| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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Watch the U.S. Army's 250th anniversary parade and celebration Saturday, starting at 6 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN. | |
| C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at c-span.org. | ||
| Democracy. | ||
| It isn't just an idea. | ||
| It's a process. | ||
| A process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles. | ||
| It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted. | ||
| Democracy in real time. | ||
| This is your government at work. | ||
| This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy unfiltered. | ||
| Joining us this morning as Ezra Levin. | ||
| He's the co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible. | ||
| Ezra Levin, remind our 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 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 is 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. | ||
| A 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 presidents 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, we're 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
|
unidentified
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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 and 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 Canonsburg, 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, who's sent 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 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 instigated 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 it. | ||
| God, I don't even know how you would do that logistically to pay to have millions of people show up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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 in 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. | ||
| And 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 hand at the end. | |
| So, you know, Esri, 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? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're weather veins. | |
| They are weather vanes 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. | ||
| 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 is 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 didn'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. | ||
| I would love to have a Republican Party that I disagree with on policy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What we have right now is a Republican Party that is not standing behind the Democratic Republic and our Democratic institutions. | |
| Esder Levin, as you were talking about that situation at the news conference with the Homeland Security Secretary, we were showing that video, that video put on X by the Senator Padilla's office. | ||
| And you can see there on the, he's on the ground being handcuffed by the officers there. | ||
| And we're going to talk to our viewers about that and other public policy political issues coming up in our last hour of the Washington Journal. | ||
| Donna in St. Louis, Missouri, Independent. | ||
| Hi, Donna. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Three things. | ||
| First of all, what Trump wants is an oligarchy where a few billionaires have all the power. | ||
| The bombing and the arrest of Senator Badilla, that is a distraction which the media is eating up to keep our attention off the Republican bill in the Senate where they're going to give billions of tax cuts to the richest 10%, billions of cuts in Medicaid, millions of people will lose their health care, and also in Medicare and Medicaid. | ||
| And secondly, the Homeland Security Secretary Noam, she knew who the senior senator from California was. | ||
| She was in the federal building where he has an office. | ||
| She was standing there where he has this office, and either she's stupid, the stupid person in the building if she didn't know who he was. | ||
| But the fact is, Trump did not want her to answer any questions. | ||
| So the FBI agents should be fired for arresting a senator and are acting like they didn't know who he was, who along with the rest of us does have the right to freedom of speech, which is the real reason he was taken out of the room. | ||
| And that is scary, people. | ||
| That is right. | ||
| Look, Donna, so can I respond to both points? | ||
| One, we have to live in these two worlds because in the one world we've focused a lot on here, which is this authoritarian overreach, we see Trump consolidating power and him attacking our most basic constitutional rights. | ||
| That's a scary world that demands us to think as anti-authoritarians. | ||
| And how do you organize peacefully a broad-based movement to push back against that? | ||
| But we also live in this world where there is legislation moving forward in Congress as it would any given year. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And there is a Republican trifecta. | |
| So there's a Republican controlling the Senate and the House and the presidency. | ||
| And they're pushing forward this reconciliation bill that you're exactly right gives tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires and does nothing for the bottom half of the country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that's intentional. | |
| Why do you think, why do you think the Republicans are pushing forward a deeply regressive bill that concentrates power in the hands of a tiny few and gives tax cuts and concentrates wealth in the hands of a tiny few at the same time that they're attacking our fundamental rights? | ||
| Why do you think those two things are happening at the same time? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's not a coincidence. | |
| Because if your policy agenda is deeply regressive, if it is all built on concentrating wealth in the hands of industry and millionaires and billionaires, that's not a policy agenda you can maintain if you live in a free and democratic society. | ||
| If people are able to express their opinions and organize and vote freely, they're going to vote you out of power. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So you have to also at the same time systematically attack those freedoms. | |
| Otherwise, you're not going to be able to implement your policy agenda. | ||
| I see these two things not as in conflict or not a distraction. | ||
| I think see them as part and parcel of the overall plan, as you said, to build an oligarchic system. | ||
| Now, as for what we saw with Senator Pia, you're absolutely right. | ||
| They knew who he was. | ||
| He self-identified. | ||
| He said, I'm Senator Padilla. | ||
| So the White House and the Homeland Security Secretary came out with a lot of straight-up lies describing the situation and expecting that their people, if nobody else, their people will believe those lies. | ||
| And what that will develop is two alternative worldviews about what reality is. | ||
| And they benefit when Americans can't agree on what reality is. | ||
| So again, I come back to this basic request for everybody watching. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Please watch the news to become informed. | |
| Please understand what the issues are. | ||
| But also organize in your own community and have conversations with each other, even with people who you don't agree about what is happening right now, because we cannot afford to let these would-be authoritarians define what reality is for us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We need to be defining reality based on what we see, what we hear, and what we discuss with our fellow community members. | |
| We're going to go to Northport, Florida. | ||
| Cindy's a Republican. | ||
| Welcome to the conversation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| I have been listening to Mr. Levin, and I know that he seems to be doing an awful lot of complaining about this parade and the money that's been spent on it. | ||
| But he didn't seem to complain about Joe Biden spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for queers and lesbians and cross-dressers to be at the White House for a big party on Easter. | ||
| And he seems to have no respect for common sense people who freed this country so that we can have this conversation. | ||
| How much taxpayer money is he spending on this organization for people standing on the streets complaining? | ||
| That's probably going to get nasty. | ||
| Mr. Levin, any taxpayer money for the no kings protests? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, of course not. | |
| That's bizarre. | ||
| I would say, Cindy, though, I don't know what you're talking about with the Joe Biden spending, but let me just take you at your word that Joe Biden spent $100,000 on a party of some sort that you disagree with. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, I don't know if that's true, but let's say he did. | |
| That's $100,000. | ||
| How much is the Trump military parade for his birthday going to cost? | ||
| $100 million of taxpayer money, your money. | ||
| And he's doing this at the time, Cindy. | ||
| Unless you're a millionaire or a billionaire, Cindy, I don't think you are. | ||
| Unless you're a millionaire or a billionaire, he is doing this at a time where he is cutting taxes for the millionaires and billionaires in your state and not doing anything for you. | ||
| So, Cindy, I would really encourage you to take a close look at the facts here. | ||
| Donald Trump is duping you. | ||
| He is duping you. | ||
| He is playing on your own lack of understanding of his operation. | ||
| That's intentional. | ||
| He does not want you to know what he's doing. | ||
| He is trying to make you hate your neighbor, whether the LGBTQ community, whether they're immigrants, whether they're federal workers. | ||
| He wants you to focus on them so that you don't see him take money out of your pocket and give it to his billionaire friends. | ||
| Cindy, I'm with you in being upset when the federal government misuses money, but I would highly encourage you to pay close attention not to just what Donald Trump is saying, but what he and his Republican allies are doing, which is directly harming you and your community. | ||
| Carla is in Aurora, Colorado. | ||
| Democratic caller. | ||
| You're talking with Ezra Levin this morning. | ||
| Go ahead, Carla. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Ezra. | |
| Thank you for what you're doing. | ||
| I'm a proud member of a progressive group, Indivisible, in Aurora, Colorado. | ||
| And I've been livid ever since Donald Trump said he was going to run. | ||
| Right now, I would like people to understand that this man is not mentally well. | ||
| In 2017, Dandy Lee, a doctor, started a duty to warn conference. | ||
| You can Google Duty to Warn a conference, and you will find that since 2017, more than 240 highly trained mental health experts have deemed him in writing to be unfit to be the commander-in-chief. | ||
| I go to these groups with people who are educated, retired teachers, retired professors. | ||
| These are lawyers. | ||
| These are people who know what the heck they're talking about. | ||
| They've been paying attention since he began to run. | ||
| This whole situation has me so upset. | ||
| I just can't even tell you how much. | ||
| But. | ||
| All right, Carla, I'll jump in and I'll jump in and have Ezra Levin respond. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Carla, I feel that too. | |
| Look, here's what I would say. | ||
| No single one of us is going to solve this on our own. | ||
| And it is not our job to psychoanalyze Donald Trump. | ||
| We can't control what he does. | ||
| That is not in our power. | ||
| And we should be focusing on what is in our power. | ||
| So what I encourage people to do is by all means be informed and watch the news and make sure that you understand the basics of the issue. | ||
| But if we're going to do anything positive for this country in this moment, it's going to start with what you are doing, which is organizing in your own community. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe that's forming or finding the local indivisible group. | |
| That's what a lot of folks have done all across the country. | ||
| But you could join your local union. | ||
| You could join your local Working Families Party chapter. | ||
| You could start your own community institution. | ||
| But the way that we push back effectively is by joining with each other and identifying what is our piece of this? | ||
| What can we actually do? | ||
| I'm not looking for people to just feel good about being on the right side of history because we had the right opinions. | ||
| What I want to see people do is take action and specifically take strategic, effective action. | ||
| And so what you do in Aurora is going to be different than what somebody does in Beaumont, Texas, which is going to be different than what somebody does in San Francisco, which is going to be different than what somebody does in Winnebago, Wisconsin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's good. | |
| That's right. | ||
| But it's up to you to use your brain, organize with your fellow community members, identify, here's what I can do in Aurora. | ||
| Let's do that. | ||
| And I think you're not just going to feel better. | ||
| It's cheaper than therapy, we say. | ||
| You're not just going to feel better. | ||
| You're also going to make a positive impact in this current moment. | ||
| We'll go to Paul in New York, Independent. | ||
| Paul, question or comment? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So first of all, I agree with, actually, oddly enough, I agree with Ezra on a lot of things, particularly the participation stuff. | ||
| Let me tell you where I disagree with you. | ||
| One is this role of hyperbole. | ||
| I think part of the problem is that everybody seems to be calling, you know, these sort of, for instance, George W. Bush was called a fascist, a Nazi. | ||
| Obama was called a socialist. | ||
| So there's a sort of crying wolf effect, if you follow me, where since there've been so much description in such extreme terms of every politician, if an authoritarian does show up, I'm not sure people would recognize it. | ||
| That's the first thing. | ||
| The second thing is, you said that like a military parade is similar to what you see in North Korea. | ||
| Well, it's not my cup of tea, but it's actually something in France. | ||
| It's called the Steel Day. | ||
| I was actually there and I was taken aback about how militaristic it was. | ||
| And that's the sort of, you know, that's a big day for them. | ||
| So, I mean, do you think they're an authoritarian? | ||
| My guess would be that you don't. | ||
| When it comes to Padilla, very quickly, you know, I don't agree with what happened to him, but I don't see why it seems to be that it would be okay if he wasn't, if he wasn't a senator, then it would be okay to arrest him. | ||
| And if that's the case, we should be all under the same laws. | ||
| If I make a disruption at a press conference, why should I be subject to being arrested, Ezra? | ||
| Why is that so kosher with you? | ||
| Why is that so acceptable that if I were to go to an ICE facility and make a scene and push somebody, then I should be able to be arrested. | ||
| But if it's a congresswoman, oh, well, that's unacceptable. | ||
| I mean, I think there's a double standard here that you guys have. | ||
| All right, Paul, Paul, let's have Ezra Levin respond. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Let me, maybe I'll try to take it in reverse order. | ||
| So, Paul, I agree. | ||
| If you go and assault somebody at an ice rally, I think you should be arrested. | ||
| Full stop. | ||
| I think that's right. | ||
| That's not what we saw Senator Petia do. | ||
| We saw Senator Petiette at a press conference attempt to ask a question and then was immediately apprehended by the FBI, tackled to the ground, and put into handcuffs. | ||
| I don't think you should have been arrested had you attended a press conference and attended and attempted to ask a question. | ||
| So I agree with you overall. | ||
| I do think you're making this good point about the language that we use and it being almost insufficient for the moment. | ||
| You say, when a real authoritarian comes, will we even be able to know it or describe it because of the language we use? | ||
| I think from my perspective, which is informed by the perspective of the experts in authoritarianism, that moment has arrived, Paul. | ||
| I don't know what other language to use to tell you this. | ||
| I would encourage you to study up on what folks who study this for a living say we are experiencing right now. | ||
| I am left without additional language other than to say this is an autocratic breakthrough, and that is defined by the specific behaviors of this would-be authoritarian ruler. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I don't want to be there. | |
| What I would like is a Republican president who I disagree with on tax policy, and I wouldn't describe that as authoritarianism. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would say, look, he's coming to cut your Medicaid. | |
| He's coming to cut your Medicare. | ||
| He's coming to cut our education spending. | ||
| And I disagree with that for these reasons. | ||
| I wouldn't call that authoritarianism. | ||
| What we define as autocratic breakthrough here, again, is not a right-wing agenda. | ||
| That is not something I agree with, but something that is normal for our political system. | ||
| The not normal thing that is happening right now is the attack on the pillars of liberal democracy and the concentration of political power in the hands of the White House. | ||
| So when you extort Paul Weiss law from or threaten Columbia University or tell businesses they have to take certain actions, otherwise they're going to be targeted by the administration. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's where you get into autocratic breakthrough. | |
| And I wish I had better language to describe it, but I do really try to rely on the experts here and then follow their lead. | ||
| We'll go to Las Vegas. | ||
| Doug is joining us there, a Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Morning. | ||
| Just a simple uneducated high school dropout, but I'm 65 years old. | ||
| I started working when I was 14 years old, worked every day of my dang life. | ||
| Got a retarded daughter that's been retarded when she was born. | ||
| All this liberal stuff is ridiculous. | ||
| I fought with these people over that since day one. | ||
| Everybody causes complaints about their food stamps. | ||
| Well, the government gives me a whole $25. | ||
| Doug, do you have a question or comment about the no kings protest or what the actions by the president? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mad. | |
| You keep talking over people when they call. | ||
| All right, I'm going to move on. | ||
| Larry in Southport, North Carolina, Democratic caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Larry, it's your turn. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I don't want to tell them about it. | ||
| The protesters. | ||
| They're paid protesters. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| This fellow is so despicable. | ||
| I don't maintain him at all. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Larry, or Ezra 11, he says the protesters are paid. | ||
| And this is something that you've seen reported by Fox News and heard from the White House and from Republicans. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would love to see where that money's coming from. | |
| I mean, I don't know how you organize a peaceful protest with literally millions of people all over the globe. | ||
| We're talking 17 countries, every single congressional district, blue states, red states, purple states, rural areas, suburban areas, urban areas. | ||
| Gosh, we've got more than a dozen in Montana, more than a dozen in Alaska, one on every island of Hawaii. | ||
| Who is cutting the checks for these paid protesters? | ||
| Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, one of the key groups organizing the No Kings rally that's happening Saturday, tomorrow, and we'll have coverage of it at 1 p.m. Eastern Time. | ||
| Go to c-SPAN.org for more information or our free video app, C-SPAN Now. | ||
| You can watch it right here on C-SPAN. | ||
| Ezra Levin, thank you for the conversation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great talking. | |
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum involving you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington, D.C. and across the country. | ||
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| C-SPAN's Washington Journal. | ||
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| This June 14th, witness a tribute to the Army's evolution from the Revolutionary War to today, with nearly 7,000 soldiers and period in modern uniforms marching along Constitution Avenue near the National Mall. | ||
| The parade will showcase Army vehicles and equipment, aerial flyovers, and a timeline of U.S. Army history. |