Leah Greenberg, Co-Founder of Indivisible, On Mobilizing and Hope
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Brad is joined by Leah Greenberg, co-founder of Indivisible, for a powerful conversation about the unprecedented scale of grassroots mobilization since the Trump administration and the importance of finding a local organizing home. They discuss historic mass protests like “Hands Off” and “No King’s Day,” which saw millions gather across thousands of towns, and explore the effectiveness of protest and advocacy when paired with strategy.
Leah introduces Indivisible’s ambitious 1 Million Rising initiative to train people in nonviolent resistance and organizing, highlighting the urgency of preparing for authoritarian tactics such as voter intimidation and election subversion. They also cover the stakes of upcoming elections, threats to voting rights, and the need for a unifying narrative that inspires hope and authentic engagement with voters.
The conversation emphasizes the power of digital organizing, including Indivisible’s new “Truth and Share” tool, while underscoring that sustained, community-based action is essential to resisting authoritarianism and securing the future of democracy.
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Music by Ben Thede Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I am joined by an extra special guest, someone who has not been here before, but we're so glad took the time to stop by, and that is Leah Greenberg from Indivisible.
So first Leah, let me say thanks for being here.
Oh, such a pleasure.
Thanks.
You have young children.
I have young children where you might hear some children in this episode playing and enjoying their summer.
And folks, that's what the summer's about.
So if that upsets you too bad.
You know, we need to talk about all about first of all what indivisible's doing and then maybe some some concerns for the future and ways people can get involved.
I think that on this show, we do a great job of warning people about rising fascism, Christian nationalism, and so on.
Sometimes we leave hope to the end.
So I'm starting with hope at the beginning today.
And I want to ask you about what's happening.
It's easy to get depressed.
Look at headlines, think that the world is sunk.
Give us some ideas about what's happening beyond what people might be seeing and the encouraging view you see from the indivisible perspective.
Absolutely.
Well, from my vantage point, what we have seen basically since November, but certainly continuing to pick up speed over the last several months of the Trump administration is a mass outpouring of people all over the country at a at a scale that's actually pretty unprecedented, who are mobilizing, but more importantly, who are organizing collectively.
They are people who are finding each other in communities all over the country and you know, building out some kind of local organizing home and who are taking matters, you know, taking taking leadership for themselves.
I think there's a very broad sense that, you know, the elites aren't gonna fix it.
The Democratic Party's not gonna fix it.
We're not gonna be able to wait for the adults to swoop in and save us.
We've actually got to build the thing ourselves.
And while that is that is a little scary, it is also liberating, right?
There's no asking for permission.
There's no waiting to get started.
There's just what we create together.
And what I can say from where I am is that I know that anybody who's stepping forward, there are thousands and thousands of people who are stepping forward at the same moment that you are.
Remind us of the historic nature of the no hands or excuse me, of hands off and I got my my protest confused there.
Hands off and no King's Day.
Remind us of of the staggering participation in those events.
Yeah, absolutely.
So for hands off, we had about three and a half million people over more than 1,300 events nationwide, which was kind of an extraordinary number, just to give a sense of kind of the the breadth of what is happening around the country, the biggest mobilization, the biggest mass mobilizations on the same day in the first Trump term, you know, clocked in at around a maximum around like 700 events, which I believe was for family separation in 2018.
So right off the bat, in April of the second Trump term, you are already seeing people mobilizing in twice as almost twice as many places as you ever saw in the first term.
No King's Day, which happened June 14th, and which I think was really turbocharged by folks' reactions to Donald Trump sending the National Guard into Los Angeles to the escalation of ice raids around the country and in blue states in particular.
That had more than five million people showing up all over the country at more than 2200 events.
So again, the scale of what we are seeing is almost difficult to grasp because I think we normally process these things by looking at like the picture of the biggest mass mobilization in the biggest city.
But what's actually more exciting is how many little towns in Montana are having these events and how many hubs of organizing are cohering around a moment like that because people who didn't realize that there were other folks who thought the way that they did, people who didn't realize that a bunch of people were actually disturbed by what's going on, they're coming together and they're organizing now too.
You know, when I when I saw the numbers for for those protests, I was taken aback and it was so encouraging to see how they had dwarfed anything that happened in the the first Trump term.
But we all know that that reading statistics and hearing about numbers is one thing and feel and perception and just the the lived experience is another.
And you know, we've been through 10 years of Donald Trump at this point in some some fashion.
I think there's a sense out there of does protesting matter?
Yeah.
Does calling that representative matter?
Does sending that email or postcard matter?
So does it matter?
Yeah.
Well, I think I think it's important to to just name a few things, right?
And the first is that each of those things are tactics, right?
And sometimes they matter and sometimes they don't.
And it kind of depends on what is the strategy that they're part of, right?
Like, you know, calling your representative might matter if it's part of an overarching pressure campaign that's getting their attention and shaping their incentives.
Showing up to a protest might matter if it's part of an overall effort to create a nationwide narrative about mass defiance.
Or it might not.
And so I think it's important to just say part of it is about understanding the overarching moment we're in and the kinds of strategies that we think are gonna be important.
Now we're in this moment of what I would describe as authoritarian breakthrough, right?
It is a short time-limited window in which the authoritarian gets into power and starts rapidly trying to consolidate as much control as they can.
They are, you know, pushing their formal powers to the max.
They are doing a bunch of illegal, extra-legal things and daring people to check them.
They're trying to control the courts, they're trying to control their party, they're trying to crush alternate sources of power.
And they're basically doing all of this to create a sense of inevitability, the sense that, you know, Donald Trump will win.
So why would you, college administrator, why would you CBS bureaucracy, why would you, individual person in your community, why would you bother pushing back in whatever way you can?
That's the goal of what they are trying to do.
And the goal of what we're trying to do with a mass mobilization is to say, oh no, you don't.
This is not inevitable at all.
There are so many more people out there who are horrified by what is happening and who are rising up and who are organizing and to just introduce into the minds of all of the all of the people who are watching and wondering how this is going to play out, the possibility that actually we're going to win.
And that I think is really, really important.
Oh, I think you might be on mute.
That last that last part is really key.
The possibility that we're going to win.
Yeah.
That's all you need for hope.
That's all you need for motivation.
That's all you need to say, you know what?
I'm going to get off the couch today.
I'm going to the protest.
I'm going to join up with the others in my community.
I'm going to make that phone call.
And on that topic, Indivisible is trying to train one million people this summer.
Talk to me about what you're training people for and why it's such a big deal.
Yeah, absolutely.
And if I can finish one last point on that previous on, I'll I'll make the connection here.
I think one of the most dramatic divergences that we've seen that has shaped the vibes pretty dramatically or pretty significantly in the second Trump term is the difference between how elites and elite institutions have responded to Donald Trump and how regular people have responded to Donald Trump.
Like I can tell you as somebody who, you know, the regular folks contact me and sign up for our emails and start taking our actions.
There was, there were people who were depressed, but there was basically nobody who gave up from you know November on.
Whereas what you saw with kind of like elite institutions, right?
Your law firms, your corporations, your higher education, et cetera, et cetera, even, you know, your stakeholders within the Democratic Party with a lot of people kind of went into a defensive crouch immediately.
And so so much of what we have been doing on the national scale, this is true for the mobilizations, and this is true for one million rising, is basically saying, how do we organize the collective people power that we have and use it to apply to everyone who might be decision maker on every level that shapes how power is moving in this moment because it's not just about targeting Donald Trump and saying, hey, Donald Trump, we don't like yield.
It's about targeting a much broader set of people who are making decisions about, you know, what is my power, what is my access, what is my safety if I go along with Donald Trump?
And what kind of world do I have to worry about if I do that and the pro-democracy forces win?
So that's that's kind of like the the macro world in which we're in.
One million rising is this basic, the basic idea here is it's twofold.
The first is we've got a lot of folks who've shown up to an action over the last couple of months, but haven't necessarily found a local organizing home.
So we really wanted to create something that was gonna be scalable where people could, you know, use it to deepen ties and deepen relationships with folks within their own community.
And so what we did, and we also simultaneously felt like we needed a level set with as many people as possible about the moment we're in about the rise of authoritarianism in America and about the ways that successful nonviolent social movements confront and check authoritarianism.
And so one million rising came out of those twin needs.
It's a curriculum of three, it's three sessions that we're doing.
The second one is gonna be July 30th.
The first one was a couple weeks ago, had about 170,000 people who've watched it so far.
And the basic idea is we're gonna, we're walking people through what is authoritarianism, how does it work, how is it upheld or undermined by pillars of society, right?
By the kinds of institutions that we might think of as apolitical, but that actually shape very much whether an authoritarian state is able to function or not.
Faith institutions, media, corporations, higher education, veterans groups, the list goes on.
And then we're like, then we're asking people to think, how are we gonna collectively strategically organize to push those pillars so that instead of complying instead of enabling this administration, they are pushing back to, they are pushing back along with us.
It's a new way of thinking for us.
We have historically been really really focused on how do we call members of Congress, how do we do these advocacy campaigns?
And we're not leaving that alone, like we're not leaving that aside.
We still got to do advocacy.
We still gotta win elections, but we've got to realize that in a moment when there is this rapid spread to consolidate power by an authoritarian, we also have to look at the alternate sources of power that they are looking at.
I have to do this just as a scholar of religion and a complete history nerd and somebody who's written on this stuff.
The American right has used small groups and coffee clutches and home meetings For generations to build a movement and to build power.
And so if you're listening today and you think, well, that sounds wonderful, but again, what will that do?
I'm here to tell you if you if you study the history, the the other side has used this very approach in order to build a movement.
And so it's a grassroots approach, it's a bottom-up approach, and it's a people power approach.
And it's very, very effective.
And it's wonderful to hear about it.
All right.
So here we are.
We've got Americans mobilizing.
We've got people protesting.
We have folks training in non-cooperation.
And there is more good news out there than maybe people focus on every day.
There are neighbors joining in a movement that is resisting.
Let's talk about what is happening and could happen.
So HR 22, which is known as the Save Act is past the House.
Yeah.
Um, what is it?
And how would that make it harder to vote for a lot of people?
Yeah.
So the Save Act is one of a number of pieces of legislation that we are tracking that is intended to make it harder to vote in a in a set of different ways.
I think most notably the Save Act makes it quite difficult if you have changed your name as a married woman and kind of creates a bunch of new hoops that you have to jump through in order to successfully register to vote and have your vote counted.
It is, I would say it's it's and and it's not just the Save Act.
We're tracking the risk of a new executive order being rolled out relatively soon on voting rights that's also very much aimed at making it as as time consuming, as complicated, as difficult for people, particularly on our in our coalition to vote as possible.
And, you know, obviously this is also paired with state level voting restrictions.
There has been a massive wave of voting restrictions at the state level.
First the wave in the 2010s after the Tea Party took office, and then the second most recent wave around stop the steal kind of movement legislation over the course of the the Biden years in response to the the you know follow-on to January 6th.
I think that we should see this moment as, you know, kind of a kind of a continuation of a broader backlash, right?
And they're coming up with new and even more aggressive ways of doing what they have always done, which is acting on this strategy of trying to restrict and shape the electorate in advance of elections.
What they've also introduced in recent years is a strategy of kind of shape how you count and what votes are recognized after the elections as well, right?
And that's, you know, not that that had never happened, but I think it's become much more clearly part of the standard toolkit since Donald Trump initiated the kind of stop the steel framing in 2020.
And so we're preparing for kind of front-end restrictions on the right to vote at the national level and attacks at the state level.
And we're also preparing for the kinds of kind of extra legal and or you know, like out of the box or out of out-of-the-box attacks on how the count how the voting process unfolds and how votes are counted as well.
Now, what I would say on the Save Act specifically is we're less concerned about federal legislation as the most immediate risk.
And that is because uh the Save Act, like a number of other pieces of legislation that are incredibly dangerous, but don't necessarily have a high chance of passage, still has to go through the Senate.
In the Senate, we have got very clear alignment by basically the entire democratic caucus against this legislation because it has to move via because it has to be subject to regular order, which means that it can be filibustered, as long as we hold the democratic caucus, we can keep that legislation stuck in the Senate.
Now, the way that we know it has so it has to have 60 votes, is what you're saying.
Yeah.
And we've got, yes, and we've got alignment with, I don't, I don't know if it's exactly every single Democrat, but I believe it's at least everyone except for Fetterman, that this is not a piece of legislation that can be allowed to leave the Senate.
So I think there's a pretty good, there's a pretty good like firewall there around that piece of legislation and barring any kind of structural reform by the Republicans.
I think we're going to be able to block that one, but that does not mean that we're not facing additional executive orders, additional state level attacks that we need to be concerned about.
All right.
So we have the front-end assault on voting, making it harder to vote, purging roles.
This has been happening for a long time.
This is a tactic that goes back decades.
But as you say, it's accelerated, it's become part of the norm.
What used to be, in some ways, a dirty trick is now just part of the the playbook every every election cycle.
We also need to think through 2026 and the midterms.
Yeah.
And, you know, I've argued on this show that the the 2026 and the midterms are an absolutely crucial moment for this country.
The lifeline of democracy, keeping the will of the people intact in any way, shape, or form, and having one branch of our government that is in some way resistant to, as you say, the breakthrough of authoritarianism.
Can you talk to us about the importance of 2026?
What am I missing?
What else do we need to know?
And why is it such a pivotal pivotal moment?
Well, first of all, I'd 100% echo everything that you said about why it's important.
And I add one additional reason, which is that the people who win in 2026 are going to be the people who shape how the election of 2028 unfolds and who are going to be fielding all of the attacks on a peaceful transition, uh peaceful democratic transition that we surely expect the MAGA movement to be making of the presidential election then.
So we gotta, we gotta win, we gotta retake the house.
We gotta fight for the Senate.
We gotta win those state attorney generals and governorships, and we've got to win local level elected offices in a lot of these places where there's a real risk of you know, mega election deniers taking control of local election infrastructure and setting themselves up for 2028.
So it's an it's a hundred percent crucial that we win.
And it's also crucial that we have the collective mass mobilization power, political power, narrative power to ensure that the people who win then take office as as intended.
I think part of that is the work that we are doing right now, right?
Like we, as we are collectively building, building a mass movement, building opposition, getting our narrative out, we are creating the cohesion electorally that we are gonna need for 2026.
There's a rich literature around how protests you can actually like sync up protests with electoral outcomes over time.
And, you know, there's a bunch of theories about like exactly how that works and what's the causal mechanism, but it's kind of as best we can tell two different things.
One is about kind of successfully pushing your narratives into the broader ecosystem, and the other is about creating the kind of local organizing infrastructure, mobilizing infrastructure that actually helps to build for a successful for successful electoral campaigns.
And we are definitely doing all of that right now.
Simultaneously, we gotta, we gotta run candidates and we gotta tell a story collectively that allows us to give people confidence that we can offer something different.
And I think that is a real challenge that we have to confront head on with the Democratic Party right now, because frankly, they are going through, they're going through some stuff that is that is getting directly in the way of our ability to successfully and clearly communicate with people why this is an alternative.
I'm so glad you brought up story.
And I just want to, I just want to p hover on that that for a minute because I think that here's here's how I'm thinking about the midterms right now.
I I've been so encouraged by the amount of people who are running for something, how many people have signed up over the last six and eight months, how many people were inspired by Mom Donnie to sign up.
I mean, you can track all of those.
You're you're seeing candidates who are 25 and 30 and 35 years old say, Yeah, like I'm gonna, I'm gonna give this my best shot.
That's encouraging.
Thinking about all of the organizing and the the 2500 indivisible groups around the country, the one million folks who are gonna train in non-cooperation.
This gives me hope too.
But we have to have a story.
Yeah.
And part of what I've I've been on for the the last eight months on this show has been you can't just tell folks that if you vote for us, we'll leave you alone and you can be you.
That's beautiful.
And believe me, I want everyone in this world to be able to be who they are: sexual identity, gender identity, racial, religious, ethnic identities.
I want everyone to be respected, included and represented.
But we also have to tell folks about a story that we're all going to be included in and that we're going to participate in together.
The, you know, the other side that we cover on this show is really good at a story of apocalypse of dune, of acceleration, and one that says, well, we have to get rid of those others so we can save ourselves.
And I guess for me, the story piece is the one that is going to really be a big deal in 2026.
Are we going to give people a vision of a world that's coming and that could be way better if we built it together?
Or are we going to say, hey, vote for us and we'll be less terrible than those other people have been?
Yeah.
No, I think this is look, this is the zillion dollar question, right?
Because I think one of the very hard lessons of 2024 is that hey, vote for us, the other guys are going to be worse is not a compelling message to people who think that everything pretty much sucks.
That's just that's just the reality is that we actually need to we need to reach people who want to preserve something about the existing system and we need to reach people who are not bought into anything about the existing system.
And we have to do that at the same time and with a message that resonates for them all and gives people like hope of something genuinely different in their lives.
Now, and I think we also do it with a party where people have largely lost confidence in that ability to deliver.
And that's, I think a really massive and central conundrum.
For me, I would say the first, the first place where I go with that is that we have to think about the things that are within our control or within the Democrats have to think about things that are within their control in a moment when they don't have power.
Like, what are you standing up for?
Where are you taking risks?
Where are you sacrificing?
What is your relationship with money and with corporate money?
How do you actually give people a sense that you're gonna do things differently in a way that actually makes them feel confidence that it's not just about whether they like your idea, because a lot of the ideas that we have pull pretty well.
It's not that they don't pull well, it's that people don't feel confidence that anything about their life is gonna change by virtue of having pulled the lever for Democrats.
And so at that moment, you got to ask, what can you do differently to convince people?
How can you, how what what ideas can you embrace that you know, really cut to the heart of the matter?
What can you do to signal that you're genuine and authentic?
I think that this new wave of new of people running is really important for that.
I think there's frankly just like a need to clean house on a lot of this stuff.
It's not like everyone all the time, but there has to be a commitment to showing up in a way that gives people the sense of the break from business as usual.
I could not agree more.
And I'm I'm yeah, I'm so encouraged by what you just said, because it it it's really hard to convince people to go through the hassle of voting when they're doing everything to make sure you can't vote.
Yep.
When you may have to worry about is my name right?
I may have to follow up and make sure they counted my vote, because they might have not, because of a signature issue or a something issue when they don't feel like voting actually is going to do anything.
Now, there have been so many marginalized communities in this country, black Americans and others for years who have said who have it in in one way or another said this is a system that doesn't work for us.
And so voting feels like it's important, but not enough.
And and I I want to recognize that.
But the authenticity piece, the cleaning house piece, the making sure that this is a party that actually works for the 99%.
I heard James Tallerico, the representative from Texas the other day, say we're focused on the the wrong one percent.
You know, we're there, there's a 1% of folks in this country who are undocumented immigrants.
There's one percent of folks in this country who are trans, and then there's billionaires.
And that's the one percent who want to control your life, steal your resources, make sure that you do not have everything you need when it comes to health care, reproductive rights, good schools, clean air, clean water.
That is a place you might focus your attention if you want one percent of this country who is not allied with your interests and is not care about you.
So there's a lot to say here about story.
Let me ask you about what people can do right now to build momentum for that.
You know, what is it today if they wanted to, they could think about doing in preparation for those midterms.
Yeah.
Well, my number one piece of advice is always gonna be find your local organizing home because and and partly because the answer is gonna be different.
If you are in Virginia right now, we need you to go all in on winning the Virginia elections in November.
And we need you to do that because Virginia deserves good governance, but also because we need to stack up a long list of elections and success over the next year and a half as proof points headed into a midterms that we think there's gonna be all kinds of funky business and sabotage around.
So if you're in Virginia, we need you working on that right now.
If you are somewhere else, it might be the case that what you should be organizing to do is talk to your neighbors about Medicaid cuts, right?
Talk about what just happened that Republicans just wrote a bill or just passed a bill that greenlighted massive tax cuts for billionaires and a huge expansion of funding for American secret police by cutting your Medicaid by setting in motion the conditions that are gonna screw up your health care and your health insurance and close your hospital.
That might be your mission right now.
It's hard to identify that, or you might need to be organizing in solidarity with local immigrant rights groups to support people who are under threat directly from ice.
It's kind of hard for me to tell you what is gonna be the single most important action you can take.
What is most important for me is getting into local relationship with people who are organizing and being in that ongoing cycle of action.
I just, I'm gonna I've said this on the show a hundred times, but I'm gonna say it again just to echo what you just articulated.
And that is find your local organizing home so you can participate and make change and feel like you are doing something to make a difference and resist, but also because it feels good to like find an organizing home with people that will become your friends and your comrades with whom you'll eat pizza late at night while you like work on a project or with whom you march on a Saturday morning or whatever.
Like it feels so much better than being in your house scrolling through your phone, hiding under the duvet, wondering like what's gonna happen next.
It just feels good, people to like go and be with others and like chant and march and write postcards and protect others, stand up for people.
That is a great way to spend your free time.
It's so much better than whatever is on Netflix or whatever, you know, your your aunts post it on Facebook.
Yeah, like it just it's a really really good thing to do for your soul.
So I just I want to put that out there too.
All right.
Here's my here's my pet concerns, and people listen to the show know that this is where my head is.
We're headed to 2026.
I'm gonna assume we're gonna run so many thousands of people who have stepped up to the plate.
I'm gonna assume that people have trained and are ready, they've organized in small groups and are ready to get to the polls.
I'm gonna assume that folks have a narrative and uh a sense of why this is so important.
And then my brain is really good at apocalypse, if you know me.
And I'm gonna wonder, okay.
But like I come from Southern California.
It feels like occupied territory at the moment.
It feels like if you're you have brown skin, you have to worry about leaving the house at all.
Yeah, you have to carry your passport or your green card or anything you have with you.
Even if you have those, it may not matter.
We're finding out.
There's military in my city if you're an Angelino.
My concern is this, Leah.
We're gonna see ICE agents infiltrating communities, making people wary of leaving the house.
That can be in LA, it could be in Salt Lake City, that could be in Northern Virginia, that could be in Detroit or Philly.
We're gonna see military and/or ICE at the polls.
Hey, I went to vote, and there were some guys in masks and military gear staring at everybody.
Some of them had guns.
I'm worried that the president's gonna say, we can't vote right now in X Place or Y district because there's just too much unrest.
I mean, do you all remember what happened in LA?
It was so crazy they were throwing mangoes.
I had to send the Marines.
So, you know, we can't vote in in Philly, we can't vote in Detroit, Atlanta.
I'm sorry.
It's just not gonna happen.
And then let's say we end up with Democrats with a uh a six-person advantage in the house and everyone is is over the moon.
And MAGA Mike Johnson says, Well, sorry, I I I prayed about it and I just can't swear these candidates in because irregularities in the in the voting, some funny business I heard about at a precinct.
And sorry, we'll just when we get this figured out, we'll get those folks sworn in.
But until now, we just can't do that.
And it just so happens we the Republicans will continue to have a majority in the lower house of the Congress.
All right.
That's what I keep what keeps me up at night.
I'm glad I can talk to you about it because my wife is tired of me talking to her about it.
What can we do to prepare for any of those scenarios and how do we anticipate that in a way that will be effective?
Yeah, it's a it's a great question.
It's one that comes up quite quite often for us.
And I and I think it's a really important one to think through in advance.
And I think the first thing that I would say is some of those scenarios are possible, some of them are less possible.
It's really important that part of the way that we head into this time is not by conceding to them in advance powers that they don't have.
Um, and I say that because going back to this idea of that they're trying to project inevitability, all of their work gets easier if we presume that they have the power to do the things that they say they are gonna do.
And, you know, for example, with elections, elections are controlled by states and localities.
They are administered by states and localities.
The president does not have the authority to like announce that the midterms are delayed, for example.
They have all kinds of tricks that they are probably going to throw at us.
And also we should not do their work in advance by assuming that they have the power to successfully carry those off without massive political backlash that will itself help to shape the midterms.
So that's the first piece is that we've got to be prepared, even as we know that some of the stuff is realistic, we've got to be prepared to react with like the most fresh and profound outrage that we've ever felt to every individual attempt to subvert the election.
Um, which is hard.
Ten years after Donald Trump came down the elevator, right?
Or came down the escalator.
And also it's an important strategic part of this is like not losing our outrage in advance or conceding that they're gonna be able to do this because we do not want to demorative our side and we do not want to falsely empower them.
So that's one piece.
I think the next piece really ties into why we're doing one million rising.
We think we have to hold two tracks in our minds right now.
The first is that we need to do the kind of advocacy that we do to shape legislation.
We need to do the kind of electoral organizing that we do to win elections.
And the second is that we need to prepare the kind of local infrastructure that can mobilize and that can disrupt if necessary in a situation where there is a power grab, which is what we should view that as.
Like a lot of times in a regime that is trying to consolidate power, an election that is very clearly stolen or subverted or sabotaged is a flashpoint for a broader societal moment of reckoning.
And those are moments when it really matters whether you've built any kind of collective infrastructure in advance that can do more than you know a single day protest.
And so that for us is also part of why we're talking about non-cooperation right now, because we really want people to understand part of the way that you actually are, you know, that you force some kind of meaningful accommodation with power in a moment like that is that you've built the kind of leverage that causes institutions to react in a certain way.
You've built the kind of capacity that allows you to credibly threaten some level of disruption in a moment when they are attempting to steal an election, subvert authorities that they don't have, or just generally maintain, you know, cement their authority.
So it's not the most inspiring, you know.
I wish I could tell you like we don't need to worry about it.
I think we need to worry about it.
And I also think that a lot of the tools and a lot of the things that we are building right now are fundamentally the things that you want to have in place in that moment.
Yeah, it's it's one of those scenarios where, you know, I want everyone listening to know that that we're aware that there have been so many tactics used in the previous decades and honestly throughout American history to prevent people from getting to the polls, purging the rolls, making it harder to register, limiting the mail in vote, that the the drop boxes and so on.
I think what keeps me up at night now are the new tactics, the ways that they will unashamedly say, yeah, it just so happens that there's ice raids coordinated in this in the in these districts in these states when people are trying to get to the polls, it just so happens that we'll pick up anyone we want, even if you're showing me a passport, I'll just sort of take you away.
That kind of thing is is to me, which you know, really demands thinking through and organizing and preparedness and and honestly a sense of ferocious resistance to say, you know, we're not gonna let that back us off.
Right.
Tell me before we go, tell me about truth and share and and ways that people can expand their reach and just do anything online in in a kind of cyberspace setting to make sure people understand these issues and win them over to to the side.
Absolutely.
So part of our big our big thinking right now is we've got to approach all the interactions we have, all of the platforms we have, all of the leverage we have and ask, how do we use this as an organizing moment?
How do we use this as a messaging moment?
How do we reach people who maybe wouldn't necessarily be reached by me, Leah with indivisibles math email list because they don't sign up for the political emails?
And so part of that is your own social media and your own ability to share news that can break through uh that can break through the haze, that can break through people's cynicism, that can be really about kind of core values or that can be about tangible ways in which Trump's policies are impacting people's lives, safety and well-being.
And so we built out a tool that kind of facilitates easy sharing of the kind of content that would allow you to to reach people who are maybe not already with us.
So sorry I've forgotten the link to it.
I don't do you have to no it's okay.
We have truth and share.
Truth and share is the link.
And wonderful.
Okay.
Yeah.
And it I it'll be in the show notes people, you can go find it.
Yeah.
Okay.
Wonderful.
And yeah.
And so so it's intended to be a simple one, you know, simple click, simple sharing tool that allows you to to make that kind of connection for your own social network.
Yeah, that's great.
And I as somebody prone to arguing with strangers and others on online, I think restrategizing my approach is probably a good idea because I feel like I've won all of those discussions, but nobody I've discussed them with seems to agree with me for some reason.
Well Leah, thank you for taking the time to be here.
Thank you for sharing with us reasons for hope, reasons for an understanding of the ways people are resisting, even if it does feel dire and like we are just in the midst of it every day.
And thank you for thinking through with me the the actions we can take right now in order to get people ready for the present moment and for the future.
So appreciate you coming by and we look forward to all the great work Indivisible's doing now and as the months come ahead.
Thank you.
It's such a pleasure to join thank you so much and I appreciate it.
It's even harder to do interviews with with kids screaming out the door.
I know how that goes.
So you're you're a true pro.
So I appreciate that too much too had lots of practice.
Yeah good good yeah no thank you and I'll get those links in the show notes and we'll get this we'll get this posted.
We'll let your team know and if if you can share it that'd be great.
