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Green & Red: Podcasts for Scrappy Radicals
Democrats Skip Out of Texas, Non-Compliance Trainings and DC Free w/ Patrick Young (G&R 408)
00:44:48
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to Green and Red Scrappy Politics for Scrappy People, a regular podcast on radical environmental and anti capitalist politics. Brought to you by Bob Bozanko and Scott Parkins.
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B
Welcome to the silky smooth sounds of the Green and Red Podcast. Your co host, Scott Parkin in Berkeley, California. Bob is out today but will be back soon. But we're having a State of the Resistance conversation. And joining me for that is our old friend and comrade Patrick Young. Patrick, welcome back to the Green and Red podcast.
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A
Hey, it's great to be here. We need to get a State of the Resistance custom theme song.
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B
Oh, yeah, we totally need to figure that out. We can do that. We can get the State of the Resistance hat. Although I wore my wobbly sabo cat, you know, direct action gets the goods hat today. And for folks who don't know Patrick, if you haven't listened to our other episodes with Patrick, Patrick is a labor organizer, climate organizer. He's worked with a number of labor unions. He's worked in Rising Tide North America and with shut down D.C. and most recently the Movement Infrastructure Project. Patrick is a good troublemaker. And so as we're in this moment, here we are in August of 2025. We've got about seven, we're about seven, six and a half, seven months in on the Trump administration and we haven't talked, I think maybe since May. You know, there's a, there's a lot that's happened over the summer and maybe just to kind of kick it off the sort of one of the, one of the big news items in the last week or so has been the Texas Democrats. This week, 50 Texas Democrats fled the state of Texas to prevent a quorum from being formed in the legislature, to prevent an aggressive redistricting plan being put together by Governor Greg Abbott, John Cornyn, in an attempt to suck up to Trump and prove how MAGA he is because he has a difficult primary election coming up. It's called in the FBI. You know, there's a lot of authoritarian moves being made in Texas. There's a lot of authoritarian rhetoric being put out by Trump and, and others. I'd like to sort of get, you know, this, this hearkens me back to what we saw in the first Trump term, which I used to call hashtag resistance, which was the, the Democrats, right. You know, actually doing these performative acts like Pelosi ripping up the speech and Trump's face during, I think it was a state of the union. But when the Democrats are doing things like this, they fled to Illinois. The governor of Illinois is sheltering them. Do you see these as legitimate acts of resistance or is this more of the same performative politics? There's a lot more coming out with these, this redistricting civil war, as the media is starting to, to call it.
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A
Yeah, I don't think that it's particular that it's, what they're doing is going to be particularly effective. I wouldn't go as far as calling it completely performative. You know, the concept that, hey, we're going to, we're going to lead the state, we're going to bust, we're going to bust a quorum and we're going to hold this, hold this off from happening like that. That's solid. That makes a lot of sense. This isn't the first time they've done it, though. Texas Democrats have done it a handful of other times and inevitably they, you know, they don't really have an exit strategy other than come back at which point the bill is going to move. And, you know, Abbott's not a complete idiot. He was able to pack aid, relief aid from, for the floods into the same special session. So he was able to kind of put them in a position where they're out. You know, they're, they're holding off this redistricting, but they're also holding off something that folks in Texas need, need immediate relief on. So it's, they know it's not going to work because you hear the way that they're talking about it, like in their, in their interviews. They're, they're thinking of this as a messaging move and frankly, I prefer them do a messaging move rather than nothing. But that doesn't mean that Democrats here have a winning strategy. They are, as you alluded, teeing up some other possibilities in the strategy, ones that I actually don't think are really good ideas. And that is this idea that. Okay, now Gavin Newsome, who anywhere there's a national news story is going to figure out a way to insert himself.
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B
He's talking almost like he's running for president. You would think, you know, you think.
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A
He'S going to run for president. I, it just never occurred to me that that was a possibility.
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B
You know, that's what they say here in California about who knows. I live an hour away from Sacramento, so my ear is more to the ground, near, closer to the ground, I guess, than you at this point.
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A
Yeah, I mean, of course, you know, he's been, he's been running since, since last election, you know, and I was surprised that he didn't jump in front of Kamala. But, you know, so, so he's talking about doing, doing, you know, gerrymandering scheme in, in California and sparks this, like, this debate within the Democratic Party about, like, okay, well, we say that gerrymandering is a bad thing. So why are we going to do it as well? Now what they always say, you know, what they're saying on the news all the time is both sides do gerrymandering. Both sides do gerrymandering. And that is absolutely the case. But if you look at the maps, you look at the most egregious maps for the past 30 years, it has really been overwhelmingly, we've seen gerrymandering, the most egregious cases benefiting, benefiting Republicans. So it really is a more Republican phenomenon, this idea that politicians are able to pick their voters. It's a bad idea. And I don't see that as a real movement building strategy.
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B
I mean, it seems like it's just this escalation, which. What's it, what's it going to, what's it going to lead to? Particularly as we see this ramping up of authoritarianism. Right? It's like, you know, Texas, Texas in 2019 had a blue surge, almost elected bet beto o'. Rourke. As to the Senate, it actually put a lot of Democrats into the state legislature and state Senate. It's called the Beto wave. And ever since then, the Texas Republican Party has been waging war on voting rights. I mean, there's where they're doing this redistricting because they know they're probably going to lose the House because Trump is so unpopular. Contrary to what he says in the media, he is so unpopular and there's probably going to be an anti Trump wave in 2026. And so they're trying to sort of head that off. But like, you know, Greg Abbott has been waging war on the, on the blue counties, like, which are huge metropolitan areas of Texas for, since 2018. And you know, it's just, it's a, it's a race to the bottom, I would actually call it.
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A
Well, it's raised to the bottom everywhere because, you know, so if Newsom is able to do it in California, Hochul's.
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B
Talking about it too.
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A
Yeah, Hochul's talking about it. I think there's too many constitutional hurdles in the New York State Constitution to really move it there. But you've got Florida is talking about doing it as well. We've got JD Vance just yesterday in Indiana trying to, you know, trying to build up some steam about redistricting. There, there are more, there are, in this strategy, in this moment, there are more, way more congressional districts for Republicans to pick up going down if we really nationalize this nonsense, than Democrats. And once again, it's a bad fight because it's about letting politicians pick their, like, pick their, their constituents, not the, not the other way around. So it'd be one thing if the, if the Democrats had a plan to, you know, actually win and gain more seats because of this, but I, I think that they're picking a battle that is politically losing and tactically losing. Yep.
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B
Just to sort of move on from this into the, the other, the other realm. I, I, one thing, I mean, one thing that occurs to me is that a lot of the institutions which are, like, opposed to Trump, he's been really going after, like, you know, the universities Columbia and Harvard, the big law firms, the Y Shu law firms in New York. You know, he's, he's really going after his, like, who he sees this as. I mean, the Democratic Party in many ways. And, and, you know, they just subpoenaed Bill and Hillary for the Epstein files, which we can, we can talk about. But, you know, it seems, it seems like, so I feel like the hashtag resistance is not what it was in 2017 and 2018, but the grassroots resistance, like real resistance we're seeing all over the country. And, you know, this is a big umbrella and this is everything from, like, mass protests, which are hands off, no kings, good trouble. You know, there's more coming. I think there's going to be a big march in New York in September. And then also the community resistance we see in places like Los Angeles and Chicago against ICE and, and things like that. You know, what, what, what is your view on that? It's like this grassroots resistance seems somewhat fierce. There's also lots of corporate campaigns targeting sort of companies like tech. Tesla's the most obvious example. But, you know, as we see the waning of the hashtag resistance and the bending the knee to Trump, but we're seeing fiercer action in the street. I'm just wondering what your thoughts are on that. And, and like I said, I, I definitely put this move by the Texas Democrats in the hashtag resistance category. Yeah, versus, versus, like what we see in Los Angeles. And we've done a couple of shows on Los Angeles, too, in the last couple of months.
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A
Yeah, well, I think that we definitely, I unfortunately think that we are turning a bit of a corner and moving into a new phase with the grassroots resistance. I'm Going to separate that from the, you know, the community based non compliance and the anti ice work. But you know, so we saw the, the President's, you know, the, the President's Day mobilization that surprised everybody. That, that people, you know, people came out with the 50, 51. Nobody ever heard of this before. They were organizing on Reddit. Then we, you know, then we see hands off mass mobilizations, you know, in many cities all over the country and in smaller, smaller areas, rural areas and historically red areas, that was a big story. Then we have the no Kings mobilization that is timed against Trump's birthday parade here in Washington D.C. once again, Mass mobilizations all over the country. In fact, it may have been one of the largest single day mobilizations in U.S. history. So this is some, you know, so we saw this grow, you know, from nobody really expecting anything to happen to, you know, what, you know, what may have been the largest single mobilization in a day in U.S. history. And then the next big day of action was the, you know, the John Lewis Good Trouble mobilizations on the 17th of last month. And those were, there were a lot of them. You know, the map had 2,400 protests. So it's happening in a similar number of places. But in almost every case they were just a fraction of the size of those of the mobilization that had happened before. So I think that this is part of what we see every time, you know, in every one of these movement moments, you know, folks are like, oh, well, it's really easy to organize. All we do is we put out an announcement and we tell some people to come and then bring their own signs.
- [12:46]
B
Bring their own signs?
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A
Yeah, bring your own signs. Resources show up from somewhere and it's great and we're okay, we should call for another one and we can call for another one. And at some point you can't just put out an announcement. For a mobilization, you need a compelling moment. You need real organization, you need real structure to be able to deliver. And hopefully I think that worth that realization point for that wave of mobilization. What I'm kind of excited about is a bit of a pivot where people are certainly thinking about continued mass mobilization. We're going to see activity on Labor Day. We're going to see some stuff happen in September. It's going to continue to go on. But we're seeing, I think two folks leading into two different projects right now. One is this set of non compliance trainings that the, in general, the coalition has been, was doing. The no Kings type mobilizations. They've really leaned into A particularly indivisible thinking about, okay, what does it mean to move from protest to actual act of non compliance? And this arc of trainings and House parties, and that is really building on an area of work that Daniel Hunter and Nadine Block and all sorts of other really smart people in the Freedom Trainers Network have been working on since before the beginning of the Trump term. The other thing that we're going to, I think, see over the next four, you know, the other big story I think we're going to see over the next four weeks in terms of that type of grassroots resistance is activity at certainly the town hall meetings of members of Congress. They're on, they're on recess for a month, so they're out in the districts. So I think we're going to see Trump's big bad bill passed. People are understanding what is in it, they don't like it. So I think we're going to see some significant confrontations happening out in the field.
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B
Yeah, I mean, I think that's an important thing to notice. The big beautiful bill is, you know, it's stripping away a lot of people's health care and stripping away a lot of, a lot of stuff. And I personally think, at least on the Republican side, probably on the Democratic side too, so they're just going to be canceling their, their town hall meetings, so they're not having to deal with that. But, and we're already starting to see, we're already starting to see, I mean, I've been seeing on social media some of those confrontations to kind of get into the sort of non cooperation, non compliance, you know, strategy that's beginning to become elevated. And I heard Daniel Hunter on a different podcast the other day talking about this, but he actually did, they actually did, they actually did this training for 130,000 people on a zoom call, which is like massive. And you, I mean, what do we, what, what do we think this is going to result in? Because I, I do agree that even at a certain level, I think, I think mass protests are good. I think it's what keeps the, it's, it's a gateway for lots of people. But, you know, it also becomes like a formulaic thing that the, that the state basically bakes into their, you know, what they're doing. They, they've done it for, you know, decades at this point. But do you think, do you think this not mass non compliance is going to begin to do. And, you know, I was actually looking at an article where Sarah Nelson in March, I think we've Talked about this on a previous episode, was talking about how we need to all band together and work on a general strike. Is this going to feed into the calls general strike in 2028? Well, I personally think it should happen sooner too, by the way.
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A
Yeah. Yeah. I mean that's. If, if we don't do something between now and 2028, the, the landscape is going to look, is going to look a whole lot different than we get there. So I think that the, the thinking about ourselves as a resistance movement fighting against democratic backsliding is the absolute right thing to do.
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B
Little, Little D. Democratic backsliding, correct. Yes.
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A
The big D's are backsliding to or.
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B
Part of or part of the.
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A
Or part of it. I think that, I think we're going to need some examples of people really effectively operationalizing non, non compliance to, to really open people's imaginations to concretely like how do you put this? How do we not think about, okay, well what if we like knock down this pillar like in our role in this pillar. But like, like actually, you know, seeing activity like flight attendants saying, oh well, air, air traffic control is shit right now, so we don't feel safe getting on planes, we're not going to fly and like people putting together oh shit, that kind of shut down the, a chunk of the economy for a bit. So it is right now we haven't figured out how to put it into practice. There's, you know, I think that there's a narrative out there that there's some army of federal workers that are doing, you know, that are doing this type of work behind the scenes. I'm not seeing it. I'm sure that, I'm sure that some people are doing heroic things. But like, we're going to need to get some concrete examples for people to really start to understand what this means in their lives. And I don't know that we're there yet. Something that is positive about that 130,000 person Zoom call is that went into after that there was another zoom call that was like a train the trainers for having house parties to talk about this with your like people. And then over the next couple weeks they're, they're having some number of, you know, all these house parties. You know, it's actually kind of a popularized like out, you know, training, training program that it's, it's, it's too early to really understand what the metrics look like because they're, you know, they're being, you know, relatively smart. These, you know, the, these events are, they're getting registered and vetted, but they're not, there's not like a website for that, for them the way there was for like no kings where you can look at a map and see all these different, you know, all the dots. So if that's happening at scale, if people are talking in their living rooms about okay, what does non compliance mean for us, then that could be, that could be a real thing that could become very, very powerful.
- [20:19]
B
Yeah. And just to kind of like pull in the takedown. The Tesla takedown movement, which kind of in many ways went viral and was very much, I would say very partnered with these mass protests. But you know what, what those protested and in some places, at least in the places you would expect like New York or San Francisco, you saw people doing civil disobedience inside Tesla showrooms or you know, people, you know, protesting at the homes of, of people connected to the company. But it did bring down the stock price like by 70% which, it's an inflated, it's an inflated thing anyway. But it's interesting that that actually had such an impact to the point where, you know, that was one of the contributing factors to why Musk left the government and has had his split with, with Trump. But, but to see this at even, and I feel like that was at a scale that I hadn't really expected, but to see this other non compliance and the machinations of the state is going to be very interesting. I also, I think that, I think the whistleblowers that we've been seeing are very interesting. I think there's been like a couple of anti excise whistleblowers and then Anthony Aguilar who was ex military, who was at the Gaza Humanitarian project, who's been very much on the, on the talk show podcast circuit talking, being a whistleblower about what they're doing in Gaza is also, you know, very interesting. Hopefully encourages other people to do things like that. Which I think whistleblowing, to me whistleblowing is a form of non compliance.
- [21:51]
A
Absolutely. And I'm glad you brought the Tesla takedown because when we, when I was first on the podcast, I was, we talked about this and I was very dismissive about the Tesla takedown. I said, hey, this doesn't make any sense. The people who are out there, they're not buying Teslas to begin with. Hell, I've been boycotting Tesla for my entire life. And I think that in what, what the people who were working on doing that organizing understood is that, is that to run an effective boycott of, of Tesla, you can't just say, hey, nobody go buy your Tesla. What you need to do is, you know, have, have people with Teslas getting stickers put on their cars, talking about what kind of they are and you need to have activity at, at Tesla stations and you really need to, you're, you're not just thinking about convincing people who might buy Tesla. You're creating an environment where it's uncomfortable to, to buy and own a Tesla. And that's the lesson there. The thing that makes me a little nervous is people talking about running boycotts of everything else now. Well, the Tesla boycott worked, so let's boycott Target. Oh, and Walmart.
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B
And Home Depot. Home Depot.
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A
And Home Depot. And at some point we're just picketing capitalism. Right? So in, yeah, making more responsible choices about, about our consumption is a good thing to do. But that is different than organized non compliance.
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B
Just because I'm trying to keep us keep, keep an eye on time a little bit. The other, just to kind of like, I think, I think this non compliance, non cooperation thing is going to be a theme of what we see sort of coming more and more in coming days. But you know, you're based in Washington D.C. there's potentially an opportunity for like mass non compliance there. As Trump has been threatening to take over and federal. Well, it's already federal, but take over like the Washington city government and the D.C. police and things like that. How, how are people in D.C. reacting to this? Is there organizing going on around this? Will we see? Yeah, non compliance.
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A
Yeah, absolutely. So there is a, a really incredible organization in D.C. called Free D.C. that has been doing, they've been doing onboarding training, they've been doing non compliance trainings. They are organized in a ward based structure. They're onboarding about 1500 people a week. It is just, it's, it's, it's massive. The folks who are involved in organizing it are really, really smart. I've got tons of respect for them and they're doing some incredible work and they are leaning, I think that the number one crisis moment that they're naming is some sort of federalization of either law enforcement in D.C. or our home rule, our ability to make, you know, some laws, as long as Congress says that they're okay. So they, they've been doing a lot of, you know, a lot of building. They've been involved in a lot of action, but they were like, listen, we're like, we're not gonna like really lean into disruptive action like until we're specifically fighting against this this red line for us. So, so I'm very eager to see how that transpires. And they're doing smart stuff like, you know, they're onboarding like 1500 people a week that they have 2% of DC's population already signed up on their, like on their email list. They started six months ago. And so, so I think that there's, there's a lot of really, really exciting.
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B
Opportunities there, you know, because often Trump's, Trump's threat is anywhere he's having, you know, problems. Like he talked about this with Los Angeles about, you know, federalizing. Take the, the federal government taking over the city of Los Angeles and the lapd. He actually did send the military into Los angeles to. But D.C. is a place where that threat is even more real because technically it is more under the control of the federal government.
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A
I mean we also have, we have 47 different arresting agencies, most of which are federal in one way or another, that are already here during the, and you know, after this, you know, after last week, this, you know, former Doge staffer, the big balls or blue balls kid, got a well deserved beat down by a couple of 15 year olds. Trump announced that he's is bringing a surge of law enforcement into, into D.C. for a seven day period. That seven day period started at midnight last, last night. Yesterday we didn't see a lot of federal police. Today folks are reporting seeing more federal police around and exactly what that looks like. It's, you know, I think we're going to learn it's been 13 hours, it's 1 o' clock on Friday here in D.C. so I think it's going to get pretty tense over the week. You know, the first thing, the first communication I got about this was from pre DC with like tips on how to stay safe in this moment that also emphasize that hey, this is our home and a way to engage in resistance in this moment is to not hide and it's to go be visible, be out in the streets, go for a walk with your kids, have some joy because that is an act of resistance that we can have in this particular moment. I think it's going to get more acute as we understand exactly what the federal interventions start to look like.
- [28:41]
B
One of the characteristics of rising authoritarianism from my understanding is incompetence because they hire for loyalty, not competence. And, and we're also seeing like layoffs of, you know, he just actually laid off a whole bunch of people out of the FBI who were part of the January 6th investigation, that sort of thing. So hopefully What. One thing we will see through all of this is, you know, whatever they do when they, if they do things like this, they'll do it poorly. I mean, definitely, when I look at the, the ICE raids in Southern California in particular is, it's, it seems like it's very, well, it's very disorganized and the, and that the, the community resistance there is, is pretty fierce and disrupting their operations.
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A
And so they're rolling up to Home Depots and box trucks. This is like, this is Patriot Front. Like.
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B
Yeah, I'm sure there's, I'm sure they're recruiting out of Patriot Front too.
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A
Yes, they're, they're, they're recruiting anybody, as we learned in South Park. South park this week.
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B
Yeah, yeah, that's true. So the, the last thing I wanted to touch on. Well, there's one other thing around the incompetence and the, of the, of the Trump administration is that there's, because we just said we wanted to talk about this is there's like a, there's also a level of disruption going on with Trump, at least within his narrative around the Epstein files. I'll just ask you this as a media consumer and as A resident of D.C. is, you know, what are you seeing around. Around that, if anything?
- [30:10]
A
Yeah. So I think that, you know, it's, it is. The situation is tragic and it is amusing to watch for us, as horrific as the, you know, as the experience that the survivors and victims went through. It is. It, it seems like a really unforced error. I wasn't thinking about Epstein six weeks, you know, six, six months ago. It was only that Pam Bondi said, I have a file with the list, and then didn't said, there's nothing here like it. It's a complete, complete unforced error. I think that there's, so I think there's a couple things we should be concerned about. One is how this gets, how this gets gets weaponized. You know, the deputy Attorney general went, you know, went to, you know, to Florida, interviewed Gazelle Maxwell, who. The only way she's going to walk out of prison, like, as a, like before she's 80, is if she gets a part from, from Trump. Nobody was asking people, the government to open an investigation. People were saying, share what you already found. Share what it is you already found. So now they're going and getting this new information and they're likely to. And, you know, there's, there's talk about releasing it. And I'm sure that one, I'm sure that People like, like Alan Dershowitz, Larry Summers, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates very likely engaged in Prince Andrew. Well, yeah, definitely we've known that like all are implicated in this. So, yeah, that's, that's going to come out. But like, everybody knew that already. You know, I think what, what I think that we are missing with the files and in that is that there's something in, there's likely something in those files that is. So we all know that these men did terrible things and they're probably not going to face consequences for it even if the files are released. They're unlikely to face consequences. There's probably something about the sources and methods of how they collected that information and, or other activity that Epstein was involved in on behalf of some government or something that, that makes, that has made it. So both sides, both Democratic and Republican administrations have looked at and they're like, oh, we can't release that. So it, it seemed, you know, it seemed like a forced error. But then, you know, I, I am, I am a little concerned at the way that the, that the Trump administration is likely to kind of weaponize this, this next phase, to deflect from themselves and move away from whatever is really, you know, really in those, in those documents.
- [33:37]
B
The interesting thing I find about it is that it's actually just not going away and, and I, I'm happy. Which actually makes me feel, there's some sense of relief I have in that, that it's not something they've been able to just let pass with the 24 second new news cycle that we're on. And so I'm happy about that. It's also interesting how it's actually created some division in the MAGA base, at least initially. It seems like they've tried to sort of do something about that, but I, you know, it's just not, it's not. And I think that's, I think that's a great thing. So.
- [34:16]
A
Yeah, I mean, the, the one like I, this, I'm going to bring, bring this back to something that I wanted to bring up earlier. I can imagine some version of this playing out during, you know, the Congress doesn't have to do a lot on an ongoing basis. They, they, they gotta pass it, they've gotta pass a budget or a continuing resolution to keep the government running. And we are going to hit another budget deadline on September 30, and if we got a situation where there's a collision course between the administration and Congress and Democrats are, you know, in a position to, to hold the line, then it could become really difficult for the, for Congress to figure out a way to fund the government. And we could see some type of shutdown opportunity around September 30th. And it is just this kind of like, it's not Congress's job to investigate creeps like Jeffrey Epstein, but is just this kind of like debacle that they have created that could create the perfect storm where there's enough division that they, they can't actually get something done. And it could have a significant, significant material impact in stalling the Trump operation.
- [35:48]
B
Yeah, yeah, totally. This goes back to the thing I was saying about the incompetence is that they're completely one, he's completely corrupt and criminal, but then incompetent too, and brings incompetent people in to run his operations who just don't know what they're doing. And that includes with some of the leaders in Congress. Sadly, I would also say the Democratic leadership is also very bad at politics. And, and you know, the like you're saying this is another great opportunity for the Democratic leadership to do, to lead, to do something to undermine this push and you know, give it more than 50, 50 that they will flub it. So the last thing I want to say in the last couple of minutes we have the one last thing I want to ask you about around the resistance is the, is that we're seeing this mass starvation campaign in Gaza. And you know, resistance, there's been a lot of resistance around this. You and I were talking about this before the show. We've seen a lot of mass mobilization. We saw actually what I felt like this pretty strategic action on the base of student, university students last year. And I'm just wondering, you know, what your thoughts are and what you're seeing on this front.
- [37:02]
A
Yeah. So I think that you can only have just big rallies so much. So over the past many months, we've really seen a pivot towards, I think more strategic interventions going after corporations like Raytheon and Palantir. You know, we're seeing specific, you know, more targeted action around specific members of Congress with more specific sets of demands where the float the kind of spate of flotillas that we've seen. Greta Thunberg hopped on, hopped on a boat. Chris Smalls from the Amazon Workers Union was, was on a flotilla. And I think most interestingly there's a family of hostages flotilla that's that is departing, you know, relative.
- [37:59]
B
It's happening now.
- [38:00]
A
Yeah. So, so I, I think that we saw a lot of a move towards kind of smaller, more kind of laser focused actions. With the, the recent news that Netanyahu says, you know, is saying he's going to permanently occupy Gaza City. And also this, you know, a lot of countries around the world changing their position on recognizing the state of Palestine. We may be pivoting towards a more mass mobilization, mass resistance or mass disruption moment. And here in the US I also think that we're likely to see much more dramatic resistance going on among the Israeli people who really have no interest in continuing this, this war in this, in this particular way.
- [38:59]
B
You know, although I do find polls I see coming out of Israel very troubling. Like 80% are unbothered by what's going on in Gaza or more than 50% support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. I am, I am very troubled by that. But I do see a minority of Israeli Jews and probably Israeli Arabs who are like very much part of this resistance where we see a lot of people in the streets that go to, you know, Netanyahu's house and protest at his house. And you know, Israel also has a lot of authoritarian characteristics as well. So I think that's quite courageous. The other thing I want to ask about is we're seeing US Action targeting contractors like Raytheon and the media. We also had a home demo near DC of the head of the Global Humanitarian Project, which I'm glad to see that in my opinion that is an evil entity. Is a very evil entity. It's luring people to food aid and shooting them. And so I'm glad to see, and I'm glad to see that people connected to the Global Humanitarian Project are being targeted.
- [40:13]
A
Absolutely. And we're getting, you know, whistleblowers with. You know, I think that this is, this is stuff that we've seen with, you know, we've seen with, with our own eyes, we've seen images of. But now we're having people who are, you know, directly involved coming, you know, in speaking out. I think that makes it.
- [40:33]
B
Anthony Aguilar is like on everything from Zoteo Media to Democracy now to just did Tucker Carlson. It's also interesting to see Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene being part of the resistance. In many ways. I would actually say they're more fierce resistance to some of what's going on under the Trump regime than the Democrats. Some of the Democrats, anyway.
- [40:55]
A
Yeah. And that is something that we all actually need to figure out how to navigate because there's this, you know, I think if we are going to build the type of resistance that we, that we need and create the type of disruption that we need. We're going to need people in action who are people that we don't necessarily, that we disagree with about a lot of things. There's a big difference between having people be in action and kind of understanding their strategic actions along in the context of ours and being in our movements. Right. We don't need to, you know, open our arms and welcome Tucker Carlson into our movements, but we can understand that some of what he is doing right now is, is, is, it's, it's moving groups of people that, that we, we don't necessarily, we don't want to talk to, you know, so our challenge is a bit, how do we not put on blinders and, and ignore the fact that it's happening? Because it's important to, to understand the full. While also maintaining our political and our integrity. Because these are people who say and do things that hurt our communities a lot.
- [42:32]
B
Yeah. And I want to say one of the things that we've also seen historically of resistance movements against authoritarianism is that in the authoritarian foundation, there are wedges. There are cracks and there are wedges. And so what Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Green and others on in MAGA world, particularly in MAGA podcast world, as we're seeing it a lot, but also, you know, some, some political figures and other figures, is that these wedges are really important. And this is where we're starting to see it. I mean, whatever. Trump is also at 35% or 37% popularity with the country, but these wedges in his base are, are actually very critical to how we win and hopefully avert an authority. A complete authoritarian takeover.
- [43:24]
A
Absolutely.
- [43:25]
B
I'm going to wrap it there, Patrick.
- [43:27]
A
Great, Patrick.
- [43:28]
B
It's been fun talking with you folks. We've been talking with Patrick Young in Washington, D.C. organizer and good troublemaker. You're listening to the Green and Red Podcast. Check us out on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And Blue Sky. And if you're watching us on YouTube, hit that subscribe button. If you're listening to us on an audio platform, give us a rating review. It helps with the algorithm. And if you really like this, go to greenandredpodcast.org and hit the support button. Or become a patron@patreon.com backslash greenredpodcast.
- [44:00]
A
And you are a Patreon contributor long enough. Scott will invite you on the show.
- [44:04]
B
You will become a recurring guest. You'll be recurring guests. Yeah, because Patrick is both a guest and a comrade and a patron of the Green and Red Podcast. Everybody make trouble and misbehave, and we'll talk to you again soon.
- [44:29]
A
Sam.