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On January the 7th, 2021, I sat down on the floor of my closet with a podcast mic and nothing else
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And with a few minutes of righteous rage ranting, ended up recording the most popular episode of my podcast
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I'm distracted that we'd had in our first two seasons. And I think it's because none of us knew exactly what to say or to do, but at the very least
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we knew we had been forever changed. And so with no guests, no agenda, no segments, I just tried to keep it real
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July 2nd, 24, on what would have been my father's 73rd birthday, the man who taught me the power and the value of protest
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I feel the exact same way I felt on January the 7th. What happened in yesterday's Supreme Court is worse than what happened on January 6th
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January the 6th was a dramatic representation of a coup that had been afoot for a long time and that was going to continue long after it, whether or not January the 6th looked successful to the rest of us or not
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In a country, built on stolen land with stolen labor, the people who stand to benefit from that system the most
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are always going to be committed to maintaining their power at whatever cost by whatever means
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Listen, if you think that January the 6th was the first time that there was ever a coup attempted on this country by those very people
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sit down. Let's talk about John Wilkes Booth and the conspiracy not only to murder Lincoln, but to murder reconstruction
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One of the mini iterations of this attempted coup started 50, 60 years ago when a bunch of white supremacists looked up and realized
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that integration had passed under their very noses. They were not having that. Because all the coup is is an attempt to seize back power
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for the few when it has started to trickle out to the masses. The Ku Klux Klan, a coup in the form of racial terrorism
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Ronald Reagan, a coup in the form of economic oppression. The anti-abortion movement, a coup that projects itself
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to be pro but is actually anything but and is really hiding the segregationist ideals of its founder And just like the coup was afoot before January the 6th it continued on after Yes we did a hell of a lot of work to make sure that we beat back Trump in the 2020 election
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But while that was happening, they were still moving forward with their coup
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Don't say gay bills, a coup. Anti-trans bills, a coup. Banning books where kids will look up from the page and look around and say
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hey, I actually think this is fascism, a coup, making it illegal for their t-shirts
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to say, yeah, it absolutely is. A coup. Passing anti-protest laws, a coup
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Sending anti-protest sentiments out into the zeitgeist, a coup. Testing those anti-protest sentiments such that when people dare to say the Palestinians
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and Sudanese people and Congolese people and Haitians are, you know, actually human
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beings, that those people are not just punished by the government, that those people are
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actually ostracized from their social groups, they're punished by their employers, they're put
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on lists so that they never get employed. It doesn't actually take the government just to
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pushed that because now those people are being punished by private industry and universities
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Yeah, the coup was working. Crushing voting rights, decades after people had died to secure them
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a coup. Electing many Trumps all over the country to governor's offices and appointing those kind
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of folks to judges' benches. A coup. Making sure that the never Trump wing of your party has no
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chance at actually blocking Trump from getting back on the ballot, despite his lawsuits and criminal
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prosecutions and convictions, a coup. Stripping us of the right to bodily autonomy and the right to
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privacy by overturning Roe versus Wade. A coup. Leaking the Dobbs decision that did that to test and see if we would pour onto the streets en masse
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realizing that by and large, it didn't really happening, the coup is working. Enticing social media giants to not actually pay attention to the disinformation that they're
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promoting on their platforms as long as their owners get rich. Ok, engaging with publicly supporting and partnering with the far right swing that the entire
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globe is taking at the moment. A coo Sneaking in right ideologies on the backs of Tradwis and podcast bros a coup At this point the coup is going so well They don even have to hide the plan anymore
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No, they put it on paper and labeled it Project 2025. They get on television and talk about it proudly
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They have been publishing that they are planning on making sure that Trumpism, not conservatism, not even Christian nationalism
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Trumpism is the permanent law of the land that they're going to do it next year
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So yesterday, on July the 1st, 24, The Supreme Court that they had been assembling for such a moment as this did exactly what they were put together to do
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They took Project 2025. They took all of these pieces of the coup that had been being put together for decades and for generations
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They put a nice little bow on it all and delivered it at the door of Trump, white supremacists, and Christian nationalists right ahead of the election
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And if you untie that bow and read the inscription on it, it says that on July the 1st, we made it such that presidents can in fact be kings
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Because as far as they're concerned, the former president, who they want to be our first
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dictator. Just days ahead of this country celebrating so-called independence from tyranny and monarchy, they made it so that that person can be free from criminal
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prosecution for any official acts and they didn't tell us what those official acts are
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The other inscription you'll find on that bow is what they did just a week ago
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In the Chevron case, to make sure that federal regulators don't actually have much power
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to regulate. Us making it real easy for Project 2025 to just slide on through
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I got the guy exactly where they want them to be. I got the plan exactly where they wanted to be
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And if we're not careful, they'll have us exactly where they want us to be. Listen, I'm not here to tell you what to do
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But I will tell you what I'm going to do. And the first thing is to make sure that we all understand that July the 1st
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2024 is 10 times worse than January the 6th, 2021. Because it didn't take people hanging from buildings and trying to kidnap members of Congress
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and collecting rank and file white supremacists from all over the country
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who came to put their freedom and bodies on the line to defend an ideology that they didn even realize had been robbing them hand over fist for generations No it didn take all that on July the 1st It took six thugs in black robes with lifetime appointments putting the middle finger up to whatever
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bit of democracy we were here to protect and the democracy to which we say we aspire
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Sonia Sotomayor said, for democracy, I dissent because she understands, just like you
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and I need to. These decisions undermine the entire democratic experiment that we were still busy trying to solve
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I'm not going to tell you what to do, but here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to make sure that everybody I know understands that the struggle always continues
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no matter who's in office. The struggle continues right now to make sure that the administration we have in place
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is truly responsive to the will of the people domestically and abroad, from Gaza to Georgia
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And I am going to understand that my responsibility to do that does not negate my responsibility
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to ensure that democracy actually has the chance to fight. Because here's the thing, dictators don't respond to movements
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They crush them and every single person in them. If you think that the repression of protest movements cannot get worse from where it is today
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it absolutely can. And the person pushing the red button to make it happen
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isn't even punishable anymore by law. And while he is deploying his soldiers to crush us
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he'll be carrying out Project 2025 to crush everybody else. So I'm going to do whatever I can do
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to make sure that he never gets to perform an official act again
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I'm going to remind people that that's a first step and not a last step because the last time we beat him back
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a lot of people went home and that's part of the reason why we're in what we're in now. This is not a love letter
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I'm setting up the conditions for my fight. That's it. Thank you
