The Science of Partying Against Fascism

Summary

Podcast Summary: Next Comes What – "The Science of Partying Against Fascism"

Host: Andrea Pitzer
Guest: Anat Shenker-Osorio
Date: March 26, 2026

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Overview

In this powerful episode, Andrea Pitzer sits down with messaging and linguistics expert Anat Shenker-Osorio to dissect the pivotal role of language, narrative, and collective action in beating back authoritarianism—specifically in the era of Trump and rising global strongmen. The conversation traverses the mechanics of political messaging, lessons learned from struggles abroad, the critical need to name atrocities as they are, and the science behind building movements that both defend democracy and offer a joyful, welcoming alternative.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Language Matters: Naming and Framing Atrocity

• Concentration Camps and US Detention Centers
  • Pitzer highlights the dangers of sanitizing language around immigrant detention and likens modern ICE facilities to both historic concentration camps and the Middle Passage ([00:08]-[00:43]).
  • Osorio stresses, “No one should be warehoused—that is for things, not people.” ([01:16])
  • Naming atrocities with historical accuracy clarifies what’s at stake and mobilizes resistance.

2. The Power and Peril of Political Messaging

• Winning Hearts, Minds, and Action

  • Shenker-Osorio explains: “If your words don’t spread, they don’t work.” ([00:07], [11:58])
  • Advocates must go beyond base agreement and create messages that supporters will repeat, act on, and embody ([02:03], [11:47], [12:38]).
  • Hyper-moderation or adopting the opposition’s frame is both morally and electorally ineffective ([15:37]).

• The Race-Class Narrative

  • “When certain politicians want to divide us and make us afraid, we know that means they’ve got nothing else to offer.” ([03:51])
  • Developed with Ian Haney López and Heather McGhee, the approach calls out how the right uses racism and zero-sum thinking to divide and conquer ([04:20]).

• Dog Whistles and Code Words

  • Language like “welfare queen,” “inner city crime,” or “illegals” conveys racist ideas without explicitly mentioning race—a classic dog whistle tactic ([04:40], [05:10]).

3. Global Lessons: Argentina & Australia

• Argentina’s Abortion Rights Victory

  • Campaigners used unapologetic health-based advocacy, symbolism (green kerchiefs), and social proof through mass visibility ([07:22]-[08:13]).
  • “Social proof is just understanding that humans are social creatures and we do the thing we think people like us do.” ([07:49])

• Australia’s Offshore Detention Regime

  • The government’s brutal “open air prison” approach inspired US hardliners like Trump ([09:17]).
  • Human rights advocates lost ground using technical, legalistic messages; only when messaging shifted to humanizing unity did they win major campaigns ([10:35]-[14:39]).
  • Example message: “No matter our differences, most of us believe that all people deserve to live in peace.” ([13:05])

4. How Change Happens: The Science of Persuasion

• Engage the Base, Move the Middle

  • “The message has a job, and the job is to engage the base in order to convert the conflicted.” ([11:38])
  • The middle is not fixed—people can hold contradictory beliefs and can be moved through compelling, values-based storytelling ([16:52]-[17:43]).

• Winning Narratives Are Viral, Not Moderate

  • “[Trump’s base]…he could murder their own daughter and they would still vote for him.” ([16:29])
  • The opposition’s message “had already reached that ‘tell your friends and put it on a T-shirt’ level of virality.” ([12:38])

• The Big “We” and Naming Villains

  • To persuade, build a joyful and inclusive “big we,” call out the true culprits (“the only minority destroying America is the billionaires” [24:13]), and offer material improvement ([24:13]-[25:07]).

5. Avoiding Euphemisms: Call a Regime a Regime

• Naming the System
  • Use “regime, not government, not administration,” to avoid normalizing authoritarianism ([25:51]-[26:39]).
  • “What this is, is a regime of the bullies for the billionaires that has taken over our government.” ([25:51])
  • Eschew the language of “immigration policy” for what are really assaults, abductions, and concentration camps ([27:26]-[28:32]).

6. Hope is an Action: Making Change Possible

• No One Knows What Comes Next

  • “Nobody actually knows what is going to happen next… The future is made of the decisions that we take together.” ([30:26])
  • Their aim is to erode our will to resist—don’t let them win without a fight.

• Voting Isn’t Enough

  • “We’re not going to vote our way to democracy… If we were going to vote our way to democracy, we would have in 2020.” ([32:25])
  • Wealth inequality is the root political and economic problem feeding fascism ([32:25]-[33:51]).

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Virality of Messaging:
  “If your words don’t spread, they don’t work.” – Anat Shenker-Osorio ([00:07], [11:58])

• On Moderation:
  “The idea that you beat your opposition by becoming them is ludicrous.” – Anat Shenker-Osorio ([15:37])

• On Mobilization:
  “You need the base to not just agree, but to say it, to repeat it, to wear it on a shirt, to go out and protest it.” – Anat Shenker-Osorio ([02:03])

• On Race and Dog Whistles:
  “That’s why it’s a dog whistle.” – Anat Shenker-Osorio ([05:10])

• On Billionaires:
  “The only minority destroying America is the billionaires.” – Anat Shenker-Osorio ([24:13])

• On Hope:
  “The future is made of the decisions that we take together… If you start buying into the idea that there’s nothing you can do, they beat you, they got you.” – Anat Shenker-Osorio ([30:26])

• On Joy as Resistance:
  “If you want people to come to your party, throw a better party.” – Anat Shenker-Osorio ([37:23])

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Key Timestamps

• 00:07: “If your words don’t spread, they don’t work.”
• 01:16: “No one should be warehoused—that is for things, not people.”
• 02:03: The “choir” concept—persuasion for action, not just agreement
• 04:20: “Zero sum thinking… what’s good for one group… at the expense of another.”
• 07:49: The power of “social proof” in movement-building
• 11:38: “The message has a job: engage the base…convert the conflicted.”
• 13:05: Unity messaging example
• 15:37: Rejecting moderation as a strategy
• 16:29: “Trump is their Jesus…” unmovable opposition base
• 24:13: Billionaires as the true “minority destroying America”
• 25:51: Strategic use of the word “regime”
• 30:26: Hope, unpredictability, and action
• 32:25: “We’re not going to vote our way to democracy.”
• 37:23: Joy and community as an organizing principle

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Action Steps and Takeaways

• Speak Clearly and Boldly: Use historically accurate and emotionally resonant language. Name atrocities for what they are.
• Make It Spread: Craft messages your base will repeat, wear, and organize around.
• Organize Nonviolent Direct Action: Participate in or organize “No Kings” protests ([34:47]-[35:14]).
• Build Social Proof: Celebrate wins, use symbols, and make activism visible and joyful.
• Call Out the Real Villains: Direct blame toward billionaire power and authoritarian enablers—not vulnerable groups.
• Don’t Succumb to Despair: Remember, major change often comes unexpectedly, and your resistance matters.
• Reject Respectability Politics: Don’t water down your message in hopes of winning over a mythical “moderate.”

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Conclusion

Pitzer and Shenker-Osorio make the case that effective resistance to fascism requires bold, vivid messaging, grassroots joy, and real community action. The lessons from other countries and past struggles suggest that clarity and courage—not caution—are what shift public opinion and create the movements that make history.

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Recommended Resources:

• ASO Communications – Learn Tab for open-source messaging guides
• Podcast: Words to Win By (Anat Shenker-Osorio)
• Upcoming “No Kings” protests and organizing guides ([34:47]-[35:16])

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Share this episode with someone hungry for tools, hope, or a reason to join the party for democracy.

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Transcript

[A]

I'm excited to have spoken to an expert whose work I find fascinating. Anat Shenker Osorio if your words don't

[B]

spread, they don't work.

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And on the podcast I recently went through in detail the idea of what a concentration camp is hurting our feelings, hurting our emotions, hurting our memories, and why it matters that we use that term.

[B]

Look, academically you're right.

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My argument for it is literal and historical. People laying on the floor head to toe that people can't understand what's going on today. That reminded me of the pictures that I in elementary school of how they brought the slaves from Africa without understanding the concentration camp process that's unfolded in the past and is unfolding now before our eyes.

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The ICE detention re engineering initiative, or hub and spoke model calls for eight mega centers that can each house 7 to 10,000 people for up to 60 days. They're supported by 16 regional facilities with a capacity of up to 1500 people each.

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That's not to say that people couldn't recognize ICE and Border Patrol actions as cruel and inhuman.

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Caught on camera ICE agents deploying pepper spray into a car with a mother and three children inside.

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All US Citizens or to see the US immigrant detention that we are seeing all around us as heinous.

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No one should be warehoused that that is for things, not for people.

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It's literally a warehouse. But letting others know about this historical context makes clear the stakes in stopping what's happening now. We negotiate with bombs showing how deeply immoral it is.

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Lawyers for five year old Liam Conejo R.A. ramos and his family have now filed an appeal after an immigration judge denied their asylum claim and ordered them to be deported to Ecuador.

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And that it's likely to get much worse in the absence of millions of us standing up against it. This Saturday, Liam's hometown of Minneapolis will be the flagship protest and what is

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expected potentially to be the largest single day of protest in American history.

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But there's another reason it's good to use the term, a strategic reason.

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You need the base to not just agree, but to say it, to repeat it, to wear it on a shirt, to go out and protest it, to talk to their neighbors about it.

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So today's episode will be entirely devoted to the role of messaging in how political change works.

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And we shall overcome.

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It will be a long one, but there's so much great stuff to get to here. I'm not a big fan of people using the term. As I said, we'll hear from Anat Shankar Osorio, someone who thinks about all this For a living.

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This isn't a matter of right or left, but quite simply a matter of right and wrong.

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She has developed really helpful ways to ponder the challenge of pushing back against the hateful propaganda that has such powerful effects on the country at present.

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Three days after ICE killed Renee Goode, the Labor Department tweeted, quote, one homeland, one people, one heritage. Remember who you are, American. NBC News reported that many people said it bore similarities to a Nazi slogan that translates to to one people, one empire, one leader.

[A]

She and I sat down together earlier this month to talk.

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My name is Anat Shankar Osorio, and officially I am the founder and principal of a comms firm called ASO Communications. My background and research area is in cognitive linguistics. So I look at why certain messages resonate and others don't. And with that, do analytic work looking at patterns in language, often in metaphor, and then empirical work testing different kinds of messages.

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Once all that is sorted out, she helps people craft and implement campaigns for

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both electoral and issue campaigns in the US and abroad.

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One of the things I wanted to talk with Shankar Rosorio about was her work on developing the race class narrative for use in public campaigns.

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So when certain politicians want to divide us and make us afraid, we know that means they've got nothing else to offer. We're onto them. There are lots of ways to be

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Minnesotan, and all of them are greater than fear. She was a pioneer of this approach in the US After Trump rose to power a decade ago. And collaborating with legal scholar Ian Haney Lopez. It's racism as a strategy. It's cold, it's calculating. It's considered. And policy expert Heather McGee.

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This is zero sum thinking that what's good for one group has to come at the expense of another. It's what's gotten us into this mess.

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Shanker Osorio tried to figure out how to counter the far right narratives.

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We will make America great again. Thank you.

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They get furthered through racially coded dog whistles.

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By that I mean if you want to go old school, things like welfare queen or inner city crime and sort of, if you want to go into more modern, current times, they're not coming in the right way. Threat to our way of life, if you'll forgive the use of the word illegals. If you listen to all of those words, what's interesting about them is that at no point do they actually name race.

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But she suggests everyone understands what the people using these words mean.

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That's why it's a dog whistle.

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So she worked with collaborators to develop and Test the race class narrative so

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the race class narrative was created and tested to figure out what is it that we need to say that is simultaneously about class but doesn't try to play into this we just won't talk about Bruno strategy that has been a failure the world over where we just won't talk about Ray if or we just won't talk about abortion or we just won't talk about immigration. Fill in the blank in the hopes that somehow we can eke out a win with colorblind populism, not recognizing that the right is gonna keep doing their unrelenting race baiting, xenophobia, hate stoking and if we're silent on it, that either just gives them permission to have all the airtime or if as many center left parties do, we actually echo them, we give a light version of their refrain, somehow will capture people back she

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worked on a project in the UK to figure out how to frame this for the public over time and included gender in the approach, meaning both struggles around abortion and the rights of trans people.

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So what it sounds like is basically point your finger at the bad guy, not the brown guy. It is a narration of the dog whistle. So in the UK case, for example, it's if you want to know who took your money, it's the people with all the money. That's how you can tell. And if they can convince you that it's anyone else that you need to point your finger at newcomers or at black folks or at trans people, then they can keep picking your pocket.

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I've been anxious to talk with Shankara Sorio about a number of examples of her overall approach, and she described the tactics, for instance, that organizers adopted to win legal abortion in Argentina. Women outside Congress waited anxiously for the vote to happen,

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and when it did, there was pure joy among those campaigning for that result.

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Organizers unapologetically advocated for the right to abortion as health care and stood up for the women at risk when they were denied this right.

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We have friends affected because there are no legal and safe abortion and it's a debt that we have as a state society.

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She talked about the use of everything from coat hangers to green kerchiefs in the campaign. The kerchiefs became a widely visible symbol of the movement as a whole.

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It was a sea of green in the same way, and I hate to use this odious example, but it's relevant that the red MAGA hat plays for that movement. It created a sense of instant shared identity and something that we call in psychology, social proof Social proof is just understanding that humans are social creatures and we do the thing we think people like us do.

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The organizers faced a number of challenges and setbacks, but abortion rights became law in Argentina in December 2020.

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It allows women to get a free abortion in a public hospital and will end the fears women have of being reported to the police if they try to terminate a pregnancy.

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I found our conversation on abuses against immigrants by Australia to be particularly illuminating.

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These are rare photographs from what Amnesty International says is an island of desp.

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Talked before on this podcast about how the government there managed to do a hard sell during the beginning of the war on terror, imposing terrible policies to offshore people seeking asylum and detaining them in third countries under monstrous conditions.

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The island says Amnesty is an open air prison where Australia's government inflicts as much suffering as necessary to stop some of the world's most vulnerable people from trying to find some safety in Australia.

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Shankar Osorio noted that the tactics were so nasty that Donald Trump found them inspiring.

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In 2001 is when this evil practice of sending people to offshore detention began. It was maintained through sequential, both labor and more right wing governments. They just kept doing it.

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It is not a conflict zone, it is not a place where people are supposed to suffer. And yet some of the things they're going through are very similar, similar to the exact same things that they're fleeing from.

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When Trump came into power the first time around, he had a conversation with then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and literally said, oh, wow, what you're doing is really evil. Mr. Trump appears to praise Australia's stance, telling Mr. Turnbull, you're worse than I am, before ending the call abruptly, I'm going to adopt this. So he outrightly said, I'm going to model my policy on Australia. Trump actually interrupted him and said, that's a good idea. We looked at what was the status, status quo messaging. How had the human rights sector attempted to prosecute their argument against these really horrific things that the. That that different governments were doing? Not just one government, 15 years, almost

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every other person I spoke to, men, women and children said that they either already attempted suicide sometimes several times, or they're thinking about it.

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And what was the opposition saying? More or less? Something like, as signatories to the Refugee Convention, we must fairly police our territorial waters and ensure that our procedures for asylums, you know, it was like human rights this, legal that, signatories, whatever. And the opposition meanwhile, had a narrative that was basically like terrorists, Q jumpers, danger.

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Not surprisingly, the scary message was more effective it was one of the worst numbers she'd ever seen. In surveying, one in four voters was completely sold on this message, worse than what she was seeing in the us at the same time, we should do that too. When Shankar Osorio did testing to divide subjects into the categories of base supporters, persuadable people and the opposition, it didn't involve splitting them by parties. She wanted to consider them in terms of the message they wanted to get across and get support for.

[B]

The message has a job, and the job of the message is to engage the base in order to convert the conflicted.

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When testing the current message about Australia being a signatory to refugee conventions and so forth, she found the base agreed with that message, but it still wasn't an effective message.

[B]

If your words don't spread, they don't work. And if the base just merely agrees with the message, which they did, they agreed with that status quo message. When we dial tested that status quo message with the base, they were like thumbs up, I'm into this. But again, the base is defined as the people who agree with your issue. So that's really not an achievement. The people who agree with your issue agree. When you talk about your issue, congratulations. But what you need the base to do is actually act as a choir. You need the base to not just agree, but to say it, to repeat it, to wear it on a shirt, to go out and protest it, to talk to their neighbors about it.

[A]

After identifying the true size of the opposition to their message, they found that the opposition's message was very potent. They had already reached that tell your friends and put it on a T shirt level of virality. The level of persuadables turned out to be around 55%, which is usually around 60%. But again, this message of abusing and hating on those seeking asylum had won over a lot of people by that point.

[B]

That's how badly this thing was going when we were doing this testing. So instead we created new messaging called Unity. Citizens of the world, which goes, no matter our differences, most of us believe that all people deserve to live in peace. Our policies for people seeking asylum should respect human dignity and take place in full public view. Doing what's right means upholding people's basic rights to safety and fairness. We cannot turn an issue of human rights into political bickering. We all have a stake in making the world a safer place. So we need to fairly examine each person's asylum case in a safe space and quickly integrate the people requiring asylum into our communities. This isn't a matter of Right or left, but quite simply a matter matter of right and wrong. So that's one of our two top testing messages. You can tell it's pretty different than that status quo message I described. But the most important thing about this is that after doing the message testing and doing, say this, don't say that they implemented. So in 2016, they conducted four winning campaigns that basically vacated nearly all of the prisoners that had been held in these camps, some of them for, you know, 15 years at that point. And it's little asterisk. There's, there's real complications still with Nauru. It was closed, they've reopened. It's not a perfect situation by any means, but basically close the camps.

[A]

Each of the campaigns developed these incredibly humanizing tactics, showing baby pictures, organizing healthcare workers, getting protesters to blockade entrances. It began with babies and then moved on to parents.

[B]

Malcolm Turnbull, bring dad here.

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They put up Bring them here signs in front of tourist attractions.

[B]

Bring them here. Prime Minister, Bring them here.

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They got corporate partners, they shifted public opinion. I asked Shankar to Orio to put this approach into context when it comes to US attitudes about immigration and to address the tremendous pressure by pundits and within the establishment to get Democrats to present some kind of hyper moderate face in order to appeal to independence or to 2024 Trump voters.

[B]

The idea that the way that you beat your opposition is by becoming them is ludicrous. And it is both. It does not work, both morally and it also does not work electorally.

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She compares a message to a baton that has to be passed person to person. If it gets dropped, if no one hears it, then it's not working. No one is ever going to hear this pile of hyper moderate messages because they are boring. If your own base won't repeat it, she suggests there's no way the media will buy into it or cover it in useful ways.

[B]

It's pretty clear as Democrats we believe in a strong floor and no ceiling.

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The second reason hyper moderation isn't going to work, Shankara Sorio says, is because the public has been fed a false story.

[B]

Trump is their Jesus. He could, he could murder their own daughter and they would still vote for him. Like so let's at least agree that trying to move those people, I'm telling you definitionally, these are the unmovable. There is also a set of people who are unmovable on the left, a

[A]

false story about what these supposed middle of the road voters want the rest

[B]

of the people, if they are up for grabs. What the research show is that they don't have a fixed position. Here's the secret. There's no thing that they already believe. This is what's wild about them. They are capable of believing multiple contradictory things.

[A]

Looking at survey results, she found that even within the same survey, there was an enormous percentage of participants who would, when asked two questions with opposing ideas about, say, immigration, would agree with both of them. A majority of people in a given survey might support mass deportation, while even more in the exact same survey would support a pathway to citizenship, though a number of outlets just wouldn't report on the latter result.

[B]

You can get yes to both of that. You can get yes to that question on trans people. So it is the job of a winning campaign to use their base as their choir, to create social proof, to make what we believe be a matter of common sense and what everyone thinks and what everyone believes in order to move those conflicted people toward us.

[A]

Currently, of course, Trump, Miller and their ICE lackeys are already getting the message out themselves. For the left, their rank cruelty and brutality are shifting public opinion away from them as we speak and toward abolishing ICE on the scale of a staggering 20 point swing since Trump's return.

[B]

It's not the job of a good message to say what's popular. It's the job of a good message to make popular what we need said because we have an agenda we need to enact and because that's how we win.

[A]

And for those politicians afraid of alienating somebody for using charged terms or of making a direct case, Shankar Rosorio didn't mince words.

[B]

How's that been working for you? It's the first thing I'd say. What's your theory of change on that? I mean, the number of times in a day that I have to ask campaigns and candidates, that's very interesting. What's your theory of change? How are you going to actually enact your agenda by never speaking about your agenda. Tell me more about that. So, to me, the purpose of politics, and I include electoral politics in this, is not to get elected for the sake of doing so, but rather in order to enact an agenda. Russell Vogt, a lead architect of Project 2025, now inside the administration as the Office of Management and Budget Director. And here he is. Political capital is not our scarcest resource. You can always build a time as our scarcest resource. And so that's why we are going

[A]

at it with everything we've got.

[B]

And what has happened is that over the last at least 20 years, arguably even 40 years, we have been subjected to the reactionary centrist advice that we should just not make the argument. Just don't make the argument on abortion. Abortion's too divisive. Just leave it alone. You know, one of the animating ideas behind Project 2025 was that if the right wanted get things done, they needed to do it really fast. Just don't make the argument on race. Race is too divisive. Just don't do it. And I think that has a lot to do with the kind of blitzkrieg approach the Trump administration has taken. Don't make the argument on immigrants, don't make the argument on trans people. And on and on and on and on and on. Moving very quickly to shutter agencies, lay people off, attack existing programs, you know, before really anybody has a chance to react to that, whether that's Republicans or Democrats, Democrats or the courts. And in not making the argument, in not wanting to touch a nerve, not wanting to be offensive, what has happened, as you and I both know, is that basically we are losing on all of those fronts. I mean, part of the idea of Project 2025, maybe ironically, is to kind of build a right wing deep state. When you do not make the argument, what you are in essence doing is handing people a set of headphones. And in one ear is the unrelenting hate baiting, xenophobia, misogyny, you know, you name it. Because they never shut up. Landon with a 665 pound squat and a 465 pound bench press. What about women playing in men's sports? They're always making the argument. And in the other ear is silence. Think we could have a woman take your position? Is there a woman out there? I don't think so. Or in the other ear is, I guess, polite Muzak. That isn't really about anything at all. Strong floor and no ceiling. What that means is that their framing and their ideas go uncontested. Thank goodness the Democrats keep pushing these things. So what I would say in terms of those fears is like, what are you trying to have happen in the world? What are you trying to actually get done? You're not gonna be able to persuade people toward the kind of world that you want to live in without talking about that world. And in fact, telling people to bite their tongue is what serves authoritarianism.

[A]

Looking at what moves conflicted people, she found it's often watching what other people are doing. Shifting the cultural conversation shifts what people think is normal, what's the dominant attitude, and what's acceptable.

[B]

With respect to the issue of whether gays and lesbians should Be able to get married. I've spoken about this recently. As I've said, my feelings about this are constantly evolving.

[A]

I struggle with this. Just look at how quickly and deeply public opinion changed on same sex marriage.

[B]

We have to make those same shifts by making the argument in a values based way. Not in a you're a racist, you're an asshole, you're a bigot. That's not going to convert the conflicted. But making a values based argument that says, for example, I have friends, I have people who work for me who are in powerful, strong, long lasting gay or lesbian unions and they are extraordinary people. The same is true today. It's been throughout history. People move, move to make life better for themselves. It is hard to move, to pack up everything and go to a new place. That takes incredible courage. Immigrant Americans move here for the promise of freedom and opportunity in this country. But today this maca regime of the bullies for the billionaires wants to turn us against newcomers because they hope that if we point our finger in the wrong direction, we won't notice when they're stealing the health care that all of us need in order to hand billions more to their backers. But we know better.

[A]

Those who want to change minds can begin by making what is called the big we out of a core value. Then call out the real villains for what they're doing and ascribe motivation to it. Or in our case, the only minority

[B]

destroying America is the billionaires. You actually have to can have a plan to improve the material conditions of people's lives, period, exclamation point, underscore. You have to be for a thing that is going to improve the conditions of people's lives, which means taking on the billionaire class, which is the reason why we presently do not have nice things. It's theft, it's fraud, it's corruption. These billionaires may have bought our governor, but they don't own this state. If you view politics through the lens of not just getting people elected, but the lens of enacting an agenda, then you need to figure out how to do that and you need to present that agenda in the most compelling, repeatable terms. Big money is powerful, but it's nothing compared to people power.

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I asked Shankar Rosorio about terms she'd looked at relevant to what's happening in the US today that she'd recommend to those who are organizing or even talking to their neighbors and hoping to establish values of human decency or to show the actual villains here.

[B]

You have one man, Mr. Musk, who owns more wealth than the bottom 53% of American households.

[A]

She recommended checking out the ASO Communications site and visiting the Learn tab there because the organization's research is open source and there are messaging guides there on almost everything that you could think to ask about. And along with that, she touched on a few specific terms.

[B]

Regime, not government, not administration. Administration and government to normalizing makes it seem like it's kind of okay, maybe doing things we don't love, but still acting in some sort of democratic fashion. We also need to reserve the word government. The word government is important. We need to be able to talk about the government that we want. We need to talk about the scientists who are finding cures for the future, the school teachers who are taking care of our kids, the people who are paving our roads like there still is government. What this is is a regime of the bullies for the billionaires that has taken over our government. So all of that is very intentional.

[A]

And the term regime is just the start in Chenko Rosorio's playbook.

[B]

I also call them the MAGA murder regime. This has generated no end of people tsk, tsking me. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth today said no nation in the world takes greater care to avoid civilian casualties than the US Every day the body count rises and they prove me more right. But the US is currently investigating an explosion at a school next to an Iranian Navy base that Iran says killed more than 150 people, mostly schoolgirls. So it is a MAGA murder regime. You're not going to persuade anybody toward what you need them to do by pulling punches. You need to be explicit and direct on immigration in particular besides concentration camps.

[A]

I'm not a big fan of people using the term.

[B]

Immigration is a word that has a meaning. Look, academically, you're right. The word immigration means the movement of people into a country for the purposes of residency. When we say about what is going on or was going on and still is to some extent in the Twin Cities, the the immigration enforcement has gone too far. Immigration enforcement is this. Immigration enforcement is that. Or when we say Trump's immigration policy is wildly unpopular, this immigration policy is this what? Immigration policy? Go back to your own country and figure out your constitution. Immigration policy is how many people get visas in a year? How long does it take to get a green card? You know, how long do you have a green card before you can become a citizen? What kinds of visas are we going to allow? And reasonable societies can disagree about immigration policies. Concentration camps, abductions, assaults, murders, none of those Things are immigration policy. There is no immigration policy in any of those things.

[A]

Things.

[B]

Think how we would feel if people referred to the World War II ghettos as religion policy or the concentration camps there as religion policy. That's absurd. It should sound absurd in the way that I really want immigration policy and immigration enforcement to sound absurd to people. So I know I'm beating on this. It's really important. There's no immigration being enforced. That's not what's happening. I actually have no problem with immigration, so that's not the reason I'm saying this. All she does is complain about this country. It's just wildly inaccurate. So we need to call things as they are. These are assaults, they're abductions, they're concentration camps. And we need to call this regime a regime. And then we need to have an affirmative demand. And that affirmative demand is to free America. Free America from this regime. Free America from wages we can't live on and houses we can't afford. Free America from the billionaires who are destroying our lives. Free America from these murderers who are from Epstein to Ice to Iran hell bent on destroying anyone and anything that does not obey their demands.

[A]

A lot of it starts with Barack Hussein Obama.

[B]

I mean that's what's going on.

[A]

If we can't name the thing for what we can see with our own eyes in front of ourselves, how are we going to convince anybody? I asked Shankara Sorio what she would say to people who want to believe in these huge shifts that could change society but are feeling really overwhelmed at this particular moment.

[B]

Rebecca Solnit has a new book out so I want to credit where due and in it she talks about how she went back and looked at all of the news media accounts about 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall and this sort of like giant sea change around former Soviet countries. And in the time leading up to that massive change, no one, I mean the very smart people were hindsight 2020 and saying like of course we knew we could have predicted but in reality they predicted nothing. So the point of this story is that nobody actually knows what is going to happen next. They don't. And if they pretend to, they're lying. The future is made of the decisions that we take together. I literally co founded an organization called we make the Future. We named it we make the Future because one of the most important things that we have to do in order to be able to fight authoritarianism is understand that their ultimate aim is to erode our will to resist. We've already won in many ways, but we haven't won enough. If you start buying into the idea that there's nothing that you can do, they beat you, they got you. This is not endless nation building. So at the very least, out of the sense of like, don't let them get you, you can't be thinking that this is only just the beginning. So what is it that you can do? Well, first of all, you can be speaking in honest, robust terms that yes, invite people into this bigger we, but are honest about what we are confronting and what it is we need to do.

[A]

Talking about the role of elections, we discussed how they can be very important, yet insufficient to guarantee democracy. Securing democracy is going to require more of us.

[B]

We also have to recognize that we're not going to vote our way to democracy. Maggie Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people. And that's been a big mistake in progressive politics in the US which differentiates it to some degree to other countries. And what I mean by that is if we were going to vote our way to democracy, we would have in 2020. They refuse to accept the results of a free election. And they're working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself like in reality. The fact is that did not stave off the rise of fascism. It didn't. MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards. And so we have to recognize that we have an economic problem masquerading as a political problem. Never before in the history of this country. Never before have we had so much income and wealth inequality. We have a problem of the concentration of really rapacious wealth in very few hands.

[A]

Today in America, the top 1% owns

[B]

more wealth than the bottom 93%. That has extraordinarily detrimental consequences on society at every level.

[A]

And Anant had so many great ideas to share. We can only get through literally a fraction of of the conversation that we had in this episode. I may do a whole second episode with the rest of our talk later, but in the written post on Degenerate Art, I will link to several projects on her site that are great examples of her work and of successful campaigns using this kind of approach in the US and overseas.

[B]

We wouldn't be climate change denialists and we wouldn't ignore the science of climate change. Why would we ignore the science of how people reason and come to judgment

[A]

and if you don't already know it, I highly recommend her words to win by podcast.

[B]

Why would we ignore the science of how persuasion works?

[A]

I always finish these Tuesday posts with action items you can take up if you're looking for something to do. And in this case, Shankara Sorio framed one in our conversation which I will close with Today.

[B]

You can participate in non violent direct action that means both things. Like no Kings, of course. There were 2,500 protests at the first no Kings.

[A]

There were 2,700 protests at the second

[B]

no Kings organizers say for this one, there are Already more than 3,100 protests

[A]

planned all over the country.

[B]

There's another one coming up March 28th. If there is not a no Kings protest within 30 minutes or so of where you live, you should probably be organizing your own.

[A]

Both to make the point on March

[B]

28, but also to start organizing your own community for what comes next. It means go to States at the core, they have a substack. You can figure out how to sign up up to be trained in nitty gritty nonviolent direct resistance where you live to create your own rapid response network and mutual aid network. Don't be fooled. Boycott the target.

[A]

Boycott continues. It continues because the demands have yet to be met.

[B]

Figure out which corporations are funding this thing and refuse to give them your money. All across the country, people have been doing kind of guerrilla promotion about that protest. Figure out what creative things you can do. In Chippewa Valley, Wisconsin, local organizers there showed up with shovels and dye and made this very cool sign in the snow. One of the many things that Australia did was they rented boats. They stuck them in Sydney, Harbrook. Where the hell are people in rented boats in front of the Statue of Liberty saying close the camps. Go to Dilley, San Antonio. My understanding is 45 minutes an hour

[A]

away, 23 more centers are gonna open

[B]

up and they wanna house 80,000.

[A]

The Americans need to stand up and put a stop to this.

[B]

You live there. Go rent caravans and stand outside of there singing songs of peace and love. Elizabeth Jolly says she hopes speaking up loudly and publicly will help lawmakers on every level move on behalf of human kindness. Go raise money to bring supplies to the children in there. They wrote those beautiful, beautiful letters. We came to the US because there were people who wanted to hurt us that were so touching. I'm the third teenage girl who has tried to take care of this little two year old boy, write letters back and go try to deliver them. Not because you'll be able to but because that's a piece of content. Because what's going on is wrong. Everyone is human. We're all human.

[A]

We're not better than the other because we're born here or not born here.

[B]

At the end of the day, we need to be there for each other.

[A]

We spoke about the importance of having something for people to move towards and the role of joy.

[B]

If you want people to come to your party, throw a better party.

[A]

Whether it's frog costumes or music or humor.

[B]

Number one thing that we need to be doing. The popular children's Entertainer known as Ms. Rachel says she is now fighting to close the Dilley Immigration center in South Texas is continuing to shove in the public's face exactly what's going on. She recently was on video chat with a 9 year old boy from that detention center who says all he wanted

[A]

was to do his school spelling bee. And that's it. Thanks for listening to Next Comes what? Please share this with one person who's looking for ways to survive this mess. To support this podcast, please become a paid [e-mail] and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts.