Greetings all. Sending along one of my favorite discussions since the founding of Hopium - a new talk recorded earlier today with Indivisible’s Ezra Levin. I asked Ezra to come by and preview the upcoming March 28th No Kings day, and reflect a bit on the inspiring success of Indivisible and the No Kings movement. A recording of our wonderful discussion can be found above and a full transcript is below.
If you haven’t found a No Kings event near you head here. Here’s their latest map of events on March 28th. Thousands and thousands events across the country. So remarkable…..
There is so much in this discussion I think you will find helpful in your own work each day. Here is one of my favorite parts:
Ezra Levin:
Look, I don’t think there is a way to take on the fascist by having your own centralized power structure by doing top down. I just don’t think it works. I think maybe you’ll get people involved for a little bit, but very quickly they will burn out. I think one of the reasons why we got here is we didn’t intend to start this. All we were looking to do was provide people advice for how you can effectively organize to achieve goals that we share. How do you stop a Trump regime? How do you push an elected official to move and to change their behavior?
The answer for us is not [that] you develop a massive centralized organization at the national level. Maybe somebody could do that. That’s not in the cards for us. I don’t think that’s in the cards for the pro-democracy community. If we are going to succeed, we need a participatory democracy. That means people got to participate. So look, I’m proud of Indivisible national. I’m proud of the work we do to support the groups, but I’m even more proud that if you Google image search Indivisible logo, you’ll see the Indivisible national logo, and then you’ll see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other Indivisible logos lovingly created by the folks who own and operate their local Indivisible group… that’s the magic. That’s how it actually is able to sustain and build itself… that the real success is losing control… it’s not controlling it here… it is allowing other folks to actually control it. I’m just a deep believer in that. I think that’s how democracy has to function.
Amen to all that…….
Get to this discussion with one of the great heroes of this moment when you can, my friends, and let’s work together to make this next No Kings the biggest day of protest in American history. It is what is needed now, and what our Mad King so richly deserves - Simon
Bio - Ezra Levin, Indivisible
Ezra Levin is the co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible. Prior to founding Indivisible, Ezra served as Associate Director of Federal Policy for Prosperity Now, a national anti-poverty nonprofit. Previously, he was the Deputy Policy Director for Congressman Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), Field Director for Doggett’s 2010 reelection campaign, and an AmeriCorps VISTA in the Homeless Services Division of the San Jose Housing Department.
Along with his co-founder and spouse Leah Greenberg, Ezra has been featured as one of TIME 100’s Most Influential People of 2019, included on GQ’s 50 Most Powerful People in Trump’s Washington, and ranked #2 on the Politico 50 list of top thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics. He has appeared as a commentator on and/or been interviewed by MSNBC, CNN, NPR, Pod Save America, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico, TIME Magazine, the New Yorker, the Nation, Slate, and Rolling Stone, among others. He is the co-author of We Are Indivisible: A Blueprint for Democracy After Trump, published by Simon & Schuster’s One Signal Publishers in 2019.
He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Carleton College and a Master in Public Affairs from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.
Transcript - Simon Rosenberg and Ezra Levin (3/10/26)
Simon Rosenberg:
Welcome, everyone. Got a special event today. Joining us is one of the real heroes of our movement, Ezra Levin from Indivisible. Welcome, Ezra.
Ezra Levin:
Hey, Simon. Great to be talking.
Simon:
So listen, you guys have helped create one of the most important mass movements in American history. You're helping a lot of Americans find their way into constructive activities during a time of enormous challenge. And I really wanted you to come on just to give us an update on No Kings. It's coming up in just a few weeks. We're going to make it the biggest and baddest ever, but just before we begin that, talk a little bit about the history of Indivisible and how you got to this place that you're in today. I'm just fascinated to hear the story personally.
Ezra:
Look, Indivisible started accidentally. Donald Trump had just been elected the first time. This is 2016. And there were a couple of reactions to his election that were shocking to both me and Leah, my spouse, our co-executive director. One was a future Trump appointee talking about the Japanese internment camps here in World War II as a model for what to do with Muslims and immigrants and refugees. This terrifying agenda that was coming in with the Republican Congress behind them. They were planning to support this guy to implement his agenda. But the second was this sense that our leaders, even in the Democratic Party, were not raring to go to oppose this agenda. I remember an interview with Chuck Schumer back then in the New York Times, in which he said, well, Trump won… that happens… we just got to figure out a way to work together… maybe we can work together on infrastructure. And that was what really broke me and Leah because we had been congressional staffers during the rise of the Tea Party. We saw the Tea Party rise up against Barack Obama, a very popular president with huge majorities in Congress, and they weren't able to stop everything that he was doing, but they were able to generate a lot of opposition and stop some of it. And so when we saw Trump come in, losing the popular vote with slim majorities, one of the least popular elected presidents in modern American history, we thought well damn… why aren't Democrats unified… we need to push to unify the opposition against this incoming Republican trifecta. And so we thought we would take the lessons that we had learned from the Tea Party, putting aside the racism and their violence, and their misogyny and their bigotry, but cluing in on what did they get right?
They organized locally. They focused on their elected officials and they played defense. They said no loudly and treated that as a complete sentence. And so Leah and I drafted this Google Doc and I posted it to what was then Twitter, which was not then a fascist hellhole, X, but actually a useful site for getting in touch with people. And look, shockingly, it went viral. People started reading it and they started communicating with it. They started sending us emails and they all said the same thing… this guide is full of typos. Because it was just a Google Doc. That's all it was. We weren't trying to start some kind of big movement or anything. We were trying to give people information about how do you effectively push your elected officials? Why should you be engaged? And what can you hope to accomplish? And our argument was simple. It starts locally. In a democratic republic, you as an individual, unless you're rich or famous, you don't have a lot of power. But the good news is you do have power if you organize together and your elected official fears you.
They fear your votes. They fear your advocacy. But you got to organize in order to get them in shape. So we put it out in the world. And then we started seeing now at this point more than 2,500 local Indivisible groups organizing in just about every congressional district in the country. I think the key thing is we wrote a Google Doc. We're not the leaders of this movement. The leaders of this movement are building it up independently all over the country. I think that's why we're here nine years later still building power because it's not me and Leah out there. As much as I appreciate these conversations, Simon, it's not about me. It's not about this conversation. It's about the millions of conversations that are happening at the local level. That's where the power is actually being built and wielded.
Simon:
Well, and you know that part of what you've done in this… let's nerd out here a little bit, but just the whole concept of network theory, right? Like I agree with you, you know, this is the first time, by the way, we've ever met, which is just kind of crazy, right?
Ezra: Yeah.
Simon:
But I study what you do. It's in my face every day because you have such passionate followers in the Hopium community. And there's enormous overlap between our communities. Although yours is a little bit bigger than Hopium [laughs], the whole concept of network theory, right, building networks that are decentralized. And it's very kind of de Tocquevillian, very kind of American in every way, you know, I think your model is so powerful because it's putting people in charge and not you, actually, right? I think there's a lot of humility in that. There's also a lot of brilliance in that. In terms of how this needed to happen. I mean, the only way I think you can get to this kind of mass scale that you've been able to get to is if people have local ownership and for it to grow rather than being top down, you know, we're part of a thing where we have to invent this thing together, build this thing together. And I think that's where you've created a really powerful permission structure for people to invent their own thing and to build their own thing on their own terms, which makes this more durable and sustainable over time.
But it's also far more, I think, in keeping with how people want to approach their own democracy, right? Which is that they don't want to be told what to do. They want to build their own alternative. And what's important for you… just as an outsider… is that the amount of people who will openly talk about their affiliation with Indivisible just in these casual conversations, you know, oh, I'm an Indivisible, you know, blah, blah, blah. You've created crazy brand power by letting people invent their own thing. You deserve a lot of credit, you know, you and Leah for having built something very powerful. We're now seeing the power of it, you know, emerge… the true power of it in the second Trump term.
Ezra:
Look, I don't think there is a way to take on the fascist by having your own centralized power structure by doing top down. I just don't think it works. I think maybe you'll get people involved for a little bit, but very quickly they will burn out. I think one of the reasons why we got here is we didn't intend to start this. All we were looking to do was provide people advice for how you can effectively organize to achieve goals that we share. How do you stop a Trump regime? How do you push an elected official to move and to change their behavior?
The answer for us is not [that] you develop a massive centralized organization at the national level. Maybe somebody could do that. That's not in the cards for us. I don't think that's in the cards for the pro-democracy community. If we are going to succeed, we need a participatory democracy. That means people got to participate. So look, I'm proud of Indivisible national. I'm proud of the work we do to support the groups, but I'm even more proud that if you Google image search Indivisible logo, you'll see the Indivisible national logo, and then you'll see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other Indivisible logos lovingly created by the folks who own and operate their local Indivisible group… that's the magic. That's how it actually is able to sustain and build itself… that the real success is losing control… it's not controlling it here… it is allowing other folks to actually control it. I'm just a deep believer in that. I think that's how democracy has to function.
Simon:
I often use the term, Ezra, that politics is like jazz. It's not like classical music, right? You need to let go and you need to improvise. And there's a maturity in that, by the way, that we're seeing the other side is lacking that maturity with Trump and so on. So let's fast forward to No Kings. Talk about how this happened last year. It went through, I think, a name change originally. But talk about, when you began this Trump term, how did you approach it? And then how did we end up here with No Kings?
Ezra:
Look, we approached it the same way we approached the first Trump election. So on election night, Leah and I… my mom was visiting to help with the kids. We got a three and a five year old. And she said she could watch the kids. We went to a cabin in West Virginia and wrote a new Indivisible Guide. And the new Indivisible Guide was focused on how do you push back against this authoritarian regime? How do you effectively organize? How do you form a coalition of no? And at that moment, and it's still the case in some sectors, we were seeing media capitulate. We were seeing universities capitulate. We were seeing law firms capitulate. We were seeing some elements of the Democratic Party capitulate. The conventional wisdom in Washington, D.C. was this guy's riding high. He's got a majority in the House and the Senate. He's got a unified Republican Party behind him. We've got to get in line. And similar to eight years before, we were not seeing the leaders that we needed come together and say, no, we can say no. We can say no because he is going to overreach and he was not elected for Project 2025. He was not elected to implement a fascist agenda. He was elected to lower the price of bread and eggs and milk. He was not elected to implement this agenda. People will turn against him and we should unify against him in order to welcome those people in. And the basic idea behind this still comes down to constituent power.
Now, where you apply that constituent power could be different based on the political realities. What you are going to organize for in rural Arkansas is going to be different than what you organize for in Berkeley. What you organize for in a purple district or purple state is going to be different than what you organize for in a deep blue or deep red state. But you still got to organize. You got to find out where you can apply that power. Maybe that's at your trifecta Democratic state level, or maybe it's you've got a squishy Democratic member or a squishy Republican member… you can push them in Congress. But we came out with that guide and the response was overwhelming. People wanted to be part of the opposition. They wanted to be asked to do more in that moment and not just told to donate, or to sign a petition, or to vote in two years to get them back in power. They wanted to organize now. And look, we've quadrupled the size of the movement in the last year because people want to organize to fight back.
The first place that materialized where the public saw it were the town halls in February of last year. About a year ago, people were showing up at town halls yelling about Elon Musk, yelling about what he was doing in the federal government to ransack federal programs and and raid the federal coffers. That was in February. We built towards the first major mobilization in April was called Hands Off. And it was aimed at fracturing this relationship between the richest man in the world and this authoritarian in the White House. It was called Hands Off because of what Musk was doing in the White House. And at the time, I know it seems quaint at this point, but Hands Off was enormous.
Hands Off had 1,300 events all across the country. There were 3 million people. I'll put that in context, Simon. The largest protest, which is a big, empowering, inspiring protest of the first Trump term was the Families Belong Together protest, which was protesting the family separation that Trump was doing at the time. There were about 750 events nationwide. We almost doubled that with Hands Off. And one of the signs that we saw repeatedly in Hands Off, it was a lot of the 50501 groups that were putting this on, we saw it at 50501 events for Hands Off as well. What did the signs say? They said No Kings.
We saw it again and again and again in communities across the country. And as we were looking for what we do next, and as we heard that Trump was planning this ridiculous military birthday parade for himself on June 14th, we said, well, we got to we got to bust through that image that he's trying to present as this all powerful authoritarian. We're not going to confront him in D.C. He can have D.C. for that day. We're going to protest everywhere else and we're going to call it No Kings. That's what's resonating out there. That's why we called it no kings. It wasn't some idea Leah and I dreamed up. It wasn't poll tested in some back room. This was coming out of the streets. This was coming from people who are already showing up.
And it succinctly said, we're not going to go along with this undermining of the Constitution on the heels of the 250th anniversary of the Founding of this country, a country founded on rejecting authoritarianism and the attack on our basic rights. So we thought it would resonate. We hoped it would build. But you know, anytime you announce a big party, you don't know who's going to show up. And No Kings ended up being at the time the largest –– one of the largest protests in American history. There were five million people at 2,100 events. We ran it again in October for No Kings 2. The Republicans were claiming we were going to be violent Marxists showing up in the streets in these troubling ways. Mike Johnson couldn't stop talking about how dangerous it was going to be. [We] saw the National Guard called out in Texas and in Virginia. I remember the Austin Indivisible groups who were putting on No Kings in Austin… [they said] well, great, they can come listen to our bands and dance with our fellow participants if they like, which is exactly what happened. There were no incidents. The nonviolent protests at Hands Off, No Kings, No Kings 2… the image coming out of that is enormous numbers of people, joy and power, joyfully coming together to say, look, this is not what we stand for. There are more of us than there are of them. And we're not afraid to show up.
I don't care if he calls out the National Guard. I don't care if he threatens us with prosecution. I don't care if he threatens to take away our rights. If we don't show up for rights, we don't have them. So we're going to show up. So we had three million people at Hands Off, five million people at No Kings 1, seven million people at No Kings 2, No Kings 3 on March 28th. This week, we are going to announce we have more events on the map than we had for No Kings 2. It's going to be the largest protest in American history. Because as bad as he is, as much as he is lashing out, every time he does that, more people come into the movement.
Simon:
It’s very exciting, and it’s also coming out in the East Coast a very cold winter, so I think people are also just going to be incredibly excited about being outside after what’s been a shit winter in the eastern part of the US. And the timing was perfect. You picked a great weekend. So we're less than three weeks away. How can people get involved? And I want to say, I don't know what I need to do to make Hopium a sponsoring organization, but please include me. And if I have to send you some money or something, let me know. But just include Hopium on your long list of sponsoring organizations, and we'll continue to promote it heavily. How can people get involved as well?
Ezra:
Well, look, you don't have to donate anything to Indivisible or No Kings. Nobody listening to this has to donate anything to Indivisible or No Kings. This is not a pay to play kind of thing. This is you join because you raise your hand and you want to be part of it. So what I would recommend folks do is go to NoKings.org and look on the map and see if there's a No Kings event near you. If there's not one within 30 minutes of you, what I would say is congratulations. You get to be one of the organizers of No Kings 3 in your community. You get to participate in this historic event. If there is one near you, great, find one or two people who did not go to Hands Off or No Kings 1 or No Kings 2 and bring them along.
This is how we build towards a mass pro-democracy movement in this country. How we build the capabilities we're going to need as we head to a midterms which I believe we will win hand over fist. We are going to crush the regime in the midterms, but they're not going to go like that. They are going to try to undermine the results. And so we're going to need to show up in force when they do, nonviolently, insisting that we are going to respect the rules set out in the Constitution, that we're going to respect the results of the election, and we are going to seat a new Speaker of the House, a new Senate Majority Leader, and we're going to hold this regime accountable. That means showing up now. And so whether you're starting your own No Kings event or you are recruiting people to come to your No Kings event, this is a time when we don't just sit on the sidelines. We've got to get into the game.
Simon:
Well, and I do want to reflect upon how little there's been virtually no issues with any of these events. I mean, given the size of them, given how decentralized they are, given that many of them are being put on by people that don't have a great deal of experience in this kind of stuff, they've been remarkably peaceful, remarkably successful. I went to the original Hands Off event in DC by the Washington Monument. And I just want to say that I agree. I've been to all of them so far, just as a person, wandering around, they were remarkably joyful, which I think I was surprised by, to be honest with you, Ezra, because there is so much frustration and anger towards Trump. I went to the last one in October in DC, down by the mall, and I walked around. My middle son was biking that day. He's a cyclist, and he met up with us, and we wandered around… he's not a deeply political person and we wandered around in the crowd. I said I want to just take you through the crowd –– I want you to see, you know, people. And there was just joy and happiness. Like as the root kind of sentiment of the day. There wasn't anger, frustration, dark sentiment.
There was joyful sentiment, and given Hopium's orientation, which is that we believe that part of the way that we beat them is by putting positive sentiment out into the world to sort of counter their negative sentiment, I think this has been a remarkable collective achievement, the overarching sentiment of this process. Talk a little bit about that, because when you began that, there's no way to have known that's what would have happened. But it's become… I think the reason why this is growing is because you identify with this movement, and what you're getting is joyful protest, not bitter, angry, frustrated protest, which could have happened, Ezra, right? I mean, I think that would have been one way this could have manifested, but that's not really what I have found when I've gone through these events.
Ezra: Yes. A couple of things.
One, this speaks to just the quality of the folks who are participating in this movement and the amount of training and preparation that is done for all these events. This is not somebody just sends an email and suddenly there's a No Kings event. There has to be a safety and security lead for every single one of these events. We're offering de-escalation safety trainings again and again and again to make sure people know how can we best prepare for this to make sure that these are successful events. There's a lot of work that goes in to making these as successful as they are. I'm proud that the No Kings team makes it look easy. It ain't easy. You don't get to three of the five largest protests in American history just by putting something on a website. There's a lot of effort that goes in this, and there's a lot of effort going into No Kings 3 to make it as successful as it is.
But the second thing, 1000% agree, Simon. I think sometimes it feels like our enemy is Trump, or our enemy is the Republicans, or our enemy is some elected official that isn't doing what we would like them to do. Or some business or some university or some law firm… those aren't the enemies. They are opponents from time to time in these campaigns. But the real enemy in this moment… when we're trying to defeat this authoritarian agenda, the real enemy is cynicism and nihilism and fatalism, a sense that nothing we do matters, that it's all a foregone conclusion, that this guy has all the power. It doesn't matter what we do because the end is already written. And that's what we try to bust through. That's what we try to break people of thinking. We want them to have hope. We want them to believe that what they're doing matters and that by collectively doing it, we can actually make change.
So I think events like No Kings, what they can accomplish if they are wildly successful is they make clear that, oh, wow, maybe democracy will reassert itself. Maybe we are going to have elections. Maybe he can't just railroad the Twin Cities or Chicago or L.A. Maybe he's not going to be able to accomplish everything he wants to accomplish because maybe people aren't going to be so afraid that they don't show up. That is one thing it can accomplish, but if that is one day, that's not success. The biggest one-day protest that you can imagine will not save democracy, will not defeat fascism. So half of the successes [is to] get a whole bunch of new people out, an unexpected number of people in an unexpected number of places.
But then the other half of it is plugging them into their own local organizing. I want to see people going to start new Indivisible groups or 50501 groups, or finding the immigrant rights organization and becoming an ICE watcher themselves, or signing up for an ACLU “Eyes on ICE” training. We need people plugged in to that organizing work, not just to do the work and learn the skills. Bcause then they become part of a community. It’s not just existing on an email list or belonging to the right party and voting the right way… it’s finding your people where you are. And that's what will fuel your work from here until when Trump is just in the trash heap of history. So I am most interested in how do we get people to take the step on March 29th to join that community. And so a lot of work is going into that handoff between No Kings 3 and the next thing.
Simon:
Well, let me make a couple of observations about this. Number one is that I do think that the timing of the October event helped generate some of the enormous electoral success that we had in November because it woke people up. And then we had remarkable performance in November elections. And I give No Kings a lot of credit for that, by the way, because I think it got people into that mindset of, OK, now, you know, it's game time and we got to participate.
Ezra:
You know there's research on that, right? There's research on the connection between Tea Party protests and the outcome of the 2010 elections. And they had an interesting way of looking at it. They looked at where there were larger Tea Party protests because they weren't rained out. And so your control variable were places that were rained out. And they found [that] places with larger Tea Party protests in 2010 had better Republican outcomes in the election in 2010. It is no surprise to me that a few weeks before the November elections, when we had the largest protest in American history, that produced one of the best election nights we've had in a decade.
Simon:
I'm with you on that. I think the second piece of this that's interesting is that the I do think that part of the reason this has been so successful is that officially for many people coming out of COVID you know, I mean, we were away from each other for years. WE got pushed away from community. And we went into these virtual communities, which have been incredibly important from an organizing standpoint, right… I've been doing this a long time since the early 1990s… but I also think there are limitations to the the digital and the virtual organizing.
And people needed to come back together in physical community. It's something I think a lot about for Hopium –– that I don't think Hopium will not really get to where it needs to go until we start having physical interactions with each other and not just digital ones, but I think you also caught this wave of people kind of going back into society again and people who are doing remote work who were not necessarily as connected physically to others, and I think that's been part of the joy, that I think the joy is people being in physical community again in ways that we used to be. Which was like kind of a no-brainer.
And the third observation I have about all this is that I do think that you're right... what I'm seeing, just in Hopium, the feedback I'm getting is that this is translating to local in-person networks that are cohering into not just talking to their electeds now more aggressively and learning… because that's also something we do, one of the things we've done together is to really help people understand that talking to their elected officials should be a daily thing, if possible, and that this is how our democracy was supposed to function… and that actually, as you know from being a former congressional staffer, these offices really pay attention to this stuff… I mean, I've had to really convince people that they really pay attention to this stuff, but they really do. And so, you know, we have daily calls that we make and I'm asking people to make every single day, asking people to put aside if they have the time… but I think the other thing that I agree with you on is that you're starting to see these local networks develop that have electoral and advocacy impacts that are going to really matter this year and in the future.
Where communities are forging, people are meeting one another at Tesla takedowns, at these No Kings, right, electoral events, I mean I love the stories we get of people protesting or going and scheduling an appointment with their local congressional office to meet with a staffer to go through all of their issues with them and bring 20 people in. I love those kinds of events because we're teaching, we're helping people understand that this is what democracy was supposed to be, right? This is the whole theory of this. And the absence of this is actually part of what becomes the danger. And that we're filling an incredible void of engagement that is required for us to have a healthy and muscular democracy. And so I do think what I get a lot of joy of at Hopium, as somebody who, like you Ezra, right, I made a choice at some point in my life to do this, and not to other things, is to see the joy that people get of meaningful engagement with the process and how empowering that really is to people and how much they feel like they're doing their part. They're being proud patriots, as we call it at Hopium, and contributing to their democracy through their voice, through their actions. And what you've done is you've created a lot of powerful patriots. This process has created muscular patriots all over the country who are never going to let go of this. I mean, I think it may ebb and flow depending on the moment, but I think a new floor has been raised for the country and for our pro-democracy movement that is going to be lasting potentially for decades. Because I don't think we will have sunshine patriots here. I think we're creating 24-7, 365 patriots in this country and it's been very rewarding, and I think that you know we'll have you back in April when we get through this, and you had an amazing day to talk about next steps.
I mean in our community we have things we do every day, right, we're raising money for candidates… we're more candidate focused than some other parts of the family, but that's also my background and where I come from. It's what I know, the part of the game that I know. But I agree with you that where this all matters is translating it into sustained activity over time. I think my feeling is like, I've seen that with my own eyes through the Hopium community, people now are hungering for this engagement, looking for new things to do, looking for ready to pounce when an issue emerges to sort of define, you know, get their talking points, to build their signs, to make their social media posts, right, like there's now an incredible appetite for this. So it's exciting. I's been really exciting to be working in a parallel way, and I'm glad now that we're more formally connected, Ezra, and just very grateful for what you guys have been able to build. As you pointed out, this is hard, you know, hard work. And because you're dealing with people's hopes and dreams, and their aspirations and their love of country, and they want to do it right. And you've been able to help a lot of people do it right.
Ezra:
Well, I think we're all on the same boat rowing in the same direction, Simon. And it's going to take a lot of us doing the things that make sense based on where we are to get to where we're going. I think I'm incredibly proud of Indivisible. No Kings is not just Indivisible. There are hundreds and hundreds of organizations that are weighing in. Maybe they're organizing communities. Maybe they're providing legal support. Maybe they're providing issue-level support. It takes more than a village. It takes a whole nation of folks who are engaged in their own way to do this work.
I don't want to just say the same thing that you said, but I agree with so much of what you just said. People are hungry to be part of something real right now. People are hungry for actual human connection. And so much of the way that we engage in this world right now is digitized and extractive. You try to get my email address so you can ask me for money. You try to keep me on your app so that you can sell ads. You try to keep me disconnected from real human connection because how do you monetize that? I think the reason for hope that this isn't just creating a few sunshine patriots for this particular moment is because something special happens when people actually gather in community together. Something special happens when people observe their power that they have built actually have an impact in the world. They like it. They want more of it. And so I think we're converting millions of people right now to a new relationship to democracy. And that gives me a hell of a lot of hope.
Simon: Me too, brother. So just remind everybody about how they get involved on March 28th.
Ezra: Go to NoKings.org.
Simple as that. Find the event near you if there is No Kings, but there is still time to organize. There are maps. There are new No Kings events being put on the map every single day. There are more than there were on October. This is going to be the largest protest in history. It's going to be powerful. It's going to be joyful and it's going to be impactful. You should be part of it.
Simon:
Listen man, thank you so much for being here today. Good luck. Give my best to Leah. And just thank you for your incredible work in this time of challenge for this country. Everybody, listen, we all got to be there on March 28th, right, universally, this is going to be an incredible day, particularly given everything that's going on right now. Ezra, one thing you said today, if I can just reflect, the way that you said… it's okay to say no, right? We don't know each other, but I can't tell you how important that articulation is about how just this simple idea that saying no… that we're not playing ball with this, we're not on board with this. This has been a little bit more complicated, frankly, for our family than I would have expected. And I think that your insight into giving permission structure around the no is really important. And it's been a little bit hard for me, just reflecting on my own work… of all the things you said today, it was the thing that probably struck me the most as being a major insight into what was required now. That wasn't necessarily organic for the organized established party, you know, to your point, and so thank you for that important insight. That was one of the big things I took away today from this great talk.
And just I'll end by saying, listen, everybody, we got to get this done on March 28th. So let's go to work.
Ezra: Let's do it. Thanks all.
Simon:
Listen, please share, hit like and subscribe to Hopium, get involved in Indivisible and No Kings. Really important day coming up in a few weeks. Many of you participated in the Stand Up for Science events this past weekend. I viewed that as kind of a warmup for March 28th. We got to make this the biggest protest in American history and hopefully the most memorable. Thanks everybody.
