Spirit in Action

10 Things To Do Now That Trump Has Won

More than a decade ago I interviewed Daniel Hunter about a book he had written, and when I saw the article he had written just before the November election called 10 Things To Do If Trump Wins, I knew it was something I needed to check out. After all, Daniel has done organizing and training in a number of settings, in the United States and abroad, preparing folks to effectively make this a better world.

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 24 Jan 2025
Audio Format:: other

[Music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat and each week we bring you visits and conversations with people doing healing work for this world, hearing what they're doing and what inspires them and supports them in doing it. Welcome to Spirit in Action. Today's guest for Spirit in Action is Daniel Hunter. More than a decade ago I interviewed Daniel about a book he had written and when I saw the article he had written just before this past November's election called "10 Things to Do of Trump Wins" I knew it was something I needed to check out. After all Daniel has done organizing and training in a number of settings in the US and abroad preparing folks to effectively make this a better world. He's written several books about climate resistance and ending racism and a choose-your-own-adventure style book called "What Will You Do if Trump Wins?" By the way there is a full uncut version of this program on northernspiritradio.org where you'll get another five or six minutes of my interview with Daniel. He is inspirational, engaging, and thoughtful and he joins us today via Zoom to help equip us all for a challenging future. Daniel it's great to have you here today for Spirit in Action. Thank you it's great to be back. 2013 was when we were last together. At that point we were interviewing about strategy and soul, a campaigner's guide to fighting billionaires, corrupt officials, and Philadelphia casinos. The only thing this changed is the casinos I think right now. We are still up against an oligarchy and some billionaires who are trying to tell us what to do yes. And people can go to northernspiritradio.org and if you search for Daniel Hunter you'll find that interview. It's well worth reading that book even now. I think the kind of creativity that you used in that campaign against the casinos was so inspiring to me. I mean I've been doing this for 20 years and that stands out very strongly. The kind of creativity and energy and it has to be for the long haul. The long haul just got longer I think with current situations. What have you been doing before you started ramping up this organization for post inauguration? What have you been doing before you shifted to that energy? So for the last 10 years I have devoted my work to been working at 350.org. So working specifically as a global trains director where because climate change is such a major issue and it's a global issue it's one that we're all experiencing we're all suffering underneath and that will be more and more true as these climactic changes are afoot. I wanted to support organizing an activism around it and 350 is a global organization so in over a hundred countries. My work was getting to support other activists training them developing training infrastructure across the globe so that there would be lots of pockets of resistance because while it may feel lonely here in the US because we don't pay a lot of attention to the rest of the globe there are many many many people all over fighting on climate change and so we are not alone. They know that we're up against a very tough regime now and they see that and that means they have to redouble their efforts they get that but it also means there's a lot of sympathy and empathy from the rest of the globe about what we're facing and we're not facing something entirely unique. Other people are also facing repressive regimes that are supported by the billionaire class in the oligarchs and who are also organized based on a right-wing populism of an extremism and so there are other dynamics like that that we're seeing in other parts of the globe so there's both lessons that they can share with us and there's also a bigger bigger world of solidarity that we're in. Now the article that you wrote recently 10 things to do now that Trump has won when did that actually start when did you actually write that and start conceiving of that because I think that was much of a year ago. So maybe about a year ago it became clear to me that Trump was a real possibility of winning and something that happened folks may recall there's a head down imagine it won't happen etc and so there's a real flat footedness eight years ago when Trump won and many organizations hadn't made game plans about how will we move in these times and so there's a lot of anxiety and even depression and concern and and rapid response so I thought to myself it would be helpful if we don't replicate that again by game planning out what happens if Trump wins. So we began running these scenario planning sessions where we would bring colleagues and friends and different comrades to get together and just people play different roles some people the military some people Trump and Magga some people entrenched in government some people would be active citizens etc and began playing out what were some of the different dynamics that would unfold and the first one I'll just be totally honest with you the first one at the end of it is a two-hour session at the end of it I was exhausted at a level that I don't remember being in quite some time and the psychological impact of just walking through what we are going to walk through is huge and so I think first we just realized the psychological dynamic that the care that we have to do to each other is just really big the second thing that we noticed was the response of the activists and that by and large this first round that we ran the exercise activists attempted a lot of social persuasion getting people to sign petitions or getting celebrities to do sign-on letters or telling politicians to don't do that thing or organizing our people to show up at a rally where many of us would go and say we're not happy about this thing Magga didn't care about any of those things they did not get in the gears of the system they did not slow it down and in fact many of them especially the mass rallies became opportunities for counter protesting for violence to occur and that would then create some tipped off some cycles of fear-based action and then the second thing was an incredible amount of denial from our people who are well okay they can't do another thing and then Magga would come up with another over the top behavior I think those two things became important notes for us to track of what are some of the different behaviors that we would need to support in that time so over the last couple of months after that we began doing more and more of those we start to train people specifically about what are some different methods that become useful so we began talking about non-cooperation and some of the things we'll talk about in this conversation and also trying to urge people away from just actions that are public angsting or symbolic actions because when we're dealing with a more entrenched regime those actions will have increasing inefficiency in terms of being able to actually move they may feel good as as a kind of action at the moment but they are largely dead ends in the face of a Trump administration so you asked the question how did I write this article so the article that I wrote 10 things to do with Trump wins I wrote three days before Trump won I thought like many of us there might be a week or two of counting ballots afterwards and obviously that wasn't the case so we very quickly renamed the article to be right on to the times but I think it was the accumulation of eight months of preparation and tracking and having conversations with different people coalitions I was in rooms with military talking through what they were thinking and it was a fascinating thing for a peace activist like myself to be engaged with you keep referring to we and I'm assuming you're not referring to 350.org maybe waging non-violence who you're referring to we loosely call ourselves around the choose democracy so as a project of choose democracy the book that came out of it was a what if Trump wins which is a choose your own adventure to kind of explore to help people move away from just all the bad things will happen but also what are the things you want to do and how those may influence the macro political system so how just as regular folks that the tiny things that we do that may add up we created the book that was a team of myself as a writer and Elizabeth Baer who is the artist who just did a phenomenal amount of work to make that issue come through and then again with the article that was a collaboration of waging on violence and the team at choose democracy. If people want to become part of this energy I mean I know we have to organize locally I know we have to connect with community right around us but is choose democracy someone they should be contacting who should they be linking into to be part of the larger network. One of the things that we're doing at choose democracy feel free to join an email we're trying to help articulate to people what we see in the larger fabric we're constantly putting out resource of here's what other people are doing siemper and North Carolina is doing great they just created great resource on and we're in rights to help people who are plugging in on that issue there's a group that's created the resistance guidebook we're gonna put all this on our website on just what if Trump wins dot org or on choose democracy dot us but what we've done is put a lot of research out there that other people are creating in these times that we can kind of track some of the different resources that are out there. I want to come back to the two things that you said that you experienced when you were first enacting these scenarios I think we should have learned from the first term of Donald Trump and I think we didn't that he doesn't care about democracy in the sense that most of us think of it that in fact he thinks he should have all the power to do whatever he wants. Supreme Court has now accorded him more leeway than we've ever thought of having a president having before and he just believes he gets to say whatever he says if he doesn't get it he'll have a tantrum and he'll make people do it somehow he's even been talking about using the military within the United States to take out his enemies so the idea that all we need to do is get someone to vote on something seems pretty naive in the face of his stated intentions when he states that well I'll be a dictator I'll be a dictator on day one does anyone really think that it's only going to be day one? Well I mean people use the analogy of the frog in the pot right the story of those increasing things and I think in some ways I want to start at a different place which is not just our analysis of Trump but our analysis of ourselves I've been very influenced by Hannah Arendt who's done a lot of writing about autocracies and one of the things that she's sort of written about and autocracies is the exact word that she's using a lot but the dynamic of an autocertier dictatorship or whatever you have you a big piece of it is there's a breakdown a social breakdown and the reason that someone who's over the top who has simple answers for complex problems gets attractive I think has to do with the amount of fear and anxiety that that's out there there are big problems out there climate change you name it there are huge problems out there that there don't seem to be clear answers for there don't seem to be the political motion to make them happen we seem intractable on on these various conflicts whether they could be solvable or not but they feel intractable they feel like we're not moving in the right direction and so people look for something and so one thing people look for is they can go towards very simplified answers and for some people that feels like Trump because he can provide x-y or z simplified things but the strong man and this is not a again this is not a unique phenomenon to the u.s strong men are getting elected chosen by their people across globe because i think there's something inside that people aren't tending to a kind of fear for the moment so one place to start and this is where i start in the article is i think the first place to start is really distressing yourself because there's a lot of social distrust and so being a person who's trust worthy being a person who trusts your own instincts we don't know what's going to happen i'm not saying that we trust in with a kind of certainty of our analysis the correct one but instead about believing in your eyes and your gut what you're seeing so when you're being told that Trump's going to be a dictator just on day one and your gut says something different go with your gut here and stop questioning it go with it because it becomes crazy making i think if we continue to constantly internalize so the messages that are coming from the outside i think that's just a place to start and you asked another question which is where to plug in and i think the second step here is to really connect with other people who you trust and i do believe a lot of organizing initially is really about local affinity-based local-based organizing not just because that's where mass moves will emerge from that has always been true but it's also the case that we need your people around us to be brave when we're alone it's much easier to be scared prisons know this that's why if you want a prisoner to be scared you put them in a solitary confinement because people do not do well when we're on our own and so when we're instead in formation connected with other people that we trust and so if you haven't yet post-election call to all your people in for some gatherings or meanings in your house or whatnot this is a fantastic moment for that to just be with each other and to connect so that we're building some base of people to encourage each other to be brave and bold and say we have each other's backs to show that we love each other to create these kinds of connections that's the model out of chili chili which is experiencing vastly more extreme dictatorship than we have i think even in our more imagination at the moment here during the 70s and 80s the dictatorship just shut down everything it was to the point where people were scared to just even say their names to other people and so social connection became so important so that's why they organized through affinity group model tiny groups of people nodes who would get together they would do quick actions together sometimes in public sometimes in private institutions but they would be a place to act from and i think that affinity group model is a natural way for us in these times to connect and form and a lot of people have done that already you don't have to call it a affinity group but knowing it as such may be helpful so some people to really touch base with let me ask you a couple questions daniel about those first two i read the article i'm very impressed with it and i think you're spot on in each of these points a lot of people may not actually understand how right you are or understand in which way you're right so the first one trust yourself a lot of people right now are still saying oh it can't be that bad so i don't know if that's denying themselves is that trusting themselves or i trust that things will be okay i trust the american people will make out right at this point that seems to me naive denial so maybe i'm asking them not to trust themselves i don't know could you address that complex question because you know you can start with a tiny bit that you know inside you but when you go to the society you have to have ways to determine what you're knowing i mean we're quicker and i think one aspect of trust is not just an integrity is another word for this which is none of us have certainty about what will happen in fact i think that part of the anxiety of this moment is how extreme will it be how wild will it be will he use the military for this or that which things are posturing and we don't know that and so i think a level of healthy sketches about our own beliefs but trust is different i'm using trust more than just trusting your political analysis but also leaning into your own inner wisdom your own inner guide and being back in touch with that i can pretty much guarantee for all of your listeners that like when we're on Facebook scrolling or on whatever social medium scrolling we lose touch with that inner grounded thing of ourselves that is about being trustworthy and instead we get caught up in other people's opinions or our insecurities or uncertainties as opposed to this more grounded position and the old Quakers used to use the phrase to stay low when you hear that phrase i think a little bit about it's not about everything i believe is true it's not that version of trust it's coming back to my own center and returning to the things that i know to be most true and i'll say it's a different way which is when i asked a lot of people i've talked to thousands of people in the last couple of weeks when i've asked people what they've been up to in this time post-election regularly are telling me they're spending more times with people they love they're spending more time either in nature or spending less time reading the news these are healthy behaviors as i think people are searching for more of that inner center so that's what i'm naming is you really do have to protect yourself one of my colleagues described it this way he said if you don't have an energy practice or spiritual practice or prayer practice and this time you're going to be really out to lunch so this is the moment to get that so that you can be a trustworthy body your step two is about finding others who you trust i've got several groups i've got two different men's groups i meet with each week we trust each other deeply right i'm part of the quaker meeting i'm part of a folk dance group i mean there's a whole number of people who i trust but our society actually works to militate against trust and once you spend time on facebook people take pot shots each other do things they would never do face to face right but our society economically has militated to isolate people don't ask your neighbor for an egg you can order an online at this place etc how do you resist those great title waves of energy of our society which really tell us to invest out there facebook or amazon or whatever you just named it you just got to do it by doing it you know i mean you're expressing the challenge which is it's easy to identify the things that trump tells us to do to divide people up right telling people to distrust the list is long right democrats people who are socialist people who live in philly people who have female bodies people who i mean on and on people who are trans people who are from mexico people who are immigrants people who are undocumented i mean right but that's in the culture that's not a unique phenomenon i mean parts of it was unique no question but it's not a unique phenomenon and so resisting it takes at least identifying who the next tier of people outside of the people when you say you're we you ask me who's my we when you when you ask who's your we what's the next tier outside of that and to be more inclusive that those are also your people those are also your neighbors and this moment i'm reminded of mr rogers who i think people watched his movies that recently about him that have come out a couple years ago i think can be a kind of symbol of neighborliness as a spiritual practice that that was a thing that he was holding and doing for all of us and that that's a different way of operating we may not be in shape to extend it fully widely unconditionally but it's the constant expansion of that we have a bigger we and to be intentional about that that our intention is to grow the we of people and so trust doesn't mean that someone won't violate it that someone won't hurt us that someone won't but it means that we get less lonely less isolated as we're in touch with other people and willing to forgive and connect and and so forth and so this trust is a pattern and we have to interrupt it because otherwise it gets harder to organize a society to connect with other people to we miss allies because they didn't say it the way we wanted them to say it or because they didn't say it and the moment that we needed that wanted them to say it and i think behaviors that continue that disconnection are assisting the oligarchs that's what their primary aim is we can control a population if they're at each other's throats you mentioned earlier about how Pinochet did his process of ruling Chile people were unwilling to talk to one another you've had experience beyond the u_s_ borders with dictators with autocrats with people who are taking over control of countries places where you thought i was a peace corps volunteer in togo in west africa which was a dictatorship still is i got to see how that looks on the ground and i think a lot of americans really simply do not understand that living in a dictatorship doesn't mean that you know you're living in a dictatorship this is our president that's what the term was used for yadama who was the ruler in togo back then people would joyfully stand up whenever he needed support right he did that in terms of we love togo but in fact i saw one of the teachers at my school and another one that i didn't know firsthand who were hauled away because in a regional teachers meeting they had raised a question about corruption in government and he disappeared for a week and he came back and never could say a word about what happened to himself but most people in togo i think weren't thinking they were under a dictatorship although when i mentioned in class the first month i was in togo i mentioned something about how the government shouldn't do this interrupting class so that we can go cheer for a government official who's coming to town i had students come to me and said you should be careful because something can happen so what's your experience with actual autocrats dictatorships places where people have had to be leery of the government in that way very similar to yours a major dynamic that shows up living under aquatic regime is it becomes harder and harder to analyze your own situation and you named a particular aspect of that that i i'm really glad you did which is that gentleman who came back the teacher who came back who then couldn't tell their story they had experienced some amount of pain we don't know what but there wasn't a spot to then unhook the emotion so they could do grief that grief becomes interrupted in south africa what do the government do as it was trying to shut down anti-apartheid protests it would shut down funerals because those were interrupting grief cycles rituals of community mourning i think there's two ways that there's many different ways to interrupt it in fact there's compartmentalizing rationalizing i mean you know intellectualizing one of the ways i've noticed people avoiding grief is one direction is i just can't believe it's going to happen like this or i can't believe he's doing that which is not accepting reality as it's currently happening so as over the next couple of months years as we watch trump making moves it's going to be very important that when he says he might do something we consider that that really might happen and that's going to reduce our ability to say i can't believe that peace is important for us a second aspect i've been noticing is people also doing avoidance and this happens in other places by making up a story that it's already lost far before it is and acting as if they then are accepting by saying it's he doesn't honor the law anyway so it's not going to happen in a way shooting down activists who are attempting to say we couldn't make a better world by doing this bad or the other thing both of them aren't actually dealing with the emotional load that dictators put on people now i'll just give a specific example in Zimbabwe i remember watching election after election that Mugabe would run Mugabe was just held tight to the country he would run elections and Zimbabweans would say to me i think we're going to be able to win this one and they would have a reason they think the opposition party was better organized or we're more prepared or something and it's not my country i i didn't know better than them so i just listened to them but i i said you really think that's going to happen or do you think he's just going to steal it again doesn't that seem like what he's been doing i said no no i think i think this time it's for real and what i realized is that one aspect of living under one situation that we're your hope your political hope is fractured so many times is you start just putting it anywhere you start putting your hope in pathways that clearly would not have so Mugabe would steal the election again and they would say oh that's devastating but then a few years later Mugabe would announce a new round of elections and people would say well this time and they'd keep investing energy in a new thing that wasn't likely to happen at all so i think the alternative to some of that is just acknowledging i i feel a little soft here i'm a strategist by nature but a lot of when i'm laying out our emotional psychological things but a lot of the territory of autocracy is psychology that's why they took that person away and then scared them because that teacher then scares everybody else by not even knowing the story it becomes even more scary because you and me have now imagined and all of your listeners have imagined what happened to them and we don't even know and that makes it worse but if they just said this thing and they worked through their feelings date and we're able to name them right that's what gets taken away is our power to name our own life experience own it and so we're going to need to do a lot of naming our life experiences what we're experiencing from a term administration what we're worried about what we're scared about being sad together and that's part of that why we need that community of people to see other aspects of our feeling states that we haven't even noticed but that we can begin to honor all of those things internally grief crying holding people breathing all the kind of things that becomes an important element it doesn't have to be public that can be part of the public discourse as well and that that's often powerful movements are able to express untold stories but that at least we need to be able to do it with ourselves with our own people so before we even get to strategizing or list-making or planning or those kind of things some places we're releasing some of those feelings again folks we're visiting with daniel hunter article he put out right before and after it was revised after trump one is 10 things to do now that trump has one you can track him down i've got several different links that are on northern spirit radio dot org where you can see the full article of the 10 points he makes and we're adding more color to that but there's some that we're not going to talk about we're not just reading the article by any means choose democracy dot us what if trump wins dot org are two of the places you might want to go but what's really going to be important is the folks in your area who are engaging for this so please follow up with those a little bit more about your experience daniel is that you've been consulting with training with working with people in places like Burma or Sierra Leone i don't know if you had anything to do with Syria the change that has happened in Syria could be exciting or scary as it is getting rid of one dictator doesn't guarantee that you're not just going to go down a deeper hole like egypt did so do you have experience in Burma or Sierra Leone that's applicable to what we're doing here in the u.s right now what we're entering into yeah i mean you've named a really important piece which is visioning what happens afterwards so that it's one thing to have an opposition party so folks in Serbia for example who are involved in overthrowing losevic they weren't only a direct action wing pushing on non-cooperation but they're also trying to figure out how can we also insert an alternative structure both those things are really important and so one of the ways i've written about this in the book and elsewhere has been starting to kind of understand there's different roles for the next couple of years for us to kind of track some of us will be doing protection work and so in any of the places i've worked there's always people who are identifying people who are in immediate need and offering them help so whether they're trans whether they're immigrants whether they're you know having abortions etc those are going to be people that will need and that's a role that some of us will be called to and another one is defending civic institutions from attack and so my colleagues in turkey years ago i had the opportunity to listen to one of my colleagues give a talk about what does the u.s need to learn from turkey and the first thing she did she got and she said you need to protect your media if you do not have an active vibrant alternative media it will get very hard quickly and that was her very very message was as they watched the media get destroyed in their country it became much much much harder to source out quality information to actually track what was happening in other regions and other places and to get intel about what's really happening with the government because instead they were just hearing government rhetoric more and more and being harder to track what was going on so some people will be involved in that aspect of it which is defending civic institutions so knowing those aren't they're not perfect and that's not a body of work that personally i feel called to do i don't think i have the patience to protect bureaucracies but epa is going to be on the chugging block education department the u.s military local institutions local election systems if we want to keep as fair elections if we had we're going to need to defend that so that body of work is one avenue for people so protecting people defending civic institutions and then the work that i'm more familiar with is groups who are doing the disruptive disobey that's often the people i've been supporting in in other places i think they have a ton to teach us because we have gotten to see a lot of people in this era pushing back against right wing populace and i think some of the things that they're teaching us has been like in korea where they've just engaged in a big push against their government through mass non-cooperation and through a polarized society with some set of people absolutely supporting current regime and others saying we don't want this what's been interesting about that dynamic has been mass non-cooperation doesn't start at mass level and that's a good memo for us to really get in our heads it doesn't start at an effective level mass on cooperation the theory behind it is when we reach a tipping point where enough of us are no longer willing to go along with the current regime no matter what it wants to do it cannot keep that up because trump doesn't do anything and i mean this in a very literal sense trump doesn't watch windows he doesn't build roads he doesn't milk cows he doesn't run the internet he doesn't build websites people do these things and when people refuse to do these things in large numbers then it becomes unstable and that's the the theory of non-cooperation but a bunch of people would have to try that out and typically they will not be successful in dismantling or disrupting the regime they may take a portion to target so rather than targeting the whole enchilada they'll target what's sometimes known as like castles of reform parts of the reform that are minor pieces that destabilize so for example i've just been in conversations with some people of faith have been talking to tax resistance as a possible option if things get dire they said as moral people we would have trouble continuing to support a u.s government if if it is ordering its military against its own people so that's a position and and then that conversation starts to go to other people inside the establishment of the city level who started also out of conversations about what if the city gets pushed by trump and trump says to the city of philadelphia i'm not going to give you money anymore because i don't like your policies on immigration or how you're treating your neighbors or to la you're not going to get money unless you change these policies about gays or environmental or whatever whatever wildfire thing we are trying to pretend to happen so then it becomes a chance where the city could then say we're not going to continue to collect money and send it to the federal government until you change policy and until that point we're withholding our taxes as a city and so that's how those things escalate and i say this for this reason even if you're not into mass non-cooperation at this moment in time that's fine there will likely be opportunities to join in the future and one thing that will assist those of us who are supporting the disruptive disobey strategy is to not test whether or not we've been effective at the whole enchilada but instead whether or not other people are ready to join some of the different tactics of the look and be on the lookout for other tactics to join because it's not going to work if we all have to come to some big consensus moment and we're all in easy agreement we're going to have to join some things that we're a little uncomfortable with but it's going to get approximately where we need to get to so i'm just i'm saying that i think prefiguratively that we're not there in non-cooperation for mass non-cooperation but we may indeed have to get there and one reason we may have to get there is if the traditional institutions don't work out if elections aren't able to kick them out in four years or if elections don't even run in two years or whatnot and we don't know i'm just joining that area we don't know non-cooperation is the strategy so in autocracies non-cooperation becomes a key pathway tax resistance national strikes work shutdowns other kinds of mass disobedience tactics are the ones that are actually the most effective to displace an authoritarian and then i'll just say the other the last piece just because i'm on the roll there so i've talked about protecting people defending civic institutions and then disrupting and disobeying those are three different pathways and the fourth is building alternative and i would say this is the one that we may need the most love for because if we're going to get better democracy than whatever we've had in this past version in order to become a better version of this we have to really engage some people have to really engage in some deep thinking about what kinds of systems will work for the people that live in the united states what are some systems that will help reshape and reform so that we can come back together in some ways and those are a different set of the disruption of disobeying people we're building on cooperation to stop a thing but as syria and many countries have shown simply removing a figurehead a dictatorial figurehead without some structural reforms means you have not solved the problem trump is not the problem trump is merely a symptom of the situation that we're in of the the moment of history in the us empire that we're in so that whole world of building alternatives is so critical to help us get beyond just we ought to reform the electoral college but something that makes our hearts sing and that's the world of parallel institutions and alternative party platforms you know the growth of third party institutions new culture building that that realm i also want to honor a rich cultural work that prepares us for a different kind of society than the one we're in now and what daniel hunter is talking about and his ten points that he sent out about what we need to do now that trump has been reelected is number five find your path i want to talk a little bit more about that first folks i want to remind you you are listening to spirit in action for twenty years now we've been bringing spirit in action and song of the soul to you via northern spirit radio northern spirit radio dot org is our website we're on some thirty five stations nationwide but a whole lot of podcast places and you look for spirit and action song of the soul on those different platforms and you'll be able to listen to us weekly that way but daniel hunter is here because he's been organizing for a long time now and there's an earlier interview i did with him back in two thousand thirteen if you come to norton spirit radio dot org and search for daniel hunter you'll find that interview and you'll get some more ideas about the creative ways that we can make a difference unfortunately there's so many of us who think uh... there's something bad going on what i want to do is have a rally and it's not that rallies are in themselves bad but it may be a loss of our energy towards something much more valuable i'll have daniel say a little bit more about that but just keep in mind all of those links for those programs for the past twenty years are in northern spirit radio dot org we love to wait communications and one of the points that daniel's already talked about is we have to find those we trust and we have to be open to communication we have to learn together we have to build community together so please when you visit post a comment let us know what you're thinking suggest who we should be talking to i'm not doing this alone i'm only able to do this because of your support and i view myself as part of this alternative media that we need to get out to the rest of the world so please support us there's a way you can donate so please do help us out again all these links to all of my guests the past twenty years are on nordin spirit radio dot org so follow those people here people like george's lakey i found the link to your article daniel via something that george sent out he pointed me at a couple other ones just excellent sources we need the best minds working together because one of the things that's going to happen folks is they'll take down one or two point people they'll somehow remove them put them in house arrest and take them off the internet and unless we have as a community banded together we will lose our energy so please you're a vital part of whatever gets done just keep that in mind your point six was do not obey in advance do not self-sensor i think this may be really hard for people who are used to nurturing our society the way we get along is go with the flow and it may be the the kind of organizers that you're looking for will not be self-sensoring will not be giving up in advance but your other point you say is don't fight the battles that can't be one i don't think you use those exact words but to talk about what that means for you and and why is that important i want to just give direct footnote here out loud which is that phrase do not self-sensor i took directly from timothy snider who wrote a book called on tyranny and it's a fantastic series there's a book he made a video series out of it but his first number one thing on the gate he said let's see if i remember this quote most of the seritarians is freely given it's not taken in times of i don't remember the phrase and in times like these and something like that individuals think ahead about what the government wants what the authoritarian wants and they give it freely without asking without being challenged about it and so what he's in analyzing is and this is across the border out of authoritarian regimes which is as they begin to grow people once tip off will often be jokes people say oh don't sign that thing because you'll be on the list oh the cia is on your case that's why the phone is da da da da and those become signifiers of the culture that we're imagining and imagining a culture that's tracking us and watching us and we're now being seeing our own cells through the eyes of the authoritarian regime not as free people but instead beginning to think about that and then we make choices to say oh actually i won't do that because i don't i don't want to get on a list even though there might not be a list in fact there often isn't a list i mean this government is not a well-coordinated machine this incoming administration it is messy it is blurry it is not clear what they want to do they are at each other they are combative with each other i'm not saying many other things are also true that they might be very effective but that they are not a well-coordinated machine and yet we ascribe to them a level of sophistication and coordination and and that they've already tracked cia and so forth so i i note that and there's been actions that we've already seen i i think we could know like washington post and the la times early on when they refuse to endorse a candidate in the presidential race while it was still going that was classic self-censorship they made a choice to not pick a fight with someone that they were worried might do something and so that avoiding of a fight means that the political space shrunk a little bit that day as individuals we may not have a lot of decisions about what the most of the la times does though we can tell our annoyance to them about it but that we also have political space what do we say what do we not say because we're worried about what others might ascribe to us or so forth again i'm not saying to people that you can't make choices to self-protect or keep your job or you know make choices i'm a big fan of that but to be really conscious of the degrees to which we start to shrink our own political space without anyone asking us we're ever being told and it's instead instead to keep pushing back against that because the the lesson is this political space that you don't use you lose and i saw this happening daniel when i was in togo it's not only the person who came back from being removed for a week by the police it was also peace square volunteers who had to be careful what they said so i looked what i would say in class and without talking down the government i found a way i could talk about well here's how we do it in the u_s i could set up that ideal and create the tension so even when you perceive that something is going to happen and by the way i knew a peace corps volunteer who had written something home and very jazzed up english that she figured the censors would not get because we knew all of our mail was read coming and going she wrote something to her mother that criticized something that was done by government official and she got hauled away by the police and deported from togo the next day so it can happen it can happen that's right but they count on the fact that you're not going to say anything critical so when there was an assassination attempt uh a coup attempt on the dictator in togo while i was there everybody had to go out in the cities and march down saying oh we love our president and they were doing it half-heartedly but they also had to set up an enemy that people could sacrifice if you will so it was the signs they were carrying in my village were down with colonists and i looked around in my village where everybody else was black except me and i said i wonder who that's referring to but even though i didn't think their hearts were fully in it i think they were going along with what the government wanted them to do and it's very easy to fall into and give up the struggle before it actually happens it's probably good to make them work for their victories too when you've got a dictator for your facing down now did you see that kind of thing in bermar other places where you've had first-hand contact with oh absolutely i mean you've mentioned a couple different stories and and i could go examples with that and and bermot too where bermot instituted vast system of networks of spies and how vast it was began to be as over the years i think more and more inflated because it doesn't take a lot of political repression to scare a lot of people to not keep speaking up and so something in this moment where we don't have an entrenched repressive regime to that extent it becomes particularly important and we would say the same things for folks in bermain i won't make a distinction here but that the story was still very similar which is in the us we don't have such a advanced regime for capturing repression though it certainly is live and active but that we have a responsibility then to push against that and to conscientiously and and continuously push against these things but some of that's also attitudinal and so here i'm thinking about like in serbia i mentioned that so in serbia outpour as an organization they had a very particular relationship to police violence and police brutality that happened against them and one option for them was they could tell the story and tell how horrific it was and accentuate that story and they went a different direction which was to minimize it by making jokes about it uh it doesn't hurt so much when you're scared and they would really do the kind of minimizing thing and the story they told instead was the more you hurt us the more our movement grows and that became the story they would keep telling and one example of that was just to kind of make that point on new year's eve they had a big celebration march in the middle of the street in belgray they had big celebration big rock party people were playing music then at 12 o'clock they counted down 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 and then they shut the music off and they said there's no party we're gonna go home and we're gonna next year we're gonna bring down this regime we're not going to give in to their repression they've been beating us up but we're not going to give in to it that's a statement that's an attitude that they were promoting and presenting it's very gondian in some ways gondi wasn't about trying to avoid the repression gondi was saying the repression itself will actually be part of the thing that we will use as energy because people will see how wrong it is and that will become part of the impetus to continue resisting and so rather than walking away from oppression or trying to push it down he embraced and engaged with that repression that does mean cost and sacrifice there's cost and sacrifice in this equation no question and for all of us we will have the internal questions of at what level and when i'm a father of a six-year-old kid and want to think about what that means and so there will be questions for us to analyze and understand but the piece around where we're heading we have to tell the story that we're not going to be scared by the intimidation therefore when a repressive thing happens when a political violence thing happens the story isn't let's freeze in the face of proud boys in our streets and get scared and then tell each other that means we're not going to go into the streets anymore instead we say grabbing a tactic from another example where they decide to do a fundraiser okay so for every kkk person you see will give ten dollars to xyz black organization and that that became a way to dethuth or other folks who show up at clan rallies as dressed as clowns and to just mock the whole thing the whole activity those are all things that respond to political violence with less fear which is going to be important for us and i i think in the article i tell a story from bard reston and i do love the story is another quaker so bard reston he had arrived in makamari at a very particular time makamari during its early years of the makamari bus boycott king had just been appointed he was new to non-monster actually he didn't know anything about non-monster really he hadn't been schooled in any of this yet he was just a pastor who had been appointed because he was unknown neutral territory the smart loser king you're speaking of the smart loser king jr yeah and so dr king had been you know positioned as the leader of the makamari improvement association the makamari bus boycott organization and the leaders in makamari had dusted off some old antiquated laws basically targeting the organizers accusing them of running their own taxi cab company and so the leaders had kind of gone underground king had left the city for a period of time and the rest of the leaders were largely hanging out in their parishioners homes and otherwise largely hiding out and bard came into the situation bard reston was an old gondian and had really been a just vibrant organizer he's young at the time but he looked at the situations and this is not how you want to move you don't want to be in hiding from this so he talked to Ralph Abernathy who is dr king's right hand man and tried to convince him to face the repression directly and Ralph Abernathy wouldn't be persuaded so he went on he found edy nixon edy nixon got the memo understood it and so edy nixon with a bunch of his members of his congregation went down to the police station and they demanded that they get arrested and so edy nixon came out with his papers held high of look you've been arrested and his citation and said i'm you know i'm in it and people cheered and then other people got the memo and so other pastors and leaders began filing into the police station and they too began demanding that they get arrested then and there on their terms right i'm picturing this just to say i'm picturing this as a possible response when liz chaney gets arrested or if liz chaney gets arrested or adam kitzinger or someone but that these become moments where we don't shrink we okay if you're going to rest someone as conservatives liz chaney well you've been you definitely want me and so it becomes a moment and what they did was they transformed the fear that was operating into valor in fact some people who were leaders in the Montgomery movement they showed up weren't on the list and they began arguing the police you have to arrest me my people they'll nothing less of me but i don't get arrested do with them so you gotta put me on the list man again what that does that makes a different transformation that's a different relationship to the repression when we're so scared of it fear itself is deeply paralyzing you know i tell it's a fun story that way but this becomes an approach that we need to figure out how to keep supporting each other on and that's why we need affinity groups to help us stabilize us people who take care of our kids during those days or weeks that we're in prison etc but that becomes part of that because this is new territory new day i think we're at the point eight or nine on your ten things that we have to deal with now what do you want to mention about the other ones i know that we have to free you to up more work that you have to be doing well we've covered a lot of them the two other pieces that i think are really critical in this time it i think having an understanding of where we are is going to be critical but having a vision for ourselves of what could be that is an only jury so one thing i did in writing this two zero adventure book which is a fascinating way to write a story for a movement organizer but i wanted to get people thinking not just what bad things might happen but also and then what do you do you know there's a series of moves by trump and then then there's an opportunity for you to think what do you do and part of the reason for that is it's not going to be enough if we just vision the reality of bad things happening it's important that we also spend energy envisioning what kind of future we could imagine coming out of not just as hyperbole not just as a exercise and this i i think i'm led by octavia butler who really engaged with it sort of if you want to call it an apocalyptic viewpoint what might be and where she came to it wasn't a happy-go-lucky society-get-saved moment but it was about how society and the individuals around it might be transformed and develop a whole new ethic and i'll say it personally this way which is right after the election i did a series of interviews right so this article went very viral and so i began doing a bunch of different interviews and one reporter says this is days after the election one reporter asked me a pretty tricky question i can't remember the exact framing but something like you know loaded question like how do you hope trump supporters will suffer or get their comeuppance in the time ahead which isn't a way that i hold it all so i had to like step back from the question and i found myself just taking a breath and remembering the things i know about when you get a loaded question from a reporter's don't rush into it take a moment take a breath and think to yourself what is really true that you want to say here and so mark you know that i'm someone who's been around quakers for decades what came out of my mouth to the shock of me and everyone who heard me was look i'm quicker what that means is i believe there's that of god within every person therefore what i'm looking for in this period of time ahead is that each one of us have greater access to the inner divine so that we can be more wise more kind and more compassionate for the times ahead the first as you can hear my voice the last few sentences made perfect sense to me but i had said way too fast i'm quicker and what i realized as i processed this later was that i mean initially i dismissed it initially i just thought oh i was just stressed and spoke too fast the next day i got asked almost the same question by another reporter and i found myself answering the exact same way look i'm quicker that means i believe there's that of god within every person what that means is that i want each of us to have greater access to the inner divine so we'd be more wise carrying compassionate the time ahead boom but what i've noticed among my friends and i don't know if that's true everywhere but what i've noticed among my friends and peers and people i've been tracking has been many of us are looking for more faith in these times sources of grounded spirituality or however we relate to that but something beyond just this moment i think that's a important position for us to hold that's about envisioning a positive future that's about having a bigger relationship to the world and just reading the news if we're just going to read the news we will find no respite but if we're able to speak to the times or be in some kind of greater connection greater whether that's an earth seed connection that we're feeling or whether that's a strong connection to the divine or greater relationship with god this moment is offering that for many people and i think that's a healthy thing i think that's a thing to lean into because just having a vision of direness won't help us worth where we are we also have to lean in in fact i think that's a good way to close because i feel like that really essentializes a lot of these lessons these are non-cooperation isn't just a as Gandhi kind of taught it it wasn't just a mechanical strategic strategy as he did it but it was also a kind of faith statement about humans can make our conditions better when we act like free people when we move like a free people do we will be more free again point ten of daniel hunters ten things to do now that trump is one is envision a positive future a lot of people may choose to ignore that in the midst of the fight as daniel just pointed out it's something we need to be moving toward it's not only what we're resisting it's what we're moving toward that's going to make all of the difference of where we end up so please remember to do that again we've been speaking with daniel hunter the article that he released i'll have a link to it on waging non-violence dot org there's other connections you want to get a hold of choose democracy dot us what if trump wins dot org and where is the best place to get your book daniel if we don't want to get it through amazon if you go to what if trump wins that or you can go through it online we want people to just use it so you can go through it online we do also have a link on the website to be able to order if you want to avoid amazon through that as well daniel your work your deep reflection the way that you've helped people in our country and in the rest of the world is so influential for me and i'm significantly older than you are and i love learning from other people who've put their feet on the path and have walked it steadfastly and so i am so thankful that you've been doing that work that you shared this preparation for the coming tribulation and that you join me here today for spirit in action thank you so much mark i love your engaged mind and your creative questions they're great great chatting with you thanks so much and again all those links are norton spirit radio dot org we'll see you next week for spirit in action the theme music for this program is turning of the world performed by sera Thompson check out all things spirit in action on northern spirit radio dot o-r-g guests link stations and a place for your feedback suggestions and support thanks for listening i'm mark helps me and i hope you find deep roots to support you to grow steadily toward the light this is spirit in action