How to Defeat Authoritarianism in 2026

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams from Cricket Media. I'm your host, Stacey Abrams.

Speaker 1 This is our last show of the year, and so we wanted to really spend this episode focusing on you, the audience. I want to both highlight our wins and the ways we've taken action.

Speaker 1 And of course, answering your burning questions. So, to help with today's episode is our associate producer, Farah Safari.
Sarah, welcome back to the pod and I love the haircut.

Speaker 2 Oh my gosh, thank you so much, Stacey. It's great to be back.

Speaker 2 Yes, for those of you who haven't noticed, I did indeed shave off all of my hair for the new year. I'm a big believer in that hair holds memories.
And, you know, this year, interesting year for me.

Speaker 2 So I just need to cut it all off. Oh, thank you.
I mean, like, as it's been an interesting year for everyone, and we have so many great listener questions to get into.

Speaker 2 Are you ready to answer a few of them? I'm ready to go. Okay.
Well, before we get into that, I wanted to see if you had any reflections for this past year.

Speaker 2 I think we all knew and understood, you know, going into this year that what the Trump administration was going to do would be incredibly jarring and damaging. But

Speaker 2 I don't know, I want to look to you and ask, like, was there anything in particular that surprised or shocked you?

Speaker 1 Surprise and shock are not the two words I would use. I would say I have been amazed at how fragile our systems are.

Speaker 1 This

Speaker 1 venerable nation built on infrastructure and constitution and norms quickly collapsed.

Speaker 1 And it did so not because of external pressures, but because we had for so long presumed we all had a shared goal.

Speaker 1 And so I was saddened by how easy it was for this authoritarian regime to insert itself. I was devastated by the meanness and the cruelty and the intentionality of harm.

Speaker 1 But I can't say I was shocked or surprised because I read Project 2025. I grew up in the South where so many of these behaviors have been practiced for so long.

Speaker 1 But I've, like so many, been focused on what else we need to do that I forgot how much we need to still protect. And so I leave this year thinking,

Speaker 2 okay.

Speaker 1 We know what they're capable of, or at least we've seen the first or second phalanx. What's the third? What's the fourth? But I'm also emboldened.
And that is, what do we deserve?

Speaker 1 Now that they've shown us what they can break, let's uncover what we can build. And that's what really is motivating me right now.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And I think that's a great place to start.
And I want to get back to what you said about Trump's authoritarian regime. So let's get into our first listener question.

Speaker 2 June member on Reddit asks, what is the game plan for defeating authoritarianism in America? How are these authoritarian governments eventually toppled?

Speaker 1 So there are three things you have to do if you want to defeat authoritarianism. You have to recognize that it exists.

Speaker 1 You have to then activate around resistance, but then you've got to build what comes next. And those three pieces have to be treated with equal urgency, but not necessarily the same tactics.

Speaker 1 So the first one is recognizing what we face. And I think we've seen this play out, unfortunately, with the decision to end the shutdown, that not everyone understands what's happened.

Speaker 1 We still have folks who think that this is just a redo of 2017, 2018. And if we win the next election, this dark chapter will pass.
And that's not where we are.

Speaker 1 We are in the midst of what is charitably referred to as competitive authoritarianism.

Speaker 1 And so our first responsibility is to recognize that we are in the middle of authoritarianism, not at the the start, not at the end, but we're in it. The second then is how do we activate around it?

Speaker 1 And I think that's the question of how are authoritarian governments eventually toppled, where they're toppled because there are basically 10 things that you do.

Speaker 1 And in the 10 steps campaign, we've really tried to articulate what those are. And we're going to spend a lot of time in the new year giving really, really salient examples.

Speaker 1 the range of activity, it's sort of bucketed as you got to know what you know, you got to share what you know, you got to tell people what to do, and then you've got to keep doing it.

Speaker 1 Authoritarianism does not end with elections. So, as much as we are going to focus on the 2026 elections, that's one piece of it.
But that's not the only part of it.

Speaker 1 We have to deliver services because one of the ways you defeat authoritarianism is for people to believe there's something better on the other side.

Speaker 1 And so, part of activation is that we've got to show here's a small sample of what you could have, but if you want it to be scaled, if you want it to be consistent, you got to have a democratic government to do it.

Speaker 1 And I'm using democratic with a small D. Of course, I also mean it with a big D, but democracy has to reassert itself.

Speaker 1 And then that gets us to the third piece, where you've seen authoritarianism actually toppled and not reorganized is when you actually fix the broken pieces.

Speaker 1 There have been a lot of times when authoritarianism failed, but then it just reconstituted itself, gave itself a new name, and it came back.

Speaker 1 What we have to do is actually use this moment to start demanding what we deserve. If we only resort to what we had, we are simply inviting authoritarianism to come back.

Speaker 1 And so we've got to talk about what should the Supreme Court look like? What should Congress look like? Why should DEI be the clarion call?

Speaker 1 Because a pluralistic government, a government by and for the people, has to include all of the people.

Speaker 1 And so we've got to build the next thing that we need because what we had was clearly insufficient. And simply restoring what it was is not going to solve the problem.

Speaker 1 But if we do those three things, if we recognize the problem, activate our resistance and then build the next thing, that is how you eventually and permanently topple authoritarianism.

Speaker 2 And I think also just accepting that we're an authoritarian regime is a really tough pill to swallow, right?

Speaker 2 Like when we think of authoritarianism, we're thinking of different countries whose governments have been fully toppled and have yet to make their way back.

Speaker 2 And to follow up on this conversation about authoritarianism, I love it, mate, on Reddit asks, do you think the lower courts can still effectively block Trump's more authoritarian measures?

Speaker 2 And I mean, to add to this, right? We've seen the lower courts be instrumental in blocking some of Trump's measures, right? They blocked his National Guard deployment in Los Angeles.

Speaker 2 They blocked his executive order aiming to end birthright citizenship. But then we've seen SCOTIS, which is stacked in Trump's favor.

Speaker 2 And, you know, just last week, they agreed to hear Trump's challenges to birthright citizenship.

Speaker 2 So I guess this is a two-parter in that, like, what can the lower courts do, as the Reddit user asks, and how do we measure that against the Supreme Court's power?

Speaker 1 So in the authoritarian regimes, the first step is the election because you go from democracy to authoritarianism. Second step is that you see this expansion of executive power.

Speaker 1 You see not just Trump, but the Republican administration take more and more power. But the reason they were able to take so much power is because the two competing

Speaker 1 components of a democracy, typically you have the executive, you have the legislative, and you have the judiciary.

Speaker 1 And what we have seen happen is that the legislative has basically been a rubber stamp. And then the judicial at the lower court level has tried to intercede.
But as you point out, Para,

Speaker 1 at the top of the funnel,

Speaker 1 you've got a Supreme Court that just keeps saying, oops, yeah, you can. We didn't say you couldn't, or we said you couldn't, but we didn't mean it.

Speaker 1 And so we're watching the Supreme Court walk back its precedence, completely ignore the term and its term of art story decisis. It stands decided.
And really, it's fomenting authoritarianism.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 And I want to flag here the fantastic conversation we had with Sky Perryman and Democracy Forward, but also the conversations we had with Liz Schuler from AFL-CIO and with Becky Pringle of NEA.

Speaker 1 I lift all of them up because the lower courts matter because we fight. And Democracy Forward, the ACLU, the labor unions have all been filing suit.

Speaker 1 And those lawsuits matter because they may not block the measures in total, but they lay the groundwork for what we have to fix.

Speaker 1 And what I'd like to remind folks of is that if you are a black person in the United States, Plessy v.

Speaker 1 Ferguson and Dred Scott were two of the most damaging, cruel, intentionally dehumanizing decisions ever made by the Supreme Court.

Speaker 1 But the lower courts kept challenging, kept litigating, kept talking about.

Speaker 1 And the more they did so, the more we built not just a body of law, we built a body of narrative. We had judges saying, this is why this is wrong.

Speaker 1 And when you were able to knit all of that together, when Thurgood Marshall knitted those pieces together in Brown v. Board of Education, we had this seismic change.

Speaker 1 We are trained by Law and order and Perry Mason and you insert your favorite lawyer show here to think that the decision that's made at the end of the episode is the final word. It's not.

Speaker 1 It's the story. And so the lower courts can be effective.
They're not going to stop him.

Speaker 1 They're not because the Supreme Court does not want that to happen, but they can slow him down.

Speaker 1 And when I was minority leader, I used to say that my job as minority leader was to stop stupid or at least slow it down. And that's where we have to look to the lower courts.

Speaker 1 We need them to help slow down the speed of evil, to slow down the speed of pain, but also to build the blocks that are going to help us build the next thing we deserve.

Speaker 1 We are going to get out of this. I am absolutely certain of it.
But it is going to take all of us.

Speaker 1 And that means the lower courts who are still believers of, champions of, and defenders of what we say we are as a democracy.

Speaker 2 I think the next time someone asks me what I do for work, I'm just going to say, well, I stop stupid and try to slow it down,

Speaker 2 which is incredible.

Speaker 2 Also, you know, there were a lot of listeners who had questions about the Democratic Party,

Speaker 2 from its effectiveness in 2025 to how they should rebrand ahead of the midterms.

Speaker 2 And so Luke Skywaka asks, what steps are Democratic congressional leadership taking to oppose this shift to authoritarianism?

Speaker 2 It feels like it's only the governors like Newsom and Pritzker that are doing anything meaningful, while New York senators look more concerned with opposing Momdani than they do with opposing Trump.

Speaker 2 If Dem congressional leadership really believes this is a troubling shift to authoritarianism, they need to be doing a lot more than just bragging about changing the official name to Trump's spending bill.

Speaker 2 Right now, much of the base sees Dem congressional leaders as muted, ineffective, and very out of touch.

Speaker 1 I think these are legitimate critiques, and I want to be very clear that

Speaker 1 there are different ways to oppose authoritarianism. But I want to be also very clear, not everyone in Congress believes that this is an authoritarian regime.

Speaker 1 We have a lot of folks who think that this is just fisticuffs, it's political fighting, and that they have to be the pragmatic

Speaker 1 person in the room. They've got to be the adults because that's how it's always been.
And so when I say recognize, I mean Congress has to recognize that this is authoritarianism too.

Speaker 1 And we've got a lot of members of Congress who simply think that taking power in 26, winning the House, possibly winning the Senate is enough.

Speaker 1 And I think that is laudable and incredibly naive.

Speaker 1 And the thought is, well, if we have the power again, we can shift the balance. The problem, though, is that this has gone deeper than congressional power can control.

Speaker 1 And it is broader than simply what happens in Washington, D.C. I talk about how the right has been very effective in their breaking of democracy, their breaking of the perquisites of democracy.

Speaker 1 And one example I use is abortion rights. They start by demonizing your language.

Speaker 1 And while we're fighting over what we call it, they move over to litigation. They go to court.
They start dismantling the infrastructure that was making protection of those rights possible.

Speaker 1 But then they legislate and they put in place barriers to ever rebuilding what we had.

Speaker 1 And so the problem for Congress is that Congress tends to believe that it is the imprimatur of what democracy can be on the legislative side.

Speaker 1 But what authoritarians understand is that they can do this at the state level, at the local level. They can do it through the economy, and that Congress is only one facet.

Speaker 1 And so part of, I think, the inaction that we see or the muted response is this notion that this is just a really extreme version of normal politics, an extreme version of polarization.

Speaker 1 And my very fundamental and vociferous belief is that this isn't an extreme version. This is a new thing.

Speaker 1 This is American authoritarianism, and it is virulent, it is embedded, and it will continue to expand even when we win elections in 26. So, if we know that, then what do we do?

Speaker 1 Well, that's why we see governors doing what they're doing, because a lot of the governors are feeling it. They are seeing it at that state level.
They are seeing how

Speaker 1 authoritarianism has bypassed congressional action to go directly to where they are. We are seeing mayors fighting back, trying to evict militarization of their communities.

Speaker 1 And part of the challenge for Congress is that they have a specific job to do, and the job didn't include this piece.

Speaker 1 But if we know wrong, if we know what's happening, what do we do about it? And I think we're starting to see more happen. We saw that from the House when the House stood up against the shutdown.

Speaker 1 We watched the Senate do part of it, but I very clearly disagree with ending the shutdown. But we're also seeing it with the offering of legislation, the pushing back.

Speaker 1 And what Congress can do more in 26 is be louder.

Speaker 1 We saw a little bit of that with the hearings that started to happen, and they were so effective that members of Congress, especially Republicans, stopped having town hall meetings.

Speaker 1 But we have to be even louder. We have to have even more

Speaker 1 conversations from congressional members. They're not going to pass legislation.
Look, again, I used to be in the state legislature.

Speaker 1 The idea that I could prove our intention by actually offering legislation was never going to, we did it because we needed people to know what our ideas are. So that is absolutely important.

Speaker 1 But we were never going to stop them. They called me leader to make me feel good.
They put minority in front of it so that I understood I would never get anything unless they agreed.

Speaker 1 But that then means you shift. the tactics.
We have to be relentless about articulating what harm is being done. And so I would argue that Congress in 26,

Speaker 1 Democrats in Congress, independents in Congress have to actually offer proof that democracy can deliver. But that proof has to be done in concert with state and local leaders.

Speaker 1 We have to have an echo chamber of democracy, much in the way they've created an echo chamber of authoritarianism.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and you're saying be louder, which completely agree with like the Democrats like need to be louder and show their voice.

Speaker 2 And it's hard because there are democrats that are doing this right and you just gave some uh really apt examples and this might be a little bit of my gen z brain but then we have this conversation on the internet where people are like democrats are cringy and they're uncomfortable and it feels like um a lot of times no matter what they do, there is going to be a really hard criticism in some way, shape, or form.

Speaker 2 Like we kind of saw it done positively when Gavin Newsom turned into Trump for like a week on Twitter and was just tweeting really funny and really a bit obscene things.

Speaker 2 And, you know, my generation, the inner, thought that was so funny. And it really did help, you know, secure like Prop 50 in California.

Speaker 2 And I guess it's kind of just what, one, do Democrats do to break through the noise, but also what do Democrats do to be cooler?

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 I don't know if that helps. No, it does.

Speaker 1 Look, look, I don't know if you've met politicians,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 cool is not exactly the brand,

Speaker 2 irrespective of party.

Speaker 1 It's not exactly the lane. But there are three words that were used.
So muted. If you're muted, you got to get louder.

Speaker 1 And the problem we have is that we want to be right more than we want to be heard.

Speaker 1 I talk about DEI, even though most people will tell you DEI is dead or it's terrible and it's a bad brand. No, actually, it's not.
DEI is more popular today than it was two years ago. Why?

Speaker 1 Because mayors like Brandon Johnson fought back when he was attacked and he said he didn't run away from it. And so one, we can't be muted by allowing the attacks to take hold.

Speaker 1 We so often apologize for who we are and we apologize for what we need.

Speaker 1 They are loud and wrong and we are right and quiet. I like to say they will tell a lie a thousand times until it sounds like the truth.

Speaker 1 We tell the truth one time, and when people don't applaud, or you don't get a bunch of likes, we stop talking.

Speaker 1 I disagree with a number of my colleagues in the public space who are running away from identity.

Speaker 1 The mayor of New York leaned into identity because people know better. They know that they don't just get seen as one person.
They get seen by race, by gender, by borough. They get seen by

Speaker 1 what do they need? What do they have?

Speaker 1 What do they they want identity matters in america identity matters in life and so we can't hide from identity and therefore we can't hide from policies that need to address identity because i can tell if you're not talking about me if i don't hear you saying me that doesn't mean you have to not talk about someone else it means that we've got to talk about all of it and there are really effective political leaders who are doing that work second is effectiveness right now we can't pass much at the congressional level but we can talk about what's getting getting through.

Speaker 1 If you're a member of Congress and you go on MSNBC or MSNOW, or you go on a podcast and it doesn't go viral, keep talking.

Speaker 1 They go everywhere. They go all the time everywhere.
We do it once or twice. And again, we think our effectiveness has to be measured by their rule book and by their yardstick.

Speaker 1 I don't. I think part of effectiveness, does the audience hear you and do they believe you? That's how we prove we're effective.

Speaker 1 We may not have the levers of power, but we are not denied the levers of influence. And we are in a moment where influence matters more than power.
And that gets to the third one, the cringiness.

Speaker 1 Our expectations of what political leaders can do, I think, has to be calibrated to the people we got.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 1 being in touch, being accessible, doesn't mean you have to be clever. It means you have to be authentic.
I am no one's idea of an influencer.

Speaker 1 I am not at all cool in many ways, but I don't try to be something else.

Speaker 1 I don't try to be the person that my 19-year-old niece and my 20-year-old nephew would try to make me into, but I try to be the person they can trust.

Speaker 1 And as long as that's my brand, then I can be who I am and be very authentic in that brand.

Speaker 1 And so I would argue for my party, but also for anyone who wants to fight back, our authenticity is our brand.

Speaker 1 It's when we try to be them, when we try to outmaneuver them, when we try to copy them that we lose.

Speaker 1 When we are who we are, when we lean into that authenticity, when we lean into the fact that we are reflective of such diversity, that's when we win because people start to see themselves in us.

Speaker 1 And then they believe that we'll do something about making all of our lives better.

Speaker 2 Well, Stacey, if you ever change your mind on being an influencer, I can teach you a few TikTok dances. We can really get that career started.

Speaker 1 I'll keep that in mind.

Speaker 2 Just as a backup, call me, let me know. As a backup plan, of course.

Speaker 2 I mean, keeping on this track, then Sam I Am asks, Why are the Dems so focused on being centrists when we clearly need a more significantly progressive stance?

Speaker 1 Okay, so in politics, there is

Speaker 1 a very basic truth. The person who gets the most vote win.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 there are three things you can do. You can get all of your people to vote.
You can convince all of their people not to vote. Or you can build a network of voters and you just outnumber them.

Speaker 1 The challenge we have on the Democratic Party side is that we are more willing willing to go after

Speaker 1 their voters than we are to go after those who share our values but don't vote.

Speaker 1 I would argue that there are people who are truly centrist, meaning that

Speaker 1 they have very moderate positions on certain policies.

Speaker 1 I push back though on the notions of centrism that are to the exclusion of identity because I don't know what the centrist position on racism is. What's the moderate posture on bigotry?

Speaker 1 What is the median for hate? And so I think we are using the term centrist

Speaker 1 to justify and permit behavior that is antithetical to our value system. And I'm very, very wary of anyone who would argue that that's how you win.

Speaker 1 I would argue instead, and this is how I've built most of my political work, my civic work. I talk about the 90 million.

Speaker 1 There's 77 million people who clearly identified and said, I want what Trump offers. There were 75 million who said, I want what Harris offers.

Speaker 1 But there were 90 million people who said, I don't hear myself reflected in any of you, and I'm going to sit down.

Speaker 1 My political advice is that instead of trying to go after Buddhists to convince them to become Baptist, which is what you do when you go after a Republican voter with a specific orthodoxy, you try to convince them to vote Democratic.

Speaker 1 I think instead of going after Buddhists to make them Baptists, you just get Baptists to go to church.

Speaker 1 We got a lot of people who share our values, but do not feel invited into our party, don't feel invited into our beliefs, don't feel invited into our process.

Speaker 1 We don't all believe exactly the same things,

Speaker 1 but we have enough commonality and enough overlap that those should be the things that we fight for. And if that's what people mean by centrism, I'm okay with that.

Speaker 1 But often when I hear political pundits and consultants talk about centrism, they do not mean I want to moderate my position.

Speaker 1 What they mean is I need an excuse to violate my values in order to secure your vote. And when that is the intention, that's the problem.

Speaker 1 Not everyone who says they're centrist means that I have very good friends who are centrists, who truly are this far, but no further.

Speaker 1 But what I want to ask, and what I do ask, is centrist in what way? What policy are you concerned about? We have to have those conversations. We have to be intentional about those markers.

Speaker 1 Because when we use this broad brushstroke, what we do is create a permission structure to not have values that anyone can identify. You may disagree with Republicans in this moment.

Speaker 1 You may be aggressively in opposition to their posture, but you know what it is. You know what their values are.

Speaker 1 If Democrats can't say the same thing about our party, If we can't say the same thing about our candidates, if we can't say what we believe, then we're asking people to invest their hope and their time in something amorphous that may turn on them.

Speaker 1 And that's a dangerous bet for people who've never seen democracy really deliver for them.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think something you do really fantastically on this show is like talk about semantics specifically and the importance of word and word choices and how we use language.

Speaker 2 And I don't know, I mean, like through answering this question, I'm really reflecting on the fact that it's like, it's not only just the word choice, but it's also the definition of it.

Speaker 2 And like, what does a centrist mean to you? And I think you very aptly put it together. I've been thinking about words a lot recently through producing this podcast.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, I want to be clear. I do not want anyone to hear me say that there are no centrists, that there are no moderates.
That's not my point.

Speaker 1 My question is, centrist in what way? Moderate on what issue?

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 1 when

Speaker 1 someone tells me, well, I'm a moderate, I want to know, okay, tell tell me what that looks like for you in practice.

Speaker 1 Because what happens in politics is we get surprised by what they meant when they said they were centrist, when they then vote against something that we need.

Speaker 1 And so I'm not saying there cannot be centrists. There are people who have very different values.
I'm a black Democrat in the South.

Speaker 1 If I'm talking about my value systems and how I think about how politics live out my value systems, if I'm in Montana, i'm kind of progressive if i'm in california i am absolutely considered a moderate and so you know i've started an organization and i used to say that my job was to translate progressive policy into southern

Speaker 1 because we all start from different places yeah and Because you were right, language matters. People may not agree.
I have lots and lots of people who do not agree with me.

Speaker 1 They spend a great deal of time on social media explaining in grave detail how much they disagree with me. But they rarely say they didn't understand me.

Speaker 1 And we cannot be so afraid of our values that we refuse to voice them. But if we decide to abandon who we are reaching for who we think they want,

Speaker 1 who our opponents will tolerate, then we are not being ourselves. And that's when we cannot win.
But that's also in this moment of authoritarianism.

Speaker 1 That's when we sacrifice democracy because authoritarianism is designed to deny accountability. Democracy is its antithesis.

Speaker 1 There is accountability for the power that you hold, but no one can know that power if you don't tell them what it's for and how you're going to use it.

Speaker 2 I think this conversation about authoritarianism and democracy is a great pivot into a question about election integrity.

Speaker 2 So Hare on Burr on Reddit asks, I've always assumed we could trust the integrity of our elections. Everything I read in the pre-Trump years affirmed this trust.

Speaker 2 But with Trump and shadowy tech bros, like figures like Curtis Yarvin, having expressed the desire to disrupt elections, my question is, what are the Democrats able to do to ensure or fair elections?

Speaker 2 Please reassure me that there are smart people that we can trust who are able to detect any attempts to cheat in the next few very important elections. So Stacey, please calm everyone down.
Okay.

Speaker 1 So this one, I'm going to refer folks back to when I had the extraordinary Ari Berman on.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there is a very real problem and there is a very strong intention for that

Speaker 1 erosion of democratic values to happen at the ballot box.

Speaker 1 But when you know something, you can do something. I live in a region of the country that has perfected voter suppression.
And voter suppression is, you know, can you register and stay on the rolls?

Speaker 1 Can you cast a ballot? And does that ballot get counted?

Speaker 1 To that end, I have helped stand up organizations. I've intentionally created

Speaker 1 infrastructure that is now part of a larger national network of organizations fighting for democracy.

Speaker 1 So whether it is Fair Fight or Fair Count or Black voters matter, you've got lots of groups out there who are doing this work.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 we have to be a part of the solution.

Speaker 1 In most states,

Speaker 1 individuals get hired to be poll workers. They are a part of the party.
And in most states, each political party gets to send observers in.

Speaker 1 We think that there's this massive cabal in the background called the Democratic Party doing this. No, the party is us.

Speaker 1 We are they.

Speaker 1 And so, if we want our elections to be secure, we've got to start showing up. We've got to go to boards of election meetings.
We have to flag things when we see them.

Speaker 1 We have to make certain that the small units of government that control elections get the same amount of attention as the national folks do. We've got more than 3,000 counties in this country.

Speaker 1 And almost every state, those counties control those elections. Do you know who's in charge? Are you paying attention? If not, that's one thing we can do.

Speaker 1 And so I encourage us to go through and find out who's doing the work where you live. But don't just wait for the November elections.
They're going to be primaries. That's where they practice.

Speaker 1 Georgia practiced its voter suppression in the primaries and perfected it for the general elections year over year over year. So we've got to show up where the practice is happening.

Speaker 1 18 states are being sued by the federal government because they refuse to give over their voter data. You should be loud and talking about this to anyone you know.

Speaker 1 Do not let your state give your data to the federal government because that's going to speed voter suppression because they're looking for who they don't like.

Speaker 1 Mark Elias and the work that he's doing with Democracy Docket, huge part of that work. Democracy Protection, doing amazing work.
Find an organization, but also find your place.

Speaker 1 We can protect our democracy. We can protect our elections, but it's got to happen from the bottom up as well as from the top down.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, there are a lot of good national organizations, but I need us to also get in the fight.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 it's hard too, right? Because it's hard to get people's attention on politics 24-7, and it's also hard to get people's attention on politics in a local level.

Speaker 2 It's like, how would you suggest I think people find out a local elections or who does what or even find the resources to call their congresspeople?

Speaker 2 Because we're in a weird era where like Google's a little bit messed up. It's hard to like research a lot of things or people don't really have the attention or capacity to do that type of stuff.

Speaker 2 So I guess for lack of a better word, what's the most like through line? easiest.

Speaker 2 I know not everything is easy or should be easy, but way to, I guess, get someone who's just scrolling on TikTok or sitting on the couch who does care and has that innate care to just go and find out how to do these things.

Speaker 1 So I'll name check three organizations right now. So Fairfight.
Fair Fight is the organization that I founded that really focuses on election protection.

Speaker 1 The League of Women Voters, being currently led by Selena Stewart, is doing really smart work here. So look at what they're doing.
Common Cause has great resources about local government.

Speaker 1 They can tell you who's in charge of stuff. So those are the three I would start with.
But I would also remember we don't have to do everything, you know, everything everywhere all at once.

Speaker 1 Fantastic name for a movie. Terrible mission statement.
But we can all do something somewhere soon. So pick the thing that matters to you the most.

Speaker 1 And if this is the thing, those are great organizations that will get you into

Speaker 2 the process.

Speaker 1 Sometimes we think that the way we win is by doing these big cinematic things.

Speaker 1 It's the small things.

Speaker 1 It's the boats.

Speaker 1 If you saw the movie Dunkirk, or if you know the story of Dunkirk during World War II, when British and French troops were stranded and Churchill was like, we don't have the ships to bring our people home.

Speaker 1 Folks got their motorboats and their yachts and their fishing boats and moved hundreds of thousands of soldiers across the channel to safety.

Speaker 1 We all are capable of doing one thing, but there are so many of us. There are 300 million of us.
We only need like 12 million of us doing stuff over and over again.

Speaker 1 According to Erica Chinowith, who we had on the show, who talked about the tipping point for civil resistance, you need about 12 million, 3.5%, about 12 million people.

Speaker 1 It's not like means tested, but it's what we think is true.

Speaker 1 We can do that. And it doesn't mean doing the same thing over and over, but it means always doing something.

Speaker 1 And we can be Dunkirk.

Speaker 2 Dunkirk is one with Harry Styles. Styles, right?

Speaker 2 Yes. Okay.
Thank you. Sorry.

Speaker 2 I was in my brain.

Speaker 1 I try to meet people where they are.

Speaker 2 And that's where I'm at. So thank you.

Speaker 2 In my brain, I was like, I've heard of it before. And I was like, oh, it's the one with Harry Styles.
I did watch that.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And I also just think there's a lot of reprieve in just, you know, a lot of exhaling and like, oh, I don't have to do everything.

Speaker 2 Cause I know like even me myself, I just get overwhelmed with all the things that like we should be doing or I think I should be doing.

Speaker 2 So I think getting that messaging from you, just like doing one thing over and over again is better than doing nothing at all.

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Speaker 3 That's me with a lemonade in a rocker on my front porch.

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Speaker 2 So we've done a lot about the U.S. and authoritarianism.
So I would love to broaden this conversation to international policy and politics.

Speaker 2 So Picardy 3rd 1 asks, what are some key differences between what is happening in the United States and what happened in Germany, Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela?

Speaker 2 How does our specific culture, political system, media landscape, and economy protect us from or make us more vulnerable to the worst consequences of authoritarianism?

Speaker 2 And then I want to add to this by referencing a conversation that you had with Tim Wu on our show last week about technology and economic monopolies.

Speaker 2 So he referenced Denmark as an example of a country outside the US that we should look to to follow their like economic model specifically.

Speaker 2 And I was also wondering, is there a country country that the United States can look to as an example of how to get out of this regime?

Speaker 1 Sure. So we use Germany as a proof point because that was the largest authoritarian regime in the 20th century and the fastest.

Speaker 1 It took 18 days for the Weimar Republic, which was actually a progressive democratic political leadership team

Speaker 1 to fall and for Germany to become the

Speaker 1 use case for totalitarianism, for ethno-fascism, for Christian nationalism, for authoritarian power. But it also followed a playbook that continues to be used.
Hitler did not seize the government.

Speaker 1 He was put into power using their structure. But then he expanded the power.
He did,

Speaker 1 you know, a political blitzkrieg. There was so many pieces of what happened that we can absolutely track.
They had the staff, the secret police. They weaponized and normalized violence.

Speaker 1 They went after the media, after truth tellers.

Speaker 1 And of course, what we know the most is that they scapegoated vulnerable communities.

Speaker 1 And in Germany in the 1930s and 40s, that meant Jews. That meant the disabled.
It meant the Roma people, it meant blacks. They went after any community they could blame for

Speaker 1 the economic or cultural hardships that people felt in Germany. And you got to remember, Germany had come out of a previous war where they were indebted to the world.

Speaker 1 And the people in Germany were overwhelmed and they were angry and they were mad and they were facing economic hardship.

Speaker 1 And it made sense to give power over to someone who could tell them whose fault it was and could tell them there was a magic pill for getting out of it. Does that sound familiar?

Speaker 1 And this is why I want people to think about the fact that Trump is not

Speaker 1 the end goal. He is the avatar.
And this is a conversation I had with Ezra Klein. This idea that Trump himself is sui generis and that the end of Trump is the end of this is completely bollocks.

Speaker 1 It does not end when the figurehead is gone. It ends when the people decide that we cannot sustain the systems they've put in place and that we want our nation back.

Speaker 1 But this notion that a 26 and a 28 election will be the end of Republican authoritarianism is absolutely wrong. It will endure.
And in fact,

Speaker 1 you need the popular person to bring you in. but you need to change the culture and the systems and the landscape and the economy to hold it.

Speaker 1 And that is why we see the consolidation of power in Paramount among the Ellisons and why they're trying to take over TikTok.

Speaker 1 That is why we see the tech bros and the oligarchs changing the nature of how our economy actually moves.

Speaker 1 That is why we are seeing the Calais decision sitting in front of the Supreme Court that can gut the Voting Rights Act and not only cost us 18 to 27 seats that would make the Congress permanently Republican,

Speaker 1 we could lose up to 200 state and local seats, state legislative seats, which means that when the maps get redrawn, we can never have power again across this country.

Speaker 1 And so we got to remember that while we get focused on the big shiny object,

Speaker 1 Venezuela is the proof point that the face is not the same as the body. And the body of authoritarianism will survive.
Even if one head gets lopped off, another one will grow in its place.

Speaker 1 And I'm sorry for mixing my metaphors there. I went from, you you know,

Speaker 1 I somehow ended up in Greece. But anyway, that's what we know.
And if we know this, then what do we do about this? We remember that they are taking our power from us.

Speaker 1 So it is our job to take our power back. But we don't do it again on these grand scales.
Grand things make us feel good, but it's the small,

Speaker 1 insistent, repetitive actions that reaffirm the nature of democracy.

Speaker 1 That's what works. And the nature of democracy is people in service to each other.

Speaker 2 I'm, are we not exhausted? Are we not tired?

Speaker 2 I feel like, and I know that the whole goal of 10 steps, right, is to show that like, this is a cycle that has been happening for years and in many different countries, as you've explained.

Speaker 2 And I don't know, to me, I'm just like, this feels a little bit like I'm going like a little insane and a little crazy because you've laid them all out. And I'm just like, oh, this keeps on happening.

Speaker 2 Let's stop it.

Speaker 2 And then it just seems like we have amnesia or there's some weird Mendel in fact that's happening throughout the world where it's like we hit a certain step and they're like, well, this like, we'll just, this is going to work out this time.

Speaker 2 Right. And then years down the line, like future generations pay for it.

Speaker 2 Just want to point out that I'm scared.

Speaker 2 Okay. Well,

Speaker 1 no, I'm glad you said that. So here's why I'm doing the 10 steps.
It's why we do assembly required. It's why I have assembly notes.

Speaker 1 It's why I am incessant and why I find ways to go on TikTok and talk about this.

Speaker 1 The most pernicious and effective power of authoritarianism is exhaustion.

Speaker 1 You just get tired of fighting. And as long as it's not that bad, you can deal with it.

Speaker 1 And so part of what we have to fight back against is not the legitimacy of the exhaustion, but what we do with the exhaustion. And that's why I wanted to create the 10 steps campaign.

Speaker 1 We got to tag in and tag out. We got to have folks who come in when we are too tired to do this anymore.

Speaker 1 And the more people we have in this process with us, the more energy we can share, but the more time we have to rest and reset and recycle.

Speaker 1 That's why it's so important that we bring more people in so we can spread the load because their goal is to exhaust us. Their goal is for complacency to feel better than fighting.

Speaker 1 Because opposition takes energy. It has risk.
It goes against our nature.

Speaker 1 But we have to think about what's on the other side.

Speaker 1 And that's why I think that question about the other nation states is so important because there are communities that have no freedom, that have, they don't have basics.

Speaker 1 And if you think about all of the people who fled Venezuela, it's not because they were simply angry. It's because they lost everything.

Speaker 1 I don't plan to go anywhere. I don't want to go anywhere because we have an extraordinary nation here.
We have good people here.

Speaker 1 And so we should be willing and able to fight for it, but we can't fight all the time. And so we got to make sure we bring folks in who can do it with us.

Speaker 2 Now I have this visual of the 10 Steps campaign just being one giant relay race.

Speaker 2 There you go. I don't know.
That makes me a little happier.

Speaker 1 10 steps,

Speaker 1 somebody else.

Speaker 2 Tag in. don't drop the baton, please.
There you go. Our country relies on it.

Speaker 2 Okay. So our next question comes from username suck.

Speaker 2 Why can't slash won't Democrats try to corner Republicans in Congress who are behind the scenes unhappy with Trump and don't fully agree with him?

Speaker 2 So just to add to this again, in the last few months, we've seen major figures in the MAGA party capitulate from Marjorie Taylor Greene to Nancy Mace.

Speaker 2 And like this listener said, I think they're starting to feel the anxiety of following Trump off of a very, very steep cliff.

Speaker 2 And how do you think this is going to affect the MAGA movement, you know, especially ahead of the midterms?

Speaker 1 Okay, so this is one of the places where I disagree with a lot of folks who say that if we could just convince the members of Congress,

Speaker 1 guys, as someone who has been in and out of politics, Politics is about power. Who has it? Who wants it? Who gets to use it?

Speaker 1 But it's also about values. What do we believe? Why do we believe it? And what do we want to do with it?

Speaker 1 There are a lot of folks who may disagree with some of the tactics that Trump has used, but they don't disagree with him fundamentally. They don't disagree with his invective about Somali refugees.

Speaker 1 They don't disagree that women should be

Speaker 1 reeled in and that they shouldn't have access to bodily autonomy. They agree.
And so I don't want us to think that Trump is, again, the sui generis standalone idea.

Speaker 1 David Graham was on the show and he talked about Project 2025 in depth.

Speaker 1 The reason I had that show and the reason we had the great show on pro-natalism and the reason we had the extraordinary show on Christian nationalism is that those are set pieces that a lot of members of Congress agree with.

Speaker 1 They may take exception to some of the ways he's achieving it, but they don't disagree with the end game. Marjorie Taylor Greene is not a Democrat.
She just didn't like how it was being done.

Speaker 1 She didn't disagree with the outcome. She disagreed with methodology.
The MAGA movement believes what they believe. And the way I like to talk about it is that as someone who is pro-choice,

Speaker 1 Someone who is pro-democracy, someone who believes in civil and human rights as a native good, someone who thinks poverty is immoral, there is nothing you can tell me to convince me that my values are wrong.

Speaker 1 Why do we think we can do that to someone who believes something different?

Speaker 1 My parents are pastors. Their job is conversion.
That is

Speaker 1 really taxing work, and it does not. actually really work.
People are rarely converted unless they agree to the conversion.

Speaker 1 They come to learn and they have some experience that tells them that this is why they have to be different. That's not going to happen in the cloakroom in the Dirksen building.
It's just not.

Speaker 1 And so part of what we've got to stop thinking is that we're going to lecture someone out of their beliefs.

Speaker 1 That's why I come back to the convincing Buddhist to be Baptist is a nice thing to think about. It doesn't really work very often.

Speaker 1 But getting Baptist to go to church basically says you already share my beliefs. You just don't share my behavior.
We are reading too much into these moments because it makes us feel good.

Speaker 1 And it makes us think that because Marjorie Taylor Greene did what she did, because Nancy Mace put her name on the line, that somehow they've disavowed their values. They have not.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I think on that note, too, bad people can do good things, you know, and these are not the greatest people and they've done a lot of things to harm large sleuths of Americans and different identities.

Speaker 2 And, you know, it's great that they're capitulating against Donald Trump every now and again.

Speaker 2 But, you know, their greater agenda, their greater goals, and their greater ideas still hurt the public at large. So bad people can do good things.
Good people can do bad things.

Speaker 2 Not everything's black and white. Things can be gray.

Speaker 2 And, you know, Stacey, on that semi-depressing note, we could, let's have a little fun. Let's be a little loose.
Let's be a little light. Are you ready?

Speaker 1 I am.

Speaker 2 So, Constant Cupcake on Discord asks, what's your favorite holiday food tradition?

Speaker 2 So, particularly, Constant Cupcake rings in the new year with Lord of the Rings books every year and makes a full English breakfast like Little Hobbits on New Year's Day, which is so cute.

Speaker 1 That is very cute. Okay, so my family, we have two traditions.
One is that we have a Christmas Eve program that we have been been doing since we were little, and we have to do a full performance.

Speaker 1 We have over time been able to convince my parents that making their 45 and 50 year old children sing and dance is just mean and wrong. And so we've been able to winnow it down.
But we have a program.

Speaker 1 And as a boon for doing this program, we have a little Christmas party. And it's eggnog and cookies and

Speaker 1 little nashas. And that's it.
And then my mom reads the night before Christmas and she reads the story from of Jesus' birth from Matthew.

Speaker 1 And then we pray and we sing some carols and we go to sleep and wait for Santa to arrive. And then on Christmas Day, we have the most amazing Christmas dressing that my mom makes.

Speaker 1 My dad does the Christmas ham, which makes us all very happy.

Speaker 1 I do what we call the great bird, which is I do the turkey. But our two food traditions are the Christmas program feast and Christmas dinner on Christmas Day.

Speaker 2 Well, that's beautiful.

Speaker 2 And again, if you ever want to get into TikTok, you just like cut that little segment of you doing a little dance, put it on there. Like we already have content for you to post.
This is great.

Speaker 1 I will let, thank you. Farah is now my agent.

Speaker 2 Thank you, Sarah.

Speaker 2 Great. I love a side gig.
It's perfect. There you go.

Speaker 2 Okay. Next question from Liliana M.
Which book this year made you want to underline every sentence? And I know you're a big reader. If you need a top three, you let me know.

Speaker 1 Okay, so the three that I've been reading, I appreciate you giving me three. Of course.

Speaker 1 God

Speaker 1 of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno Garcia is this beautiful Mexican mythology that is just, it's still with me. And it's, it's a lovely story about who we think we are and how we navigate the world.

Speaker 1 And I love that one.

Speaker 1 The second

Speaker 2 is

Speaker 1 on tyranny. We did a whole series on it and it anchored me as we started this year.
It was incredibly important

Speaker 1 to remember that we could win and to think about what that victory could look like.

Speaker 1 And then the third is a book I just finished. I I actually just did a blurb about it.
So I have a friend who's got a book coming out next year. Her name is Morgan Radford.
And

Speaker 2 she

Speaker 1 tells this extraordinary story about

Speaker 1 falling in love, but it's woven together with Cuban history

Speaker 1 and the rise of Castro, but without it being about Castro.

Speaker 1 What it reminds me of are the sacrifices that we make for the beliefs that we hold, but how real

Speaker 1 the human connection is and the human cost is.

Speaker 1 And so her book is called Now Then. It'll be out next year.
And I got to do an advanced reading, but it is one of those stories that I'm still sitting with.

Speaker 1 And it's just really extraordinarily well told.

Speaker 2 Oh, I love that. I love historical fiction.
Okay. This might be one of my favorite questions.

Speaker 2 The next question is from SZR.

Speaker 2 And you have a book, Stacey, called Code of Justice, which focuses on the ethical dangers of AI in the medical industry, particularly concerning veteran healthcare.

Speaker 2 And the lead character is named Avery Keene, who is a former Supreme Court clerk and now works as an internal investigator at a high-end law firm.

Speaker 2 So, if you had to make a movie adaptation of Code of Justice, who would play Avery Keene?

Speaker 1 Okay, see, this is a trick question because

Speaker 1 Avery's got to be played. She's got, you know, this is her third outing.
She has a fourth book that I'm working on right now.

Speaker 2 Incredible.

Speaker 1 I know how I see Avery,

Speaker 1 but being now in the

Speaker 1 Hollywood space, it is a dangerous, it's a very dangerous thing to say who I think should play that character.

Speaker 2 Oh, no.

Speaker 1 Because if I say the wrong person, then I don't get my movie. So I appreciate the question.

Speaker 2 No, I love the question. No, cut the question.

Speaker 2 Cut the question. We need the movie out there.

Speaker 1 But I just want, I want every actress who wants to be Avery Keene to know I'm looking at you.

Speaker 2 Okay, perfect. That's a very democratic question.
The very democratic answer. Love that.

Speaker 2 Okay. The next question is from Waste Walrus.
Which TV show deserved way more hype than it got this year?

Speaker 1 I love season two of Silo, which was fabulous. And again, in the moment where we are facing the rise of authoritarianism, it's a show that, again, talks about how

Speaker 2 people

Speaker 1 make choices and how we face

Speaker 1 challenges and harm and how we can be disappointed by people we love,

Speaker 1 how we might give too much emphasis to those who hold power and forget that power is borrowed from us.

Speaker 1 So I love silo. And I watched that season with my niece, Faith, who you guys met on the very first episode of

Speaker 1 Assembly Required. She and I love TV.
And so like watching that with her, very different vantage point, very much

Speaker 1 Gen Zero was just, it's a show that was really, really well done.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I've actually not checked that out, but I will. I'm really bad at watching TV shows.
The next question comes from Environmental Angie.

Speaker 2 If you could, you know, you might not be able to answer this one similar to Avery Keene one, but we're just going to go for it. Hey.

Speaker 2 If you could could green light anything for next year, a reboot, a sequel, adaptation, or original, what's getting made?

Speaker 1 So one of my favorite books as a child was The Phantom Toll Booth.

Speaker 1 I would love to see a movie adaptation of The Phantom Toll Booth, especially for a generation that probably has never read the story. But it's this amazing book about this watchdog named Tac,

Speaker 1 who he's literally a dog made of a watch, and and this little boy named Milo. And they have to go into the land where there's a fight between math and words.

Speaker 1 And so it's just, it's one of the most fun books I ever read. And I would love to be the person who gets to bring that to life.

Speaker 2 Cece, that's such a you-coded book. Like that is, if I had to describe, if someone was like, what do you think her favorite childhood book was?

Speaker 2 And someone gave me that descriptor, I'd be like, yeah, that one.

Speaker 2 I don't look, I am am nothing if not consistent you since childhood that's beautiful

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Speaker 1 Hear that?

Speaker 3 That's me with a lemonade in a rocker on my front porch.

Speaker 1 How did I get here?

Speaker 4 I invested to make my dream home home. Get where you're going with MDY, the original mid-cap ETF from State Street Investment Management.
Getting there starts here.

Speaker 5 Before investing, consider the funds, investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Visit state street.com/slash IM for a prospectus containing this and other information.
Read it carefully.

Speaker 5 MDY is subject to risks similar to those of stocks. All ETFs are subject to risk, including possible loss of principal.
Alps distributors, inc distributor.

Speaker 2 Okay, let's end on a reflective note. Okay.

Speaker 2 What's one thing you learned about yourself through the media that you've consumed?

Speaker 1 I've always believed that

Speaker 1 I don't have to pick a lane, that

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 1 have

Speaker 1 skills and opportunities and ways of thinking that have

Speaker 1 not always been

Speaker 1 in one space.

Speaker 1 And for a long time, I was challenged by people like, oh, you need to pick a lane, pick this thing. Why don't you just be a writer? Why don't you just

Speaker 1 this

Speaker 1 year?

Speaker 1 I got to see myself on media, having conversations on just a range of different topics.

Speaker 1 But I also got to see myself have an impact on people who did not think anyone was listening.

Speaker 1 When I did the 10 steps on the Jimmy Kimmel show with Anthony Anderson,

Speaker 1 It was because I'd had a conversation with college students.

Speaker 1 They were part of the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation program.
It was a John Lewis fellowship program. And one of the young people basically asked me, Would we have a country in a decade?

Speaker 1 And I was trying to give him,

Speaker 1 yeah, we can, but only if we, only if we make it so, only if we do this work. And so I was walking through, here's what we face.

Speaker 1 And then when I had a chance to join Anthony on the show and talk about it more broadly,

Speaker 1 it was for me this revelatory moment where all of the things that I get to do, all of the privileges I have, because I've been able to be in politics and be in the civic space, because I've been an entrepreneur who has learned how to build things fast, because I've failed in my political ambitions sometimes and succeeded in other times.

Speaker 1 I have been able to

Speaker 1 construct

Speaker 1 this

Speaker 1 flywheel of opportunity that I can now share. And in a moment of just extraordinary darkness,

Speaker 1 when people are being kidnapped, when the worst impulses and instincts that we say our nation is designed to prohibit are being put front and center and celebrated by our leadership,

Speaker 1 I learned that I could be part of the solution, not the only thing, in fact, not even an important thing,

Speaker 1 but that I was ready to do something.

Speaker 1 And that to me is

Speaker 1 just a gift to be told that you can be useful and to learn from how I engage that my utility is real.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 that was a very reflective answer.

Speaker 2 And that is also very beautiful that, like, through consuming media and being on media and having your own media platform, like this podcast and your assembly notes on Substack, that you have very much been able to feel feel the changes that you've been making um

Speaker 2 yeah well thank you stacy that ends the listener questions portion of our show today thank you for everyone who tuned in and wrote questions and thank you stacy so much for like being very thoughtful with your answers well farah thank you for asking really thoughtful questions but also for weaving in your own i saw how you did that and thank you so much i am happy for us to do this offline too because you speak for a lot of folks.

Speaker 1 And I appreciate the fact that you and the entire Assembly Require team,

Speaker 1 our producers and our staff, like you all are not just doing the work of helping produce a podcast. You are helping build community that feels empowered to do things.
And yeah,

Speaker 1 that I am also incredibly grateful for.

Speaker 2 Well, that's actually a perfect segue into our new segment.

Speaker 2 This show is all about giving listeners action items, a toolkit, or as you always say, a little bit of extra homework to help not just navigate this insanely weird and challenging time, but actually do something about it.

Speaker 2 And there are so many listeners who have put those lessons, the incredible lessons that we've learned from our guests on the show and that you've also given them into action.

Speaker 2 And we wanted to close the year off by highlighting them. But before we do that, Stacey, do you have anything to tell our listeners?

Speaker 1 Well, I just want to say thank you. So many of you have listened to the third segment.
You know, in podcast world, we have an A block, a B block, and a C block.

Speaker 1 And the C block is where we give homework. And so many of you do your homework.
I'm just so grateful that you listen and you take notes and you do the things that need to be done.

Speaker 1 Part of building the world we want, you know, as I said, you got to recognize, you got to activate, but you got to build. And you all are part of building this world.

Speaker 1 And again, sometimes it feels very small and very micro.

Speaker 1 But if we've learned nothing from Star Trek and Star Wars to a lesser extent, is that the micro, when knitted together, the micro becomes the universe and that becomes our reality.

Speaker 1 And so thank you for all you're doing to make that so.

Speaker 2 I love that.

Speaker 2 And maybe at the end of this segment, you can give them a grade with how well you did

Speaker 2 or don't.

Speaker 1 I was a student. So, when I went to law school, your first year at Yale and law school, your first semester is pass-fail.
And so, I am a very firm believer in the pass-fail system. And yes, we passed.

Speaker 2 We passed it. We passed.

Speaker 2 Okay, perfect. Well, I'm assuming everyone here is going to pass.

Speaker 2 And the first listener spotlight comes from Dem It All to Hell. So they said,

Speaker 2 though North Carolina ultimately went to Trump in 2024, still proud of the work we did in Wake County.

Speaker 2 In early 2023, I was battling depression and hating the outlook of our political landscape and the negative echo chamber of social media.

Speaker 2 Listening to assembly required in PSA and hearing the calls to action motivated me to finally get out of the house and actually do something.

Speaker 2 So I volunteered with the Wake County Democratic Party to knock some doors and had a good experience even though my more senior partner did 95% of the talking.

Speaker 2 From there, did some voter registration drives each weekend at a few farmers markets and town events, then got to knocking doors every weekend by mid-June, eventually pulling one to three shifts almost every Saturday and Sunday until November.

Speaker 2 I personally knocked on thousands of doors and became a team leader helping launch multiple canvasing events in the western Wake County over the summer and fall.

Speaker 2 Keeping up with the crooked media shows and Vote Save America content helped me stay informed and have good, meaningful conversations with the people I talked to on the ground.

Speaker 2 I made some wonderful friends, met some amazing people who opened their doors and actually talked to us.

Speaker 2 The experience also helped ground my worldview and meeting community, both sides of the ideological aisle.

Speaker 2 It helped me restore my hope in a better future for America, and I honestly had a fantastic summer and fall.

Speaker 2 Through our coordinated efforts and amazing volunteers, we managed to almost completely flip our county map in the 2024 elections.

Speaker 2 Thanks to the crooked media team for giving me the spark and motivation to actually go out and do something.

Speaker 2 Seeing this map at the end really solidified to me the action that can be done and does make a difference. Looking forward to 2026 and 2028 to finally flip this whole state.

Speaker 1 Well, I'm going to do number two.

Speaker 1 The next one comes from Aragon Vibes Gimli Height.

Speaker 1 I live in Indiana and I work as a psychologist at a public institution.

Speaker 1 I can't really do public action in the way I'd really like to, particularly because our state government has focused on going after liberals at public universities, even if acting in a personal, not professional capacity.

Speaker 1 And then he or she says, I need y'all to trust me that being a mental health professional and advocating for things publicly, especially working for a state university, can be really sticky and complicated.

Speaker 1 We believe you.

Speaker 1 I've been a steady communicator with my Republican state senator on a variety of issues, and I will give him credit for voting no on some of the extremist bills that have ultimately been signed into law.

Speaker 1 Thanks, Supermajority.

Speaker 1 I'd been in touch with his office as the redistricting pressure picked up, and he was actually the last Republican senator to come out opposed to the new maps before the Senate announced they weren't voting on them a couple of weeks ago.

Speaker 1 He actually replied to an email I sent and said I was one of the many constituents who voiced their concerns and over 90% of the contacts his office had received were people saying no to redistricting.

Speaker 1 I sent a very kind reply thanking him for the message and wishing him and his family well, as he had just been swatted after coming out in opposition.

Speaker 1 And I'd like to think I'm making it more likely he'll continue to oppose extreme legislation.

Speaker 1 I often struggle with public action because of the potential implications for me professionally, but I feel empowered to do

Speaker 1 just one small thing to make my voice heard. And if I can be a liberal that is approachable and reasonable and empathetic, I'd like to think it makes things better for all of us in this district.

Speaker 2 Now from Laura. Because of Stacy and the podcast, I feel constantly pushed every week to do the most I can for my community in Florida, especially as a white woman transplant from the Midwest.

Speaker 2 I'm the vice president of our local LGBTQ caucus and a legislative director of the state LGBTQ caucus. I host a podcast about local issues for St.

Speaker 2 Pete's sake, and I'm actively involved in my local community. I think about people like Stacy constantly in the back of my mind because I know the skin that I wear grants me the privilege.

Speaker 2 And I want to, like Bella from Twilight, random reference, yes, project that privilege onto as many people as I can.

Speaker 1 Well, I wanted to say to all three who wrote in, this is the perfect example of why this show matters to me so much.

Speaker 1 I'm glad it matters to you because the work done in North Carolina meant that there was a Supreme Court justice that gets to keep her seat.

Speaker 1 And it means that heading into next year, we can expand the ability of the state of North Carolina to serve its people.

Speaker 1 North Carolina is one of the few southern states that expanded Medicaid, and that's because of people who fought and believed that voting matters. And then in Indiana, redistricting matters.

Speaker 1 We have seen it take front and center. And when Indiana rejected those terrible maps that were designed to purely steal power from people.

Speaker 1 The fact that you took the time to engage and believe that your voice mattered to prove that yes, calling your legislators, calling your congressmen, it may not change everything, but it changes something, that is critical.

Speaker 2 And that

Speaker 1 the ability to use privilege, not simply to be, but to stand in the gap for others, to be in the local community and to understand that change has to happen incrementally is why not only is the work being done for St.

Speaker 1 Pete's sake, but it's why there's a new mayor in Miami. Those pieces add up.

Speaker 1 We are an extraordinary nation and I'm just so grateful that so many of you are listening and taking action and most importantly, telling us what action looks like.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I can, for one, can say I'm heavily inspired by the people that listen to us.

Speaker 1 And these three stories really

Speaker 2 just made me very grateful of the work that we do here. And so, before we wrap up, I wanted to end with two rapid quick fire questions because we've been going on for a minute.

Speaker 2 We will be dark through the holidays, including winter celebrations and the new year's. So, I wanted to take the opportunity to ask you, Stacey, what is your New Year's resolution this year?

Speaker 1 My New Year's resolution is to

Speaker 1 give myself permission

Speaker 1 to try hard, to make mistakes, and to try again.

Speaker 2 Mine was to put a screen time limit on the apps on my phone. There you go.
Well, see, very different approaches. No, no,

Speaker 1 I did that two weeks ago.

Speaker 1 And that's why I need to be able to make mistakes and try again because TikTok lets you put in, you know, a really easy code.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And so

Speaker 1 I'm going to fail, but I'm going to keep trying

Speaker 1 because eventually

Speaker 1 I'm going to take my screen time back.

Speaker 2 Yes, I believe in that because it says, it allows you to keep going after 15 minutes. And I'm like, oh, I keep pressing 15 minutes.
And, you know, I will steal your news resolution as well.

Speaker 2 Like, I will continue to try hard and stop going on my phone.

Speaker 2 Well, that's all. for this week's episode.
Thank you so much, Stacey.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 1 I want to thank everyone again for writing in with your questions for today's special episode of Assembly Required.

Speaker 1 As always, if you like what you hear, please be sure to share this episode and subscribe on all of your favorite platforms.

Speaker 1 And to meet the demands of the algorithm, please rate the show and leave a comment. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you go to listen and learn and be in community.

Speaker 1 As we close out the year, I would love to know more about the issues you'd like for us to tackle in 2026.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Well, that wraps up this episode and this year of Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams. Be careful out there, take care of yourselves, and I'll meet you here in the new year.

Speaker 1 Assembly Required is a crooked media production. Our lead show producer is Lacey Roberts and our associate producer is Farah Safari.
Kirill Polavieve is our video producer.

Speaker 1 This episode was recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis. Our theme song is by Vasilis Photopoulos.

Speaker 1 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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