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The Amazing Movement Against Data Centers, plus How to be a Dissident / Start Making Sense · The Nation Podcasts

0:08
[SPEAKER_02]: From the nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense.
0:11
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm John Weiner.
0:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Later in the hour, how to be a dissident in an age of fear.
0:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Army Fields Meyer has thought a lot about that.
0:20
[SPEAKER_02]: He's co-author of the new book, On Courage.
0:23
[SPEAKER_02]: But first, there's a new kind of mass politics in America.
0:28
[SPEAKER_02]: David Wallace Wells will explain in a minute.
0:33
[SPEAKER_02]: Is the resistance to data centers a new kind of mass politics in America?
0:39
[SPEAKER_02]: David Wallace Wells has been thinking about that.
0:42
[SPEAKER_02]: He's a writer for the New York Times opinion pages, a columnist for the New York Times magazine, an author of the unforgettable book, The Uninhabitable Earth.
0:52
[SPEAKER_02]: David Wallace Wells, welcome to the program.
0:55
[SPEAKER_03]: Great to be here.
0:55
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks for having me.
0:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I have to confess that I ignored the protests against data centers when they emerged a few months ago.
1:03
[SPEAKER_02]: I thought of them just as the latest outbursts of Nimbi politics, not in my backyard, seeking to preserve an America that doesn't exist for a lot of people.
1:12
[SPEAKER_02]: And I thought the challenges would be easily resolved
1:16
[SPEAKER_02]: building data centers and places that welcome to economic growth maybe I thought a few candidates looking for an issue would demand concessions from the companies and maybe they get some minor ones but Microsoft and Amazon web services are just too powerful for a handful of towns to resist so I was feeling
1:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Pretty uninterested in those protests.
1:38
[SPEAKER_02]: You've written that you felt sort of the same way.
1:41
[SPEAKER_02]: You once called the movement against data centers, a pretty, quick, static way of fighting the progress of AI.
1:48
[SPEAKER_02]: How are you feeling about that way of fighting right now?
1:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I feel shamed by what has transpired against my own expectations precisely because I was so fatalistic as I take it you were about how limited the ability of citizens to take control of this story really was.
2:10
[SPEAKER_03]: Six or nine months ago, I was already seeing polling suggesting that the American public was really uncomfortable, wary, frustrated, even angry about the mass infrastructure
2:23
[SPEAKER_03]: you saw some quite dramatic jumps over the course of the fall into the winter in public opinion polls and you saw a lot of you know small scale but quite impressive protest activity at the level of town halls and that sort of thing but I myself I looked at that problem and ran them out the same way that you did and thought
2:41
[SPEAKER_03]: we do not live in a healthy political economy in which since can exert control over the powers that shape our lives very reliably, most people know that.
2:52
[SPEAKER_03]: That is one source of political frustration is that they have already learned that lesson over many hard years.
2:57
[SPEAKER_03]: And so even if AI now looms as a new challenge, which they see as larger or more urgent, then previous things that motivated them to get out and protest, the end result was likely to be pretty similar, which is to say an expression of outrage and disgust followed by victory on behalf of the corporations who have the most skin in the game, and I have to say,
3:18
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know for sure that that story won't play out in precisely those terms going forward.
3:23
[SPEAKER_03]: I think, you know, that it is by any measure, the data sent a build out is not just continuing, but accelerating in many cases when there has been pushback and projects have been canceled as you suggest, they move to friendlier locations.
3:37
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think over the longer term,
3:39
[SPEAKER_03]: even if this really grows into a genuine national movement in which it becomes almost impossible to build anywhere, I do think that much of that work can be done abroad, which means if you understand the objection primarily as anxiety about artificial intelligence and it's, you know, march of progress through all of our lives, then I don't know how much this movement is really going to change that trajectory ultimately.
4:03
[SPEAKER_03]: But just at the level of political organization, coalition building, and consensus building, I think what we have seen is the most astonishing development in American politics, since the rise of MAGA, maybe you could drop further back to Occupy and the Tea Party before that.
4:23
[SPEAKER_03]: And in a certain way,
4:24
[SPEAKER_03]: you know casting your eyes back further into history because the truth is we're now at a point when 75% of the country objects to the construction of data centers and that is in their own backyards and that is a level of consensus that we just haven't seen on almost any issue for a very long time.
4:42
[SPEAKER_02]: I just want to pause on that figure.
4:45
[SPEAKER_03]: Tell us that again 75% of Americans say that they do not want data centers built in their own communities and
4:53
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, on the one hand, you can look at that and think of it as nimbusum.
4:57
[SPEAKER_03]: And nimbusum is a part of it.
4:59
[SPEAKER_03]: People don't want these things built on their backyards.
5:01
[SPEAKER_03]: They don't want the local pollution effects.
5:03
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, they don't want the ice ore of construction.
5:05
[SPEAKER_03]: They don't want their small towns being shattered by a giant data center whose inner workings they don't understand, run for the profit and benefit of corporations, which don't understand them.
5:15
[SPEAKER_03]: All of those things are factors in this resistance, but it's also the case that
5:20
[SPEAKER_03]: Fifty-five percent of Americans believe in a national data center more toward it, and they believe that no data centers should be built anywhere in the country.
5:26
[SPEAKER_03]: Fifty-five percent, which means at least that share of the coalition is not objecting on a nifty basis, because they're not saying, I don't want this in my backyard, they're saying, I don't want this anywhere in this country, even if it's hundreds of miles from the closest town, we don't want to do this at all, more than half of the country now believes that.
5:44
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's especially striking that seventy-five percent figure when you compare it.
5:47
[SPEAKER_03]: to other things that people have raised and be objections to.
5:51
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm a climate person.
5:52
[SPEAKER_03]: I've written a lot of them thought a lot about the struggles to build renewable energy and over the last few months you've heard a lot of people raising comparisons between the anti-data center movement and the anti-renewable movement and there is some overlap there's they share some people, they share some rhetoric.
6:07
[SPEAKER_03]: but more than two-thirds of Americans want solar farms built in their backyards and more than two-thirds Americans don't want data centers built in their own backyards.
6:16
[SPEAKER_03]: So we're seeing something that is really divergent, different in category and scale from any comparable movement of the last decade or two and that I think is really notable, significant, and should make people like you and me really reflect on what we're seeing here, what it tells us about where we are and especially what it tells us about where we're heading.
6:36
[SPEAKER_02]: What do we know about who is in this 75% who are these people?
6:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Everybody!
6:43
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the short answer.
6:44
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, you can divide this country by certainly by partisanship.
6:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Republicans are a little bit friendly or to data centers than Democrats, but there is something like 40 or 50 points underwater with Republicans.
6:55
[SPEAKER_03]: So there may be 80 points underwater with Democrats, but we're still talking about a huge, huge opposition all across the political aisle, centrists, two independence.
7:05
[SPEAKER_03]: You can divide the country by education level by income, whether you live in an urban area or rural area.
7:10
[SPEAKER_03]: whether you got a college degree or you're just a high school graduate or didn't finish high school, every single subcategory that you can divide the country by will show a significant opposition to data center construction at least in one's own local community.
7:26
[SPEAKER_03]: And that is, I mean, just put aside the issue itself, put it aside what it tells us about policy.
7:33
[SPEAKER_03]: It is just an astonishing fact
7:39
[SPEAKER_03]: that this is something that the entire country has rallied around, despite the fact that our politicians are, well, they're now belatedly kind of climbing on board to the movement.
7:49
[SPEAKER_03]: But up until a few months ago, you almost can find a national leader who is speaking, you know, really fourth rightly, really directly, really dramatically against data centers.
7:58
[SPEAKER_03]: So, on some level, this is a truly grassroots movement as well, and I think just as astonishing or even more astonishing on that basis.
8:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Tell us a little bit about not just the extent of support in opinion polls, but the concrete goals that have already been achieved by this movement in just the last couple of months.
8:21
[SPEAKER_02]: You have these figures about the number of jurisdictions that have passed bands, the situation in state politics.
8:28
[SPEAKER_02]: What do we know about all that?
8:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I mean, in general, what we're seeing is something that is much more developed at the local level.
8:35
[SPEAKER_03]: And you've seen hundreds of data sent a more historians pass by local jurisdictions over the last few months.
8:40
[SPEAKER_02]: You say 500.
8:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
8:42
[SPEAKER_03]: And in certain states, we're, you know, I remember reading and reporting about Maryland.
8:47
[SPEAKER_03]: Something like 80% of Maryland is now covered by data center moratorium.
8:51
[SPEAKER_03]: So even when you hear local level restrictions, they can really add up and become a quite significant barrier to construction.
8:58
[SPEAKER_03]: We now have in New York the first state level moratorium, which was signed by Kathy Hockel, maybe two months ago.
9:06
[SPEAKER_03]: in the relatively recent past, you've had something, they're not, they're technically not more athoriums in the same way, but something like that being implemented by the executive order by both the governors of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, and the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, and both of those seem really quite significant to me culturally because, you know, we think we've got the
9:25
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, an ally of Zoran who's navigating a kind of, you know, navigating the centrist left when divided in the democratic party relatively nimbly.
9:33
[SPEAKER_03]: She's got her figure in the wind, she's following some trends.
9:35
[SPEAKER_03]: Josh Shapiro is someone who has made his name as a national politician as a kind of, I'm going to get, get stuff done, that's his, like, catchphrase.
9:44
[SPEAKER_03]: He's proud of plowing through environmental review and suspending all of these restrictions on construction projects, that's how he got the I-95 bridge fixed so quickly.
9:55
[SPEAKER_03]: And he presents himself as a kind of abundance, technocratic centrist, get it done liberal.
10:00
[SPEAKER_03]: And as recently as six months ago, was personally celebrating large scale data center projects in the state of Pennsylvania on that basis, you know, according to that logic.
10:09
[SPEAKER_03]: And now he's come out and said, you know, I'm not going to be bullied and intimidated by these corporations who don't have the interest of Pennsylvania's at heart.
10:17
[SPEAKER_03]: We need to pause this, we need to slow this down, we need to make sure absolutely sure that
10:21
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, these projects are serving the communities in which they're built and in the meantime we're going to not do any more of them politically I thought of this as more a democratic issue than a Republican one and it's not that's surprising that Josh Shapiro would would join in but you say Greg Abbott is also part of this what do we know about Republican
10:45
[SPEAKER_02]: opposition to data centers.
10:47
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, you know, to trust the survey data, it is overwhelming, to trust the on the ground reporting at protests, which is to say, not just people who tell a pollster that they don't want to data center in their backyard, but people who are willing to go out and screen that their local town council about it.
11:03
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, some significant share of the objections are familiar from our understanding of the MAGA and MAHA right.
11:11
[SPEAKER_03]: In fact, there's a relatively serious stream of influence from the MAHA MAGA right into the data center resistance.
11:19
[SPEAKER_03]: Steve Bannon has been an especially pronounced prominent critic of AI and data center built out and he has a number of sort of prominent followers who are regular guests on his show who are now relatively central parts of the coalition.
11:33
[SPEAKER_03]: And if you're interested in that, you can read that there's a great piece by Molly Taft and Wired.
11:38
[SPEAKER_03]: A few weeks ago documenting that sort of right wing part of the coalition.
11:43
[SPEAKER_03]: I wouldn't say that it's dominant.
11:45
[SPEAKER_03]: It still
11:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Most of the people who are objecting to the extent that they identify politically are left of center and they do front-load their environmental concerns They often talk about worries about climate and emissions and so for all those reasons I do think there's probably a have your liberal anchor to the coalition But Texas Texas is a place that has portrayed itself as you know the ultimate utopia of unchecked corporate power and yet you say Greg Abbott
12:14
[SPEAKER_02]: has issued a data set about amounts to a moratorium.
12:18
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I mean, I would even further than in your set up, I'd then to say it's unchecked corporate power.
12:22
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I hear a lot from people in the climate world that Texas is an enviable place to build clean energy because they're so hands-off.
12:30
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's the reason why Texas is now building so much more renewable capacity than California.
12:34
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not because Texans care more about climate change.
12:36
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not even because they care more about their electricity bills.
12:39
[SPEAKER_03]: It's just because the regulatory environment is so much more permissive, you can build whatever you want in Texas.
12:44
[SPEAKER_03]: And so when the renewable developers who see all the,
12:47
[SPEAKER_03]: capacity, all the possibility for solar and wind, they can just stand up those new infrastructure quite quickly, whereas in many other states, particularly blue states, it's a little bit harder.
12:56
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's not just about handing over the keys to the corporations, it's about letting anybody do whatever they want.
13:02
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, in this case, a lot of corporations want to build data centers for the exact same reasons that they want to build solar farms and wind power, which is, say, it can get done more quickly.
13:11
[SPEAKER_03]: There's less oversight, and there's also a lot of booming demand in Texas for, you know,
13:15
[SPEAKER_03]: that's that's where some of the companies are based.
13:18
[SPEAKER_03]: And in fact, some of the biggest biggest projects in America have been based in Texas as a result.
13:22
[SPEAKER_03]: But there has been a really significant backlash on the ground there.
13:27
[SPEAKER_03]: So much so that yes, this incredibly outspoken right wing governor is not just putting a pause on data center development.
13:34
[SPEAKER_03]: He's talking about that
13:37
[SPEAKER_03]: that would be familiar at any town hall in the country.
13:40
[SPEAKER_03]: He's saying, we need to prioritize Texans first.
13:43
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, there's a big rallying cry among the anti-AIM movement.
13:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Humans first and Greg Abbott is saying, we need to put Texans first.
13:50
[SPEAKER_03]: He said, we need to ensure that all of these projects meet our own environmental standards.
13:54
[SPEAKER_03]: So we're not polluting the local environment.
13:56
[SPEAKER_03]: This is a state where it looks like anything, you can build a petrochemical plant in cancer, I don't even know if he cares.
14:01
[SPEAKER_03]: But he's willing to, he's willing to make a stand against environmental toxins in the context of data centers too.
14:07
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that is because the data that he's looking at the survey information that he's seeing shows him that this is not a vocal fringe who are really raising their voices loudly.
14:18
[SPEAKER_03]: It is a set of worries interlinked.
14:20
[SPEAKER_03]: sometimes contradictory, but a patchwork set of worries that are shared to some degree by the large majority of even his loyal constituents.
14:28
[SPEAKER_03]: And when a politician, a professional politician, sees that dynamic, they simply can't ignore it, even if they're kind of Godfather, Trump and DC, is more interested in serving the needs of Silicon Valley oligarchs who are committed to him.
14:42
[SPEAKER_03]: Those who are closer to the ground, more responsive to local constituents, have to recognize that there is an enormous backlash brewing of a scale and a kind that we, as I said, really haven't seen in America for quite a long time.
14:55
[SPEAKER_02]: We also have to talk about Ohio here, ground zero for the politics of data centers right now is the Ohio Senate race, where Sherrod Brown is running against John Hustett a couple of weeks ago.
15:08
[SPEAKER_02]: The National Republican Senatorial Committee warned that Democrats have made data centers the centerpiece of their Senate campaign in Ohio, and that it is working.
15:24
[SPEAKER_02]: And his ads call his opponent the face of data centers, which is true in Ohio.
15:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you think the Republicans will be able to recover from this in Ohio?
15:35
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I think each of these races as all political races are multi-determined.
15:40
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not, narrowly, none of these races are going to be determined exclusively by data-centered resistance.
15:46
[SPEAKER_03]: But I do think that it's a benefit to be, at least in support of a moratorium, if not an outward ban, and those who are more committed to building out the infrastructure in a more aggressive way and are on record doing so are going to be political losers as a result.
16:03
[SPEAKER_03]: a problem not just for Republicans and Ohio, it's a problem for basically every incumbent politician anywhere in the country because up until quite recently, this seemed like the sort of deal that most politicians would intuitively take, which is to say, you may have to wave some tax breaks in front of a developer to get them to locate their project and you are
16:29
[SPEAKER_03]: economic boom, which they assumed that voters would appreciate, particularly as you said at the top, some of the particular concerns were addressed.
16:39
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, you know, that no longer seems to be the logic, but it was so intuitively the logic to leaders that, you know, Kamala Harris was running
16:47
[SPEAKER_03]: promising tax breaks for data centers in 2024, not producing significant backlash in the public because it was one of those kind of bipartisan consensus issues that this is a way to re-industrialize the country.
17:00
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a way to revive union labor work that we limit losing in other areas.
17:06
[SPEAKER_03]: as well as sort of securing a more of a national foothold in the technological future.
17:12
[SPEAKER_03]: Again, this is the kind of like, if we're checking boxes, this is something that checks the box for every centrist politician out there.
17:17
[SPEAKER_03]: And as a result, they were all broadly speaking, supportive even if they had some...
17:22
[SPEAKER_03]: they were picking up on some AI anxiety from their constituents.
17:25
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, we're in the absolute opposite position.
17:28
[SPEAKER_03]: The consensus by partisan perspective is not to support this build out.
17:34
[SPEAKER_03]: It's to oppose it.
17:36
[SPEAKER_03]: And that is especially striking given that
17:40
[SPEAKER_03]: the to the extent that we can measure whether those that political that economic political calculation I just mentioned cashed out that is to say to the extent that we can measure whether the data center projects that have been built to this point were economic booms to their local communities.
17:57
[SPEAKER_03]: There are many really positive, powerful cases where there were huge benefits.
18:02
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean in loud and county which is an incredibly rich place.
18:05
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the richest county in the United States.
18:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Loudon County, Virginia, just south of Washington, D.C. People often say of the rich people really like data centers.
18:14
[SPEAKER_03]: They should build them in their own backyards.
18:15
[SPEAKER_03]: Actually, they are building them in the British County in the country, more than anywhere else in the country.
18:19
[SPEAKER_03]: And in that inland county, they're expecting more than half of their tax revenues to come directly from data centers as recently as the next few years.
18:27
[SPEAKER_03]: And this could be a big thing in poor counties, too.
18:30
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, absolutely.
18:31
[SPEAKER_03]: And there are examples of that.
18:32
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, in the PSI mentioned in Richland Paris, Louisiana, they gave $50,000 bonuses to elementary school teachers, none of whom make $50,000 in salary.
18:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Because of the construction of the metadata center, and there, you know, I wouldn't say countless many projects are not negotiated in this way, and so don't have such concrete benefits to offer.
18:55
[SPEAKER_03]: But if you were like in a position out of town hall trying to make the case to your local constituents, there are a number of examples to point to where say we can get a deal from these developers where like we're going to get a new high school.
19:05
[SPEAKER_03]: We're going to have a new emergency response system.
19:08
[SPEAKER_03]: We're going to have a huge boost in our property tax revenues so much so that we can count on cutting your taxes over the next decade or so.
19:16
[SPEAKER_03]: We can promise all of those promises.
19:17
[SPEAKER_03]: We can extract those promises in writing and even with that pitch.
19:22
[SPEAKER_03]: nobody in the country is interested.
19:24
[SPEAKER_03]: And that to me is among the most astonishing and impressive things about this movement, on some level, I'm even ambivalent about it because I do think that the benefits to local communities in poor areas can be quite significant, but as a pure expression of political refusal, as I keep saying, we just have not seen anything like this in America, ever before that kind of a deal that they're offering,
19:47
[SPEAKER_03]: should be the sweet spot in American politics.
19:50
[SPEAKER_03]: It's what we were told was the sweet spot in American politics.
19:52
[SPEAKER_03]: We're going to improve your public services and you get to pay less in taxes.
19:55
[SPEAKER_03]: But the people who are hearing that pitch don't trust the people making it.
19:59
[SPEAKER_03]: They enter the extent that they trust that there will be some benefits.
20:02
[SPEAKER_03]: They simply don't believe that they should outweigh all of the costs that they're tabulating in their minds from water stress to electricity prices to the strain on the community.
20:16
[SPEAKER_03]: degradation of the natural environment all the way down to we're worried about what AI is going to do to our children's brains and you know the way that it will supercharge the surveillance state and they tell you all those things and they tell you up the concrete benefits in terms of tax revenue and improved social services and they say I'm not going to take that deal.
20:34
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm kind of in awe of that.
20:37
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's just spend a minute on Trump's remark that the people who oppose that as Sanders want to be, quote, backwards and poor when I hear Donald Trump saying those things, I feel a little, you know, tickle of glee that he is completely, he's been boxed in an outflanked and misunderstands the country for whom he has presented himself as a kind of a tribute now for a decade.
21:00
[SPEAKER_03]: When I look at the data, I see some of the same math that Trump does, and I see local communities refusing payouts that would change the landscape of their lives.
21:09
[SPEAKER_03]: But they're also refusing to have a future dominated by artificial intelligence imposed on them from above.
21:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Without their input, they are essentially saying, there's nothing you can pay me to buy my future from me.
21:24
[SPEAKER_02]: David Wallace Wells, you can read his piece at the New York Times website.
21:29
[SPEAKER_02]: It's called, I expected tech fatalism.
21:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Americans are putting up a remarkable fight instead.
21:35
[SPEAKER_02]: David, thanks for all your work.
21:37
[SPEAKER_02]: And thanks for talking with us today.
21:39
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks so much for having me.
21:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Great stock.
21:53
[SPEAKER_02]: how to be a dissident in an age of fear.
21:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Ami Fields Meyer has thought a lot about that.
21:58
[SPEAKER_02]: He's been a strategist to national civil rights organizations and political candidates, including Kamala Harris in 2024.
22:06
[SPEAKER_02]: He's written about defying authoritarianism for the New York Times, and about other things for the Atlantic, the American Prospect, and Arts.
22:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Right now, he's a senior fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School.
22:17
[SPEAKER_02]: and he's co-author of the new book on courage how to be a dissident in an age of fear.
22:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Army fields buyer, welcome to the program.
22:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, John.
22:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks so much for having me.
22:28
[SPEAKER_02]: When you started this project, how to be a dissident in an age of fear, Trump had just returned to office and it started doing things he hadn't been able to do his first time, a lot more and a lot worse.
22:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Now as the midterms approach, we are much stronger and Trump is much weaker, but that does not mean that we do not live in what you call an age of fear.
22:53
[SPEAKER_02]: As my next door neighbor said, no one knows what the wild animal will do when it's cornered.
22:59
[SPEAKER_02]: A more threatened and a more desperate Trump could become more aggressive and more destructive, and he's got two more years to do it.
23:07
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's still a lot to be fearful about.
23:11
[SPEAKER_02]: want to start here at the beginning.
23:13
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to start with you winter 2025.
23:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Trump takes the oath of office on January 20th.
23:20
[SPEAKER_02]: What were you doing?
23:21
[SPEAKER_02]: Were you a seasoned organizer of resistance movements ready to go back to work?
23:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I had left the White House where I had worked on civil rights policy issues.
23:32
[SPEAKER_01]: I had worked on the protection.
23:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I had worked on technology policy.
23:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Much of that moment showed me it was that a lot of the world that I came from with smart people, thoughtful people, that a lot of folks in that world were not, were not ready for what was coming.
23:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I teamed up with Julia Angwin, my co-author for this book and a great journalist.
23:52
[SPEAKER_01]: And we began calling up dissidents all over the world.
23:57
[SPEAKER_01]: We began this work with a shorter essay for the New Yorker that was called so you want to be a dissident.
24:03
[SPEAKER_01]: It outlined some of the basic tools of civil resistance that we thought Americans could begin to get used to.
24:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Those who had not yet engaged in that kind of work.
24:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course,
24:17
[SPEAKER_01]: unions, racial justice organizers, tenant organizers, many others in this country have engaged in that kind of work for a long time, but there were many who were going to have to learn.
24:26
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we brought the voices of, I don't know, 10, 12, 13 folks in that initial article for the New Yorker, and it resonated.
24:36
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we spent the rest of the year interviewing people who had resisted political repression
24:47
[SPEAKER_01]: to Hong Kong, to Nicaragua and beyond, and also people all over the United States who had done that, and ultimately wrote this book with the lessons from them, everywhere from, how do you do what this in your inner life, to how do you build a movement?
25:01
[SPEAKER_02]: My favorite part to your book are about the amazingly brave heroic people you write about who nobody has heard about.
25:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Just want to start with Kathy O'Leary, 58-year-old mom from Northern New Jersey, who volunteers outside the Iceholding Center in Newark, the notorious Delaney Hall, tells about Kathy O'Leary.
25:24
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I think that if we had written a book about the most famous
25:29
[SPEAKER_01]: That would have been maybe an interesting book, but it wouldn't have been if we had written about, say, the Navalny's and the Malala's and the Mandela's of the world.
25:36
[SPEAKER_01]: It may not have been as helpful for normal people.
25:40
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm a normal guy.
25:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Wouldn't have been so would have been as helpful for somebody like me, because
25:45
[SPEAKER_01]: We look at those people as predator naturally, courageous.
25:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And we wanted to profile people who were legible to people like us.
25:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Kathy O'Leary is a mom who has volunteered outside various permutations of ICE to touch a facility since before the Trump administration.
26:06
[SPEAKER_01]: She was involved in trying to make sure that some of these facilities weren't built in the first place.
26:10
[SPEAKER_01]: But many years ago, she realized that the way that immigrants were being treated in these facilities under all administrations was devastating.
26:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And what she's done during this administration is that she realizes that she cannot on her own, get people removed.
26:27
[SPEAKER_01]: But what she does,
26:29
[SPEAKER_01]: is she and other volunteers just go and show up outside the detention facility where there are family members waiting for hours and hours in the hot sun or in the freezing cold to visit with their family members.
26:45
[SPEAKER_01]: There is precious little information given about the condition, about the wearabouts, about what's going on with these folks who are very rarely given due process as we know.
26:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And they just help.
26:56
[SPEAKER_01]: They just help.
26:57
[SPEAKER_01]: They make sure that the people on the outside have water and food as they're waiting.
27:03
[SPEAKER_01]: They help them to engage often if there's a language barrier with the prison staff, the prison guards.
27:09
[SPEAKER_01]: They've also just done a lot of intelligence collection, figuring out how frequently a delivery truck will go in.
27:15
[SPEAKER_01]: or how often a chaplain will go in and they've they've they've learned they've hacked the system in such a way that they are supporting the families on the outside so that they can support people on the inside.
27:25
[SPEAKER_01]: The other thing that's really important that we didn't write about in the book but that has become relevant about this group is that you may remember and your listeners may remember that a few months ago there was a hunger strike at the Delaney Hall facility and part of the reason that we even knew that there was a hunger strike in the Delaney Hall facility and what the grievances were.
27:44
[SPEAKER_01]: The really horrific human rights violations that were happening on the inside was because of this community of advocates that has formed a community of presence and a community of trust and they were able to to change some of those conditions and to get the word out to the point where you had members of Congress who were beginning to show up and demand changes.
28:03
[SPEAKER_01]: So the reason that we include
28:05
[SPEAKER_01]: that story about Kathy O'Leary and we actually do it very early is two reasons.
28:10
[SPEAKER_01]: One, because it's not predator naturally courageous, there's some risk associated with that work, but anyone can show up.
28:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And the other reason is because we assume that dissent and that dissidents will always hope to see immediate returns in dramatic ways the man standing in front of the tank at the end of the square.
28:29
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's sometimes true.
28:31
[SPEAKER_01]: But sometimes it's just about keeping track of what happened.
28:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Remembering the hills and the injustices that befell people and making sure that when it is time for justice later that we've keep in track of what's gone on.
28:45
[SPEAKER_01]: We see this all over the world and truth and reconciliation commissions and we hope that because of the work of these people and journalists and others will be able to do the same here in the United States.
28:54
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, when I first got hold of your book, it fell open to a page in the middle with a section that had the subhead Geth in Small Fights, and I thought, I'm going to like this book.
29:06
[SPEAKER_02]: This is a Kathy O'Lears, a great example of getting in Small Fights.
29:10
[SPEAKER_02]: She is, her goal is not to stop Trump's deportations or to get these people out of the Layney Hall.
29:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's talk about why you make get in small fights one of your rules.
29:23
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a theme that we heard over the course of talking to over 120 dissidents all over the world.
29:29
[SPEAKER_01]: which was that you would think that the way to grow your movement is to do something for people.
29:37
[SPEAKER_01]: But actually the way to grow your movement, the way to get people involved in a campaign and effort is to ask them to do something for you, is to ask them to become a little bit more invested to get in a small fight and to sweat it out a little bit, to get some sweat equity in there.
29:52
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll give you a couple of examples of this.
29:54
[SPEAKER_01]: There is right now a massive social movement happening, I would call it an anti-corruption social movement happening in Serbia.
30:03
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the biggest movement that we've seen in that country since the fall of Slobodan Milosevic around to the year 2000.
30:11
[SPEAKER_01]: And part of the reason it's grown so big is because it's led by students who are getting other students involved.
30:17
[SPEAKER_01]: The way that those students told us that they are growing their movement is not by saying, show up with us on the barricades right now.
30:25
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the way to get into this.
30:27
[SPEAKER_01]: What they're doing instead is that they say to their friends who are interested in political activism and interested in the movement,
30:36
[SPEAKER_01]: but aren't they aren't quite there yet?
30:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you just bring the blankets?
30:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you just bring blankets with you to the students who are cold and sitting on the front lines?
30:46
[SPEAKER_01]: That's all we really need for you.
30:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Those students would bring the blankets.
30:50
[SPEAKER_01]: They would see they would witness the camaraderie of what was going on among the people sitting at the barricades and the front lines outside the universities to try to get the attention in these active civil disobedience.
31:01
[SPEAKER_01]: and they would then come back because they were interested in they would bring food and then they would bring money and pretty soon they themselves were also sitting sitting on the barricades.
31:10
[SPEAKER_01]: We heard this also from people in Hong Kong that Nathan Law, who is a a dissident leader who has functionally been banned from Hong Kong for leading the umbrella revolution, being one of the leaders of the umbrella revolution.
31:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Many of those students are now in
31:27
[SPEAKER_01]: but he is he is not and he told us that at the beginning ultimately he was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by U.S.
31:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Senators for his
31:36
[SPEAKER_01]: What they described as predator natural courage, he ultimately was arrested, he ultimately put his body on the line.
31:43
[SPEAKER_01]: But the very first time that he had the opportunity to be involved in this movement, there were three options for what students could do.
31:49
[SPEAKER_01]: One was that they could sit on the very front risk and risk arrest.
31:54
[SPEAKER_01]: The second was that they could be a little bit further back and help make the mass of people so that the cameras could see them.
31:58
[SPEAKER_01]: And the last was the the lowest level of risk just pass out water bottles.
32:03
[SPEAKER_01]: And Nathan Law is a risk-averse person, as he describes himself, and he began his work by passing out water bottles.
32:09
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was the same thing.
32:10
[SPEAKER_01]: He witnessed so much violence against people he knew and cared about, that he
32:18
[SPEAKER_01]: felt that the only possible expression of his commitment to those people was to take those small fights, those small investments that he had begun with, and to expand them dramatically into something more.
32:29
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is why we ask, this is actually more of a directive for organizers, which is to say, get other people in small fights, and they'll feel more invested in your movement.
32:41
[SPEAKER_02]: I was also very interested in your argument
32:45
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a bad idea to do this alone and start your own organization.
32:51
[SPEAKER_02]: You say, repurpose your networks, even if you're not part of a dissident organization and most people aren't.
32:58
[SPEAKER_02]: You are part of some things, and some things can become something different.
33:03
[SPEAKER_02]: And you have a great example here that especially for those of us who are academics.
33:09
[SPEAKER_02]: I conclude with myself among this David Salastela Cruz, professor of chemistry at Rutgers Camden Campus.
33:18
[SPEAKER_02]: never heard of this guy.
33:19
[SPEAKER_02]: He was appointed to the Faculty Senate, the Academics Senate.
33:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, I know from my own experience, this is a job no one really wants.
33:27
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a lot of boring stuff for the administration just wants you to kind of rubber stamp there.
33:31
[SPEAKER_02]: The things they're going to do anyway.
33:33
[SPEAKER_02]: In February 2025 was when Trump launched his campaign to get universities to submit to his demands for control over their campuses or else lose their research funding and Rutgers was one of the campuses that he targeted.
33:46
[SPEAKER_02]: In other words, Colombia, which submitted immediately, David Salas de la Cruz didn't want Rutgers to do what Colombia did.
33:55
[SPEAKER_02]: He did not organize a new group, Rutgers professors against Trump.
33:59
[SPEAKER_02]: Tell us what he did.
34:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
34:01
[SPEAKER_01]: He repurposed a network he was already part of.
34:03
[SPEAKER_01]: He repurposed the University Senate.
34:06
[SPEAKER_01]: He also, at this time, is hearing Trump talking all about how he wants to, you know, flirting with the idea of withdrawing from NATO or destroying NATO.
34:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And he thinks, wait, I don't really know that much about NATO.
34:20
[SPEAKER_01]: So he Googles NATO, and he realizes that this all for one and one for all packed.
34:28
[SPEAKER_01]: And he goes to Chechipi T. This is one of those AI for good uses.
34:35
[SPEAKER_01]: He goes to Chechipi T, and he types in something along the lines of, can I create,
34:44
[SPEAKER_01]: a NATO-like pact for universities that are being attacked, and that are the object of this campaign of coercion by the administration.
34:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And what he does is he does this, and eventually gets faculty members from over 175 different campuses across the United States to sign on, it's called Stand Together for Higher Ed.
35:12
[SPEAKER_01]: They will speak, in a moment when universities refuse to stand up for one another, when one is attempted to be picked off by the Trump administration, because it's research funding is stripped, it's accused of something antisemitism, you know, under the guise of antisemitism when they're really going after a conservative agenda, your listeners will know this agenda well.
35:38
[SPEAKER_01]: When that happens, even when the universities don't have the institutional courage, and most don't to stand up for one another, faculty from who are comprised of these university senate on over 175 campuses will speak in one voice.
35:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And that creates,
35:56
[SPEAKER_01]: both a dynamic in which, you know, universities, institutions are only going to be as courageous as their leaders are and as their constituents, their students, their faculty, their donors, etc.
36:06
[SPEAKER_01]: demand that they be.
36:08
[SPEAKER_01]: So part of that dynamic is creating that pressure.
36:13
[SPEAKER_01]: But the other thing is creating the public narrative that none of these universities can any longer be picked off one at a time without some noise somewhere else.
36:22
[SPEAKER_01]: You cannot just get away with it.
36:25
[SPEAKER_01]: So I love that story, but part of the reason that we lead with that story is because it's reflective of this broader dynamic that we see in dissident movements all over the world, which is, nobody starts from scratch.
36:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Here's the hard part.
36:38
[SPEAKER_02]: We need more people.
36:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, we have millions of people, invisible mobilized eight million people last March and 3300 places.
36:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Nothing like it had ever happened before, really awesome.
36:50
[SPEAKER_02]: But we need more.
36:56
[SPEAKER_02]: We need them to change their minds and then maybe even become dissidents themselves.
37:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Lots of Trump voters we know are having second thoughts right now.
37:06
[SPEAKER_02]: How do we encourage them?
37:08
[SPEAKER_02]: How does that happen?
37:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Not on Cheransky, the Soviet Refuse Nick incident leader who unfortunately has become a major right
37:24
[SPEAKER_01]: has some really useful advice on this.
37:30
[SPEAKER_01]: He says that every, he says every totalitarian society, I would say every illiberal society, has three kinds of people.
37:36
[SPEAKER_01]: They're the true believers, they're the dissidents, and they're the double thinkers.
37:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And the double thinkers are the people who have doubts, but haven't yet been
37:48
[SPEAKER_01]: boosted, haven't yet been given the context, or good enough reasons, a rationale to move, to emerge, to come out, to express how to actually feel, and to join the movement.
38:00
[SPEAKER_01]: And there are a number of different tools that we can use for those.
38:04
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that shame is a limited political tool.
38:08
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that we can use it in the context of public leaders.
38:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Shaming people into submission, normal people, day to day people who are just trying to live their lives, doesn't work.
38:25
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the other ways to do this.
38:27
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the ways is to help people arrive at what we call in the book a moral collision.
38:34
[SPEAKER_01]: to help people get to their own breaking point, or they feel what you have once felt, which was, I can no longer stay silent on this or anything else.
38:46
[SPEAKER_01]: One of my favorite stories from history on this comes from Mississippi Freedom Summer.
38:52
[SPEAKER_01]: And what we know from that moment was that there was a big fight, a big argument
39:04
[SPEAKER_01]: activist, black woman, activist on the ground, and Mississippi, and the national leadership of SNCC, student nonviolent court and in committee.
39:12
[SPEAKER_01]: What we know from this story is that there's a big argument around 1964 about, while they were trying to push for the Voting Rights Act, whether to bring in, whether to include
39:25
[SPEAKER_01]: white northern students, some of whom were sort of on the fence, and some of whom were interested, but yet didn't yet have a clear entry point into the movement.
39:37
[SPEAKER_01]: And the snick people, the stick people up in Washington DC said that's going to dilute our movement.
39:46
[SPEAKER_01]: And the folks on the ground said, are you kidding?
39:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Every time we bring down white students, we get more press, more media, DOJ has a bigger presence here.
39:55
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a little bit safer for us and more people will get to know what's going on.
39:58
[SPEAKER_01]: So she won, they won out.
40:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And as a result, you saw bust loads of white students show up in Mississippi that summer as part of the ultimately successful push for the Voting Rights Act and what they witnessed, they witnessed so much brutality against their black peers for simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights that many of them were radicalized and became members of this movement in ways that we're helpful, we're helpful.
40:29
[SPEAKER_01]: But the other most interesting part of this, and I think even more relevant to your question, is that the other knock-on effect that we hear less about was that many of their parents were also moved.
40:42
[SPEAKER_01]: These were people who were much more obstinate, much more stubborn, much less likely to join or become sympathetic to the civil rights movement.
40:50
[SPEAKER_01]: We need to get people involved.
40:51
[SPEAKER_01]: We need to bring people to the brink of their own moral collisions.
40:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And we need to make sure that the arms of a movement are waiting to catch them when they're ready.
41:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever it is that they're ready, as difficult a proposition as this is for my friends and peers.
41:09
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a really, really, really important work.
41:11
[SPEAKER_01]: And we see that from all over the world.
41:14
[SPEAKER_02]: One last thing.
41:15
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's talk about fun and humor and joy in dissident movements.
41:23
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I think that joy is a beachhead for organizing.
41:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Being part of a movement gives you a lot of agency.
41:32
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's not always so serious.
41:35
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not always so dire.
41:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Everything is ultimately about fighting for justice, but what we see in many, many places is that making it fun for people and making a joke for people gives people away.
41:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'll tell one other story on this, which is also actually from Syria, but it is during the Malosevitch era.
41:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry, from Serbia, but it is during the Malosevitch era, which is that as protesters at that time
42:01
[SPEAKER_01]: protesting and pushing back against Milosevic's corruption.
42:04
[SPEAKER_01]: They brought a barrel with Milosevic's face into a town square, to a city square.
42:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And they said, you could pay two D-Nars, hit him, to hit his face on the barrel.
42:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you didn't have enough money, you could hit him twice.
42:22
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the point was all about how Milosevic was stealing all your money.
42:25
[SPEAKER_01]: And eventually, the police showed up and confiscated the barrel because you're not supposed to make fun of the authoritarian.
42:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And the movement in response put out a press release that said, this see this is how repressive blows of it is he even arrested a barrel.
42:42
[SPEAKER_01]: There is tremendous power in giving people joy.
42:46
[SPEAKER_01]: We need many, many ways in.
42:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of those will be more collisions.
42:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of those will be giving people a role in your movement.
42:52
[SPEAKER_01]: But sometimes that's just going to be inviting people to something where they're going to have fun and feel connected and feel a little bit more agency in the work.
43:00
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm E. Fields Meyer.
43:01
[SPEAKER_02]: His new book is I'm Courage.
43:03
[SPEAKER_02]: How to be a dissident in an age of fear.
43:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Rachel Maddow called it a classic for our time and decided she wanted to read the audio book.
43:12
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm E. Thanks for all your work.
43:13
[SPEAKER_02]: And thanks for talking with us today.
43:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, John.
43:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Such a pleasure.
43:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Start making sense.
43:28
[SPEAKER_02]: A podcast from the Nation Magazine is recorded at our upstairs studio in Los Angeles.
43:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Renee Reynolds is our associate producer, Alan Minsky is our producer.
43:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Ricky D'Ambrose is executive producer, Boskarsun Kara is president of the nation, Katrina Van Nouvelle is editor and publisher of the nation.
43:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Our theme music is Barcelona Afrobeat, licensed by Creative Commons.
43:53
[SPEAKER_02]: You can find out more about start making sense at thenation.com and subscribe to start making sense on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
44:04
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm John Weiner, thanks for listening.