I'm joined now by Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg, the co-founders of Indivisible and the organizers of the No Kings Day protest. Thank you guys both for coming on.
Hey, Brian. Great to see you.
So we have the No Kings Day protest this weekend, Saturday, October 18th. This has come under intense attack by the Republicans who are right now branding this thing an Antifa rally, a hate America rally. There is this idea from some folks in the political sphere that Donald Trump may try to use this as a pretext to be able to invoke the insurrection act. Do you have any concern, any fear about the Trump administration leveraging this to
be able to exact revenge on his enemies?
Well, look, first of all, the Republicans just can't stop talking about it. And I did not pay them anything for the free publicity. They are telling everybody that the largest peaceful protest in modern American history is coming out on Saturday. And on the more serious note, you're right. They're doing this for a reason.
They don't want people peacefully protesting. The number one thing any authoritarian regime fears is broad based, ideologically diverse, geographically dispersed mass people power. And that's what we're going to give them on Saturday. So I think this is a standard part of the authoritarian playbook. And they are trying to dissuade people from exercising their First Amendment rights.
And do you know what you do, Brian, when some regime tries to get you to not exercise your First Amendment rights? You exercise your First Amendment rights. That's how you protect them. So they're not slowing us down. We're not backing down.
There are more of us than there are of them. And we're going to show up joyfully, powerfully, and in communities all around the country, red, blue, purple.
I also wouldn't lose sight of the fact that part of why they're doing this is because they are totally panicking about the fact that they have lost the thread on the shutdown fight. Americans blame Donald Trump, they blame Republicans, they are mad about rising healthcare prices, they are mad about the cost of living crisis,
they're mad about the chaos and terror that they're inciting in communities. They don't have a message, they don't have an excuse for their own failures, and so they've pivoted to trying to smear millions of peaceful Americans who are coming out and exercising
their First Amendment rights instead, and it's not going to work.
I want to dig into a little bit of what you were speaking about just a moment ago with regard to what an autocratic leader might fear as it relates to a mass uprising. Why is this important? Like, why is it important to get so many people out into the streets?
And what will it accomplish other than people going out into the streets? Yeah, great question. We're not doing this just to see our names in the papers. I love having a conversation with Brian, but this isn't the purpose of it. The purpose of this is twofold. One, a successful authoritarian regime creates this image that they are all powerful, that there is nothing that the population can do to push back against, so you might as well give up. There's no sense in coming out. So goal one is to burst that bubble. Make it clear that this is a weak, enfeebled, lame duck president who is lashing out violently
against communities around the country, but ultimately is on the way out, that the people are standing up, the democracy will reassert itself. So that's goal one. But goal two, any protest is a tactic. It's a one day event, and that's not going to suddenly save democracy. So the real measure of the success of something like No Cane is even as historic as the day is going to be, is how many people actually get plugged in to on the ground, productive organizing going forward. This is a mass recruitment event for democracy and we're going to judge
its success in the weeks and months and possibly years to come.
Leah, to what extent does the fact that we saw kind of our first foray into effective organizing occur during the Disney boycott after Trump leaned on his FCC to get Disney to take Kimmel off the air? Like that was the first instance where everyone was involved, everyone was engaged. There was collective action against Disney, which thought that the only risk, the only thing that jeopardized its financial success
was gonna be not kowtowing to Donald Trump. And they got a hard lesson in the fact that, in fact, there is a bigger risk, and that is basically pissing off millions and millions and millions of Americans. And so in light of that, how are you thinking about this idea of organizing, given what we saw,
given the success of that previous boycott just a few weeks back?
Well, I think that points to a broader point about strategy right now, which is that in a consolidating authoritarian regime, yes, we advocate to our elected officials. Yes, we push our formal democratic elected representatives.
But we've also got to think about how power moves differently. Power moves through corporations that are either doing what the regime wants or not doing what the regime wants. It moves through faith institutions
that are denouncing and organizing against it or staying quiet. It moves through universities that are either accepting a deal with Trump or rejecting it. And so it was an incredible, rapid response organizing moment.
Big shout out to Working Families Party, which had a plan out on how to organize and call for that boycott within literally, I think, an hour or two of the news dropping on Kimmel. And we all pushed and we were all collectively able to show Disney in a matter of days
that they needed to worry more about an activated, angry consumer base than they needed to worry about Brendan Carr and the FCC in that moment, and they backed down. And so that is absolutely the model for the kind of rapid response exertion of pressure
that we can use when it comes to particularly consumer facing brands that are enablers of Trump. And so part of what we are thinking about going forward is how are we going to ask people to leverage their power as consumers? How are we going to ask them to leverage their power as alumni of institutions? How are we going to ask them to be leveraging their power as people who go to a faith institution?
What power do you have in your daily life, in your relationships, in your network to push back against Trump and MAGA republicanism? And are you using it all? That's the question.
I think that's such a great point, especially in light of the fact that all of the institutions that we thought were going to be here to protect us, you know, all of the Democracy Dies in Darkness folks, whether it's, you know, these media outlets, whether it's the tech CEOs, whether it's law firms, whether it's universities. The sad reality is that we've seen all of these entities capitulate to the Trump administration, largely
for financial reasons. And so at the end of the day, I think we have to disabuse ourselves of this notion that somebody else is coming to save us, that it's not going to be any of these companies, that it's not going to be the press, that at the end of the day, it is going to be, you know, it's going to be all of us that have to show this administration that the power lies just in this in this mass uprising of people as
opposed to waiting for some other entity or institution to swoop in and save us. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think, honestly, I think the big story of this year is the difference between how elites, elite actors, and institutions have responded to Trump and Trumpism versus how regular people have responded. Because fundamentally, all these corporations, all these billionaires, they have folded for their own interests, maybe because they're aligned, maybe because they're scared, maybe because they just want to make a buck.
Regular people have not folded. Regular people have been organizing and more and more are pouring in every day. And it is the collective task of a movement like No Kings to ensure that that popular outrage translates into targeted pressure on these folks.
Ezra, do you anticipate that this may be the biggest protest in American history?
Let's put it in some context, Brian. So the largest single day protest in the first Trump term was a powerful, joyful expression of opposition to the regime in the form of families belong together. This was pushing back against family separation. It was roughly the same scale as the first Women's March on the order of 750 events. It was great. We were there. It was effective. Our first major protest this year had 1300 events, hands off, roughly doubling the size. No kings in June had 2100 69 events
all across the country. We have more than 2600 events on the map for no kings to I can tell you with confidence this will be the largest peaceful protest in modern American history.
Now you had mentioned peaceful. I think that so much of what Trump is trying to leverage here is this idea of of validating his warnings that this is going to be some that that not only this, but everything that the left does is just another indication of of their violence. Right. And so can you talk about can you talk a little bit about what your hopes are for this parade, this rally, this protest versus what the Trump administration wants to do and and just taking a step further beyond that, is there any
concern that there might be folks looking to incite violence so as to give a pretext to Trump to be able to a validate his fear mongering, but B maybe use it as an as an excuse to clamp down or send troops in or invoke the insurrection act, whatever it may be.
You know how we closed out the Philly rally with the flagship rally of no kings one in June. Leanne, I closed it out. There were 100000 people in the crowd. We waved American flags and led 100,000 people to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
It was joyful, it was boisterous, it was powerful, it was funny, it was fun. That was the vibe of No Kings in June, that was the vibe of Hands Off in April. If you went to any protest this year that was organized by Indivisible or No Kings
or coalition partners, that's what you would have seen. And I know there's an attempt by the regime to make this feel scary, and that's intentional. They want to scare you away. And I'm not saying we should be stupid about this.
I'm not saying we should ignore the threats, but we shouldn't let them steal the joy and the power that we are bringing to these events. We need to hold on to that and celebrate it. And then meeting those threats realistically, we need to take them seriously. We've held trainings for the last several months on safety and de-escalation. You can go to nokings.org and watch the trainings if you are worried about this. We have trained tens of thousands of volunteers in safety and
de-escalation. There are now thousands of marshals trained for these events. Every single one of the 2,600 plus events on that map have a safety lead and have a safety plan. If they don't have that, they're off the map. I'm not telling you that we can guarantee that the right-wingers won't pull some kind of shenanigans. Like keep in mind, this is the regime
that instigated a bloody attack on the Capitol, pardon the violent insurrectionists. This is a guy who just weeks ago said, with respect to right-wing political violence, quote, I couldn't care less. That was Trump's response. So we understand, these folks are serious and they fear peaceful protest. What we can do is reassert again and again and again,
these are our first amendment rights. We have a right to show up. We have a right to disagree with the regime. We have the right to show up. We have a right to disagree with the regime. We have the right to peacefully gather and disagree with what they are doing. And if we don't protect those rights by showing up, we don't have those rights.
Leah, there is reporting from Midas Touch that suggests that the Trump administration may be looking to close down I-5 out here in California. And the excuse that they're giving is that they want to celebrate the Marine Corps' 250th birthday. And so there's going to be some exercise that will, in effect, create gridlock and traffic and delays for those who are looking to protest out here in California. Can I have your reaction to that?
Well, first of all, we're monitoring it closely. We're in touch with all the folks who are impacted in the area on any protests that are happening nearby. And I think I would point out, Governor Newsom has been drawing some attention to this as well, because it's an absolutely crazy thing
to be doing in the middle of a government shutdown. You have employees who are not getting paid. You have critical federal services that people rely on that have been stopped. And this is how Donald Trump is spending his time, is redirecting public resources to disrupt traffic in order
to potentially mess with peaceful expressions of protest. So it's outrageous. And also we'll be working carefully on any disruptions that may result.
There are 300 events in California on Saturday, 300 across the state. I think a lot of people are going to come out.
Finally, let's finish off with this. And this one is for both of you here. But what does success look like in the aftermath of this Saturday?
Success to me looks like millions and millions of people who have come out, who have felt their own power as part of something that is bigger than themselves, and who turn that power into the next wave of organized actions to protect our communities, to fight back against MAGA, and to ultimately reassert and build a democracy that's better than it ever has been before.
If Leah's happy, I'm happy.
That's the right answer. We'll leave it there. For anybody who's looking to exercise their First Amendment rights this weekend and to show their displeasure with the direction of the country and with the overreach of this administration please head to no king's dot org find your local protest again as as really a mentioned there twenty six hundred across the country so please go out there make your voice heard
as really a thank you so much for taking the time thanks for the work you're doing here
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