Transcript - Simon Rosenberg Talk and Q & A With Hopium Paid Subscribers (2/4/26)
Welcome everyone. Simon Rosenberg, Hopium Chronicles, back with another great gathering of our proud, plucky patriots here in the Hopium community. And… wanted to just thank everybody for being here tonight. It’s another tumultuous week in American politics. And I want to also welcome everyone who’s joined us from watching this on Substack and on YouTube and listening on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. So welcome, welcome, welcome. What I try to do when we get together each week is to take a step back from the day-to-day and sort of give us a sense of where we are in the grand battle against MAGA and to advance our agenda.
We do this in part because one of the great things we have to learn in order to prevail is to get better and more inured from allowing him to influence our day to day understanding of the world, right? Part of their strategy is to be in our face at all times, you know, having us be obeyant to their agenda setting. And part of how we win is to extricate ourselves from that, you know, to pull ourselves out of the matrix, to approach the world through our own understandings and not theirs, not responding to them, but pursuing our agenda and our values and our orientation towards the world. And so I try to actually do that on a weekly basis here – to pull back and talk about what’s required and where we are in this grand battle.
So I think a few things. One is that I think, first of all, we’re in a deeply consequential battle now with the administration, the kind of battle that many here and around the country have wanted our Democratic leaders in Congress to fight. You know, we are in this fight now over ICE funding and over reining in ICE in the coming weeks and months and forever, right, as long as Trump is around. But we’re in this fight now, and there’s no doubt about it. We’re here now. You know, what happened was that given the incredible dysfunction of Congress over the last few years, and given Trump’s attempt to take away Congress’s Article One authority, the power of the purse, there was a decision made by the Democratic leaders to work with the Republicans to pass 11 appropriations bills… when the appropriations bills get passed and signed into law, it’s much harder for Russell Vought and Trump to move money around because there’s much greater specificity about where the money is going to go. So this was a bipartisan effort to reclaim lost powers that had been ceded by the Republicans and seized by Trump. But a decision then was made a few weeks ago, or just in the last 10 days, I guess. The Democrats said, we’re not going to vote for the DHS appropriation. We’ll vote for the other 10. Those can go to Trump. But the DHS appropriation has to go separately. And it’s on a separate track now. The other 10 have been signed… the government’s reopened… these appropriations bills are four months past the legal due date when they were supposed to have been passed and signed to the president. We’re a third of the way into fiscal year 2026. And it’s a sign of just the incredible dysfunction of MAGA and the Trump era.
But now where we are is that the DHS appropriation expires in ten days. It expires next Friday, the continuing resolution that was passed. If the continuing resolution is not renewed, and if we don’t pass a new appropriations bill, then DHS runs out of money. And the functions of the operation start to slow and grind to a halt, including things like TSA and FEMA, not just ICE and Customs and Border. So this is a significant event. And so we’ve used our leverage to get to this point. There was a press conference today, a joint House and Senate Democratic press conference, where Schumer and Jeffries and the leadership teams in both chambers laid out their priorities for the negotiations over reining in ICE. And tomorrow, in theory, we’re going to see a bill that will codify and make specific what it is they’re asking for. And so I won’t go into detail on that tonight because we’re going to learn a lot more tomorrow. But as I wrote today, the things that have been outlined [about] ICE operating like every other police force in America, meaning that they have to follow the law and they have to use judicial warrants, stopping the use of masking and creating IDs, and all these things that are in this sort of emerging package will be meaningful reform if they all were to pass.
I don’t know that Trump is going to negotiate over anything. I mean, they conceded in the last, 24, 48 hours on the body cam thing which is not really any kind of concession because it just gives them another tool for surveillance. And to do facial ID and facial recognition on people and record the protesters up close and personal which they were doing with their phones, but now they’re going to have a more structured way to do that. So none of us should really count that as a major concession. Susan Collins, for example, is claiming that this is a big thing she wangled. This is not any gift to democracy, the body cam stuff, particularly when there is no independent access to the body cams.
So we begin this fight in earnest tomorrow on Thursday. And what’s important, what I’ve been writing about, is that I’m very pleased with this initial package that they’ve put out. The sketch. But I think there’s a piece missing that I want to advocate for tonight, and I wrote two posts about it today, which is that there needs to be much more focus on the detention centers. And that in two ways… both the inhumanity of what’s happening there right now and the treatment of people in these detention centers, which are below any kind of international and domestic standard of how people should be treated… no access to lawyers, freezing cold, intermittent access to food, not regular access to bathrooms, all this stuff. It’s a nightmare and it needs to be addressed. The second is the expansion of the detention centers. I want to talk about that a little bit now because this is important.
The public reason that we are having this mass deportation campaign, according to the president and his team, is that they are getting rid of criminal migrants out of the United States. And I’ve been sharing with you the data [on] the immigration population, and how it breaks out in the U.S., and estimates are that the number of criminals in the immigrant population from citizen to, you know, newly arrived undocumented immigrant, there are between half a million and a million criminals. You know, people who are immigrants have much lower crime rates than native born Americans or, for example, the president of the United States himself, right, who has been on a crime spree for many years and is a 34 times convicted felon. Something that is not true for virtually the entire immigrant population in the United States. And so if they want to target these half a million to a million people and remove them in the next few years, there is no reason to have these huge expansion of detention centers. And what’s happened is they’ve created a cover story for their action, that they’re just targeting criminals. And they do that because they know that polls well, and the public is with them on that, right? Why wouldn’t they be, right? We got to get criminals out of the United States. But the reality is they’re not just targeting criminals. They’re targeting long-settled, undocumented immigrants who pay their taxes and are integrated into communities and own restaurants and businesses and all the other things that undocumented immigrants do, how they contribute to our society. They are targeting legal immigrants, millions and millions of legal immigrants that they’ve been detaining, harassing and deporting. And so and then, of course, they have occasionally detained U.S. citizens and I’ll come back to that in a second.
And so the story they’re telling about what their goal is… is a lie. And they’re lying repeatedly. What Stephen Miller wants to do is to deport as many of the immigrants in the United States, the tens and tens and tens of millions of immigrants, to make the country whiter and to get rid of all these people. And so what they’re doing is they’re building a detention capacity that would allow for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and of legal immigrants in the United States that would go on if they’re going to deport a million people a year… the current rate and their stated rate, this would take ICE 10 to 15 to 20 years to do. So what they’re really talking about is a 10, 15, 20 year campaign of ICE terrorizing our communities, you know, for a decade or more at this current level. This is what they are actually executing right now.
Forget about whatever the bullshit is that they’re claiming they’re doing. And the second thing that we have to be worried about, the lawlessness of ICE, that they have been trained to not follow the law, and they are law evaders of law, they don’t enforce the law, they actually disobey the law, they operate completely outside the law… is what happened with Don Lemon and the four other journalists last week where they detained and arrested not only US citizens, but journalists and opponents of the regime. And so the cover story that they are only targeting criminal migrants is, in my mind, a cover story for what they’re really intending to do which is mass deportation of tens and tens of millions of both undocumented immigrants and legal immigrants to the United States. People who came here legally and did nothing wrong and have no criminal record… and the potential of using ICE as a terror force against their domestic opponents and enemies in the United States.
And that’s not a hypothetical anymore. That changed at the end of last week when they actually did that. When Don Lemon agreed to turn himself in, they wouldn’t let him do that. They had to go to his house in the middle of the night and arrest him. And so they’ve started arresting journalists and people who are their perceived political opponents. And so we have to also take on this lie about what the strategic intent of ICE really is because Trump is clearly turning it into a domestic terror force to do mass deportation on an unbelievable scale that will be horrific and gut wrenching. And by the way, wildly unpopular. I mean, I showed you the YouGov poll from last week [on] how many believe that long settled undocumented immigrants should be targets for ICE? Only 22% of Americans believe that that’s what ICE should be doing. What do you think the number is for legal immigrants? It’s probably lower than that. I mean, we haven’t really tested that because I don’t think people really understand what’s going on here. But the second thing is that, and Quinnipiac today… should undocumented immigrants be granted citizenship and put on a citizenship track, 60 percent of voters said that [they should]. So there’s no appetite in the public for ICE continuing doing what it’s doing. There’s no appetite in the public for them to expand their targets beyond the criminal migrants. And there’s certainly no appetite in the public for them to be detaining, you know, Trump’s political opponents. And so we need to be recognizing the gravity of what’s happening here and not be naive about this.
In addition to the early things that Schumer and Jeffries are proposing, we must focus on the detention facilities. And one of the things that Greg Sargent wrote about today… and we saw Roger Wicker today, one of the most important senators on the Republican side, coming out against an ICE facility in Mississippi of all places. That they’re starting to see grassroots rising up to protest either the creation of new ICE facilities or existing ones that are being used. And I shared this video this afternoon of a citizen, I don’t even know his name, in Surprise, Arizona last night who gave this incredibly impassioned speech about [how] “we know enough” about what’s been happening at these detention centers and that we can’t allow them to happen in their communities.
And so I think that we’re on the right track here. I think there’s more that we can do. But this fight becomes important not only because we need to reign in ICE, but because we need to reign in Trump. In year one of our fight against Trump, we’ve been successful politically and electorally. We’ve won elections all across the country, some by huge margins. And Trump’s numbers have come way down and he is terribly degraded. His agenda is unpopular. You’re starting to see his coalition in Congress fray. It’s not frayed, it’s fraying. It hasn’t happened fully yet, but you’re seeing him not fully in control of Congress. And those are all things that we needed to happen. But what we didn’t do a good job at in year one was organizing ourselves to block the harms that he’s doing to the country. And that’s what we have to learn how to do in year two. We have to build on the success we had in year one and we have to become more muscular and powerful. We need to come together and organize ourselves and learn from what happened in year one and organize ourselves to become more powerful so we can be more successful in encountering his dangerous agenda.
We can’t just wait for the elections and then come back into power a year from now. There’s going to be too much damage to the country. And so there’s an urgency for our political leaders to learn how to fight him on a day to day basis, 24/7/365, right? Where we’re trying to block all the terrible things that he’s doing starting with this battle over ICE. This is consequential. You know, we have now moved beyond what I call the tyranny of kitchen table issues, where all we’re doing is focusing on healthcare and on, and on affordability, and we’re now developing this additional muscle where we’re going to be challenging his escalating authoritarianism and the decline of our democracy.
Because there are two lessons we’ve learned from all the historians we all listen to all the time, Timothy Snyder, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and others who’ve been out there helping teach us during this dark period. And the two lessons from other fights against these kinds of autocrats are (1) that you must contest them every day on all fronts because if you don’t, they view that as weakness and it gives them permission to escalate. And I think that we have been naive about this a little bit as a movement. We’ve had issue discipline and we’ve only talked about health care and affordability. And that’s signaled to Trump that he can escalate on the democracy issues and on fascism. So we must contest his escalating authoritarianism as hard as we’re contesting health care and affordability. Because if we don’t, we’re giving him permission to escalate. And the decline of democracy accelerates. We become complicit in it if we don’t contest. And (2), the other lesson of history, is what happens with us. And that what they want is they want us to split and splinter. They want us to fight with each other and not with them. They want us to be running primaries against each other instead of running candidates against them. They want us to be attacking our leaders instead of attacking them. So they’re going to do everything they can to try to pull us apart and turn us on each other. They’re going to get help from foreign hostile governments who played in our social media environments and others who want the Democratic coalition to split.
And what we have to realize is that we can’t allow that to happen. We have to stick together. And in fact, not only are we going to hang together or hang separately, and not only are we stronger together than apart, but we actually have to learn what I’ve called about how to come together to make this movement stronger, so that we’re not operating in parallel efforts. You know, we’re not operating with No Kings over here and the Democratic campaigns over here and Congress over here and Gavin Newsom in California over here. We have to stitch all of this into one big unruly movement. We have to make the sum greater than the parts. I hope in Hopium world all of you who go back out into your communities will be leaders in this idea that we need to come together. That we can’t fight with each other… we have to fight with him… that we have to aggregate power the way the Europeans did. Look, Denmark was challenged and the Europeans rallied for Denmark. And they got Trump to back down. Well, we need to learn from [the EU] and do that here. And it’s why now I hope that what happens in this fight to rain in ICE is that you see the governors volunteering to help Schumer and Jeffries in this battle, because there are many governors who’ve been dealing with this on the ground and have much greater knowledge and understanding of ICE’s tactics than our congressional leaders do. And we need to build a national movement to unify as a national pro-democracy movement against his escalating authoritarianism. This is something that must happen because we have to aggregate more power in order to be effective in challenging him. And we can do that by coming together.
The second thing that I think is going to be really important in this effort to battle his escalating attack on democracy is that I think that Congress needs to do a lot more of these kinds of shadow hearings that you saw from Senator Blumenthal and Congressman Garcia yesterday that got enormous amount of press that can use this entire new media ecosystem. You know that when they put something on YouTube, I can go live at Hopium and Meidas can go live, and Brian Tyler Cohen can go live and Courier can go live. We all have the ability to plug into the stream to use our followers to go live all across the country. We can have millions of people watching these events through our pro-democracy media ecosystem and to have it be appointment viewing like next Thursday, one o’clock, everybody, there’s going to be this hearing and we all need to be posting about it on social media and promoting it to all of our friends. We need to make these events, these hearings where we’re educating the public something that is vital to our information diet and the way that we interact with information as however it is that you come to Hopium, or you watch Lawrence O’Donnell, or whatever it is. We need Congress to be like a channel, a media channel that’s producing high quality, incredible content that we can then circulate through our networks. I’m working on this, and this is something, though, that there’s urgency about. We saw the success of this hearing yesterday. It’s the second one they’ve done like this. It’s a model for how Congress should be operating, bicameral, not apart, but together, and highly sophisticated. We had days of notice it was coming. Many of you at Hopium watched it because I helped promote it in advance. A huge new tool in the toolbox for us.
The third thing I think we need to do is to start setting up kind of bicameral ad hoc working groups to tackle specific things. There needs to be a group to prevent Trump from continuing to desecrate the Capitol itself and to tear down national monuments to John F. Kennedy and the East Wing of the White House. And all the ways that he’s disfiguring and desecrating the city’s commitment to democracy, all these monuments to democracy and freedom. We need to be, I think, having a working group attacking the tariffs every day. We need a group that’s working to go after his threats to the election security that we have in the country. We need to be more on the front foot for two reasons. One is that coming out of this fight around whatever happens with ICE, and I think we have to go get as much as we can here, is that this battle for ICE really should be seen as a single battle in the battle for freedom and democracy, and to use these new muscles that we’re going to gain through this fight and apply them to other equally important fights, including protecting our elections, getting rid of the illegal tariffs that are doing so much harm to the country, and have an agenda and an ambition to roll back the bad things that he’s doing, and not just believe that we’re going to start addressing these things after we win the election next year… to have greater ambition in doing so. I think these are all things that are possible for us now. And this is why I think this current fight over ICE becomes the beginning of a whole new stage of how we’re going to engage Trump and hopefully defeat him and have victories, to get one victory here with the battle of ICE and build on that to go get more, which is the way that I think we have to approach this.
Listen, he’s a weakened figure. I mean, the country has rejected him. The country has really rejected ICE and all these aggressive tactics. It’s really kind of remarkable. You look at all the polling. They’ve lost every aspect of this argument with the public in the last few weeks on what was up until very recently Trump’s strongest issue, right? We have to remember now that we are fighting… it’s like if you were in a football game, we’re down on their 30 yard line, right? We’re playing on their side of the field. We’re not playing on our side of the field. This is their strongest issue, which they’re now really playing defense on. This is a huge moment and I think that there’s a lot of disappointment and frustration that I understand, but we have a big opportunity in these next few weeks to do something really meaningful and significant. And I hope that you are dedicating yourself to daily contacts to your rep and your senators, but even call your governor and ask them to be helping. Call your attorney general and say, what are you doing to be helping Congress fight this out? Call your state legislative leaders, call mayors where you live and say, what are you doing to be in this fight for us? Because this fight against ICE is a fight not about immigrants and undocumented immigrants and migrants. It’s about our fundamental rights and liberties in America. This is an incredible, unbelievable violation of our basic civil rights and civil liberties, these constitutionally given things that Americans have enjoyed for hundreds of years. This is about all of us because we know from history that it always starts with an out group and then it moves into the in groups, right? We all understand this. We’re not naive here about what’s going on here. And if they’re successful at this terror campaign, then it’s going to escalate and they’re going to keep building, which is why we have to defeat it.
The other thing I want to say about this sort of battling Trump, and I need to develop better language about what I’m about to say, is that we have to have as an aspiration to not negotiate and to roll back and to fix, but we need to degrade and delegitimize the regime. We need to weaken him more aggressively. And this hearing yesterday that happened that Garcia and Blumenthal did, [it] degraded the regime. They were weakened by the hearing, the testimony that we heard. This is not the way that Congress gets up and looks at their job every day. They’re legislators. Well, that’s nice. And that may have been true in a time where we weren’t facing these extraordinary threats to our democracy. But we also have to have this understanding in this idea of setting up these ad hoc working groups and contesting space with him every day across multiple issues is that it’s in part to degrade and weaken him. And let’s go back and take a step back, and I’ll end with this, which is that the other thing that’s happened to Trump in the last few weeks, in addition to him getting rebuffed in Greenland, and the economy continuing to slow, and the health care system starting to get wobbly because of their cuts to the health care system, is the Epstein scandal has metastasized into a global scandal. Trump has now appeared in the Epstein files thousands of times. This thing is becoming a really enormous problem. It seems like it was a requirement to be a senior advisor to Trump, either in the first term or the second term, to have been active with Epstein, right? I mean, this seems to have been a requirement. I think the enormity of what came out last week is still being absorbed by people. But there’s already, you know, commissions being set up in European countries to look deeper into this. The unbelievable integration that Epstein had with Russia and the Russian government has become far more clear. You know, this was a dark and malevolent man who’s done enormous harm to the country. The question of whether or not he was blackmailing all of these Johns and all these guys on his island and feeding all this stuff into Russia has become an even greater concern given what we’ve learned. This scandal is enormous. It’s the biggest scandal in American history.
We also had another huge scandal emerge based on Wall Street Journal reporting this week about the overt bribes that Trump took from the UAE. The other dimension that we really have to develop is there needs to be an anti-corruption movement. We have the Epstein team – Robert Garcia has been leading that and doing a phenomenal job on that. And the Epstein stuff is continuing to degrade, erode, delegitimize. But we must make a massive run on his corruption, his unprecedented corruption. We have not really taken this on. It’s honestly a bit shocking, given just how in our face all of this is. And the thing is, again, if you’re Trump, if they’re not challenging me and they’re not fighting me, he reads that as permission to escalate and to do more. And so this is the learning that we have to get through our heads here… that we’re in a period of discontinuity. We’re not operating in traditional normal political time here in the United States. And there has to be this overarching thing that’s on top of our computer against the wall, which is if we don’t fight him, we’re giving him his permission to escalate. So we must fight him on everything all the time. This is a new strategy. You know who first came and spoke to us about that? Leon Krauze gave a talk to us about that in early 2025. Some of you may remember about their experiences with Lopez Obrador in Mexico that you have to contest at all times because they read it as weakness and then it becomes permission for them to escalate and then we become complicit in the escalation.
We need to make 2026 a year that we not only continue to do well electorally and politically, and congratulations for everyone for that huge win in Texas this past weekend… but we also now need to become more effective in coming together, aggregating our power, learning from the Europeans, and blocking the terrible things that he’s doing to the country. The first test of that is this battle over ICE. And we simply must win. And we must give it our all, everybody. We may not get everything we want out of this. I don’t even know if Trump is even going to negotiate. I have no idea what’s going to happen. But the public is behind us. Our leaders are leading. And now we have to join them and go get as much as we possibly can. Because even if we don’t get a deal, we’re going to be doing what I talked about, which is we’re going to be degrading and delegitimizing this regime on things that they deserve to be degraded and delegitimized by. And we’re in the fight we all wanted to have. And now we have to go fight with everything we got, folks.
So I end tonight with my remarks to you by being, you know, recognizing that the best way out is always through, that there is no easy path available to us. We always were going to have to go down this road of these kinds of guerrilla fights with Trump on his dark agenda. And we’re here now and we need to saddle up and get ready and go fight as hard as we can for the next few weeks and get as far as we possibly can.
So thanks, everybody, for being here tonight. Let me get to your questions.
I know there will be many. Let me address the one thing that I know has come up on this issue of Bannon tonight, the election… look, if we degrade, if we delegitimize, if we use these fights, it gets much harder for them to do any of that stuff later. So if you want to protect our elections, we have to win this ICE fight. It’s the same fight. It’s just an earlier-stage manifestation of the big argument and labeling him somebody who’s betrayed our democracy. To delegitimize it, to make it much harder for [Trump] to exercise power. That’s what we’re talking about, right? Delegitimize, degrade. So it becomes harder for him to exercise power in order to do all the malevolent things that are in his head, including, you know, preventing us from winning the elections in 2026 through illicit means. So, yes, of course I’m worried about that. We all should be. And I’m going to have Michael Waldman, who heads the Brennan Center, who’s one of the leading experts on these things, come speak to us next week. It’s going to be on Thursday… I think it’s going to be recorded. I don’t think it’s going to be live. And I’m meeting with Mark Elias next week to talk about ways that we can work together more closely as we get ready to go. And I told you that I had to let the November elections happen, and then I was going to start diving into all this, and I will.
The other thing I’ll tell you is that, and I haven’t written about this yet because things have been so busy, but I had the opportunity to go speak to the executive committee of the ASDC, the state chairs. [They] had a big strategic planning meeting retreat at the end of last week, and I gave a talk about the future of the Democratic Party and the great challenges ahead of us. And I was able to speak to all of them about many of the themes we’ve talked about here, particularly around the new birth of freedom and this idea that we’re in this 10-year long battle to ensure that the story of our time is not one of consolidation of oligarchy and autocracy, but one where we have a new birth of freedom here and everywhere. So I had the blessing to be able to go down and we talked about the elections. And I said the same thing to them that I’m saying to you is that this battle over ICE becomes, you know, their first skirmish in how we’re going to learn how to protect our elections in November. But I want to remind everybody… a woman named Kate Starbird did a wonderful thread about this today on Blue Sky… what they want more than anything else is they want you to either fight with each other, right, and not them. Or they want you to disengage because you think there’s no reason to go fight in the election because they’re going to rig it. So they’re going to talk about rigging the elections all the time as what is now the term that’s now becoming commonly used is cognitive warfare. What Steve Bannon did tonight by claiming that ICE was going to surround polling places. This was an effort to freak all of you out, right? He wants to get in your head and it’s cognitive warfare. He wants to f*** with your understanding. He wants you to disengage from American politics. He wants you to think the elections are rigged so you obey in advance and you don’t do anything. Right. So what’s the obvious answer to that? It’s that we have to learn how to take all their bullshit and their lying and their all their ugliness, and we’ve got to put it into a little box over here, and then have to go do our work, right. And we can’t let them live in our head. You have to extricate yourself from this kind of psychic, this cognitive warfare, as they call it, because there’s going to be a lot of it. And because they aren’t going to win a free and fair election in 2026. So they’re going to do everything they can to try to cheat. And we know this. I mean, the guy, you know, he used the Russian government to help him win in 2016. They tried to overturn the 2020 elections. I mean, this is what they do. Donald Trump cheats around everything. And so how do we protect against them? We’re going to be talking about this now more.
But remember, elections are run by states and localities. They’re not run by the federal government. We have blue state governors and attorneys general and mayors who oversee the election equipment in their states. It is not easy in our system for a single actor like Trump to do anything to significantly disrupt the election. And we have to not get freaked out about this and go into sort of a dark place because over the next six weeks together we are going to have more understanding about what’s possible and how what we can do to make it far more likely that we’re going to have the election that we all want to have in 2026. But our role in that is to help our candidates in our state parties win. That’s our job in this. We all have a different role to play. Mark Elias and the lawyers, they have their role. Our job in Hopium is to stay focused on advancing our candidates.
And one of the things that has to happen is that we need people to start giving more. That money has been slower than it needs to be. And you’ve all been in meetings. Well, I’m pissed off at this guy, so I’m not giving, and this guy’s not fighting hard enough. We’re way past that point now, right? Like, either we’re gonna engage and go win these elections or we won’t win them. And the moment for sort of bitching and moaning and being pissed off and taking your ball and going home is over now. You know, the earlier the money that goes out, the earlier the volunteers, the earlier the support, the more likely it is that all of our candidates win. Many of you have been giving a lot through Hopium. I’m very grateful for that. And we’ve raised a lot of money and done a lot of good together. But we need the machine to start turning on. I just want to urge you that we’re just past the point where we have the luxury of not being in this game every day and fighting every day. We’re going to be constantly disappointed, but we can’t let our disappointments prevent us from doing the work that needs to get done for our democracy, our freedoms, liberties and our future.
Let me get to other questions. Yeah, the script, some people have asked about the [script for calling House Representatives about reining in ICE]. I think the script, you know, first of all, we’re going to have a bill tomorrow. So there will be more specifics tomorrow or Friday. Yeah, we just want to call and say you want your leaders to rein in ICE. And we need to also prevent ICE from building additional detention centers, and that we need to bring humanity to the detention centers as they exist. Those are simple things, right? Because reining in ICE will mean different things to different people. All they want to know is that you’re calling them and telling them, you know, in the log, right, when they make the log on the phone calls, how many calls we got today, it’s like the rein in ICE box check. The specifics don’t matter as much. You just need to say, I need you fighting to rein in this terror regime and to fight for our liberties and our freedoms. I mean, just keep it simple. And it’s also less time for you, so you can do more work during the day. You don’t have to go give a three minute speech about everything.
You know, the staff that are there, they record the calls. Specifically if they believe you’re from the district or the state. Your phone number comes up on their switchboard, and so if you have an out of state area code, they’re going to be less likely to record the phone call and the contact. But it also means that in your networks, the groups that you’re part of, you should be organizing them to make calls. You should be helping generate more activity towards Congress. You should be going to visit district offices and ask for meetings with the staff in those district offices or the state offices. Any way you can create contact, social media postings where you link to the member or the senator, any way that you can make contact with your leaders right now, you should be doing so. You know, that’s the most important thing. They need to feel like people are really pissed and that they need to act upon that. That’s true for both Democrats and Republicans, right? Democrats, we have to acknowledge, have been a little bit slow about fighting the fights over anything other than health care and affordability, as important as those are. We also need to fight with equal vigor and equal intensity around all these threats to democracy. It’s not only the right thing to do, the necessary thing to do following the two lessons of history, but I have shared with you lots of polling showing that voters really care about this stuff and they’re expecting us to fight for our liberties and our freedoms as much as they are for our affordability and healthcare.
And remember our founders said that the goal was life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Pursuit of happiness was third after life and liberty and I think we have to take that to heart as we go forward. I’m looking at other questions here. Yeah, the cuts at the Washington Post. Look, I’ve lived here for 34 years. I’ve raised my kids here in Washington. So I’m a Washington resident and not just a political hack who happens to live here. I mean, I’ve chosen to live in the city and not the suburbs. I’ve lived in Washington, the city itself, this entire time. And it’s an amazing city. And the Washington Post is this kind of titanic civic part of our lives here, if you live here, in the way that any good newspaper is wherever you live. But The Post more so because of its history, and Watergate, and you know, I’m a sports guy and some of you may not know this, but The Post has generated and created some of the greatest sports writers of modern times including baseball, which is my main passion, my sports passion. And so the sports section, which was eliminated today, basically, was this incredibly kind of nationally and locally important thing. The coverage of high school sports and regional sports in The Post was significant. And, you know, for promising athletes to get the kind of attention they need to be able to get into the colleges or go on to the pros, The Post was this kind of really important place that’s all apparently going to go away. The Metro section… remember Watergate started as a local investigation by the Metro section of the Washington Post before it became a national story. They are eliminating that section of the Washington Post. I mean, this is pure malevolence by Jeff Bezos. It’s irredeemable behavior. And, you know, I don’t talk about my family very much in these discussions, but we stopped shopping at Whole Foods and buying food from the Amazon empire several years ago because of Bezos. And we still have Amazon Prime, but we don’t really use it very often anymore. We try to shop in other ways. And I do think this effort underway to continue to move away from the actors who’ve been malevolent… Bezos now is at the top of the list up there with Elon, given what he just did to one of the greatest newspapers in the history of the English language. And certainly you should all know that The Post has been my place [where] I did my work as a commentator, you know, it’s where I would get quoted all the time. It’s my home base. A famous Post author who I won’t name lives right across the street from here. I can see his house out my window. We’ve lived across the way. I don’t know if he lost his job today. In fact, I haven’t checked yet. And it’s a tragedy. And it’s, you know, it’s the killing of one of America’s greatest civic institutions.
And for the civic life of this region, it’s a tragedy, too, in addition to all the political stuff, just for communities, and coverage of what people are doing and its understanding of what governments are doing… there’s no way to replicate what The Post did and. So, this is an out-of-state person coming in here and destroying arguably one of the most important civic institutions in this entire region. So it’s a tragedy. But it reminds all of us that, you know, the independent media that you support like Hopium and MeidasTouch and all the other places… the 8 million Substacks now that exist, you know, we matter more now than ever, right? And to be judicious in your news diet, to support the good guys, to give them more resources to do the work, it matters more than ever.
I was thinking about how to describe what happened to The Post today and it’s that growing up, I lived on a farmhouse in Connecticut, after we left New York City when I was seven years old, in a town called Wilton, Connecticut, a beautiful part of Connecticut in Fairfield County. And we had a house that was built in the 1820s, and when we bought it, it was pretty run down, and I don’t think my father and mother really knew exactly how much work this was all going to be to maintain a five-and-a-half-acre property, an old farmhouse built in the 1820s. But you know, we had mice and things, right, like we were out in the country sort of you know, it’s really a suburbs country. So we had cats growing up, and we had one cat that when they would kill a mouse, they would bring it up to my mom’s bedroom and the cat would lay at the foot of the bed with the dead mouse and wait for my mom to sort of acknowledge this gift that had been brought to my mother. And that’s what Jeff Bezos did with the Washington Post today to Donald Trump. It was like a dead mouse that he, you know, brought to my mother and he cannot be redeemed after this. There is no redemption for him. This is crossing an extraordinary line for our democracy, our freedoms and our liberties. So yeah, that’s how I feel.
What’s my criteria for endorsing candidates? Our bias here is open seat and challenger races. Incumbents usually have more resources. I feel like our money goes further for open seat and challenger races. We also only endorse in races where we have a shot at winning – we don’t really get involved in long shots. We’ve taken on a couple of long shots that I felt had strategic importance. We try not to get involved in primaries. We try to let those get resolved on their own – we have endorsed once in a primary that I felt were circumstances. But where I try to give you advice on where to put your money is where I think it’s going to go the furthest to make the biggest difference. The same is true with your volunteerism.
And the work that we’ve done with the state parties this year, I mean, I hope you all realize that we’re a significant contributor to the Texas State Party. Kendall Scudder’s spoken to us twice. The Texas State Party played a major role in this victory that we just had, and we’re very active in that campaign. So your resources, if you’ve contributed to the Audacious Expansion Fund, your money went into that victory that we had in Texas this week. And I am trying to create an appetite in the family for more investment in state parties. I think the defunding of state parties that was done over the last 20 to 25 years was a horrific strategic error by the family. And now that we have so much money, we can afford to make the kind of investments that we need to make. I mean, the DNC is investing a lot of money in the state parties, creating a floor of support each month that allows them to hire staff and have more financial stability. But I don’t know… I learned something last year when Jane Kleeb spoke to us [the second time] that, I mean, this still is kind of a mind blowing thing is that of the 50 state chairs of the 50 state parties in 2024 during our presidential year, only 10 of them were paid. 40 of our state party chairs were unpaid volunteers. How in the world can we run professional parties if we don’t have enough money to even pay the person who’s responsible for leading it? And I think that the chronic underfunding of our state parties has been a huge error which I’m trying to correct in our work together. And I’m grateful for those of you. I was able to speak to the state chairs last Thursday… Wednesday and Thursday, and I was able to tell them that, you know, our community has raised $3 million for state parties and the DNC in the last two years. You know, I mean, probably the only place that’s done more than that in the whole country is the DNC itself. So, amazing work, everybody. I’m really proud of our strategic investments. And people, by the way… I get lobbied all the time by all of you for getting into this race or that race. And you should continue to do that. I mean, it helps me to understand where people think there’s a great candidate or there’s an opportunity. But also I adhere very closely to what the party committees do, to what the DNC, the DSCC, the DCCC do, because if the DCCC and the DSCC are not in a race and supporting it, it’s very hard for a candidate to win. So their recommendations to me about where to put our resources weigh very heavily in my decisions. I’ve worked with these party committees for decades. I know them well. You know, I was a senior staffer at both the DNC and the DCCC at different points during my journey. And so I rely very heavily on their sort of assessment, the landscape, in addition to hearing from all of you and all my friends around the country that I have accumulated over the years. [That] helps weigh in on our decision making. I would like to be involved in more races than we are right now. And I think part of what’s happened in the House is that a lot of our House candidates are involved in primaries right now. I will say one thing – we will never back a challenger against an incumbent Democrat. And I just want to tell all of you that I think that given the gravity of where we are, given how much money Trump’s going to have, I think that’s a luxury we don’t have right now. I think we need to stay focused. All of our money and attention should be on clawing back power from MAGA, advancing our candidates. These inter-party wars, there’s a time and place for this, and I don’t think it is the time. And so we would never back here a challenger against a sitting incumbent Democrat. And I just generally don’t believe that that’s a good use of our limited resources. I know there are other people in the family who disagree with that. That’s fine, but that’s just my approach to how we do things.
Okay, let me go into the written questions. I’ve covered a lot of ground tonight. And yeah, I see a whole bunch of questions about things like the ad hoc working group and other stuff. And what I’ll say is that, you know, I also want to just thank Kate today, Kate Feldman, who weighed in on some things that were happening on our chat today. And thank you all for all of you who are involved in our chat. I say this all the time, but it’s real. I read almost every post. I wish I could read every post. I don’t have time to always respond, but your posting helps keep me informed about what’s happening in your communities around the country. I often tell people that I work with here, political consultants and staff, that I feel that I really have my finger on the pulse of the family because of all of you and your posting every day. So the posting really matters to me and I really try to follow it closely and read it. And yes, I moderate the conversation. I’m a moderator of the conversation because I want to let people feel like they can, you know, say things without being attacked or harassed by people. It’s the opposite of social media. But I also ask that people come with a spirit of can-do-ism and not use it as a place to dump their anxiety and their worries. That’s not what this place is about. You know, we are here to learn how to become more effective. We all know about the horrors that are going on. We don’t need to sort of dump those into our community. Hopium is a form of cognitive warfare, to use that term, I really do believe, and I wrote about this today in the chat, that one of MAGA’s central strategies is to dump negative sentiment into our discourse every day. They want us to feel bad about our country, our democracy, our leaders, and each other. Part of the way that we overcome that is by not responding to their negative sentiment with negative sentiment of our own that pushes people further and further away from politics and from each other, but by lifting people up instead of tearing them down.
Hope with a plan, right? We just don’t hope that tomorrow will be better than today. We do the work to make it so. That this sensibility is really the distillation of my many, many decades of working in this game, domestically and internationally, and understanding what it takes to win. And, you know, there are a lot of people in our system, people that you follow and subscribe to and admire, who’ve never been part of a winning campaign. They’ve done other things in politics. And so what you get when you come here is people that have been part of winning because this is all about winning now, right? I mean, there’s one job. We have to beat these guys. We have to degrade and delegitimize, and we have to continue to weaken them and to make us stronger. And that’s what I’m focused on. There are other people in the family that have other jobs, and I respect that. But that’s what we do here. And let me just say one last thing, just to wrap up, is that I’m really happy that we’re in this fight over ICE. It’s overdue, but it’s here now. And Schumer and Jeffries… what was important today is that we saw them working together. The House and Senate Democrats have not always agreed on things and they haven’t always come together.
The only way we win is if we come together. And if you can take anything out into the world and into your communities of where you work, Indivisible groups, local party groups, however you do your work in whatever community you’re part of in your local communities, this idea that we have to come together and stay together is the most Hopium thing you can possibly do. Because it’s not how everybody feels right now. But it is a requirement at a strategy level. Forget about feelings, right? And our frustration and our anger and our fear and our worry that we have, which are all with us every day. That’s all to be expected. That’s all part of the game here, right? But at a strategy level, how do you win? In a chess game, how do you go take the king? How do you go take the next hill in a battle? At a strategy level, we have to stay positive and we have to stay together.
And those voices and those forces who are encouraging us to split, they must be marginalized, right? Because that’s what MAGA wants. MAGA wants more than anything in the world… what the Russian government wants and MAGA and all of our adversaries around the world… what they want more than anything else is for the Democratic Party to split. And for Trump and Vance and MAGA to stay in power for decades, because we’re a weaker nation with them in power than when we’re in power. They get more of what they want out of the world when they’re in power than when we’re in power.
And so the forces that are going to be trying to pull us apart and pit us against one another are going to be ferocious. And we have to recognize that, right? This is about winning. This is about strategy. This is about, you know, not leading with your heart but leading with your head here. And we have to know this is all coming. And we have to recognize that as hard as it’s going to be, and for the frustrations that we have, and trust me, the level of frustration that I have had over the last 12 months with some of our leaders are as great as any of yours, but it’s not what I communicate out to the world. Part of what I talk about is how we have to take responsibility for the sentiment that we put out into the world. And I hope that the sentiment Hopium people put out into the world is a sentiment where we lift each other up and not tear each other down. That we stay focused on the real opponent here which is Trump and not each other. That we anticipate to be disappointed in our leaders and not be surprised by it, not be angered by it, because they’re human and they’re not going to always get an A in every class every day. And that our job is to bring positive sentiment and to lift people up and to bring this Hopium idea out into the world. You know, it’s hope with a plan that we don’t just hope tomorrow will be better – we do the work to make it so. And that we’re going to have stumbles and we’re going to have falls, but we’re going to be the first one getting up and dusting ourselves off and lifting others up.
And for those that want to take this moment to turn on other people in the pro-democracy movement, you know, those people need to be shouted down in your communities because that’s corrosive and divisive and it will hurt us. It’s an indulgence that we don’t have right now in my view. And I want to just say that I know that people disagree with me on this, but I think they’re wrong. And I think that, you know, these are debates and discussions worth having.
Anyway, I could go on all night. I’m going to go have dinner with my wife. You guys should go on and do what you’re going to do. We’re in the fight now. We’re in the fight we all wanted to have. And now we’ve got to put our head down and we’ve got to go kick ass and take names and work as hard as we can. Trump is weak. They’ve made enormous mistakes. They betrayed the country. We have to do what we always talk about here at Hopium, which is that our job is to let our leaders know what’s expected of them now. And in that sense, you’ve got to be really loud and proud in the next few weeks. And you’ve got to be calling everybody you can because this is a fight that we’re going to be in. And it’s a fight we’ve got to win. It’s not a fight we have to win for the Democratic Party. It’s a fight we have to win for our country and for freedom and democracy here and everywhere all around the world. Love you guys. Keep fighting hard. I’ll see you tomorrow bright and early.