The fight against unions that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and his right-wing backers have brought to Madison is about more than unions; it’s part of a larger war against the working class. GRITtv‘s Laura Flanders has been on the ground covering the protests for the past week, and on Monday she joined filmmaker Michael Moore, The Nation’s John Nichols and former Wisconsin Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager to describe how the left is fighting back.

Protests erupted in state across the nation last weekend, with Wisconsin seeing it’s largest in the state’s history with more than 100,000 gathering at the Capitol building in Madison Saturday. But the mainstream media barely covered the protests, Moore says.

“We didn’t start the war, the war has been conducted on us for about 30 years now,” he says. “It started when Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers…. If only people would have understood that was just the first volley in their war against us, their war to destroy the middle class.”

And according to Nichols, its also a fight for freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and basic liberties. “That’s what people are really out there for today. They know that their presence in the Capitol probably won’t change Scott Walker’s opinion tonight,” he says. “As long as Wisconsinites are out en masse in the thousands and thousands…. That resistance empowers Democratic legislators to be bolder, more courageous than they had been; it empowers people around the state to stand up. I think, frankly, it empowers people around the country and even around the world.”

—Sara Jerving