On this episode of Start Making Sense, Rebecca Solnit and Leah Greenberg talk strategy, tactics, and the big picture.
Employees and supporters protest outside the headquarters for United States Agency for International Development (USAID), on Monday, February 3, 2025, after Elon Musk posted on social media that he and President Donald Trump would shut down the agency.(Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.
Understanding our power: “If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one.” (Ezra Klein) Last week, Trump tried to stop payment of all federal grants and assistance. But people rose up in protest, and within a day Trump rescinded the entire effort. How did we do it? What does that tell us about him–and about our power? Rebecca Solnit comments – her new blog is “Meditations in an Emergency.”
Also: Trump’s strategy of flooding the zone with executive actions is intended to paralyze the opposition. But there’s lots of grassroots mobilization underway right now, and one of the biggest organizers of that mobilization is Indivisible. Leah Greenberg will explain the group’s strategy and tactics — and this week’s work assignments — to get four Republicans to vote “No” on Trump’s four terrible nominees. Leah is one of the co-founders and co-executive directors of Indivisible.
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On this episode of Start Making Sense, Rebecca Solnit talks about understanding our power. Last week, Trump tried to stop payment of all federal grants and assistance. But people rose up in protest, and within a day Trump rescinded the entire effort. How did we do it? What does that tell us about him–and about us? Rebecca’s new blog is “Meditations in an Emergency.”
Also on this episode: Trump’s strategy of flooding the zone with executive actions is intended to paralyze the opposition. But there’s lots of grassroots mobilization underway right now, and one of the biggest organizers of that mobilization is Indivisible. Leah Greenberg explains the group’s strategy and tactics—and this week’s work assignments—to get four Republicans to vote “No” on Trump’s four terrible nominees. Leah is one of the cofounders and co–executive directors of Indivisible.
Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.
It’s been only a couple of weeks since the No Kings 3 protests, but we can see now how protest and resistance are changing in America: that one it wasn't just bigger than the previous No Kings. It was different: Deeper and more connected. Rebecca Solnit argues that to understand resistance and change today, we need a much longer perspective than a couple of years. Her new book is The Beginning Comes After the End.
Also: Minneapolis made history with its mobilization against ICE. But what about the rest of the state, where the immigrant population has been growing for a couple of decades? What kind of resistance has developed there? Emma Janssen went to small town Minnesota to find out. She’s a writing fellow at The American Prospect.
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Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.