EP 26: How to Resist & Build in this Political Moment and Beyond, with Moe Mitchell of Working Families Party

What does it mean to truly resist and build community against violent colonial powers manifesting as billionaires actively orchestrating the rise in global authoritarianism as we speak?

This conversation with Maurice Mitchell dives into the dying MAGA era, the importance of building community, telling compelling stories, and taking collective action to create a more just and equitable future in the face of authoritarian and oligarchic forces.

E.g. 

• Unpacking what is actively going on in American and global politics as we speak
• How you are a part of a bigger ‘We’
• The importance of building community, solidarity, and collective power to challenge systemic injustices
• The role of year-round political engagement, organizing, and governing beyond just electoral politics
• The significance of personal stories and lived experiences in shaping one's political motivations and approach
• The power of creativity and storytelling in shifting the dominant narrative and inspiring action

Maurice Mitchell is the National Director of the Working Families Party. Maurice is a nationally-recognized social movement strategist, a visionary leader in the Movement for Black Lives, and a community organizer for racial, social, and economic justice.

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Transcript

Unknown: 0:02

Hey, everyone, welcome to supersede a series of conversations between me, Madeleine MacGillivray and passionate folks from all sectors who have found their superpowers. This is about taking that big existential question of what can I do and turning it into specific, grounded actions and takeaways. We want to inspire you all to supersede the systemic powers of oppression and sit in your own powers to collectively build towards a joyful and equitable world. Well, welcome to supersede. It's good to be here. Thank you so much for being here. For sure, I am just going to dive right in. I'm going to read your bio for folks. Maurice Mitchell is the National Director of the Working Families Party. Maurice is a nationally recognized social movement strategist, a visionary leader in the movement for black lives and a community organizer for racial social and economic justice. Born and raised in New York to Caribbean working class parents. Maurice began organizing as a teenager, and never stopped as a high school student, Maurice served as a student leader for the Long Island student Coalition for peace and justice at Howard University after a classmate was killed by police officers, Maurice led organizing efforts against police brutality and for divestment from private prisons. Maurice went on to work as an organizer for the Long Island progressive coalition, downstate organizing, Director for citizen action of New York and director of the New York State civic engagement table, seeing the need for an anchor organization to provide strategic support and guidance to movement for black lives activists across the country. Maurice co founded and managed Blackbird. Maurice was a key organizer for the movement for black lives convention in Cleveland in 2015 in 2018 Maurice took the helm of the Working Families Party as national director. He's applying his passion and experience to make WFP the political home for a multiracial working class movement. Thank you, Maurice, I can attest that all of those things are true. I remember all of those things all happen well. I hope we, I hope we touch upon all of them in this conversation. I Yeah. I mean, there's so much that I want to talk about, there's so much that we can get to. I think that it would be wise to right now, talk about the current political moment that we're in. I just want to dive right in. Okay, let's go. Let's go, dive right in. We have to, we have to. So we now, you know, in between actually scheduling this interview and sitting with you now, we have essentially an unelected billionaire effectively orchestrating a coup to erode our political and digital systems of democracy. So a few days after the election. Back in November, you wrote a memo to the Working Families Party National Committee called what happens next. This was November 11, and your opening idea sort of was quote, though it may not feel like it today. This is the beginning of the end of the Trump and the Maga era. End quote. So you know now, did you foresee what's happening now? And just kind of, can you expand on this idea from where you were writing it on November 11 to today, February 10, like in the present moment? Absolutely, yeah. And when I wrote that, what I and we meant, and we still believe, is that Maga is an old idea, right? In some ways, the Maga coalition is a group of people who seek to go back to 1850 can even say 1750 right in some ways, in terms of, philosophically, what they want to visit upon all of us, and maybe some billionaires that want to go back to 1880 like the guild the gildanate age, right, seeking to seduce many Americans to believe that they could go back to their imagined idea of what 1950 was, right? So it's basically leaving together a set of old ideas and seeking to shoehorn these past sort of imaginings of these idealized ideas based on who you are, the billionaires, some sliver of white working class people and some white Christian nationalist right to today and. I'm saying is that that does not compute, that cannot happen, that will not happen, but they were able to weave it together enough to against all you know, despite all those contradictions, to be able to win this election. But we live in the present, and it's our job not to decide whether or not we're going back to some age that no longer exists, but it's actually our job to develop and construct and build a future that's really exciting to me. And when I look at the even the debate inside of the Democratic Party, in some some ways, it's a debate between people who are trying to go back to the Clinton era, and some folks are trying to go back to the Obama era, and they're in a kind of debate, and but I'm like, there's this wide open terrain that is our present and our future, and I get really excited about that. So when I say this is the beginning of the end, that's, in part what I mean, what I also mean is that this is Trump's last presidency, and sometimes we equate Trumpism and maggot with the Republican Party. Trump is, in some ways, is a is a singular force, and many people voted for Trump and Trumpism. They didn't necessarily vote for Republican rule. Many people voted for Trump and Trumpism, whatever it meant for them. They didn't necessarily vote for a billionaire engaging in a smash and grab robbery of our collective resources. You know, when we talk about government, government is just like the stuff we do together, in some ways, like that's what government is. What democracy is. When you talk about democracy, it's like these systems and these institutions. It's like how we roll and how we share, and most people didn't vote for Elon Musk and others, kind of deciding that they wanted to, you know, bring down our government, which is the things that we share together, so that they could pick through all the valuable parts and throw us the scraps. And so that's also what I mean, that that idea is not popular. They were able to convince enough people that they were buying something else. Yeah, and now it's our job, when all these contradictions are so clear, to be able to tell a popular story about how we build a future together. The other thing I want to say is, yeah, yeah, I did. I did know. I did feel pretty confident that that these things would happen, not because I'm some sort of a soothsayer or anything like that. I just chose to, and I choose to take them seriously and literally. So when the president's son in law said that Gaza looks like really attractive real estate. I chose to take that seriously and literally. When the authors of project 2025, laid out in detail about what they were going to do, minute one day one, I took them seriously and literally. And you know, you could go back our our statements all throughout this campaign season were essentially us, you know, sharing as far and wide as we can the things that they were would plan on doing. And it's interesting, these things were so horrible that many people could not process the reality of them, yeah. And so for some people, it feels like a shock, but if you actually listened to and took seriously the things that they would say on live mics like this, you know, in writing, you could just download a PDF and read it right. Listen to Steve Bannon, listen to Steve Miller, listen to Donald Trump. Listen to Russ Vought, who recently just got, you know, got confirmed, and he's now head of the OMB. He is the framer and architect of project 2025 if you remember, we were saying that there is a direct line between Trump and project 2025 and Trump said, No, there isn't. And even, even though there was so much evidence of that being the case, and there was this whole debate, this false debate, as to whether or not Trump's agenda day one agenda would be project 2025 but we now know that, in fact, the day one agenda is the day one agenda that they said that they said they would execute, right? So I don't give me any credit for for knowing and believing these things because they said it yeah and so yes, I'm not surprised. And we you. I have been preparing for this scenario doesn't make the scenario any less horrible. And in your mind's eye, preparing for a scenario doesn't necessarily approximate what it feels like, yeah, you know, so definitely, just as a person, it's horrific. The headlines are really hard to process. And you know, the whole flood the zone thing that they talked about, they talked about that they were like, look, we're going to do as many things as possible, as soon as possible. And it would overwhelm both people like me, who organize every day people like you who are using your platforms in order to inform your audience, the institutions, right from the judiciary to all the to media. And there is something to that theory that's they're testing this flood the zone thing out, and it's going to be our job people who believe in democracy, to attempt to challenge their thought, their flood the zone theory, which I'm excited about so I don't feel overwhelmed. I'm in it. Like, as an organizer, I'm like, game. I'm not gonna let Steve Miller out organize us. Like, let's go. Yeah, yeah. There's like, two sort of ways that I want to take that, what you just said, because there was so much there, yeah, one is that, I think that, and we were talking about this a little bit before recording, actually, when you were talking about a very normal and kind of natural response to All of what's going on from people is, is to kind of, what was the word that you used? Yeah, there's a, there's a, there's, I've noticed as an organizer, there's several kind of conditioned tendencies, right in the face of really stark odds, really stark political odds, like, when you know, a authoritarian force like Donald Trump in a right wing populist movement like Maga teams up with the richest person on the planet, a cartoon villain billionaire, it's just like, Oh my God. How can I, you know, with a like heavily organized and meticulous, meticulously detailed plan like Project 2025, you as a just everyday person who knows this stuff is bad, could just be so overwhelmed that you you retreat to abstentionism, right? And it's just like I I do not believe that any of this matters. Voting doesn't matter nothing. And so I'm going to attend to maybe the small and beautiful corner of my life, and sort of, in some ways, distance myself from all of this, right? And what I want to say is that I think that that is a perfectly natural and understandable emotional response to something that terrible, and I have a lot of compassion. Yeah, you know, I know there's, there's people like, we engage in a lot of activity that's focused on voting, getting people elected, and there's people in my position that I think engage people who choose not to vote in ways that don't, I think appreciate the natural emotional place that would bring somebody to that or also somebody's experience, right, right? There's so many experiences that everyday people have, of government, of voting, of the two party system, of the Democratic Party, specifically, of liberal politics, you know, where, like, understandably, why would anybody come away from those experiences. Let's just say your experience of government is the DMV and the police and a shitty education. That's your experience, or, you know, all those things, and you know public assistance bureaucrats that when you engage with them, you feel less dignified. That's your experience of government or and perhaps on top of that, a local elected official who is not responsive to you. Why would somebody who that's your day to day experience believe, Oh, I'm powerful. My vote matters. Government could do good and powerful things. Organizing matters. And so I think it's really important to appreciate that disconnect if you're interested in organizing, rather than, I don't know, shaming people for not doing the the shit that you think they should do, right? Um, and so, yeah. Yes, there's a, I think, a natural emotional response to truly ghoulish political actors out here trying to take our money and our power. And there's people's everyday, working people's lived experience of the sneaky suspicion that things are not right, that there are a set of people who have more money and power than they do, that have rigged the system against them, that are stealing money, power, dignity from them, that there's something happening, that believe your eyes and ears. There are there are those things are happening. And what's ironic is, I think, and this is not just in the United States, but one of the things, one of the slights of hand that right wing populists sort of engage in, is they tend to be a little bit more compassionate when it comes to people's feelings of powerlessness and loss of dignity and fear. More compassionate, compassion Yes, enough to be able to prey on that right and offer a compelling story, right, right? Whereas what happens is a lot of the forces that are pro democracy forces in the world like the because these pro democracy forces are big United fronts that are are led by, oftentimes, like these powerful center left or center right political parties Who are not the whole problem, but are kind of part of the problem. Yeah, right. So they tend to miss the mark often when it comes to the starting premise of believe your eyes and ears Yes. And a lot of right wing populists start off with Yes, believe your eyes and ears, and then they tell a story that leads to a bunch of scapegoats, right? It's a very compelling story. And so, yeah, I do think this is a period of time where we should be asking a lot of questions. Be listening a lot more. Be in a posture of humility. Be curious about about why so many people do not feel like they have a sense of connection to their own power. And what we have to do to re inspire people in a sense of connection to their own power, which is something very different than when I'm watching the news, what people are talking about, they're like, let's do this autopsy on the Democratic Party, you know. And the question is, how do people re establish trust with the Democrats? How do people reestablish a connection to the Democrats? I'm like, that's the wrong question. How are we reestablishing a connection to one another? Yeah, and how are we reestablishing a trust with one another and a trust in my own sense of power. Yeah, that's the question we need to answer. So the you know, I, I don't know if I've fully answered the question, but we kind of doesn't matter. Okay, yes, no, and this is the question that myself and kind of everybody in my circles are asking ourselves, I think I when it comes to folks feeling like they have agency, folks having any semblance of trust in the process and the processes that we work within to share resources, as you put in the past couple weeks. I mean, basically the first time I've ever seen people be like, Oh, we actually, really do have to call the people that we've elected into office and tell them how we feel about this, and tell them that we don't tolerate X, Y and Z. And I think that there are, there's like, I can feel the palpable overwhelm from a lot of people that absent absenteeism, yeah, absention, abstentionism. Abstention right? Yeah, abstentionism. Now we're all gonna get absention. Is abstentionism, a better word, the head in sand, the, you know, the whatever that I can feel it and and I understand. I also think that, as you're saying, there's a lot of right now this, this freeze response from the fact that we don't know, like where this is gonna go, so to speak. But as you're saying, we actually do in many ways. So there's, there's actually a lot of ways to feel more grounded by kind of doing what feels painful, and actually reading project 2520 25 and being. Aware and listening to what these people are actually saying, as opposed to being like, oh my gosh, are we devolving into total you know, yes, absolutely. And that's kind of the trick, right? And this is a playbook that isn't new. Like, these people are not magicians, these people are not wizards. Their ideas are actually pretty boring, right? Many of them are, are, are in some ways violently mediocre, right? And one of the tricks is they first have to trick you into thinking they're more powerful than they are, right? And, you know, like, Trump's press secretary said, like, Oh, he's playing four dimensional chess. And some of this stuff is, some of this stuff is planned. Some of the plans make no sense. Um, some of it is throwing spaghetti on the wall and seeing what sticks. Um, all of it is designed to overwhelm you, right? And I think that that's actually really important. Despair is a political project of the far right of the owner and billionaire class. They seek popular despair. They seek a sense of isolation, right? And this is one of the reasons why so much of their work is about the individual. So they don't want us to feel like there's any reason to actually invest in in anything collective, invest in organizations, invest in unions, right? They want us to imagine that basically, the best we could do is put our heads down as individuals, maybe our families and kind of thug it out right? And so it's really important for us to understand what they're up to, so that we could overcome that. The way, I think, to overcome the overwhelm is to make choices. Like, there's a lot of information. There's more information than we know what to do with. And it's like, you know, a handful of bros own, most of the most of the platforms that we communicate with. Choose something right, choose a lane and focus on that lane. Choose one or two things that you want to focus on, find an organization. It's really important. This is not a time for individual activism on its own. Activism has its place, and it's fine, but it's insufficient. And also, as an individual activist, it's easy for you to be overwhelmed, right? And there's ways that you could just kind of spin yourself into burnout through your through, you know, online activism, offline activism, just kind of like for every atrocious thing, it's another rally. We also have to build, not just a resistance movement, which tends to lean into the the activist energy and the spectacles and all those things. They have a they have their place. You also have to build the muscle of being an opposition. Opposition seeks to win, you know. And I don't simply want to be a resistance to the power. Yeah, I don't want to simply sort of write myself into Steve Bannon or Steve Miller's story, right, where I'm resistance organizer number one in a Steve Bannon or Steve Miller written and produced sort of, you know, play, yeah, right, right. I want us to write our own story, which means let's be an opposition movement that has aspirations for actually being in power, for toppling the oligarchs and the billionaires, for advancing our agenda, for building, again, something that is grounded in the present present, but has an aspiration for a future that has yet to be written. So that, to me, that gives me a lot of hope. Like, you know, I had some bad days and bad weeks after the election. I think, like a lot of people, I was telling somebody, I allow myself to look despair in the eye and to actually sit in my own sense of loss, and I allowed myself to feel The feelings of, you know, personal, like, personally, I question what I'm doing. Like, what am I doing? Yeah, as a, you know, oftentimes I have this, like, you know, forward march type of attitude. I actually allow myself to, like, what are we doing, so that I could arrive honestly at this place of clarity and defiance and. Feel like I've gotten there pretty honestly, and I'm ready, I'm ready to go. You know, nothing is guaranteed, which is why what we do in the present really matters. What they do matters, sure, and what we do matter. And we're not spectators, or we shouldn't be lulled into being spectators. We should be we should choose to be agents. We should choose to be protagonists, right? Using the analog, again, the analogy of a play, right? Yeah, I don't want to be a big character. I don't want us to be big characters. You know, one of the reasons I'm so excited to be having this conversation with you is because we're working to sort of make grassroots political advocacy and involvement more accessible and more approachable for people. You know, for example, I'm working on just a climate policy database. It's just a Google spreadsheet that actually lays out, here's what's in the pipeline that needs support and directing it, literally linking it to an action that people can take. We're writing scripts. You know, we're linking to coalitions. We have tools, and because there's such a lack of like, accessibility for folks who want to get that little extra step of political involvement. And I know you're not talking about just political involvement. There's so many ways to show up, but I would love to talk about just go deeper into what you're saying in terms of how folks who are not directly involved in, you know, political advocacy and kind of building these systems in opposition can really understand and live the fact that, yes, they have so much power. We all have so much more power than, I think we have been led to believe that we have. And like, sort of how folks can be more active in pushing towards justice from a political standpoint, you know? And really, yeah, I mean advice to folks again, we're sensitive to the word activism, you know, sometimes people don't, do not want to use that word, and rightfully so. And there's so many other ways to live, to live in the play and own the play and not be written in by somebody else. So and I want to touch on that, because in your piece that I quoted at the beginning of this conversation, you go on to talk about the need for us to, you know, have each other's backs because all we have is each other, which is, it could not be more true, the need to remind ourselves that there is so much hope, as you're saying, to operate with humility. And then you also say, We need a plan. And you say, quote, we will need to go on offense at the state and local level, win policies that benefit working people and pick fights that fracture Trump's base in advance of the 2026, midterms, where we flip congressional and state power away from the Republicans. End quote, I really want to talk about that too. So, so, so sort of weaving into the you know, yeah, okay, all of that. Well, I'm going to respond really specific, specifically, because I want your audience to maybe hear something that's really grounded, right? Cool. Um, last week, and it's, it's hard to talk about these things and not sound like you're a conspiracy theorist, but these are the things that are actually happening right in real time. This is true, yeah, reality. So you know, just to update everybody, um, Elon Musk, who is the wealthiest person on the planet, um, through like, hundreds of millions, maybe 300 million, maybe more of his own money into the election in order to swing the the election towards Donald Trump. He then, without breaking a sweat, immediately beelined after inauguration, into attempting to with him, and like a handful of you know some teenagers and other folks that I assume are very loyal to him, to dismantling agencies that are doing business and and regulating his various businesses. Now I'm a fan of oxen razor, which believes that it's basically a belief that, you know, the most obvious thing is the thing that's happening. You could either believe that Elon Musk is had just decided that his main thrust in life is no longer to be an entrepreneur, is to be a crusader for efficient government, and everything he's doing is based on his legitimate and altruistic desire to make government better and more effective for you and me, or it could be that he sees an amazing advantage to. Power himself to free him and his companies and various corporations from from any scrutiny and to basically corporately capture the largest by far, infrastructure for all types of cruelty or compassion so that he could apply whatever's in his in his head on all of us. It looks like that's what he's doing, but maybe he's doing that other thing. But again, ox comes razor. I'm gonna assume he's doing the thing that it looks like he's doing, right? That's what's happening. The reason why I say that is there's things we could do about it. Yeah, number one, there are people who are using the judiciary, and they are filing lawsuits, and many of those lawsuits are winning, right? But again, that's just one piece. I just wanna remind, remind people that there are hard working people, who see what we see, who are fighting the good fight legally. There's things that you could do. We organized people to actually physically go to the Treasury. There was 3500 people who just in less than a day, hit the streets. And it was really inspiring to see that many people actually confront him at his own game. They did that at the Department of Labor. Those activities actually prevented, I think, of the Department of Labor, them actually being able to physically get in. Yes, right? Yes. And we had 1000s of people begin to call their representatives, yeah. And people's phones. You know, your representatives phones both, uh, Congress, both house representatives, as well as folks in the Senate. They're ringing off the hook. We know, yeah, and it's mattering. So we saw the Democrats. They were like, well, what are they doing? And then we've seen them kind of steal their spine. Why are they? Why are they stealing their spine? Because of you, right? Because of people like you that picked up their phone in mass, yeah. And so the one thing you could do is pick up your phone and communicate directly to your representatives, right? It's, it'll take a few minutes. You could do it coming to and from work, coming to or from daycare right before you go to bed. That is, it's hard to process if you don't know what's happening on the other side, how powerful that is, but it is truly powerful, right? So that's one thing you could do. The other thing you could do if you haven't, is join an organization. So I invite everybody to join the Working Families Party and and, yeah, check us out. Learn about us. If you decide that based on who we are and our perspective, the WFP doesn't work for you, that's fine. Find another organization. This is a time, I think, for organizing. And if in your search for organizations, you can't find an organization that aligns with your values or aligns with your identity or your perspective, then, my friend, it's your job to build an organization that does Yeah, right. And so again, there's concrete things that you could do right now, and we actually have tools. We make it easy for people to call their representatives, which is why I say, Join the WFP. Make it very, very easy. And that's one of the first things that you could do that could really matter. But once you do that, that action, do it with other people. And it's why I say do it with other people. It's because, like, again, nothing's guaranteed. I don't have a crystal ball. Change is not linear. There's there's all types of twists and turns. I've been organizing for decades, so I've experienced losses and wins. Yeah, we're not guaranteed victory, but when we do these things together, to me, that's the point, because, because I choose to be in community with others, in political community with others. After a win, that also means I get to choose who I celebrate with, and after a loss, that means I get to choose who I comfort and who comforts me and to me, that's the point. Yeah, that is the point. It really is. I sometimes talk about the fact that you know, if you like, like calling your reps, if you are kind of looking for a super entry level, tangible, hyper specific thing to do, if you don't know all your neighbors, get to know your neighbors. Go, you know, to be best friends with them. Just, you know, get their numbers, you know, build those lateral resiliency networks. I think we're really, absolutely in super, super deficit of just even understanding the importance of doing that, which is, yeah, which? Well, that's why, that's, to me, one of the underlying reasons why we got here. Yes, we didn't. I. But November didn't happen like, no the outcome in November, like the the election swinging to Trump didn't happen in November. What we're looking at is a close to the outcome of a close to five decade single sided war against working people, both here and all over the world, and part of that war is convincing us of the lie that there is no society, that there is no reason to build community, that there is no reason to build solidarity with one another, and it's become such a fundamental plank of the mainstream culture, it's in the air that we breathe, and we shouldn't be surprised that. You know, the Surgeon General said that we have an epidemic of loneliness, that people feel so isolated, we shouldn't be surprised. And to me, the solution to that is organizing, you know, is being curious about what your neighbors up to, and seeking to build those kinship relationships across difference and insist on doing things together, and which is why I say even, even joining on. You know, I'm a I'm really into politics, but joining any type of organization is better than trying to just thug this thing out on your own, you know, find a adult intramural sports team. Find it just do something together. Yeah, do something together, exactly. We also have released, you know, a zine and several materials. I remember us doing a webinar we should do again, on a solidarity pod. Sort of what you're talking about is find a group of folks. Maybe it's, you know, two people, maybe it's nine people, but not many more, necessarily, who you can every week. Schedule a time, protect that time. There's so many ways to do that, and you take action together. Maybe you call your reps together. Maybe somebody reads a poem. Maybe you dance, whatever it is like incorporating some somatic and creative aspects to it so that it really is sustainable. Yeah, we have something at WFP called wolf packs, which is, you know, similar to this idea where we promote folks rolling together. And we help people start wolf packs, you know, so that people could text bank together and phone bank together and door knock together and, you know, just kind of be together in their political advocacy. Yeah, I was gonna, yeah. I think that that, idea of the next two to four years, I think thinking about finding folks, if you don't already, and expanding who you can can weather with, and who can be your symbiotic mycelial network and uplift each other and share space with I'm thinking about the next two to four years, and I'm just like, what exactly are you can we get a little more granular into, like, the plan side of things, like, you're talking about the midterms? Oh, yeah. Like, can we get Yeah, I think it would be good to just touch on that a little bit. So let me, let me talk a little bit about that. Yeah. So the Republicans won a trifecta. What that means is they won the presidency, they won a majority in the House and they won a majority in the Senate. It's like the worst case scenario for in terms of their ability to move the federal government, because they have the executive as well as the legislative branch. And you know, they actually have a majority in the Supreme Court, but that when you look a little bit deeper into their trifecta, they have a very, very slim majority in the House of Representatives. Why is that important? For two reasons, it's going to be really hard for them to govern. So this is, you know, when I say, Look, they're not magicians. You know, Trump isn't a king. They their plans aren't assailable. It's inassailable. It's important to look at their their weak points. They have different factions in the House of Representatives. They all, they all don't get along right. And so it's actually historically, they've been really hard for this virgin, this kind of Maga version of the Republican Party, to govern together, because when it comes to the basic ideas of what they should be passing into law, they really diverge. They can't lose any votes. They can't lose any votes Now, not all of them, not all of the Republicans, won in very, very red, super, super like Maga districts, some of them. Won really close elections, which is why, you know, elections matter, right? Some of them won really close elections. And those representatives what's more important to them if they want to keep their job, what's more important than whatever Donald Trump is telling them is their ability to stay in office, which means in two years, they have to figure out how they could make an argument to the people of their district that they should get a majority of the votes right. That means they need to make an argument with people other than Republicans, right, which means it's going to be hard for every single one of those members to go along with the really, really, really far right? Really, really loony stuff, yeah? And that is a vulnerability, right? Because many of them are going to Yeah, and starting now, it's our job all over the country, but especially in those, those places where those Republicans are vulnerable to tell a story, a true story about how extreme, how extreme this version of the Republican Party is, and why their representative is a party to that. And the representative is going to try to tell a story about how they're moderate, how they are a common sense, you know, solid, moderate, you know we, you know we have that problem in you know, we're filming in New York. There were a number of members last last election in New York that were arguing that we did a pretty good job of getting them out of office, because we told the truth about who they are, not all of them, but most of them. So our job over the next two years is to get that done so that we will be in a position, hopefully in 2026 where the Republicans no longer have the legislature and the executive branch, where their majority in the House will cease, which means they can't pass really bad bills. That's really important, and it's just one step, but it's an important step, and it's something that we could actually do the and the thing that that we should know is that historically, the the party in power during midterms, which is the the election in between presidential elections, that party in power has a hard time keeping all of its seats, and so if the Republicans only have a three seat majority, yeah, you know, we that the you know, it actually looks like all right, if we tell a compelling story, yeah, that is true about how it's us versus the billionaires, right? And how we need to come together, all of us versus the billionaires and get these these folks out of office, we could imagine, in two years, being able to knock them out of their legislative majority so they can't do harm through Congress. That is a concrete thing we could do. But I want to zoom out a little bit so, because to me, when we talk about the plan, the thing that I shared isn't like 100% rocket science, and the map of those districts that are marginal, give or take one or two is the same. Whoever you are, whatever the strategist is, what I want to focus on is, if you'll indulge, indulge me a little bit. Yeah. I was knocking on doors in North Philly, and I encountered a woman, she was like, in her 20s, black woman in this like working class to to working poor black community. And she spent a good amount of time with me on her block, and I really appreciate her, you know, giving as much time as she did. And we were talking about, you know, her vote choice, and I was trying to convince her, like, Yeah, listen, this is a big election. And, and, you know, she said something that really stuck with me. She said some something like on her block, on that block alone, more than one, multiple people were no longer there because of gun violence. And it's at the point where for her and other people in her community, like they don't even cry anymore when they learn of news of another neighbor losing their lives. And she was just like, I can't tell you if, maybe I'll vote if I get time, but I can't tell you that my vote's gonna matter, or any of this stuff matters, or, you know, like, I'll probably vote for that lady if I do it. But like, I don't know if her getting that job is gonna matter or not. When it comes to what me and my my neighbors are dealing with, I. Yes, and so what I heard there, it, it haunts me, yeah, because, you know modern electioneering, and like, you know how, how much, how much turf you cut in one district versus another, and you know how many canvassers go here, whatever, there's slight differences based on the strategies you might talk to or, you know, how much you spend on digital ads versus field you know, when I say, feel like door knocking and stuff like that, but the real question in terms of our plan and our duty has to run right through the provocations that she was sharing with me, yeah? Which is, to me, something much deeper, something spiritual, even, yeah, right, which I think we've lost when we look at the party experience when we look at the Republican the Democratic Party, this thin experience that almost amounts to two different marketing schemes, right? When you think of the billions of dollars that were raised and spent this past cycle, mainly on digital ads and television ads, and you know, paid, when I say paid fields, like paid people that you don't know personally knocking on your door, you know, a few weeks before Election Day, all those things have its place, but they amount to something that actually feels spiritually hollow and doesn't in any satisfying way, deal with the existential questions that people like her and her neighbors all throughout the country are dealing with. And so when I talk about the plan, I'm talking about a lot of things. So the proximal stuff that we need to do between now and, you know, two years from now, in order to to kick Republicans out of the House of Representatives. But I'm also talking about over the next decade plus, how we insist on putting people like her at the center of everything that we do, and and reclaiming a politics that is anything but hollow, that is vibrant and connected and and real and present in her lives and in the lives of others like her. Can you share more about how you and WFP are working to sort of do that on a daily basis, and how people can help when they want to because I know folks, I want to get involved with WFP, and I want to hear more about how we can get absolutely so we do. We really believe in year round engagement. When I talk about the thin experience that many people have of political parties, most people don't hear from political parties until a few months before the election, or maybe a few weeks before the election, like if you're if you're in the Get out the vote category, which tends to be where most black voters are, as it relates to Democrats, then you're not hearing from you're not hearing from them. You're not getting mail from them. They're not knocking on your door. Knocking on your door until after Labor Day. Yeah, right, which is why so many black people are like, we feel like, All right, we get the Republicans absolutely are white nationalists. You know how to tell us? Like, we know better than you, right? We know how to discern who's a racist or not. That is a racist institution, but the Democrats, you are taking us for granted because we're not hearing from you, right? So we don't believe in to ascribe to the that that type of politics or you get the every four years we'd come around during election season, right? Type of thing, right, which we also think is very destabilizing, right? Totally. We seek to build a year around politics, and we seek to build politics that look at democracy, and we we try to get people to go out and vote, but look at democracy as much more than voting. Yeah, right, and so we're in New York. Just the other day, we held a mass rally in defense of loud and proud, in defense of our immigrant neighbors, because the mayor. Mayor of New York is acquiescing to the Trump administration saying, like, yeah, you want to go to you. You want to send your your agents into schools, and it's go right ahead. Now again, I don't know as a fact, but I have to imagine that it might have something to do with the fact that our sitting mayor has some legal problems, yeah, and that Trump could choose to do something about or not, right? But again, I allegedly that might be what's going on here. Yeah. So, so we organized our members and our elected officials and city council and state legislature in order to take on the mayor, and we held a rally and and and in the days before and after, we're on the phones, yeah, right, and in places like Philly, for example, we have a coalition that is or that organized in many ways successfully in order to challenge a really problematic Chinatown redevelopment. Because, you know, cities are have this abusive relationship with their sports teams, and, you know, the billionaires that are attached to them, and they were seeking to, you know, gentrify a historic community in a way that was just basically a handout to these billionaires. And we pushed back against that, and we saw it for what it was, yeah, and that was not simply us voting. That was after the votes Kendra Brooks and Nicholas of worker our city council working with a coalition of labor unions and grassroots organizations and activists, day in and day out, making it plain and it looks like I just came back from in California. I came back from the Bay Area, where we have 100 elected officials who are WFP endorsed elected officials on the local level, all the way to the legislature, where they were meeting together and they were thinking about the governing agenda. So it means a lot of different things, and it also is us. You know, after the election, it was me again in Philly with a bunch of just it was a sacred space of black women who wanted to come together as the 92% who understood, understood the assignment where they wanted to break bread together, and they wanted to build together, and they wanted to bear witness to the journey that they're on together. And you know, I was the only male body person that that they allowed in that space. But that's also political work. That is the work of a political party, right? It's a lot of things, right? It is in many ways, yes, voting, you know, going to city council passing bills like the moratorium on evictions that we passed in Philly with Kendra Brooks and and eventually Nicholas O'Rourke, who also passed this legislation preventing algorithms for from artificially upping people's rents or or chi ASE in in New York City Council passing legislation you know, if you're a renter in New York, you know, preventing them from adding these, like, totally onerous fees. So that's not going to have, yeah, the broker fee, even though, if you don't go through a broker, he's still paying the broker fee. So, you know, it's that, and it's and it's creating those sacred spaces where we're just being together. And that is the work of a political party too. So we try to do all those things. We try to govern together, vote and campaign together, build community together, organize together, and weave all those things together as like a coherent party experience. I think that there's a lot that you have said that is gonna stick with me for a really long time, definitely the spiritually hollow nature of the present and far right wing politics and in many cases, democratic as well as you're talking about. And so this is really beautiful to hear. The good news is, though that you know, in in nature and science, but also in politics, vacuums must get filled. Yes, so what are we going to fill that that hollow space with? Yeah. It's exciting. That's a creative project. Yes, so I'm looking forward to that. Yes, yes, exactly. It is a creative project. I also have been thinking about all the ways that when you say the story, and framing it in that way is very powerful to talk about the fact that we are telling a story, and we have to tell a specific type of story, a specific type of way, and owning the story, and how many people are so not only needed, but totally essential for that story to evolve and shift and change, and all of the creativity that we might not be thinking like, Oh, if I'm somebody who's creatively inclined, or I'm a creative professional, or I just think in ways that, you know, tap into a creative energy which is everywhere and doesn't, doesn't mean arts necessarily at all, yeah, but just tapping into that in in the shifting of the story, is something that I think about a lot, which is really powerful. I also want to talk if, if we may, I want to pivot a little bit to your story. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Like, like, I'm just like, how did you get here? That's sort of my question. And, you know, I have questions here that I could ask that go through these points in your life, right? Hurricane Sandy, how it has impacted you beginning to organize as a teenager growing up, you know, to working class Caribbean parents in New York, and then your involvement for with movement for black lives, and all these things that you've done. But I, I kind of just want to give you the opportunity to answer the question, yeah. I guess today I'll answer in this, yeah, yeah. Today, because I feel like every time I answer it, I have a different understanding of it, right? You know? Yeah, it's kind of like free therapy in some way. Tell me today, okay, how you feeling so, you know, let me just preface it by a theme that I brought up earlier, how I believe that despair and isolation are projects of the right wing and projects of the owner class. And if you notice, all of their arguments seek to remove everything from its context, right? So like give you any example, if we're talking about a police shooting, right, they just, they don't want to talk about, no, the context, right at all. They don't want to talk. They just want to. They want to talk about that one individual and that one pilot, yes, yes. So it's like they do with everything, yeah, right. If you want to talk about a, let's talk about a extreme weather event, right? They don't want to talk about the context, no, right? They just want to talk about that one event, right? Because if you talk about the context, then you have to talk about climate change, and you have to talk about capital and talk about extractive industries, and you have to talk about our power, and, you know, so and they get it so fast. They own that story so fast. Yes, right. How do they do that? Yeah, so quickly. I mean, they're, they're so calculated. Well, they they understand the assignment. Yeah, they understand that it's gonna land with folks if it's that hyper specific thing, yes. And how are we gonna ground that? And when we talk about the story and talk about climate change and talk about the fires and everything that has contributed, how do we get people in that specific way? This is a question that I'm asking myself a lot. But can you continue? Yeah, so I don't think about myself as an individual, right? I have a context, yeah, you know. And there's a way that people talk about history as being like the individual heroic actions, usually of a man, and like the things that they do, right it? But the way that I think about history is that every individual historical figure is actually in the context of a particular time, place and condition, and in the context of a community, and in the context of a whole set of relationships like MLK isn't really just MLK and okay, is in the context of all these other things, right? And it actually when we start talking about ourselves like that. Yeah, it is like a very like, intensely ego gratifying, de contextualizing of yourself, right? Like, there's all these self made people. It's like, well, yourself didn't make that road you walked on right yourself didn't invent the language that you speak right yourself didn't invent the culture that you found yourself in, right? You did not fall out of a coconut tree. You didn't fall out of a coconut tree. You did it Yeah, like, straight up, yes. And so Eddie, I say all that to say, you know, my, um, my dad was born in 1939 in rural Grenada. His his mom, my grandmother. I. I basically grew up along she was a young person when she had him, and grew up alongside of him. My mom was born in the 40s, in the mid 40s in in rural Trinidad and Grenada. She had like, I think 10. Yeah, 1010, brothers and sisters and my grandmother, my mom's mom, she would hustle and move the family from one hustle to another. There was a point where all the kids were recycling, all the kids were and the hustle that she she did that that led to me was leaving Trinidad and Tobago, Tobago to come to the United States and find work as a domestic worker in the homes of other people, leaving her her kids and taking care of the family and kids of other people, sending remittance home, which is a common story for a lot of a lot of migrants, a lot of immigrants, and was my grandmother's story. And she she lived Monday through Friday in people's homes, and on the weekend she didn't have a home. And it was through the generosity of somebody in the community who noticed that she was, you know, kind of hanging out by herself in this park, and asked her some questions. This woman who's still alive, somebody who, you know, I actually bumped into a few weeks ago, who was curious enough to ask my didn't just treat my grandmother like she was just part of the scenery, and discovered quickly that my grandmother really didn't have a place to stay on the weekends and and invited her in. It's through her generosity and through that community that led to my grandmother getting her feet under her and hustling and eventually finding an apartment, eventually getting one of my aunts over to this country. So now they're in the apartment, and then eventually my grandfather, so three of them in the apartment, and they're hustling together to kind of cobble together everything that they have and sending remittance home to the other kids who are like, you know, the older kids are parenting the younger kids, where she was able to buy a home, and then that led to a set of a whole like chain reaction that led to my parents eventually coming to this country, and me being born. And in the context of now all these aunties and uncles and all these cousins who all lived in this one place, one home, and eventually were able to branch out. And so, you know, I was born 1979 which is like the beginning of the new neoliberal era, right? And I was born in the context of this community that really cared for me and loved me. I sat many times at my grandmother's feet as she made meatballs and told me stories, and she would look, you know, math gets updated every generation, so she's like, how what is this? You know, she tried to help me with my homework and what I learned at her table and what I learned through my my parents, is that we are, are a bigger we like we are a bigger we. There is no just me floating around, that we're actually all interconnected. I learned that that was applied on me, and so that is the basis of my politics. That's why I've taken to organizing in the way that I think I take to organizing. My first organizing lessons weren't learned in the in some disconnected way. Was kind of learned through just witnessing like I saw. My parents bring people in, my grandmother bring people in, and these are humble, working class people, and whatever they have, they share. Yeah, right, and so I understand the power of sharing. You don't share when you have excess, you simply share. You just simply share with whatever you have. And there's something really powerful about that interaction. And so that my understanding of family is not just the people you're related to, but the people that you choose. And so my organizing practice follows that. And then, of course, like my parents, they were in unions, that was really important. So I saw the power of being part of union, you know, 1199 had a strike when I was younger. My dad is from Grenada, which, you know, Grenada has a really powerful story of 1979 again, the year of my birth, the new jewel movement, these revolutionaries were able to spring Grenada. Into this sort of Renaissance, you know, until it was tragically cut down. And, you know, the United States invaded Grenada. So all these things influenced me. I remember my dad, you know, after the the move bombing in Philadelphia, saying, always remember the move. Always remember that. And the stories that they told about their upbringing, but also because they're coming from countries that are newly independent countries, so they're sharing all these stories about the African world in general. So I feel very connected to black people all over and feel very concerned about the freedom and liberation of black people in the United States, but just black people everywhere. And I feel like in some ways, connected to those stories. So I felt a deep connection to the South African liberation movement and the anti apartheid movement. And as a young person, you know the same way, for whatever reason, in the same way that some young people are, like, I want to be a fireman, or I want to be a firefighter, or I want to whatever. I wanted to be a freedom fighter, and I didn't know that you could, like, have a job or whatever, but that's kind of what I wanted to do. And, you know, through experiences growing up like facing institutional racism and knowing it the minute I felt it like feeling the shame of my first grade teacher separate me and you know, because I grew up in a multiracial working class suburb of New York, Long Beach, I remember like yesterday, you know, being tracked to remedial math and remedial reading and the shame and that goes along with being tracked, but then using that, that individual study, in order to excel. Like it was a great environment for me and but I understood just somewhere deep inside that some injustice was taking place because, like, I wasn't tested into that. It was just kind of like, and then, you know, when I'm in remedial I was like, everybody else is basically black or Latino and and then there's the gifted classes. But if you go to the gifted classes, just nothing but white kids, right? And facing that, facing, you know, growing up in the 80s. This is like the crack era, right? And getting constantly pulled over by the police, eventually facing, you know, false or false arrest. You know, was, you know, by the time I was 20, I was, I can't tell you, many times I've been pulled over by the police, falsely arrested, falsely jailed. It builds an appetite to want to do something about it. And so I think, you know, again, I am my mother and father son. I am my grandmother's grandchild. I am very much a part of that very close family network. And I am a direct or indirect recipient of the downside of neoliberalism and the downside of these abstract policies that actually visit violence and trauma and pain on real people and real communities and real families. You know my mother, she worked in Far Rockaway on the front lines of the drug war because she was a detox nurse. So I would hear those stories every single day. So I am a product of all those things, and I can't think of a better reason to get up every day, but to create conditions where people like my mom and my dad and my grandmother or the students of today won't have to experience the same feelings that I had to work through going through those changes. So, yeah, I feel, I feel this intimate sort of sense of palpable anger around educational apartheid. So when you ask me that question, I don't think I had a choice but, but to do these things, and I don't feel like I have a choice, and I don't think the choice is just simply mine. I don't really, yeah, I am an individual, and, you know, my individual likes and dislikes and passions and whatever I deem are my skills matter, but also who my people are, I think, and how they've raised me and their values and their story, I think, ultimately, is why I'm talking to you. Thank you, MO. Thank you so much. Thank you. Okay. Thank you so much for listening, everybody. I hope that you enjoyed that episode as much as I did, and I will say also, please share these episodes with your friends, with your family, with your coworkers. Review them on Apple and Spotify. If you've benefited or enjoyed or learned something from this episode, from other episodes, you mean a lot to us. If you did all that and always feel free to check out our website and we'll see you next time. Thanks, everybody. You.