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We just finished talking with the labor journalist Hamilton Nolan and 1,600 Ink readers about the #teslatakedown movement and a real, practical plan to take $100 billion out of Elon Musk’s bank account.As Nolan told us, Tesla’s stock is hugely overvalued — it’s based not on the value of the cars or factories, but on public expectations about the company’s future explosive growth. And that’s a big opportunity to change things because those expectations are simply beliefs in Musk’s genius, based on a story that, ultimately, the public owns — and the public can take it away, by protesting, talking to people, and participating in all sorts of things you can find out about by visiting Tesla Takedown. Change the story enough, and when people go shopping for a car, they’ll buy something else, which means investors will sell off their stock — and turn the Wall Street math that made Musk towards unmaking him.We spoke with Nolan — the publisher of How Things Work, and author of the new book The Hammer, Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor — not just about Tesla, but about the many challenges facing the labor movement in the 21st century, from gig economy entrepreneurs making an end run around union regulations to A.I. threatening to take away the jobs of millions, and about the hope and possibility labor solidarity still represents. And we talked about the kind of change people working together can achieve in this moment. Taking away Elon Musk’s power is just the start.“The bad people who are in charge right now are not that smart,” Nolan pointed out, “So there’s no reason we can’t kick their ass.”Want to get started? If you missed the conversation, check out the full video above. You won’t want to miss it.In the public interest, we are opening this video and transcript to all. But we’re also asking candidly that folks support the half dozen or so people who now write for and edit and otherwise support the work of The Ink by becoming a paying subscriber today.Take a moment to support fearless, independent reporting, and to help us keep bringing you conversations like this one. Or give a gift or group subscription.Your support allows us to open these ideas to as many people as possible, with no paywall. Get full access to The.Ink at the.ink/subscribe

Hey, folks! Anand here.I just had another informative, illuminating, head-spinning, therapeutic, and, dare I say, healing conversation with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the scholar of authoritarianism and editor of Lucid, the newsletter covering autocracy and threats to democracy globally.Thank you to the more than 4,000 of you who joined live. Talk about building a new kind of media. Wow. We are floored.People who like freedom and democracy turn out to be numerous. That is good news.If you missed our live conversation, we encourage you to watch the entire video above.In the public interest, we are opening this video to all. But we’re also asking candidly that folks support the half dozen or so people who now write for and edit and otherwise support the work of The Ink by becoming a paying subscriber.Take a moment to support fearless, independent reporting, and to help us keep bringing you conversations like this one. Or give a gift or group subscription.Your support allows us to open these ideas to as many people as possible, no paywall.Call notes from The Ink’s managing editor, Michael BerkWe covered a lot of territory:* It’s the three-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and, even more significantly, perhaps the end of an 80-year transatlantic era as Donald Trump does his best to withdraw from America’s commitments and replace them with a mafioso, art-of-the-deal transactionalism — and we talked about how this leaves a vacuum for Russian and Chinese power.* We talked about the continuing failure of legacy media to call things what they are — to continue to tell the story of what Trump and Musk are up to as a business story, of Musk applying startup techniques to government, of Trump acting like a businessman — when, Ben-Ghiat reminds us, these “drain the swamp” efforts are one of the oldest authoritarian scams.* We looked at what the German elections might mean, and saw some signs of hope in the AfD’s underperformance — and the way in which young voters turned to the left in big numbers. For Ben-Ghiat, this is a lesson that, to oppose autocrats, you can’t run to the center — you need to dig in and stand for progressive values.* And, as we often do, we talked about the psychological ground of politics, about how Musk’s OPM letter demanding federal employees justify their existence in bullet points is part of an overall strategy to create trauma, one that goes back to Project 2025 and OPM head Russell Vought’s plan to keep government workers in distress. As Ben-Ghiat told us, this is part of the playbook: authoritarians threaten — and they don’t need to act further because people just obey. That’s what people need to resist.Everyone should head over to Lucid, by the way, and read Ben-Ghiat’s account of her disinvitation from delivering her Bancroft Lecture at the U.S. Naval Academy — it’s a case study in how authoritarians stifle dissent and something everyone should be aware of — because it illustrates how afraid they are of that dissent, and how critical it is to express it.Marching ordersWe’ve been trying to turn these talks into opportunities and come up with advice you can act on right away.A point we kept coming back to in this morning’s conversation was that our sense of alarm is not joined by enough people. We are outnumbered by people who are broadly sympathetic but not alarmed. And that’s something that we need to change.Our marching orders for you this week are simple:Be the anti-fascist skunk at the garden party of apathy and obedience.If you hear about local protests, tell everyone — as Anat Shenker-Osorio told us last week, creating social proof — giving people the incentive to act like they think their neighbors are acting — is essential to building political power, and it’s easy to get started.* The enemy is denial and the desire for life to go on, to be able to go about your business as usual. It’s up to us to make the connections, to show people how what Trump and Musk are doing will make business-as-usual impossible.* If you hear about local protests, tell people, spread the news — if people think nobody is resisting, that creates negative momentum. So create positive momentum* Most people don’t want to be subjugated — they want to be free. Remind them.Again, in the public interest, we are opening this video to all. But we’re also asking candidly that folks support the half dozen or so people who now write for and edit and otherwise support the work of The Ink by becoming a paying subscriber.Take a moment to support fearless, independent reporting, and to help us keep bringing you conversations like this one. Or give a gift or group subscription.Your support allows us to open these ideas to as many people as possible, no paywall. Get full access to The.Ink at the.ink/subscribe

Remember the old talk-radio shows? I always wondered if it would be possible to revive the idea of just letting people call in and talking to them — without the whole breaking-the-country aspect of talk radio.Well, we’ve been trying it, with great success, I might say.Thanks to everyone who tuned in today. Here is the video for those who didn’t.We talked about:* whether people even know about the Musk coup in conservative communities* why legacy media still refuses to name openly authoritarian actions like attempting to purge the federal civil service* why Nextdoor might be an interesting new frontier for under-the-radar organizing* and what people think Trump’s greatest potential vulnerability is with their right-leaning neighborsThese highly localized testimonies about what people are seeing and hearing in their communities is important. Please share.Thank you for being part of this. As always, these Lives are open to all who join. Later we post the full videos for our supporting subscribers to rewatch and share.Above, a short preview is open to all. If you want to watch the whole thing, subscribe. That’s how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve.Stand up for media that bows to no tyrant or billionaire. Join us today. Get full access to The.Ink at the.ink/subscribe

Yesterday, we spoke with one of the most brilliant minds in politics in America, and one of the most brilliant in the world: Anat Shenker-Osorio. She’s a messaging guru, who I met when I was reporting my book, The Persuaders — there's a whole chapter about her in it — and ever since at The Ink we have often turned to her whenever we need the best advice.But she's so much more than a messaging guru. She's a comedian. She is a person who, in spite of her messaging prowess, will always say something that really pokes and inflames people, but she does it intentionally, to provoke them into seeing what they might not otherwise have recognized. And in a moment when so many people do not know what to say, or how to say it — or seem to have lost the use of their vocal cords and spines — she is someone we can ask to tell people what they should be saying, because she knows just how to frame the most important questions of this time, and has answers for so many of them.For those who’ve been looking for leadership from above, she made it very clear that nicely asking Democrats to do something has never brought about real change. So stop doing that. Stop trying to get Chuck Schumer to do something.This conversation is an incredibly practical guide to what you need to — and can — do. Anyone and everyone can lead: we make the future, and it’s time to do it by stepping up. If you want to, you are a leader!Congrats! Sorry. But congrats!You can start by creating social proof locally — which is to say, create a perception in your community that lots of people feel the way you feel. You might start with signs, hats, talking to people, or, as she put it, the painting of a barn. Just pick something, and get started. And soon enough you’ll be leading.If you’re not sure where to jump in, Anat’s team keeps track of actions across the country, so visit her ever-evolving list of Ways to Resist. And read her Freedom over Fascism toolkit for tons of ideas and insight into how to communicate all of the ideas you’ll find below.We know some of you prefer reading to watching, so we’re publishing text excerpts of the conversation below. If you missed our live conversation, we encourage you to watch the entire video above.In the public interest, we are opening this video and transcript to all. But we’re also asking candidly that folks support the half dozen or so people who now write for and edit and otherwise support the work of The Ink by becoming a paying subscriber today.Take a moment to support fearless, independent reporting, and to help us keep bringing you conversations like this one. Or give a gift or group subscription.Your support allows us to open these ideas to as many people as possible, with no paywall.I wanted to start maybe on a positive-ish note by asking you who is telling the right story right now? Who do you see in the pro-democracy movement? And I know that your answer to this may not take a lot of time because it may not be a very long list of people, but who is telling the right story?Well, let's start with a story that you helped bring to light, in your Live with Senator Chris Murphy. I thought he was absolutely spot-on in many ways. I don't know whether we'll come back to this, but I thought his response in particular when you held his feet somewhat to the fire about why other Democratic leaders are not stepping up. That was probably him at his most diplomatic. But I thought his description of reality was really spot on.Unsurprisingly, he’s an MVP, is always there, always prescient, always saying the thing, speaking truth, not just to power, but ensuring we're speaking truth to each other.AOC, Jasmine Crockett, obviously. Governor Pritzker's responses yesterday were extraordinary. Exactly what's needed. And then outside of the elected official space, there's a lot going on. There are burgeoning protest movements, both from known organizations like Indivisible and Move On and Working Families Party, but also from brand newbies that just self-assembled on Substack, like the 50501 movement, and the burgeoning general strike movement.And because there's no up without a down, as they say, who is getting it most dramatically and maybe for you infuriatingly wrong?Do you want to open this Pandora's box? You know, the list is very, very, very long.One might say infinite.Most infuriatingly, it's the siren song of the authoritarian that they are fomenting a counterrevolution against a revolution that never occurred. This has always been their story, time and place immemorial, that you're being attacked, you're being put upon by some usurping minority, whether that be immigrants, whether that be Roma people in Hungary, whether that be people seeking asylum in Australia, whether that be Southern Europeans in the case of Brexit, whether that be trans people. It's always some other who is coming to get you and they have amassed too much power.And so I think what is most infuriating beyond just the absolute unwillingness to locate a single vertebra let alone a spine is the layering on of the misdiagnosis of why we are here when we blame when we make believe that the people with too much power in our society are undocumented immigrants and trans people. If it weren't so pathetic and sad it would be funny. So I think that that is what is particularly infuriating.Talk to me about specific moments in the last month where you've seen someone give a press conference, you've seen someone give a floor speech — give me the hall of shame because I consider you one of the only people, frankly, who I could ask to do that and you'll just do it.I mean, who am I most disappointed by? I think I'm extraordinarily disappointed by many of our senators. I'm thinking in particular, really sadly, because of all the extraordinary work that I know movement groups like Lucha in Arizona went to, putting him into power. But Ruben Gallego, not only refusing to stand up to this administration but also actively sponsoring the Laken Riley bill, which let's not kid ourselves, is about eliminating due process rights. It is about creating an unjust — even more unjust — legal system in the name of genuflecting at the altar of immigrants are the problem.I think that Amy Klobuchar has said things that are really infuriating and incensing. I think obviously Chuck Schumer's stance of, “We’ll just rap about the price of eggs.” Hakeem Jeffries, in a very similar vein, and just a lot of, “Well, we can't do anything. We don't have any power.” Excuse making.It's so interesting when you see a lot of the folks on TV and when you're under a Biden presidency or an Obama presidency maybe you don't notice the mediocrity as much because it doesn't like risk the republic — and now to see some of those same people, they’re not evil or awful the way that we're talking about on the right, but they are so profoundly mediocre and not up to the task of responding to a once-in-a-century emergency.You know, I referenced earlier before the conversation that you had with Senator Murphy and I was reflecting, because obviously I spend a lot of time listening to people because if you want to be decent at messaging, you have to spend a lot of time listening to people.And by listening to people, I mean in focus groups where we are asking them deep questions, we are extracting metaphors, we are uncovering their underlying assumptions and beliefs about what is going on. What is the origin story behind it? What are their desired solutions?And so I think a lot about what people's underlying motivations are, and the psychology of how they came to be where they are and doing what they're doing. And I think when I think about these folks who have risen to the halls of power, it kind of makes sense because to be honest, that they're behaving in these milquetoast ways.Is that what it takes to get there?Well, partly it's what it takes to get there, but also it is an accurate fact that that has worked for them. The things that they have done in their life have brought them to The New York Times newsroom, because — let's just widen the net of culpability a little bit here — has brought them to the pinnacle of journalism, has brought them to the pinnacle of politics, has brought them to the pinnacle of whatever it is I assume they desired to do once they became old enough to have a thing that they really wanted to do.And so… If taking certain steps and engaging in certain ways and refusing to upset people has been successful or at least successful within a trajectory that you define for yourself, then it actually kind of makes a lot of sense that random lady with big hair being like, “What the actual f**k are you doing? There's a hostile takeover of our government happening on your watch, friend.”It feels like, well, this has worked for me and it has achieved the things that I desire to achieve. So why would I change course?So here's something I'm struggling with. I think part of what explains the election loss going back to November is this problem you and I have talked about before of a tendency to kind of misappraise what is really, really salient with people. And you are someone who studies this and measures it. There are things you and I are worried about. There are things you've been screaming about that it turns out, way more people should be worried about it than are.If you were right about the election, if I was right about the election, a lot more people should have been concerned about things that, maybe did not reach the top rank.And so even now, now that we're in this presidency, I struggle with my own sense of how grave this is, how serious this is.This is a coup. This is that. And then sometimes I just, I live in New York City. Like I've walked down the street. I see people living their lives. These are people, 90 percent of them vote for Democrats, but you can just tell, if you sit in a restaurant, you hear conversations or you watch a normal TV show, the Jennifer Hudson talk show, you see normal life. And normal people living their lives are not living as though, as Senator Murphy says, this is the most serious crisis since the civil war and we may be a few months from irreversibly losing democracy.So my maybe difficult question for you is, is this thing that you and I share, this concern that everybody watching this shares. Is this concern out of touch in some way, maybe accurate, but is it out of sync with how regular people read things? Are we too ahead of the curve? Is it not landing with people?Talk to me about that disconnect.Yeah, it is not landing with people.So I want to say two things about that. The first is that in the lead-up to the election, I coined this phrase, the credulity chasm. And what the credulity chasm means is that when we look at the fundamental attitude that was most predictive of voting for Harris versus doing something else, and by something else I mean voting for Trump, staying at home, voting third party, etc.It wasn't, “Wow, that Project 2025 agenda, that sounds real sweet. That's like a Baskin Robbins tasty level of flavors. I'm excited.” It was whether or not people believed the agenda would come true. So this notion that the country has shifted rightwards is actually not supported by data.What has actually happened — and what happened through the election — was what the people who got it were saying: “No, it's for realsies. This is not hyperbolic. This threat is real. And all of this will come to pass and come to fruition.”And in fact, there's a Project 2025 tracker that shows that already within this first month of being in a hostile takeover, they have made good on one-third of the Project 2025 agenda. Just a little side note.So that credulity chasm, which I would argue we are still in — it is a basic facet of human psychology, and we see this among respondents in many, many parts of the world.This is not a uniquely U.S. phenomenon, but there's a U.S. layer on top of it that John Jost, the psychologist at NYU, calls system justification theory. Basically, there's kind of a fundamental human need to feel like I can predict what's going to happen. Tomorrow is going to be somewhat like today. Things are more or less okay. Things happen for a reason. Good things happen to good people. Bad things happen to bad people. There's a fundamental explanation for the universe because to question that and to really truly be living within that — the badness or the recognition of the badness, I should say — it requires a level of upset and a level of agitation and a level of awareness that is understandably very difficult for most people, because for most people, the basic facets of life, like being able to see a doctor, being able to help out your parents when their water heater breaks and being able to send your kid to university, et cetera, is pretty challenging.And so to ask people to layer on another thing is a lot. And I think that what we are experiencing over and over again, and it's been happening for a while. It’s the frogs in boiling water problem, where we truly think this is a hot tub. And a little toasty, get a little cozy. But, you know, it's winter and a hot tub is nice and winter in most parts of the country. And I'm joking, but not by much.Anticipating this is actually why it is absolutely so fundamental that we be crystal clear and that our leaders be crystal clear that what's happening is in fact what's happening because not every problem that is named can be faced, but zero problems that we refuse to name and refuse to recognize can actually be faced. And this is where I think the strategy of hat in hand, please, sir, may I have a tuppence begging Democrats to locate a spine is wrong. And we need to stop pushing in that direction.Okay, but I guess what I'm wondering is, and I wonder this very personally, because I'm afraid that I'm doing it wrong.When I see Elon Musk shadow presidenting his way through these agencies. It basically gets rid of Congress. I mean, it's as grave a series of things as you know. And I talk about Elon Musk's anti-constitutional coup. I feel like I am describing reality as clearly as I can. I feel like I'm saying things that, given what I understand about this country and what people claim to care about, should be ringing bells.And I also feel like I can almost hear with that double consciousness, people are not going to care about that. Everybody watching this is going to care about this, right? But not all the people not watching this, who actually outnumber the people watching this. And so, is that even just doing it wrong? Like, should it just be, “Your grandma's social security check is in danger?” Like, just the practical things?Because this kind of parallels the whole thing in the election about crime and eggs and democracy, all that stuff. Am I doing it wrong when I really fixate on the anti-constitutional coup by Elon Musk?You're right to fixate on it. You're wrong in voter-facing and public-facing messaging to call it that. And it's for the reasons you've already intuited. The Constitution is an abstraction, even though it is actually a physical document, I am aware. Whenever we are in the language of protecting institutions, protecting norms, protecting democracy — democracy never bought anyone dinner.And in point of fact, the way that most people, the way that the average American thinks about democracy, if they think about it at all, is the system as it is presently construed. The thing that we have now. And by the way, the thing that we have now, I'm not loving. I'm not very fond of it.So anytime our language, our messaging implies that what we are asking for is a return to January 19th, 2025, meaning right before inauguration, people weren't psyched about that day either. And so the answer is, As you've already intuited, is how do we make it person-facing, voter-facing, American-facing? How do we make it tangible?So what do we say? We say: “This is a government of the bullies for the billionaires.” Trump and the billionaires who bought him, Musk — you can name both of them, you can name either of them — are coming for your life and your livelihood. He is coming for your freedom. He is coming for your privacy. He is coming for your information. And he is conducting a hostile takeover of our government so he can take our money.”That's the simplest way of expressing it.But do you think that is working? Right now?It's not happening enough. But, you know, I can tell you from experimentation, both within focus groups and within our own internal polling that we continuously do. Yes, the most the highest impact way that we can characterize what Musk is doing is, “a hostile takeover of our government and an armed robbery of our money and our and our very deliberate there.But ultimately, there is absolutely nothing that we can say that will ever be as loud as what we can do.Yes, we should be calling our representatives. And yes, we are rightly incensed about the fact that these people who purportedly have sworn an oath to govern in our name apparently can't be bothered to work on Fridays and, you know, don't want to use the mechanisms at their disposal to throw sand in the wheels of government in order to stop this hostile takeover.Infuriating. Rightly so. Call them. Call the Republicans, too. But understand what has stopped autocracy in other places and within our own history, when we think about the civil rights movement, when we think about ACT UP, when we think about the movement to get the Americans with Disabilities Act, and women's suffrage.Imagine if the Montgomery bus boycott folks were like, “I know, here's an idea. Let's ask the Democrats if they would pretty please end this whole completely unjust, horrifying segregation thing.”Or when folks newly in the throes of the HIV AIDS crisis, dying en masse from this disease that apparently came out of nowhere, watching their loved ones suffer and struggle, if they were like, “You know what we should do? We should ask the Democrats if they would pretty please do something about this.”No, that isn't what they did. They broke into the New York Stock Exchange, as you may know, and they hung a banner from where the bell gets rung saying, “Sell Burroughs Wellcome” which is the pharmaceutical corporation that was making AZT at the time.And sure enough, by the end of the month, the price had dropped. And not that much later, there had been an appropriations bill, the Ryan White bill, to actually bring money into this fight and force research and so on.And so what we do is so much louder than what we say, because what we do, people being out in the world saying, physically opposing this and speaking about it and writing songs about it and making parodies and making TikToks and painting “F**k the Fascists” on the side of their barn.That is actually what sways public opinion. What sways public opinion is what we call social proof. People do the things they think people like them do.And so it's this chicken-and-egg problem where you're walking around New York or I'm walking around the Bay area or someone's walking around in the middle of America and you don't see anyone else freaking out. You don't see anyone else angry. You don't see anyone else upset. And so you're like, I guess really nothing's happening. And so it's about the doing more than it is about the saying.This is so important what you're saying. And it's reframing something for me.It's almost like when we talk about protest, mass mobilization right now, resistance, I think the frame in people's mind is, the object of that is the right. You're protesting against the right, you're resisting the right. And you're hoping for maybe Democrats to be part of this. You're the subject opposing that object and you're kind of inviting them to be part of the subject.And you're reframing this like, no, no, no, the Democrats are like a second object. They're not here. They're there. They're another thing you are mobilizing against for different reasons. It's a different kind of mobilization. But you are mobilizing against their passivity and then against the things the right is doing.Does that sound right?I mean, yes and no. I think… and feel free to lob the charge of hypocrisy at me. Bring it on, because I'm about to perform a big old hypocrisy on you.I'm obviously extraordinarily pissed off at Democrats. I have spent the last many years of my career helping elect Democrats. And so you can understand how it feels especially galling to me and many of you. However, it is the fact that when our public discourse — this is where you're going to come at me, come at me because I'm guilty. Do as I say, not as I post, I would say.When we are loudly saying, “Democrats aren't doing this, Democrats aren't doing that, Democrats are weak here, Democrats are weak there, Democrats refuse.” Then that is the narrative. That is the discourse that is in the public. And insofar as people continue to view the Democrats as the rightful centerpiece of the opposition — which is a reasonable conclusion, they're purportedly the opposition party in a duopoly — it looks like the regime is unopposed. What the regime is doing is fine. People are largely O.K. with it.And so because in life you cannot actually make other people do things — it is very, very unfortunate. It's one of the hard lessons of parenting. You can't actually physically make people do things. You can only really focus on what you're doing.I'm not saying stop pressuring them, but I'm saying what would actually cause a sea change among the calcified leadership — and yes, hashtag not all Democrats, there are extraordinary Democrats who are doing the right thing, as we said earlier — is when there is a mass movement.Actually they're not leaders, they don't go first, literally, to lead means to go first. That's really all it means. And so that means that every single one of you listening right now: If you want to, you're a leader. If you want to, you're a leader.Let's look, for example, at the Black Lives Matter resurgence that happened in 2020. During that protest, during that June, public opinion of BLM moved ahead by 12 points. It was only when the protests stopped And the right-wing coordinated backlash happened that opinion swayed back, which was an intentional thing.The same thing with the Muslim ban. When Trump was first promising the Muslim ban during his first run, it polled popular.But when it actually happened, and people took the extraordinary step of driving to the airport. And you live in New York. Nobody drives — your wife doesn't drive you to the airport. I don't know your business, but I'm telling you that. Who drives to LAX? Who drives to SFO? Nobody drives to these airports. That is not a thing that happens to everyday Americans.It’s showing, not telling — showing, not telling — that they are against this. That is actually what altered people's perceptions of whether or not the Muslim ban was okay or not.So that's really it. And that is what drags Democrats along. It's ordinary people showing that they disagree.So this is so helpful and you are always so helpful. Even though I’ve spent so long engaging with your work, there's like a particular unlock here. And a lot of people are responding to that also. I'm just going to try to summarize.I hear your point on managing the correct level of infighting or criticizing Dems. You talk about calling your representative, pressuring them to do things.Your idea about painting the barn really struck me because a lot of people — everyone who subscribes to The Ink, all their comments are like, “I call everybody, I do this, nothing's happening.”And I don't think a lot of people have thought of it as what you said, which is, yes, you're trying to pressure some leaders, but a very tangible thing you can do is increase the perception of people around you about the number of people who feel this way.Exactly. Because that is something you can do and you can measure. I'm not saying don't do the calling your reps and stuff, but that stuff just feels so remote to people I know.And people are so frustrated, like changing the perception about the number of people who feel that way around you. That is like a marching order.And the other thing to recognize and to realize, and we have a running list that we just keep for ourselves for our team of the actions that are happening right now. It is by no means comprehensive. It couldn't possibly be comprehensive — stuff is popping up everywhere. It's just the stuff that comes across our radar.Do you know how many people go to the average school board meeting in most towns? Do you know how quickly and easily you and two, three, four of your friends will be the only people at the school board meeting?A lot of what has happened in our politics is that we actually stopped organizing. And a lot of the heroic, extraordinary, wonderful organizations that I admire and respect and like count as colleagues, we all became so fixated on channeling ourselves through the electoral process. And that means that instead of organizing, everybody moved to field and called it organizing. And by field, I mean getting people registered, getting people to vote. Fine, do that. I'm not knocking it.But that's not organizing. That is not organizing. And we need to stop kidding ourselves. Organizing is finding out who runs the PTA in your town? Who runs the biggest church? Who are the Boy Scout leaders? Who are the Girl Scout leaders? Are you actually talking to people and radicalizing them in the original definition? You know, radical just means “to the root,” right? Are you actually radicalizing them in a new political understanding of what is happening? Why is it happening? And what is the origin of it? Where does it come from?So that they can withstand all of these constant right-wing drumbeats that say it's the immigrants or it's the Black people or it's the trans people or it's whomever, it's the Muslims. So that they actually have an authentic consciousness and that they themselves then are talking to other people.That's organizing.And so go local. I cannot emphasize enough, especially if you live in a smaller place, especially if you live in a red state, in a purple district, whatever.You show up at your school board meeting and the two of you or the three of you or the four of you, you show up at your city council, you're the only people there. These fascist policies, yes, they are being constructed at the national level. Of course, they are. But they have to be implemented at the local level. And it is at the local level.Let's just take, for instance, Aurora, Colorado. That is where they want to massively expand a detention facility. In order to continue with their evil draconian plan of concentration camps for people who happen to not have been born here and, you know, speak English with the wrong accent, apparently.So Aurora is not Manhattan. It is not Los Angeles. It is not D.C. It is a particular town with a particular city council with a particular set of folks. And right now there is a battle going on to define Aurora, to massively expanded detention facility there.People in that town and surrounding communities could go and say, “We are Aurora.” They could do food trucks of every ethnicity, and nationality. They could do giant dance parties saying, “We are Aurora. This is what we believe.”I'm going to go to Aurora as they do all this. I mean, as God is my witness, I will. This is my pledge: I am going to make a 10,000 or however many food truck caravan from every contiguous state to D.C, in order to have the largest bhangra, K-pop, salsa, samba, polka — I'm not intentionally leaving out any kind of music fill in all the musics — dance party to show not tell that immigrants are awesome.Because we can not live, we can not survive in a dual narrative or a three-part narrative in which immigrants are either villains, which is of course what the right says, or they're victims, which is all too often, sadly, where we have been in advocacy. What I call the ay pobrecitosnarrative. You know, with due respect to the Statue of Liberty, give me your tired or your poor. Most people feel tired and poor. They're not really out seeking that. Or the third narrative, that being immigrants are our valets. You know, they do the jobs that no one wants. They help us.Immigrants are awesome. Immigrants are joy. Immigrants are life. Immigrants are interesting. They're entrepreneurs. You know, America is supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. And that's a good thing. And so let's make it that way, as you recently wrote.One of the only silver linings for me of this whole era is that the thing that I wrote about before I met you, before I did Persuaders, was a book about billionaires. And it was very difficult to convince people to care. A lot of liberal and even progressive people were like, “Why are you going after these people? Like, sure, they're not the best, but like, really? These are your enemies? You know, Bill Gates or whoever?”It was actually hard in 2018 when that book came out. It was hard. I was often on the back foot, right? I really had to make a case. People were very, very skeptical of why anyone would say anything negative about the ones who give money away and do all this stuff.It is really different. Seven years later, like everybody gets it. Everybody understands what oligarchs are, you know?Thanks to you.Well, I don't think that's the case. It’s thanks to AOC and Bernie and Elizabeth Warren and others. But I wonder whether you think, again, with Elon, the oligarch frame, the warning of oligarchy — is this as salient and helpful with the mass public as we seem to think it is?Having people truly understand that this is a government by the bullies for the billionaires, that concept.I guess just the wrinkle is in a country where still a lot of people kind of want to be billionaires, is it as cool a message as I think it is?Yeah.It is, in fact, the case, as people often report, that in America, no one is poor. They're just pre-rich, right? We're all just temporarily embarrassed. You know, we just haven't made our billions. Oprah hasn't given us the car or whatever she's supposed to give us. So there is still that very, very, very deep kind of yearning and with it an admiration and a cultishness around the extraordinarily wealthy.But wow, are people pissed at the rich. I mean, that may be the only thing that has bipartisan agreement in this country is just how extraordinarily furious people are, because I think the fundamental difference is that in the olden times, this cult of people are rich because they're made out of awesome, because they're uniquely smart, because they're uniquely capable and hardworking and so on. That's largely been punctured. And people understand.So it's not just that they're rich. It's how they're rich, why they're rich. And the fact that the reason that they're rich is because they've stolen from you. It's that connection.Because sure, people can aspire to have their own, you know, whatever their dream is. In my case, an extensive shoe collection. But, you know, you do you.But the notion that the reason why people have so much money is because you don't — that is increasingly salient. And that's really the crux of it.Now, where this gets hard — and this brings us back to the earlier conversation of you can't just articulate the problem for people, although that is absolutely extraordinarily essential — they also have to feel that the articulation of the problem lends itself to something that they can do.And so in the universe in which what people are “supposed to do” is petition their government in some way or another. And I say that broadly, right? So vote, register to vote, get other people to vote, call their member of Congress, ask for policy change.It's extraordinary the degree to which people, even low information, low engagement folks, think the jig is up on that particular theory of change.And so I think we are now in a place in which people need to be directed, their anger and their ire need to be directed into what I am calling the “Mangione without murder” strategy. Without murder. Hear that whole phrase.You really do know how to coin a phrase.Yeah, we don't need to be murdering people. I just want to say on the record here that I'm telling you. Anti-murder. I'm anti-murder, whatever you heard, whatever they told you. Sharp messages, no sharp weapons.That's right.Imagine if we actually had people doing, you know, die-ins where corporate CEOs are. If we actually had people going to the places, it's easy to look up. These motherfuckers are all hypocrites. They all go to church. Why aren't we showing up in the parking lots of their churches? And this could both be MAGA Republicans and CEOs. Singing hymns that are actually about what Jesus preached. When they get out of church, say it to their faces.And so I think that the challenge with the billionaire articulation is not that it is not landing. You are correct in your supposition that it is absolutely landing. It's that it quickly becomes, well, every election is a contest between their billionaires and our billionaires. And so the solution, which presumably has been, well, that's why you should vote for Democrats.I know people are really responding to how clear your advice is. And I think it's making a lot of people feel like they know what to do more clearly than they did before. So thank you. I want to go back to that and compile all of your advice. Let's focus on marching orders for everybody here.People are in agreement with you about how grave this is and how serious it is. People feel incredibly undefended by elected Democrats in general and are not expecting them to change very soon. People are doing things already, like calling Congress, but maybe don't know the third, fourth, and fifth things to do.Can you just give us some very, very, very tangible marching orders?So the first thing I would say is in the preservation of your own mental health and wellbeing. Pick a thing that you care about and can be motivated to stay the course with.For some folks, that's going to be education. For some folks, that's going to be immigrant rights. For some folks, that's going to be policing, whatever. There are so many things happening at once that we can all become like cats with a laser pointer and make ourselves nuts.So you pick the thing. You go as local as possible about that thing. And so if it is education, just take that for instance, then you decide with yourself and a handful of your friends, you have a potluck beforehand, you do you. Do something fun and entertaining and get together beforehand. You look up in the public record when the next school board meeting is in your local community. And you go there and you make statements about ensuring that all children have the freedom to learn the truth of our past, and that all children have the freedom to belong and be who they are within their schools. And you oppose any kind of effort to implement the draconian fascist agenda in your own community.So that is one thing. You can do that within the context of immigrant rights. You can do that in the context of disability justice, racial justice, et cetera.The next piece of advice is to wear your beliefs. Get yourself a “Fabulously Fighting Fascism” t-shirt. One of the things that is most important to the right and to any authoritarian force is to suck our joy, is to suck our uniqueness, is to suck our our being. I say all the time, put up a billboard in the middle of nowhere that shows people across the gender spectrum just having themselves the best possible time, and say “Fabulously fighting fascism.”You will get so much local media and local attention, even if it's in the middle of nowhere because it is a saucy message. Show, not tell that you do not agree with this, that you refuse it.So I think the name of the game is really resistance. refusal, and ridicule. And ridicule is a key and essential element that I have danced around.Join a union, if you can join a union. Support union efforts. That is a place where deep and authentic organizing actually happens and needs to happen much, much more expansively. One of the most important keys to fighting autocracy is a strong, integrated, active, in-your-face labor community.Before we go, to leave people on a note of hope, in a lot of the messaging that you do and the formal proper messages you draft for TV ads or other communication, there's a certain structure, which I wrote about in my book. It's often the beginning and the end where more hope and uplift come in and in the middle is where you explain the obstructions to that promiseA lot of people really can't see the after of this. It's very hard to see anything. I find it very difficult to visualize 2026. I find it very, very difficult to visualize 2035. I could see a scenario where it's totally fine, this thing blew over, it imploded, and my kids are just living a normal life, vaguely remembering this. And I could imagine a scenario in which most people I know don't live in this country anymore. It's so hard to picture the after.Can you help us picture the after in a hopeful way if we get this right, if we do all the things you're talking about?The fact that you can't picture 2026. I can't either. And that is either extraordinarily terrifying or fantastic. The reason why it is potentially fantastic is because it takes a fundamental rupture, a big rupture that we think that we have already had, but we have not — because we are still waking up in the morning and going to the store and answering our telephones and checking our social and getting our kids to school and all the things that, of course, we need to continue to do.That rupture has not happened for most people. And it is only in a fundamental rupture that we get a period — and obviously, the decimation of it is one of the most tragic and horrible things in American history. But Reconstruction wouldn't have happened without the Civil War. The New Deal wouldn't have happened without the decimation of the Gilded Age and God forbid, the Depression.Moments of extraordinary rupture are moments of extraordinary possibility where, as my colleague, Mike Podhorzer points out, pre the Revolution, when people were hanging out in the colonies, and trying, you know, to do the Boston Tea Party and to petition the king, “Hey, yo, like, we're not fond of this. We're not keen.”And I'm not discounting the fact that things were pretty bad for most people and enslavement and no women's rights and so on. I'm not making believe that that period was a beautiful era in American history.The only point that I'm making is that there has to be a rupture so fundamental that people are like, “Oh no, how about we just don't have a king? How about we just don't be a colony anymore? How about we decide that we are going to invent a new country from scratch?”Obviously not really from scratch because of the destruction and usurpation and genocide of Native people — again, I am not trying to say this was like a beautiful era.All I'm trying to say is that in the unknowing, in the what-the-f**k-is-going-to-come-next, is actually where invention comes. And it requires us recognizing that. To give you a tautology, the problem is made out of the problem, as we were discussing at the top of our conversation. To think that a system that is working largely as designed, to bring us representatives who, with notable and noteworthy and laudable exceptions, are not actually serving our interests and are not stepping up to the plate. To think that they would behave any differently is to not understand that the entire progressive movement is begging the master for money to buy tools to take down his house, and it always has been.And because we've continued to limp along in this, “But maybe we'll win this election, but maybe we'll get people to vote, but maybe we'll pass this one little policy,” is not to recognize the fact that actually within U.S. politics, there is no correlation between majority support for a policy and that policy passing. And so we have to stop thinking that tinkering at the edges of the old ways, as we have done, is going to yield a new result.And I don't know if this isn't sounding hopeful, but to me, it is always the case. The most fundamental truth of life is that the future is made out of the decisions that we take collectively.We make the future. What comes next will be decided on the basis of what we do. And that's up to us.Readers like you make The Ink possible and keep it independent. 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Yesterday we talked to Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, one of the fiercest voices speaking out against the Trump administration and in defense of the future of the American republic. He spoke very bluntly about just how real a threat this administration poses for the survival of American democracy, about why the Democratic Party has failed so far to meet the moment and what can be done to fix it — and why it’s ultimately up to the American people to mobilize to stop Trump and Musk from breaking the country’s institutions beyond repair.As we know some of you prefer reading to watching, we’re publishing text excerpts of the conversation below, and we encourage you to watch the full video above. It’s a frightening warning and a real call to action.In the public interest, we are opening this video and transcript to all. But please consider subscribing to support fearless, independent reporting, and build the kind of independent media that can continue to speak truth to power in this moment.Senator, you're a student of American history, and you've studied the various stages in the history of this country: wars, crises, insurrections, fractures — serious things. I wonder how you would define this moment we are living through and situate it in the sweep of the very serious things this country has been through in its history?I'm very reluctant to engage in too much hyperbole here, but I think this is increasingly becoming the most serious moment since the Civil War.It's a miracle that we've lasted as long as we have, 240 years of multicultural democracy. This is an absolutely revolutionary idea that gets pulled apart, as it seems, every generation or so, because it's unnatural, the idea that we would make decisions for ourselves instead of investing decision-making power in a hierarchical structure, which is what we do for mostly everything else that we care about in our lives, and that we would choose to live amongst people who are very, very different from us, even while our biology, millions of years baked, tells us that we're better off and safer retreating to our tribes.So what we've done is unnatural. Self-governance in a society that's multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multi-racial. And so, of course, there are these times where folks get told it would just be a lot more efficient if one guy made all the decisions, get stuff done a lot faster. And wouldn't it be easier if we just kicked out everybody who doesn't look and feel and sound like us? That'd be a lot simpler.So I think that this is increasingly serious because I think what you're seeing is that a lot of people are very transparently up for that transition. There are a lot of people in this country — and a lot of folks who now occupy positions of power in the United States Congress — who don't even feel that it's necessary to defend democratic norms and democracy.This idea that took root inside the conservative movement maybe a decade ago that democracy is outdated and antiquated and needs to be replaced by a CEO model is now pretty mainstream. And I think we need to confront it head-on.Instead of thinking that Republicans are really for democracy in their heart, but are being cowed into silence by a really strong leader, we need to understand that a lot of them — more than you think — are actually on board for this whole transition.That comparison you make, I think is valid — this is the most serious crisis since the Civil War. Obviously, we know how that one was resolved. I don't think that way of resolving this would be what anyone wants, certainly not what you or I want.But I'm curious, maybe speak personally first. I think we've all witnessed you — not to say you were a wallflower before — go through something publicly in the last few weeks.You've been very clear about a lot of things for a lot of years. Can you talk about the experience you've gone through to get to that place of realizing the gravity, even in spite of how seriously you took it before? What has been your radicalization around this in the last few weeks and how have you changed?I've spent a lot of the last two or three years just stepping back and doing a lot of thinking about the spiritual state of the country. And I think I came into this moment maybe understanding better than some other people how angry and anxious this country is and how many people are in a truly revolutionary mood.And so for me, it made sense that there were a lot of folks in this country who were really willing to entertain the idea of throwing out 240 years of democracy. Now, that's not the majority of the country, but it's a strong, powerful minority movement.I've been pretty angry at my party for not realizing the spiritual unspooling that was happening in America and finding ways to plug into it in a more powerful, more constructive manner, even as the anti-democratic conservative movement very methodically put together a plan and an infrastructure to make sure that they were able to seize this moment.I think a lot of folks thought that Trump 2 was going to be Trump 1 again, just a lot of bluster. We'd survive. But I watched them get ready for this moment. And so I'm just convinced that they are operationalizing, as we speak, a plan to convert our democracy to something fundamentally different, an oligarchy, a kleptocracy in which only a handful of people have power and the rest of us are just pawns for profit and gain to that small set of elites.And so all of the moves that have been made, the targeting of independent journalists, the conversion of our justice system to an exercise in forcing loyalty to Donald Trump, the normalization and endorsement of political violence, are all not just random points on a map. They all exist on a continuum, part of an effort to ultimately try to install Donald Trump and his family in power permanently.And I think this has been coming. The groundwork has been laid for this moment for four years. And I just am absolutely confident that it is as grave and as significant as the crises that we faced 150 years ago.I think it is no surprise to you that Democrats out there feel completely abandoned by the vast majority of your colleagues. I think there's a sense of being texted a lot for $5 by Democrats, often by people who have hundreds of millions of dollars in their own bank accounts, when we're living through what you say is the most serious crisis since the Civil War.And I'm sure you could point to things someone said in committee and things that are being done that we don't know about. But I think you probably sympathize with the broad feeling that I'm sure you've heard from your constituents and others, that basically people feel completely undefended by the Democratic Party in the worst crisis since the Civil War.You're an exception to that, and I think most people would agree. Just put it as bluntly as you can: What is going wrong with your party that they are leaving so many of their most loyal supporters feeling this way?One is that it's a lot easier to get up in the morning if you convince yourself that everything is going to be okay. It's a lot easier to go do your job if you think that all of these are just random points on a grid and that this is going to look a lot like the first four years looked.If you actually think that we are months away from the destruction of democracy such that it is irreversible — man, that requires a different level of energy when you wake up every morning, a different level of urgency that, frankly, not everybody has inside the Democratic political infrastructure.I think it's also true that when you get to this level of power, you start to care deeply about the institutions and you want to protect your institution. And so here in the Senate, there's still a lot of talk about working with Republicans and not fighting Donald Trump on everything because we want to make sure that the Senate is preserved as a place where bipartisanship can happen.But that's illogical when you're fighting a would-be tyrant who doesn't give a s**t about institutions or norms and is willing to shatter every single one.If the rest of the field is burned to the ground and the Senate still stands on the top of a pedestal, what does it matter? So for me, it was easy to say, I'm not voting for any of Trump's nominees. I'm not expediting any of these nominees until this constitutional crisis is solved. I'm not going to be complicit in populating an administration with people who are going to violate the rule of law.And then the last thing is that it's hard when you're fighting liars. It really is. We do hold ourselves to some concept of truth and provable truth. And I think it has caused us to not be clear about what is likely happening because we're not absolutely sure. What is Musk doing inside the Treasury right now? Do we have irrefutable proof that he is stealing people's data in order to enrich himself or in order to ultimately withhold your Social Security benefits because you post something ugly about him on Twitter?I don't have a smoking gun, but why should I give them the benefit of the doubt? Why do they deserve the benefit of the doubt on anything? I am going to lay out the worst-case possible scenario because I think the worst-case scenario is the most likely one.Does what you just said justify leadership changes in the House and the Senate immediately?I think the Senate and the House are stepping up here. I think you have seen my colleagues come to the decision almost to a person that they are not going to support these nominees.I think you will see a very vigorous effort to oppose the upcoming reconciliation bill, which is their attempt to steal money from the rest of us, to cut Medicare and Medicaid benefits to fund their tax cuts. I think you are going to see Democrats starting to rise to this moment, and I'm going to continue to try to rally them to rise to this moment.But people are asking in the chat specifically about Senator Schumer and Leader Jeffries — and if you're right about, “months away,” if you're right about the worst crisis in 150-plus years, is it time to at least think about new leadership?I think they both have very difficult jobs. I wish that all 47 Senate Democrats were really easy to marshal and push into one direction, but they aren't. We have a diverse cast of characters. And so leadership is pretty easy to critique from the outside. It's harder to operationalize on the inside.And remember, leadership doesn't only come from the folks that have the official titles. Leadership comes from AOC. Leadership comes from Jasmine Crockett, leadership comes from me, from other senators.I wanted to ask you about this broader point that people were making last year during the debate about whether President Biden should stay on the ticket. And that is the question of whether Democrats have a kind of culture of politeness that prevents them from stating hard truths. Things everybody was saying in group chats about President Biden's capacity were not being said out loud. Things everybody is saying privately about this moment don't necessarily reflect what they say in front of the cameras. Is there a politeness problem that needs to be shaken off given the stakes that you're talking about?That's a good question. I've never really thought about it as a politeness problem. But listen, there certainly has been a shaming exercise that has happened inside this party on folks who get too far out of the conventional wisdom. In retrospect, Dean Phillips, though I didn't support his candidacy, understood something about where the American public was that it took the rest of us far too long to understand.Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren still get shamed by the mainstream of the Democratic Party because they are dangerously populist, even though they are plugged into the actual conversation that people are having in this country.I want to ask you a little bit about the new party chair of the Democratic Party. There was a question of how fundamental the change should be. What is the process, do you think, at this point, of really rethinking the party in the way that you were trying to do in the last few years and now with much greater urgency? It's obviously difficult to do when you're also running 80 miles an hour. How can this happen right now?I don't think we should overhype the power of the DNC. It has never been a thought leader inside the Democratic Party. I'm not saying it isn't relevant. I weighed in on behalf of another candidate, because I do think it's important to have the right person there. But I think Ken Martin will do just fine. He will be a very good party chair.But yes, it does feel overwhelming. There was this, and there still exists, this meme, this idea that the resistance didn't work in 2017. And so we shouldn't do it again. And in part, because people want to focus on a bigger project, which is rebuilding the Democratic Party brand and winning back all those working-class voters. And I've talked a lot about that as well.I think the problem is we actually have to do the resistance and rebuild the party, and we have to do both at the same time. And I actually don't think there's a choice.The resistance, to my mind, worked. We didn't stop the big tax cut in 2017, but we stopped the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. We literally saved tens of thousands of lives. We won in the midterms in 2018. We beat him in 2020. Did it solve the underlying problems in the party? No, but there were political wins and really big ones. There were policy wins and some really big ones. So I think you've got to do that again, so that you shave the edges off of their policy agenda and ultimately you put yourself in the best position to win in 2026.But we have to rebuild the party because the party brand is just fundamentally broken. We are the party of elites. We are the party of the status quo right now. We are the party of market-based reforms. And people want real big revolutionary economic change. They want the system unrigged. They want a democracy unrigged. And right now we are not the party selling that convincing message.So I admit that these are two big projects that have to happen simultaneously. rebuild some form of the traditional political day-to-day resistance and convince folks that we cannot run back the Democratic Party that got our clocks cleaned in 2024. We've got to build a new party.One idea that's been proposed is creating a single point of communication — people have suggested Pete Buttigieg, who's out of government right now, have him do a daily response, or there are various “shadow cabinet” proposals. I'm sure you’ve heard a lot of these. Do you think any of those things are interesting as a way to solve the party’s communication problem, the problem of people not really having a clear response?Not really. I'm all for people searching for new ideas. That just sounds like something else for people to compete over. If you were to create a shadow cabinet and you had to pick Democrats to be in each one of those positions, you'd have to come up with a process and there'd be campaigns and backroom efforts to try to be the Shadow Secretary of Defense.It would be a lot of wasted energy and I'm not sure, ultimately, it would result in the best people being in those positions. I mean, what's happening now is a little meritocratic. The folks who have more amplified voices are the folks who are just more plugged in with the actual emotional zeitgeist of the country.And I don't necessarily have a problem with a moment in which the folks that are portraying the kind of urgency that the American public wants are the folks that are being self-selected by the movement in the country as leaders inside the party.Now, do I think that we have an information distribution problem? Yes. But I think that that is something that needs to be solved in a really thoughtful, planful way.We don't have the echo chamber that Republicans have because they spent money on it and we didn't. We spent a billion dollars — $2 billion in the last election — and most of that was on 30-second TV ads. That was a horrible mistake. We should be building the kind of permanent owned media, the permanent set of influencers and amplifiers that the right has.That should be our project, not coming up with a b******t shadow cabinet.So you’ve talked about blanket holds. Senator Schatz of Hawaii has talked about this also. Are there other tactics in your arsenal, maybe ones we haven't been talking about, maybe more serious ones? If you say we're possibly a few months away from irreversibly losing democracy — what else have you got besides blanket holds?There are a limited number of tools in our toolbox as the minority party in the Senate and the House. The House has very few. The Senate has a handful. One of them is just kind of gumming up the works and making things take a little bit longer. But that tactically only prevents nominations or legislation from occurring by hours.The other is to just signal that we are not being complicit in any of this, and we are not going to support them doing anything legislatively, or we're not going to support any nominations until they take seriously the destruction of our democracy and the handover of our government to billionaires.So I don't want to overhype what we can do internally, while also telling my colleagues, you better do everything you can do.And that's still an internal debate. There still are a lot of my colleagues who are voting for these nominees. They've got a lot of reasons they do that, but one of them is that they don't think that our internal day-to-day tactics translate to the outside, that nobody pays attention to what happens inside the Beltway.I don't think that's true. I'm not saying everybody pays attention to whether there's 47 of us or 21 of us voting against the nominee to go to the Department of Agriculture. But I do think that the most committed activists don't love it when the Democratic Party isn't putting up the loudest fight that they can. And if we aren't putting up a loud fight, then they aren't willing to give four hours a day or six hours or eight hours or 12 hours a day to the fight. And when that inner ring of the most committed activists aren't doing that, the next ring of potentially committed activists aren't stepping in.So I think there are ripples that start here in the United States Senate. And so that's why I argue to use every tool that we have, because I actually do think over time, that's one of the tactics that helps build a meaningful, loud, national opposition with scope.I’ve pressed you and your party on what you can do for people. But obviously, this is a democracy. And at the end of the day, people need to make their own voices heard and pressure people to do things. But I think a lot of people are at a loss. What can people do besides the obvious stuff that they know to do?I think the obvious stuff that people know to do still works. There were protests yesterday, some with hundreds of people, some with thousands, but not necessarily of the size and scope that you would think this moment would demand.And I think that is due to the fact that a lot of folks don't think that it has impact and influence — and it does. The only route through this crisis is the mobilization of the public. Political gravity still exists in this country. It works a little bit differently than it did 10 years ago or 20 years ago. But if the public is mobilized, it will and can have an impact. Right now, joining groups like Indivisible and Move On, calling, showing up — all of that matters. Volume matters.It may not persuade Elon Musk to stand down, but it will start to eat away at enough Republicans so that everything they want to do becomes a little bit harder, so that there is finally a little bit of legislative friction against the tasks that they are undertaking.Donald Trump's net popularity has come down by six or seven points already. If that drops by another six or seven points because of our mobilization, well, then that frays a bit the hold that he has on the party.I remember back in 2017 when their number one agenda item was to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and they didn't do it only because we mobilized, only because in the end, we made just enough Republicans realize that this was not going to be worthwhile for them politically. That works now.Now, ultimately, if they completely break this thing — and I think that comes by the transparent, brazen violation of a court order, and most significantly, an order from the Supreme Court — then we have to talk about a wholly different set of tactics. And I don't think we need to cross that bridge right now. But if we are at a moment in which they have just completely and brazenly taken control of the government without any regard to the judicial branch, then we have a different conversation about the kind of things that citizens should be doing.But right now, traditional political mobilization can and I think will work. But we need more people than hundreds out at these protests. And part of that is our job, to have more people talking like me to convey the sense of urgency that will convince people to mobilize.People have suggested a general strike. Is that something you think people should look at?Listen, I think when we talk about those elevated tactics — general strikes, civil disobedience — I think people will know the moment when it comes. And you frankly don't want to promise that you can do something that you can't. So I think you've got to be very thoughtful and planful in those kinds of actions. I don't think we are there yet. If the moment comes, I think people will know it.A lot of people appreciate your leadership right now. Are you thinking about running for president? And including or beyond that, what would be your commitment to people if this continues to go in the very bad trajectory that you talked about? What is your vow to people about how you're going to defend people who are feeling very defenseless?You asked the question at the beginning, why are people paying attention to me now?I think it's in part because I legitimately don't have a personal agenda here. Like, I do not wake up every day thinking about my political future. I've got two kids who I want to grow up in a democracy, and I see how dangerous this moment is. I have clarity. I have existed in politics for a long time, plagued by a lot of gray. There's a lot of moments in my political career in which I saw my side, but I also saw their side.And now, I see what they are doing, and what they are doing is evil.So I wake up every day speaking authentically and urgently in part because I'm not thinking about my next move here. I will be satisfied if, at the end of the day, democracy is still here four years from now and we actually have a free and fair election for president.You can imagine the kind of calls that we get into this office, given that political violence has been normalized and given the fact that I'm out there, talking in a way that not everybody else is talking. And so my only commitment is to just not be afraid in the way that a lot of other institutional players are clearly acting scared. I'm just not going to do it.Readers like you make The Ink possible and keep it independent. Sign up to join our mailing list, support my work, and help build a free, fearless media future by becoming a paying subscriber today. And if you’re already a part of our community, thank you, and consider giving the gift of The Ink!Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images Get full access to The.Ink at the.ink/subscribe

We just talked with Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, who has emerged as one of the fiercest voices speaking out against the Trump administration and in defense of the future of the American republic. He talked to us in even starker terms than we’ve heard from him so far about the emergency we face, the very real and imminent threat the administration poses, the structural challenges facing a Democratic opposition — and what the American people can and must do about it.If you missed our live conversation, we encourage you to watch the entire video above. In the public interest, we are opening this video to all. But consider subscribing to support fearless, independent reporting.In our conversation just now, Senator Murphy made news and spoke in unusually blunt terms. Among the things he told us:* On the gravity of the present constitutional crisis: “This is increasingly becoming the most serious moment since the Civil War.”* His belief, which he said not all his Democratic colleagues share, that America may be “months away from the destruction of democracy such that it is irreversible.”* After years of working with Republicans and trying to see things in gray, he now regards what the Republicans are doing as straightforward “evil,” to be stopped urgently if everWe also had a very candid talk about why Democratic opposition has been tepid in response and unsatisfying to many who feel deeply undefended. Some highlights:* He empathized with widespread frustration about a party that is quick to text people for $5 and then slow to respond to a grave crisis; the Democratic Party does have a problem, one he says he’s been trying to fix for years* Too many of his colleagues don’t want to believe how bad it is, because it is a hard way to live — but he hopes their minds are changing* The Democrats let themselves become the party of the status quo and market solutions in a time of thirst for revolutionary changeI also asked if he thought Elon Musk has broken criminal laws, whether present Democratic Party leadership should be replaced given his critiques, and whether he is, as some muse, planning a run for president.And I asked about the role of regular people. He had a striking answer about what he believes will ultimately work against Trump.Readers like you make The Ink possible and keep it independent. If you haven’t already joined us, sign up today for our mailing list, support our work, and help build a free and fearless media future by becoming a paying subscriber. And if you’re already a part of our community, thank you! Get full access to The.Ink at the.ink/subscribe

Freedom isn’t free, the song goes. But with rare exceptions, America’s leaders and institutions haven’t been meeting the moment and stepping up to defend democracy. Instead, they’ve been smiling uncomfortably and failing to say no — or, in the case of New York City Mayor Eric Adams, just compromising their ideals and selling out their constituents and, yes, collaborating.Anand went on “Morning Joe” and talked to Mika Brzezinski about the spinelessness of many of our leaders who might think themselves brave but are showing otherwise.It’s time for regular people to stand up, Anand told the panel. It’s clear now that no one is coming to save us. Only we save us.Follow the link below to read the full essay. And we hope to see you at noon today.The Ink is powered by readers, not billionaires. If you haven’t yet, join us and stand up for independent media that isn’t afraid to tell the truth by becoming a paid subscriber today. Get full access to The.Ink at the.ink/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit the.inkToday Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the brilliant scholar of fascism, joined me for another of these Substack Live shows we’ve been doing.I have come to treasure these conversations. They are full of clarity about what we are seeing and living through — but also full of hope about what we as citizens can do.I want you to dive into the whole conversation above. But we covered things like:* the 50501 protests today and whether it’s the beginning of a real movement* the terrifying IRS story that broke overnight, and the collision of Silicon Valley engineering culture with organized-crime culture in Trump’s DOGE* the failures and bright spots in old and new media covering this moment* very practical things regular people can do, at all levels, to fight back* how this moment is best understood not as a tragedy but as an assignmentWhen I asked the folks who joined our show what they took away, here is some of what people said. This is why we do this.Thank you for being part of this. As always, these Lives are open to all who join. Later, we post the full videos for our supporting subscribers to rewatch and share.Above, a short preview is open to all. If you want to watch the whole thing, subscribe. That’s how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve.Stand up for media that bows to no tyrant or billionaire. Join us today.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit the.inkWhen Donald Trump floated the idea of taking over the ruins of Gaza and turning it into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” the American media dismissed it as the usual “outlandish” rant, or dug into the real-estate implications of the supposed “deal.”But that Trump has simply dismissed the agency of millions of displaced human beings and casts a genocida…

Earlier today, Anand went on “Morning Joe” to argue that Elon Musk is waging an anti-constitutional coup. We must name it.Congressional Republicans seem to think they’re in charge — but are they, really? Meanwhile, Democrats are finally waking up and starting to talk about thinking about possibly, maybe exercising the powers that they have, but will they do anything?Anand talks with Mika Brzezinski and Jonathan Lemire about why the legacy media won’t straightforwardly call a coup a coup, why that needs to change, and why someone needs to step up and lead the Democratic Party with a clear message and a grasp of how to deliver it to a scared public.The Ink will not back down from these hard truths and conversations. The support of you, our readers, allows us to do this work and stay independent of billionaires and their whims. If you haven’t, subscribe today. Get full access to The.Ink at the.ink/subscribe