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And now a word from Ezra Levin at Indivisible.

This week’s actions are all about fighting bravely and pushing others to be brave with us — from Disney execs in the Kimmel showdown, to our Democratic senators in the funding fight, to our communities on No Kings Day. But first, Ezra addresses the past few days’ big news.

A while back, Leah and I watched the HBO miniseries Years and Years, which tells a dystopian fictional story of the UK’s slow decline into authoritarianism. Each episode jumps forward a few years, with the technofascist story lurching ahead ever more menacingly. Emma Thompson is great as an authoritarian leader, but it may hit too close to home if you’re (reasonably) looking for escapism now.

Unfortunately, our reality is not just some dystopian fiction. Things that all-knowing political commentators dismissed as alarmist months ago are now being defended by MAGA footsoldiers and both-sided by upstanding political commentators. The simple facts are galling:

The president of the United States said publicly, “I couldn’t care less” about right-wing political violence.

His regime then bullied ABC/Disney to censor Jimmy Kimmel for being too critical.

And the administration is now widely reported to be preparing a crackdown on political opponents.

But as threatening and dangerous as all this is, what I see here is a weak regime lashing out. This is desperate, bizarre stuff that will backfire if we make it backfire.

The regime is making a mistake. We’ve got to take advantage of that. I’m not a professional political commentator (thank god), so here’s my take as a pro-democracy organizer instead:

The regime is overplaying its hand. They think they are now justified in cracking down on free speech, peaceful protest, and the opposition. But they’re wrong — they don’t have the support for it.

We’ve seen this kind of overreach and blowback again and again this year. “Winning” issues for Trump — immigration, cancel culture, crime — all crumble in the aftermath of his spasms of authoritarian power grabs.

Americans don’t like masked men disappearing people to foreign gulags. Americans don’t like invading and occupying American cities. Americans don’t like rigging the next election to protect the regime from accountability. Americans don’t like crackdowns on freedom of speech.

And over the past few days, Americans have shown that. Just as we were about to send a different version of this newsletter, ABC/Disney reinstated Kimmel.

Pressure works! This happened because Disney executives — including CEO Bob Iger and Entertainment Co-Chair Dana Walden — felt the heat:

Tens of thousands of Disney fans moved to cancel their streaming services, Disney trips, and more until Kimmel was reinstated. At one point, so many people were cancelling their Disney+ subscriptions that the page crashed.

They were joined by Disney stars who announced their own account cancellations and skewered their employer for capitulating.

Responding to popular outrage, enough people in power spoke up. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez sounded the alarm about the illegality of threats by her colleague, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, and congressional Democrats called for Carr to be subpoenaed.

By all accounts, ABC/Disney caved to Trump because they thought it’d be the easier thing to do, but they were not in any way prepared for the blowback that followed. They bought into the image of Trump as all powerful — but found out pretty fast that everyday people hold a lot of power, too.

The regime wants to look all powerful — we shouldn’t let it. On Friday, I talked to Jen Psaki on MSNBC about the Disney pressure campaign and the regime’s escalation. My main point: The best way to fight back against Trump’s attacks on our rights is to exercise those rights.

We did that over the last few days by pushing Disney to reverse course. Now, we’ve got to do it again — by making No Kings on October 18 an enormous, historic demonstration of people peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights.

We’re closing in on 1,500 events on the map with nearly a month left. We’re exceeding the rate of new event registration we saw for No Kings in June — then the largest domestic protest in years — meaning this is shaping up to be the largest peaceful protest in modern American history.

I want to close out with the guy who closed out our official No Kings launch last week. Mark Ruffalo — one of the Disney stars who pressured the company to reverse course — told us: “We’re the home of the brave and the land of the free. But if we want to be free, then we gotta be brave.”

Damn, Mark, you said it. Read on to this week’s action items for some actionable ways to be brave — and push others to be brave, too.

In solidarity,
Ezra Levin
Co-Executive Director, Indivisible