| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Launched dozens of missiles toward Israel, beginning its retaliatory campaign after waves of Israeli strikes devastated Tehran's military chain of command and struck critical nuclear facilities. | |
| Iran's supreme leader, Ayatolya Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that Israel should anticipate a harsh punishment as some of Israel's European allies expressed worry that Israel was ratcheting up its military conflict with Iran. | ||
| Again, that from the New York Times. | ||
| And we'll have live coverage of the Security Council meeting when it gets underway here on C-SPAN, starting at about 3 p.m. Eastern. | ||
| Joining us this morning as Ezra Levin, he's the co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible. | ||
| Ezra Levin, reminder viewers, what is Indivisible? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look, we're a pro-democracy grassroots movement of local volunteers who have formed local indivisible groups in basically every single congressional district in the country. | |
| And we're organizing to protect American democracy. | ||
| So that means pushing our elected officials to actually represent us, in some cases, organizing to replace our elected representatives. | ||
| And in a moment like this, we're organizing to push back against an autocratic overreach from the federal government. | ||
| And you have organized, you're one of the key groups that has organized this no kings protest rallies across the country on Saturday. | ||
| What are they? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look, when we heard that Donald Trump was planning a military birthday parade for himself that would cost $100 million of taxpayer dollars, your money, my money, everybody who's watching your taxpayer dollars, we were shocked. | |
| I mean, that's not the kind of thing we've seen in America. | ||
| It's the kind of thing you would more likely see in North Korea. | ||
| And that's really dangerous. | ||
| What we know from the experts in authoritarianism is would-be authoritarians want to project strength like this. | ||
| They want to show that they are the supreme leader. | ||
| And we couldn't let that stand. | ||
| We didn't want to play into Trump's hands. | ||
| We didn't want some kind of counter-protest of that parade. | ||
| We didn't want to give him the narrative device that he could say we're protesting in the military. | ||
| So instead, we said, look, Donald Trump can have downtown D.C. for his little birthday parade. | ||
| We're going to organize peacefully, joyfully, boisterously, and powerfully everywhere else. | ||
| And on Saturday, there are going to be more than 2,000 locally led peaceful protests for No Kings Day, not just in the big city centers, but in places like Homer, Alaska, in Winnebago, Wisconsin, in Eureka, Montana, in small towns and cities across the country. | ||
| People are standing up and saying, we don't do kings in America. | ||
| What's your prediction for how many people will turn out across the country? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So this is always hard to tell, but this is not our first rodeo. | |
| Earlier this year, on April 5th, we held the then single largest day of peaceful protest in many years. | ||
| It was called Hands Off, and we saw events in more than 1,300 communities worldwide. | ||
| The conservative estimates held that there were about 3.5 million people who showed up for hands-off. | ||
| 1,300 events were hands-off, more than 2,000 for No Kings Day. | ||
| So I would expect millions more. | ||
| There is a rally in Philadelphia. | ||
| We will have coverage of that at 1 p.m. Eastern Time. | ||
| The No Kings protest taking place in Philadelphia. | ||
| 1 p.m. Eastern Time, it's featuring Congressman Jamie Raskin, Randy Weingarten, the teacher union president. | ||
| And you'll be able to watch that rally at 1 p.m. Eastern Time on C-SPAN, on C-SPAN Now, our free video mobile app, as well as online on demand at c-span.org. | ||
| Ezra Levin, I want to play for you what the president had to say yesterday in the Easter room at the White House when he was asked about these No Kings protests. | ||
| I don't feel like a king. | ||
| I have to go through hell to get stuff approved. | ||
| A king would say, I'm not going to get this. | ||
| The king would have never had the California mandate to even be talking to him. | ||
| He wouldn't have to call up Mike Johnson and Thune and say, fellas, you got to pull this off. | ||
| And after years, we get it done. | ||
| No, no, we're not a king. | ||
| We're not a king at all. | ||
| Ezra Levin, how do you respond? | ||
| The president is saying there's checks and balances in place. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think he's doing everything he can to undermine those checks and balances. | |
| And that's not just me saying that. | ||
| You look to the scholars of authoritarianism. | ||
| You look to Maria Steffen, Heather Cox Richardson, Timothy Snyder, Erica Chenoweth, the folks who have studied this for decades. | ||
| And the way they describe the moment that we're in right now is using the term autocratic breakthrough. | ||
| And autocratic breakthrough is not just defined by a right-wing government pushing a conservative agenda. | ||
| I would disagree with that agenda, but that's not autocratic breakthrough. | ||
| Instead, autocratic breakthrough is defined by the concentration of power in the hands of one individual and then attacks on other sources of power. | ||
| So when I think of autocratic breakthrough, I'm thinking of the attacks on media institutions and universities and businesses and nonprofits. | ||
| When I think of autocratic breakthrough, I think of the undermining of the rule of law, disappearing Americans to a foreign gulag, militarizing American cities and sending Gestapo forces out across the country to tear apart American families. | ||
| That's what it looks like to see a moment of autocratic breakthrough. | ||
| What it doesn't look like is some sort of monarchical rule from the history books that you can identify. | ||
| It's a slow descent into authoritarianism. | ||
| And one day we wake up looking for our First Amendment rights, looking for our rights to peacefully organize, and we find out we don't have them because we didn't stand up to protect them. | ||
| That's why it's so important for us to peacefully but powerfully stand up today to protect those rights. | ||
| How do you respond to critics who say overreach by the executive branch has happened with previous presidents as well? | ||
| Former President Barack Obama said he had a pen and he was going to use it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, former President Barack Obama wore a tan suit and the right-wing media ecosystem lost its mind. | |
| The idea that you would compare, that you would compare some form of overreach from Barack Obama or frankly, other Republican presence in decades past to what's going on now betrays a total lack of understanding of the current moment and history. | ||
| Again, look, you don't have to ideologically agree with me. | ||
| You don't have to be a progressive in this moment. | ||
| If you're only organizing with progressives in this moment, your room's too small. | ||
| We need people of all ideological stripes. | ||
| We need progressives and moderates and conservative Democrats and never Trump Republicans. | ||
| And yes, even Trump voters who wanted lower prices of eggs and bread, but now are seeing their fellow community members be disappeared overseas. | ||
| We need them standing up in this moment saying, look, we might not agree on everything, but what we do agree on is this is a constitutional republic. | ||
| We have freedom of speech. | ||
| We have the right to organize. | ||
| We believe in due process. | ||
| And while we might not agree on the precise budget we might pass next year or education policy or tax policy, that's okay. | ||
| What we can agree on is we don't do kings in America. | ||
| We'll go to Jim, who's in Stanford, New York, Democratic caller, up first for this conversation. | ||
| Jim, you're on the air with Ezra Levin. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Yes, good morning. | ||
| As far as tomorrow with the parade for a so-called king, tomorrow is flag day. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And I don't hear people mentioning that. | ||
| Jim, thank you for bringing that up. | ||
| We just did a call with participants last night, and I specifically called that out. | ||
| And if you look at our resources at nokings.org, in addition to finding an event near you, you'll find some toolkits for how to put on those events. | ||
| I think it's very important that we lean into patriotism right now. | ||
| Part of the point of holding a big old military parade, rolling tanks through the streets of D.C., is for Trump to kind of claim the mantle of American patriotism. | ||
| He is America. | ||
| We can't cede that narrative to him. | ||
| As you note, it is Flag Day on June 14th. | ||
| It's not just Donald Trump's birthday. | ||
| It's also the 250th anniversary of the forming of the Continental Army, that army that was formed to push back against another mad king. | ||
| So I strongly recommend if you are going to a protest on No Kings Day, you know, have some fun with it. | ||
| Bring your family, bring your friends, prepare to dance, prepare to chant, but also prepare to wave your American flag, prepare to listen to some veterans that are going to be having speaking roles, I'm sure, at your events. | ||
| Embrace patriotism in this moment and show the rest of the country and world what pluralistic democracy in our representative democracy looks like. | ||
| Ezra Levin, what do you say then to President Trump as he prepares for this military parade and asks that Americans celebrate the U.S. Army and its birthday? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, Trump is somewhat irrelevant to the day. | |
| He has his little parade that I do not think is going to be well attended, and that's in downtown D.C., and he can have it. | ||
| There are going to be millions more people all around the country who are standing up for American democracy. | ||
| I would say the most quintessentially American thing that you can do is to stand up in defense of your constitutional rights and peacefully organize in defense of them. | ||
| That's more American than apple pie. | ||
| I hope to see people of all stripes, all ideological persuasions, all geographies showing up on this day. | ||
| I think it's going to be an awesome, incredible, empowering display of what makes America one of the best places to be in the world. | ||
| As we said, we will have coverage of the No Kings protest rally in Philadelphia at 1 p.m. Eastern Time tomorrow. | ||
| We will also have coverage of the 250th anniversary parade in celebration of the U.S. Army. | ||
| That starts at 6 p.m. Eastern Time on C-SPAN on C-SPANNOW and C-SPAN.org. | ||
| Ezra Levin is with us here this morning talking about the No Kings protests that are planned across the United States on Saturday. | ||
| We'll go to Daniel, who's in Cannonsburg, Pennsylvania, Republican. | ||
| Daniel? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey there, Ezra. | |
| And I would agree with you if it was like, for example, like how MLK went with peacefully protesting, even though they were really, you know, brutalized by the police and stuff. | ||
| But the thing is, though, with the LA riots, I agree with Trump saying the National Guard and even the Marines because you saw what they were doing. | ||
| They were looting Adidases. | ||
| They were looting Apple stores. | ||
| They were causing chaos and they were throwing rocks off of the bridge at police cars that were driving by. | ||
| And the thing is, the thing is, I remember I wasn't born when the, you know, you know, the Korean rooftops. | ||
| I wasn't born when that happened. | ||
| But that's what happens when the National Guard or the Marines even don't show up to these riots. | ||
| Okay, let's take your point, Daniel. | ||
| Ezra Levin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Daniel, I appreciate your question because I think what this hits on is a core part of the discussion right now, which is what is the role of peaceful protest and how can it show up? | |
| And what is the strategic logic of it? | ||
| I would be first to say Indivisible has been rooted in the principles of nonviolence from the get-go. | ||
| And frankly, if I had to compare receipts with Donald Trump on who is more committed to nonviolent political engagement, I would be happy to. | ||
| As I mentioned earlier this year, we were helping organize the hands-off protests with 1,300 events all across the world. | ||
| Not a single incident of property destruction or violence reported in 1,300 events all across the world. | ||
| Whereas Donald Trump, we were shocked and appalled when he did a riot, a violent, murderous riot at the Capitol on January 6th. | ||
| And then the first chance he got when he was elected again, he pardoned those violent insurrectionists. | ||
| I think what's happening in LA is atrocious, but I think it requires some context. | ||
| The people of LA, the mayor of LA, the governor of LA, identified that there were some small number of people that were engaging in property destruction. | ||
| That's bad. | ||
| And they said they had it under control. | ||
| The LAPD said that they had it under control. | ||
| Nobody asked for Donald Trump to send in troops. | ||
| Nobody asked for him to nationalize the Guard or send in the Marines. | ||
| What he is doing there is inflaming the situation intentionally. | ||
| And Daniel, I think we agree here on the importance of nonviolence, but I would ask you to look at the full context there and understand that authoritarians often do exactly this. | ||
| They aim to inflame tensions and spread chaos, not just to cause harm, but to escalate the situation so that they can claim more authority and militarize more. | ||
|
unidentified
|
At the same time that Trump is escalating in LA, he and the Republicans in Congress are asking for $150 billion more dollars for ICE and immigration enforcement. | |
| What we are seeing in LA is a rehearsal for the rest of the country. | ||
| They would like to hire 10,000 more ICE agents to tear apart families around the country. | ||
| And the way that you push back against that kind of authoritarian escalation is broad-based, ideologically diverse, geographically dispersed, peaceful, people-based organizing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that's what we're doing. | |
| Who or where are you getting the funding to organize this effort? | ||
|
unidentified
|
From viewers like you. | |
| The single largest source of funding for Indivisible is people going to indivisible.org and sending us 20 bucks. | ||
| That is the fuel for the grassroots movement. | ||
| And primarily what's happening on the ground, though, is normal everyday people deciding to take it upon themselves to organize themselves. | ||
| Nobody's getting paid to show up or organize these protests. | ||
| There are more than 2,000 of them. | ||
| God, I don't even know how you would do that logistically to pay to have millions of people show up. | ||
| Instead, if you go to a hands-off rally in April or if you show up tomorrow at a No Kings Day protest, what you'll see is moms and grandmoms. | ||
| You'll see teachers and IT technicians and government workers. | ||
| You'll see normal everyday folks from the community. | ||
| We have a saying in Indivisible, politics in this moment is too important to leave up to the politicians. | ||
| So look, by and large, we're not professional politicos. | ||
| We're not professional organizers. | ||
| We're even maybe not activists. | ||
| What we are Americans who are concerned for our democracy. | ||
| All right, we'll go to Henry next in Michigan. | ||
| Democratic caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Ezra, a congresswoman, Monica MacGyver, is up on charges for shoving or interfering with ICE. | ||
| A senator yesterday was manhandled and a presser by Christy Noam. | ||
| We're not slow walking towards dictatorship and authoritarianism. | ||
| Trump has threatened that the marches tomorrow, the protests, they're going to be met with force. | ||
| Now, I'm concerned that last night's attack by Israel is just another cover for Trump to move headlong into his agenda to take over America and establish authoritarianism here. | ||
| I wonder if you can speak to that for us, please. | ||
| Is Nathan Yahoo working in concert with Donald Trump to take America into a dictatorship and authoritarianism with this attack on Iran? | ||
| You know, I don't know. | ||
| Can I just be honest? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What I do know is America should stop sending hundreds of billions of dollars to an authoritarian in Israel who is subjugating his people and starting foreign wars that could drag the United States in. | ||
| I think it's a waste of U.S. dollars. | ||
| I think it fuels atrocities. | ||
| I think it does not make one American safer. | ||
| As for what Trump is doing this morning, I think you're right. | ||
| He is escalating quite quickly. | ||
| Again, I've mentioned this. | ||
| I'm not a scholar of authoritarianism, but I read the scholars of authoritarianism, and it scares me where we are right now. | ||
| What we need to recognize, though, for those of us watching this right now, most of the time, most people are not paying attention. | ||
| It is not going to be that one day we wake up and suddenly democracy is gone. | ||
| Suddenly we're under monarchical rule. | ||
| That's not how it works. | ||
| Instead, we are a frog in the slowly, increasingly boiling water. | ||
| And so we have a responsibility, us organizing and paying attention, to alert as many of our family, of our friends, of our community members to this fact. | ||
| And when they do lift their head up and say, oh my gosh, they're disappearing people to El Salvador. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, my gosh, they're trying to militarize cities across the country. | |
| Oh, my gosh, they're tearing apart families. | ||
| Whatever it does that makes people lift their head up, we need to welcome them into this pro-democracy movement. | ||
| What we know from the folks like Erica Chenoweth, one of these authoritarian scholars, is it is very difficult for an authoritarian to maintain their hold on power if just 3.5% of the population organizes in a persistent, pro-democracy, peaceful, insistent manner. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In the U.S. context, that's somewhere between 11 and 12 million people. | |
| It's a lot. | ||
| It's not impossible, but we need to continue to build the peaceful, insistent pro-democracy movement around the country. | ||
| And this is one of the exciting things about No Kings Day because I think it's going to be a cool place for people to be. | ||
| I think people are going to want to be part of it. | ||
| I think people are going to have fun. | ||
| And people are then going to get plugged into organizing persistently in their own communities. | ||
| Corey in Garner, North Carolina, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so we did get back to the No Kings issue at the end. | |
| So, you know, Esra, I would like to kind of understand your meaning of politics not left to politicians and how that relates to the previous administration versus now six months in. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So I think politics should never be left to the politician. | ||
| Look, Indivisible is not an arm of the Democratic Party. | ||
| We've called for Chuck Schumer to step down from leadership because we don't think he's a good leader. | ||
| We've regularly pushed Democrats to actually fight back in defense of our democracy when we've seen them not doing that. | ||
| I don't think democracy works if it's just the politicians who are leading because you know what the politicians are? | ||
| They're weather veins. | ||
| They are weather veins and they go where the wind blows. | ||
| And you know who's blowing that wind? | ||
| It's donors. | ||
| It's industry. | ||
| It's interest groups. | ||
| If we want a functioning democracy, I don't care if you're a Republican or an Independent or a Democrat. | ||
| If you want a democracy that responds to you, you got to blow that wind. | ||
| You got to be part of what's influencing them. | ||
| And the way to do that is to focus on organizing in your own community. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's what works. | |
| That's how our democracy is structured. | ||
| Donald Trump wants everybody to think that he is the sole elected official. | ||
| He's the owner of political power in this country. | ||
| It's just not true. | ||
| That is not how the founders designed our constitutional republic. | ||
| There are literally hundreds of thousands of elected officials in this country. | ||
| And you build power by organizing locally, focusing on who your representatives are, and pushing them. | ||
| And that is true regardless of what your ideology is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I do believe our democracy will be stronger if people do more of that and less doom scrolling or yelling at each other on the internet. | |
| Organizing your own community. | ||
| Talk to each other. | ||
| Build community. | ||
| That's what's going to strengthen our democracy. | ||
| Mr. Levin, which leaders are doing an effective job pushing back? | ||
| And are there leaders on both sides of the aisle? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so certainly there are plenty of folks like Chris Murphy, like Maxwell Frost, like Jasmine Crockett, like Jamie Raskin, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, like Bernie Sanders. | |
| We see lots of leaders who are standing up. | ||
| I wish I could point to some elected Republicans in Congress, but the Republican Party has fully been taken over at the national level by Donald Trump. | ||
| This wasn't true in his first term. | ||
| In 2017, there were actually plenty of elected Republicans who were willing to stand up to him. | ||
| Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney, among others. | ||
| These are, frankly, Republicans who I strongly disagree with ideologically. | ||
| We wouldn't agree on tax policy. | ||
| We wouldn't agree on education policy. | ||
| We wouldn't even agree on many elements of civil rights policy. | ||
| But we agreed that Donald Trump was a threat to democracy and folks needed to stand up together. | ||
| That's not the Republican Party that we have at the national level today. | ||
| And that's part of what makes this moment so dangerous. | ||
| Somebody mentioned earlier that the United States Senator yesterday was tackled to the ground and put into handcuffs. | ||
| That senator is Senator Alex Padilla, one of the senators from California. | ||
| If you haven't seen that video, I would recommend you take a look. | ||
| He was attending a press conference with the Secretary of Homeland Security, attempted to ask a question, and in response, he was forcibly removed, pushed to the ground, and put into handcuffs. | ||
| In response to that, in response to that, this incredible, egregious act. | ||
| What did Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, the Republican Speaker of the House said? | ||
| He said that the senator should be censured by the Senate. | ||
| This is the Republican Party we're dealing with now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would love to have a Republican Party that I disagree with on policy. | |
| What we have right now is a Republican Party that is not standing behind the Democratic Republic and our democratic institutions. |