Read the Transcript
Episode 303
As the Trump regime moves to subvert the midterms, thousands marched on Washington this week to defend voting rights. What will it take to defend those rights—and to stop the fascist regime attacking them?
Sam talks with fellow Refuse Fascism leader Coco Das about the escalating assault on the elections, where the power to stop fascism actually lies, and what history can teach us about moments when ordinary political channels are under attack.
They dig into the dangers of relying on the midterms to stop fascism, the potential for millions to break out of waiting and accommodation, and what needs to be built now to transform widespread outrage into sustained, nonviolent mass resistance.
Mentioned in this episode:
The Rolling Coup: Trump Must Go Now!
This Week in Fascism: Week of August 24 by Paul Street
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Music for this episode: Penny the Snitch by Ikebe Shakedown
Episode 303 Defending the Vote and Defeating Fascism
August 30, 2026
Sam Goldman 0:22
Welcome to episode 303 of the Refuse Fascism podcast. Podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism unites all who can be united in sustained mass nonviolent resistance in the streets and throughout society, to drive the Trump fascist regime from power.
Before we begin, if this podcast helps you understand the dangers we face, if listening helps strengthen your determination to act, help us reach others, rate and review the show on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen. Share this episode. Grab Refuse Fascism merch like our Refuse Fascism hats and beanies. Become a paid subscriber on Substack or join our Patreon community. Links to do all of those things are in the show notes. Your support helps keep this podcast going and growing, and helps bring the urgent demand, Trump Must Go Now! where it needs to be.
Friday, thousands marched on Washington to defend voting rights, 63 years after the historic 1963 March on Washington. Speakers sounded the alarm over voter purges, attacks on mail and early voting, redistricting, and Trump actively moving to interfere with the midterms, while not saying anything about the fascist agenda that this is part of. The march declared the right to vote is the source of all our power, but is it? The movement being invoked Friday tells us something different; people dreaming together of what too many deemed impossible, of a world where Black people had full rights and dignity, and they fought together to try to realize it. They did so through sustained struggle, mass resistance, enormous sacrifice, and a refusal to accept the terms of an unjust system.
It is because of that courage, that conviction, that refusal to accept the intolerable that even voting rights were won. That distinction matters now. Millions are counting on midterms to put a check on Trump. Groups like Indivisible recognize that Trump may try to sabotage those elections and are organizing people to vote and defend elections.
But is defending an election against a fascist regime the same as defeating fascism? If not, what are we actually preparing people to do? Today, I’m joined by fellow leader of Refuse Fascism, Coco Das, to dig into that question and what it will take to bring forward the power that could actually stop this regime. I want to start by just saying we had this conversation via chat this week about how to process what is a nauseating deluge of atrocity, where everything is outrageous.
It’s very easy to get whipped around and to get, as I said, nauseated by just the onslaught. That isn’t to say that it’s not like important to recognize what’s happening. We can’t put our heads in the sand by any means, and so then there’s a situation where like, how do you make sense of that trajectory, and how do you recognize where there are qualitative leaps towards consolidation? Every week, we’re confronting another set of truly heinous crimes against humanity, and there’s a danger that we experience them separately.
All these insane attacks, one after another, divorced from each other, and we put them together: the attacks on immigrants, the political repression, the ongoing now what is it six months of illegal war, illegal, illegitimate, and immoral war on Iran by the U.S. and Israel, the assault on elections, the fascist Supreme Court, and you see a regime removing obstacle after obstacle that’s in its way to consolidating power, and so, what do you see as the key ways that this regime is consolidating fascism right now? Or, or put another way, like, what are the qualitative changes that you’re seeing?
Coco Das 4:35
Yeah, this week in particular was just extremely alarming. Every week, it’s terrible. We were talking about how long the list is of things happening. For me, I think it’s really important to start with what is the character of this fascist regime. What is it that they are going for? If you look at it from the perspective of what they’re going for, which is a complete remaking of society and government in the service of the unchallenged domination of white supremacy, male supremacy, and this vicious America first xenophobia, in order to maintain the position of America as like the top dog in the world at a time when there are challenges to their power from these other imperialist rivals, that’s where they’re coming from.
If you put yourself in that position for a minute, once you’ve got power, you’re in the White House, you’ve got the Supreme Court, you’ve got the legislature, or you figured out how to ignore the legislature. You’re not going to give that up easily. You’ve got to keep moving towards consolidation. It is completely existential for them. You can see with the moves that they’re making, and particular moves that they’ve made over the last four weeks and this week. It is all to remove, as you were saying, remove the obstacles to them consolidating power. So you have the the number of ICE raids.
Paul Street’s column is going to be up soon, and it talks about the leap in the number of people arrested. It was 49,571 people in July. They’re not even like spectacular raids. Just brutal picking up people as they’re going about their daily lives, along with the ICE torture and announcing the largest revocation of visa statuses. So that if you are on a tourist visa and then you applied for asylum, it’s basically then putting a target on your back. The disappearance of hundreds of thousands of people in order to you know make America white again, and then there’s the Supreme Court allowing Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting and overturning a lower court ruling that said that the regime needs to not put any more restrictions on voting.
You can see how these are in service to the kind of society they want, the kind of world they want, and then there’s the continuing war on Iran. I was honestly very puzzled by the trade war with Canada. I think Paul Street gives some insights on that in this week’s column, but it is all consistent with this kind of 21st century Monroe Doctrine, right? There’s no area of the world that the U.S. cannot touch, and then there’s all the anti-science lunacy, the measles outbreaks, and the anti-climate change attacks on climate scientists and things like that.
If people have seen the scenes of the glacier collapsing in Nepal, there’s going to be more of that. You have that on the one hand, and then you have a regime in the most powerful country in the world that is attacking the study of these natural phenomenon, so that we have no tools at all to stop it. So those are some of the things I’m leaving some things out. There’s another extrajudicial killing of a attack on a boat in the Eastern Pacific, but removing every guardrail, you know, declaring nothing is going to stand in their way of remaining in power, and it doesn’t matter if they lose the midterms. They are thinking of every contingency, and they are not going to let go of this power easily. And then, after it is consolidated, it isn’t fully consolidated yet. Then you know it’s a whole different story, and we’ll have to have another discussion.
Sam Goldman 8:34
You mean about what changes once it’s consolidated?
Coco Das 8:38
Yes. Yeah.
Sam Goldman 8:40
I think that what you laid out, both in the domestic and international arena, is extremely heavy when you are able to situate all these crimes under what they are trying to hammer into place. It is not simply that he is egomaniacal. It’s not simply that he’s a demented narcissist. There is an agenda at work, and it’s not just about him. As you are getting at, the Republican fascist party has been working on this for decades, and this is their now or never moment on how they are going about to save their system.
The decent people that we talk a lot about still are not on the footing of understanding that it is for us too, a now or never moment if they are able to lock this form of rule into place and what that means for yes, the horrors that could come and and the stakes, but also the potential for a world and a future worth living in, the positive aspect that states when everything’s thrown into question, what can be possible?
I want to talk in light of that. There was the 63rd anniversary of the March on Washington yesterday, and the media and organizers were recognizing that it kind of hit different this year, as it was the first time since the absolute gutting of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court that you were having, very institutional forces come out to say defend the vote, amongst other demands. But there was very much an identifying of the attacks on voting rights, I do think it’s worth just recognizing that it happened. I mean, I can’t get precise reports on numbers.
We can say that on the one hand, they completely pale against the frontal assault on the rights of Black people to vote. It was thousands of people coming out responding directly to the gutting of the voting rights protections, of the gerrymandering, the voter roll purges, the attacks on mail and early voting, and the federal demands for voter data. I’m not sure if you got to listen to any of it. I listened to some clips, and while we will get into the issues with it, which there are many that are important, there was a sense that this was a very dangerous moment that everyone is faced with.
Bernie Sanders described Trump and the Supreme Court majority as carrying out the most significant assault on voting rights and segregation, and you did highlight all the ways that they are attacking people’s constitutional rights to voting. I thought it was worth emphasizing that they were describing the regime’s approach as an attack on the electoral system. It was Martin Luther King III was talking about the despair and the exhaustion that people feel, he didn’t use these words exactly, but to have to take up the same struggle your ancestors took up, you know, that people fought and died for, and then just be hit with assault after assault after assault. What that does to your sense of power and agency?
Sharpton, told the AP that marchers get attention, and that that is why this has to happen. And said people have to now go to the trenches and organize. I just wanted to get your thoughts on what you made out of the march, what you’re seeing in the mainstream civil rights organizations describing this assault.
Coco Das 12:22
I think that it’s really important that this march happened and that people were making a connection to the pre-civil rights reality for the lives of Black people. You know, this is a regime that wants to go back to a time before Jim Crow was overturned, before the liberation movements of the ’60s won these very hard-fought constitutional rights that were not respected and then reinforced in the Constitution through constitutional amendments, and after 50 years to be in this position again of having to really think about what would it mean to go back into the trenches and fight and sacrifice on the level that the people during the civil rights movement had to.
When you watch like footage from the civil rights movement, it really brings alive like what was required in order to even get the nominal rights that they got, which have been enforced to some extent. But the backlash started right away, and you know, as you said, this movement has been building for decades to sort of reconsolidate after that loss, you could say, of the civil rights movement and the other liberation movements. I was hoping for bigger numbers and expecting bigger numbers, but the spirit of it was right, and also recognizing what these attacks on voting rights represent, which is just to make it real, putting black people back into their place according to these white supremacist fascists.
It’s not just disenfranchising; it’s dehumanizing, delegitimizing them as people who have a place in this country. When you have that in the hands of a genocidal regime, their vision of society is a society of brown and black people gone from society, or so submissive, so delegitimized that they have no power that not only the government, but no white person has to respect, which is what was the reality for hundreds of years through the history of this country. I did not watch all the speeches, so I didn’t hear what kind of organizing is being called for and what response people were calling for?
What does it mean to go back into the trenches and organize? I will say, if it’s just organizing people to vote, Texas just put 1.2 million people on a suspended voter list, which means that they now have to go through a whole rigmarole in order to vote. Then there’s all the other attacks on voting that they’re planning on even sending out on the day of when the polls open, right?
So, or is it really a fierce fighting spirit which we are going to have to resurrect again? And just as these fascists are resurrecting the dead hand of the Confederacy, we have to resurrect that fighting spirit of people facing down water hoses and attack dogs and just the really going for really struggling with millions of people to be flooding the streets and the Washington Mall and you know being a visible force that is really a force of millions that can actually stop this trajectory as things are moving very quickly towards consolidation.
Sam Goldman 15:48
I really appreciate that, and I will say, as someone who did watch it, that was not it. You know, this is my personal opinion, not the opinion of Refuse Fascism or anything. But if you’re looking for a model of what it looks like to domesticate dissent, this was a great example, to take people’s righteous outrage, people’s massive disenfranchisement as a plank in a program of utter dehumanization, and taking it in a direction that changes nothing, that challenges nobody. That I will say has been the tone and tenor of this march for some time, and that is not to degrade or denigrate anyone who participated or the righteous demands that people who participated raised.
But when organizers are operating under a framework that is of sheer cognitive dissidence, we’re going to acknowledge a frontal assault on people’s fundamental rights, including the right to vote, and then direct people where? To put all their energies into voting, a right that you just said was frontally assaulted. It was facing an all-sided attack, right? But there are no words that I can find to fully describe how disarming that is. Because then you have to question: Well, is it really that dangerous? If all we have to do is more of what we’ve done before, then is the danger real or not?
Does it actually not matter that black representation is gone in the South and that no amount of blue state voting changes that? Like, is that a thing or not? Because if it is, a strategy that’s fundamentally focused on registering more voters and getting people to vote early can’t combat that. And the sentiments of the people who did the 1000 mile March to Memphis or whatever, those are good sentiments. The people are caring about people being thrown back to a time where black folks had no rights that white folks were bound to accept or respect, but the strategy to then address that is what’s not measuring up.
It’s not that. It has to do with people’s concerns can be good, and then people go and take those concerns and they do something that isn’t going to address them. That isn’t only a miscalculation, but it’s harmful because we should be using that time right now to prepare for what the regime is telling us and showing us that they that they’re doing. And so, when people say things like “go to the trenches and organize,” and that’s really focused on, as the the NAACP’s page said, “ the streets that carried the civil rights movement now call people to carry the struggle to the ballot box,” when those ballot boxes are not being respected and votes are being suppressed, what does that mean?
As AOC talked about in November, “We’re going to see a tide like never before, and it’s going to be this beginning tide of a whole wave of new tides,” I’m sure her metaphor made more sense, even if it was wrong, than what I just laid out. But there were two things that I wanted to get your thoughts on in terms of message about what people are being organized to do. One is that the official material for the march and in a lot of the content that came out is that the right to vote is the source of all our power. And AOC echoed this when she told the crowd yesterday that our ability to win depends on our ability to vote. And I just wanted to ask: Is that true? Is this the source of all our power?
Coco Das 19:38
Yeah. Quick answer: No, that is not the source of all our power. There are countless examples of how to prove that. One, even one, even the right to vote was not won by voting. It wasn’t won by the decent men in society voting so that women can get the right to vote, or the decent white people voting so black people could get the right to vote. It was won by fierce, contentious struggle in the streets and in other realms of refusing to go along with the way things have been.
But also there is the example of the fact that in 2020 Trump lost the election, and then what did he do? He sent out a mob to attack the Capitol, and on top of the rolling coup that was already happening, to try to overturn those results, and that was a dress rehearsal for everything that they’ve been able to do since they came to power, since they regained the White House in 2024, and now they’ve had almost two years to solidify some of those attacks on the electoral system. So this has been rigged at the time, but the point is that if voting alone was the source of our power, we would not have a second Trump term.
The fascist movement would have been defeated; they would have slunk away with their tail between their legs. The kind of struggle that was needed never happened, Okay? There were seeds of it, there were beginnings of it. It never matured into something that could actually defeat this fascist movement. No social justice has ever been won in this country by voting alone. And then we can talk about also what the electoral system, what is it designed to keep in place?
I’m speaking for myself here, not Refuse Fascism. There’s a whole system of exploitation, the dominant role of the U.S. as the world’s leading world superpower. Those are the things that all of the people who are elected to office under this system, that is their priority. That’s their first priority, to protect the interests of the system. You know, not that there’s not you know some dynamism within that. And then you know, I think we do also have to look at certain examples of like what are you forced to compromise on when you’ve got one side of the the two ruling parties who are hell bent on enforcing this new form of rule that is based on brute violence and terror, that sees everybody else as illegitimate, and you’ve got the other side that’s completely tied to these norms that have been torn apart, and you know that forces certain compromises.
One that was pointed out, I think, in a couple of columns ago, you know, it’s something that was in the news a little bit, was that right after TPS was revoked for Haitian immigrants, Haitian people who were working in Mamdani’s City Hall were fired, given their pink slips, very quickly because now the law changed, and you know they no longer had legal status to be able to work. So these are some of the reasons why I believe that the right to vote is not the source of our power. However, the right to vote is extremely important because it’s tied to other rights.
You know, it’s tied to how people are seen as citizens and human beings and people worthy of of having any rights. So it is complicated. In that sense, we have to defend the right to vote. It’s not nothing at all that people are losing their right to vote, but from that, it doesn’t follow that the right to vote is the source of all of our power.
Sam Goldman 23:23
Exactly, you know. I think that there are two different questions: Is this a pivotal right that needs to be defended, and is this the source of all our power? They are not the same question, and that’s why they don’t have the same answer. I think that one is very obvious, and the other is more complex. People are told if it didn’t matter, they wouldn’t go so far to suppress it. There is something to it. Look, Trump again. I’m going to say, of course, I’m speaking. It’s my opinion, but I like to make it clear to you that this is my opinion, not one that necessarily would make it to Refuse Fascism’s website.
Look, it would be great for this fascist regime to possess something that it can turn into a mandate from the people. It was very helpful for them that they won. It is not nothing that they won. They got to then say “mandate from the people,” right? They got to continue the the legacy of great American democracy because the people voted for this, and so therefore, under that logic, which is not true, everything they do has the stamp of approval of all people because that was the party that won, and so part of their strategy is to suppress the vote so that they can maintain that legitimacy. The key thing is that they are not beholden to that. While that would be nice for them, they prefer that, they have a multitude of other scenarios already in play. Because they care more about their power than they do about their legitimacy.
Coco Das 25:06
Well, I want to make a point about the legitimacy too, because I was thinking about this in terms of the march on Washington. Also, if we contrast the way that this regime completely shits on the legitimacy of so many swaths of people, you know, whether it be you know different groups of immigrants, what they call “shithole countries,” and then all the way from that to their you know who they consider their political enemies, including like leaders of the Democratic Party and stuff.
You contrast that with the complete legitimacy that the decent people will hate, like really viscerally hate, everything that the regime represents, but bestows on all of the institutions that are all being transformed, and therefore on the regime because they won an election through the system, through the workings of this system. They won an election, therefore they are considered legitimate. And you know, one of the things that you will find in all the Refuse Fascism, on the website is that fascism is never legitimate, and we really have to wage that struggle in a big way.
This is illegitimate. What they’re doing-it’s illegitimate, it’s inhumane, and it’s dangerous to the future of humanity. They don’t care about their legitimacy. They don’t care about other people’s legitimacy. But there is this disconnect in the way that the fascists delegitimize, and the decent people and the you know mainstream Democratic Party leadership insists on the legitimacy of the regime, in a I think in a very dangerous way. That part is my opinion, but that fascism is is never legitimate. This is I I think something really important to grasp.
Sam Goldman 26:53
Absolutely, and the view of their legitimacy, while it may not matter as much as their need for power for them, that is not the same as the ruling class doesn’t care about their legitimacy, or that other powers around the world don’t care about the U.S. seen as a stable, legitimate democracy. And so, it’s actually a very powerful thing. The more that people can lift up the illegitimacy of this rule, the more possibility that opens for any chance of nonviolently ending this nightmare, which is the strategy of Refuse Fascism. I did want to put that in there because maybe I wasn’t being clear.
As we were talking about the the civil rights movement and its legacy, you know, there is, in addition to that, cognitive dissidence about you’re saying that there’s this attack on the voting rights, and then you’re telling people that okay, well, that’s why we got to vote and get people in power that are going to defend their voting rights. You know, there’s that, but then there’s also the commemorating the legacy of people who exercised their power far beyond the ballot box because they were deprived of the ballot box as part of it, along with many other rights and humanity. Right? That they were being sense of humanity they were deprived of, but commemorating in many ways, a mass struggle while drawing a completely electoral lesson for the movement whose history, a history that people like Sanders did reference, about the great sacrifice that you spoke to, about people who went to jail, who faced dogs and fire hoses and risked their lives, that was noted, but that history demonstrates something much more true about where people’s power comes from, and that dissonance just was with me as well.
I was really glad to see that [Refuse Fascism] organizers from the DMV chapter and from New York City were out in the crowd, were getting out our palm card, which we’ll link to in the show notes, and we had a banner that said Jim Crow, Hell No, the Trump fascist regime Must Go Now! and we’re recruiting them into the only movement that’s serious about making that reality. I just wanted to return to where we started in the conversation about this is happening while they’re attacking this election. That’s what, two months away, maybe a little over two months. Right?
Going back to I think Sanders’ own list is useful because it was pretty extensive. You know, voter roll purges, federal demands for voter data, mail-in voting restrictions, early voting restrictions, redistricting, federal agents around polling place, and the march occurred as we said at the beginning, just days after the Supreme Court opened the door to more of Trump’s election executive order, while litigation continues. I just would like to get into the strategic answers can’t simply be to use that same electoral system to defeat him that he’s subverting and suppressing. And so then the question I think for most people is okay, what power do people possess, and how do they exercise that? How do people defend their vote when the federal executive itself is attacking the conditions in which it is exercised? And you know, what power do people possess that would actually challenge this?
Coco Das 30:35
I think that power is still a collective power. It’s definitely not grumbling amongst your neighbors and friends, which you know you people should do that. I’m not I’m not knocking it, but it is still a collective power, but it has to manifest in a way that people around the world can see it, and you see it in little pockets like in Minneapolis when people rose up after the ICE killings of, you know, Renee Goode. That all eyes are on that city, and then you know it calls into question the legitimacy of the regime, and then the regime has to respond.
It’s just worth noting that the way they responded was to get rid of the people who were creating these big spectacles and doing a quieter strategy that actually rounded up more people, you know, the regime has to respond, and then you know you go back and you say no, this this is unacceptable. But people often make the point that we are the majority. This is true. Most people in this country do not want to live in a fascist America, but if they are just waiting for an election that’s being subverted, it doesn’t matter that we’re the majority. I live in Texas. They have figured out how to do minority rule, and you know this is a model for fascists all over the country.
So you know it’s a collective response of people in their millions, but you know thousands to begin with is is good, and you know, then hundreds of thousands, and something that becomes an unrelenting movement of people in the streets, and you know, public squares, and in institutions, and you know, of refusing to go along with it and demanding an end to the regime. That’s the ultimate solution to the immediate emergency that we’re facing. So people non-violently together in the streets facing down what is the program of a fascist regime as a whole. You’re not going to stop ICE under this regime. You’re not going to abolish ICE under this regime, and that’s a key thing.
It’s a key part of the strategy that Refuse Fascism has been advocating for since our founding. Why does that matter? Because it creates a necessity for everybody, every institution, including the regime itself. The world is, you know, now looking at what’s happening, and suddenly the regime doesn’t seem so all powerful. That still remaining, you know, less and less, but still remaining splits in the institutions, and the the splits are there. But you know, the people who are remaining in these institutions who could then make moves to remove Trump from power legitimately, you know. So that’s the nonviolent strategy that could defeat this. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s the best shot, and it has not been tried yet. I’m sure there are things I’m leaving out, so I’m going to pass it back to you.
Sam Goldman 33:36
Well, one thing that I was thinking about is you know looking at the majority of strategies out there amongst forces that recognize the danger that Trump and his regime pose to the elections. The strategies that I’m seeing are sound the alarm, be prepared, get involved in in local elections to help protect their integrity, register more people so that it’s too big to rig. I think another is vote early. I think the belief there is that there would be less freedom, I guess, to mess with those results or to count them out.
As a last case scenario, take independent, mass, nonviolent, sustained action should he try to move to steal the election. I was wondering how Refuse Fascism strategy is is different. Like, what do you see as missing there? Why is it a mistake to focus solely on if this fascist regime steals the election, then we’ll call people into the streets and people will come and we will do this in a sustained fashion, and we will non-violently demand that they stop stealing the election.
Coco Das 34:45
First of all, one: things are really bad. Things are very bad already. Constantly moving the goalposts and saying when this happens, they’re already rigging too big to rig. They’re already rigging it. It’s already being the the key operative word there is rig. It’s already being rigged. Is it possible to make something too big that you know all of their attempts to rig just get overwhelmed?
You know, I’m not saying that’s not possible, but it’s sort of ignoring the rigging part that’s already been underway for a long time, and you know the fact that Trump attempted to stage a violent coup back in 2021, so things are already very far along on this road to the consolidation of fascist power, which would create a situation where any attempt to redress is gone. So the stakes are extremely high, and then my other response is: Let’s say you have the best case scenario where they are not successful at stealing the election, and millions and millions overwhelmingly are able to get around all the attempts to suppress their vote in red states as well as blue and win back the House and the Senate.
Then what? If you are operating from a view that there are normal channels for removing the threat of this regime, let’s say even short of you think the regime has to go immediately, but you’re going to stop the worst excesses. How is that going to work exactly? If the Democrats win the midterms, the regime is going to respond right away. They’re going to respond. I don’t know. I can’t predict every way that they’re going to respond, but they are definitely going to throw some some wrenches into allowing this to continue without a huge struggle, then what? Let’s say then they, you know, are all sworn into power in January.
Then they start a process of impeachment. No president has actually ever been removed by impeachment. It’s really just a way of like kicking the can down the road. As on the other side, they are fighting like hell to hold on to power, and the number of lives being offended, destroyed, killed, not just here, but all over the world, is accelerating. You know, I think that what’s missing from that strategy is an actual confrontation with what this regime is trying to do and what’s already been happening and the reality that’s right in front of our eyes,
Sam Goldman 37:26
I’m going to complicate my own argument right now. But while people should not wait, and there does need to be not only a society-wide recognition that those in power are moving fast and furious ahead with their fascist program, and part of that, in order to lock in power, means rigging, stealing the midterms, but that it not stop there. That people then be raising the demand Trump Must Go Now! everywhere and preparing for the worst, and that means to me building the organization and networks and resources that we need to politically defeat this regime.
But many people are waiting, and the majority is waiting, and the majority is being passive, right? And this is where I’m complicating my own argument to say millions do believe that relying on elections is is still it. I’m not saying that we give up the work of struggling with as many people as possible, but the majority is dug deep in that civic religion of you know elections and politics as usual, and they’re waiting for November. They’re waiting to see what happens, and part of that does mean to me that such a blatant attempt to nullify their votes to steal the election could potentially have enormous consequences in moving people from passivity to the kind of collective nonviolent action that you were describing.
I have so many caveats to that too, right? In terms of what we witnessed in 2020, you know how things have changed since then, and what people have been been accustomed to. But I wanted to see, like, we don’t know what the cataclysmic event would be, but like, what could you see suddenly changing if that type of normal channel that people are relying on disappears? Like, how? What might that look like? Because I think that’s hard for people to visualize and think through.
Coco Das 39:32
Yeah, I think sometimes it can be hard to predict. But you know, let’s say that they do send ICE agents to polling stations, and there are scenes of people getting turned away or people being harassed, and perhaps that’s something. Perhaps there’s like a clear result, like a popular vote, and in some area that’s like clearly being overturned. You know, perhaps something like that, or. It is hard to predict if the Republicans or the Republi-fascists just win back, let’s say everything has been successful on their end of their attempts to get things lined up in their favor, and there’s the House and the Senate go back solidly in Republican control, and then there’s like a further consolidation of all that.
Maybe that would be it. And then something else could happen that’s a step too far, and people not having any options. The midterms are over. You’re going to wait another two years, maybe. But maybe that would be the attitude. But that could potentially be something that awakens the sleeping giant. I think things are so volatile, and I think people do have this like sense. I mean, people I talk to do feel like anything can happen at any time, and for some people, that means I’m just checking out.
But it’s that disturbance is there, and so this war in Iran, it’s not going well for the regime. There could be something that happens in regards to the war in Iran. It could be something in terms of the economy. You don’t know, but there could be at any point some kind of spark that means that the regime has completely miscalculated something, and the people find that the only way to respond to it is to rise up in nonviolent collective action. So those are some ideas, but we’re not fortune tellers, so it’s hard for me to kind of predict too many particulars. But it could be another person killed, another video.
There are so many outrageous things happening. I’m just going to give a little analogy. There were many, many. I can’t remember the number of people that police killed every year when George Floyd was killed, but there was something about the conflagration of everything around that time, where the killing of George Floyd was a last straw, and millions of people flooded into the streets, which I think were the largest mass protests in U.S. history, those are some thoughts.
Sam Goldman 42:16
Yeah, I think it’s really worth zeroing in on the midterms and their attempts to steal it as the most likely potential of one of these ruptures, the because of what it means in the change of form of rule objectively, and because the way that people see elections in this country as the most sanctified right. Or however it’s it’s easiest for people to understand, and there are several scenarios I think in which they could steal it, and it’s worth re-listening to the conversation that I did with David F. Walberg a couple weeks back for some of that.
As you said, the intimidation forces at the polls being one of them. Another January incident is another possibility. There’s the counting and the the actually counting people out of the vote, as was attempted last time. These are all examples of steps too far that could propel people into the streets. And I think that they’re worth thinking about, and it’s worth remembering. You were saying people are able to come up with, or I forget how you were phrasing it.
Many people, if they’re paying attention at all, can imagine some absolute atrocities that are very likely to happen if this regime remains in power. Many people are also able to imagine that somehow all of that gets resolved without any sacrifice, without any struggle, with just the normal workings of good old American democracy. But people have a really, really hard time imagining that the decent people in this country could or would do something extraordinarily positive to change the course of history. People really struggle with that, and I’m not saying this as some kind of like, well, you work with three to five year olds, so you have really positive world outlook, and you see the best in people.
No, this comes from like much more materialism from that. People have sacrificed and do sacrifice, but parasitism does weigh on weigh on this whole society and shapes things, but the example that you gave was not that long ago. Was not that long ago that white majority small towns, some who where people did not know personally a black person who had been murdered by the police, let alone just a friend, you know, like took to the streets again and again, got tear gassed and and beaten by the police for saying Black Lives Matter. It was even less time in Minnesota where people came out to defend their neighbors against ICE, and once again, this great repression and even death in doing so.
To think that that is not possible now, I think, is an indictment of the work that we need to do. I think that when it comes to the role of a demand in that moment, I think it’s not the only thing that would take it from an outpouring to something positive to something that changes history-it’s not only the demand, but it does play a pivotal role. Because I’m thinking back to 2020, and in Philadelphia, where it was the epicenter of the whether they were going to keep counting or not, and the majority of the demand was you know hands off our vote, keep counting, that kind of thing. And I was proud to be with others saying these this fascist regime’s got to go. They lost. Get the fuck out, and that changes things. If more people had taken that up, it would have made a world of difference.
The kind of accountability and consequences for?fascism would have been greater, which would have made it harder for it to rush right back in doing the same thing. And I think in this context, you know, 2026 is not 2020, and that could be a whole other conversation that we have on the podcast, what’s changed and what hasn’t. But one of the things that I do think we are more in a position to have, is if this demand got out there now, and people could find those Trump Must Go Now! people in that situation, that demand could be really a magnet for the kind of massive, unrelenting resistance we need.
Coco Das 46:46
Yeah, the point of the demand becoming a magnetic force, even if it’s a minority of people who are spreading it, but it becoming a magnetic force that that can then change the terms on which people are acting. It’s extremely important. The one other point I want to make is, even under extremely, extremely challenging circumstances of extreme state repression throughout modern history, there have been uprisings of millions of people facing down tremendous repression and violence, who do not relent, and it has driven out hated regimes.
You know, we didn’t really even talk about the fear factor of people being afraid to act and their political repression that is definitely escalating, targeting protesters, targeting people who are organizing peaceful, nonviolent actions, but I do think that you’re right about people have such a hard time imagining that the decent people in this country could rise to that kind of challenge. Although in pockets they have, you know, I think we do need to remind people and also help them imagine what more is possible and the impact it could have.
Sam Goldman 48:05
That makes a lot of sense to me, and I also think that I don’t want the lesson to be like we’ve done it before, so we can do it again. We we haven’t done it, but there are things that that indicate that we can. And I think that we also have not faced this before, and so to think that people won’t because they haven’t isn’t facing that we’ve not been in that reality before. And so while we are a special people in what we’ve allowed thus far, we are also not that different from special.
Coco Das 48:38
Special not in the best sense.
Sam Goldman 48:39
We are also not that special in that that people have risen up before non-violently and announced to people. Yes, we are different. We are different. We’re gay. We’re big. We’re this. We’re that. But the basic truth of creating conditions in which those in power are unable to rule in the way that they want through nonviolently shutting down business as usual. It is a long shot, but it is not a no shot. In fact, it’s our best nonviolent chance of compelling the removal of this regime.
The work that we do now building this movement that is uniting people around this demand. Trump must go now and spreading the demand everywhere, a demand that is a dividing line between living with or stopping a Trump fascist America and the work that people do to fundraise or donate to build this movement and bring this demand into the streets and through society nationwide. I think the more that we do that now, the better position that we will be in, no matter which of the the scenarios we face. I want to thank you for talking with me and and helping us sift through all this, Coco. I wanted to just say if there’s anything that we didn’t talk about or that you feel is left unresolved that you wanted to end on.
Coco Das 50:08
We’ve covered a lot. I’m sure you know. In the middle of the night, I’ll be awakened by some thought of what we need to talk about immediately. But I think that we’ve gotten to some really crucial points, and you know, in processing what’s happening and juxtaposing some of the different strategies out there, and going into a time period that’s extremely volatile and perhaps decisive in the the direction of things in the immediate future.
Sam Goldman 50:38
It’s definitely given me like, oh, what we need for future conversations, like okay. Well, what about transforming the Democratic Party, or what about best case scenario? What happens?
Coco Das 50:51
Yeah. Thanks, Sam.
Sam Goldman 50:59
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