The Republican War on Knowledge

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Welcome to Assembly Required.

I'm your host, Stacey Abrams.

Knowledge is power.

It's a cliché to some, a very familiar commercial to those of us from Gen X.

And if you're a regular listener to the show, I think you already know that I believe it's true.

It's how we understand our rights and when they're being violated.

Understanding our history is how we know that despite the dark chapters, this country is resilient.

Knowledge is the key to being able to take action to shape our futures, but it's also how we understand what preceded it.

But knowledge relies on a common understanding of what is true.

And since Donald Trump first grasped power and bent the Republican Party to his will, they have worked to subvert that common understanding.

They are diligently working to strip out truth, even in most important knowledge-generating institutions, and they seek to replace it with ideology.

They're doing this in big and small ways.

Some you've probably heard of, and some you may not have.

Climate data has been wiped from government websites.

The Smithsonian has been ordered to remove exhibits that are deemed divisive for reasons like acknowledging that race is a social construct, and potentially life-saving scientific studies have been halted.

Even the ongoing Republican-led government shutdown is an exercise in information manipulation and knowledge restriction, where blatant provable lies are cloaked by rhetoric and cherry-picked in bills.

This is all incredibly dangerous, and it fits squarely into the authoritarian's playbook.

In the 10 steps to autocracy, step two is when the aspiring authoritarian exceeds the bounds of their power and attempts to control independent institutions.

In step six, they go after the truth.

And in step eight, they attack the institutions that defend truth and knowledge.

It's an assault from all directions.

They come after knowledge because it's precisely what authoritarians fear the most.

An informed public that understands their rights, can spot lies and deceit, and refuses to hand over its future.

That's why this week on Assembly Required, I'm speaking with senior writer at The Atlantic and the author of the excellent book, The Cruelty is the Point, Adam Serrer.

Together, we're going to unpack the Republican attack on knowledge, and we're going to learn what we can do to reject their efforts to replace truth with ideology.

Adam, thank you so much for joining us here on Assembly Required.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

Okay, so a few months ago, you wrote this remarkably prescient piece in the Atlantic called The New Dark Age, and it focused on the Republicans' attack on knowledge, the deliberate destruction of education, culture, science, history.

You basically warned us about what was coming.

And I'm really a little bit annoyed that you got so much of it right.

So would love to start this conversation out by having you outline some of the most glaring examples of this attack and how this attack has escalated in the past couple of months.

Well, you know,

I think the thing I started with was grants for scientific research.

So it's clear that the administration has withdrawn or attempted to withdraw a tremendous amount of money financing medical and scientific research that they feel is politically incorrect.

Like I'm not even sure how else to describe it.

Any kind of research that might lead to information that

draws people to politically inconvenient conclusions about

climate change, about energy, about pollution,

you know, about gender, about race.

You know,

and this is

not just happening with scientific research, but with humanities research.

You know, they've taken away,

you know, they're trying to purge the museums of inconvenient facts about slavery or racism.

You know, they've stripped national parks of information referring to slavery or the founding fathers being slave owners, things like that.

They've taken away research grants for historical projects.

You know,

the attack is so incredibly broad.

It even extends to knowledge that the government has about itself, about what kinds of policies are efficient, about

getting rid of corruption, because after all, the administration, this administration is one that is very much interested in

profiting personally off of

commercial arrangements with private institutions.

I think

disemboweling the inspector general's offices is one way to ensure that petty corruption flourishes within

the federal government and ensure that funds that are supposed to go to people who need them or members of the public who need them or public funding public projects instead go to people who don't need them.

And there's no way to find out because you're getting rid of the people who figure out when those funds don't go where they're supposed to go.

And I think, you know,

the

way to understand this kind of corruption to me is that it's a kind of theft.

You know, you're stealing from the public and you are preventing the public's lives from being improved

on the basis of

the government's ability to improve scientific, medical, historical knowledge.

And you are doing this because you want to prevent people from coming to political conclusions that might lead them to oppose the policy priorities of the administration.

And we already know that this administration simply does not consider speech that they do not approve of protected.

I mean, the president essentially thinks it's illegal not to like him.

And so

he says things like the news that you publish about me is illegal or the jokes that late night comedians make about me are illegal.

And this is really sort of an extension of that.

They simply do not believe that people should be allowed to pursue lines of inquiry or

express views that they find objectionable.

And that extends to scientific rigor.

You know, one of the analogies that other people have made that I don't personally make, but that have been made by other people is to Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union, which is basically, you know, you take the actual scientific method and you invert it on its head and you say that every scientist has to express this particular political view, otherwise, you know, we're not going to support it or it's going to be treated like heresy.

And that's basically what's happening with the federal government with everything from

medical science to

technological research to historical research to artistic expression.

I mean, to some extent, the federal government does, you know,

support the arts.

And now that money is not going to anybody who, who, who, who, or they don't want that money to go to anybody who might produce art that, you know, isn't some sort of jingoistic propaganda.

Starting with the theft of our history,

you always infuse your work with this very long view.

And in your book, The Cruelty is the Point,

you

said that Trump is a manifestation of, as you put it, the ideological trends in American history that have been the most dangerous to our democracy.

And in your article in The Atlantic, you really laid out

what was being done in that first wave of Trump 2.0, this new Republican authoritarian regime.

Can you talk about why the theft of our history is so dangerous to democracy?

Well, I think, you know, their attack on history sort of explains it in a roundabout way.

Their attempts to eliminate, you know, factual research, historical research, or historical expression of, you know, events that happen is really an attempt to

prevent people from accessing this history of American liberalism.

And the reason they're doing that is because,

you know, it conflicts with what they want to believe about the history of the country.

And I don't really describe that as, you know, I think it's more of a kind of America fandom than it is like patriotism, because they love an idea of the country that isn't real rather than, you know, the history of the country as it actually exists.

And, you know, to the extent that despotism has had a foothold in American culture, it has always been in some way, shape, or form through racism.

I mean, when you think about,

you know, even the founding of the country, you know, at the time, you know, white men who were not propertied also didn't have the right to vote.

But with that expansion of the franchise to, you know, working class white men, the franchise was restricted from black men.

And so, you know, you have this sort of concurrent line of ideological thought in American history that thinks of the country,

you know, thinks of these ideas of democracy and liberty as only applying to a particular class of people rather than being universal.

And you have, you know, an alternate version of that kind of ideology expressed, by people like Frederick Douglass or Martin Luther King or John Lewis or Ida Wells that

believes in

American principles as universalist principles.

And basically almost all the conflicts, the sort of existential conflicts of this country have involved those two ideological

tendencies clashing in some form.

And it's not always that neat.

I mean, you think of something like the turn of the century progressive movement where, you know,

people who modern day liberals might be sympathetic to were also significantly,

you know, were also liberal

in,

you know,

by modern standards, certainly.

You know,

they were racist or they were sexist.

But, you know, I think this

attack on history is really an attempt to make the inequalities of the present illegible.

So if, you know, this fantasy version of America, where America hasn't ever been racist at all, is real, then there's no need to try and rectify racial injustice because it's just a product of natural inequalities between black people and white people.

And if you're thinking, well, that sounds pretty racist, it certainly is.

And I think the same is true with gender.

Since the founding of the United States, you had a country that was founded on the idea that all are created equal, but also that protected the institution of slavery.

And that contradiction is the same one that's haunting us today.

And you see sort of an extreme expression of it in this administration, which has a conception of liberty that only applies to them and people who think like them.

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So, I recently launched what I'm calling the 10 Steps Campaign, which is designed to spread awareness about our headlong rush into autocracy and authoritarianism.

And this attack on knowledge, which you describe, fits very clearly within step four, which is that you gut government, so it doesn't work.

And that means eliminating access to information.

Step six, going after the truth.

Step eight, the work to make sure that the external institutions can't step into the breach.

And together, it all just makes it more difficult for citizens to know what's true.

And in your piece, you write that Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination by destroying knowledge.

Can you paint a picture for us of what impact this attack is having now and what it means for a decade or 25 25 years down the line.

Yeah, look, I mean, I think

the thing to remember about authoritarian institutions, modern authoritarian states, is that they typically retain some vestigial aspects of democracy.

And sometimes when I want to explain this to people, you know, I go to Star Wars.

You know, you remember in the first Star Wars movie, the one

from the 70s, you know, they say something like, you know, the Senate has been abolished, the Imperial Senate has been abolished and the last remnants of the old republic have been swept away.

But what that means is that the Senate was there for a long time.

So, you know, you have these democratic institutions that actually do not have power

to check the executive.

They look and they're called what they might be called in a democratic society.

But in fact, people do not have an ability to change their mind, essentially.

You cannot change the leadership of the state because the state is not democratically accountable.

And what you see them trying to do now, as far as you know, you have administration allies

in corporate America trying to consolidate control over the media so that the media is friendlier to Donald Trump.

You have

an attempt to shape higher education so that people are not taught what

the Trump administration considers forbidden thoughts, forbidden facts about our history.

And ultimately, what they want to do is, you know, their view of the country is that they are actually the real Americans.

And so, you know, democracy is when, simply when they have control of the country forever in perpetuity, because after all, the people who would change their minds about them aren't real Americans.

And so their political will should not actually count.

And, you know, what they're hoping is that you know, with the destruction or with the shaping of higher education to no longer, you know, present people with facts that might be used to challenge the administration, with research, historical, scientific, of any kind, not being used in ways that might

provide people with information about

policy alternatives that they might prefer to whatever the administration is pursuing.

This is going to make the country easier for them to control, they hope, ultimately.

I mean, the truth is that nothing lasts forever.

It doesn't matter how spectacularly successful you are at it.

You know, but

I can't tell you how long this is going to last.

But again, like, I want to reiterate: this is a kind of theft.

It is a kind of theft from the public because so much of what

has made life easier for people over the past hundred years has been scientific advancements and technological advancements and educational advancements that have been made, you know, in part with the support of government.

You know, and this is especially obvious with

commercial technology because initially

companies don't want to make investments in expensive investments in technologies they don't know will pay off.

So with something like the internet, that starts off as like an American military thing because they have the money to,

they don't have to worry about their shareholders getting angry about what they're spending money on.

They can afford to invest in technologies before they're profitable.

And then, you know,

the sort of market innovation of capitalism can do its thing after, you know, that original sort of beachhead

is established.

But this is going to prevent that.

This is going to prevent people from learning the truth about their own history and forming their own conclusions.

It's going to prevent people from,

you know,

it's going to slow technological and medical advancements.

So people are going to get sicker and not big,

and we're going to be prevented from discovering how to make them better in more efficient or effective ways.

You know, people are not going to be, and I think fundamentally, in the end, you know,

it's not like the truth is that the pendulum swings.

So, what they're concerned about ultimately is making sure, not just making sure that they have control over people's minds, but that they have control, a sufficient control over the political system that even if they say lose a vote,

they do not have to see power.

And I think that's the thing that I think a lot of people are rightly worried about, given that, you know, the current president, last time he lost an election, attempted to overthrow the Constitution of the United States.

I mean, it looks to me that he and Republicans have, instead of trying to overthrow the government, they just don't plan to ever relinquish control of the government.

And you have framed up a number of their attacks on the knowledge-producing institutions rightly as going after DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

And one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is that in our 10 steps to autocracy and authoritarianism, your writing, your analysis has really highlighted every single one of those steps.

And so, you know, step seven is you scapegoat vulnerable populations, but you also decimate their access.

And you write about how at the NIH, staff members were instructed to cancel grants for projects that study transgender populations, gender identity, DEI, and the scientific workforce.

We have an executive order from Trump that says that you can't use DEI to train large language models in artificial intelligence.

You quoted an African-American studies professor at Yale who made a very sharp observation about why Republicans are coming after

studies that focus on observing gaps in outcomes based on racial, gender, and class lines.

He said, it turns out when you pay close attention to these issues, you don't end up where they end up.

And so they've had to manufacture their own facts, and they're attacking the places that have the facts on the ground and the reality of history.

This is textbook authoritarian behavior.

Can you talk about what is happening in this moment that both chills you, that you wish people understood, especially around the issue of DEI?

And where are the opportunities for us to insert better behavior or at least better knowledge?

So I think the important thing about DEI is that it's a misnomer.

You know, I think a lot of times when people think about DEI, they think about, you know, sort of annoying HR workplace trainings.

But what they're really going after is

enforcement of civil rights law, enforcement of non-discrimination law.

What they're saying is you should be able to discriminate because some people are better than others.

And that applies to, you know, racial and gender groups, not simply individuals.

That's sort of the

dark reality behind these attacks is they simply think you should be allowed to discriminate.

They think it's wrong that civil rights law, federal civil rights law prevented that for so long because some people, some classes of people are simply better than others.

And I wish that's what people understood about DI.

They're not talking about, you know, your annoying colleague who uses like academic race jargon.

They're talking about, you know, if I don't want to hire a black person who's qualified, I shouldn't have to do that.

And, you know, I wrote a different piece called The Great Resegregation, which really focused on this.

And I think, you know,

the thing to understand is that

American

occupational segregation has not changed much since the 1990s.

You know, we are about as segregated as we were in the 1990s in part because

sectors of the American economy

where you do not need a college degree

remain,

but can make a decent amount of money, remain tremendously segregated.

And, you know,

one of the things that I think people need to understand

is that they have sort of

been misled, I think, by the extent to which a lot of people in public-facing jobs have become more diverse.

Like if you watch television now, if you look at Congress, Congress is more diverse.

But in terms of like actual,

you know, the actual American workplace, things haven't changed very much at all.

Things haven't changed very much in terms of residential segregation.

So if you think of these things as problems,

then you might want to do something about them.

But if you take the mindset that actually these are just reflections of people's inherent abilities and nothing needs to be done about it, and also, you know, we'll take away the history that shows that it's the result of government policy rather than people's actual abilities, then people won't understand why, won't have another explanation for why inequality is the way it is.

And I think another like really important thing to understand is one of the places where black people traditionally have been able to advance

in employment is the federal government.

And why is that?

Because the non-discrimination protections are so strong.

Even in sort of, you know, even in the private sector, you know, your social links can be a tremendous factor in whether or not you get ahead.

You know, you know somebody's somebody's daddy who owns a company and you can get a job there.

But with the federal government, you know, the non-discrimination protections have been so strong traditionally that you have had a lot of black people, the black middle class has substantially been built by federal employment.

And it's not a coincidence that you, I mean, I think the New York Times had an article about this a while ago, that so many of the people who are being laid off,

you know, losing their jobs with the federal government are black people, in particular, black women.

I mean, my mother was a black civil servant.

My father was also a civil servant.

He worked for the State Department.

He was white and Jewish.

But the point is, you know,

this is something that's been known for a long time.

It's something that's like very well represented in the social science.

And I think the irony about it is that,

you know, it's almost as if the right looked at all the sort of liberal and left-wing critiques of structural racism in the United States and said, yeah, all of that's true, but it's good.

So we should like make sure that there's more structural racism instead of less or more structural sexism instead of less.

No, I think you're absolutely right.

I encourage people to go to aprnetwork.org.

There is a really robust list of all of the laws that are DEI laws, from labor laws to the Americans with Disabilities Act, all of the civil rights laws, because I think you're right.

We tend to mischaracterize DEI as this annoying HR issue.

And they very clearly see DEI as the structural underpinning of a pluralistic democracy.

And they are aggressively and assiduously working to dismantle it.

I think we also saw that with Pete Hekseth and his speech about the military.

We know that the intention of

requiring everyone to be clean-shaven has a disproportionate effect on black and brown members of the military.

And I think you're right.

They are working hard to make it legal to discriminate again.

Right.

We're not talking about, when people say DEI, they think we're talking about sort of silly stuff, but they're talking about the Civil Rights Act.

They're talking about the Voting Rights Act.

They're talking about equality for not just people of color, but for men and women, for people who have disabilities.

Their view is simply that they should be allowed to discriminate discriminate because some people are better than others.

Some classes of people are better than others.

And if you have any doubts about that, you could look at their quote unquote refugee policy, which pretty much at this point only accepts white people from South Africa.

And I think it's incredibly important that you spend time talking about this and unpacking it.

Because if you care about authoritarianism, you have to care about DEI.

My very strong argument, and I think you make this so plain in your writings, is:

in 17 years, this nation becomes a majority-minority country.

They can count.

Those who are trying to change the structural

reality of America understand that.

And if you read Project 2025, if you look at their areas of attack, it is all designed to make certain that the people they don't believe are worthy of this nation have no power in this nation.

And so, one of of the questions I have for you is just based on your research and your thinking, what are ways we can countermand or at least have a better grasp on how to understand what's happening?

Well, I'll say a couple of things.

I think the irony is that a lot of, you know, I think that you're right that they do think that, but I think the irony is that they're wrong.

I mean, they have this sort of quote-unquote great replacement theory that when the U.S.

becomes minority, minority conservatism is doomed, but it's not true.

I mean, mean, it's just simply not true.

Like, you know, this idea that your demographics determine your politics is simply incorrect.

And you could see it in, you know, Trump's increasing share of the Hispanic vote,

you know, and not just the Hispanic vote, the Asian vote.

I mean,

the reality is that, you know, this

racist idea that if you're not a white person, you're probably not going to be a conservative.

You know, there are versions of it on both left and right, but on the right, it's become this like great motivating ideological concept called the great replacement.

But the sort of political theory behind it is incorrect.

There are a lot of people of color who have very conservative views and might even vote Republican if it were not for

the Republicans talking about race and racism in this way.

The other thing I would say is that I think

the most important thing people can do to understand what's happening right now is to read books about American history,

because there's a couple of things that really matter for the purposes of American flavor of authoritarianism.

And one is that American authoritarians always present themselves as defending democracy rather than attacking it, because that is, you know, a sort of

the word is universally understood mostly as good,

with the exception of a few like really hardcore ideologues.

So, you know, when, you know, at the end of Reconstruction, you know, people who were disenfranchising black people in the southern states, their view is that they were saving democracy from people who are too, quote, ignorant to exercise the franchise.

And

so, you know,

this

idea that,

you know,

if there was an authorism, authoritarianism in America would look like something out of Europe is just incorrect.

We have had illiberal traditions in the United United States since the founding of the country.

And when you look at those illiberal traditions, they become very familiar in terms of the kind of problems that we're dealing with now as a country.

So my recommendation, my number one recommendation in terms of understanding things is simply to read about American history and read about how

these forms of government worked.

I mean, we talk about gerrymandering as if it's just like a part of partisan combat.

But one of the first things that they were doing at the end of Reconstruction was trying to gerrymander black, you know, before they put in the full Jim Crow restrictions, what they were trying to do was gerrymander black votes into districts where they could not have an impact on the outcome of the vote.

You know, this is not something that comes out of nowhere.

All of these, all the things that are happening right now, most of them at least have historical antecedents where, you know, and events in which Americans basically accepted,

you know, at one point or another in the country, the existence of authoritarianism within the United States, even if it wasn't fully the whole country.

I mean, when you understand that America has only been a true multiracial democracy since 1965,

everything that's happening now makes a lot more sense, including

this sort of attempted authoritarian takeover by a man whose rise to political prominence stemmed from his questioning of the citizenship of the first black president of the United States.

It's just not a coincidence.

Well, another aspect of this attack on knowledge is the practical implications it has for the economy.

So let's take the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This is an independent agency that reports on the labor market, and people who want to understand the American economy heavily rely on these monthly reports.

This summer, the president fired the independent commissioner who headed up the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a week jobs report.

Last week, Republicans celebrated the fact that the government shutdown meant that there would not be a report on the continuing weakening of the economy.

And I recently did a TikTok where I explained the intersection of why you need a BLS report because BLS does the consumer price index, which is how people get their colas if you are on Social Security or if you receive disability.

And yet, people don't really understand

that the federal government is one of our leading producers of knowledge.

Can you talk about sort of the practical implications of his tendency to install loyalists and to destroy the information?

So if you're looking at what he did at BLS, what he did with

Robert Kennedy at HHS.

what he's trying to do with Governor Lisa Cook at the Federal Reserve.

Can you sort of talk about why it matters that the knowledge we get from the government needs to be true?

Yeah, I mean, look,

the government's knowledge has to be rigorous and fact-based.

And if it's not, and you can see, you know, what's interesting is Republicans have been the most squeamish around stuff like this.

So, you know, Trump's nominee to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics was rejected.

You know, and the Supreme Court has given Trump pretty much everything he wanted, but they've been less willing to do that with the Fed.

And it basically, I think, comes down to,

you know,

part of the bargain with Trump is that, you know,

rich people get tax cuts and

they get non-enforcement of regulations and they get to, you know, pretty much get away with whatever they want.

And, you know, and then, you know, on the flip side, Trump gets to do his culture wars.

But part of that agreement, I think, is they don't want him to actually mess with their money.

They don't want him making the kinds of decisions that are going to prevent them, you know, market actors from behaving rationally in a way that will allow them to preserve those profits that they have worked so very hard to keep to themselves.

And so, you know,

firms cannot make sensible economic decisions in a climate where the government is putting out economic propaganda.

And they understand that.

It's why it's the one place where they've been a little squeamish about Trump doing this stuff, doing the regular stuff that he's been doing everywhere else.

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I think this attack on knowledge can fly under the radar because so many of the knowledge-producing institutions, whether it's entities within the federal government or external groups like universities, can feel a bit far removed.

Can you talk about how these attacks are harming regular Americans, both now and what it means down the line?

Well, look, I mean, I think, you know,

the thing that comes to mind immediately is the measles outbreaks.

Like, why are we having measles outbreaks?

Because Republicans have decided to go in on anti-vax insanity.

When the

government leans on universities to teach propaganda, then your kids don't learn how to do things properly.

You know, when you

you prevent the government from gathering information about itself and making sure that it's spending money correctly, then that money doesn't get spent the way the public needs to be spent and the public loses out.

When

When the government is not investing in new technologies and is instead shoveling funds to the president's allies for like, you know, building new ice prisons or whatever, you know, we get less technological advancement.

We get

less advancement of things that

improve Americans' daily lives.

And there's also just fewer jobs.

You know, this sort of economic malpractice that the president is engaged in is going to make things harder for everybody.

It already is.

And

part of this attack on

the information producing institutions that deal with the economy

is to prevent that news from getting out in any way that's definitive.

It's not so much that they don't want you to have access to the information, period.

They want you in a state of constant cynicism to where nobody can really come to an agreement about what the facts are or what is true, which is some ways even worse because they operate very well in this sort of world of unreality.

I mean, if you look at what's happening now with these sort of deployments of the National Guard for supposed terrorist attacks and insurrections that just aren't happening,

you know, people, they understand that they're voters and that people in general are, they think in terms of who their team is.

And so they will want to believe things things that aren't true if their team, if the leader of their team says it,

even if on some level they know it's false.

And you can see this, you know, with the sort of

with the 2020 election, I don't think that there are, I mean, there are people who really believe that the election was stolen, but I think for the most part, it is an expression of, you know, my team won and therefore I don't have to feel bad that my team lost.

And in this, like I said, in this environment of unreality, not where the information is not accessible, but where it's so confused to where people can't establish definitively what the truth is.

One of the institutions that was able to do that was the government.

And that's not to say the government was always right, but

when you say there's no racial discrimination in policing and DOJ produces a pattern or practice investigation of a police department that

is

struggling

in a very real way with racism and discrimination on the basis of

statistics and communications internally,

you know,

how

the police themselves are told to behave.

You know, that stuff is harder to argue with.

So it's better to just destroy it or make it so untrustworthy that

people's cynicism can fill in the blanks and be like, well, that's probably not true because nothing's true.

And I really think, you know, I really want to emphasize that

that kind of like sort of blanket all-purpose cynicism is actually, it makes you susceptible to being manipulated, even though it's supposed to be a protection against that kind of manipulation.

In the end, what happens is you don't trust anything, and as a result, you can't figure out what the truth is.

I mean, you've been adamant that the politics of cruelty is not limited to Trump, and that even without Trump, something like Trumpism would always find fertile ground in this country.

Now, I've also been very vocal that we can't lay all of this destruction at his feet alone because we've seen how the entire Republican Party has doubled down to become Trump's enthusiastic co-conspirators, whether it's in Congress or governors that are sending National Guardsmen into

other states or a court that has handed him win after win that's eviscerated the Constitution.

I worry though that this is a permanent feature that we are just seeing in real time, but that we won't be able to move away from.

Can you talk about why I'm hopefully wrong?

Well, I can't say that you're wrong.

I can't say that you're wrong.

But what I will say is that, you know, democracy does, there's no, you know, there's no

riding into the sunset with democracy.

Democratic self-determination is something that every generation has to preserve.

You know, so when we talk about, well, why does every election have to be so important?

It's like, well, because you're preserving your right to choose your leaders is important.

And if you get complacent

or enough people get enraptured with the demagogue, you can lose that freedom.

And that's why you have to be so vigilant all the time.

And, you know, you know, I think of, you know, when you think back to somebody like Ida Wells, who, you know, sort of came of age after Reconstruction.

So they saw, you know, her generation saw the dawn of Reconstruction and then saw the sun set on

the multiracial democratic project, you know, for decades.

And the truth is, is that, you know, you have to fight for this stuff.

You have to defend it if you want to keep it.

And that's true for every generation that is born.

It's just not a fight that ends.

And so, you know,

and

The hopeful thing about that is that, again, nothing lasts forever.

This ends when the people decide that they want it to end.

And they have the power to do that.

And,

you know, if they didn't have the power to do that, the Trump administration wouldn't be so desperate to control what people think and how people think and how people talk.

Adam Serrer, thank you so much for joining us here today on Assembly Required.

Thank you for having me.

I appreciate you.

So, joining me now to help me answer another one of your questions is our producer, Farah.

Hi, Stacey.

Thanks for having me.

Of course, you're always welcome.

Thank you.

So, for this week, our listener question: we switched it up and we asked the assembly-required Discord.

And yes, we have a Discord that you can be a part of if you become a friend of the pod at Crooked Media.

And this question comes from the listener, Confused Disaster, which, by the way, is a very relatable username because I'm also a Confused Disaster.

And they ask, what do you think is the best strategy to use when dealing with someone who is with us on one issue, but struggles with another important issue?

I.e., they are with us on environmental issues, but not there yet on the social justice or environmental justice front?

So I've always believed in alignment, not agreement.

Agreement says that if you're going to be with me, you have to be with me everywhere and in every way.

We have to be in lockstep intellectually, emotionally, psychologically, and that's a lot of work.

My parents are pastors.

Their job is to convert people's souls, to help people find all of those pieces and put them in a package.

That's not my job.

And it is nearly impossible to achieve or to know that you've done it.

Alignment, though.

says that we can find enough points of common agreement and enough points of common intention that we can work together.

And when we start with alignment, we actually create space for agreement to grow.

We don't know why someone doesn't agree.

We don't know why they haven't decided that the issues that animate us should animate them.

And by starting with alignment, what we do is welcome people into the conversation.

Today's discussion was about knowledge.

And the way you build knowledge is by creating space for people to ask questions, but also for them to gather information and to process it.

And so, this is a very long way of saying that if we focus on alignment, where can we work together?

We create space for agreement.

Where do our ideologies resonate with one another?

But I would never say no to working with someone because they haven't quite gotten to the same place I am on every issue.

But if our values are aligned and our intentions are aligned, we can get to agreement eventually.

That's great.

Thank you so so much, Stacey.

Of course.

As always on Assembly Required, we like to give our listeners actionable tools for facing the challenges of today.

So here's this week's toolkit in which we will, as you know, encourage you to be curious, solve problems, and do good.

First, be curious.

Pick up a copy of Adam's book, The Cruelty is the Point, and check out his incredible writing for the Atlantic for important commentary on how to make sense of our current reality.

Number two, solve problems.

If your local school district is making moves to undermine education and knowledge, attend school board meetings to speak out, whether you have kids in the school or not.

Consider following the lead of parents in Florida who've started gathering students at a local cultural center to teach them supplemental lessons on Black history.

Educators and content creators are turning to TikTok to share important history lessons as well.

So find reputable sources to keep yourself and the young people in your life informed.

And of course, do good.

Recently, ProPublica reported on the 94 million pounds of food that the Trump administration destroyed rather than allow it to be delivered to food banks across the country.

As the economy continues to weaken and with furloughed federal employees facing dwindling pay, I encourage you to support your local food bank.

Visit feedingamerica.org to locate your closest food bank and find ways you can help.

As always, if you like what you hear, be sure to share this episode and subscribe on all your favorite platforms.

And to meet the demands of the algorithms, please rate the show and leave a comment.

You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you go to listen and learn.

Please also check out my sub stack, Assembly Notes, for more information about what we discussed on the podcast and other tools to help us protect our democracy.

Thank you to the thousands of you who've signed up for the 10 Steps Campaign at 10stepsCampaign.org.

We've recently updated the site to add more resources, a glossary, and a Spanish language version.

I'd love to hear more about what you're going to be doing and what tools or resources would be helpful.

And please practice step two and share the site with your friends and family.

If you have a report, a question, or a comment for me, send it in.

You can start with an email to assemblyrequired at crooked.com or leave us a voicemail and you and your questions and comments might be featured on the pod.

Our number is 213-293-9509.

That wraps up this episode of Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams.

Be careful out there and I'll meet you you here next week.

Assembly Required is a crooked media production.

Our lead show producer is Lacey Roberts and our associate producer is Farah Safari.

Kirill Polaviev is our video producer.

This episode was recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis.

Our theme song is by Vasilis Photopoulos.

Thank you to Matt DeGroote, Kyle Seglin, Tyler Boozer, Ben Hethcote, and Priyanka Muntha for production support.

Our executive producers are Katie Long and me, Stacey Abrams.

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