Whew, the past few days have been a lot. Like you probably, Chris hasn’t slept much this past week. There’s a lot to process given that Donald Trump is now president-elect… again. Our guest this week, who has worked as an organizer throughout numerous political ups and downs, points out that we “must not neglect the work of standing up right now to fight back.” Anna Galland is the former executive director of MoveOn Civic Action from 2012 to 2019. She now works with a range of national pro-democracy organizations, coalitions, and leaders. Galland also teaches about democracy renewal & social movements at Northwestern University. She joins WITHpod to help us take stock of this moment, what the progressive movement can do right now, reasons for hope (we could use it, right?) and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Anna Galland: I just keep thinking like we’re going to be digesting the results of that election for the next four or five, 10 years to really fully understand it. So we should have strong opinions loosely held and make some decisions on them and also not neglect the work of standing up right now to fight back. Because that actually if we get too preoccupied and navel gazing into what we just did wrong, we might actually undermine the work of confidently powerfully standing up and resisting the very scary stuff that’s coming at us.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host Chris Hayes. Well, here I am. Here we are. It is the Friday after Election Day 2024. I have not slept much, not just in the last few nights. Obviously we were on air until like 4 or 5 a.m. election night into Wednesday morning. I haven’t slept a ton, I would say, in the last three weeks or so. And I’m a little punchy and a little manic and I’ve been thinking and texting with a million different people and arguing and fighting and DMs with a bunch of people just because of the way that I process all this.
And the thing that I’m processing, of course, is the election of Donald Trump. I don’t need to go through the details. If you’re listening to this, I think you’ve probably heard a lot. So, okay, here we are. It sucks really bad. It sucks real bad. So, what do we do? I have so many things that I can say, and I’ve been doing them on my show, and I’ve been, I might even do like a whole monologue podcast of my takes just because the way that my anxious-self processes the world is by just generating content. It’s perverse, strange, adaptive quality. It’s suited me pretty well, but I was like, who do I want to talk to?
And on the day before the election, I had gotten to Zoom into the classroom of a really good old friend of mine who’s a really special person, extremely like sort of I would say like a moral genius and very wise and profound and rock steady and open and curious. And I’ve known her for 25 years, probably met her as a freshman in college. And she’s basically spent her whole life as a progressive organizer, thinker. She ran MoveOn for a long time, the moveon.org, was an anti-war activist with the Quakers back when the Iraq War was happening after 9/11 and has just, has been through many cycles of being ascendant and crushed over the last 25 years. And that’s true.
I know organizers in their seventies who the same is true, but I thought of all the people I could talk to, I’d had this conversation on Monday, the day before the election with, and her name is Anna Galland at a class that she teaches at Northwestern. And then I was thinking about who to talk to. And I was like, yeah, I really want to talk to Anna because I feel like, I don’t know what’s comforting at this point. I think different people are processing this different ways. I think some people find it weirdly comforting to kind of like the way you lean into the skid, like lean into the doom. It’s like, we’re all totally screwed. Some people for whatever reason find substance from that. And I, you know, whatever people need psychologically at this moment, because there’s a lot of really important and hard work ahead.
What I find comforting is like just trying to go to kind of a deep philosophical intellectual place and also kind of just bring historical context. And the one thing that I’ll just start off with before we get into this conversation for that historical context is like, and this is generational, you know, different people of different generations will have their, this version of this, but like, you know, I remember the morning after George W. Bush was reelected, which is the last time the American people as a whole gave a popular mandate to a Republican. It was 20 years ago, was the last time a Republican won a national popular majority, which is pretty wild when you think about it. Twenty years ago.
And it was in the wake of this strategic, moral human catastrophe called the Iraq War. I mean, hundreds of thousands of people died. The legacy of that would extend for till today. ISIS came out of it all, you know.
And just being like, how could people what this guy, the morning after, after he did what he did. And then also just feeling like we’re screwed, the country is out of our hands, we’re never going to win a majority again. And within three years, George W. Bush, who seemed like this colossus, had a 20 percent approval rating and slinked off into history as like a unanimously discredited figure.
And basically, when Donald Trump ran in 2016 in the Republican primary, a huge advantage he had in the primary was being like, George W. Bush sucked so bad. That dude was horrible. Like that was one of his huge advantages in Republican primary. If you told me that the morning of 2005 election morning, I would have been like, no, what are you talking about? They’re about to put this guy on Mount Rushmore.
So, like things change quickly and the future, things intervene in the future. I find that comforting. And so, I thought someone who is exactly my age, exactly my cohort, who has gone through a number of these ups and downs would be a great person to talk to. And so with that said, my old dear friend, longtime progressive organizer, former executive of MoveOn. She works now with a bunch of pro-democracy organizations, coalitions leaders. She teaches about democracy and renewal and social movements in Northwestern University, Anna Galland. Anna, how you doing?
Anna Galland: Oh, man, well you just made me feel a lot of feelings in that run up, Chris. And I do agree that it feels good to connect with dear old friends in this moment, actually. Chris is cracking open a beverage in order to have this conversation with the right level of hydration and depending on the beverage.
Chris Hayes: It’s not alcohol, no.
Anna Galland: Okay.
Chris Hayes: It’s seltzer.
Anna Galland: I do, but I’m doing actually pretty well, oddly. I feel very steady this week. And the reason I think I feel steady is both, as you said, that as an organizer, we’ve been through tremendous ups and downs in my own organizing history, in my own lifetime, but also actually where you just went, I feel super humble about what we know about what’s coming. I have some hypotheses. I have some instincts. I have some, I’ve been thinking a lot about what we should learn from the first Trump administration actually, and carry forward and what we need to unlearn. But I feel like it is a kind of act of an overactive ego or narcissism or something to be too pessimistic right now about what exactly is going to come, how this is going to play out. Yes, there will be severe damage. Yes, people that I love and care about are very scared. Yes, I’m scared, but I just think a little humility is in order intellectually and also emotionally, given where we are.
Chris Hayes: So I am so glad you started on that note because I just want to vent for one second. I’m really going to try. I’m just going to say this. I’m naming this in a sort of therapeutic sense ahead of the time. People have noted this sometimes in the podcast when I have a really, someone I’m really close to and that I get a little bit of the show off demon and I talk too much. So I just want to name that ahead of time.
Anna Galland: Oh.
Chris Hayes: So, I just, I don’t want to like overwhelm this conversation with my takes, but very quickly.
Anna Galland: I like your takes. I think we want them. Keep going.
Chris Hayes: Well, but it’s like all things in moderation. It’s like mayo on a sandwich, you know, you want just enough. But the humility is important because one of the things I have found so maddening is everyone immediately interpreting the election through their priors, like literally hitting send on like the like, if you thought beforehand the problem was Democrats were too woke, then this shows that Democrats are too woke. You thought beforehand that Democrats were too corporate and too neoliberal, this shows they were too corporate and too neoliberal. If you thought beforehand, it was Gaza, now it’s Gaza.
Everyone has just across the ideological spectrum. And I’m just like, it can’t possibly be the case that no one has reconsidered anything.
Anna Galland: Right. I’ve actually had a similar thought, which is I don’t want to either under learn or over learn any lessons here. First of all, it’s also too early. We won’t have the voter file back to actually know what happened at the voter level for months.
Chris Hayes: Can you actually explain that? Because I think people need to understand the difference between the exit polls that are being published right now and that everyone’s posting and the voter file.
Anna Galland: Right. I was thinking today that it’s almost like the difference between polling that told us what might happen in the election and actually having some sort of --
Chris Hayes: Returns.
Anna Galland: -- of returns. Like, exit polls are to the voter file as pre-election polls --
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Anna Galland: -- were to the election itself.
Chris Hayes: Thank you.
Anna Galland: Right?
Chris Hayes: That’s perfectly said.
Anna Galland: And so we don’t actually know exactly what happened yet. We know, for example, that more people voted for Donald Trump than for Kamala Harris, but we don’t know how many of those folks were flips from how they voted previously. We won’t ever know on the individual voter level, but we’ll know down to a kind of precinct level, down to a zip code level. We don’t know how many of them flipped and how many of them were new voters, entered the field, had stayed home previously. And we don’t know how many Democrats stayed home.
But that’s obviously there’s still a lot you can start to talk about. You can start to talk about the way that the economy post-COVID was of course a major factor. You can talk about the racism and sexism based into a sort of contest that involved a Black and Asian woman running for president. Like you can talk about movement fractured around a failed Gaza policy. You can talk about the failure of the Democratic coalition to address corporate power sufficiently and da, da, da, da. We could talk about lots of factors that I believe are real, but we actually just don’t fully know the story now, and we should all collectively, with all of our takes, be exercising humility, not just because of the data, but because it’s going to take a while for us to sort out the stories that people themselves are telling.
Chris Hayes: That point, let me just stay on this for a second, that analogy, which I just want to hammer, exit polling is to the voter file what pre-election polling was to Election Day. And we know that like, pre-election polling actually did a decent job.
Anna Galland: Yeah. It was a ballpark.
Chris Hayes: It was in the ballpark. It was in the ballpark. It was, look, we went into the race being like, it’s a toss-up election. It’s about a 50-50 election and Trump is going to win by like two points. You know, so it’s like, that’s not a, that’s not a huge miss. It probably, again, under sold Trump everywhere. But the point being that it was in the ballpark, but not the reality. And that’s the case with the exit polls versus the voter file.
Anna Galland: That’s right. And Chris, I think you’ve been saying something that I have found really helpful and important, which is that at the end of the day, before the election, we knew if you picture the electorate as 100 people in a room, it was roughly evenly divided. There’s a whole question about the people who are not in the room or who are standing around the edges and choosing --
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Anna Galland: -- not to enter the fray. That’s really important. But it’s a roughly evenly divided room and a few people either moved or entered the field or stayed off. But we still have tens of millions of people in this country who are signed up for the vision of a multiracial democracy where everyone has a place of dignity and honor, who stand for human rights, who stand for a climate that we can hand down to our children, who stand for constraints on corporate power and all the rest of it.
And I just feel like there’s a risk right now of psyching ourselves out and we have to be real attentive. Anyone who has a major take to share should be real careful about whether that take. I’m not aiming this at people with takes. This is really for all of us.
Chris Hayes: They’re the worst, but go. Yeah. People with takes. I hate people with takes. I literally sat on a meeting the other day and was like, I hate everyone’s takes with one exception, which are my takes.
Anna Galland: My own. No.
Chris Hayes: Wait, no, but finish that sentence.
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Everyone with takes should be cognizant of.
Anna Galland: Cognizant of the downstream effects of our takes at this time.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Anna Galland: And I actually want to bring a note of hope into the conversation on this front end in addition to humility. It’s like humility and hope feel like important North Stars for me right now. The hope part, I had a prior heading into this election that if Trump won, the aftermath, the kind of conditions of the next phase of resistance would be very different than 2017. I still believe that.
Chris Hayes: Amen.
Anna Galland: And, but, last night, the Working Families Party, Indivisible and Move On, had a Zoom call that had 140,000 people on it, and 8,000 of them signed up to host community meetings.
Chris Hayes: Oh, my God. Wow, I thought I was like, everyone’s going to check out.
Anna Galland: That’s what I thought too. That’s what I thought too. And we are experienced people who are connected to movements or active in movements or observing movements. And so we had a hypothesis about what might happen after the election. And so far, I’m very happily surprised. I woke up this morning, not just steady, but actually leaning forward.
Chris Hayes: I just got goosebumps. I just literally felt a physical reaction to you saying that.
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: That really makes me feel good for the first time. That’s not no cap, as my 10-year-old would say. You have like 12-year-olds, right?
Anna Galland: Uh-huh.
Chris Hayes: Or 13-year-olds.
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Anna Galland: I’m not sure they would say no cap because in my presence --
Chris Hayes: No.
Anna Galland: -- but they might in general. Certainly I wouldn’t be allowed to say it.
Chris Hayes: Oh, my God. If they ever heard me saying no cap on this podcast, they would lose their minds. But isn’t it perversely fun to embarrass your kids? It’s weird.
Anna Galland: A thousand percent.
Chris Hayes: Why? It’s such a strange thing, but it really is fun. So that gave me like a physical reaction. And again, agree on the humility there. Like right now there’s just a lot of confident pronouncements, which is what the punditocracy does.
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: My favorite was someone today did a bit where they said, you know, people want to say like, it’s all the woke language. And someone searched and found that like, Kamala Harris has not used the term Latinx since 2020. And then someone on Bluesky very funnily was like, she lost because she didn’t say Latinx.
Anna Galland: That’s my election take.
Chris Hayes: And it’s like, see how easy this is? You could just like point to anything you want and just be like, that’s the reason.
Anna Galland: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: On the downstream effects, like I want to tread carefully here because everyone’s processing this differently, but one of the things that I think is a really dangerous take is finding the demographic group to blame.
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And I see this impulse in a lot of places I understand it, but as a in terms of building towards whatever we’re going to do next, I just think it’s a really destructive impulse.
Anna Galland: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s one of the places where especially that principle about the limits of exit polls comes into play.
Chris Hayes: Totally.
Anna Galland: Because that’s exactly where we’re getting that information from about how different people voted is coming from those exit polls. I mean, look, I also think that there’s a way in which we do need to reflect on the results of the election and what they mean for people in different seats.
Chris Hayes: Totally.
Anna Galland: If you’re a democratic politician, what do you learn from it? If you are an organizer who uses certain language with your own community, what do you have to learn about, right? If you’re someone who’s trying to build coalitions and you’re looking at the fact that this particular campaign’s choice to extend from Chomsky to Cheney, as we sort of have jokingly said at different points about the breadth of this coalition, you might assess how that worked out positively or negatively. Like, we all have things to reflect on, coalition builders, volunteers, organizers, politicians, members of the media. All of us, I think, should be reflecting and trying to learn.
I just keep thinking like, we’re going to be digesting the results of that election for the next four, five, 10 years to really fully understand it. So we should have strong opinions loosely held and make some decisions on them and also not neglect the work of standing up right now to fight back. Because that actually, if we get too preoccupied and navel gazing into what we just did wrong, we might actually undermine the work of confidently, powerfully standing up and resisting the very scary stuff that’s coming at us. Right? Which we could talk about, like, how do we resist in this round? But I just, I want to understand what just happened, but I also want to look forward and protect what needs protecting.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, and I also feel this strongly about, I had Sarah McBride on my show last night, who will be the first openly trans member of Congress. She won the at-large district in Delaware where she outran Kamala Harris by a bit.
Anna Galland: Wow.
Chris Hayes: A very, extremely obviously like, supremely talented politician. Just, you know, I talk to politicians all the time. They really do range in how good they are at communicating. She’s like very good. And so we spoke about a few things. One of the things that I really feel strongly is just like for those of us who are not trans, like just absolutely like standing up and being like, you will not. We’re not throwing these people under the bus, off the boat, we’re going to link arms with them.
Anna Galland: We’re not throwing them anywhere. We’re standing together --
Chris Hayes: Over our dead body.
Anna Galland: -- especially with the most vulnerable communities.
Chris Hayes: Like no.
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like no, that’s not.
Anna Galland: Yeah. And actually Chris, can I say something that brings to mind for me?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Anna Galland: A thing that I have found really helpful, important, insightful over time, including in the first Trump administration, but actually also in recent years, is conversations with anti-authoritarian activists who live overseas. And also elders in our own sort of country who’ve been through civil rights and other struggles here.
But there’s the people who have worked to counter authoritarianism abroad that I’ve learned from. Folks from Hungary, right? People who have organized in India, people who have organized in Turkey. One thing they say is that the retreat from public speech is a characteristic of authoritarian regimes. The way in which people silence themselves, the way in which they, there’s a great phrase which is anticipatory obedience, the way in people like preemptively decide to quiet, not to speak out against the autocrat, the way in which they might not stand up when a trans person, when a undocumented immigrant, when someone else who’s threatened and marginalized comes under attack, like that fuels the cycle of authoritarian takeover.
Let’s not do that. Let’s agree right now that we’re not going to be silent when someone is attacked, whoever they are in the coalition, and whether or not you have a direct sort of stake in their existence, their survival, their thriving. And just, I feel like that note that it’s important right now to do the most courageous thing possible in public to the extent possible feels really right. Like we should all do the most courageous thing we can, and we should do it as publicly as we can again and again and again in the coming years.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
(ADVERTISEMENT)
Chris Hayes: There’s a phrase from organizers in Brazil that emerged during the Bolsonaro regime, presidency regime.
Anna Galland: Potato, potato.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Sort of aspiring autocrat who was turfed out and tried his own chance six, and then they were like, you can’t run again and we’re indicting you. Which interesting way of doing it. Different countries have different ways of dealing with that. I came across this and I won’t say the Portuguese version, the rough English translation is, no one lets go of anyone’s hand.
Anna Galland: Yeah, that’s lovely.
Chris Hayes: And it came with like an image of people grasping hands and it became a kind of incantatory call of the progressive anti-Bolsonaro resistance, no one lets go of anyone’s hands.
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And that to me is like real key here.
Anna Galland: Yeah. There’s another one that brings to mind for me from the French activists actually who beat back their right wing threat earlier this year over the summer. And the expression as I understood it was, (FOREIGN LANGUAGE), I’m going to say it wrong in French too. We’re going to argue later, basically is the expression. So, they made this, you know, this coalition that had profound disagreements and they agreed that they would stand together, work together for the purpose of beating back a threat to all of them. I think about that a lot too.
Chris Hayes: I don’t think I quite realized how much interaction you’ve had with these international, but can you tell me a little bit more about that? Because I have not. I’ve done some, but I haven’t actually had that much interaction with folks that have worked the countries you mentioned, which really run the gamut. India is the one we talk about the most, but Turkey is sort of further gone in terms of its democratic mechanisms. And India is a really scary place if you were in the political opposition. Just what you’ve what those conversations have been like and other stuff you’ve learned.
Anna Galland: Yeah. And I can’t claim to be an expert on those country contexts. The thing I guess I want to lift up first is just that we should be looking to learn from people with experience in more acute circumstances right now. Those of us who had the fortune to grow up in the United States during a time when politics could be almost like a fun hobby. It can still be fun. It will still be joyful in all sorts of ways in coming years, but the risks have gone up for all sorts of actors in our country context, I think heading into the next four years. So we should be looking for people who have been through more acute threats.
One of the groups that I’ve been really fortunate to learn just a tiny bit from are the activists from Serbia, who organized a group called Otpor, which engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience and direct actions in order to kind of model courage with respect to their particular autocrat. They eventually were successful at helping to topple him. So there’s, I think let’s like --
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Anna Galland: -- seek out opportunities to learn from those networks where we can. And again, it’s not just overseas. You know, that expression from the great science fiction writer William Gibson, where he says the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Anna Galland: There are people here who have had all sorts of tremendously courageous stands against attacks by state actors. I’m thinking actually of some of the local groups in Texas who faced already harassment from the attorney general there --
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Anna Galland: -- Ken Paxton, they have something to teach to the rest of the country about how to sort of strategically push back and we should listen to them.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, and one of the things always, you mentioned this at the top, is that like, America has a long authoritarian tradition. The post reconstruction South was an authoritarian one party state in which all kinds of things that we think associate with liberal democracy, not just like racism and Jim Crow, but like all the things you talk about people not, you know, openly speaking their mind, like suppression of dissent, like not an independent judiciary, all that stuff operated in the Jim Crow South for years and even outside the Jim Crow South. But in that, like that was an authoritarian state. That was not a liberal democracy in the U.S. Over and above the fact that it was an apartheid state, it was also remorselessly repressive --
Anna Galland: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: -- in a bunch of different directions.
Anna Galland: And something, Chris, that I have been thinking a lot about this week is actually, I want to think about what organizers have to take into account here, and then I also want to think about what just everyday folks who are maybe going to show up for something on the side of a very full life. But for organizers, I think we have to reckon under Trump, too, with the lack of shock and what that means for our ability to move together, change public opinion, successfully defend communities on the front lines, successfully defend key norms and institutions of democracy.
So here, it’s obvious, but we’ve been through a round of Trump governance once. So it is not shocking that we’re back here. But without shock, shock was a precondition for us to move hundreds of thousands of people into the streets when children were being separated from their family on the U.S.-Mexico border. And there was this wide moral revulsion and outcry that brought people out, you know, all the way from abolish ICE activists to Barbara Bush. Right? Great.
I will take that kind of coalition as a coalition that can successfully move something in the public square. But there are also lots of more quiet wins that we and others in movement space together secured under Trump 1 that were more like fighting back against a steady drip where the public wasn’t suddenly shocked by something emergent, but was able to move into action together. And the example I’m thinking of here actually is SNAP benefits.
So one of the ugly things that happened in the first Trump term was an effort to reclassify or change the criteria by which people, kids would be eligible for free lunch. So a million kids were going to get kicked off of free lunch programs. And the pushback against that, this was not actually something that’s so shocking in a way. It’s a morally repulsive thing to kick a kid off of their access to free lunch at school, but it’s less, you know, eligibility for benefits, tweaking is like a normal politics --
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Anna Galland: -- kind of thing that we might fight over.
Chris Hayes: Exactly. Yeah.
Anna Galland: Right? And that effort, which recruited in unusual allies, people who were Trump voters, but had kids that wanted to be able to send them to school and get free lunch was basically successful. They ran into COVID, so there’s like, you can debate whether or not it was a win that would have held with or without COVID. But they prevented the administration from finalizing this rewritten sort of criteria that would have kicked kids off of free lunches.
And I just think of like, we’re going to need the big showy mobilizations that inspire confidence, that help us all see each other, that remind us we are not alone. And we’re going to kind of need the workmen-like day in, day out building of coalitions, including with unusual suspects that don’t rely on new, shocking information in the public eye. We’re going to need both modes. Does that make sense?
Chris Hayes: It 100 percent makes sense. And I just, I didn’t even, I vaguely recall the SNAP stuff, but I didn’t actually know that story, which tells you that it really --
Anna Galland: It was out of the public eye.
Chris Hayes: I was either ignorant --
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- or it really was an under the radar victory. That thing about Trump voters with kids, like this is another thing, again, I don’t want to be hectoring, but like, just making the tent as big as possible --
Anna Galland: Yep.
Chris Hayes: -- to resist the worst stuff is just --
Anna Galland: It’s crucial.
Chris Hayes: -- so important.
Anna Galland: We’re going to need a strong, like I think about it as a two-part project, a strong left flank or a strong progressive movement or whatever language you want to use. The folks who you know are the usual suspects for democratic principles, for protecting minority groups, for human rights, da, da, da. Strong left flank, strong progressive movement and big 10. Wide open arms to national security folks who have that in mind, military families and veterans who don’t want to see the military domestically deployed.
Chris Hayes: Correct.
Anna Galland: Right, like don’t want to see their family members or current service members deployed to squash protests or to go police the U.S.-Mexico border after Trump declares war on Mexico or whatever nonsense. you know, moderate evangelicals who don’t want to see millions of immigrants deported. Which by the way, the politics of immigration, you should have a conversation with one of the sort of experts in that field, you have had expert in that field on, but I just want to note that the concepts and the reality are sometimes two different things. And I think the politics of immigration will shift if we are seeing some of the kinds of draconian proposals that Trump is proposing actually implemented.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I mean, there’s this notion in political science, which I find are really, which I, you know. I’m kid or miss on political science, to be honest. Totally honest. Like, sometimes useful, sometimes not that useful.
A concept there that I think is just really quite useful and also borne out by the data, which is called thermostatic public opinion, which is that when, you know, someone starts doing something on an issue like we’re going to give everyone healthcare, then people start being like, ah, I don’t know how I feel about that. The government is too big. And we saw this with immigration. You know, when Trump started doing his immigration stuff, the public opinion got way more pro-immigrant than it had been.
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And then when Trump went away and Biden took over and huge amounts of people were coming over the border, people got very anti-immigrant in public opinion. But the point being, that’s not a fixed thing.
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It moves and responds in all kinds of different ways.
Anna Galland: Yeah. That’s right. Conditions change and people’s thoughts and feelings and their focus changes as conditions change, right? Which is another reason for hope and optimism, just because we’ve just come off an election where it feels like the electorate shifted right, where it feels like a lot of people have some really ugly views about immigrants in our country. Yeah, okay, let’s like digest that, make meaning of it. And also remember that we can call forth better versions of people with our organizing, with our stories and with conditions as they change.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I mean, there’s this famous quote from a British prime minister named Harold Macmillan. And he was asked like, you know, what’s the hardest thing about being prime minister, being a statesman. And he famously said, events, dear boy, events. And it’s like that I think about that all the time, like event, like whatever the event is that, you know, when to go back to that morning in 2004, where it seemed like George W. Bush was a colossus. Like --
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- I didn’t know the largest financial crisis in 70 years was coming.
Anna Galland: Right.
Chris Hayes: None of us did. And it turned out like, well, that sure as heck changes stuff that changed his legacy --
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- changed the politics, changed the coalitions, changed everything. Like --
Anna Galland: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: You know, that stuff, events matter and we don’t know what events will be --
Anna Galland: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: -- but we have to be prepared to move around --
Anna Galland: To meet them. to meet with them.
Chris Hayes: -- to meet them.
Anna Galland: That’s right. And I want to be, I realized that there’s one version of being humble as an orienting posture, which I don’t want to suggest, which would be to say like, you know, there’s that fable, Chris, a friend was just telling me this. That like a man gets a cow and his neighbors are all jealous and he says, we’ll see. And then the cow runs away and his neighbors say, oh, I’m so sorry. And he says, we’ll see.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Anna Galland: And then the, you know, da, da, da, you know, like keep playing it forward --
Chris Hayes: Right. Yep.
Anna Galland: -- and at every stage he says, we’ll see.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Anna Galland: And his fortunes keep changing. I don’t mean to suggest that Trump being elected is in any way good. It is not.
Chris Hayes: No.
Anna Galland: It is terrible.
Chris Hayes: No.
Anna Galland: Like that one we’re clear on.
Chris Hayes: No, yeah.
Anna Galland: But it’s the, what are the conditions we’re going to be facing for the next four years? That’s where I think we need to be extremely --
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Anna Galland: -- open to things changing and nimble, right, to moving into them as they change, right? That’s, we’re going to have to be, and we will be, I’m confident.
Chris Hayes: When you talk about this coalition building and we talk about events, I’m curious, I have a whole thing I can do on this. And you know, listeners and viewers will get a lot of this because of a book coming out January 28th called “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource,” about attention is the most important resource. And Donald Trump and Elon Musk are of the main figures in the book because they understand it better than anyone.
So I’m going to be riding that hobby horse, but I’m curious for you, like how you feel that social media and the information attentional environment affects the work that you do and has done. And particularly if you could reflect on it over the 20 years you’ve been doing it. Because here’s why I want to set this up this way.
I sometimes think social media is like the root of all evil. And then I remind myself that like, if you go back and you read Taylor Branch’s, majestic, three-part, you know, chronicle of the civil rights movement. That’s, you know, whatever 800 pages per book, like 70 percent of it is just people beefing with each other, just beefing, like fighting constantly in a way that if it happened on Twitter, you’d be like, this is what social media does to people. And it’s like, no, this is what human life is. So like --
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- you’ve been in it long enough. Like you’re in a unique position to have been doing this work across the rise --
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- of social media. And I’m very curious how you feel given that experience. What is the social media and what is it just how factionalism and movements and coalitions work?
Anna Galland: Yeah. How much is it us and how much is it the tools --
Chris Hayes: The tools, yeah.
Anna Galland: -- which we have constructed and are now living within? I mean, I love that question. I think about it a lot and I’m so excited. I should say I am so excited for Chris Hayes’ new book to drop because I actually think it’s speaking to one of the central questions for social change makers, not just for humans living inside the weird, you know, bath of information --
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Anna Galland: -- which is our social media environment. It’s going to be so good. But I guess what do I see? I see the acceleration most clearly, like the speed of everything. And I hear I’m thinking about when I lived in Rhode Island post-college, from 2002 to 2004, organizing with the Quakers, who by the way, the writer Jonathan Schell once said to me, the Quakers are great because they’re usually right like 400 years before everyone else, which I was stuck in my mind for a long time. But they really are, you know, just a remarkable community, a durable community for sort of a bunch of core values, including anti-war organizing.
But when I was living there, I had this office in a church basement on the East side of Providence and I would host these coalition meetings with all sorts of a range of people that were pulling together, this, you know, Catholic peace groups called Pax Christi, student organizers, this young person who would stand out on a street corner and sell socialist newspapers on the campus of Brown University, this a little bit more establishment folks, church leaders.
Anyway, we built a coalition across lines of difference, faith, community, students, local businesses, da, da, da, da, patiently built it together and organized vigils and rallies and marches and protests and congressional office visits. And I learned the ropes.
Chris Hayes: Against the Iraq War.
Anna Galland: Excuse me, yes, against the Iraq War.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Anna Galland: And I really learned the ropes of organizing in that context. And then one day I went down to the Rhode Island State Capitol in fall 2002 before the invasion of Iraq in early 2003, because I got an email about a big vigil against the Iraq War. And I thought based on the coalitional work I had been doing, I could picture in my head, every segment of the community in Rhode Island who was engaged in some way in anti-war organizing. And I showed up there and because of early digital tools, a thousand people were on the lawn of the Rhode Island state capital, you know, with, they had gotten instructions by email from a person named Mary S to show up at a certain time and they didn’t know Mary and they had no connections to durable community organizations, but they were coming out because they shared that value, they knew they weren’t alone and they wanted to connect with others.
And so that to me, it was almost overwhelming at the time because it gave me a sense of all the potential we were not tapping with our existing tools and how slowly we were moving versus the speed that events were unfolding in the run up to the war with Iraq. So, I think of that speed and that like detection mode of finding people like you as being too relative strengths, I guess. The speed sometimes actually works against us. But for things like disseminating information, getting out the word, building momentum, da, da, da, it can be very powerful.
I guess what I would also say is that that speed, it’s like we’re living through the two sides of what speed is doing to us. We’re accelerating the pace of possible change in all sorts of ways, and we’re accelerating the pace at which we write each other off. And I don’t know what to do with that without on one level using those tools smartly. And by the way, I keep thinking that that’s like, that’s now ancient history. What’s going to be the move on of the AI era? What’s going to be the indivisible guide of the Trump part two era? I don’t know what that’s going to look like.
Chris Hayes: Well, I thought the AI era is a great setup for like jokes. You know what I mean? It’s just like.
Anna Galland: It sends you a lot of requests for money.
Chris Hayes: Yes, exactly. Or like bots, like a bot vigil. Like --
Anna Galland: I picture, you know --
Chris Hayes: Siri, write a letter to my congressman saying I don’t, you know, I don’t know.
Anna Galland: I mean, what I imagine, who, God, who was it? John Powell, the remarkable thinker about othering and belongings based out of California, just said as an aside in a conversation this year that he imagines our children coming home with their first AI boyfriend or their first AI girlfriend, right? Doesn’t that blow your mind as a parent? Like it’s going to be a weird world in all sorts of ways.
Chris Hayes: Oh, my God. You just truly --
Anna Galland: Isn’t that terrifying? Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Okay.
Anna Galland: Sorry, I didn’t mean to raise all of my blood pressure --
Chris Hayes: No, it’s okay. I’m --
Anna Galland: -- in this particular week, but.
Chris Hayes: My mantra for this week has been not to future trip, which is like a term. I don’t know who originated it. I got it from this podcast that I love called “Too Beautiful to Live,” TBTL, with Luke Burbank and Andrew Walsh, which is just two guys who hang out and talk and are great. And I’ve listened to for 10 years and they talk about future tripping and they also talk about borrowing trouble from the future, which I think is a great phrase and I forget where that comes from, but like you can start to future trip about a million things right now.
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And I feel myself doing it. It’s just like --
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- again, humble about the future. Don’t borrow trouble from the future.
Anna Galland: Yeah, don’t borrow trouble. I have sometimes been a grateful pessimist, which means I’m like, it’s going to probably go bad. Oh, I’m really thrilled it didn’t.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Anna Galland: But I actually think this is a moment not to be, like this is, again, let’s just reroute ourselves in one step at a time. Optimism based on some of the things we can already see, which is the emergence, strength and determination of people around us, et cetera.
But back to your question on sort of what are these social tools doing to our collective ability to organize. I talked about speed and the sort of double-edged sword of speed. I also just, I want to remind myself that the next generation of tools that are coming online will work differently, look differently, and they’re going to have a bunch of new leaders in the driver’s seat figuring out how to use them.
So as an old guard person, I feel like I’m now doing the work of saying, well, let’s remember the key principles of organizing when we start to figure out how these tools are going to work. Okay. Do we know how to make a persistent relationship with people so we’re not relying on corporate platforms as intermediaries? Do we know how to follow up with people? Can we build a community with some set of shared values? Do we have some agreements? Can we find a common aspiration and then live into it? Like, I almost --
Chris Hayes: Right.
Anna Galland: -- feel like I just want us to hold on to some of the best principles of organizing from the old school and respect the intensity and ferocity almost and the pace of the new tools and not psych ourselves out. Not, what’s it? Future doom, would you call it?
Chris Hayes: Future trip.
Anna Galland: Borrow future trip, not future trip --
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Anna Galland: -- or borrow trouble from the future.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, those are all, I think, really wise. You’ve always been a very wise person when you’re 19 years old. And I think that one of the things that’s, I mean, one of the things that’s just sort of funny about being 45 is that like, I remember very clearly like being the vanguard of things, particularly on the tech front, you know?
Anna Galland: You were a blogger. Yeah, you were totally.
Chris Hayes: I was like, I got my first ISP connection when I was 13 or 14 years old, which I like bullied my parents into getting when I was like, I’m not doing this like walled garden prodigy stuff. And I was like, I was like surfing the internet with links, the browser before --
Anna Galland: Oh, God.
Chris Hayes: -- Marc Andreessen actually created Netscape to create the graphical user interface and what was called Mosaic, I think at the time. So, like, I just remember being at the front engine. Now I am not. And I just, it is, it is a funny and humbling thing.
Anna Galland: Back to humility, I know.
Chris Hayes: To just understand that like, I’m not like people are going to --
Anna Galland: They’re going to build all sorts of amazing stuff.
Chris Hayes: -- they’re going to stuff.
Anna Galland: I think we, I guess that is something I do find myself thinking a lot these days is like, what’s it going to mean for our activist movements, for our progressive social movements to have to insist on the human as we become more and more like hybrid robot types? I don’t know how to build a kind of set of demands or politics that has to factor that in that has to say, actually, we are going to be resolutely pro-human. But maybe we should be thinking about that.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Anna Galland: And we should also be asking our kids for advice on how to understand TikTok.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Anna Galland: That’s also probably a thing we should do sooner than then.
Chris Hayes: Do I put the emphasis on no cap or no cap? Is it no cap or no cap? You know, questions like that, which they would really love.
Anna Galland: I’m trying to think of the most cringey thing I’ve said to my kids in, and I think --
Chris Hayes: I say so many cringey things.
Anna Galland: It’s kind of endless.
Chris Hayes: But I do it as a bit. It’s like sort of I have a running somewhat self-aware bit. My daughter, my oldest daughter says lock in about everything, which I love.
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I know you. She actually likes it when I use it. She’s like, lock in.
Anna Galland: And can you just use that in a sentence? Like it’s as we anticipate, how do you say it?
Chris Hayes: Like get ready to like to focus, like lock in.
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like do it, like get it done, lock in.
Anna Galland: Yeah. Wait, okay, let’s keep playing with that for one more second and say, we’re heading into a hard time, it’s going to be hard.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Lock in.
Anna Galland: So like, but we have some, yeah, lock in. We have some clear mandates ahead, which are to take care of each other, to take care of ourselves, to pace ourselves for years of work. This is a marathon, not a sprint that we’re entering.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Anna Galland: And to get real clear on some of the values and principles that are going to undergird the work ahead. Like lock in. Let’s do it.
Chris Hayes: Lock in, I mean, if I can get real talk for a second.
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I am a person who, there are certain compulsive behaviors I have, and I say that, but I have been lucky enough in my life that I have never personally wrestled with addiction. It has not been a thing I’ve had to deal with. I know so many people, as literally does everyone, who has wrestled with addiction, different kinds of addictions and recovery. And I’ve read a ton about it and talked to people about it, but I’ve never had to like do it. And I really did in the last few days, find myself doing the AA one day at a time where I was like starting to look down the barrel of four more years.
I mean, look, world’s smallest violin. I’m incredibly privileged in every possible way a person can be privileged. And I really mean that. And I’m incredibly grateful every second for it. But like I have spent nine years like thinking about Donald Trump. And like, it is a lot.
Anna Galland: Oh, man.
Chris Hayes: And you know, staring down the barrel of another four is like not a great feeling.
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And it was a strong enough not a great feeling that I started to feel a little bit of like the plummeting on a roller coaster feeling.
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: As I started to feel it and I had to literally go to the like, one day at a time. You know, it was the first time --
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- in my life that I’d ever --
Anna Galland: Needed to reach for those tools.
Chris Hayes: -- needed to reach for that tool in that very specific way that people in recovery, I think use it. Not that I’ve ever been in recovery, but like I found it really helpful of like, you don’t have to be sober the rest of your life. You don’t have to be sober for the next, like to skip the next drink.
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I have to do today’s show. And that actually really helped me to just --
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- honestly get through yesterday --
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- when I was really feeling it. And I think that marathon, not a sprint, there’s all these cliches one day at a time.
Anna Galland: Yeah. But they’re cliches because they’re kind of useful sometimes. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Super useful.
Anna Galland: Yeah, I also think the AA model, I actually feel like there’s probably a whole fascinating dive to do in why it’s been so effective for so many people. But one thing, one piece of it that I, as I understand it, is that it’s resolutely social. You show up to an AA meeting --
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Anna Galland: -- for and with other people. You don’t try to conquer very scary or very hard things alone. And that does also feel like a key principle for all of us in the time ahead. I actually pictured this week my friend, Cristina Jimenez, who is one of the original Dreamers. So an undocumented young person started an organization called United We Dream. That organization is absolutely on the front lines of all sorts of scary stuff heading into this administration. And Cristina wears a necklace that says unafraid.
And I just literally thought of that necklace this week because I thought if I had already faced some of the horrors of being so uncertain about my future and my family’s future in a country that is making me feel like I’m not welcome despite all the things we’re giving to it, I would probably be scared. But Cristina is insisting on courage. And if she can insist on courage, I can insist on courage right next to her. What was the phrase again? Hand in hand, like we will not let go of each other’s hands.
Chris Hayes: No one let go of anyone’s hand.
Anna Galland: No one let go of anyone’s hand. Like we’re going to be here with and for each other. That’s part of our commitment to our country, I think to ourselves, to all of our brothers and sisters here. Like that’s what we got to do.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
(ADVERTISEMENT)
Chris Hayes: This has been great. I’m going to take it in like a maybe like an overly critical direction, but I want to just push on this a little bit.
Anna Galland: Good.
Chris Hayes: We’re all sort of being humble. And like, let me just say this. There’s a lot I think the cable news has done wrong.
Anna Galland: Likewise, the left. Well, each --
Chris Hayes: And a lot that I have --
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- like there are things I am, part of the reason that I haven’t slept in weeks is I am constantly, I mean, and I mean constantly, I mean like at four in the morning in my head, like assessing what I have done wrong, the mistakes that I’ve made, tactical decisions about what to cover, things I haven’t covered. Like, you know, so I want to just say that like, I’ve done a lot, made a lot of mistakes. We’ve, in cable news, 100 percent. But I want to ask about an institution that is known in democratic politics as the groups. Because --
Anna Galland: Yes.
Chris Hayes: -- I think this is actually a really important conversation and I think is going to be an important conversation here. For people that don’t know what the groups are. The groups are, well, how would you explain the groups to someone that doesn’t know what the groups are?
Anna Galland: I mean, I’m assuming there’s actually probably different versions of this conversation. I’m assuming that you’re thinking of like the independently-funded progressive nonprofit ecosystem, which exists independent of the Democratic Party, is connected to academia culturally, is connected to liberal media in various ways, but exists outside of politicians and party actors that have the kind of discipline of needing to go out and stump for votes and are advocating for a specific set of issues, communities, agenda, whatever.
Chris Hayes: Exactly. So, right. So, like, you know, the human rights campaigns, Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, and I’m not saying this like disparagingly at all. I’m trying to like actually describe a really, I’m trying to describe a reality about --
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- Democratic Party and progressive politics that’s important for people to understand that people outside of it don’t really understand. That there is a cluster of independently funded, sometimes membership organizations, often not membership organizations that are progressive organizations that have different electoral arms, 501C3s, and serve as a kind of like communicating policy mediating force between what we might describe as like the progressive base of like actual voters on the ground and the Democratic Party as like an institution. And different versions of this have tried to solve this sort of problem of organizations without members, which is a very famous coinage --
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- by a political scientist whose name is escaping me at the moment, that like sometimes these groups could want really good things, but like it’s unclear who they’re representing. And they have a lot of weight in Democratic Party politics.
Anna Galland: Yep.
Chris Hayes: A great example of a counter to that is a labor union that has elected leadership and move on, which I think one of the fascinating things, that the reason I’m asking you is one of the fascinating things about MoveOn is it was a totally new type of quote, unquote, “group,” because unlike some of these other groups that don’t have this direct membership representation happening --
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- it was a membership organization and is a membership organization all the way through.
Anna Galland: Yep.
Chris Hayes: And I guess my, I just sort of want you to talk to me a little bit about this layer of --
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- these institutions that matter a lot and are going to matter a lot in this era.
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And if there are ways to think through lessons about changes there.
Anna Galland: Yeah, I know. I really appreciate that question. And it’s something I have thought a fair bit about, I guess, a couple things I’ll offer. One is that there’s a saying within MoveOn as an organization that I’ve found really useful in lots of contexts over the years, which is that, MoveOn as a basically liberal populist organization, right? It tries to channel the aspirations --
Chris Hayes: That’s great, yes.
Anna Galland: -- and values of millions of people. It retains accountability to them through a variety of different things like membership votes and da, da, da. That MoveOn has this kind of principle that I’ve found grounding, which is strong vision and big ears, meaning you can’t lead anyone. You can’t lead yourself, your family, your community, your party, your organization, your company, without having a vision of where you’re trying to go. People want that from leadership in various ways. Even anarchist collectives will have, you know --
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Anna Galland: -- a vision of some sort that emerges, right? Quaker meetings will.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Anna Galland: You have to have a vision of where you’re trying to go, what you’re trying to do. But also having big ears to listen to what’s real for people in their life, in their lived experience on the ground. Unions do this, like they have to do this because they serve a membership base, they get their dues from members, da, da, da. And I do think that there is a way in which all organizations in civil society, and this is not just true on the left, like in a thorough going way, I think our democracy would be healthier if every group had more accountability to a real base of people in some structured way. It doesn’t have to look like union dues, doesn’t have to look like digital members. It could be a range of things.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Anna Galland: But I do think it’s an interesting challenge to think like, how could my organization be a bit more rooted in the people it claims to serve or the interests it claims to advance? I think that’s true across the spectrum.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Anna Galland: And then the other thing I just was, actually just sitting with the other day was that organizations that are pro-democracy of all sorts that want to have a strong vision and big ears are also going to need to have a strong stomach in the period ahead because we’re going to need to work with a bunch of organizations that we do not agree with at all on a range of things --
Chris Hayes: Great point.
Anna Galland: -- in order to stand as part of a broader united front or a broad big tent that is for democracy, for the protection of vulnerable people and all the rest of it. So I could say more about the organizational layer, but that’s the first thing that you brought to my mind.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, that’s a great point. And I’ve been thinking about this in the context of personnel, where we were talking about this on air. It’s interesting, we sort of had a disagreement. I mean, a friendly and collegial one when I was on the panel with Rachel and Joy, where I was like, I’ve changed my mind about whether people should go work for the Trump administration, which is that I think they should.
And what I mean by that is, if you’re the kind of person who’s on the fence, who’s like, I’m a Republican, I think he’s like, an awful person, but I, should I go serve my country? I think if you’re that kind of person who thinks like, I’m a Republican, I don’t really like Trump.
Anna Galland: Right.
Chris Hayes: Should I go in? And like, I think you should. And the reason I, and which is different than what I thought the first time around. And the reason is just what happened in January six, which is like, truly like, but for the decisions of like a pretty small group of people who, to be clear, have terrible politics and have done terrible things and who I think like, need to like repent before they’re God what they’ve done, like truly like I can’t strongly condemn. But, but for a group of those people doing the right thing when it counted --
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- we really could have had a coup, like there genuinely could have been a coup. And the thing that really stopped it was people whose politics I loathe doing the right thing in the right moment.
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And I kind of feel like I want as many of those people with the potential to do that at the right moment inside this administration right now as possible.
Anna Galland: Yeah, I haven’t worked out my thoughts on that. I know what you mean. There’s a strong strategic argument for holding the line and not legitimizing them --
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Anna Galland: -- through going in or right. And so I guess that’s the question is.
Chris Hayes: Yes, that’s the other --
Anna Galland: Is that line still possible to hold?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Anna Galland: Yeah. And what’s the sort of benefit and cost of going in? I am, I guess I just don’t yet have quite enough of a sense of what’s going to happen to institutions that are conflicted. And I would like to have a better sort of strategy.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Anna Galland: I’m thinking here, like every company in America is right now trying to figure out, oh, God, a business leader yesterday told me that the message from the administration has been, get ready to build, get ready for retribution. So, like business leaders who are hearing that kind of message are like, how do I get on side? And then organizations that are nonpartisan that serve, right?
Chris Hayes: Oh, my God.
Anna Galland: That serve lots of different constituencies are now trying to figure out how to kind of accommodate to a fascist faction. I hate that. And I don’t know.
Chris Hayes: I hate that.
Anna Galland: I don’t know what the strategy is.
Chris Hayes: Don’t like that.
Anna Galland: Don’t like that. Right. But I think we are going to need to figure out what our strategy is to hold the line.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Anna Galland: When also there’s a strategic argument to sometimes go in to try and do harm mitigation --
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Anna Galland: -- which is the only thing you can do.
Chris Hayes: Great point. Let’s end on this final question, which I want to end on kind of like an up note, but it’s one I really believe. And I said this on Bluesky the other day, by the way, if people are looking for a social media site that’s not owned by --
Anna Galland: Propagandists.
Chris Hayes: Propaganda, like a genuinely vile propagandists or another billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, like Bluesky is great. I recommend it. And it’s like, it’s got vibes of like Twitter, circa 2011, 2012.
So I said this on Bluesky the other day. One thing I think I want to counter is, I want to hold the genuine menace and threat and fear people have about what these folks are going to try to do. But I don’t want to see them, their big bad wolf bond villain shtick.
Anna Galland: Totally.
Chris Hayes: Like, just like this idea, like we’ve got a plan. It’s like, you guys are jabronis.
Anna Galland: You guys are feckless. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: You are idiots. Like some of you are smart enough, but you also just like trip over each other. I saw you do this the first time. Like again, that doesn’t minimize it. And then people are like, well, you can still be stupid and destructive. Totally. Like I’m not minimizing. I’m just like, let’s not overly seed --
Anna Galland: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- how sophisticated and planned out and thought out they are. Like --
Anna Galland: These guys are knuckleheads. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Give me a break. Like I just, I’m not going to be scared of you. Like, no, like, war, retribution. You talk a lot. These people talk a lot of smack. But just, you know, don’t see them that in advance is sort of one of my big mantras here.
Anna Galland: Yeah. It’s funny because I’m thinking I want to take the things that they could do very seriously --
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Anna Galland: -- while also taking them, while seeing how small, how --
Chris Hayes: How small.
Anna Galland: -- I was about to use the word pathetic, which may be not quite right, but just how small and how, they’re kind of embarrassing, they’re cringed.
Chris Hayes: They’re creepy weirdos.
Anna Galland: Creepy weirdos.
Chris Hayes: They’re a bunch of creepy weirdos.
Anna Galland: And that actually, back to the international perspective, that is something I also have internalized from some of these folks overseas who’ve dealt with real serious autocrats is they’ve managed to laugh in the face of these guys and say --
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Anna Galland: -- you’re kind of embarrassing and pathetic, man. Again, that, I think --
Chris Hayes: That’s a great point.
Anna Galland: We need to continue laughing at them because they’re so small. And to your point, Chris, and I know we’re winding down here and I do want to say thank you so much. You’re the best. You are just like such a pleasure to be in dialogue with about anything, including at the direst and darkest moments. And I think that you’re using your platform for the good. So just like much appreciation for all the things you’re doing. And as we wind down, I do want to say, I think we can take the risks seriously, but also take our own power --
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Anna Galland: -- and even more seriously.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Anna Galland: Like we have power, momentum and --
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Anna Galland: -- possibility in this moment far beyond --
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Anna Galland: -- what anyone I think is currently really seeing.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Anna Galland is a long-time progressive organizer. She was the executive director for years of MoveOn. She works with a range now, national pro-democracy organizations, coalitions leaders. She teaches about democracy, renewal, and social movements at Northwestern University. And we’re just so lucky to have you in the fight, Anna. Thank you.
Anna Galland: Thank you, dear. Stay steady.
Chris Hayes: You, too.
Anna Galland: We got this.
Chris Hayes: Well, once again, great thanks to my old dear friend, Anna Galland. I mean, I don’t know what you guys are listening to, what you’re feeling like listening to. A lot of you are probably pretty checked out from politics. Maybe you’re not listening at all. Maybe I’m just speaking into the ether.
But to the extent you’re here and hear my voice right now, I hope you found that useful or invigorating in some senses. I truly did. And we’re going to try to do more conversations like that going forward over the next few months as everyone kind of gathers themselves.
As always, we’d love to hear your feedback. So please send us emails withpod@gmail.com. You can get in touch with us using the hashtag #WITHpod on a bunch of social platforms. Search for us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. I am on Threads, what formerly was known as Twitter, and Bluesky, which by the way, Bluesky is really blowing up. I think it’s my favorite social media app at the moment. I’m @chrislhayes there. I suggest you come over. Lots of people coming over leaving the Musk site.
Be sure to hear new episodes every Tuesday. And as a special to MSNBC premium subscribers, we’ve got a very special episode next week with the one and only Rachel Maddow, which will be only available to MSNBC premium subscribers. “Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. This episode was engineered by Cedric Wilson and features music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mention here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.