Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I'm an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I'm going to give you your weekly horoscope and no-bullshit mystical advice for living your very best life.

Jessica:            Welcome back to Ghost of a Podcast. I am so excited about this week's episode. It is really different than what I usually do on the podcast, partially because this is my first video episode but much more importantly because in this episode, I am speaking with activist, author, and journalist Anne-christine d'Adesky about Project 2025.

If you have been feeling helpless or hopeless and unsure what to do in the current situation in the United States, this is the episode for you. This episode is loaded with education, resources, links—everything you need to be informed and activated to make this world better and safer. Make sure to check out Anne-christine d'Adesky's work. Subscribe to their Substack, and also check out resistingproject2025.org. This episode has a ton of links and resources, as I said, so make sure to check show notes so you don't miss out on any of them. And enjoy our conversation.

Anne-christine d'Adesky, welcome to Ghost of a Podcast.

Anne:  I'm feeling very welcome. Thank you.

Jessica:            Oh, good.

Anne:  You're enveloped in pink.  What else would I feel?

Jessica:            I mean, that's the—

Anne:  It's like a very contemporary womb over there.

Jessica:            Thank you. That's what I was going for, contemporary womb. That was the thing I was going for.

Anne:              Modern womb.

Jessica:            Yeah. Very, very.

Anne:              A womb with a view.

Jessica:            A womb with—okay. I feel like you could keep going, and I will have to write my memoir called A Womb With a View.

Anne:              I like it.

Jessica:            So we're here to talk about fucking Project 2025, and I think we're all scared, and we all see how dangerous it is. So where do you think we should begin the conversation?

Anne:              I think we should begin from where we are today, right?

Jessica:            Thank you.

Anne:              And then I can give some context about Project 2025, for those who don't know, which is of course this kind of blueprint with a bunch of pieces to it for the policy changes that we've been seeing the second Trump administration put in place. So let's start with where we are today. We're maybe like 110 or 115 days into the new administration, and we have an emboldened Trump who got in with an election, which we arguably will say—some people will feel it was stolen. It could have been, but we don't know. But we know that he got into office technically legally until we prove that he didn't.

Jessica:            Right.

Anne:              But I think what's most important to understand is that we are partly reeling because we have an unprecedented type of coup. No one in the world has ever seen the kind of coup that we're experiencing in the United States. The United States has never had a coup, first of all, but even in the world, we haven't seen this kind of coup, meaning that, first of all, it's what we call a self-coup, meaning that it is someone who was legally elected and then has begun to usurp the powers of the Congress and the courts as they are basically taking office, and very quickly.

And in this case, the goal is to consolidate and to essentially rule with kind of an authoritarian rule. It's taking apart the system of checks and balances, which is really the fundamental structure that we've had in the United States, as imperfect as it's been. So what we're facing is a self-coup, and it's also a coup that was—it's not just Trump. People keep saying, "It's Trump. It's Trump." It's not Trump. Trump is taking orders in some ways, or he's fulfilling the plan that was developed by a small group of radical right libertarians primarily, Christian nationalists many of them, kind of an end-times belief. And their end goal is really a combination of privatizing the government—not just making it smaller—and also, in many ways, putting in place what they believe will be a government that is reflecting Christian ideals, values, and really even law that kind of reflects this biblical law. So it's a very kind of 1950s patriarchal vision of the future.

Ultimately, what they want is a Christian state for America. So, with that in mind, what we're seeing is we kind of have this self-coup with this authoritarianism, right? That is, the goal is to rule with impunity. And it's backed by both people who in the cabinet—many of whom helped to write Project 2025, which is a playbook for how you take apart a government and you install all this really regressive social policy and economic policy, too—but also a smaller group that we don't know as much about, but we know that they're there. And they represent a private sector that are billionaires, primarily in the tech field, Silicon Valley, again, right wing, extremely far-right libertarian.

And these folks don't believe in democracy at all. What they're hoping is that one day, they can even live apart from everybody in these kind of little city-states where it's all run by crypto money, and they can live by the rich, for the rich, and they don't have to live by any of the rules that we have now in our current system of democracy, or even if it was a different system, they want to—essentially, I think if it as an apartheid mentality.

So just to say that that's what we're looking at. And one of the reasons we're having such difficulty is because these plans for what we've seen in the last 110 days were written starting in 2022. So Project 2025 has three parts. So one part was this big document that people refer to as Project 2025. It's, like, a thousand pages of how do you basically reform and remake and dismantle and completely gut every single department of government, 30 departments? And how do you get rid of maybe all of the federal workforce that you don't want and put in your own people? So the second part of Project 2025 was that piece of recruiting people and training all these conservative Christian folks, many of whom had no background in government at all, but basically in order to be loyal to the executive branch.

All of this stuff reflects something that they call, in political science, executive unitary theory. And it is basically everything is about consolidating power in the executive branch. It's not just the president. It's the executive branch. So the big two people who are really behind this coup right now—there are two individuals. There are others, but two in particular. One of them is Russell Vought, who was the head of the Office of Management and Budget under the first Trump administration, and he's now back in that same position. He's also just an incredible sort of understanding—person who's understanding of how all the levers of the administration work.

So he wrote a chapter of Project 2025, and he has been behind the idea of how you can actually go and essentially do a coup and take over. And the way that they've done it with Trump, which is, again, the most unique feature, is Trump has not had to engage the Congress or legislature at all. He's used over 150 executive orders to do this. Now, a lot of them are illegal, and they're being proved illegal with the passage of time and court cases. But that is really also what is very different. It's not a military coup. It's by executive order. He's kind of seized these things.

And lately, he's been seizing these kind of wartime powers, using kind of obscure laws and resurrected them and say, "The conditions under this country qualify me to do this." So they've done this in order to really weaponize something called the Alien Enemies Act, which gives him power to go after immigrants in particular—undocumented immigrants—and to declare certain people essentially almost equivalent to a foreign country army, which is specifically two sets of Central American gangs, the MS-13 and Tren de Aragua. And so anybody now who's Salvadoran or from Venezuela is kind of automatically assumed to be not just a member of these gangs but an enemy of the state. And so, therefore, they can be deported, etc. So we've been seeing that.

Secondly, I think, is the piece around Christian nationalism, which is very important. They're beginning to now implement that. And so we've seen that a lot of the targets that they had laid out are where they do things like a typical autocrat, which is, "We're going to try to divide and polarize people." And we saw this with the elections when—particularly using AI technologies—Trump, using Musk and other colleagues, began to do this on different social media platforms. And they became real, kind of incredibly effective tools for propaganda, disinformation, etc.

So that's the other feature that we're seeing now. We're seeing that a private group, who was unelected, unaccountable to no one, has been given this power. And people look at Musk and at DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, but really, Russel Vought has been the one directing DOGE since the beginning. And he's now actually, as of, I think, yesterday or today, officially going to be taking that title now that Musk is stepping aside.

The other person is Stephen Miller, who is now the deputy chief of staff. And Stephen Miller and Russell Vought had—in the time that they left the Trump administration, they started these nonprofits that were essentially think tanks for the right. And many of the people who are in the cabinet now, top cabinet, are from those two organizations. So they recruited tons and tons of lawyers, and they began working from 2022 and 2023 to put in place all of these executive orders. They were mostly written before Trump came to office in—January 20th.

Jessica:            Interesting.

Anne:  They were all written. So they were all ready to go.

Jessica:            So they were written for him.

Anne:              Yes, written for him and ready to go. And he claimed that he had nothing to do with it. Of course, we know that's absurd. He knew all about it. And in fact, there were some, like, sting interviews done by a media group with Russell Vought a few months before where he admitted that everything was ready to go and that Trump had known all about it and thought he was doing a great job.

Okay. So this has been a plan. And we have more things that will happen, but the main one was to dismantle the government and eventually treat it like a private corporation. So the goal is you're going to remove all these former Biden officials from office. Remove anyone who doesn't agree with you. Put in place your loyalists, and also gut it in such a way that the agencies do not function. And the reason to do that is to then be able to say, "See? Federal government doesn't work. It would be better for us to privatize this."

So that's why they've come in, and that's what DOGE has done. And the main tool for this—there's two of them. One of them is called impoundment where, essentially, you're just cutting federal funds off from people and agencies and everything so they can't do what they need to do, including all the people that you consider woke or liberal or whatever. The second one is by capturing the data. So they have given a bunch of recruits from Musk's companies—private companies who are, again, unelected, unaccountable, no experience in government—and they put at least one of these people in every department right early on. And they began to essentially put artificial intelligence agents that were created by X and Musk and SpaceX, etc., onto the government system in order to begin to synthesize and basically create a centralized database, which they have now done. So they now have—

Jessica:            A database of us?

Anne:              A database of all of our private and personal financial information. So, anything they want about America, they've got it all together. I mean, I don't know if everything is—it seems like everything is now done. I think—Musk is leaving; it's probably all done now. And what do they do with this? What they've been able to do in 112 days is essentially use these tools to create a framework for having complete access and control to all of our movements, all of our financial information, all of our professional stuff, all of our social media comments. It's easy, very effective surveillance state.

                        And they've done it using this technology that was already in use by the Department of Defense and NASA and stuff that was created by one of Musk's key allies named Peter Thiel. And it's—the company is Palantir, and it's specialized in surveillance data. So what we've seen is this is how they've been able to now, for example, weaponize IRS data, now weaponize Social Security data to go after and find the people they want to remove. So they started with immigrants, undocumented and others. Then they've gone to students to try to see anyone that they think might be somehow someone who is not going to be going along with their policies. So specifically around Gaza we've seen this, anyone critical of the policies with regard to the Middle East or any—perceived in any way as pro-Palestinian.

                        They've also been able to do this by banning, I think at this moment, 150 words from even being allowed to be said in federal government policy, including the word "woman," including words like "DEI" and others.

Jessica:            I've heard that they even banned the word "diversity," which I would imagine is in every medical text, like a diversity of factors or—

Anne:              Yeah. Yes.

Jessica:            Yeah. [indiscernible 00:13:30].

Anne:              So what's important to understand is, what are the underlying goals of this? The underlying goal of this is you're advancing a white supremacy agenda where you're trying to remove any not just visibility or opportunities for leveling a playing field or all the things that were kind of behind a lot of the civil rights legislation and others—you're not just making it invisible; you're removing the possibility of people to confront any cases of discrimination, advance programs, etc. It really also impacts, of course, students of color. It's very much attacking folks of color and whitening the country.

                        And it's also doing that in terms of not just our present and our future but our history because when you remove information, documents, data, programs, research, references from your current data, available data, you are removing the ability of people to know what happened before. So, essentially, the goal is to rewrite the story of American history, to rewrite it and present a false narrative that is white, that really misrepresents the diverse social history and progress and role. And that's why you're seeing the removal of the Black astronauts, the removal of the women who helped to do things in NASA—I mean, in every area—the removal of people from the cemeteries. I mean, it's an extraordinary purging.

                        And we need to understand that this is about an apartheid white supremacy agenda underneath it all. And we need to really pay attention to why it's so important that we do this. So I'm going to say these are the big things that are happening, and I want to talk about what's being done about it, what's working effectively, but for people to understand one of the reasons it's been so hard for us to wrap our hands around it is because it deliberately put in place all these things at once in order to keep us so off balance that we couldn't even put our hands around it—

Jessica:            Right.

Anne:              —and then introduced this AI, which makes it even more difficult. So I think we're doing incredibly well after 112 days to already be having such a mass mobilization, more people even than—apart from Black Lives Matter, we're seeing already bigger numbers than we have seen in prior protests in American history. So we're already getting a lot of people into the streets, which is very, very important.

Jessica:            Are there any elected democrats that you're aware of that are facilitating this? I mean there's facilitating in the context of not creating real opposition, but I'm asking about actively supporting or helping along the agenda of Project 2025. Are there any democrats that you're aware of that are supporting that?

Anne:              I think the one area where we have to be extremely critical of the democrats is primarily in the area of Gaza.

Jessica:            Yes.

Anne:              There is a separate project that's a parallel project to Project 2025. It's much smaller. It's called Project Esther. Both of these were kind of helmed administratively by the Heritage Foundation. Project Esther is a blueprint for weaponizing anti-Semitism. It's this gaslighting where you're saying to people, "If you even talk about the problems, then you're yourself being anti-Semitic."

And the reason that they did this was because, actually, a lot of the model for Project 2025 was first developed and really put in place by an ally who has been helping to really develop it and served as a consultant. And that is the autocrat in Hungary Viktor Orban. He's been in power for 14 years, and what he did was he not only went after immigrants and kind of did this whole plan and model, the war on gender, etc., but he also recognized that there was a value in this kind of thing, like weaponizing anti-Semitism.

So we see it not just in the U.S. It's happening in a bunch of other countries. It works. And so the importance of it is, why are they weaponizing anti-Semitism? Well, of course, one part is because of what they want to do and take over Gaza and privatize it and help Israel in its agenda in the Middle East and all that.

The other part of it is, again, this kind of apartheid mentality where the goal is to dismantle and take control of what is being taught to this generation and future generations of Americans. So the goal for them was to go after what they consider to be the liberal or maybe just not somehow radical right deans of the top universities. That was their clear goal when they began Project Esther, and that is what they have successfully done for the most part. They were able to get rid of a couple of deans. They went after Harvard. They went after Yale. They went after—that's the first thing. And then, of course, very quickly, they realized what an opportunity they had with the student protests. So that is what they have been doing.

So democrats who are very much in the pay of the pro-Isreal lobby AIPAC have been just remarkably complicit in failing to—

Jessica:            And that's the majority of democrats; is it not?

Anne:  I don't know what the numbers would be.

Jessica:            Okay.

Anne:              But it's certainly enough that it has been like—I mean, we've seen some very, very strong democratic voices, of course, that have been opposed to this, from AOC and there are others. But we've also seen just atrocious, immoral—in my own view, because I consider what's happening in terms of the military decimation of folks in Gaza to be immoral.

Jessica:            Yes.

Anne:              But it really has been this loop. And I think the other piece that people need to understand is that the people who are in the cabinet are not just Christian nationalists. They're what we call Christion Zionists. And many of them are from a specific branch of Christianity. It's the second, I think—maybe it's the fastest growing branch now in the world at this point.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Anne:              It's a specific branch of kind of evangelical Protestantism that's called—[indiscernible 00:19:19] is called the New Apostolic Reformation, known as the NAR. And the NAR has been growing for many years. And really, the cabinet, the top cabinet of people, whether you're talking about Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Russel Vought, etc.—they are all members of this philosophy. They're believers of this. And it's an end-times belief.

                        And the piece that fits into Project Esther and what's happening on campuses in Israel is that in order for Christ to return in the future—

Jessica:            Yeah, I [crosstalk 00:19:48].

Anne:              —Israel must exist, and the Jews need to be there, specifically even in the land of Gaza. That's why—

Jessica:            Right.

Anne:              —they are doing this.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Anne:              That's why: because in their mind, if they can get rid of and displace all the people in Gaza in the next year like Trump wants to do, then they're advancing the possibility—

Jessica:            End times.

Anne:              —of the return of Christ earlier.

Jessica:            Yeah. And—

Anne:              Now, it sounds so crazy to us, doesn't it? It sounds like—

Jessica:            Insane. Yes.

Anne:              —"Oh my God. What kind of dystopian thing?" But you have to understand, I mean, people have many belief systems. And there's a lot of money that's gone into building this. This has been a well-constructed political movement. NAR is not just a religious movement; it's a political movement. And their goal, their belief, is that as living apostles—which anyone who's—will belong—is a living apostle. Their responsibility is to take control of the seven mountains of human society, like in every sector. If you look at Project 2025, that is what it represents. It is essentially a playbook for taking over all the different mountains of human society.

Jessica:            And I just want to clarify because this is what I've learned, and I just want to check it with you, is that they want Jews to be in this part of Isreal so that—and in this prophecy, the Jews die.

Anne:              Well, not necessarily. The Jews can convert. At the last minute, they have an option of converting.

Jessica:            They convert or die.

Anne:              If they don't convert, then they are the heathen, and all the heathens—yes—

Jessica:            Die.

Anne:              —do not have a future.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Anne:              They will not go to heaven.

Jessica:            Right, right, right. So everybody's basically—in the apocalypse, everybody is raptured. Everybody goes to heaven or hell. These are the two—

Anne:              Correct.

Jessica:            So, basically, everyone dying in the next year is their hope and goal.

Anne:              I don't think that we should say that. I think that would be false.

Jessica:            Okay.

Anne:              I think they want them displaced because they want the land, because they want the Jews to settle the land, because then that gets them closer to the vision of where Jews need to be in order for Christ to return.

Jessica:            I see. So it's not that they think, once the Jews are there, in the next five minutes, Christ returns. It's that now it is possible for Christ to return.

Anne:              They're accelerating.

Jessica:            I see.

Anne:              It's an accelerating of the vision—

Jessica:            Great.

Anne:              —of prophecy.

Jessica:            Which kind of contextualizes part of why they wouldn't care that they're destroying the planet, because the planet can be destroyed; we're all going anyways. Or is that an inference?

Anne:              I mean, I don't know that we see that in their thing. I think that their vision is, again, they need to take control of all the pillars of society. It's also something that represents what we call the prosperity gospel.

Jessica:            Yes. Yes.

Anne:              So these folks believe that becoming richer is what God wants for you. So that is why we see, essentially, an oligarchy, a small group of billionaires who are getting into power, gaining access to power, seeking to privatize as much as they want. And what we're seeing is—when I say this apartheid, we're seeing the exclusion. We're seeing this set of people sees a future for itself, and it must be apart from other people. So part of that creation is that you're rich, you're succeeding; you're doing God's will. If you're poor, then you must not be doing the right things.

Jessica:            Right.

Anne:              So it's really seeding this kind of exclusionary white supremacy, Christian right agenda and getting people accustomed to the idea that these people are worthy and these people are not.

Jessica:            Right, which includes immigrants, people of color, women, Queers, Trans people, disabled people—

Anne:              Well, women only—I mean, not all women. If women are willing to be handmaids and being of service to men—I mean, if you even look at the specific policies, one of the things that has really surprised me in the way that we haven't seen more pushback against is that conservative women in particular, all of whom or many of whom take their husbands' names—they are not going to be allowed to go and vote unless they can find their birth certificate and bring it and it shows that they have their birth certificate name on it. [crosstalk 00:23:48].

Jessica:            This is the SAFE Act you're referring to, correct?

Anne:              Yeah.

Jessica:            The SAFE Act.

Anne:              I mean, we have this now where they're saying you have to be able to show up to vote. So it's extraordinary to see that they—I mean, always, many, many people vote against their conscience because they have this other vision that they're being—saying, like, "You have to sacrifice something for the greater goal." And we should again talk about who doesn't like this. I mean, we're actually seeing, first of all, a couple things. We talked a little bit about numbers, but we're seeing more people taking to the streets. We're seeing what's called a mass mobilization. Some of it are completely new groups like the 50501 people or kids on Discord or whatever that are organizing. Then you see more established groups.

                        So we're seeing this happen in every city at every level. It's really phenomenal that people are making their views clear. And where they really saw it was when it hits them personally. So we saw it when Trump basically embraced this idea of the tariffs, which was something proposed by Peter Navarro, somebody who wrote the Project 2025 chapter on that. And suddenly a lot more people got very scared because the people who voted for Trump—many of them were small businesses—suddenly saw that they were going to be losing their business. And they were like, "Wait. We didn't really vote for this."

                        First of all, a lot of people believed Trump because he lied to them repeatedly about having nothing to do with Project 2025. So suddenly they're seeing this, and they're saying, "This isn't what we signed up for." But they're very happy to get rid of immigrants, for the most part. They really are. They just don't like the idea of people being picked up in the street, and suddenly, "Wait a minute." They're suddenly having to worry about maybe leaving the country themselves as citizens. They're stopping every fourth car that's going from the United States to Canada on the northern border now. That isn't what they signed up for.

                        So suddenly it's hitting home for them, and they're realizing, "Wait. This isn't what we wanted. We went too far. You have overreached." So there is this backlash that we're starting to see, and we see it in—one of the latest polls showed that something like 61 percent of these people polled, of the broad sector of conservative, blue state, red state independents, were not supporting Trump, particularly his economic policies.

                        But what we saw also is a growing number of people who voted for Trump and who are—they don't know what to do. And I think what's critical now is that we are going to have to create a movement that lets those people join us as opposed to saying, "You screwed us up. You're responsible for this," to say—because they were sold a line. They were told, "Blame these people. These people are responsible for this. I will make [indiscernible 00:26:12]." And many of those people voted for Trump because they thought that he would make them richer and more secure.

Jessica:            Right.

Anne:              And instead, they feel less secure, and they're watching their 401(k)s tank. So these fractures are critical. And the question is, what are we going to do? How are we going to be able to organize? That part is slowly getting written. But I think it's super important to recognize that we're already seeing these fractures. And in other countries where they have overcome autocrats, it's what you do in terms of your organizing of your democracy that is really the place to focus on. You can focus on everything the autocrat does, but what will stop them is how you organize.

                        And we are already seeing people talking about civics, people talking and defending our democracy in ways that they haven't thought about. I mean, you know, you're seeing a lot more of that. And with one really centralized enemy, you're also seeing people who normally wouldn't be able to work together recognize that maybe they're going to have to.

Jessica:            Right.

Anne:              So we have a lot of challenges. We have to see if we can create a decentralized movement that has a couple of targets that understand how to really organize to move the needle. But we are seeing, already, a tremendous mobilization. And that's very encouraging.

Jessica:            It is. So I just want to just pause and just kind of reiterate a couple things you said that I think are super important that I want to make sure people hear, which is the essentialness of creating coalitions with and working with people who are not completely aligned with our values but who are now turning away from the autocrat and—

Anne:              Well, they're aligned with our core values. We all want to have economic safety. We all want to have financial safety. We want to feel like we have privacy, that people can't go and steal all of our information and use it and weaponize us. Those are all things. We may not agree on Gay rights. We may not agree on lots of things.

Jessica:            A lot of things. Yeah.

Anne:              But the core things—yeah. You have to organize around the core things and then—but also not ask people to agree about everything. It's really fine—

Jessica:            Yes.

Anne:              —if we don't agree about a lot of things. We just need to be able to create a structure where people can organize from their own base with the people, and also, these people—they have no reason to trust each other. [indiscernible 00:28:24] doesn't know anything about [indiscernible 00:28:25] or whatever. You have to create platforms for people to learn to collaborate and work together. And that is what we're starting to see.

Jessica:            Great. Okay. Let's talk about how we can fight this because I am with you. It is—I mean, he's a reality TV star, right? He's so good at capturing the public's attention and distracting us. But as you said, that's not where we're going to make impact, by obsessing on everything he says and does to outrage us. So how can we fight back? What are steps that people who are new to activism or just are super overwhelmed and don't know what to do—do you have ideas about action steps, including boycotting, divesting—

Anne:              Yeah. I do.

Jessica:            —all that kind of good stuff?

Anne:              So I think the very first thing is to say that people come into social movements and protests at all sorts of levels. So, wherever you are at, you're good.

Jessica:            Yes.

Anne:              I would say the very first thing to do is to check in with yourself and say, "What is it that I'm feeling? What is it I'm afraid of in particular?" Name it. And also reach out to people who are in your close circle and stuff. It's really important for people to create what I call little mutual aid societies, almost like personal support groups.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah.

Anne:              And the second thing is also to recognize that you're the majority. It's really important to understand that we are the majority in this country who doesn't want this. So that's an important thing. And I always tell people there's both local actions and then there's larger action and national actions. And they all have a role.

                        So, on a daily basis, check in with yourself first, and look and see. If you don't know what to do around these issues that you're afraid of, there are resources locally that you can look at. I mean, we have a particular campaign website, and I'll just name it right now. It's called Resisting Project 2025, and it's a .org. We have a lot of tools there, including, you know, we also have a Substack, same name, Resisting. And we have—

Jessica:            We're going to link all of this in show notes, so people can just look at the show notes.

Anne:              Yeah. We've put articles on, like, "Here's what you want to do if you're worried about traveling. Here's what you want to do if you're thinking about taking a vacation. Here's what you want to do if you're worried about your 401(k)"—giving them tools so that they can take—so taking action will already make you feel better. And understanding that one of the biggest things that we're dealing with is uncertainty. And we need to learn to be able to deal with uncertainty. We deal with uncertainty every time we take a trip. We don't always know how it's going to go, but we do our best. So you just plan for what you can, and take the steps you need. And then know that in doing that, you're not going to be alone. You have other people with you. And that's where your sense of safety comes in, too. So that's the first thing.

                        Locally, I'd say that wherever you are at, thinking about your own things that you care the most about in terms of subjects and topics—because this is such an attack on so many things that you can have a role—so kind of coming to it with your own best or maybe something you want to learn about is also good. So, whether you're thinking about working on, for example, veterans' issues or elderly issues or mental health issues or you have a kid who's maybe got a special needs issue or you're an educator—all those areas, there are ways that you can do and things that you can do. There are groups that are organizing around them both locally and nationally. And they have specific asks.

So, on a given day, like probably every week, I do do a couple of calls specifically to my Congress on specific things. I sign some petitions. I attend a regular meeting on Wednesdays with my New York City local action group called Rise and Resist. There are probably actions almost every day. I can't go to most of them. I'm very busy. But right now, I'm particularly interested in one just because I—it kind of gets me, which is showing up in front of the law firms that capitulated. I like that.

Jessica:            That's—yeah.

Anne:              And I want to go to the law firms that didn't capitulate and thank them. So that's just one. Another one that I'm liking is this is a new campaign that they're going to do, and that is naming and saying the names of every single person who is currently in the CECOT El Salvador prison. And now they're thinking of starting this as a kind of say their names. It's very important that we make the people who are disappearing visible and we—

Jessica:            Yes.

Anne:              —keep them front and center. These are all ways. We're in a better position to do that. We're safe to do it. Say their names. Speak for the people who are less able to. Tons of mutual aid—so, when I think about it, the groups that are particularly under attack right now include, of course, the—I mentioned the disabled, but also include immigrants. They include Transgender folks in particular who are terrified.

Jessica:            Yes.

Anne:              This past weekend, I was Brighton Beach. I went to a Brighton Beach event where—this was a way to do solidarity, where the organizer said—there are so many people in our small community, about 500 members actively in a larger network. A lot of them are from Russia or from the [indiscernible 00:33:07] or Central Asia. And they're really scared. These are folks, some of whom do not have their green card yet. They are applying—they're all asylum seekers. They left Putin because they were going to be killed or put in prison or whatever, or they had been really treated poorly.

                        And they don't know where to go. They don't even know how to leave the country because it seems scary to have to leave And what if you have a Transgender passport with an X mark or a gender marker? So the organizer said, "All right. I don't want you to come to this celebration of our pride this year. Instead, I'm going to invite the rest of Brooklyn to come and march in support of those who can't and to show them that they're not alone."

Jessica:            That's really powerful.

Anne:              That was very good. So what I did was I wrote a Substack about it, told people about it, and I went. And there were a couple hundred people. So it was a very good showing up, and you also saw that there were people from Brighton Beach who are not part of the LGBT community who turned up. Now, who didn't turn up was—

Jessica:            Which is as it should be.

Anne:              —local officials didn't turn up. It's a very conservative—there's a lot of Trump voters there. It's also kind of relatively a fair number of Russian orthodox folks. So they have some work to do. They have some demands to make. So, in your local community, you can reach out to the organizations who are already doing things. Ask them. I mean, the first thing to do is—you want to do something? You don't know what to do? That's a fine place to start.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Anne:              Who is it you want to help, maybe? Find out what they need.

Jessica:            Fall in line. Yeah. Yeah.

Anne:              They know their problems better than anyone. And then you can say, "Okay, that's here. Here I am. Here's my time. Here's my background. Here's my knowledge. Here's what I'm available to do or not do." And then you begin to sort of do a match to see. Whatever you do is going to be adding to this large collective, tactical movement.

Jessica:            So let me just sit with that for a minute because this is so important. First of all, it's like don't reinvent the wheel. Find orgs that already exist. Find people who are already planning, organizing. And, understanding there is a difference between organizing and activism, you don't have to be an organizer; you can get involved with activism.

The other thing that you're speaking to which I think is so important and so hard for most people, certainly for my audience who I've been talking with about this, is doing something small today or in three days. It feels like we are in a tsunami, and I got out a spoon and I took a spoonful of water out, and it's not enough. And so there is this panic and this overwhelm and this urgency about, "It's not enough to do a small thing. I can't figure out what the biggest thing is. They're moving so fast. We're moving so slow."

Anne:  Correct.

Jessica:            And I think some of that is mental health stuff. We're in a bad situation, and so it does feel bad, and it's hard to cope. But I'm curious what you say to that or what your advice around that kind of stuff is.

Anne:              Well, first of all, we're not moving slow. We're moving fast because we had things come at us, and we had to understand what they were in order to be able to—and the law does move slowly, but I just want to say if people are wanting to see us in hope—I mean realistic hope because I don't like to really put forward hope that is not realistic.

Jessica:            Yes.

Anne:              I'm very, very, very concrete in how I like to see social change happen. But even, I mean, in the last 110 days, we've had so many legal victories it's kind of unbelievable, really, both at the federal level and at the state level and even a local level.

Jessica:            Okay. Here's my question about that. So I know that. I'm informed of that, but this is what I don't know. We're having the legal victories, but is this administration respecting the law? It matters that we're having legal victories, and also, is it actually making a material change?

Anne:              Right. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about material change. So material change means that right now, they wanted to get rid of all these people having temporary protected status from all these countries. The ruling said no, and now they can't. So that's all on hold. Will in be on hold [crosstalk 00:37:11] keep appealing it?

Jessica:            So it is on hold.

Anne:              Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay.

Anne:              They tried to put in place the Alien Enemies Act. They just got another major decision Friday. They can't do it. So they're being forced to hold it. Are they trying to disregard it as much as possible? Of course, and they will keep doing that. That is their strategy. It's written in Project 2025, "We will seek to test the bounds of the law." That's why they recruited 5,000 lawyers and did everything they could do and studied this and had this all ready to go.

Jessica:            Right.

Anne:              Their goal is to try to supersede law. And so they will. And ultimately, a lot of times, they're hoping it'll bump up to the Supreme Court, where they think that they have a conservative majority, and they do.

Jessica:            Yes.

Anne:              And of course, those people gave immunity to Trump, so they have a lot of reasons to be optimistic. But we're also seeing this—right now, we're at what's called a constitutional crisis. People sort of say that. We're seeing these test cases this month. We just saw this one this week, alien enemies. We've seen birthplace citizenship. There's a number of them.

                        So the answer is yes, that they are working in some ways. Do they work fast? Not always. Look. They managed to get a bunch of planes out even when the judges were making those decisions.

Jessica:            Yep.

Anne:              That was an early point. No one who's fighting this has any illusion that the Trump administration is seeking to follow the rule of law.

Jessica:            Right.

Anne:              And yet, still, they are in that engagement. So we do still have a democracy. We do still have a functioning—I like to tell people when they think about, "Where are we at?" we're at between this thing called sort of autocratic actions and what you call autocratic breakthrough, where—people who study this, political science, there's three phases. The third phase is, really, consolidation, which you see in China and Russia where you have a mature autocracy. It's all there. They own all the institutions. They've captured it all. We're not there. We are fighting to hold our institutions.

                        And so, right now, for example, there is a consortium—new. It got built in 2024 as Project 2025 was happening and people started studying this, getting all ready. All the legal fights that you see—they got ready for those in 2024. They knew what was coming, and then they had to implement it. It takes time. Unfortunately, to go through the legal system, it takes time. It takes the time people need to appeal. So, initially, we're winning with all the temporary restraining orders on things. They kind of put a pause, and then they have to wait until they have a hearing, and then things happen.

                        We're seeing already that all those students who are being targeted, who got removed and made overnight illegals by having their status in their student system—that can't happen anymore. Now they're all back to having status again and being legal again, and they don't have to leave. That's because of a court victory—not just one, many court victories, but in particular one major one brought about.

                        It's critical to understand how many victories we have had. And unless you're following this every day, you don't know that. You kind of look at it and say, "Oh my God. They just arrested the mayor of Newark. Oh my God. How can they do this?"

Jessica:            That's exactly it. It's like the flooding of the zone. I know it's a tactic, and yet it works on me really well because I consume news every day, and I hear good news and I hear bad news every day. But the bad news feels new, and the good news feels like, "Well, it stopped something for a period of time."

Anne:              Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            And so I don't know how to hold it. But you—I've known you for enough years to know you're not accepting wins and being like, "Yay," for everything. I trust you is what I'm saying. I trust that you're not saying—

Anne:              No, it's concrete. It has to be concrete.

Jessica:            It has to be concrete.

Anne:              Also, you don't go from someone unrolling an authoritarian rule to just stopping them overnight. This is not a military coup. It's a different kind of coup.

Jessica:            Right.

Anne:              And we're not going to get those people out of their office who are going to every day seek to put out another order and directive, and the people who are still in government still have to figure out how to do it. So we're dealing with a different kind of coup, and there's that time frame in it. But there's a couple of things that I think are important to understand, is we do have already an election that's happening, a midterm election happening next year. And we are already seeing a lot of what is happening—I want people to understand one of the goals of what they're doing.

                        One of the goals of data capture, the reason that they want to have data, is data is currency. It's the system for having your eyes on people and controlling people and controlling the message, and it's also the way to potentially tip the vote before you even get to the vote.

Jessica:            Right.

Anne:              So that's what's happening. You remove all these people who are immigrants, some of whom are now voters, and you have already removed a lot of people that—traditionally, the numbers show many of them vote for the democrats. And we're seeing that at the state level, all sorts of levels. We're also seeing a lot of victories, again, around fighting the vote. We know what they're trying to do. So, even with the AI, we're starting to see that people who are progressive people and work in technology and things are looking to say, "Let's get our hands on what kind of AI is being done. What do we think this is looking like? What can we do?" etc. So our eyes are open. That's already really, really important.

                        So the vote is really important. They're trying to capture the vote even before so that they don't even have to be worried about this, and then they have a big fight because every single time they do something like arrest a mayor of a town or people don't feel comfortable—you see a 16-year-old tackled in the middle of the street and her neighbors freaking out about it—that hits home.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Anne:              And overnight, we're seeing many, many Americans who had nothing to do with politics, who wanted to stay away, suddenly going, "This is not right. This is not right. I don't agree with this." And so they're being radicalized, essentially, overnight. What are they being radicalized to do? To defend our democracy, to defend these ideals, and to maybe take to the streets because they don't agree, and they feel like, "This is targeting me. This is not the country I want to live in." So that is huge. It's really, really important.

Jessica:            It is huge. I'm surprised you're giving me hope. I had no expectation of emerging in any way from this conversation with hope.

Anne:              Yeah.

Jessica:            I really—I didn't expect it, so—

Anne:              But it takes time. So you have to understand—

Jessica:            Yes.

Anne:              —we might see another year, two years, of much worse things. We should expect—we know what they want to do.

Jessica:            Yes. Yeah.

Anne:              But as they do this—I said in the beginning what matters is what you do in response. That's where our energy must go. In other countries—I'll give you a good example that encourages me. Hungary is a good one because they've had Orban there for 14 years. Now, Orban has been there a long time. He's done a lot. But most recently, what they found is that when they lost, essentially, by electing Orban, they had an opposition and they realized—the sort of lefty opposition realized that one thing they had stopped doing was talking about democracy and teaching civics and discussing this with people. They were very much also in a conversation, and pretty much a lot of it around things like identity politics and things like that that have been very much in our discourse, right?

                        So, even as they were getting repressed and they were losing their free speech—they were seeing immigrants, the country, sealed off. They were seeing targeting of women's rights and abortion and reproductive health. And they began to organize town halls in village levels and talking about civics, talking about what they wanted and what they could do and holding their local people accountable, saying to local people, "We want you to pledge that you are not going to put in place an illegal order; you are going to protect us." We're seeing that here. We're seeing, at every level, people saying—it's almost like a pledge of resistance that is starting to happen, right?

Jessica:            Yeah.

Anne:              And what we're seeing is to the point where in—two months ago, you saw the largest demonstrations in Hungary ever. And for the first time, you saw the opposition party polling higher than Orban's party.

Jessica:            For the first time in 14 years or 13 years?

Anne:              Yeah. Yeah. And Orban in response said, "I'm going to ban pride, and I'm going to outlaw any foreign organization because this is—because Soros is giving money to people, and this is not what the Hungarians want. This is really an outside attempt to influence." Well, he did do that. He has a captive majority in Congress like we do with republicans. But for the first time, on the day that they went to do that vote, you saw the opposition politicians, who are not radical LGBT activists, releasing rainbow-color smoke bombs in the Parliament, creating chaos.

They have still managed to get the vote across, but outside, they had hundreds and hundreds of people protesting, and they had Hungarians who had never been in an LGBT protest because they realized, "This is about our democracy." That's what's happening. And so you have to look at it, and that kind of model we've seen in many places. So you do have to create a broad movement. Even if we start with—because you have to be broad and you have to advance those issues, and you have to target them very specifically. It helps when you have specific laws and specific things you want to do.

So we're seeing a major demonstration happening on June 6th. The veterans all across America are saying, "Come and march for us as veterans. We have served. We believe in this country. Veterans' rights are under attack." That's a great one for people to participate in.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah.

Anne:              Then we see there's, on June 14th, a massive nationwide protest against the military parade because we all know that Trump is basically just throwing himself a party because he's trying to show that he has might. The biggest message I can give you—and we're about to put our release—I think we actually did today. We released a very nice Substack of this conversation between my colleagues Sally Driscoll and [Ellie Kaufman 00:46:16], who's a longtime person studying nonviolent resistance and tactics and everything. And it's basically about, how can you be brave in the face of a fearsome time or a scary time? And we talk about that.

                        What autocrats want to do by this kind of—as you say, calling it like a multipronged attack or whatever—is that they count on people being scared. They want to project an aura of invincibility. And so all of these individual little spoons that you call them, the little dibs, those are all putting little cracks in, and they become bigger cracks. And we're seeing some really big cracks. You're seeing large companies saying, "We don't like these tariffs." You're seeing ally governments saying, "We don't agree. We're not going to go for it." In fact, they're offering asylum in Scotland to Transgender Americans and things. And we're seeing all this alliance happening. They've done more to ally Europe than we could have ever possibly done.

Jessica:            Right.

Anne:              It's crazy. They've done more to radicalize a progressive America than anything we might have tried to do in all of our organizing.

Jessica:            Right.

Anne:              We're still dealing with attacks. We're still dealing with a system they've put in place. We have very serious surveillance and attacks that are happening. We have to do what we can. But what we need to mostly do is organize and tactically—things. And at the state level, it's very encouraging because a lot of what they do, the government, is they said, "Okay. We're going to take away federal funding, so now it kind of punts to the states." And during the last election, actually, quite a number of democrats won at the state level. And there are a number of moderate republicans, too.

                        So, come next election, they're the ones who are really going to be in a position to do it. But already we're seeing this, incredible actions by the attorneys general, the democratic attorneys general. They have been really, really good not just about defending sanctuary cities and doing all these things and changing laws, but using the law to say, "Sorry, but our state law supersedes your federal law."

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah.

Anne:              So these are combinations of kind of legal strategies and policy strategies. And unless you're in that sector, you don't maybe know about it. You—mainly in the education sector. But it's happening.

Jessica:            Okay.

Anne:              We're seeing all the law firms get together, all the universities get together. I mean, it's really impressive that we're finally starting to really see what I would call—is really tactical solidarity.

Jessica:            Right. Right. People coming together. So what are organizations that you're aware of that are offering resistance that people can—people who are just like, "I don't even know where to begin," turn to, start with? And I can, again, provide links in the show notes for them.

Anne:              Yeah. Well, I'd say, first of all, if you're interested in what are people doing to stop people legally, there is a new website that was created called—it's a hub. It's called Democracy 2025. It has about 1,000 organizations who are a member. It's mostly legal organizations, so it's all the legal groups. And they also have links to the trackers. You can see everything that's being done and that's being won—

Jessica:            Great. That's—

Anne:              —or where—that's already won.

Jessica:            So, also, if somebody needs to be like—if they're just drowning in the bad news, it's valuable to have that as a resource, as well, to be able to look at, "Okay. There are also wins."

Anne:              Well, but there's also other stuff. Let's say you're a nonprofit, and you're really worried about being audited. They have another website called Civil Service Strong. It has, specifically, resources for you so that you can reach out to them and you can get pro bono help. They're offering pro bono legal aid to nonprofit organizations and others. Same thing for the media. So all these resources have been created that are very concrete.

                        There's also—now we're seeing with the AFL-CIO, they've created a brand-new big website for all the federal workers who got fired, many of whom of course have fought back and are doing lawsuits. We're seeing whistleblowers. A lot of them have gotten their jobs back. We don't hear about that so much. But that's also the concrete assistance and help for people who are in/across government, not just at the federal government level, but they might even be at the state level—for them to do it.

                        We're seeing incredible action on the part of faith movements. So you have the Poor People's Movement. Of course, Reverend Barber—he just got arrested for doing prayers in the Capitol very recently. But you've seen a lot of interfaith work to really take on the need to provide sanctuary, to provide support, particularly for migrants and others. That's another area. So, in all of the sectors, you'll see—so, if you look at Democracy 2025, you can already see in the different sectors which organizations are part of it. You see all the immigration organizations that have really stepped forward. You'll see the groups that are helping Transgender folks, LGBT folks, women, women with children, folks who are worried about Social Security, etc. So it's all there for you.

                        At a protest level, I think there's a bunch of different ones. So you can have very well-known, large social movement-building groups like Indivisible, which has local chapters and national chapters. You can go to indivisible.org, and you can find what they do. We also have new groups like 50501, you know, 50 states, 50 actions, one day—whatever. It's all about taking an action. And they all have tool kits.

So, even for something like King's Day on June 10th, there's a tool kit just for King's Day. You want to do something on King's Day; you don't know what to do? Maybe you want to do something locally. You want to know who's doing something locally. You can go and find out who's doing something in your local town, your city, your state. What kinds of things are other people doing? You can join conversations and forums and be part of the conversation to hear what other people are thinking.

You have tools available to you. There are signs you can get. There are messages you can get. It's all being created so that wherever you are, you can take an action. Maybe you can't go out of your house because it's too dangerous or whatever—for many reasons. You don't have the ability. Maybe you have motility issues. You're disabled or whatever it is.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Anne:              There are things you can do. You can make calls. You can take so many actions. So understand that we need this kind of multiple, decentralized, all-levels action.

Jessica:            Yes.

Anne:              When you do, you're going to find all those other people who are doing, and you're no longer going to feel as alone. You're going to see what's being done, and you're also going to see measures of your success, with I think is super important.

Jessica:            So important, because I really do see and experience myself—both—how, when we consume news alone or we consume social media and we see people weeping and screaming, being ripped off the streets, or we see footage from Gaza—all of these things—it's so demoralizing. And then you're like, "Oh, what can I possibly do?" and, "This action doesn't feel like enough." And I want to just really kind of—

Anne:              The marching isn't the only thing you do.

Jessica:            Right.

Anne:              Most of the people—it's—as we put it—as [indiscernible 00:52:51], I think she has a nice expression. She says it's an onramp for organizing. It's not the only thing you do. It's very important for the big numbers to be there. In fact, they show that when you get like 3.5 percent of a population, that's usually the tipping point for getting rid of autocrats. But you need organizing in there, too. So we're not there yet.

Jessica:            You need—yes. Yeah.

Anne:              We're at maybe—I don't know—not quite 1 percent. But we're getting there with all the people we have in America. But it's what people are doing when they leave those marches. They're not just kind of going home and waiting. Some are. They're getting involved in all sorts of things. And it just is amazing. I mean, I even tell people, "Look. Throw a dinner party for your friends and something, and just get together once every two weeks and just talk about how you're feeling."

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah. Have a Zoom meeting, dinner party—

Anne:              And identify what you can do and want to do.

Jessica:            Yes. Yes.

Anne:              It's really important. I mean, I enjoy going to things where I see other people because it gives me energy. It makes me feel hope, and it's also really nice to hear about things that are being done. And I can only do a few things. I'm very busy. I have a lot of work. I want to do things. And do I think going to a Tesla action—I haven't been to many of those, but—is it useful? Yes. Why? Tesla's tanked.

Jessica:            Right.

Anne:              You don't think that every other person who's got a big business is watching this? We have like 14 companies that are completely capitulated to Trump. We can go after them. We have companies that have done great things, like Costco. Some people are doing wonderful things like coming and singing thank-you songs to Costco because they've been so great.

Jessica:            Right.

Anne:              There's many things to do. Some feel better. Some feel worse. But the point is express yourself. Some people do civil disobedience. Some people can never.

Jessica:            Right.

Anne:              People can't even maybe show up, but you know what people could do the other day who could not go to the Brighton Beach faction? They could amplify on social media or on other people's social media what was happening. There's many ways to act. It's not a hierarchy of what is more important. Do what you can do, and also assess for yourself, "What matters to me?" because that's really where you're going to bring your own skills.

Jessica:            I just want to repeat what you said, which is there is not a hierarchy of actions, that all actions are equal because they are part of this larger wave—I'm expanding on what you said, but it's part of a larger wave of collective action. And I have witnessed so many people really getting kind of trapped in that ultimately white supremacist model of some things are big enough, and some things are too small. And we need to just release that so that we can sustain the road ahead and stay in the actions.

Anne:              Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Anne:              I think the other piece that I think is very important, also, is one of the things that happens—once you kind of capture enough of this other thing, what an autocrat needs to do is be in control of the message. That's why they're going after the media. That's why Musk is trying to basically make the entire federal government run on Nexus platforms, so he can control everything and use all that data. It's all for profit, power, controlling the vote, controlling the message.

                        And we have other things. So even Substack is emerging because we don't have the media reporting as much as it should on the protests and things. We have a lot of ways in which we have great voice. So that's a really important one. But last year, during this whole Project 2025 thing, I loved the fact that these folks who made an animation, made a cartoon, about Project 2025 had sort of more views than almost anybody else. Look at Tesla as a good example. Do you know how many people have made their own social memes around the Tesla stuff? It's been amazing.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Anne:              You also saw people creating the messages that they want other people to project onto the back of a Tesla because they provide a great screen.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Anne:              We're seeing so much creativity and artivism, what I call artivism. Visual protest is so critical. In Boston—I think I wrote about this recently, but there is a group. They have been projecting messages about our democracy taken from really early documents of the American Revolution democracy and projecting those on the main public buildings in Boston and Cambridge. What's so great about that is you can't ignore that when you're walking around.

Jessica:            Right.

Anne:              All it takes is a projector and a window. Nobody can stop you, and it's not illegal. So, if you can't speak out because you're worried that you're going to get arrested at a demo, there's other ways to be able to get your message across.

Jessica:            Yeah, and it's—

Anne:              There are so many ways, and they're so creative, and they can be so fun. I mean, I want to give you three examples that I've shared recently because I was doing another podcast about what's working other places. I think it was in Turkey they did this thing where—or maybe it was in Budapest. Anyway, these people took ping-pong balls, and they put a dictatorship message on it calling out the dictator. And they were in areas of the public where, in the public squares, there's a lot of stairs and steps. So they would put these ping-pong balls down. They completely got in the way of people being able to walk and do their regular business because they were afraid of falling. People had to pick up the balls, read them, and so they started unleashing security forces to get rid of and pick up all these ping-pong balls. So then they would videotape the people picking up the ping-pong balls. And it was just an incredibly successful action.

                        They would also do things like they banned music because they said it was going to lead for people to, you know, be somehow too liberal and have sex and have fun and whatever—happiness, you know? And what they did was they took all these little USBs. They put them—you know, and they would put them into these really stinky places like garbage cans and things like that. And then they would turn them on. So you're in the middle of a public square, and you're suddenly hearing all this music. And the security forces are going nuts, and they have to go digging through garbage.

Jessica:            Inspiring.

Anne:              There was another one where, in order to be able to identify with the opposition movement—because it was really like people were being put in prison and jailed and everything—is that they made the orange, an orange, the symbol of their movement. And so people walked around the city with oranges. And they wanted to arrest people, but they were just having oranges. How can you arrest them? And they began to see all these people walking around with oranges to show each other, "I don't agree with this dictatorship. I'm with you."

                        There are so many ways that you can be visible in ways, and you don't even get to that point of repression. So I tell people think creatively. Have fun. Humor is an amazing weapon. And what autocrats want to do is they want to show how powerful they are, you know, like with this military parade.

Jessica:            Right.

Anne:              I had suggested to friends my favorite—I wish I could do an action. I was saying to people, if I was in charge, what would I do—and I had time? I would have organized a penguin brigade, all right? So organize people in penguin outfits and see—you know, we could join the Washington military parade, or we would have our own in which the penguins would—you know, the generals of the penguins and the ranks of the penguins were demanding that we take over the United States as representing the penguins from Greenland. Why? Because humor is—because, you know, you're walking—

Jessica:            Because it's—

Anne:              It instantly registers to understand to show—

Jessica:            Yes.

Anne:              —this guy is an emperor with no clothes.

Jessica:            Yes.

Anne:              And many people who are in those ranks of the army disagree with him.

Jessica:            Right.

Anne:              So it's just lots of ways in which to do things. And do what gives you energy, what expresses your message. Think about the weapon. Think about what you're trying to do. Look at what other people may have done. I'm going to give you one last—there's a website, also, called Waging on Violence. I think we put it into the Substack that's called the three Rs, and one of the Rs is ridicule. Resist, research, ridicule. But anyway—

Jessica:            Resist, research, ridicule. Love that. Let's not jump past that. It's so good, so good.

Anne:              Yeah. But there's hundreds and hundreds of examples of creative protest or other types of organizing that have worked for people, including from the U.S. And so I tell people, "Go find out what other people do. It will be so inspiring to you." They stopped—and if you look at a country like, "I'm going to a different country to look and see what people have done," but—like Bolsonaro was a major dictator in Brazil. He's gone. Who got rid of him? Afro Black feminists from Brazil who got together with some of the indigenous rural organizers, and they eventually were able to work with the remnants of the labor movement from [indiscernible 01:00:38] and stuff. And they got rid of Bolsonaro, who they thought was an entrenched dictator.

Jessica:            Yes. He seemed so entrenched.

Anne:              Poland women got rid of their autocrat when teenage girls started getting together in protest of an extremely repressive abortion law.

Jessica:            Yes.

Anne:              And what they ended up with was a structure for decentralized organizing that served them then to organize for election, and they got rid of their person. All over the place, we've seen this. So it may not be exactly what we do here. We may not do it exactly in the same way. We got lots of models for things that work.

Jessica:            Did you say there was the name of a website that collates these?

Anne:              Yeah. I don't have it in front of me, but if you look at that on Substack—suggest to people, if they're interested in anything around humor and how you use visual protests, read that Substack. It has lots of examples, and it has specific links for you to go and see the 400 case studies that have been done in different countries and the 150 that are using protests, etc.

Jessica:            This is so neat. I'm so glad this exists because it really does help to see models of successful movements.

Anne:              Oh, absolutely.

Jessica:            Yes.

Anne:              Absolutely.

Jessica:            Yeah, especially accessible ones, right? Not just for lawyers because not everyone's a damn lawyer, right?

Anne:              Yeah.

Jessica:            So that's really powerful. I love that.

Anne:              Yes.

Jessica:            I love that.

Anne:              Yes. And also, one thing I always tell people is that my background is I've been in political groups. I'm a journalist and organizer. But I started out reporting on the [indiscernible 01:02:00] movement to get rid of a dictator in Haiti—

Jessica:            Yes.

Anne:              —when I was just coming out of being a teenager and I was a young journalist. And there could not have been a more hopeless place and a more dangerous place and a more repressed place. People were being tortured, were in prison. There were killing fields, etc. And the way in which people learned to work together who did not trust each other—because everyone had a kind of deprivation mentality, and every group wanted to be the one in charge and was afraid of what another group would do. They learned to organize themselves around a couple of things that they knew because they had a common enemy. And that helped them put in place structures for working together.

And when they got rid of that dictator—and it wasn't easy, and people did get killed there and other things happened there. But they got rid of it through a popular movement through a vote. And they wrote a constitution for the first time. They began to have a longer road to democracy. Today, Haiti is still a mess. You have gangs there. You've never had much of a functioning government. They didn't get rid of everything overnight. They are building it, right? But they already have an example of having overthrown what was a dictator who represented colonial rule and years of outside occupation, including U.S. occupation.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Anne:              They learned to redo it. And then people are saying, "Well, why is it such a mess now?" They had a major earthquake in 2010 that killed many, many of the people in government, much of their leadership. They had an entirely new generation of people who had little governing experience, and they had to rebuild cities, countries, and everything else. And they then also had sort of another semi-occupation with all of the humanitarian aid and groups that came in.

                        So they had, in these last 14 years, a lot to contend with. So it gave opportunities for, again, strongmen rulers. It gave opportunities for gangs and others and things to get [indiscernible 01:03:46]. I have faith in Haiti in the longer term. In the short term, it's incredibly difficult and dangerous. One place you want to do something? Find out if you have Haitian community near you where you live. Haitian community is under serious attack. They can use so much help.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Anne:              Anything. Bring pizzas to their organizers—whatever you want to do, it will be welcomed. It will make people see that they are not alone and that other people don't agree with this purging of America of anyone except for mostly white men or white Christian families.

Jessica:            Yeah. This is so, so helpful and so powerful. And I really just thank you so much for sharing. It is a lot of information. Some people are going to know some of it. Some people are going to have known none of it, right?

Anne:              Yeah.

Jessica:            So I really appreciate it.

Anne:              Well, I think the other thing is to just let you know that there are trainings that are happening. Every one of these groups that I've talked about, whether it's 50501 [indiscernible 01:04:39] offering training. Some of them are over the phone. You even have representatives that are organizing this now. Here, for example, Rise and Resist—they offer trainings both for nonprofit groups, for individuals. They're free.

Jessica:            Right.

Anne:              So you can get yourself trained. If you're wondering, like, "Well, maybe I'd like to do something, but this is—it scares me. I don't want to get arrested. I can't afford to get arrested," talk to them. There's other ways to do that. You can even become a legal observer. You can become a marshal. All sorts of ways to be involved when you're ready to take just another step and you may not be sure what you want to do. So get yourself some free training.

Jessica:            Yes. Free training.

Anne:              And learn from others. Learn from others.

Jessica:            I love this, and I feel like—

Anne:              Well, the last thing I was going to say is Premila Jayapal—Premila Jayapal, U.S. representative, you know—she has started providing tactical resistance trainings, kind of the lessons from other movements, very recently. So, if you look at her stuff, you'll see that—if you Google her, you'll find—Resistance Lab is what it's called.

Jessica:            Yes. Yes, I've heard of that.

Anne:              That's the name of the project. And Resistance Lab—I think they had something like 2,700 people already trained, but they're going for thousands. And so, again, you want to learn how to do this? Learn. It'll give you more ideas. Think about it. Share what you learn with other people.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Anne:              Throw your dinner parties.

Jessica:            Yes.

Anne:              And then the last thing I would say to people—because I come out of the [Active Tradition 01:05:55]and I come out of Lesbian Avengers and I come out of having done lots and lots of work in a lot of movements is that—and first of all, it's okay to feel afraid. It's normal. It would be strange if you didn't feel afraid. But also, courage is contagious, and you can gain and regain your courage to do things. And preparing yourself for those things helps, and also taking care of yourself in other ways. I think about mentally and otherwise.

                        But part of that is we are not ceding our lives to this autocratic government or this person. We're not going to live under it. So we don't want to volunteer to silence ourselves. We don't want to volunteer to stop doing things that we love. I do plan to travel. I do plan to do things. I have three daughters in their 20s. I really care about the world that they're going to inherit. And we had a wonderful Mother's Day dinner last night, and I plan to go dancing this weekend. And none of that is going to stop me. I mean, celebrating your joy and finding your joy is also a resistance act.

Jessica:            Well, that's fucking powerful. Thank you so much. Again, I'm really so pleasantly surprised that I feel inspired and I feel more hopeful than I thought I was going to about talking about this topic. I can't thank you enough.

Anne:              Absolutely.

Jessica:            And I will make sure that everybody gets a million links. And just to reiterate for the people, just because there's a dozen links—you just pick one. You don't have to pick a dozen. You don't have to get overwhelmed. You just sort through and find the flavor of gum that you find enjoyable to chew, and just chew some gum.

Anne:              Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            That's what we're going for here.

Anne:              Yeah, and again, I'll just reiterate it: we're the grand majority in this country, and we have an opportunity to maybe do something with our democracy that wasn't going to happen.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Anne:              I mean, maybe it's the worst-case scenario for why it should happen. But what we do now is what we should care about.

Jessica:            Yes. What we do now is what we should care about. I love that. And I thank you for joining me and for all the work that you do. And everyone should go follow your Substack and join all of your projects. And again, links, links, links will be everywhere.

Anne:              Wonderful.

Jessica:            So the people will have access to you.

Anne:              And  I don't know what astrologically all this means.

Jessica:            Oh, there's a lot.

Anne:              But I think that, as far as I'm concerned, I just say let's just give the stars all that energy to take us forward in a good way.

Jessica:            Yeah. And you know, I will say just very briefly, astrologically, there's a couple of dates that I'm really paying attention to at the end of May. There's the middle of June, and then again in July, we see major shifts and at each of these benchmarks. And it doesn't take an astrologer to be like, "Oh, things are moving fast, and there's going to be a lot of changes." And so it's just about staying engaged and staying [crosstalk 01:08:44].

Anne:              And June 14th is King's Day, so—

Jessica:            Unfortunately, astrologically, there's a big astrological event happening that day. And you know—

Anne:              It's what you do. It's not that a negative thing—it's what you do with it.

Jessica:            That's exactly it. It's about being adaptable and staying present with what is. And that is a really difficult thing for a lot of people to do. I think it's difficult for everybody to do sometimes, and for some people, all the time, it's difficult for them.

Anne:              Yeah.

Jessica:            And it's about developing the skill because it's time. It's go time. Yeah.

Anne:              And also, help is all around you.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Anne:              What you're going through is what other people are going through. There's tons of help, tons of resources, and lots and lots of evidence of the places that we're winning. So I always say to people, "If you think Trump is winning, you're wrong." It looks like he's winning in the short term, but we're already winning in many, many, many places. So we just have to really now turn it into more of a force, a tactical force.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Anne:              But there's a lot of winning going on.

Jessica:            Fuck yeah. Yeah. Okay. Great.