Andrea Pitzer (0:00)

You're listening to. Next comes what from Degenerate Art. This is Andrea Pitson. Each week we'll look at one aspect of authoritarianism to figure out how we got where we are and how to fight back. Last week, I talked about how courts and crowds were our best means to keep control of our government and to protect the most vulnerable Americans from abuse by leaders that are clearly trending authoritarian and by their lackeys. Hey, I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people. I had planned to talk today about some historical examples you might not know, in which people used public protest or private tactics to delay or block oppressive governments. But given what's happened in just the last few days, I want to take a good part of this episode to focus on what's happened in the courts and the kinds of protests that have taken place and been successful just in the last few days. Meanwhile, today, 21 members of the U.S. digital Service, the agency that Musk turned into the Department of Government Efficiency, resigned, posting online that they won't use their technical expertise to, quote, compromise core government systems, jeopardize American sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services. Amid all the bad news, it can be easy to miss just how much has been accomplished. So, first, let's look at the courts. So, taking a moment to get the panoramic view, I wanna point out that more than 90 cases have been filed against the new administration in the five weeks since Trump took his oath of office. The judges are looking at these lawsuits and saying, yeah, maybe the Trump administration can't shut off federal funding. Judges are in the process of blocking executive orders and policies on a widespread basis. Federal judge, the same one who blocked Trump's birthright citizenship order, has now blocked the Education Department and Office of Personnel from sharing data with doge. The same day, Judge Royce Lamberth granted a request to expand a preliminary block protecting trans women from being sent to men's prisons and guaranteeing their access to medical care. And the same day, a court blocked enforcement of an order allowing Department of Homeland Security agents to detain immigrants in and near churches without a warrant. It's where we gather for worship. It's where we help to provide needed resources like food and clothing, ESL classes. It's where we take care of one another. Still on Monday, Judge Colleen Caller Catell was demanding to know who is the head of DOGE officially and how any team members working under the auspices of that project were hired. All these examples happened in one day. In so many ways, what this administration is doing is not only unprecedented, not only breaking norms, but is illegal. We can't normalize it. In recent days and other rulings, judges have also blocked the Treasury Department from granting access to DOGE affiliated individuals, not allowing them to see any payment record. The supreme court, on a 7 to 2 vote, rejected the administration's attempt to appeal a temporary restraining order reinstating Hampton Dellinger to his position as special counsel in the Office of Special Counsel, blocking implementation of executive orders banning and targeting DEI initiatives. Another judge wrote that, quote, plaintiffs irreparable harms include widespread chilling of unquestionably protected speech. The question is, who decides what are the legitimate powers of the president? And in our country, that's the courts. These are just a few more things that have happened in courtrooms since our last episode. A federal district court judge just raked a Trump administration lawyer over hot coals in court, demanding to know why the Trump administration had not complied with an earlier court order from that same judge that commanded the Trump administration administration to restart foreign aid funds that they had unilaterally cut off. The judge ruled from the bench yesterday, issued what's called a motion to enforce that told the Trump administration they really did not have a choice on this matter. That court order had to be respected. They had to restart that funding by midnight tonight. All this is just on the court's front. The Trump administration rushed to the Supreme Court ahead of this midnight deadline this hour. The Supreme Court has responded. The court ordered the lower court ruling, quote, stayed pending further order of the undersigned or of the court. So what this means is that they do not have to meet the midnight deadline to restart those funds. But the Supreme Court says they've only got until Friday at noon to start briefing them on what's going on here. And then the Supreme Court will make the final call. When it comes to protests, Americans across the country have been busy, too. Hey, hey, ho, ho, Hila. Protests can take a lot of forms. People can demonstrate in public or express their views in writing. They can mock public figures. They can privately offer help legally or illegally to those targeted by the government. They can slow walk or even quietly block implementation of policies they reject as immoral or dangerous to the public. They can vandalize buildings or vehicles. They can turn to violence. I'll talk a little more about violence in a minute, but I want to focus on nonviolent tactics for now. So what is the economic blackout? The idea is to not shop at any major retailers starting at 12am on February 28, when Elon Musk demanded through an Office of Personnel Management email that all government employees make a list of five accomplishments from the last week and send them to him by midnight on Monday. Random Americans wrote to him with song lyrics or insults, pointing out that his exercise was inane. Employees were not thrilled, leading some to respond with very rude emails listing fake, vulgar accomplishments, even sending links to graphic images of sex and scatological content. Musk's attempt collapsed on itself under the weight of public ridicule, poor implementation, and the refusal of several agency heads to enforce his authority. It's somewhat voluntary, but it's also if you don't answer, I guess you get fired. Monday, someone hacked the video feed for screens throughout the agency at the Department of Housing and Urban Development showing visitors an AI generated video of Trump molesting Elon Musk's bare feet. As many people have noted, intentionally or accidentally, Musk had two left feet in the video. Now, this kind of ridicule might seem juvenile, but it really can be useful to show the limits on power of authoritarian wannabes. They will worship you as a God. No, no, you mustn't say it. You make me afraid of it can also undermine the popularity of strongmen in ways that help to delegitimize them with part of the population that admires swagger and bullying. I am become meme? Yeah, pretty much. I'm just, I'm living the meme. I've talked before about how focusing only on a personal battle with Trump can be a losing approach because his supporters have become hardened in their opinions about him and reflexively dismiss those criticisms, which is one of the reason that Musk has proven to be such a good target for things like that HUD video. Doge started out as a meme. Think about it. Now it's real. In part because he's so thin skinned and in part because he doesn't seem to have Trump's snake oil salesman Carney appeal with the general public. And if you can mock Trump by putting him in a relatively weaker position to Musk while you're mocking Musk, then that can be a really effective exercise. So like, I mean, the sort of the left wanted to make comedy illegal. You know, you can't make fun of anything. So there was like, comedy sucks. It's like nothing's funny. You can't make fun of anything. It's like legalized comedy. Yeah, legalized comedy. Protests have focused on Musk in the last week, with Americans around the country targeting dozens of Tesla deal dealerships in New York, Seattle, Kansas City, from Vermont to California demonstrators have picketed Tesla showrooms, with one San Francisco location being visited by demonstrators four times in eight days. It's a shame on Trump and us. People are just very outraged at what they're seeing. The number of protesters grew in front of this Tesla showroom, and we saw Tesla after Tesla drive by. I can hear it all the way back in my office. People are also taking their representatives to task nationwide over everything from federal federal job cuts to Medicaid funding to Trump's lack of support for Ukraine. Did Ukraine start the war? Well, it's simple. Did Ukraine start the war? Yes or no? Did Ukraine start the war? They are really rattling a number of representatives. House Republicans are trying to stop the blowback by pulling back on town halls altogether. A Republican aide told NBC News that leaders are urging lawmakers to stop engaging in them all together to avoid scenes that go viral. In the absence of those conducting town halls, voters and residents are still making themselves heard. How can we be represented by you if you don't have a voice in Congress? My friend Beth Macy reported from Roanoke this week, writing that hundreds of people showed up on Monday to protest outside Congressman Ben Klein's office, demanding a town hall meeting. He didn't show up, and staffers let in just four constituents at a time to hear their complaints. The protesters are showing up every Monday at noon to make themselves heard and to point out that he is not holding town halls. Some of you might remember the episode late last year in which I went to Roanoke to speak at a gathering put together by my friend Dina Imbriani, who decided to invite some of her friends together to help figure out ways to protect the most vulnerable people in her community. So many people who heard about that gathering wanted to be involved that she's been setting up workshops and trainings ever since. She held another group meeting with the mayor and a state legislator as speakers. This time, more than 100 people showed up to find out how to connect and protect everything from immigrants at risk to trans rights and women's reproductive health. Many of these court cases and public efforts are going to continue for years. Many victories won't be definitive or final. Some of those losses can be fought and others can be appealed. So I'm not saying everything is fine. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. The goal of the Trump administration has been literally to traumatize those it targets. We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected when they wake up in the morning. We want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. They're doing as much damage as they can as quickly as they can. Three HIV positive children in Soweto might lose their chance at life saving treatment because of a sudden freeze in US funding after losing both parents to HIV. The children are being raised by their 20 year old sister Nomsa, the only family member without the virus. A local organization, Ikagang Itireleng AIDS Ministry, has been their lifeline, helping them get birth certificates, social grants and monthly food. The center supports over 1,000 vulnerable children in Soweto, but now faces closure on a national level. So many people have learned how to protect themselves that ICE is having trouble meeting its quotas and as a result, its agents seem willing to act more and more thuggishly in retaliation. These campaigns cause real harm and there are secondary effects too. You've probably already heard about Jocelyn Rojo Carranza. Jocelyn was an 11 year old 6th grader who committed suicide after being bullied by her classmates, saying her parents were going to be deported and she was going to stay home alone. Other immigrants appear to have been brutalized during arrest. The Judge Advocate Generals who enforce the law in the military have been fired. We want lawyers who give sound constitutional advice and don't exist to attempt to be roadblocks to anything, anything that happens in their spots. There are still many crises that are unfolding and new ones arrive each day. On a state level, reactionary legislatures are doing what they can to promote extremism. When Republicans started passing abortion trafficking laws that restricted teenagers ability to leave their state for abortions and they said that they were just, you know, protecting teens from predators. I warned constantly, other people did too. I warned in my book, I warned at the newsletter that this was never going to stop at teenagers, that they were using teenagers as a test ground and that what happened to teens today comes for the rest of us tomorrow. And now tomorrow is here. And I want to be really clear, no matter what happens with this bill in Montana, this has national implications. They have broken the seal, they have gone after women and there is no coming back from that. In West Virginia, where I grew up, they're trying to remove even the rape and incest exceptions from already pretty extreme anti abortion laws. But the people who want to do this kind of harm are again and again coming up against hurdles they have to jump against trenches that they can't yet cross, and even some brick walls that our institutions and everyday Americans are putting in their path. These posters that you're looking at on your Screen right now have been spotted in several neighborhoods. Now they contain photos, names and phone numbers of ICE agents, along with a message written in Spanish which reads, careful with these faces. I've mentioned before that there are long histories of protests that show different ways it can work. There are so many great creative examples of people around the country today that I've ceded quite a bit of this episode to things happening right now to show you how people improvise and do great things in our current setting. But I do want to throw in some historical examples you might not know, because the sky is the limit when it comes to the potential variety of protest actions. By and large, we're not anywhere near the worst case scenarios, but I want to mention a few in which people nonetheless managed to find ways to gunk up the system. A Portuguese consul staffer in Bordeaux, France, During World War II, Aristides de Sousa Mendez, helped what's been estimated to be between 10 and 30,000 Jews to flee the Nazis. He said, if so many Jews can suffer because of one Catholic, meaning Hitler, it's all right for one Catholic to suffer for so many Jews. Portugal was not a democracy at the time, and De Souza lost his career as a result, but he saved many thousands of lives. I came yesterday morning to be here for this wonderful occasion, to be able to honor the man who rescued my father and my grandparents on May 24, 1940, at a concentration camp called Neuengamme in Germany. During that same war, detainees even found ways to swap the identities of the dead and the living, so that those detainees who were in trouble could be said to have died, keeping them from official punishment and retribution. Even at Auschwitz, the Sonderkommando who were forced to help in the gas chambers took more than a year to plan a revolt and managed to demolish Crematorium 4 from time to time. After a certain period of work, they were being murdered as not to bear witnesses, and that particular group decided that they are going to rebel. They used this gunpowder and manufactured little hand grenades made out of metal round boxes of shoe polish with a wick and filled with gunpowder. And when you lit it, it exploded. When it comes to America, I've mentioned the astounding successes from Jim Crow era examples of black resistance. Already we made a decision to attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery, to dramatize to the nation and to the world that people of color wanted to register to vote. Let me throw in one more from that era from organizer Scott Nakagawa, an example that may be less familiar to you as it was to me. Ahead of the Hawaii General Sugar Strike of 1946, there were issues of culture and language and groups that had been pitted against each other. In 1946 there were 34 sugar plantations covering 208,000 acres and employing 28,000 people. Some workers were higher paid than others, many of whom did not speak English. The fact that these companies controlled life on islands that lay so far away from any other place had put a lot of people at the mercy of those running the plantations. So workers brought in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. A core group of sugar workers was selected for advanced training in California at what was known as the California Labor School. The curriculum included ideology, labor history, labor law, and perhaps most important, practical experience with other union struggles. And they prepared for a long term strike. On September 1, 1946, the strike began. Picket lines went up and 25,000 employees refused to work. 33 of Hawaii's 34 plantations were targeted and most were effectively shut down. Caught in an isolated setting under the thumb of the plantation owners, workers ended up turning the tables completely. They took a we're not stuck in here with you, you're trapped in here with us approach and they effectively dismantled the corporate lock on sugar production on the islands. And it was a similar kind of system to Jim Crow on the mainland that had been imposed against the workers there. They thought they could take us on, but it was a long strike. But they found out that the workers were in the stick together, they're solid, that they cannot beat the workers. In support of the strike, people held dances, planted gardens, they gathered food through fishing parties. They got local stores to donate supplies to them. I was in the entertainment department, keep the morale up. So I was lifting weights since I was 12 years old. And then after I lift weights, I go into wait deep in entertain all the strikers. So don't get bored. They even organized a baseball team. The new political action effort had a major impact on the elections. With 35 union endorsed candidates winning office. This new and powerful force in Hawaii politics marked the beginning of the end of Republican party domination. I would say that Americans as a nation are not ready for a 79 day strike. And if we're lucky, we'll never have to take those kinds of actions against those kinds of odds. But the actions regular people are already out there taking are building the kind of connections where serious and sustained efforts will be possible. Where the discipline and the learning to collaborate across differing priorities and kinds of movements become part of muscle memory. Now I want to address two bits of feedback that percolated after last week's podcast, each of which went very different places. One person scolded me for lulling people into complacency, for making people think maybe the situation isn't that bad and that things are going pretty well. And I'll be honest, that comment did surprise me. So in case I haven't been clear, I do want to say clearly that just because I talk in a calm way about what could happen and suggest that we aren't well and truly screwed yet, that is in no way intended to suggest that we aren't in danger. The country as a whole is in danger and many vulnerable populations inside it are at tremendous risk already. The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one don't let it happen. What I'm trying to communicate to you is that there is a lot that people are doing, a lot you yourself can do right now, today, to keep the worst that might possibly happen from becoming reality, or to undo some of the harms already done. And I want to address another comment that brought up the possibility of not just courts and crowds to respond to Trump and his allies, but that brought up the possibility of violent uprising in terms of fighting Trump and his cronies, researchers Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan conducted a study looking at 323 mass actions around the globe between 1900 and 2006, so more than 100 years these actions resulted in the overthrow of a government or in territorial liberation. They found that nonviolent civil resistance is far more successful in creating broad based change than violent campaigns are. And there's more. This trend has been increasing over time, so that in the last 50 years nonviolent campaigns are becoming increasingly successful and common, whereas violent insurgencies are becoming increasingly rare and unsuccessful, a finding that was not at all what Chenoweth had expected. I was left with a few questions about the way I used to think. Why was it so easy and comfortable for me to think that violence works? There's some suggestion that violent resistance to authoritarian governments helps to establish extrajudicial violence as an acceptable tool across the board, making it harder to build democratic movements in the long run. If you think about it, everyone is born with a natural physical ability to resist non violently. So I'm not saying that violence has never had a role in political change in history, but statistically, using nonviolence, your odds are better for achieving actual change. And though nonviolent protesters have certainly felt the force of the state in terrible and unjust ways, turning to violent protest is far riskier in most cases for those involved, there are ways for people to engage in nonviolent protest at very little risk to themselves. And what I'm trying to do with this podcast is, is to inform you and to get as many people as possible engaged. Chenoweth and Stephane found that a tiny percentage of the population being involved essentially guarantees a successful outcome. But get this, every single campaign that surpassed that 3.5% was a non violent one. In fact, the nonviolent campaign were on average four times larger than the average violent campaigns and they were often much more inclusive and representative in terms of gender, age, race, political party, class, and the urban rural distinction. Just 3.5%. It's a little percentage, but it's still over 10 million people that we're going to need to get involved to really ensure that we can keep democracy. It isn't necessarily we have to have that many, but that many can be a guarantee. So we should go for it. Ultimately, this is going to be a political fight, and 80% of more than 80% of Americans say that the President has to obey court orders. So if the President were to disobey a court order, that would be wildly unpopular in a way that is a much stronger check than any of the tools that the courts have at their disposal. And it's a lot easier to gather people into that coalition if it's a nonviolent one. Like my friend Dina in Roanoke, you don't have to be experienced to make a difference. It can help, but expertise is not required in order to take action. If you want to know about upcoming gatherings, including more Tesla protests, the March For Science on March 7, and more 50:51 protests, you can look at Jo Katz's Blue sky feed. I'll put that in Friday. Link Roundup if you're not tied into a community and you don't have easy access to creating one, there are lots of tiny but meaningful actions you can take. Garrett Bucks made a list of 30 of them and I'll post that link on Friday as well. It includes wheat pasting signs, posting stickers, using sidewalk chalk to get your messages out, as well as one on one encounters in your daily life and subscribing to newsletters. Have I mentioned that your paid subscription to the my newsletter@Andreapitzer.com can actually support this podcast? But the important thing to remember for today is that by wanting to address the harms happening, you are already part of a vast community. Some of it working through institutions, some of it taking place in the street, but successfully defending against authoritarianism it depends on you. We have the knowledge. We have the means to do something with it. All that's missing is is those who have yet to act and whether they've long realized the country was in danger, or whether they've just woken up to the crisis that we're in. There is room for everyone in this fight. And that's it. Thanks for listening to Next Comes what? Please share this with anyone who's looking for ways to help each other survive this mess. To support this podcast, Please subscribe@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts.