Hegseth’s Strike Order, “Remigration” & the Midterm Stakes (with Alex Wagner)

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welcome to assembly required with stacey abrams i hope you all had a chance to have a restful holiday with friends and family now that we're back it's time to dive into the news that you may have missed

Pete Hegseth, head of America's Defense Department, has been accused of ordering the extrajudicial killings of two survivors of an American missile attack on a fishing boat suspected of containing some undisclosed amount of drugs.

The two dead are among more than 80 killed during an undeclared war being waged in the Caribbean under the guise of defending U.S. citizens against the scourge of illicit drugs.

This is what happens when step five of the 10 steps to autocracy and authoritarianism take place. Step five is when loyalists are given unfettered authority and scant oversight.

As both Democrats and now Republicans scramble to understand what happened, both parties agree that his actions may be war crimes.

War crimes committed on the pretext of protecting Americans from the drug trade, a pretense eviscerated when the sitting president of the United States has announced his plans to issue a pardon for Honduras' former president, Juan Orlando Hernandez.

Why is this a problem?

Because President Hernandez was convicted in 2024 in New York State for receiving millions in bribes and partnering with cocaine traffickers to actually deliver illicit drugs to U.S. citizens.

Men bobbing on boats off the coast of Venezuela, who received neither due process nor trial, have been summarily executed by the U.S. military.

Yet a proven drug trafficker serving 45 years in prison after proceeding fully through our legal system, has been given a get out of jail free card as a favor because autocrats look out for each other.

You see, Hernandez isn't simply a convicted felon who used the power of the presidency to enrich himself and engage in breathtaking corruption.

He was also credibly accused of manipulating the Honduran courts to stand for a second term despite constitutional barriers. Sound familiar?

During his tenure, he had iron control of the Honduran Congress and the presidency. And when he stood for re-election, the vote was deemed fraudulent by the opposition and by international observers.

In response, his government declared a state of emergency. They killed 30 demonstrators and arrested more than 800 protesters.

This is the man Trump intends to pardon in the name of solidarity.

Here in America, apps are being blocked because they help people know where American secret police might be planning a raid or planning to kidnap lawful residents.

Palantir and others are suspected of linking together targeting technologies to spy on Americans using their home security devices, street cameras, and other tools.

Nonprofits that invest in pro-democracy efforts face investigation by Republican-led inquiries coming from Congress and the administration.

And protesters are increasingly under pressure to be careful of their their right to assemble.

Breaking government and civil society are steps four and eight, and they are bolstered by an overreach that convinces us that dissent is dangerous.

Our most fundamental obligations in this time of authoritarian power are to recognize what we face, activate in response, and use our momentum to build the nation we deserve.

Victories like election wins in November or the release of the Epstein files can be seductive, convincing us that we're only a few dominoes away from this regime toppling under its own ignominy.

Democracy isn't an abstract. It's about the ability of families to eat at a time when food security is under attack and the worst is yet to come.

It's found in the government response to exorbitant healthcare costs and the subsidies that serve their purpose and are now being threatened by Republican inaction.

Look, I don't believe in democracy as a concept. I believe it is how we force the power we share with our leaders to be returned to us in the form of goods, services, and justice.

Voting rights aren't a civic duty. They are the bedrock of ownership, true ownership of our nation, which is why we must push back against anyone who would diminish their effectiveness.

Affordability isn't a complaint. It is a demand that socialism for billionaires be met by basic decency for the rest of us.

Through the 10 Steps campaign, through this podcast, our campaign is to fight autocracy and authoritarianism. The Just Fix It initiative is going to advocate for affordable health care.

This podcast and other venues are doing their best to help you know what is at stake because we can get this done.

I'm focused on how we get what we deserve. And I know it sounds like a lot.
So does this present moment. But we know how to do hard things.
We know how to multitask. We know how to win.

And I am here as a weekly reminder that we're in this together.

Now, one more voice that understands the complexity of our present age and is doing her part is my guest, journalist and host of the new crooked media podcast, Runaway Country, the indomitable Alex Wagner.

Alex Wagner, welcome to Assembly Required. I am so excited to have you here.
It is truly a thrill. I got the invite in my, in my email inbox, and I was like, I've reached the mountaintop.
Here I am.

And the Stacey Abrams is going to be asking me questions. A discussion I've been waiting for forever.
Thank you for having me on. It's great to see you.

It's wonderful to see you, but I think that's called turnabout is fair play

because of

the inquisitions I have gotten to have from the Alex Wagner.

I, you know, gentle, loving,

they were thoughtful and, you know, incisive. And I'm really glad that I get to do this.
So, yeah.

And this, this is a grin of welcome, not a grin of anything else that you should worry about.

I'm thrilled to be here. I'm thrilled that we're part of the same family, finally.

And

give me, you know, hit me with your best shot, I guess. Well, I'm going to start with congratulations.
Your new podcast, Runaway Country, is fantastic.

You dive into the real lives behind the headlines and you've got this great tagline. If you want to understand our unreal times, you got to talk to the very real people living through them.
True.

So you've done so many extraordinary things. I was a devotee of the circus

and just the work that you've done. You are such a thoughtful,

not just interviewer, you're a thoughtful observer of politics. So why this show at this moment and what should we be learning?

Well, I mean, I don't know about you, but I, uh, my intense market research, which is to say, is talking to my friends

and just being out in the world, I think, made me realize the degree to which all of these insane headlines and news developments have become abstracted.

And that it's like, people understand we're living in serious times. And I think obviously there's a certain amount of privilege when you don't have to feel the stakes deeply personally.

But I thought, how do we get people to sort of re-engage with what's happening to them and their democracy? And I think one of the best ways to do that is by storytelling.

And I think we've really lost sort of the human element in a lot of this. I mean, these headlines, first of all, are coming so fast and so furious.

But the issues themselves, I think, have gotten a bit nebulous for people. They don't feel the emotional weight of what it is like to see a mother or a father deported.
They're not in the courtroom.

They're not necessarily on the streets. They don't understand the stakes as viscerally as I think we need to generally as a population to perhaps become re-engaged and do something about it.

So I'm always someone that's loved being in the field, as it were, whether it's the circus or whether it's the work that I did, you know, in the first 100 days of the Trump administration for MSNBC, now MS Now.

But I like talking to people.

And I think we've lost a little of that reporting muscle as a sort of, you know, broader news industry.

So I was very blessed that the good people at Crooked said, well, why don't we do that podcast here?

And we'll start, you know, telling the stories behind the headlines and then do some brilliant, you know, 30,000-foot analysis from the smartest people we know.

So we try and give people both the granular and the big picture.

And hopefully it forces or encourages people to kind of feel something in this moment that then, I guess, maybe supercharges engagement or at least a sense of civic duty.

Because I think that there's a lot of numbness. And I think we all got to shake it off, you know.
No, I think that's such an accurate analysis and diagnosis.

And I think about your interview with Epstein survivor Marina Lacerda about the near-unanimous vote in the House and the unanimous vote in the Senate to release all the files that were related to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

And that numbness you describe really reflects this public conversation that has really turned into political sports and brinksmanship as opposed to, you know, understanding the real people at the center of this, the survivors whose stories and whose trauma have to live inside those documents that are being bandied about like.

so much fodder.

Yeah, that conversation became just, I mean, and look, I understand there's a political element to all of this, but it was like, these women need this information because a lot of them don't remember what happened to them.

Like their brains shut down that period of trauma and they want to see the videotapes because they want to understand.

You know, I just feel like we lost a lot of the human story in that whole, I mean, I will say the ongoing Epstein saga. It's certainly not over.

And that, you know, we talk about recentering the victims, but part of the way you do that is by actually letting them tell you how they feel about what's happening in the middle of this maelstrom.

So, um, yeah, that was really valuable perspective.

Like, I, I didn't, I, I didn't imagine that you, you know, wouldn't have remembered, but of course, so much of what happened to me at age 13 and I had a normal life, I don't remember.

But when you have trauma that profound and ongoing, I mean, yeah, of course, there's complete like sort of lacunae and you need the information.

That's the element, that's the essence of the struggle is to find a way to close it and heal.

And to to your point about you do this amazing job of talking about the very human consequences and context.

But I would love for you to take a moment and talk then about, as the listeners, as the observers, what do you want us to be talking about as these conversations go forward?

I mean, this is going to, again, dominate headlines with every new discovery and every new piece of information. What should we be talking about?

Well, I just think, I mean, I found in conversation, right? When people are divorced from a topic, it's about getting them to be, if something moves you, right?

If you listen to, for example, my podcast and you're, you know, you hear about an ICE raid in a town near you, and that's sort of like you have neighbors or friends who aren't really engaged with it or for whom it's not like a high stakes situation.

I think one of the things that often spurs people into action or like, you know, kicks them into gear is telling them a story that is real and that involves people.

The very first episode we had, we talked to an immigration court judge.

And it's like, people do not, when you begin to relay, but let me tell you about the story I heard on whatever, a podcast, or just the story I heard about this woman who was an immigration court judge and she was doing the best that she could.

And they're overloaded with literally tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of these cases.

And they're trying to adjudicate them in courtrooms as ICE agents in bandanas and masks are sitting in the courtrooms, scaring not just the people who are plaintiffs or defendants, but the judges themselves.

And then you hear people being apprehended and ripped away from their families on the other side of the wall as they exit the courtroom.

And the chaos and the sort of tragedy and the suffering that is a normal sort of part of this very every what used to be everyday process.

To me, that was like a revelatory thing.

And I think the more we can convey the sort of human struggle and these stories, I mean, just tell our neighbors and our friends about, you know, the stories we've heard about how people are managing this moment, how people are struggling to do the right thing, how the system is overloaded.

I just think it starts with storytelling. I really do.
I mean, the oral tradition is like part of our history as Americans. And I think we need to, I think we need to bring it back.

You know, people are just so divorced from the news and information. It's like push alerts or it's TikTok videos, but we really are no longer putting ourselves in other people's shoes.

So I think it's like building that empathy through storytelling.

I mean, that sounds pretty like high-minded, but I do think it is a thing of like, let me tell you about this woman that I heard from on a podcast.

Well, I think that makes sense, but it also reminds us of the complexity of the world we're living in.

I mean, right now we are in this split-screen moment where we had two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C.

who were shot and the suspected gunman is from Afghanistan. And embedded in that story is the unconscionable taking of human life of a National Guardsman.

There's also the military occupation of Washington, D.C. by the National Guard.

There is the suspected gunman being a recipient of asylum in the United States because he served our country in Afghanistan. And then there is what kind of darkness would lead to this.

And if the story that gets told is only the story that Christy Noam or Pam Bondi are telling, that's a very different thing versus the story that's being told about what will happen to other asylum applicants who are going through this very vigorous vetting process or us reneging on our promises to Afghan nationals who risked their lives to help the U.S.

during our war there.

I'd love for you to talk for a second about how we take the storytelling, but also the listening to narratives to navigate what can be weaponized against so many different communities in response.

Yeah, I mean, I think, so we're focusing on that for that, that particular story for this week's podcast, which drops on Thursday.

And I feel like, as you point out, There's so many different layers to it, right? I think it starts first. I mean,

there is the discrete story of the human beings at the center of this, right? Which I think it's really important.

And whether it's the story of the National Guardswoman who was shot and later died or the actual alleged assailant and what that person went through.

And you could argue that every story is multidimensional, but this one in particular touches on

the sort of brutality that was executed in our name overseas in Afghanistan, the death squads, for lack of a better term, that this alleged assailant was a part of, and the sort of the things we asked of people, the debasement and the repression of basic humanity that we did as a sort of foreign policy prescription overseas.

And I think we need to grapple with that. But I also think, Stacey, a huge part of it.

And this is where I think we need to be, I think with every story, there is the Trump administration point of view. There's the facts we sort of of know immediately.

And then you always have to ask yourself, okay, but

what is the long game here? Or what's even the medium game?

Because I do think what's not being talked about enough with regards to this particular story is how, unfortunately, the fact that this assailant was an Afghan citizen is a convenient lever for Trump to pull in the name of

really effectively like a Nazi era policy of remigration, right? The idea that we need to get rid of

the people who are brown, the people who are from the developing world.

This is all in service of this larger agenda that I would argue, I mean, very much predates Trump, goes back to like, you know, pre-civil rights, if not further than that.

Like, as part, the darkest part of the American project really questions who gets to be here and what it is to be American. That's at the center of this story, right?

Trump is using this as an opportunity opportunity to continue forward with a policy that is,

I think, so against the vision of America that most of us bought into in the late 20th and early 21st century, which was an inclusive, racially diverse, multi-ethnic, multi-religious society.

And he is trying to reverse the gains that we made, you know, arguably in the last 100 years.

And that this, this is, I mean, so, you know, the story that we should be discussing is not just the story of the discrete personages involved, but also the story of

the country. This is, I truly think, a hinge point in terms of American values and what this country stands for.
And

that's as, I think, essential in all of this, that the big picture story is the one we can't let

go under discussed or undiscussed as we talk about actually what happened to the National Guardspeople and what's going to go happen to this alleged assailant.

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Part of the challenge that I grapple with as someone who has stood for public office, but who now has this platform.

As a reporter, you have this responsibility for truth-telling, but you also have this responsibility for what used to be known as actual balance and now seems to be eviscerating.

But I wonder how much can we talk about things and what obligations do we have when the talking about things in this environment could lead to retribution.

And so we'd love to have you impact that. I mean, we've spent a lot of time on this show talking about authoritarianism, talking about the dangers of dissent and why we should do it anyway.

And I'd love for you to weigh in.

You know, I was talking to Medi Hassan, my former colleague who's now the head of Zatteo, which is like going gangbusters,

independent media organization. And he said, you know, the idea that anybody can sit out the fight and that there's like a kind of

non-partisan, you know, it's not about partisanship. It's if you are in the business of journalism and truth telling, you are in the fight.

Like you are literally by virtue of wanting to tell stories and accurately report what's happening, you are a combatant against this administration because they are so intent on stifling dissent, stifling criticism, and stifling the truth.

And so we are at odds. It is not about the Republican Party.
It is about fighting fascism. And so we've all been drafted.

And I do think that that's a discomforting place for a lot of journalists who started out in like the 90s and early 2000s to be in because there were still vestiges of sort of institutional news media.

And this is the way you reported things, and this side, you know, but I'm not going to say both sides isn't, but there was a sense that, you know, if you spoke too

pointedly, you know, against members of one party too consistently, that you would be tagged, you know, no longer trustworthy.

And I think that we need to do away with that idea because I think just by virtue of trying to do your job, you are now not an advocate.

You are literally, as I said, you've been drafted in the war against fascism. So that's how I think about it.
But as you you say, that doesn't come without cost.

And

there have absolutely been moments in the last several years when I was, whether I was working at MS Now or even at Crooked, you know, these organizations are targeted specifically and repeatedly by this administration, by the president of the United States.

The president of the United States has called me out before, he's called my colleagues out before, and that is not a comfortable place to be. But I think,

you know, I worry about it. I have family.
I have a mother who's a naturalized citizen. That's all stuff.
Those are stakes, right? But at the same time,

I think about, as scary as that is, I also think like, what an extraordinary time to be in the fight. You know, there's no greater clarity.

There's no greater sense of purpose than the one that we have now, right? That we get to be the ones.

It is, I feel very lucky and privileged to have a platform that anybody wants to hear from me, that I get to go on Stacey Abrams' podcast and talk to you about this stuff.

But, you know, we like we get to be, you know, soldiers in the

war for the survival of liberal democracy. You know, like

it's like you get all the feels.

You get the terrified feels, you get the scared feels, but you also, there is a sense, you know, when we can platform people whose stories are being untold, when we feel like the audience is with us and make, you know, engaged and that it's making a difference and that we're moving the ball forward in like the existential fight of our times.

That's an incredible feeling. And it's an incredible time to be a journalist.
So in that way, it's scary, but I also feel very privileged, if that makes any sense. No, it absolutely does.

I mean, look, I am not a journalist. I am lucky enough to be able to use this medium as a platform to have conversations with folks.
And when I was name-checked by Trump at the, you know,

State of the Union,

there was this time when I was cautioned against talking about my work and mentioning places where I'd been doing work because it might cause a problem.

And I've been navigating this tension of how much do I say

when's the right time to say it, but never the question of should I say it. It's how do you say it.

And I think one of the incredible things about the work that you're doing through your podcast is that you're giving people space to tell the full story.

And speaking of stories, there was a story that I mentioned at the top of today's episode about Pete Hexeth, our Secretary of Defense, who is under fire. Oh, you're not calling him the war secretary?

I refuse. I refuse.

I write fiction for a living. I refuse to

repeat it unless I'm reading aloud from a book. Here, here, yes, here, here.

But, you know, he's under fire right now because a Washington Post report that is dangerous to tell the truth about right now, you know, exposed that he gave a verbal order for a second strike to kill all survivors on a boat in the the Caribbean on September 2nd.

And we know that over 80 people have been killed in these extrajudicial strikes. But the one that seems to resonate for the first time is this one.

And it's creating this broad reaction where, you know, why do you think this story is the one that's resonating? And why do you think it has created such a Sturmendrong?

in a place that has seemed impervious to actual conscience?

There's like, well, I think there are a number of reasons.

First of all, the story itself is so gutting, right?

You can actually, this goes back to my contention about storytelling and like that the sort of putting yourself in those people's places makes it resonate much more profoundly.

And the idea that these two people in the boat were after a missile strike hanging on to the smoldering wreckage and then ordered and then killed and then blown up.

You can see for a minute,

like, I don't know. I I just envisioned in my head,

I saw them. You know, I could see them hanging.

We've all seen enough action movies, but the sort of tragedy of that and the fact that they're so clearly not posing an immediate threat to the United States.

There are two people floating in the water after their boat has been destroyed, clinging to life. So,

the depravity of that strike, the second strike, I think is really emotionally resonant.

The other is like Pete Hegseth and his clownish pompadour and his lack of qualifications and his history of being inebriated and unqualified and all sorts of other incompetencies that should never have allowed him to be in this position.

I think for a while, people sort of forgot about it, right? They just sort of let that past live in abstraction and they sort of were like, okay, but he's now been subsumed by the federal bureaucracy.

But here we have an example of someone who's just grossly unqualified for the job doing

the thing, the most serious thing that the job demands, which is ordering the slaughter of people and using CL Team 6 to do it.

And it just is a reminder of the discrepancy between how ultimately unserious as a person and as a national character Pete Hegseth is, and the staggering weight of the decisions he is being allowed to make.

And I think that is particularly resonant too. Like, oh, that clown is doing these things in our name.

And then I think

the other piece of it is like,

I, at the risk of sounding overly bullish, I think it's coming at a time when the administration is weakened. You know, I think the Epstein saga, which again is not over,

and the

effectively unanimous consent from Congress to go against the president's wishes, um, his flailing about in and around that, and this, the,

you know, the sense that maybe there were cracks in the MAGA

facade, I think

makes this feel like a moment where they're actually vulnerable and where someone may be potentially committing a war crime and like, and obviously so,

which is to say the Secretary of Defense doing something that seems clearly unconstitutional is going to have repercussions in a way that, you know, even a month or two ago, it would seem like, oh, well, these guys are impervious to like, I don't know, the like law, like constitution.

Now it feels like you guys might actually pay a price for this.

So I think that that is increased the appetite to know more about what happened and the feeling on the hill to, you know, to echo your point earlier, that this guy can be held accountable.

Like this administration is not,

you know,

they have done so many things wrong. And it's about time that there is some bipartisan agreement about holding them accountable for it.

So I guess it's like three different levels of it as to why I think that that story is particularly resonant right now. No, I think that makes sense.
Part of what I have been grappling with,

I worry that we are reading this political fracturing that started with the Epstein files and now seems to your point to be extending into

the foreign policy. I mean, Mike Turner said, you know, this might be a war crime and the House committee is saying we need to look into it.

But I think we are, I worry that we are reading this as sort of a cinematic moment where there's this dramatic turning point and all will be right. And so would love for you

to join me in my cynicism and explain why this is what I'm saying. We're women.
We're women with brown parents. Like we're not thinking everything's going to turn out and be okay.

Come on now. Exactly.
Yeah. I mean, no, I think let's all lower the bar.
These are the Trump years.

Like things happen in increments, you know, and I think as with much progress, there's like two steps forward and one step back or four steps back.

But I do think, I mean, I think, first of all, it's accountability, it's like

accountability, pass it on. You know, it's like one of these things where

if you say they can't be held accountable often enough, people start believing that they can't be held accountable.

But when, and that's why I think optimism, cautious though it may be, is warranted and not only warranted, but needed. Because, you know, it, it, especially for people on the Hill,

they need to be told that it can be done. They need to be told that you don't have to kneel and bend and kiss the ring and beg and scrape.

Like they need, and I'm speaking specifically of the Republican Party, but even to some Democrats, you know, they need to be made aware that it doesn't have to be like this.

And I think the best way to do that is to be encouraging and

to like open the aperture a little bit to the possibility that the Trump administration doesn't just run roughshot over the Constitution.

So, I mean, that's why I think it's important to be bullish as opposed to bearish. But I also think it's about, you know,

just laying out exactly how much we expect from the moment.

I don't think we should be overly expectant that this is the end of Trump's power and that he's a lame duck and nobody's going to listen to him ever again, in large part because he is the Republican Party.

They got nothing without this dude. They got nothing.
And they're going to cling. I mean, I don't mean to be, you know,

doing a callback to the strike, but they will be clinging to that life raft for as long as they can because they have nothing without it. And it is all toxic.

Like, there is no good part of the Trump agenda that, like, it would be okay for them to hold on to. Like, it's all bad.
It's all, you know, against democracy.

But that's the, that the, the Republican Party is up in flames and they're going to be holding on to the burning embers as long as they can.

So we shouldn't expect, you know, a capitulation towards lawfulness and, you know, accountability, but we should encourage people to keep

our elected officials accountable and to hold them to our Constitution.

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Well, speaking of holding people accountable, we saw another example of this when the Coast Guard decided that they were going to revise for at least a day

long-standing policy against hateful symbols like swastikas and nooses. And they decided to say that they were potentially divisive as opposed to saying that they were hate-mongering.

And they also said that, quote, the terminology hate incident is no longer present in policy and that conduct that would have been previously been handled as a potential hate incident will now be treated as, quote, a report of harassment in cases with identified aggrieved individuals.

Folks like myself and yourself pointed out just how deeply evil this was.

And after widespread outcry, they rolled back this policy to say that any divisive or hate symbols are now prohibited, but they didn't change the language about hate incidents.

Talk about what it tells you that there was this immediate reversal, but that there was a

very convenient gap left in the policy.

I just like,

I just wondered whether there was even like a meeting in a board in like a conference room somewhere where they're like, the swastika, keep or go. And someone was like, no, keep, keep.

Like, it's okay. It's cool now.
Can we, can we keep it? Like, are we good with it now? I mean, it's just the idea that somehow they, they, they,

I want to, I, I, there is a SNL like a wannabe sketchwriter in my mind, and like living deep inside my chest that wants this to be like

a hapless decision, but I know better because, you know, as we talked about at the beginning of this podcast, like they embrace great replacement theory.

They embrace the tactics of the third Reich in some events.

They definitely think along the lines of the most virulent sort of white nationalists globally. So, of course, the swastika would be like, let's, how can we normalize the swastika? How can we water?

How can we tell people it's not as bad? It's like, it's graphically like pretty amazing, you know, just

like,

so, so that is nefarious as all hell and disturbing as all hell.

And the fact that they, but, but also the reversal is equally disturbing because I think what has happened is, especially in the first couple of months of this administration, administration, they've done so many bad things so quickly, largely under cover of night and with, you know, so such sort of like, not fastidiousness, but so rapidly that people haven't actually clocked what's happening.

And I think they thought they could get away with this and nobody would really notice.

And that should tell us. all that we need to be a lot more vigilant, right?

That they genuinely thought you could almost sense in the sort of verbiage that came out of the Coast Guard and from the official sort of like spokespeople that they almost seemed flat, like they were caught flat-footed about this, right?

So I think there's a sense of impunity and a sense that it's like, what is it, that Silicon Valley adage of like move fast and break things that they've been able to do that on a number of fronts so they could do it here.

That to me, I think is the tell and the sort of quick reverse, like the quick change and then the quick reversal. But what they have done on the front in terms of

normalizing, you know, hate speech, acts of hate,

unwinding what we thought was sort of settled opinion on civil rights and race relations.

I mean, I'm thinking, you know, they've done, they've, they've, they've really, they are trying to take the country back to, I think, like a kind of post-Reconstruction era America. And

the first way they do it, truly, I think. I mean, they do this in policy too, but language is so important.

And I think I'm not an English professor, but they have rendered so much language that is really important. They've tried to render it meaningless.

And that's everything from witch hunt to weaponization to hate speech and to harassment. They've just made it all nonsensical.

And they've, and that then, you know, language is important because it's how we describe, that's this first stage of holding people accountable and maybe liable or, you know,

exacting a cost for bad things happening. And when you neutralize language, when people can no longer say, What happened here is wrong, and this is how I would describe it as being wrong.

When you steal language from people, that's stealing the first way in which we hold people accountable is by the accusation.

If you can no longer make the accusation itself, then that undermines the entire system of holding people accountable. And I think that that's what they're trying to do.
That's what's so nefarious.

And that sounds like I'm a sort of semiotics professor from Brown University or whatever, but I do think

it's one of the

sort of worst hangovers of this entire entire period is the way they've just neutralized really serious and important language views for grave missteps and serious crimes.

And that really worries me for our country and our democracy. Well, I say they have this nefarious triad, and it begins as you describe it.
You delegitimize language.

You mentioned witch hunt, but the fact that they are trying to make anti-fascist a bad thing.

We saw them do this with DEI, with critical race theory. They did this with abortion in the 1970s.

We know that their triad is you delegitimize language and you make those who are protected by that language, who understand themselves through that language, spin themselves into these tight knots trying to defend their language.

Because if you can delegitimize language, as you just said, it delegitimizes who you are and what you believe.

And while we're so busy fighting over the words, they move on to litigation to dismantle protections and legislation to ensure that we never get new protections to replace those that they eradicate.

And when I think about that, I'm thinking about this razor-thin majority that now sits in Congress.

And we talked earlier about the fact that, yes, we now have bipartisan agreement that perhaps it's a bad idea to use a military airstrike against two fishermen bobbing in the Caribbean.

But we also know that with the retirement of Marjorie Taylor Greene on January 5th,

Mike Johnson will have 218 votes, period, a razor-thin majority. And there are a lot of people who are celebrating this.

I, however, think that that razor-thin majority is dangerous in the fight against authoritarianism. Because

to your point, if they are susceptible to being overthrown, they are, like any caged animal, likely to be even more vicious in their response. So tell me what you see.

I mean, one of the reasons I am such a fan and wanted you here was that I was a very strong adherent of the circus. And what I appreciated about you is how you really

could find the silver lining, but also the glowing plutonium.

So

what is it? There's more plutonium than silver lining today. You know what I'm saying? So what is this dynamic? What does it tell us about the 2026 primary cycle?

Even before we get to the general, what does it tell us? Well, let's be clear. Like when Mike Johnson has had his backup against the wall, he hasn't been reaching out for Hakeem Jeffrey's hand.

It's been like, let me double down with house crazy. Like

time and time again, he goes to his right flank and to shore up the support that he needs to get anything done. And so we, the past is prologue.
Like, I don't have any

thought that Mike Johnson's somehow going to

tack towards the center and he'll go further right.

I was listening to an interview with George Packer and Tim Miller on the bulwark and George Packer was saying he was making a capon for Thanksgiving, which is a castrated chicken.

And Tim was saying, what an animal in, what member of Congress would that be? And they agreed that it would be Mike Johnson. A chicken chicken.
That is Mike Johnson, a capon. We should just call him.

Capon of the house instead of speaker of the house. I am sorry to your mom if she's listening to this.

She will appreciate the highbrow decimation and the fact that you didn't didn't go with a really easy one there that is embedded in his name because we do not legitimize language. We sure don't.

There we go. We do.
We love language. There we go.
That's why I'm talking about capons. There we go.
But like the man is completely spineless. And that is, that's, I mean, I spent time.

God, was it earlier this year? This has been a long year, Stacey. It was in Hungary.
I was in Hungary in February, I believe.

It might have been early March, trying to understand the sort of glide path towards authoritarianism. And what is so striking is like

it is when people start

A-tuning out, but it is, it happens in these sort of discrete, it doesn't always look like

jack-booted thugs coming to sort of steal you and steal your family members from your house.

It doesn't look like people, you know, it doesn't look like what we imagine the Third Reich look like, right? It happens in much subtler ways.

And Mike Johnson is the poster child for what it looks like to

slide into authoritarianism. It is people who know better, people who in one point were maybe even good people,

just choosing the path of least resistance over and over and over again and enabling the strongest, worst impulses. And that is exactly what he's doing.

And he is, I think, loves being Speaker of the House as much as it is a ridiculous job. where he has literally, he's, you can see the puppet strings attached to his wrist if you look carefully enough.

But they love power, and that's why they're there, because it's not for any agenda. It's not for, honestly, ideology anymore.

I mean, Mike Johnson's good Christian background has nothing in common with the platform of the Republican Party 2025.

So, you know, I mean, I do, I'm with you. I really worry about what a narrow, narrow, narrow majority means.

I mean, I think it's actually that I'm not suggesting that Republicans should have a wider majority in the House, but I do think, and I think everybody needs to be acutely aware of this, the Trump administration is telling us explicitly that they want to steal the election.

They are doing it through, you know,

the means of redistricting and trying to gerrymander. They have appointed election deniers into key positions in the Department of Homeland Security.

They are going to use militarization and the National Guard and the threat of, I don't know, blue cities voting to try and suppress the vote. They will use every lever they have

to stop the House from going blue.

And it is up to Democrats, and I would say people interested in the survival of our democracy to ensure that the majority that the Democrats win in 2026, because they're absolutely on track to do it, is big.

Because I can also envision

a January in which Mike Johnson refuses to hand the gavel over and suggests, much like he did for however many days Adelita Grajalva was not seated in her House seat, that we're just working some kinks out before we can actually seat these Democrats in their lawfully obtained seats.

I think everybody needs to be prepared for chaos and everybody needs to be prepared to dismiss the claims of election fraud or questioning Democratic victories as the Trump administration would like to do after November of next year.

I appreciate the fact that you pointed out what he did to Adelita Garjalva because people forget, you know, in Georgia, when African Americans were first elected post-Reconstruction to

the

House of Representatives. Michael Julian Bond was denied his seat.
He had to go to the Supreme Court to force them to actually seat him.

And so we have a history in this country of people not being granted seats that they lawfully won.

And I think more importantly, that as you give that litany of what we face, that this is about power.

And what are you willing to do to hold on to power for another day, another year, another two years to get to 2028? And so

I want to encourage us to keep remembering what it means.

And going back to the very top of this conversation, that decision to deny her a seat when it was finally granted led to the stories of survivors of Jeffrey Epstein finally getting some modicum of access to information that was denied them.

So her being seated allowed their stories to be told. Yeah, I will just say it's the women.

And it would, I mean, like, I'm not a huge booster of Marjorie Taylor Greene, but it is Nancy Mason, Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene listening to their constituents.

Their constituents were listening to the women.

And ultimately, all of these women together, from Adelaide to Grajalva to Republican women, to the survivors themselves, who are, of course, the engine, they're the ones that have held Donald Trump accountable.

And that is, that is a victory. I mean, it is important to like call a win-a-win when you get one.

And I think it's a testament to how much voices matter, how much storytelling matters, and how much the courage of conviction matters.

Speaking of storytelling, what are you, Alex Wagner? What are you reading? What are you watching?

What are you listening to that you want us to know about as we head into a winter season where people aren't going to be doing nearly as much work as they pretend? Oh, it's so true.

I thought about this and I was like, do I get to pretend that we're in a liminal space between Thanksgiving and Christmas and nothing like really is going to happen? Of course.

Can I just like focus on balsam fur incense? There you can't. I can't.
No one can. But I like to entertain the thought.
I am like the slowest reader in history because I'm exhausted.

I'm reading Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner. It is awesome, very atmospheric, if you like, kind of like spy,

socialist spy in France, like excitement, love story, a little bit of like political history and some anthropology while you're at it. It's, it's great.
I think she's one of my favorite writers.

She's very descriptive. I just finished watching The Beast in Me with my like fifth husband, Matthew Rees, and my one day will be my best friend, Claire Daines.

And I have to say, I think that show was trying to tell us that we all have a killer lurking inside of us. I don't.
Like, I don't have any interest in like killing anybody.

But like kudos to the people for trying to tell me that there's a darkness inside that I need to subsume. I don't know.

And then in addition to that, I've been watching, because it's the holidays and I have two little children who love to eat sugar, the great British Bake Off. We've been watching the

limited run holiday episodes and eating a lot of candy and baked goods while we do it. It's our happy place.

Okay, Alex, we have one tradition on the Assembly Required podcast that you are now conscripted into, and that is we give our listeners homework.

We give them one thing that they should do to help address the problems that you think need to be addressed.

And if the problem is storytelling, if the problem is truth telling, what's your homework for our listeners? Great Alex Wagner. Tell us what you got.
Oh my God, this is so hard.

I, okay, I do, here's what I think, and I'm really obsessed with this. I do think we are in a real

information vacuum, not just in terms of reporting and storytelling.

If you are going to do one thing, like go out and purchase a subscription to a local newspaper that is reporting on state funding cuts or Medicaid cuts, support an organization that actually hires reporters to cover what's happening in state houses or in on your city council or on your school board, because that information is the most practical, real life information we get about the realities of the federal government, right?

Like, I think so much of what has happened seems like it doesn't touch us, but it of course is, you know? And the only way we know that and feel it is if we have the information.

And the information, there is a concerted effort to destroy the structures that bring us information, to defund or attack the people that are tasked with bringing us the information and going out there and interviewing officials.

So I would say this Christmas season, like maybe instead of giving people like beer koozies, give them a subscription to your local newspaper. And it doesn't doesn't matter if they actually read it.

The point is support local journalism that exists already because it still is out there and support it in a state you don't even necessarily live in.

If you live in California and you feel like you're, you know, you have an insurance policy because Gavin Newsom and his memes is going to protect you, which maybe he will.

Like give someone a local news subscription in Nebraska or wherever. The point is support the people that are out there telling the truth and keeping and holding people accountable.

That would be my suggestion and homework, especially in this holiday season.

The great and inimitable Alex Wagner, thank you for joining us today on Assembly Required. Thank you so much for having me.
It's a joy and a pleasure.

As always on Assembly Required, we are here to give you real, actionable tools to face today's biggest challenges. First, be curious.

If you enjoyed my conversation with Alex Wagner, check out her her podcast, Runaway Country. Number two, solve problems.

As protests continue across the country in opposition to ISIS' cruel abductions and other authoritarian acts by this administration, it is more important than ever to know your rights.

Visit the ACLU's website at www.aclu.org.

slash know your rights slash protesters rights for comprehensive guidance on knowing your rights when organizing a protest, participating in one, filming one, and more.

And third, do good.

Republicans in Congress have forced the Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire.

And that means that millions of Americans are going to face skyrocketing premiums and may lose health care access altogether.

Just Fix It is a nationwide nonpartisan activation led by the 10 Steps campaign in partnership with SEIU, NDWA, Caring Across Generations, Moms Rising, and supported by other labor and advocacy organizations.

We are calling on every elected official at every level of government to join us in demanding that Congress guarantee millions of Americans can keep access to quality, affordable health care. How?

By stopping the absurd annual and monthly premium increases for 24 million citizens currently enrolled in the ACA or state-based healthcare exchanges. Look, this isn't complicated.

Congress must extend the subsidies and just fix it. So visit 10stepscampaign.org slash just fix it

to learn more about the Just Fix It campaign. Assembly Required continues to grow its audience, but we need your help.
We reach more people when you tell others about us. Don't let us be your secret.

When you add us to your feed and share your favorite episode, more people can discover us. So make sure you actually subscribe on all of your favorite platforms, not just one.

Boost our visibility by rating the show and leaving a comment. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast.

And please also check out my sub stack, Assembly Notes, where we dive deep and where I share more of my thoughts on how we can understand and then fight back against this authoritarian regime.

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

We now have a toolkit where you can find concrete examples of the 10 steps to freedom and power.

We include links to organizations, recommendations for you, regardless of where you are or what you're ready to do, and we're constantly adding new organizations and examples of how to get involved.

I'd love to hear more about how you're processing what's happening around us and what tools and resources would be more helpful to you.

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.

This wraps up today's episode of Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams. Do good out there and I'll meet you here next week.

Assembly Required is a crooked media production. Our lead show 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 DeGroat, Kyle Seglund, Tyler Boozer, Ben Hethcote, and Priyanka Muntha for production support. Our executive producers are Katie Long and me, Stacey Abrams.

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