively or literally).

• Some suggested May Day slogans from Anat: No funding for fascism, no money for murder, no payouts for pedophiles.

• Who the targets of a general strike should be. In the U.S., we tend to not realize that the target of a general strike is supposed to be the capitalist class, not the government. Most people’s ire is understandably directed at Trump, but he wouldn’t be in office or have the power he does if not for the billionaires, oligarchs, and corporations propping him up. We are letting too many corporations claim to be on the side of justice while giving Trump and MAGA some of the estimated $3 billion they’ll be raising the midterms.

• Why banks are an effective protest target: they’re both sensitive to consumer pressure and have a lot of structural power to stop or prevent the regime’s abuses. Most protest targets are only one or the other. (e.g., Palantir is powerful but very loyal to the regime; Target is moveable but not ultimately very powerful.)

Upcoming Days of Action:

• April 16: 10,000 Moms Go Live: Digital day of action for moms to read children’s letters from the Dilley concentration camp in Texas (toolkit here).

• April 18: Caravan of moms to Dilley concentration camp to demand the release of children held there.

• April 25: Communities Not Cages National Day of Action to Stop ICE Warehouse Detention, from Detention Watch Network

• May 1 (May Day): May Day Strong, No work, no school, no shopping. Sign the pledge and find or host an action at maydaystrong.org.

• Labor Day: The next major structure test after May Day. Stay tuned.

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Before Auschwitz was a death camp, it was a concentration camp in the sense we usually see around the world: a place where civilians (as opposed to prisoners of war) are detained en masse, without due process, as a targeted group based on their identity or politics. And concentration camps like Auschwitz are only built after years of groundwork in the form of propaganda demonizing the out-group and justifying their removal from society. (Sound familiar?) If we can only call extermination centers “concentration camps,” what do we call places like the first Auschwitz — which was already a horror and paved the way for what came after — and how do we educate people about the historical path we’re on and where it can lead?

Educating the public is especially vital, Andrea said, because the longer we wait, the harder it gets to dismantle the systems that get built, the worse the abuses can get, and the more people are targeted beyond the original disfavored group. There are many ways these systems can end — but they never end on their own.

That’s why we have to take the kind of action today that we fantasize about taking if we had lived in Nazi Germany. In short: What do you want to be able to tell your children and grandchildren you did to stop this? Andrea’s weekly newsletter always includes ideas for actions to take. A few she mentioned include getting involved locally to block the construction of new camps, supporting legal representation for immigrants, and pressuring corporations that profit from the camps. And mark your calendars for April 25, the Communities Not Cages National Day of Action to Stop ICE Warehouse Detention.

We also discussed historical examples other than Nazi Germany: the detention of Japanese people in the U.S., the Rohingya in Myanmar, Spanish Civil War refugees in France, and asylum seekers in Australia. (Anat worked on a successful effort to help close the offshore prisons in Australia, which she detailed on her podcast here).

And we unpacked the real tension between winning freedom for the most sympathetic individuals (children, the sick) through targeted PR campaigns, versus the risk of providing the government an “escape valve” that makes closing the camps less urgent.

Remember: when you "only" call out the worst abuses of a system, you make those worst abuses, rather than the system itself, the problem. This implicitly conveys to those who are only just paying attention that the system itself does not need to be challenged.

And, remember what the rest of the famous Frederick Douglass quote tells us:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted.… The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

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Anat and I covered:

• Birthright citizenship and the Roberts Court. It’s absurd that the Roberts Court even took this case, and debating it in terms of law and precedent gives it an unearned legitimacy. What’s happening here is the same thing that the Trump regime has been doing since day one — trying to shred the Constitution and redefine who gets to count as an American.

  • Messaging guidance on birthright citizenship.

• Trump’s executive order attacking voting rights. Again, zero merits and zero surprises. Once again, Trump has proven he knows he’s losing, which is why he wants to keep people from voting in order to control the outcome of elections and seize more power. Good news: calling this out makes people more motivated to vote and take action, not less, because it makes them feel defiant instead of hopeless.

  • ”Hands Off Our Vote” messaging guide.

• Iran. We talked about what our responsibility as Americans is when our leaders are committing and celebrating war crimes. And when we spend our time tallying what the billions spent on war could buy instead (health care, etc.), we lose sight of the fundamental immorality of what’s happening.

  • Iran messaging guide.

• Slovenia. An under-the-radar election story with some interesting and troubling parallels to our own situation, including an elaborate disinformation plot.

Chag Pesach Sameach!

Also, two book recommendations for anyone interested in how Germans responded to rising fascism: In the Garden of Beasts and The Order of the Day.

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You don’t steal an election overnight, and the South is the canary in the coal mine for what could be coming for all of us if Republicans pass the Voter Elimination Act (aka SAVE Act). But we’re not fatalistic: There are courageous people fighting this in the South, and wins are happening.

It was such a good conversation that we went a little over time. We also covered:

• The real goal of gutting Black political power behind attacks on voting rights, and why we should all be “allies” of Black voters.

• The latest anti-voter news in Georgia this week, from the legal fight over the Fulton County raid to a new voter purge tool promoted by the My Pillow guy.

• What’s really at stake in the Callais case that could gut the Voting Rights Act: whether people are given the opportunity to vote for someone who actually represents their interests. (Read this report from Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter that finds a bad ruling could help secure an additional 19 safe Republican U.S. House seats compared to 2024.)

• The Trump administration’s attacks on Black history and progress (read Onyx Impact’s Blackout report on over 15,000 instances).

• What we can do: many things, including supporting election workers, becoming one yourself (sign up at Power the Polls), and donating to Fair Fight Action.

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• When Trump said “Democrats are destroying our country” in his State of the Union address, that was a tipoff that he is really the President of the Neo-Confederacy.

• Messaging moment: Call it the “Voter Elimination Act,” not the “SAVE Act,” when referring to the GOP’s bill that would keep millions of Americans from voting. Also, don’t name specific policies like voter ID; say that they want to “keep people from voting to control the outcome of elections.” (“Control” is even stronger than “rig”!)

• Note to everyone: When Trump calls for Republicans to “take over” elections, the headline isn’t that he wants to “nationalize” or “federalize” them.

• How too many Democrats are acting like a loyal opposition party to the fascist regime.

• What a French philosopher and wrestling have to do with how Trump came to power.

• What we hope for when we hope that Democrats will win (or Republicans will lose) the midterms.

• Discussing two massive resurgent labor movements happening right now in Argentina and India.

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• It’s great to see the growing use of “the Epstein class” as a term (thanks Anand Giridharadas). But even better would be “the Epstein regime.” It captures not only the many connections between members of the Trump regime and Epstein, but also the group of billionaires and billionaire-adjacents who function as a continuous regime responsible for much of society’s evils — worst of all the abduction and abuse of children (from Epstein’s island to ICE concentration camps).

• The advice of reactionary centrists boils down to “Don’t make the argument” — shy away from fighting for your values. But all that does is cede (winnable!) rhetorical terrain to the opposition. Make the argument for things like bodily autonomy, the awesomeness of immigrants, corporate accountability, and women’s and children’s safety.

• What several news stories from the last week (new polling showing low-information voters turning on Trump, the continuing debate over whether Harris was too centrist or too left, new economic data showing that the job market was getting worse in 2024-25, and more) say about the political and pundit class that has been continuously wrong for the last 20 years, yet continuously refuses to own up to its mistakes or give space to voices who have gotten it right.

• Think bigger than ending ICE: demand closing the concentration camps and bringing home the people that are in them.

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A few highlights: Contrary to long-held beliefs in democracy advocacy, talking about election subversion does not demobilize people — but it matters how you do it. The best message is simple and direct: that they are “keeping people from voting,” and that they are doing this in order to “seize and hold power.” Abstract terms like “voter suppression” or even “silencing our voices” are less effective, as is naming specific anti-voter policies (“ending vote by mail,” “kicking people off the rolls”). And it’s important to call out that keeping people from voting has real electoral consequences that impact our lives.

As Anat and I discussed, there’s a frustrating allergy to talking about consequences in Democratic messaging, and governing. People think they’re taking the moral high ground by putting everything in terms of process and fairness, when all it does is obscure the stakes.

Also, Netroots Nation is coming up in Philadelphia this year! Please vote for Anat and her colleagues’ excellent panel proposals:

- Research Collaborative & ASO Communications: The Ballot Box Alone Won’t Save Us: Beyond Elections to Defeat Fascism

- Anat Shenker-Osorio, Gabriella Zutrau, Josh Klemons & Ansa Edim: Wins are Replicable: From Mamdani to Minnesota to Middle America

- Four Freedoms Fund & ASO Communications: Brave of US: Building a Surround Sound Call for Immigrant Rights

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This project is a deeper cancer in our country decades in the making that won’t go away when Trump does, and I’ll be writing more about it in the coming days. We previewed some of what that content will look like, much of which involves reexamining what we think we know from polls — from opinion polling on Trump to issue polling on “immigration” — and why pollsters, strategists, and opinion-leaders keep leading us astray in the same ways.

Links discussed:

The War of Southern Aggression (Weekend Reading)

Monsters and Their Enablers (Weekend Reading)

The “Civil War” Was an Insurrection, Too (Weekend Reading)

Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plans (New York Times)

What Americans Really Mean by “Affordability” (New York Times)

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We also discussed what general strikes can and can’t do in the US compared to other countries, and the history of why they are so hard to pull off here. (Thanks/no thanks, Taft-Hartley Act and Roberts Court!)

And we reflected on what it means to be one year into Trump’s second term.

Almost everything that’s happened was knowable in advance given what Trump promised to do—but there has been no accountability for the Democratic leaders, media, and professional sensemakers who failed us by systematically minimizing that threat during the campaign. There’s a danger in the mentality of “we’ll fix it in the midterms,” as if democracy is on pause and damage isn’t accumulating every day. It creates a sort of bystander problem, where everyone is looking around waiting for someone else to do something, instead of realizing that we are the ones we’re waiting for.

Too often, things are framed as whether Trump or Democrats are winning or losing—not whether all of us are losing and what the impacts on all of our lives are. And too few recognize that Americans trust neither party to fix the problems in their lives, which causes us to overread polling fluctuations on which party is more trusted on which issue. If Democrats want to claim the world would be better for working people with them in power, they don’t have to wait for the next election — they should demonstrate that like Mamdani did when he showed up for striking nurses.

The horrific ICE raids we’re seeing are unfortunately what you see when the logic and tactics of 25 years of American counterinsurgency policing abroad becomes the template for policing us. As Anat put it, “authoritarianism is imperialism brought home.” Thankfully, the #BraveOfUS are showing up for our neighbors and communities.

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Minnesota represents something the Trump regime hates: a majority-white Midwestern state where multiracial democracy has actually worked — where coalitions across race, faith, and class have won elections, passed progressive legislation, and governed successfully. These efforts included the Greater Than Fear campaign, a successful answer to years of right-wing race-baiting in Minnesota against immigrant, Black, and Somali-American communities after 2016. The campaign confronted that racism head-on (instead of ignoring it), and offered an alternative rooted in solidarity.

Minnesota is under full-scale occupation — but communities are organizing at an extraordinary scale in response. There are mass protests, statewide trainings, and a call for a Minneapolis general strike on January 23, alongside a national walkout on January 20.

We also talked about why Minnesota is still a Democratic stronghold while its demographically similar neighbors, Wisconsin and Michigan, are swing states. It wasn’t accidental or due to a sea change in voters’ attitudes — it was thanks to well-financed takeovers of state governments financed by billionaires in Wisconsin (Bradley) and Michigan (DeVos), who helped Scott Walker and Rick Snyder win their governors’ races in 2010 and act aggressively to curtail democracy and decimate unions. (More on this here.)

And we discussed a deeper reason behind the frustrating actions of Democratic leadership: too many elected officials govern as if their only job is to win the next election, not to do their duties as public servants. This is both a moral and a political failing. (Read Anat’s guest post at Weekend Reading about why the dominant poll-driven strategy doesn’t work for Democrats.)

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We discussed:

• Why it’s important to say what is true, because negation or debunking (“this is not X”) often strengthens the lie we’re trying to counter. (For instance, saying “this was murder” instead of “this was not self-defense,” or “this is a direct threat to our lives” instead of “this will not make us safer.”)

• The subtle but important difference between calling the regime’s actions not just “illegal” in a technical sense, but “criminal” in a deeply moral sense.

• Why it matters to call for impeaching Trump—because what we don’t say is also a message, and not calling for impeachment suggests he hasn’t committed impeachable offenses.

• Why we must not mistake electoral strategy for moral responsibility.

Anat has messaging guidance on the ICE murder here and the Venezuela invasion here.

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Additionally, many analysts are making a dangerous mistake by interpreting the congressional vote to release the full Epstein files as a hopeful sign that Trump is becoming weaker. In reality, the ultimate power center is not Trump—it is the oligarchs who ensured his return to power and continue to support him, and releasing the Epstein files is of no moment to most of them. This is what it looks like when Trump wants something that’s only going to help him, and no one is backing him up lobbying members of Congress or other folks in MAGA on his behalf. We will likely see something similar soon with the Roberts Court on tariffs (a dynamic we’ve seen before and that I wrote about here).

We also discussed:

• It goes elsewhere in the world as it goes here: a handful of extraordinarily rich people are making large parts of the world uninhabitable, people are doing what people do and moving to seek a better life, and authoritarians are making those people scapegoats while center-left parties eke out “not-losses” against them.

• What it means that people like Marjorie Taylor Greene are standing up to Trump.

• People often ask, “How should we be talking about this moment?” The first question to ask before that should be, “What is it you wish people believed? And what is it that you wish they did?” Rather than lowering Trump’s approval, say, we need people to understand the oligarchy problem and act in continuous, unrelenting resistance to all of the forces that empower and enable it. A clear frame is: This is a regime of the bullies, for the billionaires, and by the bribes, and Americans across races, places, and parties are saying no and standing up to it.

Calls to Action:

• The We Ain’t Buying It campaign, asking people not to shop at major companies that aid and abet the regime’s evils—Target, Amazon, and Home Depot—from Nov. 27-Dec. 1.

• Join Brave of US, a campaign to show and not tell that immigrants are awesome, and that all of us who stand up with and for each other for freedom are brave to do so.

This was Anat’s last Substack Live with me for 2025, as she’ll be working abroad. Stay tuned for other Weekend Reading Live events soon!

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• What we know about “activation”—how and why people engage in resistance, protest, or defiance against authoritarian behavior. When it comes to the Trump regime, the key ingredient isn’t disapproval of Trump, but believing that his administration is functioning more like a fascist regime than a regular right-wing government.

• The Democratic senators who caved this week were acting as if this is a normal political dispute, instead of the state of exception that it is. What’s more, this is only the latest and highest profile surrender in a series of surrenders going back decades that have helped get us to this moment.

• The fight over whether Democrats should be more “moderate” isn’t actually about what Democrats should say. It’s about who Democrats should listen to—whether the same strategists who keep misreading the moment should lead the party into the future. (Watch the video starting around 24:00 for a pertinent story about Rahm Emanuel in 2006.)

• The Roberts Court mail ballot case that could have ugly implications for 2026 and beyond.

• A look abroad at the Chilean presidential election, where a left-wing working-class candidate faces a far-right opponent.

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In one sense, I called these results right after the election last year when I pointed out that in the 21st century, the best way to win the next election is to lose the last one. But this isn’t about the impersonal “thermostatic” dynamics you hear about from political scientists—this is in response to real events. The sheer magnitude of these wins, and the massive surge in (Democratic) turnout that produced them, shows that people are furious about what Trump and MAGA are doing. And it shows just how badly we were misled by poll-driven takes declaring that Americans supported Trump’s cruel mass deportation plans.

We also discussed:

• What worked for Mamdani: the magnetism of it all, and perhaps most critically his use of existing organizing infrastructure (like the DSA volunteer base and the taxi drivers he helped organize) to get people excited to talk to other people about his candidacy. He will need that same organizing energy to help make his ambitious policy promises a reality.

• What worked in the challenging narrative battle for Prop 50 in California—”taking our power back” won out over the opposition’s appeal to “fairness.”

• The significance of school board victories in Bucks County, PA, a former Moms for Liberty stronghold.

• What the polls missed, and why it drives me nuts when people ask what the polls missed. Quibbling about point estimates distracts us from the more important question: whether the polls predicted (or mislead us on) what the election would be about.

• A reminder that “turnout” is not like the tides: “low turnout” doesn’t hurt Democrats unless Democratic turnout is low. And “less-engaged” voters tend to become engaged voters when they understand and believe what Trump and MAGA will do (as opposed to who Trump is as a person).

• A reminder that the Roberts Court majority “justices” are not hacks for Trump/Republicans, but hacks for the interests that bought their seats on the court. If they strike down Trump’s tariffs, they won’t be standing up to him—they will be doing what much of the business community wants.

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In my latest Weekend Reading piece, “Calling This Court ‘Supreme’ Is Obeying in Advance,” I argue that saying “the Supreme Court did X” confers undeserved legitimacy on what is, in fact, a hijacked institution, and treats the six Republican justices as legitimate arbiters rather than political operatives who have fully captured one branch of government on behalf of outside interests. This conditions us to treat their awful “rulings” as natural disasters to be endured, instead of a deliberate political project to be resisted.

As Anat pointed out, “endurance” and restraint in the face of tyranny is even being reframed as smart political strategy among some Democrats. Luckily, Abe Lincoln didn’t have pollsters telling him to stop speaking boldly against Dred Scott, a critique that set the moral foundation for his presidency.

We also previewed my next piece on Callais v. Louisiana (the VRA case), which will help illustrate the harms to Black voters’ representation in Congress. This isn’t about affirmative action for politicians; it’s about ensuring that people living in distinct communities with shared history and values have the chance to elect someone who will represent their community’s interest, instead of having their political voice diluted. Anat discussed the messaging implications; progressives have too long ceded rhetorical ground on this issue because talking about race is seen as “divisive.” But the result has only been to allow right-wing framings to dominate, much as happened with abortion on “safe, legal, and rare.”

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With Louisiana v. Callais, Roberts could finally fulfill his lifelong dream of killing the Voting Rights Act (see my chat with Lisa Graves for more on that history) by striking down Section 2, which protects against racially discriminatory maps. A new report by Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter has the facts you need to know about that case.

Striking down Section 2 would take us right back to Jim Crow in the sense that the South will be able to elect people to the House with far fewer votes than the rest of the country. They will have representation in the House in proportion to the number of people who live there, but voters of color will have their power diluted such that they won’t have a say in who wins.

Ahead of Saturday’s “No Kings Day” protests (find one to attend near you here), the oral arguments in Callais were a reminder that the Roberts Court has been acting as an unelected king for the last 20 years.

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That methodology, which Anat dubs “Pollingism,” wrongly presumes that issue-based polling and randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of messages can tell us all we need to know about what voters want to hear and how to reach them. These are helpful tools that Anat also uses in her campaign work—but they’re not a replacement for real strategy or moral clarity (which is how too many Democratic strategists use them), and they can’t tell us what will make a message spread in the real world of constant scrolling and distractions. People’s “top issue” will almost always be the economy or jobs because we need money to live, but knowing this is the case doesn’t tell us what will get people talking to their friends and family about your candidate or cause.

There’s a better approach that Anat calls “Magnetism”—being attractive by driving the conversations that most benefit your side, and having a polarity that distinguishes you from the opposition, whose fans aren’t worth trying to please because they will never vote for you. This is the strategy that Republicans already use to great effect, but most Democrats have yet to embrace it even though it has also driven some marquee wins on the left.

In this week’s “Meeting the Moment” chat, we discussed recent examples of Magnetism like Zohran Mamdani’s campaign and Portland’s response to Trump’s invasion, addressed some questions and misconceptions about Anat’s argument, and more.

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In our weekly “Meeting the Moment” Substack Live chat, Anat Shenker-Osorio and I unpacked this moment further, including some important parallels to successful activist campaigns in Brazil and Argentina. We also covered:

• How to talk about shootings like the one at a Dallas ICE facility today;

• Why “preaching to the choir” is actually a good thing when you want a message to spread;

• Why the MAGA movement overpredicts, and the anti-MAGA movement underpredicts, their own popularity, and what to do about it;

• Why Democrats need to stop telling the same stories about themselves that Republicans do.

Thanks for watching!

On Substack Live today, Anat and I discussed all of that, as well as current challenges like how to talk about the fight over financing the Trump regime. Some key insights:

• The political system hasn’t been responsive to ordinary Americans for a long time, and voters have been acting accordingly by routinely throwing out the party in power. That’s why narrow election wins and messaging tweaks alone aren’t going to get us out of this. We need a new deal—not a “let’s go to the policy blackboard” kind, but recognizing that getting the change we need requires a durable rebalancing of who has power in the country. In FDR’s time, the labor movement was the key to that rebalancing.

• To call what’s coming up a “government shutdown fight” and argue about who will take blame is destructive and distracting. It legitimizes the current regime as a normal functioning government.

  • Anat suggests lines like: “We will not finance fascism. No dollars for dictatorship. No bankrolling billionaires.”

  • Move away from technocratic policy defense (ACA subsidies, Medicaid cuts, etc.) to visceral language: “I will not take food out of kids’ mouths. I will not steal health care from seniors.”

• What “meeting people where they are” should mean isn’t lazily going along with whatever a poll tells you people believe. It’s understanding where your values align and taking people on a journey from there.

• If you wonder why Democratic leaders and legislators aren’t listening to their base’s demands to get a spine and fight, remember where and with whom they spend most of their time—with funders and business people who for the most part are just fine with what's going on.

• In Argentina, campaigners for abortion rights hung neon coat hangers labeled with senators’ names—“Senador Percha.” Everyone knew what it meant, and it flipped votes and won. Here, too often we play nice. Why wouldn’t we say “Senator Pedophile” for those enabling the Epstein cover-up?

• Some tips on how to persuade “normie GOP” friends that the Republican Party has gone Neo-Confederate.

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