Amanda Carpenter
speaker
949 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 11 Aug
Amanda Carpenter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's just a licensing agreement.
Yeah, so this is something that I've been contemplating, and I expect to launch a newsletter through Protect Democracy. We have a free newsletter. Please subscribe. It's called If You Can Keep It. But the biggest challenge we have ahead is, number one, distinguishing between what are real threats and what's just noise, right? Like, you know, I wrote a book.
God, it was 2018, Gaslighting America, Why We Love It and Trump Lies. And we know, just because we've lived in Trump's America, how he deliberately manufactures chaos to create confusion, to polarize people, to give himself operating distance and create opacity between himself and the press. so that nobody can really understand what he's up to and that all accrues to his benefit.
So that's like the first layer task. But the second layer task is that He's going to have immense power. He expects to use it. So how do we focus on the things that really do matter in a productive way? And so what me and my colleagues at PD have been talking about is, okay, well, what is the most important thing that we can do going forward?
And we've sort of landed on the idea that it all revolves around protecting electoral competition in the future. Like we need the ability to compete. And I'm not talking about us as, you know, protect democracy, but the greater we, you know, everyone who engages in politics, how do we compete effectively in 26 and 28? And that really isn't a task that should be left to the candidates themselves.
at the last minute to organize campaigns per se. I think we can see that evidence by what happened with Kamala Harris, because you really need much more infrastructure at the front end. And the biggest threat that Trump poses is entrenching power, expanding reach to sideline opponents. That essentially is what everything... It's preventing urbanism.
The authoritarian playbook is all about sidelining opponents when you look at the end game of it. And that's all for the purpose of staying in power. This is why autocrats don't leave power. And this is probably one of the most you know, controversial things that we talk about, that JBL talks about, the idea that Trump will install himself into power and never leave. And that is a very real thing.
That is what autocrats do. He ran for three, for president in three consecutive elections and is back now. And maybe if he doesn't stay in power, he doesn't seek a third term, the odds are that he will play as kingmaker and call the shots behind the scenes and continue to play that role.
And so everything that we should be looking at should revolve around finding ways to maintain a level playing field. I think that is the biggest threat. It's Trump entrenching power. And so we have to find ways to fight for that level playing field. So what does that practically mean?
Number one above all, it's protecting the civic space, our free speech rights, the right to report, the right to speak about things. Because if you lose that, if they are successful in suing critics like Olivia Troy to bully her into silence, if they are able to shut down Liz Cheney because of what she did to speak out against January 6th,
you are not going to have the ability to organize a campaign.
And so this can take a lot of different forms, but protecting the space to speak is, wherever that comes, is critical. And next step to do that is protecting individuals and organizations who are targeted because they challenge the administration.
This is where the idea of you fight to protect Liz Cheney, not because she's Liz Cheney and you like her, but because if they realize they can take her down with these meritless prosecutions and such, they're going to go after other people. So you fight on the first ground. You fight to defend those first targets.
And I think along the way, that can have a unifying effect that helps the organization, that helps the campaigns, that helps the candidates refine these pro-democracy messages in a way that are relatable to the public and not just speaking about it in abstract terms. And that is how you get along to the business of winning elections and along the way, making sure that you are protecting elections.
the rights to free and fair elections, because electoral competition, this doesn't just mean, oh, we can go have a vote in November, 2028, because there's a lot of authoritarian regimes where people have the guise of elections. They're just meaningless because the public already lost the ability to muster any meaningful opposition in the buildup to them.
Yeah, I mean, this gets into the question, which I think is important for everyone in this space. So knowing that, you know, if you agree with my thesis, if this thesis that is developing, that protecting electoral competition, all those things that go with it are the most important thing. How do you distinguish between what are just normal policy disputes that are politics as usual,
and things that actually fundamentally threaten the future of fair and free elections and electoral competition. So let's take Kash Patel, for example. It would be within the purview of a new FBI director to come in and say, the president campaigned on stepping up drug enforcement, and I have a plan to go after these drug cartels, and allocate a bunch more resources to do that.
Like, okay, that is a normal policy. They are entitled to advance that. You may have political disagreements with it, but that's within the bounds of what an administration is entitled to do in terms of like policies.
That is much different than Kash Patel coming in and saying, I have an enemy's list and I am going to essentially harass them, use taxpayer resources against them for the purposes of sidelining them as political opponents. and obstacles to our power, right? Like those are two different things.
And being able to tell the difference amid all the challenges that we have coming, I think is going to be absolutely critical in terms of maintaining a productive means of prioritizing the threats.
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