This week’s “Meeting the Moment” featured our dear friend and former Research Collaborative colleague, Jiggy Geronimo, whose work on narrative strategy and the surveillance state is as amazing as her name. We discussed her important new piece on Substack about how to get our comms to break through in the modern information environment — which pro-democracy progressives spend a lot more time talking about than actually doing. And she walked us through how she helped organize her own community against the fascist surveillance state, specifically the network of Flock cameras that has been used to help ICE and to spy on people seeking abortions.
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.
