Trump Tried to Crush No Kings. Then Something Changed. (w/ Ezra Levin)

Hi, Bill Crystal here. Welcome to the Bullwork. I'm very pleased to be joined today by Ezra Levin, co-director of Indivisible, key organizer of the No Kings protests over the last two years, prominent activists on the left, I think it's fair to say, or anti-fascist activists. Is that a certain okay term for you? We are pro-democracy activists and Oregon managers. One of millions around the country right now. Oh, it's true, but you've done it. And you were key to No Kings over the last two years. I want to talk about meta-parent. Well, what happened to you guys in the last wide in terms of the big tech companies and so forth. But let's just say a word about No Kings over the last two years, because I think it hasn't gotten to be honest really the attention or the credit it deserves as part of the overall opposition to Trump. Yeah, I think it's important to understand the strategic logic of No Kings when No Kings first got started, because this is 2025. And Trump is ascended. Mag is ascended. They've got the House, the Senate, the presidency. They're implementing Project 2025 at a fast clip. And the conventional wisdom circle circa early 2025 was Trump's got all the cards. The smart play is to go along with him. This was true in business circles. This was true in universities. This was true in law firms. This was true in segments of the Democratic party. We're called that James Carville wrote an op ed in early 2025 in which he said they smart move for Democrats is to roll over and play dead. So there was simultaneously this sense that we've been an authoritarian breakthrough moment in which this guy is trying to consolidate power not just by implementing a right wing agenda, but by attacking other sorts of political power in this country. And at the same time, what should be the opposition party? What should be civil society is saying, well, we got to bow down. We got to bow down right now. That was a scary moment. And the the inflection point came when Donald Trump said, we're going to throw a big ol military birthday parade for me. That's what we're going to do. And that that is exactly what you would expect from an authoritarian what we wanted to do with the first no kings in June last year was to burst that bubble of inevitability. Make clear that in fact millions of Americans did not over project 2025. They do not want fascism. They do not want a king. They want a democracy that's not for sale. They want a functioning democratic republic. And the best way to do that is not to seek conflict and counter-protesting at his military parade, but instead protest everywhere else and show that we're not afraid to stand up. And that was at the time the largest protest in American history. There were 2100 protests all over the world. We had more than 5 million people come out. And so you had this contrast between Donald Trump's kind of pathetic birthday military parade and then this historic level of opposition. And I think that was an inflection point in the fight against this regime. The only downside is the record for the biggest protest in American history didn't last for long. We broke that record in October of last year with no kings to 7 million people at 2700 protests. Then we broke it again after Operation Metro Surge and the Twin Cities in the March no kings no kings three with more than 8 million people at 3300 protests. Now this all culminated then in a couple weekends ago with no kings early vote, which was a similar effort in the sense that it was millions of people out at thousands of events, but different in its intent. The goal of no kings a couple weekends ago was not to send a message. We had sent that message quite clearly. The goal was to use the tool available to citizens of a democracy, which is your right to vote to push back against election sabotage and the concentration of power in the hands of one individual. And that Saturday we did that bill. We drove the largest early vote effort in American history and it's in the data. We massively bumped up early vote in the places where no kings events occurred that Saturday. So this has been an arc of mobilization of a movement that is geographically dispersed, ideologically diverse and very focused on opposing a would be King's monarchical rule. Yeah, I was struck by two things just to not only get out to the attempt to attempt to subversion of no kings, but if I some of our big tech friends, but two things struck me. I mean, what I haven't gone to the protests have been slightly involved in some attempts to help publicize and get other people to go and so forth. As you say, the ideological diversity or the big tent character, I mean, I think you guys went out of your way to do that. If you looked at your website and you courage, not just peacefulness, but sort of a good nature. I'd say cheerful patriotism, you know, the ones I was at here in Fairfax County. I was also one of Waltham in Massachusetts. One third one, I guess. I mean, people went out of their way to thank the cops who would come just to make sure everything was quiet and everything was quiet and good nature. But it wasn't, I mean, you've certainly been down over backwards. I'd say to avoid the stereotype of, you know, anti-American leftists who are, you know, want to tear down everything here and all that. People forget also how much of an attack there was on you guys in especially in October. I mean, when they really wanted, they thought they could do, they could caricature it. They could do what they've done in the past. They could say that it was terror, terrorists, anti-American, pro-Hamas, pro-whatever, right? And people forget how sustained that was. And that came from the very top, Trump, Mike Johnson, all of them. And it just felt so flat. And I think that was, I think that was an important reflection point. And I think it did help my new liberal friends kind of get over their sense that Trump can do anything. We're sort of how he's so good at all this demagoguery. You just can't even fight it. And he tried hard here. And you guys, you know, stayed at the courts and pulled that off and it clearly fell flat and then took two weeks later with the elections in Virginia and New Jersey that were pretty overwhelming refutation of Trump and the Republicans. So I think that was also important. So I know I'm just curious. The name No Kings, the the attacks on you and your decision on how to and the big tent characteristics say a few words about all that. You're picking up on so many of them that we were trying to put out. Okay. So I'm glad that they landed. I wanted that some people were being close in that petition. I can't tell you how much effort we put into getting tiny little American flags and enormous American flags at all of these protests. At this first, at the first No Kings in Philly, Leah, my spouse, the co-executive director of Indivisible and I, we we gave a close-up speech and there were 100,000 people all waving American flags and we led them in a pledge of allegiance, 100,000 people on No Kings. I mean, so that was indeed what we were going for. Any successful anti-authoritarian movement around the world of what you will find is if it devolves into disagreements within the party about what an ideal post authoritarian platform ought to be, it doesn't build power. We are right now in a build the big tent mode. And that means it's super important that we not agree with each other on everything. If you agree with everybody in that big tent on everything you want to do once Trump is gone, you're tense too small. You're not building the size of the coalition you need. So we want people on the grassroots left. We want people who are never Trumpers. We want people who are centrist Democrats. We want people who are Republicans who just do not like what Trump is doing. We want everybody who agrees that we don't do kings in this country. That was core to it. The other thing you picked up on is the joy. The joyful opposition. There's nothing that authoritarian wants more than for us to be fearful of them to criticize them for being too strong, for coming after people who are being victimized by this regime. They love that. What they can't afford is to be ridiculed. They can't afford to see people having fun coming out opposing the regime. That is a real threat. So you saw this in Portland that the blow up unicorn costumes are broad costumes. You saw people bringing their kids and dogs. You saw bands. You saw funny signs. Yes, it was a display of people power against authoritarian power. But it was also a joyful display of community civic engagement. That's what these events have been every single one of them. And I think sometimes people miss the point of strategic nonviolent mass organizing under authoritarianism because they might think, well, you did a protest and he's still in office or you did a protest and you have boosted up the early vote. But you can't actually take an authoritarian out with the early vote. But the idea is not just that you send a message. The idea is not just that you boost the early vote. The idea is that you organize it such a vast scale, having the moral high ground, maintaining that fact that we are not scared and we are going to show up, which provides a very open target for the regime to come at you. illegitimately, but they do come at you. You're pointing to what happened in No Kings 1 and No Kings 2. Mike Johnson spent two or three weeks of press conferences yelling about what we were going to do, how we were going to tear the place down. They called out the National Guard in Virginia and Texas against No Kings protesters. And you know that the No Kings protesters said, great, I guess they're welcome to the party. They can listen to our music. They can dance if they like. And I think you're right that it was an inflection point because I would challenge you to find some senior administration official or senior Republican in the lead up to No Kings 3 or into the No Kings a couple weeks ago. You're not going to find them saying anything about it because they learn that if they engage in this way, it simply provides more opportunity for us to recruit people against what they're doing. Now that did happen with respect to the Trump regime. He didn't mention it in the lead up to No Kings, but some of his allies on the outside, as you said, our friends in Big Tech, they did engage. And how about No Kings? I'm just personally curious about this. I had an argument with a friend of I think I'd written some short thing about how it was looking forward to going to No Kings. I think it was the second one in October. And some friend of it was a cordial, though, just kind of a little bit snarky, though, but, you know, No, why do they call out that? I mean, I mean, they're smart and they know the threat is authoritarian. I mean, this guy's on our side. The threat's authoritarian is the threat's fascist. It's kind of just really different from modern key. That's a different thing. There's a little pedantic kind of starting to think, and I didn't know why you all decided to call it No Kings. And I said, well, this is more resonant for America. It's the 250th anniversary in the declaration. And it lets people all read those charges against the king. Am I right? Was that in your mind? And also, I'm literally, how did you, who came up with, if I could ask who, who came up with it, or how'd you come up with it? I mean, so you were, you're hitting the nail in the head. We knew who Who is the 250th anniversary of the founding of a country founded on? rejecting monarchical rule, what better way to frame the opposition movement to this would be, then, with a no-kings protests. Understanding, yes, we can make pedantic points about what's the difference between authoritarianism and fascism and authoritarian breakthrough, where competitive authoritarianism versus full-blown. Fine, we can have an academic conversation there, but we're not engaged in an academic exercise. Our challenge is how do you build a broad-based, popular, non-violent movement against this guy, and what is the thing that everybody can rally around? This was not come up by me, or Lee and some room, with posters judging a bunch of things. This was already something that was catching fire. I would give a lot of credit to 50/51, an organic grassroots group that did pop up in the last couple of years in response to Trump's election. They were already holding no-kings. They had big no-kings protests themselves, where they had signs that say no-kings. It wasn't yet what it became, but we saw it catching fire already. There was already energy on the grassroots. It was already resonating, and this is one of the lessons from the last ten years of organizing. Often, your best tactics, your best messaging, they don't come out of some room and these see somewhere, or some posters report. They come because you see what's catching fire, and you say, "Oh, we should double that on that." That's working. Let's nationalize that. That's good. I forgot about the 50/51. Yeah, now that you mentioned it, but I'm glad you didn't come out of a focus group. You know, straight to my prejudice against things that come out of focus groups, and that's good. Just a note about focus groups. We have run our own polling on no-kings now after the fact. If no-kings were a politician in this country, it would be the most popular politician in the country. In battleground states, no-kings has a very favorable opinion among Republican voters, as it is, of grad states. So I think we have largely succeeded in creating a popular grassroots movement driven from the bottom up that is bringing people over to our side. We don't create on everything, but we agree that we should stop what this guy is doing. Okay. So it's two Saturdays ago, whatever this was, I guess, and you're doing your stuff. Everyone's out there in the -- all around the country, and you're trying to court date at least a little or answer questions, obviously, and make sure everything's going smoothly. And talk about Instagram and what happened. It's the wildest thing, Bill. So I was at the second of the no-kings protest locally that I was going to. It was out at the flagship of Atlanta, so I was staying home with the kids. And having a great time, you know, it's a party at these events. People are playing music. People are educating people about when they can vote and where they can vote. And in the middle of this, I get a call from the team that says, "The national no-kings Instagram is down." Not just that we don't have access to it, but nobody can have access to it. I can't fully suspend it no reason given. For the next four hours, during the middle of the biggest early vote push in American history, we are desperately trying to get access to this. And without success, we cannot get into the national no-kings Instagram account. We are just locked out. So after the fact, Meta comes and says, "Oopsie, more or less." They say, "Oh, we made a mistake. We're really sorry about that." It was bizarre. It came out of nowhere. This is not. we don't have some special way of using social media. Obviously, Instagram is used to cover the World Series and the Super Bowl and the Oscars. And somehow those accounts never go down. But on this day, in this moment, this one account magically went down for four hours. It seemed suspect. And their immediate responses were also suspect. They gave one technical answer as to what went wrong and then they gave a different technical answer. Repeatedly, now, they have been focused on trying not to make this bigger than just some switch got flipped. But it is really difficult to believe that given Meta's rich history of engaging in anti-democratic behavior that happens to coincide with major elections. We know in the lead up to the 2016 election, they helped Russian bots and actors reach 100 million plus Americans. We know in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a Trump-aligned pack got access to tens of millions of users' data. We know their own internal report on the 2021 January 6th insurrection found that they didn't do enough to stop the steal movement, which was growing on their own platforms. So for them to come out and say, "Oopsie, we made a technical mistake," is hard to believe. And not just for us, because within 48 hours we saw Meta's own independent oversight board issue a public rebuke for what they did to us and what they were doing to the pro-democracy organizers in Brazil. Yeah, that was really striking. That was kind of just a tiny word detail in this. I mean, I was watching it in sort of real time. It took them four hours, I think, to get it back up. They also didn't give you an hour after that. So Saturday, you went six as I recall. They had some explanation that really didn't seem to make any sense, honestly. I don't know. You were posting too much stuff or something and overburping the system. Then everyone kind of ridiculed that. And then 25 hours later, they had a very different explanation, both put out by their PR flag, which also, I gather from people who know much more about this kind of stuff than I do, didn't make a heck of a lot of sense. And as you say, the oversight board didn't seem to think much of those explanations, right? And now we're here. Have you heard anything subsequently? Have they felt any obligation to explain what happened in any more detail? They are sort of. It's not like the bull. See, if this happened to the bull work, we are not quite the size of the matter. I would be very upset. We would apologize. We would explain what had happened. We would say what we've done to fix things. I mean, the idea that you just go totally dark and black hole. What do they have? They have quite a few people I'm gathering who I would think who can work on these technical things. Who know? You know what I mean? It's not a tiny little company, mom and pop store, you can't expect them. They were busy on Saturday out with their kids and they didn't kind of get to this for a while, right? I'm unbelievable. Look, I'm encouraged by a couple of things. I will say Bill, I think they are a big scary company that is aligned itself closely with Trump and the Maga movement. And also, we are not the ones fighting. This is not indivisible. This is not no kings. This is not a handful of activists. I don't think that's. It's possible to solve the problem of meta just with us. If you have a malevolent forcing your democracy that has a strangle hold on the attention of literally billions of people around the world and can flip a switch to decide what they see and what they do not see, that's not the role of an individual organization or activist to be gone. You need government. You need government to say, "This is a threat to our citizens. This is a threat to our democratic processes. We need to fix this." And we saw government interest immediately, not from this regime, not from the majority party in Congress, but immediately we saw members of the House and the Senate Democratic caucuses start publicly asking for questions. And that became formal letters from state and district attorneys general, U.S. senators, and the House Judiciary and Oversight Committee Dems sent formal letters asking some of the same questions that we were asking. Questions like, "Did Meta have any direct communication with Trump or this white horse or this administration in the lead up to this no kings and other no kings?" And maybe even more importantly, what is Meta doing in the lead up to this midterm, a midterm that Trump is openly talking about sabotaging? What is Meta doing to ensure that people can exercise their constitutional rights and aren't illegitimately silenced by this platform? I think these are questions that you should have, whether you love no kings or hate no kings, regardless of what your political party is, you shouldn't want some independent zillion-dollar tech company controlling how the population receives information in this moment. And while they might not give direct answers to us, they might try to shove us aside with frankly, BS technical responses. They're going to have a much harder time doing that to Robert Garcia, who's probably going to oversee the Oversight Committee. They're probably going to have a harder time doing that to Jamie Raskin, who's going to oversee the Judiciary Committee and the House. They've all goes, "Well, that is a place where I have optimism." Now, we are in communication with them now. We have not met. I'm not interested in private answers. They should give public answers to the public letter that the no kings coalition sent. And until we get that, I'm looking forward to the information Congress can get from them. I mean, I may have been a little too, I was on some call on the Monday, right after, with a lot of liberal lawyer types, good people fighting to good fight in a million different courts against various forms of election subversion and authoritarianism. But I actually was sort of indignant that people weren't speaking up as much as they were to feel like they were all these state attorneys general. They have the ability to, they don't know what happened, but none of us knows what happened. They certainly have the ability to send a letter and say, "Hey, what happened here? Please preserve all your documents and records from that day and from that, please be ready to come meet with us." We're the Attorney General of Connecticut, I'm picking that state totally randomly. And our citizens were affected by this, and we have, I'm sure there's a million statues on the book that they could at least plausibly say would affect this kind of thing, and they are supposed to watch out for, you know, the corporations could call it all the time for all kinds of things, right? Some of the media and legit, some of the volume bit of a stretch, but I guess I was a little, I was, so other people said, "Oh, no, they're working by the scenes. I don't know. Am I wrong to be a little worried that there wasn't enough of a reaction from some of the friendlier arms of government?" Bill, it's funny you mentioned the Connecticut Attorney General because the Connecticut Attorney General led a letter with more than a dozen districts in state attorneys general earlier this week to meta asking many of the same questions we had. So I think you're right. That is what you would like to see, and the reason I have some optimism is because indeed we did see this. This did not become just a small-scale fight between a grassroots pro-democracy movement and a trillion-dollar tech company. It didn't stay there for long. It very quickly became a topic of interest that people actually have power to do something about this. Now, sending a letter is sending a letter. That's nice. It's a good first step. accountability. I mean what we have from meta is a decade plus of documented small scale excuses followed by absolutely zero accountability and no real change of behavior. They have run this strategy before Bill. They issue a BS apology and then nothing happens and then we get another BS apology some other time when it happens again. So I'm not looking for an apology. I'm looking for a change of behavior. I'm looking for a corporation that doesn't interfere with America's democratic processes and we need to the actual facts of what happened here and we need some real believable enforceable guarantee that it's not going to happen again. Yeah and even if Mark Zuckerberg didn't order this happen and there's no connection with no communication with the truck administration, both of which are Charlie Paswell. You still need to know what they still would need to know what happened and be sure us that it's not going to have it. Some employees somewhere who doesn't like you guys flip to switch or that just inadvertently if it's a big demonstration, some weird combination of algorithmic things happens that shuts down the website is that I used to see so much traffic. None of that should happen and it is kind of important to going forward, right? I mean, I think it's very important to know what happened in part because it does not appear that it's done. Literally this week we saw Angie Nixon, the Democratic Senate candidate in Florida, was posting publicly to Blue Sky saying, "Hey meta, our Instagram account is down in the middle of this action that we're taking out." I don't know if it's the same problem. I don't know if it's a different problem. I don't know if there's some rogue staffer within meta who systematically going after anti-Trump candidates or anti-Trump movements. I don't know, Bill. I don't know, Bill. I'm not an expert in this. I'm not a lawyer in this. But I will say there's enough, there are enough bad facts that are publicly available that we need some public response and we need somebody to get to the bottom of this. I think ultimately that's going to come through congressional oversight. In less meta magically supplies some very convincing information over the course of the next five or six days, I think we should all be on guard. We should be on watch and looking at what meta is doing in the lead up to the election. If there is any other funny business, we should be documented and ensuring that a future Congress opens up a full-on investigation. That's interesting. Just two last questions I'll let you go. You've used the word "power" a few times, which I liked hearing, because I do think one problem that some of our contemporary liberals have is they're very correctly considered about messaging and how does Trump do such a good job being a demagogue and all that kind of stuff and use social media and our messaging isn't this good. They don't think enough about actual power relations in my humble opinion. That's something that when I got into political science as a kid and all this, there was a ton of literature. I never was very interested in it and formal informal power or corporate power or social power, state power. There's a ton of stuff left and it wasn't really ideological. It was kind of more descriptive, you might say, I had a political trying to think about these issues. I fell into this trap a little too. The anti-authoritarianism became so focused correctly on what they were doing with the justice to remember what they were doing with DHS and I's what they were doing with DOD and a lot of that is very worrisome. God knows. It didn't focus quite enough for maybe as much as it should have on the their outside allies in the corporate world and in other worlds. Either allies or our commentators or acquiesters, whatever you want to say. That's the very, what do you read about authoritarian regimes? That's a very important part of this success. The Orban allies and hungry were part of the government, but they were intimidated by, bought off by and so forth by the government. Even in Russia, Putin doesn't personally control all the oligarchs. I just say a word about that. I'm just curious about do you agree? Do you think that people are more awake now or are they awake enough to the kind of that side of authoritarianism, not Pete Hague Seth trying to corrupt the military, but they outreach into the business, corporate, civic world even? I think this is what's driving the alarm on the ground more than anything else. I was laughing when you mentioned Orban. I've got a picture of Orban being protested right behind me right there by one of the pro-democracy advocates in the state. I do think what we're seeing in the country now is it's almost a mirror image of what he's been doing to that country for 16 years. He went down, not because of some revolution in the street. He went down because of 2,500 TISA islands. These semi-autonomous local organizing hubs on the ground built a mass non-violent movement that built power. I love the word power bill. I think people misuse it a lot. I think it's poorly defined, and if you're in organizing circles, it can sometimes take on almost a mystical flavor to it that nobody, it's this thing that exists out there that we're all talking about. For me, power is not ideological. It doesn't necessarily have a left-right balance. It's something almost boring. Power is nothing more than the ability to get someone or some institution to do something they wouldn't otherwise do. That's it. When we are organizing on the ground, major non-violent grassroots movements, when we're organizing people to get behind candidates or to register voters, the whole idea is you are building power on the ground, which is to say you are having more and more ability to move individual politicians or move individual institutions to do something that without that pressure, without without what you have built, they wouldn't do it. What Trump is doing is using the formal and informal powers of the presidency to attack other power centers and cow them into submission. This is why he threatens Columbia University or a Paul Weiss law firm. This is why he goes after individual businesses. This is why he goes after individual leaders. It's effective. It works. It is a good way to then accumulate more power. It's one of the reasons why he and other regime officials are talking not directly about sending ICE agents into polling locations because that would be illegal, but he's trying to send the signal that he might do it. He might do that. So that other people who are worried will give up their power. They will not exercise that right to vote, that right to organize because they fear what this regime leader might do. The challenge for us is not to beat Trump or to beat the Republicans or to convince Democrats who aren't doing something to do that thing. The challenge for us in this moment is to beat cynicism and fatalism and nihilism, to convince people that, indeed, they can build power that they're not just victims of world events or of this present and what they need to do is connect with each other in order to build that power and contest for the right to govern this country. The way you do that, there are myriad ways to do that. You can do that by building lots of islands all over the country if seemingly autonomous groups. That's actually something indivisible does. You can do that by getting behind candidates. You can do that by connecting community members and driving up early vote, but the challenge is busting through this sense that is given to us, not just by Trump, but by also some of these big, mega-trillion-dollar tech companies that people are individuals and they should just doom-scroll into oblivion. We don't want that. We want people connecting in real life with each other and understanding how they can engage in politics and not just consume politics. It's so much in the American tradition. I mean, the founders were very interested and very, very hard-headed. Powers have to check powers. That's the separation of powers. That's what is literally called the separation of powers. Then mixing the powers so that they check each other more effectively than if they were simply separated. This is all the Federalist papers. Teddy Roosevelt, trust-busting, it was not about these people who were necessarily terrible people running these giant corporations so that you cannot have this much concentration of power. I'm very pleased to hear you say what you're saying. I hope it penetrates through that. Ultimately, government does require government, right? I mean, it's wonderful to have the citizens start the process, I just speak, but at some point, some serious people in Congress and at the state level and law firms and everywhere else have to think about, well, how can we re-structure the powers so that they're not so it's not so easy to use them for ill as Trump has shown. People, what everyone thinks of them, they are pretty attuned to the levers of power. Steve Miller and Russ Vaughn thought a lot about what levers of power they have, what levers they can use legally, what levers they can use semi-legally, what levers they can use kind of illegally, but maybe get away with it. They think a lot about that and I do think that liberals need to be more comfortable with it, not using it obviously for wrong, but you need to counteract that in a serious way. I 100% agree. I don't think that is something that just happens naturally, though, Bill, to your point. If you're hoping, if folks are listening to this and they're crossing their fingers for a good November 3rd and they're going to look and see, did we take the House? Did we take the Senate? Okay, we did both, therefore we're okay. I'm sorry, I have some bad news for you. We have to run through the tape. If we win in November, if indeed we build a Democratic House and Democratic Senate, which is what Indivisible is driving towards right now, we want a landslide, we won't have changed anything immediately. We will have won the opportunity to actually do good work and there will be an immediate fight within the Democratic Caucus and the House and the Senate about how much do we go back to politics as usual versus how much do we view this regime as an existential threat, and as our prime purpose in this moment to reinstate the rule of law and make sure democracy reasserts itself. And that means not playing footsie with Trump for the next two years. It means actually going on offense. And there are going to be different voices out there making the argument for, well, let's just see if we can work together and cut some easy deals. Let's not go too hard on accountability because that will alienate the folks that we need to make deals with. And I will say, we will be on the other side. We think the role of government for the next two years is to hold this regime accountable, make clear to the change actually did come that the millions of people that got in the streets didn't do it for no reason. But in fact, now they have brought this change and to set ourselves up for a post-Trump era where we're actually able to usher in an era of accountability reform, like the Hungarians are doing right now, like I hope the Brazilians are doing, like I hope the Serbians are doing. This is a movement that is world-wide, right? right now, but it doesn't end on election day. It ends when we actually get a democracy that reflects the world to people. - So well said. And again, it's not, it's happening around the world, some places, or they're trying to do it at least. And it's happened in America. It's not like the Teddy Roosevelt FDR, that's what they thought about a lot when they took over and tried to think about. Not just, you know, let's pass this particular benefit program that's fine or let's say certain things that are different for what our predecessors said, or even let's hold our predecessors accountable for things they've done, which is fine. It was let's actually reorganize important chunks of the society and of the, especially the corporate world, I would say, but other things as well, so that there is a better balance of power in the country, really. So that is such an important thing, but that's a little more of a 2029 thing, I guess, with 2027, it could lay the groundwork, right? - That is exactly right. So I hope people realize that we are headed into a new political reality, one way or another. After November 3rd, we will be in a new political reality. So Indivisible released a brand new Indivisible guy to a week after the election in 24, saying, look, we're in the minority, we don't have the house to the center of the presidency, we do not have a gender to the same power anymore. What does that mean for organizing locally? What does that mean for opposition? What are the available opportunities to us and how should we take advantage of them? That strategy, I'm very proud of that strategy, it was not a role over, I'm played that strategy, it was drive a forceful opposition strategy. Now we are going to have maybe the house, maybe the Senate, maybe both headed into a period where Donald Trump will be president. That means we're not passing our best possible legislation and acting into law, that's not on the table. What is on the table is setting ourselves up as effectively as possible for a 2029 era of reform and accountability. So how do we do that? How do we do that? How do we put forward a vision that actually convinces people that maybe the Democrats, this version of the Democratic Party isn't as feckless as we thought it was. It might actually deliver. How do we convince Americans that it's not just Trump bad, but also we're willing to give this team a chance? That is a challenge for Democrats right now because they have a huge credibility gap. And we shouldn't shy away from confronting that challenge. What will not solve the problem though is reaching over to Mike Johnson to cut some minuscule bipartisan deal so you can say you were quote unquote governing. That will muddy the message. That will make it more difficult for Americans to say, oh, I understand where the Democrats are and I understand the Republicans are. And I think that is a short-term comfortable play for many Democrats in Congress. And I think it is long-term disastrous results. It means that somebody like J.D. Vance or somebody even worse might be on the ascent as we head into 28. I don't want to see that. I want to see Trumpism thoroughly crushed. And to do that, we need to seek out productive conflict over the next two years with the members of this regime and the members of the MAGA Republican Party to make very clear where we are and where they are so the voters can choose between the two. - I'm going to keep that term productive conflict in mind. I like that, that's a good, yeah. - Ezra, I love it and thanks so much for joining me at all of us at The Bullwork today. This has really been very interesting and instructive, really. - Thanks to you and The Bullwork for being such a pro-democracy source of information in the world. - Much as you thanks. And thank you all for joining us at The Bullwork.