Can Protestors Manufacture a Tipping Point? - The Assignment with Audie Cornish - Podcast on CNN Audio

CNN

2 days ago

Protest Noise
00:00:00
No more deportation! Just us go!
Audie Cornish
00:00:05
It's been about a full week of protests and demonstrations against the ongoing immigration raids in L.A.
Protestors
00:00:11
Get the f*** out of here! You guys are bad people! Period!
Audie Cornish
00:00:17
'All of this ahead of President Trump's planned military parade on the streets of Washington, D.C. This weekend. It's the largest military parade the city's seen in decades, complete with dozens of tanks, about 7,000 soldiers, and a price tag potentially in the tens of millions of dollars. Now this celebration falls on the Army's 250th birthday and the president's birthday. No surprise, it's an event that's also drawn its share of opposition. In fact, in cities across the country, organizers are planning a No Kings protest. It's being billed as a nationwide day of defiance and the biggest single-day anti-Trump protest since the start of his second term.
President Donald Trump
00:01:01
And we're going to be celebrating big on Saturday. We're going have a lot of... And if there's any protest that wants to come out, they will be met with very big force. By the way, for those people that want to protest, they're going be met very big force. And I haven't even heard about a protest. But, you know, this is people that hate our country. But they will met with a very heavy force.
Audie Cornish
00:01:22
Now organizers started working on this long before the response to ICE out in LA, but I wanted to talk to them about what they're thinking now.
Leah Greenberg
00:01:32
'We are working very closely with our folks to make sure that people are really trained and careful around security, around safety, around de-escalation, clear on non-violent principles. We want people to bring their kids. We want to bring people to their dogs. We want create, in these moments, a sense of community and support and care for each other.
Audie Cornish
00:01:52
'Leah Greenberg is a co-founder and co-executive director of the progressive group, The Indivisible Project. How are they preparing? Are they changing their strategy in light of President Trump's willingness to use military force on US soil? I'm Audie Cornish, and this is The Assignment.
Audie Cornish
00:02:14
'So just for people to understand, Indivisible has been around for a few years now, going back to the first Trump administration. Can you talk about, just so we have a sense of a tiny bit of that history, because I understand that in your mind, you had just experienced the kind of Tea Party protests, you were a legislative staffer, and all of a sudden you have this right-wing populist movement that spawned not just protests then, but senators and lawmakers and energy that politically we all live with now. What was it that you saw then that struck you?
Leah Greenberg
00:02:55
'Well, so my husband, who's also my co-executive director at Invisible Night, we were congressional staffers during the early Obama years, which meant that we saw both the triumphs, like passing the Affordable Care Act, and the real frustrations of a legislative agenda that was bogged down by ferocious local opposition led by this movement of the Tea Party. And we got a lot of up close and personal interactions with those folks as congressional staffors. In 2016, when Donald Trump was elected and when we were suddenly watching everything that we had ever worked on and on the verge of being swept away by this incoming administration, as we were watching this rise of white Christian nationalism and authoritarianism, and as we are frankly seeing a democratic party that did not seem prepared to deal with any of it, we kind of like went back to those lessons. We were seeing this massive surge of people looking for answers for what to do. We were getting asked by previously non-political friends, like, how do I organize? Can I do this? Can I to that? And we decided that we were gonna take the lessons that we had learned from our own interactions with the Tea Party from their model. We were gonna to take out the racism and the bigotry and the violence, and we were going to turn it into a how to guide for people all over the country who are trying to figure out what is my power? How do I organized? How do make my voice heard to stop this?
Audie Cornish
00:04:14
Trump menace. What is it that was specific about what the tea party air quotes had done? Because it also, I remember covering it, it started chaotically. Despite everyone's sort of determination that, oh the Koch brothers had astroturfed this and this was somehow a movement that was just like completely planned, in a lot of ways it wasn't. It was a coalition of fractious smaller groups that came together or maybe were backed by donors. But it was messy at first and it came together into something. What was it that you experienced that you wanted to replicate? Well, I first, I think...
Leah Greenberg
00:04:50
'Absolutely right about that. It was messy and it was organic. I think that the lessons are actually capable of being adapted from either side. The Tea Party took much of their own organizing theory from Saul Alinsky, right? So we see the kind of like original left-wing community organizing getting repurposed by the Tea Party in their own theory of how to organize locally and then kind of pulling from what we had seen about how they operated.
Audie Cornish
00:05:15
The reason why I'm asking that is because over the last decade or two, there were Occupy Wall Street, there was the Black Lives Matter mass movement, never mind the prior few years of backlashes that were city to city to policing. There have been all kinds of progressive street protest movements in the last few years and arguably none have been as successful as the Tea Party. Even indivisible, out raise the Tea Party, you know, and fundraising for a time, like, I don't have an Occupy Wall Street Senator, so to speak, you know, I don t have, there isn't a Ted Cruz and a Mike Lee or any of those folks that have permeated the politics. And so I'm trying to understand, based on what you learned from them, what do you think a movement should look like? And what do you consider success?
Leah Greenberg
00:06:10
So what I tell people when I'm trying to recruit is that Indivisible is a movement for people who understand that politics is too important to be left up to the politicians and understand that when we come together and when we understand our own power, then we actually have far more than we think.
Audie Cornish
00:06:25
And you tell them, if we do this, and if you do this with me, this is what we can achieve. What is the this?
Leah Greenberg
00:06:33
What we can achieve is going to change based on the moment, right? We were born out of a moment of reaction. And so the initial conversation that we had with our folks, the initial guide we had that went viral and led to the formation of thousands of invisible groups was really about how you organize sustainable local infrastructure and then deploy a set of tactics that are designed to use leverage in relation to your elected officials right?
Audie Cornish
00:06:55
So how you get people to leave their house, get together in groups, and take concrete, measurable action.
Leah Greenberg
00:07:02
That's right. That's gonna change over time, right? Once you got communities of people together who are in motion, they found a ton of other things to do that were not in the original Indivisible Guide, right.
Audie Cornish
00:07:13
And they had their own goals and their own ideas.
Leah Greenberg
00:07:16
Absolutely, absolutely. And so, and we think that's good, right, because fundamentally, you know, we're not gonna get to scale on the kind of collective people power that we need in this country via nonprofits funded by grants, right we actually need to have.
Audie Cornish
00:07:30
'Right, but the Tea Party found a way to focus, so that's what I'm asking about, finding a way to focus when you have lots of little groups. Sometimes, as a reporter, when I'm covering an organized protest, not a riot or a response, I notice there are so many different signs for so many different things. And as a result, sometimes you're not sure what you're looking at. You have a vague sense that it's left and left-leaning, but you're like, I don't know what they want in this moment.
Leah Greenberg
00:07:59
You know, that can be a challenge. And especially in a moment like this, when just quite candidly, I could spend the rest of the conversation here just listing the number of harms and horrors that people are experiencing as a result of this administration. And so it is definitely one of the challenges around how do you maintain clarity about the core meta story that you are telling?
Audie Cornish
00:08:20
Core meta story. Say that again. What value is that? The core meta story?
Leah Greenberg
00:08:26
Well, I mean, humans understand the world through stories and frames much more than they understand it through policy positions, right? The right wing has a core story. It is the bad government is more focused on delivering for an other, sometimes a racialized other, sometimes a gender or sexuality based other, but some kind of other group than they are on you and they are hurting you in order to give benefits for immigrants for. Like trans people for people, right? This is the core story that the right wing uses and they plug everything that they're doing into some version of that story in order to distract from the fact that they are, in fact, a political movement dedicated to extracting wealth from the government to deliver it back to their donors. Now, on the left, like that core story can get harder to tell, right, like we are trying to construct something. Right now.
Audie Cornish
00:09:17
Right now, I mean honestly, what is it?
Leah Greenberg
00:09:20
'What it is right now. Well, the core story that we want people to understand right now, and I'm going to be clear, this is about the moment that we are in, not about the long-term and aspirational vision that we collectively need to build together, is this administration, this regime, they are out of control. They are wrecking the things that we care about, whether that is our services, whether that are our rights, whether it is the things that may give us the ability to live safe and healthy and dignified lives in this country. And they are doing it to benefit themselves. It's those three pieces, right? That they are seizing power for themselves, they are taking the things that we care about and they're doing it all to benefit themself. And that they know that this is not popular, they know this is the kind of stuff that will get checked in a democratic and accountable society. And so they're knocking out the checks and the balances that would normally stop someone from seizing power, implementing policies that hurt people and doing it benefit themselves
Audie Cornish
00:10:15
'What's interesting to me is that, that story you've just told is not different from the story you might've told during the first Trump administration. In the second Trump administration, they're just taking everything further. So there's a lot to unpack there. Number one, second Trump Administration. Despite your organizing, despite your fundraising, despite the spread of sort of an anti-Trump non-profit infrastructure. He came to power again with the support of swing voters. And number two, the things you are now asking people to turn out for, they've heard and have been hearing for a long time. So what do you feel that you learned from the first time around?
Leah Greenberg
00:11:01
We understood our job as the folks who were building this grassroots infrastructure, who were organizing. What we wanted to do was build the kind of popular opposition that would get Donald Trump out of office and then achieve the kind systemic reforms and accountability that would prevent him from getting back into power. And our movement was really aligned on the fact that we collectively were not, you know, our end goal was not getting him out. It was actually getting voting rights. It was getting structural democracy reform. It was seeing accountability for the perpetrators of January 6th. We were not the only deciders on what got on the agenda and how it moved.
Audie Cornish
00:11:39
In the Biden years. But as a protest, go back to that list, because those things didn't come to pass in a lot of way, right? The voting rights thing you brought up, but even January 6, as all of them have now been pardoned. Yeah, it sounds like you identified specifically the things that didn't really pan out, if they were your even personal goals for the organization.
Leah Greenberg
00:12:02
Well, I would say they were collectible movement goals. I think that there was actually a very clear thread that we were pulling out from across people who were organizing throughout this time that they got activated by Donald Trump, but they recognized very quickly that Donald Trump was a symptom, not a cause, right? That he was a manifestation of broader political forces around polarization, around kind of the longer term struggle for democracy in this country. And so there was there was broad support for a kind of like we actually can't just get him out We have to like fix the system in ways that makes democracy deliver for other people
Audie Cornish
00:12:36
The reason why I'm asking all of these questions is because for a time when I was covering the South, the story that I sort of came to understand about the civil rights movement, the black civil rights movements of the late 60s and the moment when that became more multiracial is there were moments where protests could turn violent. There were moments when nonviolent protests was met with violence and that that was The goal, right? Before we had viral moments, we had people say to the Children's March in Birmingham, you may have to put yourself in harm's way so people understand what, quote unquote, we are dealing with here with segregationists in the South. You're going to be harmed doing that. I don't know if people are prepared to do all that today. And so what does that mean? For inviting people out into the streets to protest, like this weekend, when all week they've been watching on the news, a government that is prepared to respond violently.
Leah Greenberg
00:13:48
'Well, it's a question we take enormously seriously, and also it's the question where we understand the answer cannot be to simply go along in advance, right? You know, we've got about 1900 events around the country. We have been doing intensive safety and deescalation training, both for hosts and making trainings available for attendees, including traditional know your rights, but also more intensive around, you know, how do you handle various kinds of scenarios? And escalations in the event of law enforcement, in the even of counter protests, in the events of agitators. We take those responsibilities to prepare people to have these events enormously seriously. And so we're in regular contact and support with the organizers of these events all over the country. Now, what I would say in terms of, how do you talk to people about risk in this moment is we can't, we're not gonna tell people that there's no risk. We're not going to tell people there's not reason to be concerned. And what we are going to say is that we are collectively going to be more powerful together. We are collectively going to embrace that commitment to nonviolence, right? We understand that it's gonna be really, really important for us collectively to show up in a nonviolent, as a non-violent movement. And we are working very closely with our folks to make sure that people are really trained and careful around security, around safety, around deescalation, clear on nonviolent principles. And we think that's a really important part of creating the conditions for bringing out as many people as possible.
Audie Cornish
00:15:17
'I'm talking with Leah Greenberg. She's a co-founder and co-executive director of the progressive group, The Indivisible Project.
Audie Cornish
00:15:25
I know that there are a lot of progressive activists who look at the choices that the Biden administration made when they came to office and were frustrated, right? Like that they somehow didn't carry forward some of the energy that had been in the streets. What's one thing you regret or you wish you did differently during that time?
Leah Greenberg
00:15:47
'Yeah, I've thought about this a lot, and I have a really simple answer, which is that I think that after January 6th, everyone should have recognized that the most important thing that we could do was meaningful accountability for perpetrators and that that would require some political capital. That would require some reprioritization that-
Audie Cornish
00:16:09
The average person, what do you mean by that? Because we know investigators went after them.
Leah Greenberg
00:16:13
So what is it that you regret? So I think that there were decisions that we made as an advocacy community to prioritize the legislative agenda, right? We needed to go full force campaigning for a stimulus and relief package. We needed it to go, full force fighting for voting rights and structural Marx reform, full force for the Build Back Better package. And there was kind of a perception, I think for many folks, that the kind of political capital required to go. Fast on prosecutions and to really prioritize them in a way that the Merrick Garland Justice Department didn't, to prioritize a meaningful effort at a second impeachment, et cetera, that those were distractions from the ability to move key policy priorities. And I think that—
Audie Cornish
00:16:52
So people said, let the law enforcement guys deal with January 6th. We don't need to spend time protesting....them.
Leah Greenberg
00:17:00
Yeah, I mean, I think I think that collectively, you know, and again, oh, and I say this, I mean, me, I means everybody who made decisions about what we were talking to activists about and I mean democratic leadership. I think collectively, we needed to recognize that part of how you pull a democracy out of this, this descent into authoritarianism is you actually create some meaningful consequences for people who have attempted a violent coup. And the fact that we didn't do that. Created the conditions for Donald Trump to slink off, kind of lick his wounds for a little while, and for his movement to regroup and to reassert itself. And so fundamentally, I think it's a lesson that we all collectively have to take about the balance of what is necessary to ultimately pull out of a democratic backslide.
Audie Cornish
00:17:49
That's interesting in the context of the way the administration is now using the word insurrectionist to describe people in L.A. on the street, right? Yeah, in a way you're saying that that word doesn't have the same consequences it might have.
Leah Greenberg
00:18:04
Well, I think there's an enormously painful irony to the fact that Donald Trump, when asked to call out any kind of support for people who were under attack in the Capitol on January 6th, was notably unwilling to do so compared to his willingness to send in the National Guard over the objections of literally everybody in California in order to instigate his preferred brand of manufactured chaos.
Audie Cornish
00:18:29
But I want to follow up on your idea, because you just said something I'd never heard before, which is you said we, as a movement, you use your political capital on legislation, big legislative goals, and not punishing and accountability for the actions of folks out of that movement on January 6th, and that maybe that would have been a more valuable place to spend your time. Am I hearing that correctly?
Leah Greenberg
00:18:57
'I think there were certainly prosecutions of some of the people who were actually in the mob on January 6th. There was not a high level prioritization of accountability for the senior leadership who egged that on and who refused to intervene. When we look at what is the theory of the case around how democracies emerged from period of authoritarianism. Part of it has to be accountability for the people who have broken the law, who have attempted to seize power extra-legally. And there was a decision, and I think it's relatively similar to the decisions that were made after the Bush administration around Guantanamo too, there was the decision to kind of turn the page and move forward and not to prioritize the kind of accountability that would have meaningfully shifted the political landscape as of 2023, as of 2024.
Audie Cornish
00:19:54
So what do you wish you did differently?
Leah Greenberg
00:19:56
I wish I had said that at the time. I wish that we had collectively as a broader movement been willing to say, we can't simply turn a page. We actually have to address what just happened. People, these are the things that have happened and we can simply keep moving.
Audie Cornish
00:20:12
To me, it seems like you're in a new landscape. You're in the landscape where more people have actually turned out to protest in a lot of ways in some cities. They've had that experience maybe in the last seven, eight years in some major cities. So why would they do it again? What is it that you're telling them now? One of the reasons why they may be feeling dispirited is not just because of the opposition, so to speak, not just of how the government is reacting, but because they actually feel like there was no significant change on the issues they cared about from those past protests.
Leah Greenberg
00:20:48
'Yeah, so here's how I would talk about it. I'm going to say, I'm gonna do two versions of this, right? Okay, so I think we have a short-term crisis, which is that there is a would-be authoritarian who's rapidly running through every page of the authoritarian playbook, and we have to halt the democratic collapse that we are seeing. And then I think, we have longer-term crises, which is we have have a democracy that actually delivers for people in a way that they are invested in it because they experience it as something that is making their life better. That was not a test that this democracy passed in 2024, right? We know that we lost folks, not because they were like all in on Donald Trump. He has his core base, but we lost some set of folks who were simply so frustrated with the status quo, who had experienced the last four years as not what they needed, not what their, not making their own personal lives better, and who did not experience appeals to institutions or appeals to kind of abstract ideas about protecting democracy as relevant to. Or as more persuasive, then simply it's time for a change. And so we have a long-term challenge, which is about how do you actually break through that level of cynicism, and that's gotta be involved like actually having the systems and the structures for democracy that can deliver for people meaningfully in a way that they feel in their lives.
Audie Cornish
00:22:01
It sounds like you're needing the people who might most believe in that era of invincibility to break that spell themselves. Or is it your visibility that helps break that spell, that helps make people feel less like, well, this is how things are.
Leah Greenberg
00:22:19
'I think it's going to be a lot of things, right? Like breaking the aura of inevitability involves a thousand acts of individual courage or organizing or non-cooperation, right. It looks like people showing up to protest Elon Musk's actions at Tesla dealerships. It looks like students at Georgetown organizing a spreadsheet of big law collaborators and saying clear of these people. It looks like a boycott of Target for being one of the core corporations that threw out its DEI policies, in order to do the administration's bidding, it's going to look like a bunch of different societal, individual, and organized reactions that collectively create the conditions for courage across our country. It's going involve a lot of people doing something that the regime does not want them to do or not doing something it wants them to do. We won't even know the names of everybody who has done that across government, across institutions, across our own movements, but that is what it ultimately takes to start to build back conditions to recover democratic function.
Audie Cornish
00:23:25
What are your hopes for the Monday after this weekend? What would you like to see, and do you see this moment as a turning point?
Leah Greenberg
00:23:35
I would like us to get a surprising number of people in a surprising number of places out and I think it's worth noting that we've seen obviously very, very large protests in, in blue states and cities, but we're also seeing really significant turnout in places that you or I would think of like as quite red and quite conservative. I would for this to be understood as a moment in which Donald Trump attempted to send tanks to Washington DC, attempted to deploy troops to California and was collectively and roundly rejected by Americans for his fascist theatrics, for his attempts to harm our communities. I would like us to collectively harness the kind of political opposition that forces them to back off what they are doing to our immigrant communities and our immigrant neighbors. We want them to recognize that they have to back down from what they're doing. And then we wanna continue to build the conditions for courage across our society so that we mount that broader pushback against authoritarianism.
Audie Cornish
00:24:38
'That was Leah Greenberg, co-founder and co-executive director of The Indivisible Project. They are organizing No King's Day protests this upcoming weekend.
00:24:52
The Assignment is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Grace Walker and Lori Galarreta with assistance from Jesse Remedios and Madeleine Thompson. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez. Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Lickteig is executive producer of CNN audio. We had support from Dan Bloom, Haley Thomas, Alex Manassari, Robert Mathers, Jon Dionora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Anderus, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow.