Transcript - Simon Rosenberg Talk and Q & A With Hopium Paid Subscribers (1/27/26)
Welcome, everyone. Simon Rosenberg, Hopium Chronicles, back with another of our weekly gatherings of our proud, plucky patriots here, our paid subscribers who keep this place going. And for those of you watching this on YouTube or Spotify or on our Substack, welcome, welcome, welcome. It is Tuesday, the 27th of January, and I want to begin with two things. I want to take a moment for Alex Pretti and Renee Good, and just remember them as a way of starting this. Their bravery, their courage, and their sacrifice.
Yes, may their memory be a blessing and a charge, as David Jolly said last night. I also want to begin by thanking the unbelievably courageous and brave people of Minnesota who have lifted us up and inspired us during these difficult times. I see that we have a few here tonight. On behalf of all of us, thank you for the grit, the fight, the courage to stand literally right in front of people with drawn weapons, and to do things that very few Americans ever thought they would have to do in their own neighborhoods against lawless, violent thugs who have now murdered two people and shot another. One of the most remarkable things I have heard from the mayor of Minneapolis is that there have been three murders so far this year in Minneapolis, and two of them have come from ICE.
It is a reminder of the duality of this moment. That we are both feeling that we are finding a higher gear, and this battle of Minnesota that has taken place, that we have won the skirmish politically anyway. I don’t know in reality, but politically we have won the skirmish. Trump in the last few days is scurrying, panicking, moving things around to make it look like they are reacting. And I will talk more about my sense of what I think is really happening here. But I think it is good a reminder that we live in this place now where these two things are going to be always true at the same time. One is that Trump is doing incredible harm to the country, and that we have to work with incredible intensity and vigor to mitigate the damage he’s doing, to advance our agenda, and win back power in all the ways that we can win back power. And we’ll talk about that. And the second thing is that he is a weakened political figure. He is old, and addled, and infirm. He is growing more and more unpopular. His agenda has become wildly unpopular, more so than him.
And even his signature issue, immigration… remember, when he came down the escalator in 2015, and yes, it has been 11 years, he started with the Mexican rapist line. That was the thing that kind of shocked the audience. And so this issue of the demonization of immigrants and his immigration strategy is really kind of the engine of Trumpism. It is the thing that generates their energy and their intensity. And he has gone from, depending on the poll, plus five, plus ten on immigration to now minus ten, minus fifteen, minus twenty, depending on the poll. And ICE has gone from -20 to -27. And like every other time they have embarked on a major project where his response has been to be a strongman and to escalate, the country has rejected it, and he has declined. And I describe this dynamic as the vicious cycle of a declining strongman… that as he declines, he needs to escalate to make himself feel powerful and mighty and strong again. And when he does that, it is rejected by the country. I mean, the majority of the country wants a president, not a dictator. And so when he does these strongman actions, he pushes himself further and further away from the electorate. And it is what I call a vicious cycle.
And we have seen that vicious cycle play out. I mean, we have discussed this repeatedly here, but at the end of December, he ended the year poorly. The Epstein files partial release was brutal for them and for him personally. You had an email come out from Jeffrey Epstein saying that he was working with the Russian government to try to figure out how to help the Russians manage Trump more effectively, which was just sort of among all the things that have come out. In some ways it was the most devastating because it was Jeffrey Epstein’s own words and his own communications. And then the Supreme Court took away his ability to invade cities. The Russian negotiations did not go the way he wanted. And he sort of ended the year in a crappy kind of mood. And so I think he made a decision to green light a series of escalations as a way of dealing with that. And one was what is happening in Minnesota. The second is the snatching of Maduro from Venezuela. And then I think buoyed by the success there, he made a run at Greenland. And it was a real run… that was not notional. I mean, you know, they activated those 1500 Arctic troops, which they claimed were from Minnesota, which was complete horseshit. It was about sort of sending a signal that they were getting ready to invade Greenland. And then that last week the Europeans rallied behind Denmark and banded together. They came together and collectively confronted Trump in a powerful way. And he folded.
And then we had what happened this weekend, right, with the murder of Alex Pretti, the ten shots in his back, not one, not two, but ten shots that you can hear if you have listened to any of the video or watched the video. And all of a sudden this kind of month of escalation… and I should add potentially indicting the Fed chair… was part of this January escalation. And it has unraveled. I mean the threat of the Fed chair spooked the markets. What he was doing with Greenland spooked the markets. The economy is already not doing well. We saw consumer confidence numbers today, at least by one of the two major measures, had plummeted in the last month because I think people are reacting to the chaos that they are seeing. And that this month of escalation has backfired on him. In most polling he has continued to drop. And he is now in the lowest place that he has been in polling in the last year.
And so in year one for us of Trump, we had a very good electoral and political year. And you know, we won elections of all kinds all across the country. We have gotten the upper hand on the redistricting fight after that looked a little bit dire in the early days. We have seen the birth of this No Kings movement and the inspiration of the people of Minnesota where we are finding our power together. Still early and much more to do. We won that mayor’s race in Miami and incredible races in California, Pennsylvania, and so on. We cannot forget that because we just had a spectacular electoral year, head to head fights with Republicans where they were spending money. Trump’s numbers are way down. He is a lesser power. His control over the Republican Party is fraying, as we have seen in the last few weeks. And he is a weakened and diminished figure. And as I often say, my line is that Republicans are growing weary and wary of defending the indefensible. He is just asking them to defend too much. And they have grown tired of it because they cannot run on this stuff. They can’t run on masked guys killing people in streets. They can’t run on this stuff and win.
And so I think we should be pleased with what we have been able to do electorally and politically in this year one of Trump. But we cannot be pleased with our effectiveness at blocking the bad things that he is doing to the country and to our standing in the world. And I think year two of this battle has to become, and you have seen me writing and talking about this in the last few weeks, and I want to put emphasis on this tonight, is that we have to gain more power and strength before the election. We can’t wait to the election. As I think about what that means… what it means is that we have to learn from the Europeans. A single one of their countries was attacked and they all rallied together. The blue states, or I should say the free states and the free cities, need to come together with congressional Democrats and build something bigger and stronger and more powerful than what we have now by unifying around a narrow and important agenda about his betrayal of the country and his illiberalism. And his corruption and his assault on democracy. And that we need to have there be immense clarity in the country about where we stand on these matters. And I think that this has been harder for us than the kitchen table issues. I think we have been successful and enthusiastic about fighting with him over affordability and health care. But we have this other thing that we have to develop sort of an equal muscle about which is defending democracy and attacking him for his corruption.
And I wrote today about how I think it’s great that the Senate Democrats have decided to make a stand on the DHS appropriations bill. And let us just talk about what this means for a minute and what this fight is going to be like for the next few weeks, few months, whatever it is. So there are eleven appropriations bills. And the Republicans, the House last week, stuck six of them together and voted on them as a basket. And the DHS funding bill was in that. So the seven Democrats who voted for the DHS funding bill, they voted for this whole basket of funding bills. And then those got sent to the Senate as a package. And they are due this Friday or the government shuts down, at least that part of the government that these appropriations bills are affecting.
And the House left town. So it meant that if the Senate wanted to make any changes before Friday, that was impossible. And so in the spirit of this city and how Congress works, given how difficult it has been to pass these kinds of appropriations bills, this was a just completely asshole, reckless, you know, f*** you from Mike Johnson to both the Senate and the Democrats. And when Schumer announced over the weekend that they were not going to vote for the DHS appropriations bill, it meant that that whole package then was not going to pass because it is part of that package. We have asked for them to split out the DHS appropriations bill and address that separately from the rest. I do not think that is going to happen. I would be surprised. I would be surprised if the government, if these six bills or five of them somehow passed by Friday. I would be surprised at this point. I think the city, the Senate, the White House, and the Senate Republicans and the House Republicans were not really ready for this. But here we are. And now that we are in this fight, we have to be in the fight and we have to make our case powerfully. And we have to make it as a national party. Because this issue around ICE and immigration is not a legislative issue. This is playing out as we are seeing in Minnesota and in Maine right now and all across the country.
This is affecting communities all across America. And it is a national issue. It is not a legislative issue. This is a national issue. And there needs to be a firm, aggressive national response from the entire Democratic Party. There should be an effort to try to bring the House and the Senate and the governors and the mayors together around this fight so that we are messaging together and arguing together. And that we seem like the party has come together to rally behind this incredibly important issue that we just can’t tolerate what Trump and Miller and Vance have done.
And I think what is so hard, though, about how this ends… let us just say, in best case scenario, they split off the other bills, they pass on Friday, and we just are focused on DHS. I don’t think the White House is going to agree to anything that we would want. I would be really surprised. This is too central to who they are. And I know there is a lot of talk about how there is this slush fund that has been set up, but not funding DHS… we are talking about sixty billion dollars here of funding annually. And not funding DHS itself will be insanely disruptive to the operations of the homeland security of our homeland. TSA is going to get disrupted. FEMA is going to get disrupted. DHS itself as an entity, the secretary and everything, will get disrupted. So this is not a small thing that could happen here in the next few days. And I don’t think the Republicans have any interest in negotiating with us because this is their thing. This is the centerpiece of Trumpism. This is the holy of the holies. And it’s like, what do you mean you are going to try to take away what we are doing in the states? This is the central animating principle of Trump 2.0. And it is the central kind of domestic undertaking of this thing. And it is central to their identity, this sort of white supremacy that we are seeing. This is it. So I don’t know what is going to happen. I mean, to be honest, I have been doing this a long time, and I do not often say that I do not know what happens. I often say, well, you know, this is what I think will happen. I do not know what is going to happen.
If you followed what happened today, they went from being conciliatory to being defiant today, right. Trump was defiant today, not making any changes. We may have moved Homan in and Bovino, you know, who is obviously an idiot, got moved out. But no substantive changes, no olive branches. ICE is still terrorizing Minnesota. Stephen Miller is still there in the White House. The likelihood that Trump would retreat on this the way that he retreated on Europe is not high for many reasons, and we can get into it in the Q and A. So here we are. We are in a big fight.
And the fight that I talked about today, my thought about sort of how we think about this… is that we need to take the issue that is on the table here, which is his illiberalism, his lawlessness. Not ICE’s lawlessness, and I want to talk about this, but just him and his lawlessness. We need to take ICE… the manifestation of his illiberalism, his lawlessness, his disregard for human life, his fascism, his tyranny, whatever all that basket of stuff is. It is manifesting in ICE, but it is manifesting in all these other ways too. And the vaporizing of agencies, the killing off of USAID, illegally, the tearing down of the East Wing and building a ballroom. Go down the long list of all the things that he has done. His constant self-enrichment, which is wildly illegal and wrong. Taking gifts from foreign countries, violating the Emoluments Clause. All this. And we need to make this a bigger debate about his illiberalism, his escalating authoritarianism, his corruption, and have that fight. Because the ICE manifestation… it is a manifestation of a much bigger problem. The reason I also think getting to a deal that we would all be happy with around ICE is going to be hard is that they are already not following the law. So why would they follow… new law? And if you haven’t watched the interview I did with Glenn Kirshner last week… you know, I have worked on immigration for twenty years and I’ve been around ICE and CBP… I sort of understand how this all works… but one of the things that Glenn explained is that this is not law enforcement. Because law enforcement is there to actually enforce the law. They are there to evade the law. They are operating outside of the law when they operate in these cities. They are not operating under federal, state, and local law. When they push over a protester like that woman that Alex Pretti came to defend, that is a felony level crime. That is battery. When they smash a window and grab an observer out of a car, that’s felony level crimes they are committing. Obviously, when they shoot people, you know, that is murder and more crimes they are committing.
And so this is like a white supremacist riot that is happening in Minneapolis, in the Twin Cities, that is operating completely outside of existing law. So why do we believe that if we pass new laws and new restrictions they are going to follow any of that. And that is the dilemma that we are now in.
I come back to this thing that I write and I will wrap up here, is that I will just say a few things. I am haunted and reminded and animated every day by these two lessons from history that we get about fighting an autocrat like Trump. Number one is if you appease, he views that as weakness. It encourages escalation and democracy’s decline accelerates. So appeasement is not an option. And for us, it does not work. We know this from history. And it actually does the exact opposite of what we think. It accelerates the transition of a leader from being a democratically elected leader to a tyrant. And so it is the exact opposite of what you want to be doing.
What you want to be doing is confronting him at all times and matching his strength with strength. And we have to learn from the Europeans. We have to learn how to accrue more power in order to become more effective at that. And that is what I talk about, about the coming together of the governors and the mayors and the Congress. And fighting together and not apart.
But then the second thing is this idea that is going to be very important for all of us for different reasons as we go forward… which is we know that the way that these kinds of regimes institutionalize themselves for a generation is when the opposition splits. And this is what happened in Hungary. And they know this, by the way. So they want to split us. They want our movement to split so we do not fight an effective election and we do not become as powerful as we can be. They want us fighting with each other and not them. And we can’t do that. And that is going to be really, really important. And for those of you who sit on calls with virtuous members of our family who are doing remarkable work, they often talk about the first lesson of history. They don’t talk about the second. And the second is as important as the first. Which is that we are going to hang together, or we’re going to hang separately, everybody. And as uncomfortable as that is, and as disappointed we may be, and as pissed off as we are in our leaders sometimes, we have to keep the focus on them and not us. And this is like a discipline. This is like working out. This is like a thing you have to aspire to because it does not feel natural, but it is a necessity. It is a requirement for us to be successful.
And so what I wrote today is that those strategists and data bros and people in our family that are advocating appeasement are advocating sabotage because it will do two things. It will encourage and accelerate the decline of our democracy and encourage Trump to become an autocrat. We know this. And then the second thing, though, is that it splits us because the energy in the grassroots movement right now is around No Kings and fighting the threats to democracy. And we are seeing this in Minnesota. And so if our leaders do not acknowledge that as a central part of their project, then they are creating division. Because they are, in essence, telling all of you who have been motivated by No Kings that we are not really with you. We are not really fighting on the same team. We do not really agree with your thing. Which would then encourage a splinter in the family. So why would we do that? Why would our leaders not just say we can be warriors for the middle class and also great champions for freedom and democracy here and everywhere? Why has this been so hard for us?
And I think that what I am hopeful about is that whether we are going to do this, when we are going to do this, that has been resolved in recent days. That we now are over the hump. We are now doing it and we are fighting. And what we have to do is really encourage our leaders to stay in the fight here because this is a fight worth having. Then finally, what I want to say is that… and I still have to figure out how to talk about all this in kind of an integrated way… is that I have been thinking a lot about what is the fight that we are actually in here. What is the battle we are in?
I want to just remind everybody that the fight that we are in, I think, is a ten-year long fight. What we want to visualize after those ten years, and we are in year two of that fight, is that we want the story of this time to be that a new birth of freedom emerged here in America and all around the world. That we were able to overcome and defeat Trump and Putinism and autocracy. And that rather than this being an era of consolidation of autocracy and oligarchy, this became the triumph of free peoples and free states and free cities here and all around the world. This is as likely an outcome, frankly, to me as the alternative. But it only happens if we visualize it, work towards it, and then build a politics that makes it far more likely to happen. It won’t happen on its own. And that is us sort of understanding that the big fight in front of us is not about restoring the ACA subsidy cuts, as important as those are, or lowering prices, as important as that is too, but it is about making sure that freedom and democracy prevail here and everywhere. Because as our founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence, their aspiration for America was life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Pursuit of happiness came after life and liberty. And we have to get this right. These are not things that are fighting with one another. They are fighting alongside each other. You can’t have pursuit of happiness without life and liberty.
And the founders knew that, and that is why they put it in that order. Certainly, I think the families of Renee Good and Alex Pretti believe that today… there is no pursuit of happiness for them because they are not here anymore. Their lives were taken. I think our aspiration as a movement, as a community, has to continue to remind our leaders what is required of them now. And we all acknowledge that this has not come together as quickly as we hoped. But as we often talk about here, at the very beginning of the Revolutionary War, we were not winning. At the very beginning of the Civil War, we were not winning. It took Lincoln a while to find his Grant to go win the war. We were not winning at the beginning of World War II either. But during the course of that conflict, we grew and we became powerful and we accrued power. And we won and we kept winning more. Then we eventually prevailed. And so we’re in those early days where we have had some important wins, everybody. And we can’t for one moment not let those wins be present in our understanding of the moment. But we also have things that have not gone as well. And we have to continue to recruit power and get stronger and be more effective at not just winning elections and winning the political battles, but also in starting to become more effective, as the Europeans were.
The Europeans blocked something last week that would have been terrible for the world and for Europe. We need to start becoming more effective at blocking things that Trump is doing and making that a priority. We can do more than one thing at a time. And so I leave these last few weeks heavy hearted about what has happened, in a little bit of shock still about the cruelty, the lawlessness, the impunity that we are seeing on our streets, the way that Americans are treating other Americans. I am inspired by the people of Minnesota and by the legacy of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. I am hopeful that in this fight that we are now in around DHS, that we are going to find this higher gear that we have been talking about, or the next higher gear, and come out of this further weakening and degrading Trump, and further understanding how to step into our own power and fight the way that we need to fight.
And I end by just doing what I often say which is I just can’t tell you how proud I am to be in this fight with all of you. Grateful for this opportunity to be with you every week. And just grateful… I get up every morning and write fresh. I try to think about what is the most important thing that I can share with you every day. This process of writing every day has become central to my ability to keep myself moving forward… the way that we’re all looking for things to do to keep us engaged and making a difference and feeling like we are doing our part. And all of you have allowed me to do that. And I can’t tell you what a gift it is that you have given to me. And that I work really hard to give you the best counsel and advice that I can. And I think we have built something really powerful here together. And I just love doing this work with all of you. And so thank you for that incredible opportunity that you have given me to make a difference in a time that really matters.
So let me get to questions. Thanks everybody.
There is a question about the voter rolls and elections. We are going to have Michael Waldman from the Brennan Center… I promised all of you that we would start having election experts come speak to us to help educate us about what it is that is possible for them. And what we think might be happening so we can be better prepared… so we get out of the “it’s just terrible and scary” and sort of get more practical about what we can do to fend this off. I didn’t want to do that until after the November elections, but it’s time now. So Michael Waldman, who runs the Brennan Center, one of the leading places working on election protection, security, all this, and actually a colleague of mine from the War Room in 1992, is going to come here in February. I’m also meeting with Mark Elias in person soon to talk about ways that we can collaborate more. I have known Mark a long time. Mark’s old firm, Perkins Coie, where he kind of grew up, has been my law firm for all of my work going all the way back to 1992. So Mark’s boss for many years, Bob Bauer, was my attorney. And now it is Brian Svoboda, who is a wonderful guy who I have known all the way back since the ‘92 campaign.
So I’m meeting with Mark and I’ll be doing more programming around sort of what it is that really is possible. Because this idea that he can cancel the elections or do something at a federal level is not true. The elections are run at the state level. And many of the states that we have to win in and are important to us, we control. And so I am going to be working to help educate everybody about this in the coming weeks.
And I mean, the voter rolls, look, we know who they are. Trump does not want to lose the midterms. He does not want to be impeached. He does not want to be investigated. So they are going to do whatever they can to prevent that from happening. And I think there is going to be the illicit stuff they are going to try to do, but the other thing we have to be prepared for is all the normal political stuff they are going to do. He basically began the midterm campaign today in Iowa. And they are raising a lot of money for their super PAC. And one of the things that is likely to be the case in 2026 is this will be the first election cycle where we may get outspent in a long time because Trump, through the bribes that he is taking and the way that he is selling off access and other things, he is raising extraordinary amounts of money into his super PAC. And the way these midterm elections work historically… let me just try to make very clear what I think is going to happen in the traditional kind of political arena. So in midterm elections, everything is usually fought out state by state and district by district. And there is not kind of a huge national overlay like in a presidential campaign.
Well, they are building something that is going to be like a presidential campaign in 2026 through Trump’s super PAC. And it is going to have a lot of money, you know, hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. And the reason this has to matter to us is that that same group of people, Tony Fabrizio and Chris LaCivita and James Blair in the White House, the young, smart political guy, you know, they beat us in 2024. And so when they look at us in 2026, they think, hey, we took these guys last time when everyone thought we were going to lose. And so, you know, we spent a lot of money and got Trump’s approval rating down from -20. And let’s say today it is -17, -18. From -20, they got it all the way up to -7 and they rehabilitated him. They fixed his broken brand in 2024. And so they are going to try to do it again. And we do not really have something that can counter that. We don’t have, you know, a presidential wing, you know, thing like that that can go out and raise hundreds of millions of dollars.
And you know, the DNC is going to try. But it is why one of the things that I will just say to you is that however you are planning to work this cycle and whatever you are thinking about how you are going to contribute, we are going to have to work harder than usual this year. Even though we should win and things are breaking our way, the thing that could prevent us from winning is this new emerging Trump super PAC, or make it much harder for us to win. This is why I have been encouraging people to give money now to candidates. Because the negative ads against our top thirty or forty candidates, there is going to be two sets of them. They are going to be from the Trump super PAC, and they are going to be from the Republicans in the House. And our candidates are going to need more money and more volunteers. And they are going to need it earlier to sort of prepare for all this. And so, I am very optimistic about what is going to happen in the election, but you know, we can’t discount the sort of the Death Star that they are building. And I will be honest with you… I am a lot more worried about that than I am about the election stuff they are going to try to pull.
Because if the story of this election is that somehow he wins fair and square again, it would be devastating for all of us in this movement. And so, you know, it is why you have a lot of options every day for how to spend your time and your money. This anger and frustration with the party that is holding back resources to our candidates and our party committees… that has to come to an end. And I know that… well, Simon, they haven’t earned my money and I’m pissed at them and all that stuff. Yeah, but if we don’t get going soon, we are not going to win the election the way that we want. This is just a practical reality, right, of our moment. You know, money has not flown. The frustration inside the family… this is why sowing division inside the family is doing so much harm to our electoral prospects, which is why they want us fighting with each other and not with them. They want us funding primary candidates. And so I know there is a lot of energy around primaries. I just want to say that I think I would just be very wary of that and of your time and your money. We need to spend it in these swing areas to beat MAGA.
That is what we do here. We don’t do a lot of primary work here. We focus on beating MAGA and winning back power. And taking out incumbent Democrats has nothing to do with beating MAGA in my view. And I know there are people in our family that disagree with that. And that’s fine. But I do disagree with that. And I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve been on the front lines of our elections, every election since 1992. And in this particular election because of Trump’s money, we don’t really have the luxury to kind of screw around here. And so I would just encourage all of you in your political time, your electoral time, and you are doing protesting on issues and doing No Kings and doing ICE trainings and all those things, that is all incredibly important, but we won’t have the election we want to have unless we’re all doing the kind of work that we did in 2022 and 2024. If we think we are, if somehow we’re going to have this great election without us doing the same amount of work, we’re just fooling ourselves.
I often talk about this as staying on mission. And staying on mission is that we have to win back power from MAGA. What I have been proposing in my work is how we do it electorally. But I am increasingly talking about how we do it in the interim between now and January of next year which is a long way away. If we flip the House, flip the Senate, we have another year. We’re only halfway through. And we need to accrue power together. Okay, that was question one. Lincoln, let me go back to your list here.
Yeah, there are questions about creating allyship, alliances with pro-democracy groups in Europe. Look, I think this is big… I did a long call with a prominent person who works in these kinds of things today. And I think part of what I was getting at… at the end of my talk… is we need to place ourselves… what are we doing? What is this thing we are all doing… what is our goal? What is our mission? I think we have to increasingly see ourselves as part of a global pro-democracy movement, which is really what America has been leading since the eighteenth century. We are not really leading it anymore because our leader does not agree with it. And we now are going to have to forge kind of a new way of building what I call the liberal internationale to counter the illiberal internationale. And I think that we have to see ourselves as part of free states and free cities, free nations, and to see common cause with fights all around the world of people trying to throw off autocracy. Because this really is the global fight right now. The global fight is, as Lincoln told us, that the new birth of freedom has to come about so we can show that government of the people, by the people, for the people will not perish from this earth. That is where we are. I mean, that is the moment in history that we are in. We may wish this was a moment that was about restoring the ACA subsidy cuts, but that’s not actually the battle that we are in. That is a tactical, a small skirmish in the bigger battle. The bigger battle is that freedom and democracy is being challenged in unprecedented ways, at least in our lifetime.
And we need to sort of have an aspiration and a goal that our work is going to lead to more freedom and more democracy here and everywhere. And to build this kind of sense that we are with the Europeans. When they challenged Trump last week, that was something we were doing together. And that when they see us fighting in Minnesota, that that is something that they have connection to… we need to start creating these linkages and understandings that we are all in this together. And then we need to come together because we are stronger together than apart. I will be releasing a few interviews I have done that will be addressing some of this in the coming days.
So yes, good question. Let me just give a good example of this. When I had Leon Krauze come on and talk about María Machado, who had just won the Nobel Peace Prize, and talked about how she had been courageous and brave in trying to fend off this multi generational dictatorship in Venezuela, I got pushback from people here… about whether she was really on the same side and same team that we were on because she had been playing around with Trump, and she comes from the right of center in Venezuelan politics, not the left of center. And part of what I tried to argue is that we are going to have to recognize that we’re in a discontinuity now. That we are on the same side as María Machado and the way that Lincoln Square and The Bulwark are. All these groups of former Republicans are on the same side with all of us. And that we have to make common cause and expand our understanding because we need more of us and not less. We need to grow stronger and not weaker. And this is going to reorganize sort of our ideological orientation, I think, a little bit as we go forward. Pro-democracy is becoming the catch all for us. And I use it a lot in my commentary here. And when you orient your politics around pro-democracy and not around progressive, liberal, conservative, your understanding of who is on your team grows… when I do my monthly talk with Stuart Stevens, one of the things I always say is that it’s thrilling for me to be on the same team with somebody who used to be on another team, that we fought. But things have changed. Now we’re on the same team. We’re on the pro-democracy team.
And so it means that when we see María Machado, who is trying to defeat a dictatorship and bring democracy to Venezuela, that we are in the same fight that she’s in, even if she’s not exactly ideologically aligned with where you may be. And it’s why we have to welcome Marjorie Taylor Greene’s huge break from Trump and her ongoing devastating attacks on him, which are continuing by the way. And she is not necessarily on our team, but she’s raging against him. And so we will take it. And we have to be agile and not rigid because we are going to make strange bedfellows here if we are going to win. And we have to get used to that. This isn’t a small club. This has to be a global movement for freedom and democracy involving billions of people if we are going to prevail. And those billions of people are going to be bringing their own quirky, weird kind of histories to all of this. But it’s the same fight. It’s life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for everybody all around the world. It’s the Four Freedoms.
Part of what I’m trying to do in my commentary in the last few weeks is to say this is actually where I think we are. This is the battlefield that we are now actually in, wherever we thought we were. And like in every fight or every battle, we have to play to win and we need a strategy to do so. That is why Hopium is hope with a plan. We just do not hope that things are going to get better. We do the work to make it so. And I’m trying to really help create an understanding of where we need to go, so it is far more likely that we actually get there, as opposed to stumbling in the dark forward. Which is really what this first year has felt a lot like. It felt like we did not have clear direction and we did not really know where we were going. We were just getting up every day and fighting really hard. We need to have a clearer direction. We need to have a rallying cry. We need to have an agenda. Because we can’t build a movement without it. And I think a part of what I’m arguing is about what I think has to happen in the evolution of the movement for us to be more successful, to make it more likely that we succeed.
Other people have other visions for that. Terrific. Let us have that debate. But the debate should be about how we grow stronger, and how we get bigger and how we become more effective, not how we fight with one another. That is not something that we have the luxury of doing, in my view. And I know that rubs against people. And it doesn’t make them comfortable. But I’m just telling you what we know from history. And the question is… do we want to do what is required to win, or do we want to have fights with each other… and I would rather win.
Let me see a few more questions.
Yeah, we will miss FEMA… FEMA helps save people’s lives and puts communities back together. It’s an incredibly important part of our government. You know, the question about a general strike and economic boycotts. I will be honest with you, this is not an area that I know a lot about. Just in all the things that I do, I have not put the time into it… there are people calling for it. I’m very open to it. And you know, we do other things here. But I’m not opposed to it. And I think it is something that needs to be aired, and debated and discussed, because again, we have to keep growing and getting bigger and getting stronger and trying new things to make us more effective. So I generally am open to new tactics with the exception of us fighting with one another.
So Joan asks, how do you allow space for Democrats to disagree with each other so we entertain all good ideas while also not splitting the party. Look, that’s a very important question. And I want to end with that because I know that what I’m saying tonight, wherever you are watching, maybe you’re like, you know, Simon, it sounds so easy coming out of your mouth, but it’s not so easy. But there is a huge difference… and you know this from work or from your family life… there’s a big difference between disagreeing and debating and discussing and fighting. And we all know the difference. We all have lived this in our own lives. I often talk about here and why in the comments section I sort of enforce kind of a rule that we have to treat one another with respect at all times and everyone who is in the family is respected and not denigrated. I try to argue here that our mission should be to lift people up and not tear them down in the family, and to encourage and not denigrate. And I know that is not how people always feel. It’s not how I always feel. I mean, there are plenty of people in the family that I disagree with. And there are things that happen all the time that I am unhappy with or disappointed by. I don’t dwell there. I try to go to the next place. And how do we keep moving forward… if you want to think about this, think about the people in Minnesota. Think about the people in Ukraine. Think about people who are in these kinds of situations.
They don’t get up in the morning and spend five hours trashing Zelensky. They know who the opponent is. They know who the enemy is. They know who the opposition is. And it is not Zelensky. He is doing his best. And we can have open debate about our leaders. We do here all the time. I write about what is happening all the time. People at Hopium do it in their own spaces. But this kind of knee jerk… what I call perpetual disappointment, is corrosive. And it just is. And I talk a lot about here about how we have to take responsibility for the sentiment we put out in the world. Because part of the strategy of MAGA is to flood the world with negative sentiment to make us feel bad about our country, our leaders, our institutions, each other. It’s a negative sentiment machine, MAGA. And one of the ways we counter that is by not spreading negative sentiment of our own, but by lifting people up and being brave and courageous. And loving and nurturing and all the things that are the opposite of MAGA.
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Trump is keeping us divided. He wants us to be in our corners. He does not want us to come together like what the Europeans just did. And we are going to have to learn from history and from our experience and accept that we are in discontinuity. We can’t stick with an old way when we are not in the old time anymore. And we need to invent new ways. No Kings is inventing. Indivisible is inventing. Our candidates have been wildly entrepreneurial and winning all over the country. We won ballot initiatives. We won the mayoralty of Miami, which we had not won in twenty eight years. We’re doing all these new and powerful things. We need to keep doing that. And just to close tonight, one of my big takeaways is that what divides the family right now is not willingness to fight versus not willingness to fight. It’s how much you believe we are in discontinuity and that new strategies and tactics and messages and arguments are required versus holding on to the belief that we are still operating in the old system and that we are going to snap back to the way things things used to be.
And we’re not. We are only going forward now. And what is exciting about this moment is that those of you who have been on the ground in grassroots organizations... you are doing something so powerful and deeply American. You are fighting for freedom and democracy, but inventing how to do it for this moment. There has been wild creativity and innovation in our movement, and that has to continue. As I often have said here, we are not up against old people. We’re up against zombie ideas and zombie strategies that are no longer applicable. And as I wrote today, the most debilitating zombie idea right now is this idea that voters do not want us talking about freedom and democracy, that they only want kitchen table issues. That idea which is creating pressure is outdated. It’s wrong. It isn’t true now. We can be warriors for the middle class and great champions of freedom and democracy at the same time. These are not at odds with one another, they are reinforcing one another.
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And that’s part of our job… to help us evolve and grow. So yeah, we feel comfortable fighting on affordability and health care. We have to get as comfortable as a family fighting in the No Kings fight for democracy space. Everyone. Our leaders, everybody. Because this is a stronger, more encompassing message. It’s not a distraction… it’s holding us back. You all know that. But we need to make sure our leaders understand that too. But I just want to say that where I really am right now and where my emotions are… is that I am pleased with how much we have degraded him and how many elections we have had. But also I am very aware of how hard this year is going to be. And I think we have to really sort of sturdy ourselves for that fight. You know, this is a marathon not a sprint. We have done a lot of good together everybody. But our most important fights are still ahead of us. To the people of Minnesota, thank you. To the families of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, thank you, let’s just close with just a moment to honor them.
And keep working hard everybody.