As a native and resident of Louisville, Kentucky, Perry has a sharp perspective on how geography shapes, and distorts, our media and political landscape. Most national political reporters cluster in D.C., New York, and to some extent Los Angeles — places where a DSA candidate is very electable and a MAGA one never would be. That dynamic, Perry explained, is one reason democratic socialism often gets more attention and panicked headlines than the real threats to democracy from MAGA. As Anat put it, the media is more interested in covering what Democrats say than what Republicans do.

Our conversation broadened to expose other pathologies that drive today’s crises. That same concentration of press, party gatekeepers, and big donors in a few zip codes decides which voices are legitimate and which candidates are “electable.” And geography plus gerrymandering goes a long way toward explaining structural differences between how the two parties operate and who their voters elect.

Highlights included:

• “Electability” is a smokescreen, but we can’t ignore Democratic voters’ worries about it. When party insiders argue a candidate can’t win, I said it usually means they disagree with the candidate ideologically but don’t want to say so out loud because those positions are actually popular with the base. It’s also a form of status-hoarding by those geographically concentrated media and political elites. Perry agreed that all of this is the case, but his advice to progressive insurgent candidates is to confront the argument head-on and make the affirmative, non-ideological case for their own electability. He said that if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez runs for president, for instance, she should think about how to convince influential, numbers-minded pundits like Nate Cohn or Ezra Klein that she can win.

• Blue-state “infighting” is the fight red states don’t have to have anymore. Now that the Republican Party has gone fully MAGA, the kinds of substantive policy debates that a pluralistic democracy would normally resolve are happening almost entirely within the Democratic Party. People who would otherwise be moderate Republicans are running as Democrats, and there are big factional disputes between what Perry shorthanded as “corporate” and “non-corporate” Democrats. The GOP has disqualified itself in blue states — but has consolidated so much control in red states that it can project its power nationwide.

  • How it got this way: Republican primaries are different. I explained that in much of the rural South, white evangelical churches function as an organized turnout machine that supplies about 60% of Republican primary voters (and still roughly half in suburban southern districts), even though evangelicals are only about 18% of the US population. That gives them outsized control over who can win in gerrymandered red seats. Democrats have no equivalent institution (other than unions, which don’t have the same geographically concentrated power), and the DSA isn’t telling millions of people how to vote every Sunday.

  • Red-state trifectas can get more done and face less scrutiny. While blue-state trifectas are stuck hashing out genuine disagreements, the white Christian nationalist monopoly on Republican primaries creates a unified GOP prepared to rubber-stamp laws that ruin millions of lives in red states and provide the blueprints for what Trump will do nationwide. And national media incentives let them operate under the radar, as Perry pointed out; just a handful of local journalists are covering the policy threats to freedom in twenty-plus red states, while a small army of D.C. reporters is tasked with following Susan Collins around to see if she’ll cast the same pro-Trump votes she usually does.

  • Democrats don’t follow the “11th Commandment.” Given all of this, Ronald Reagan’s “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican” rule is easier than ever for Republicans to follow. Still, Perry argued that left-leaning media figures on shows like Morning Joe or Pod Save America aren’t doing Democrats the favors they might think they are when they grill progressive candidates with the equivalent of, “Here’s a bunch of crazy things other Democrats believe. Do you believe these things, too?”

• The problem with “The Price is Right” messaging on affordability. Anat noted that most Democrats are great at reciting how much groceries cost down to the cent, but less great at telling a compelling origin story, complete with heroes and villains, about why things are unaffordable, whose fault that is, and how to fix it. Mamdani and other left-populist candidates do a much better job of that, and the results speak for themselves. I added that much like on “The Price is Right,” where the goal is to guess closest to the real price without going over, most Democrats are much more afraid of being too ambitious than of underselling what they want to accomplish.

• How the media, and Republican operatives, manufacture concern about “wokeness.” Perry called out the tendency of mainstream outlets to let regressive operatives like Chris Rufo act as their assignment editors. He argued that Harvard University president Claudine Gay’s resignation was almost entirely driven by the New York Times (which employs more than a few Harvard graduates) deciding to make it a headline story. Anat emphasized that in focus group after focus group, she never sees Democratic voters volunteer concern about trans issues or DEI. They can be led there, but their real concerns are that Democrats aren’t fighting for them or doing anything to make their lives better.

• The right way and wrong way to handle a “will you punch left” question. I think Zohran Mamdani gave a master class in how to handle questions like this in a recent New York Times Magazine interview. Perry and Anat discussed how Andy Beshear also did it well recently — focusing on the ways Democrats agree with each other and how dramatically they differ from Republicans — but has also made unforced errors like calling socialism a “failed experiment.” Perry observed that Beshear hasn’t felt the need to punch left as governor of Kentucky — but that as a likely 2028 candidate vying for the “moderate” faction’s support, he’ll be spending a lot more time in rooms with center-left donors who are more upset by Zohran than by Trump.

• Perry’s parting read on the media landscape. He’s glad the Washington Post lost its arbitration fight over Karen Attiah’s firing and will at least owe her something, but notes that the outlet still does some great journalism, like this piece on cuts to Black studies programs that shows the real threat to academic freedom. He says the mainstream media has failed to meet this moment, but that there’s a point of diminishing returns to pointing this out. His advice to progressives is to spend less time on Bluesky dunking on paragraph four of a bad New York Times story, and more time actively promoting the outlets that get it right, like The New Republic, the Guardian, or The American Prospect.

Get more from Michael Podhorzer in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Anat and I are both longtime fans of Naomi’s work, which includes groundbreaking books like The Shock Doctrine and No Logo. (Make sure to pre-order her new book, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, co-written with Astra Taylor, which comes out September 15, and subscribe to her new Substack.) Naomi has spent decades explaining how capitalists and authoritarians manufacture chaos to control us — and she says that AI is the worst offer she’s ever seen capitalism make to the public. They’re not even trying to hide that the goal is taking away our jobs and making worthless the education we go into debt for.

Naomi pointed out that democratic socialism has always scared the powerful more than communist authoritarianism ever did, because it threatens to actually deliver what people want. It’s why the US orchestrated coups in Latin America; it’s why we’re seeing so much elite panic over DSA-backed candidates winning elections; and it’s why Zohran Mamdani’s successes at not just winning, but governing, are so important and revealing.

But when the AI bubble bursts or the next disaster comes, we need to be prepared. We discussed how a great model for that is the “Minnesota miracle” — which wasn’t a miracle at all, but the product of deep organizing work and coalition building, especially with faith and labor groups. Anat talked about how the “Greater than Fear” campaign she helped create in 2018 helped define “Minnesotan-ness” — that being Minnesotan is being the kind of person who helps dig your neighbor’s car out of the snow. That sense of identity and belonging helps make the difference between “flash mobs,” as Naomi put it, and movements that last and spark real change. It’s why some of the most meaningful work we can do is just getting to know our neighbors — the ones who live where we do, not just online.

I added the idea of “no exit” to this equation. Unions and churches are such effective organizing institutions in part because once you’re in them, you’re part of a community that is difficult to leave. They give people structures and incentives to build reciprocal relationships, exercise collective power, and act like citizens, not just consumers. By contrast, as Naomi pointed out, exit is the billionaire’s dream.

We covered a lot of other ground, including a rundown of Tuesday’s election results; how a 2026 blue wave could transform what the Democratic caucus looks like, not just who controls the House; the power of anti-corruption narratives here and abroad; and how extreme wealth “deranges” those who hold it in addition to distorting our politics.

Get more from Michael Podhorzer in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Stop Kids from Being Disappeared

Sarah explained that when Trump was re-elected, Stephen Miller and Tom Homan said on the record that unaccompanied minors were a top target. They’ve made good on that threat in a multi-layered attack that’s less visible than the broad-daylight ICE kidnappings we’ve all heard about, but deserves every bit as much public attention and outrage.

First, kids who’ve been living for years with family members or vetted sponsors are being pulled out of those homes by armed agents, under the guise of a “wellness check.” Many of those agents are effectively bounty hunters for ICE — local law enforcement incentivized to kidnap as many kids as possible for $22,500 a head.

Second, the regime is racing to build concentration camps to hold thousands more kids, even though the number of kids in federal custody has fallen: bids for multiple 3,000 bed facilities and reported plans to open a converted military base in Louisiana, previously deemed toxic and polluted with “forever chemicals,” into a site to hold children. They’re building these camps because they intend to fill them, which means more raids to lock up and traumatize more children.

Third, the regime is taking away the lawyers these kids need to help them avoid deportation to unfamiliar or dangerous countries. Their current lawyers haven’t been paid in seven months and are owed $65 million in back pay. Now HHS has refused to renew their contract — while awarding a no-bid contract for $150 million to a law firm with zero experience in immigrant rights or child welfare.

Finally, the regime is trying to take away basic rights for children in detention under the pretense of fighting child trafficking, with bills like the Kayla Hamilton Act that would allow kids as young as 12 to be strip-searched and sent away to a prison with no judicial review, and the Permanent Trump Secure Border Act that would create mandatory long-term detention for children and families.

Sarah pointed out that under Trump 1.0, it took about two years for the public to catch on to the horrors of family separation. Now is the time to act and keep history from repeating itself. Especially if you live in Texas or Louisiana, flood your city council meetings to demand a halt to building new concentration camps for kids. Call your member of Congress to demand that all kids have basic rights and competent legal counsel, which means HHS paying legal service providers what they owe and renewing their contract, and to oppose harmful bills like the Kayla Hamilton Act and the Permanent Trump Secure Border Act.

Don’t Make Republicans’ Arguments For Them

Abdul El-Sayed beat Haley Stevens in the most expensive Democratic Senate primary ever, despite being massively outspent by outside groups and facing a steady drumbeat from establishment voices fretting that he wasn’t “electable.”

There’s a concept from the early ‘90s, credited to the late Paul Tully, called the message box: a four-square grid made up of what you want people to believe about you and about your opponent, and what your opponent wants people to believe about you and about them. Some Democrats have developed the troubling habit of adopting the Republicans’ side of that box against their fellow Democrats — using the primary not to hash out real issue differences, but to pre-load the opposition’s attack ads for the general election. Every dollar spent doing that is, functionally, an in-kind contribution to the GOP. The FEC just doesn’t require anyone to report it that way.

As Anat put it, “‘Electability’ is telling people that voters will never vote for, or find unseemly or untoward, certain kinds of Democrats.” What we should be saying instead, relentlessly, is that voters are turning out in record numbers to kick MAGA to the curb.

Get more from Michael Podhorzer in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Anat also talked to this week’s special guest, Paigelynne Gonyea — a poll worker and content creator from Syracuse, New York, who was threatened by DHS over a January Instagram post that simply named the ICE agent (Jonathan Ross) who killed Renee Good. DHS agents sought her out at her polling place and warned that she would be in violation of federal law unless she took the post down. Instead of complying, Paigelynne didn’t just keep her post up — she reshared it and spoke out about it. This created a classic Streisand Effect, where the attention DHS tried to bury instead went viral, bringing renewed scrutiny back to the ICE murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Paigelynne talked about why she spoke up, how she’s not the only one being targeted by ICE for her speech (but is happy to be the loudest one), and what’s next for her — from a possible First Amendment lawsuit against the government to a new cookbook to be published soon.

Once I finally got on, we went straight to the midterms — specifically, what the New York Times’ new Senate battleground polling really tells us about Democrats’ chances to net four seats to flip the Senate. Any realistic path includes winning two of five red states (Texas, Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, or Nebraska). But as I outlined here, the path to getting there isn’t about convincing Trump voters to switch sides (although some undoubtedly will). It’s about turning out the still-vast pool of anti-MAGA voters who have proved that they will show up to vote against Trump or MAGA when the stakes are clear. This especially includes what I’m calling the “one and dones,” who showed up to vote against Trump once or twice in 2018 or 2020, but dropped off after that thanks to disillusionment with Biden and Democrats.

Every pollster has to make educated guesses about how many people who sat out 2024 will turn out this time. In Texas, the Times modeled roughly 10% new voters, consistent with 2022, 2014, and 2010 — but not with 2018, when new voters were 20% of turnout and broke for Beto by 20 points, which is exactly what made that race close. The question for 2026 is whether this cycle’s anti-MAGA turnout looks more like 2018 or more like the quieter midterms around it — and the early signs, including a real shift in party ID among previously unaffiliated voters, point toward the former. So forget the margin of error. What matters now is the margin of effort.

Get more from Michael Podhorzer in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Less amazing were the technical difficulties we experienced, which included the Live unexpectedly ending after the first 15 minutes (video of that first part below) and my audio completely cutting out for much of the rest. Nonetheless, we had a great conversation.

Anat and I started off by discussing Graham Platner — the courage of the survivors who came forward, and the outrage we should feel (as I posted about on Bluesky) that they were forced to be so courageous in the first place because Platner, like so many other entitled men accused of assault while seeking high office, refused to do the decent thing by stepping aside before the story broke publicly. Anat also surfaced the odd symmetry between the old-school candidate selection processes and the more insurgent approach we’re seeing today — that both (with major exceptions like Mamdani) are often more concerned with winning elections than with the actual business of governing. And I argued that Dan Osborn is doing so well in Nebraska not because of his ideology or distance from the Democratic Party, but because he built genuine bona fides in the state by running a nearly year-long successful strike against John Deere.

Follow Jiggy on Substack, as well as at @DefianceDispatch on Bluesky, Instagram, TikTok, and Threads.

Get more from Michael Podhorzer in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

We had a rich discussion about the life experiences that led Doran to become a community organizer in Minnesota — from her upbringing in an Iowa town devastated by corporate greed in the wake of a defeated meatpacking plant strike (which was documented in the 1990 film American Dream), to her theatre career in Chicago, to her life-altering experience learning about faith-based organizing (despite not growing up as a practicing person of faith) — and about the philosophies and practices she brings to community organizing today.

Doran powerfully argued that the job of organizing is to identity and develop leadership, network it at the human scale (in real relationships with 25 or 30 other people at a time), and sustain it over time with organizations that help people channel and exercise their collective power. Unfortunately, not all organizations actually do this; as Doran also noted, we've spent decades systematically hollowing out the actual experience of political agency for ordinary people, replacing the hard work of building relationships with lists and email blasts. And into that vacuum, authoritarianism rushes in — because at least it offers people something to be part of.

She walked through how these theories played out concretely in Minnesota this spring, when her network helped organize the state's first general strike in 46 years in about ten days flat — proof of what's possible when you've already built the infrastructure for people to lead before the crisis hits.

We also began by discussing the final disastrous rulings of this Roberts Court term — and why, as I put it, our side needs to stop trying to find silver linings in shit clouds. A 5-4 ruling just barely upholding the obvious legitimacy of birthright citizenship is not a victory, and treating it as one just allows the opposition to keep moving the Overton window in disastrous directions.

Make sure to read Anat’s messaging guidance on the Roberts Court in general, and specifically on birthright citizenship and the horrendous TPS ruling stripping protections from Haitian and Syrian people who have built lives in this country.

Get more from Michael Podhorzer in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Prentiss Haney, board member and former co-executive director of OOC, joined Anat and me this week to tell the group’s story and give every organizer watching a guide to what to do if this comes to your door. His core message was “act free to be free,” because the only way to win is in the light: The instinct to lay low and hide behind lawyers may be understandable, but it also lets the regime control the narrative with lies and further intimidate others.

Within 24 hours of the raid, OOC helped launch the Hands Off Ohio campaign. Their courage became contagious; when federal agents came after protesters in Minnesota shortly after, people were already saying we need to be like Ohio — come out swinging first.

Here is Anat’s messaging guidance on the OOC raid. For more on how to talk about protecting our vote in the 2026 midterm elections, see the Hands Off Our Vote guide.

Before Prentiss joined us, Anat and I dug into Tuesday’s primary results, where candidates backed by Zohran Mamdani won big in New York. Brad Lander’s win over incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman is a case study in what actually works: talking to voters instead of donors, and keeping your base mobilized after you win to help actually get your agenda passed. There’s a tendency to flatten Mamdani and his allies’ successes into the idea that they just have a better message or are good at TikTok. But it’s actually about having something real to offer and being willing to fight for it.

We also got into a truly excellent essay, “Turn Out for What?”, which Anat co-wrote with Research Collaborative CEO Derek Johnson. It argues convincingly that “A Democratic victory in 2026 that leaves the operating assumptions of institutional Democratic politics intact may make repudiating authoritarianism even harder than electoral loss would.”

Get more from Michael Podhorzer in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

The conversation ranges widely from there: what Gramsci’s “monsters” of an interregnum really represent, why Indigenous worldviews and the renewables revolution offer genuine reasons for hope, how Silicon Valley’s oligarchs have gone from “cute liberals” to authoritarians controlling the actual infrastructure of thought, and why framing climate change as a matter of individual consumer choice has always been a way of letting the real culprits off the hook.

It’s a sweeping, often very funny, and always enlightening conversation that’s worth watching in full.

Get more from Michael Podhorzer in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

I’ve been professionally involved in every federal election since 1976. As almost anyone who has been involved at that level could tell you, the most important, and unbiased, post-election autopsies are not publicly available. Those that know don’t talk, and those that talk don’t know.

And why would we talk? Why would we spend millions of dollars to learn how to run better campaigns, only to publish those learnings for anyone to read, including our opponents? Nike doesn’t send out a press release about why their last ad campaign failed, and if they do, everyone knows that releasing it is for PR purposes. Same deal here. It’s not that everything publicly available is BS, it’s that without seeing everything, there’s no way to know.

So what are the public autopsies for? They’re about intraparty power struggles. They’re not about what Democrats should say in the next election cycle. They’re about who Democrats should listen to — and more to the point, who they should hire to consult. By the same token, they’re also about who should take the most blame for the previous losses (and thus who shouldn’t be listened to, or hired, again).

There’s a lot more detail, and plenty of caveats, on all of that in our conversation.

And speaking of Nike, Anat and I discussed how the big takeaway of the most candid autopsies we’ve read — like this one at The Bulwark by Rob Flaherty, Harris’s deputy campaign manager — is that the Harris campaign basically lacked a coherent brand. This is a point that Anat and I hammer often. Candidates and political parties need to tell a consistent and compelling story about themselves — ideally, a story that people can see themselves belonging to and being a part of. That’s what Trump has offered his supporters, and it’s the main reason (other than Roberts Court interference, or elected Democrats failing to do what was necessary to hold Trump accountable) that he’s stayed afloat despite so many scandals and criminal indictments.

We also discussed why Ken Paxton didn't just beat, but demolished, John Cornyn in Tuesday's runoff, despite Cornyn having narrowly led in the March primary. We’ll have more confirmation on this when the voter files are updated, but my best guess is that the March primary voters included proportionately more four-of-four regular voters, who are often more “mainstream” Republican, whereas this runoff drew much more MAGA energy.

Paxton’s win gives James Talarico a big opportunity. Anat counseled that he should respond to attacks like “Tala-freak-o” by confidently standing up for his own values, while at the same time calling out MAGA for picking our pockets and being “pedophile protectors.” Encouragingly, Talarico did almost exactly that — calling out Ken Paxton for letting an admitted child rapist back on the streets: “If Ken Paxton is worried about freaks, he should stop giving Epstein-style sweetheart deals to pedophiles.”

For more on the Democratic Party’s brand problem — and some actually-useful free advice on how to fix it — check out:

Get more from Michael Podhorzer in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

She just published a beautiful piece about Callais and her family history in Louisiana that you all should read: “The System My Grandfather Deserved: Our Political System Isn’t Broken. For Millions of Americans, It Was Never Built.” Stasha’s grandfather, Gustave Rhodes (not her great-grandfather — her grandfather) was a sharecropper on a sugarcane plantation in South Louisiana. Gustave organized his fellow workers and successfully sued to collect the wages they had been denied. But then, realizing that “Winning one battle inside a deeply unequal structure was not the same thing as transforming the structure itself,” he moved into voting rights organizing and worked alongside John Lewis.

The conversation covered, among other things:

• Why the South gets ignored until something explodes. Stasha talked about how Washington dramatically underestimates how widespread the feeling of institutional powerlessness actually is, and how it cuts across party lines. That convergence is both a warning sign and a political opening — if organizing can meet people where that feeling lives.

• The incremental reform trap — Stasha emphasized that things like same-day voter registration and stronger ethics rules absolutely matter. But incremental reforms become a trap when political leaders offer them not as steps toward bigger change, but as substitutes for it.

• “Ragency” — Anat brought in a word from organizer Ashley Fairbanks: rage + agency = ragency. Stasha pushed it further: anger is only power if you’re organizing it toward something.

• What we owe the next generation. The democracy we want to leave our children is one that’s inclusive enough to hear every voice, representative enough to reflect every community, and resilient enough to hold through whatever economic, political, or technological changes that come next. That’s substantively different from what we have now, which is a system built with deliberate exclusions that have never been fully reckoned with. The question this moment is asking us is whether we’re willing to name that gap honestly, and organize at the scale it actually requires, instead of continuing to negotiate against ourselves before the fight even begins.

More is coming soon from me on the Roberts Court, Callais, and where all of this fits into the larger picture.

Get more from Michael Podhorzer in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

The organizing driving this is a direct response to what the Roberts Court did in Callais: state legislatures across the South are already moving to redraw maps designed to lock in a catastrophic imbalance of representation not just for Black Americans, but for all of us.

Here is Anat’s latest messaging guide on the destruction of the Voting Rights Act.

The bulk of our time in this week’s “Meeting the Moment” was me walking through a slideshow, previewing charts about Callais and the Roberts Court that will soon be published with a fuller narrative at Weekend Reading.

But for now, here are a few numbers that deserve emphasis:

• During the Jim Crow era, white Southern elites had almost twice the political weight they would have had if every vote counted equally. (I say “elites” because the facially neutral measures that kept Black people from voting also suppressed the votes of many poor and working-class white people.)

• Callais is about to take us back to that awful status quo — not for individual Black Southerners’ rights to cast a ballot, but for their collective rights to elect the representatives of their choosing. In the seven deep South states where majority-Black districts are now in jeopardy, about 50% of Black voters, compared to about 70% of white voters, cast their ballot for a candidate who actually won their district in 2024. After the maps get redrawn, that number is expected to be cut in half for Black voters, dropping to just 25%. White voters in those same states go from 70% to 71%.

Again, the charts from this presentation (and more) will be published here soon with the full context they deserve. I also posted two of them on Bluesky right after the decision dropped. What I wanted to convey in this informal Live presentation was the through line showing how the Roberts Court’s rulings aren’t just a series of unfortunate events, but components of a single project.

Before my Callais slideshow, Anat shared some remarkable dispatches from her recent travels globetrotting against authoritarianism. In Barcelona, she worked with the coalition around Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez navigating a challenge from the far right, and found the same playbook she recognizes here: scapegoating refugees and foreigners, exploiting economic anxiety, and flooding the media zone.

From there she went to Berlin for a multi-country conference on confronting authoritarianism. She was struck by seeing the Stolpersteine, or “stumbling blocks” — small brass plaques set into sidewalks across Germany and other countries, each commemorating a victim of the Nazi regime at the place they last lived or worked. The artist, Gunter Demnig, started the project in 1992 to create a decentralized memorial where you literally can’t walk down the street without stumbling across the history. They reminded Anat of the signs she saw in Washington, D.C., marking the spots where ICE has abducted people.

D.C. was Anat’s final stop on her way home, where she met with organizers, many from Texas, to hold public vigils in front of the White House and Tidal Basin memorials to demand the closure of the ICE concentration camps.

Some recent Substack Live conversations on related topics:

In this week’s “Meeting the Moment,” Anat and I addressed two different topics where we've been hearing a lot of discomfort from folks along these lines. I also gave a forgotten-history lesson about what the Nuremberg trials should tell us about our current era.

Was it a good idea for Virginia voters to choose to redraw their maps?

To defend themselves (and all of us) from a fascist movement trying to seize an illegitimate House majority by doing the same thing? Of course it was a good idea! But Republicans would love you to think otherwise, judging by all the ads that misleadingly suggested Obama was against the redistricting measure.

Won't that just give MAGA an excuse to declare the midterm results illegitimate?

They don't need an excuse! We know they're going to try to do that, because that's what they always try to do when they lose. Emphasis on “try.” We can make sure they don't succeed by doing two things: preparing people to reject the BS we already know MAGA will pull, and win by so much that they can't even try to contest the results. (That's one lesson we should take from Hungary in 2026, as Kim Scheppele explained on Weekend Reading Live.)

Should we really say that Trump and ICE are holding people in “concentration camps”?

Yes — because it’s both true and strategic.

It’s true because that's what they are, as Andrea Pitzer explained in our recent conversation: a place where people are held without due process after being rounded up based solely on what they look like and where they come from.

It’s strategic because it signals that this is an extreme circumstance that demands an urgent response. Think of it this way: can you imagine a bunch of Texas moms deciding to caravan down to Dilley and protest because in America, we don't have…detention centers? You can make that term more toxic if you're trying to free a specific sympathetic population, like children, but most of the victims here are single men who also deserve freedom.

Pop quiz: What crime were the Nazis tried for at Nuremberg?

Did you guess something like genocide? That was part of it. But the first charge, and the primary motivation for trying the Nazis, wasn't specifically about the Holocaust; it was “crimes against peace.” After two devastating world wars, the international community wanted “never again” to mean: never again should any country start an aggressive war, because the consequences to the entire planet could be too devastating.

Only in the 1960s did that narrative shift, largely because the U.S. and the Soviet Union decided that they didn't want the same prohibition applied to them.

When we define “never again” as being strictly about the Holocaust, it becomes too easy to let ourselves off the hook. Nothing is as bad as that, so we can't compare ourselves to it. Things couldn't get that bad. We haven't gone that far. Which means almost any atrocity short of murdering 6 million people isn't “far enough” to sound the alarm about and move heaven and earth to stop.

Get more from Michael Podhorzer in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

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.

Get more from Michael Podhorzer in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

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.

Get more from Michael Podhorzer in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

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.

Get more from Michael Podhorzer in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

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.

Get more from Michael Podhorzer in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

• 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.

Get more from Michael Podhorzer in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

• 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.

Get more from Michael Podhorzer in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

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

Get more from Michael Podhorzer in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app