ICYMI: ‘And then they came out on the streets en masse…’

Get to know our upcoming guests — Dr. Marci Shore and Dr. Nancy MacLean — as they show you how nothing is impossible when defending against authoritarian regimes

***Please take out a membership to support the light of truth.***

Author’s note: I originally published this on December 9, 2024 as Augenblick: ‘We’re Tough Too.’ When you’re transcribing the words of two brilliant historians, the headlines write themselves. Since publication, we learned from our ally in the country of Georgia that protesters are being arrested and disappearing. I am reposting this with a new headline for the hundreds of subscribers who just joined Bette in the last 24 hours so we can see from history what possibilities lie ahead and where we can each make a difference.—hsc

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‘And then they came out on the streets en masse…’

Transcript highlights from RADICALIZED Truth Survives interviews with Dr. Marci Shore and Dr. Nancy MacLean

“We might as well start with the breakup of the Soviet Union, which is 1991, although that really only makes sense in the context of 1989 and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall. And what I would emphasize here is that it was something that most people never thought they could imagine seeing in their lifetimes until the very moment that it happened. And there's a historical lesson there, which is that many things seem absolutely impossible until the moment when they happen, and then they retrospectively seem inevitable…The Soviet Union was supposed to last forever, and then suddenly it was over.”—Dr. Marci Shore, The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution

“One of the things that has always helped progressive forces to advance in the United States, going back to the days of the fight against slavery, is the anti-democratic elite will always overstep and misuse its power. And those are the moments that people have to be ready for to use to the fullest in order to expose them, take away their power, and built alternative power centers. So that's something we should all be prepared for going forward — they will overstep.”—Dr. Nancy MacLean, Democracy In Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America and Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan

“One of the many things that fascinate me about revolution is that you never really know when you get that mysterious cocktail of elements that will produce a tipping point. You need a critical mass of people at the same time with a clarity about values, willing to cross to the other side of fear at the same time. And then what you really need are people from the security apparatus to defect…

“There's always some mystical moment when it's that one additional person. And what is that cocktail that produces that? That, to some extent, is in the realm of the spontaneous. And think about Romania. Think about, Bucharest — Ceausescu in December 1989. That regime was brutal. They had crushed everybody. And suddenly, there's a rally of support for Ceausescu, and the one guy who starts shouting ‘Boo.’ And just at that moment, the people around him catch on, they cross to the other side of fear, and suddenly, after decades of brutal repression, it's over in the next 20 minutes.”—Dr. Marci Shore

“I do take heart from what we just saw in South Korea, where the president tried to declare martial law, and the people who were older, who went back to the days of the dictatorship, said, ‘No, you're not getting away with this.’ And they came out on the streets en masse.”—Dr. Nancy MacLean

“Men were building barricades, women were making molotov cocktails.”—The Ukrainian Night

“I cling to the story of the Maidan, which was so important to me at the time, and if anything is only more important now, because it was what in German they call that augenblick — that blink of an eye, that flicker of a second in which you see that human beings are capable of something better.”—Dr. Marci Shore

“Will the Right succeed? The answer depends on the American people.”—Democracy in Chains

“You weren’t afraid of the titushki?” I asked them. “Why be afraid of them?” Ruslan answered. “We’re tough, too.”—The Ukrainian Night

Augenblick

We are going to start with some good news, because we need some of that.

I know how to break the MAGA spell, which is already cracking organically because lies are brittle things but truth burns eternal.

When MAGA learns a loved one may have to leave the country, the spell can break almost immediately and reality can puncture through the unreality created by tribal agitation. That’s because love trumps hate. Always has.

When MAGA comprehends that a loved one is no longer safe in America, the brittle world of unreality they’ve been living in — carefully built by the media they consume — can crumble and people can come back to their pre-radicalized selves fairly quickly.

I hope that a deus ex machina will save America, but so far, the fascist train is still coming so that brings me to the urgency of tonight’s report.

I want to share with you two interviews RadPod did this week — one with intellectual historian Marci Shore, whose work I highlight in my latest Hot Type column for Byline.

‘Knocking from Below’: My Latest ‘Hot Type’ Column in Byline

And the other is RadPod’s interview from today with American historian Nancy MacLean, who some of you met recently at Lucid and who RadPod has had the privilege of interviewing previously.

Both these women are brilliant and you can read more about their bonafides here, in my invite to our upcoming book salons with them. Bette members will find the registration links here, as well:

REMINDER: Bette’s Book Club

The each offer clues on how we can prevent and thwart the worst from happening so I am dashing this off to you late tonight and as always, please share with your networks.

Nancy MacLean reminds us that throughout history, organized crime rings posing as Christians groups, often collapse by the weight of their own corruption, as well as pressure from people who expose that corruption.

Marci Shore tells us that brutal regimes can end in an augenblick — German for a blink of an eye — when just the right people show up at just the right the moment, in solidarity, and with courage. ‘Likes don’t count.’ Pushing back against tyranny requires real world effort.

Because some of you prefer to watch podcasts, and some of you prefer to read print reports with transcript highlights, I am including both.

Here is Nancy’s RadPod interview:

And here is Marci’s interview:

What follows are highlights from their interviews that offer us much needed inspiration, guidance, and action in this moment.

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Marci Shore transcript highlights — Ep119 RadPod

Marci: We might as well start with the breakup of the Soviet Union, which is 1991, although that really only makes sense in the context of 1989 and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And what I would emphasize here is that it was something that most people never thought they could imagine seeing in their lifetimes until the very moment that it happened. And there's a historical lesson there, which is that many things seem absolutely impossible until the moment when they happen, and then they retrospectively seem inevitable.

And Then Suddenly It Was Over

I try to keep that in mind sometimes when I'm feeling most despairing of the state of the world, that was what everyone was telling me, regardless of what side they had been on, what they had done or not done during the communist period — when I got there in the early 1990s people kept saying we never thought we would see it end in our lifetime. The Soviet Union was supposed to last forever, and then suddenly it was over.

And another thing I would emphasize here, both for people of younger generation who don't remember the Soviet Union, and even for those of us who do, is that it was the largest, most far reaching, deepest, penetrating, grandest scale social engineering experiment ever performed on mankind. We are still in some ways coming to terms with the sheer scale of the experiment and the sheer scale of the catastrophe.

It was in many ways unprecedented. It was an attempt not just to remake a government, and not even just to remake a society. It was an attempt to re-engineer human beings on a massive, massive scale. Nobody knew what was going to happen when that fell apart.

You have the narrative that was in some ways dominant on both sides of the Iron Curtain, which was the Francis Fukuyama ‘end of history narrative’, which was essentially the replacement of one Hegelian narrative with another Hegelian narrative. So instead of history leading inevitably, inexorably towards a communist utopia, now history was going to proceed inevitably, inexorably towards liberal democracy, and liberal democracy, which conceived as a kind of utopian capitalist package in which you have liberalism, democracy, free market neoliberalism and a kind of unproblematic, harmonious whole. And okay, not everybody was there yet, and there were going to be some bumps on the road, and we had to get through this transition… transition and transitology were the words of the moment.

How do you transition from Communism to capitalism? But the idea was essentially that there was a liberal teleology of progress. Now, the locomotive was on the right track, and we were all going to end up there. So there was that cheerful optimism that, in many ways, took hold on both sides of the former Iron Curtain now at the same time in post-Soviet Ukraine, like in other post-Soviet parts of the former Soviet Union, which was all of it really, you have an attempt to move from an economy in which everything is owned by the state to which things are privately owned.

The Blackmail State

I am no expert on this topic. I've never understood economics well, but the short version of the story is that the people who were apparatchiks and highly placed in the communist regime were in a particularly good position to steal the resources during privatization.

And so you have the emergence of what you could call robber baron capitalism, going back to a 19th century precedent, or kleptocratic oligarchy. You have what my political scientists colleagues had named: the blackmail state… so the 1990s were not a happy time.

Despair Into Action

(Author’s note: she offers a brilliant explainer of the two Viktors, the poisoning that led to a redo of the 2004 election in Ukraine, and the comeback engineered with the help of Paul Manafort for the ‘gangster you know’ Viktor Yanukovych, whose last minute refusal to sign an association agreement with the EU in 2013 sparked outrage particularly among the youth.)

Marci: What determines when that despair turns into action, and how contingent is that? I think it's very possible that not much might have happened had it not been for the fact that this then 32-year-old Afghan Ukrainian journalist named Mustafa Nayyem posts on Facebook in Russian, by the way, a little message saying, ‘Hey, let's be serious. If you're really upset, come out to the Maidan (this big square in the center Kyiv) by midnight tonight, ‘likes’ do not count.’

‘Likes’ Do Not Count

And I was fascinated by that ‘likes do not count’ because it was so provocative, and it was a sentence that would have meant nothing before Facebook, it would have literally been meaningless, and now it's going to be a slogan for revolution in the 21st century.

People came to the Maidan largely, but not exclusively, young people, students. They were not interested in ethnic politics. They weren't interested in language politics. They weren't interested in religious differences. They weren't interested in opposition parties. Their whole thing was: Ukraine is Europe. That's it. Ukraine is Europe. They held hands, they sang, they danced. It was perfectly peaceful.

Impassioned Protest

People from all different kind of walks of life, but generationally, very young and again, it was November, it was getting colder and colder. That could have just kind of worn away, as inevitably, most protests do, because nobody has infinite energy, had not Yanukovych, it seems under pressure from Putin, decided on the night of November 30, at four in the morning that he was going to end this thing. He was going to send his riot police, these thugs out there to brutally beat up the students. And it seems he was counting on the fact that that kind of large scale violence against the population had not been used in Ukraine since 1991 you know, there had been journalists found dead. There had been individual figures assassinated, but this large scale violence against peaceful protesters that had been a taboo, and it seems he was counting on the fact that you break that taboo, you shock people, and the parents are going to freak out, and they're going to pull their kids off the streets, which was perhaps not an irrational calculation, but the extraordinary thing was that instead of pulling their kids off the streets, the parents joined them there.

And so many revolutions, historically are imploded as oedipal rebellions, you have each generation rising up against the fathers in their turn. That's the stereotypical trope, and it's not necessarily inaccurate. And here you have this kind of Hegelian rebellion, and the parents join their kids on the streets, and then they're not just shouting, ‘Ukraine is Europe.’ Now it's, ‘We will not permit you to beat our children!’ And now you go from something that was about EU integration into something that's much broader, something that is impassioned protest, you know, against being the victims of arbitrary violence at the hands of the regime.

(Author’s note: she offers that brillaint Polish aphorism I wrote about in Hot Type: ‘Just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, you hear knocking from below.’ And she also talks about the November 5 election as the ‘vindication of the neurotic catastrophist.’ Also important in this section is how she knew early on to be worried about Trump due to the fact that children would die if an anti-vaxxer led the country. Of that time in 2016, she explains the two camps of her friend groups.)

Marci: One camp said ‘this is very bad, but we're going to get through it. We're going to be okay. We are the world's strongest liberal democracy. We drink in our liberalism with our mother's milk. We have checks and balances. And checks and balances became like a yoga mantra. It was like, ‘breathe in —checks and balances. Breathe out — checks and balances. You know, it's going to be okay.’ And my Slavic friends who were wrapped up in what was going on in Eastern Europe, were saying things like, we're like people on the Titanic saying, ‘our ship can't sink, other ships could sink, but we've got the best ship, we've got the fanciest ship, we've got the newest ship.’ And as a historian, and especially as a historian of this catastrophic place like Eastern Europe, you know that there is no such thing as a ship that cannot sink.

(Author’s note: HiFi asks her why people don’t learn from history.)

Marci: I would say there are two things there. There is a not learning, and then there's not taking action, because one could conceivably learn and then be too passive to take action. But this is something historians bang their heads against the wall about all the time. History never tells you what will happen. History tells you what can happen… you have a sense of the possibilities, and they're generally much more expansive than people believe them to be, because we have a natural human tendency to normalize the abnormal… We have a natural human tendency to keep going as if everything is okay until it's not, and what we do learn from history is that people will keep going through their daily routine as if everything were okay, basically, until they're in the gas chambers, right? Like, like, much longer than you would ever think.

(Author’s note: she recites a beautiful poem Polish poem: A Song About the End of the World.)

Marci: The reaction is muted in comparison to 2016 even as the catastrophe seems much more decisive… (due to the judicial coup) it seems that it's much more decisive now. I feel much more like I'm saying goodbye to America, and yet the reaction is much more muted…

I teach intellectual history, so I would go back to Freud, and Freud says civilization is based on repression. (People) would like to rape and kill one another all the time, but we have to repress those desires, because that's not functional to live together. And if you take away those constraints and say, ‘Okay, now everything is permissible.’ That is real liberation. And for that, Freud says, we pay the small price of the destruction of civilization, which we are now watching.

I would call it neo-totalitarianism… you work on people so that they give up even thinking that truth exists, or that it matters and that is something different. This kind of post-modern totalitarianism is different… what happens when you have a total unhinging from empirical reality?

Cross to the Other Side of Fear

Marci: One of the many things that fascinate me about revolution is that you never really know when you get that mysterious cocktail of elements that will produce a tipping point. You need a critical mass of people at the same time with a clarity about values, willing to cross to the other side of fear at the same time. And then what you really need are people from the security apparatus to defect.

Now, what produces that cocktail of energy, of solidarity, of courage and makes it come together, and what pushes the tipping point… I watched Belarus in August 2020, and I was absolutely convinced that they had it. I thought they've got that critical mass. There are people being incredibly brave. Nobody believes in Lukashenko anymore.

When the workers were also his base of support, when they were yelling, ‘go away, go away.’ I thought it's over. And then Putin comes in and buys off the security apparatus and reinforces them with weapons, and more thugs, and I really thought they had it. It seems to me that Georgians should have it — that is a small country, and they have a huge percentage of the population on the streets.

And early on after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I was talking to one of my Ukrainian colleagues, who is based in Washington, and I said, ‘What would it take for there to be a revolution in Russia to bring down Putin's regime? And he said, 2 million people on the streets of Moscow. It's over tomorrow.’

I said, ‘How do you know it's 2 million? Is 1.9 million not enough? Like, when is it that one additional person?

There's always some mystical moment when it's that one additional person.

And what is that cocktail that produces that? That, to some extent, is in the realm of the spontaneous.

And think about Romania. Think about, Bucharest — Ceausescu in December 1989. That regime was brutal. They had crushed everybody. And suddenly, there's the rally of support for Ceausescu, and the one guy who starts shouting ‘Boo.’

And just at that moment, the people around him catch on, they cross to the other side of fear, you know, and suddenly, after decades of brutal repression, it's over in the next 20 minutes.

And you think maybe if that guy would have been standing at another part of the crowd, and the people around him would not have caught on, or they would have been afraid.

Radical Contingency

And there's always these elements of radical contingency that make it very, very hard to predict. But I do think there's always hope, even in places you wouldn't necessarily expect. I mean, for me, I cling to the story of the Maidan, which was so important to me at the time, and if anything is only more important now.

I kind of cling to it still more desperately now, because it was what in German they call that augenblick — that blink of an eye, that flicker of a second in which you see that human beings are capable of something better.

Even if that rarely happens, even if that kind of solidarity and courage and clarity about truth and dignity of responsibility, even if it's there for a flicker of a second and then it's gone. The fact that it can be there for even a flicker of a second, is proof that we are capable of it. And I cling to that now. I have to.—Dr. Marci Shore on RadPod Ep119

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Nancy MacLean transcript highlights — Ep120 RadPod

(Author’s note: we open with a convo about her book’s title Democracy In Chains, and a reminder that the people she writes about have been trying to to remove any democratic guardrails form unbridled capitalism. And then she offers a summary of her new preface.)

Nancy: So the new preface looked at what had happened after 2017 when Democracy in Chains first came out. It looks at the relationship between the Koch network and Trump — a story that legacy media just really dropped.

Constitutional Convention in 2025

And most of the new preface is devoted to alerting people that we are quite likely to face a Constitutional Convention in 2025 now that this radicalized Maga Republican Party has gotten control not only of the White House, but also of both houses of Congress — they are likely to call an Article Five Constitutional Convention.

Christian nationalist allies have been pushing for this since 2013 with the American Legislative Exchange Council in the lead. But other partners to this alliance, including Trump's allies in the America First Policy — that's something that is nowhere in the discussion for the most part among legacy media… it's not getting the attention that it needs. So quite likely we won't be prepared for it.

(Author’s note: Nancy and Jim Stewartson have an important discussion on the origins of the John Birch Society, and Nancy leads up to how much was known already about global warming in 1959 and how the Koch cadre subverted reality. HiFi then asks her why our government is allowing billionaires to engage in a conspiracy to overthrow our country.)

Nancy: Partly because we don't actually have the guardrails that we should. One of the hopes with the election of Joe Biden in 2020 was that it would enable us to do serious, structural democracy reform to address some of these problems. We forget how close we came. It was just the votes of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate that blocked that from happening… and now we're screwed, for want of a more sophisticated word.

When that captured majority on the Supreme Court has said that it's perfectly fine to use money as speech, including dark, untraceable money, we have quite a challenge ahead.

I do take heart from what we just saw in South Korea, where the president tried to declare martial law, and the people who were older, who went back to the days of the dictatorship, said, ‘No, you're not getting away with this.’

And they came out on the streets en masse.

One of the things that has always helped progressive forces to advance in the United States, going back to the days of the fight against slavery, is the anti-democratic elite will always overstep and misuse its power.

And those are the moments that people have to be ready for to use to the fullest in order to expose them, take away their power, and built alternative power centers.

So that's something we should all be prepared for going forward — they will overstep. They've already overstepped it. Matt Gaetz got knocked out of competition early on — that’s a good sign. But it's going to be quite a turbulent ride in 2025.

(Author’s note: I tell her about my work reporting on Under Cover — how some of the Nazis of the ‘30s and ‘40s in America told the under cover reporter that they didn’t believe what they were saying about Jewish people, but they just said it to create useful idiots. I also tell her about how we used to prosecute traitors. She reads from her new preface of Democracy in Chains.)

Marci: Yeah, let me share a piece from the new preface that shows the cynicism about using these reactionary populist leaders. Back in the 1970s there was a very smart, very interesting libertarian thinker named Murray Rothbard that Charles Koch was patronizing. And Murray Rothbard wrote back at the time he was, of course, friends with Roy Cohn and supported Roy Cohn and McCarthy, not because he believed some of the crazy things they believed, but because he thought they could be a battering ram against federal power.

So while Murray Rothbard was working with Charles Koch, he wrote, and I'll just say, you know about the need for what he called a populist reset, right? And think Donald Trump as I read this…

So Rothbard had explained how libertarianism could benefit from an alliance with a populist leader. The reasoning was straightforward. Libertarian ideas would never on their own win over the support of the majority of Americans but by riding on the coattails of a figure who could quote, appeal directly to the masses, emotionally, even demagogically, over the heads of the establishment, and quote — they could get to places they could never get on their own. Such a person could best, in Rothbard’s words, quote, the Ivy League, the mass media, the liberal intellectuals and the Republican, Democratic political party structure, but not just any populist would do to achieve its goals. The cause needed, and again, here I'm channeling Murray Rothbard, ‘the cause needed someone with audacity, with a genuine talent for the whipping up of populist emotions, because that is what it would take to smash through established norms.’

So here is where we are. This is not a new idea for these guys.

(Author’s note: she is working on a new project showing the global connections to this type of populist agitation.)

Tribal Agitation

Nancy: They're counting on those mechanisms to keep the base inflamed, to keep the kind of tribal agitation up that they you know happens with Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting and Clear Channel and all of those things, while they're actually moving this deep political economic agenda that will, if it continues, lead to ecological collapse, let alone all kinds of other destruction.

So yeah, frankly, at this point, not only should they be prosecuted as traitors, but also for, frankly, mass murder or at least manslaughter.

If you look at the impact — we were talking earlier about the hurricane that happened in the North Carolina mountains. Nobody had insurance for that, because it's never happened, right? A hurricane in the mountains!?

But you know, when you look at things like that, that these guys knew going back to like 1959 they were getting their first reports of how destructive climate change would be, and rather than shifting to other kinds of safer energy models, no, they invested more and they disinformed people.

So I am glad that there are trials now coming in Minnesota and North Carolina and other places against fossil fuel corporations that inflicted this damage and hurt people. But you're absolutely right.

This captured Republican Party, for years was accusing liberals of treason.. but these are the people who are actually engaging in treason.

Get Strategic

Nancy: Let me say something a little bit more forward looking and not just condemning what's happening, but where the openings for sanity and decency and rebuilding collective power will be. The right will always overstep. They're overstepping and trying to undermine public education, but I think it'll be very important for progressives to be highly strategic, because there's going to be so much provocation come January. It's going to be a firehose every day of outrageousness, but where they are structurally changing things that millions of people depend on, support, believe in and want: that's where the mobilizations should occur, right?

So the attacks on public education, the attacks on public health, the attacks on employment, the attacks on Social Security and Medicare, we know all those things are going to come.

It's going to be incumbent on us not to spend all our time letting them bait us into outrage about tweets, which only helps Donald Trump solidify that base, but instead trying to open wedges that bring light between him and his followers, to say ‘you didn't vote for this. You don't want that agenda. You know that's not what you wanted, that's not what you need,’ and so, try to have those conversations.

(Author’s note: we have a robust convo on wealth hoarder’s disorder. Nancy sits on the board of the Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute, and agrees we need to start changing the language we use to be more direct and end the deification of billionaires.)

Nancy: They are not figures to be emulated. They are figures to be controlled for the survival and the well being of the rest of us. I also like the phrase — ‘our capitalist overlords.’ I think that's a good one. These people are riding us. They've got a saddle on. They've got the spurs and the reins. And the question is, are we going to overthrow them, or are we going to let them ride us into perdition?

Nancy: The most important finding of my work in Democracy in Chains is that the architects of this strategy knew, not from the abstract, but from repeated historical experience know that their program was terribly unpopular, that no one, certainly not a majority of people, would ever want to live in the kind of world that people like Charles Koch wanted to bring into being, and if people knew what was coming, they would mobilize and they would stop it.

And so I still believe that that informed, organized majority is what we need to overthrow the people who are riding us.

And yes, Donald Trump did win one of the narrowest victories in modern American political history to get into the White House… so much of that was based on disinformation, on radically lying to people and telling them things that weren't true and promising things that they won't deliver, including protecting Social Security and Medicare and more.

And so I think it is going to be crucial for folks like us and all the kind of people who listen to your podcasts and who have been involved in mobilizing to defend democracy in recent years, it's going to be really important for folks to be ready to answer that right to help explain to people what happened, to help explain to those MAGA voters to provide them an off ramp to say, ‘You didn't ask for this, right?’

These Essentially Murderous Monsters

And to make sure that those people can become part of the big coalitions we will need to push back on all of this to get the chance again to do the democracy reform that we need to do — all of the things that vast majorities of the people want and to protect our planet from these monsters, right These essentially murderous monsters.

Let's just be honest about who these fossil fuel liars are like Charles Koch, like the folks at Exxon and elsewhere, you know, who funded disinformation while profiting from this deadly, deadly industry.

So I think we will have our work cut out for us. And I know a lot of us felt a deep gut blow that after everything, it wasn't disqualifying, and that Trump could be elected. And so I sympathize with that. I was down for the count for a while myself.

But now I think it's time to get ready for redeployment, because we need to be there when the catastrophic, cruelties of this incoming administration and project 2025 start going into effect, let alone their effort to rewrite the Constitution. We need to be there. We need to be providing calm analysis and explanation for people, and also helping people to organize and mobilize to reverse this madness.

(Author’s note: Mic drop. We could have ended there, but I told her I’d be remiss if I did not ask her for a lesson for our viewers from the 30th anniversary edition of her book — Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan.)

Nancy: Many lessons, but I think the most important one to close on that speaks to your point… is what eventually took down the KKK was the KKK was America's first Christian nationalist mass movement, right? Also white supremacist, also anti-semitic, also anti-Catholic. But it sold itself as white Christian nationalism — it was going to bring purity, protect children, you know, do all these things.

And of course, it was anything but right?

That was the kind of gateway drug to get you to the awfulness.

But what ended up taking it down most immediately was the corruption of its top leaders.

They were an organized crime ring. They were liars. They were hypocrites.

Their conduct was outrageous and when it became exposed, they lost members.

So I think that is one lesson to go back and look at that movement and see how it collapsed of its own contradictions and a lot of determined organizing from the people it had targeted, or from other people who are good people and stood in solidarity with the targets.

But that collapsing of its own contradictions, overstepping, corruption, was crucial so I think that’s a good takeaway to realize we're going to have some wind in our sails very soon.—Dr. Nancy MacLean on RadPod Ep120

(Originally published as Augenblick: ‘We’re Tough, Too’, December 9, 2024 for Bette Dangerous.)

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Ladies and gentlemen, Marci Shore and Nancy MacLean.

I feel better, how about you?

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Related:

America Is Democracy: A List of What We Do Now

American Monster — The Kochtopus

‘That Curious Feeling of Unreality’: Under Cover in Nazi America 1938 - 1943

TRUMP’S MENTOR: ROY COHN — American Monster

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