S2 Ep1038: Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin: The Power of 'No'
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Who are Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin and what is Indivisible?
Das sollte bei der Zeit, in der ihr das hört, auf die nächste Level-Feed schauen. Auf diesem Show... We're getting earnest and activist-y, which you all know is a little bit out of my comfort zone, so I'm excited for it. They are the co-executive directors of Indivisible, the grassroots movement with thousands of local groups across the country. Its mission to elect progressive leaders, rebuild our democracy, and defeat the Trump agenda. The Indivisible protests were the hands-off protests you saw a couple weeks ago, and... Coming up, the next big one is Saturday, June 14th, where there will be no Kings rallies and marches on the day that Trump is throwing himself a birthday military parade. It is Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin. Levin?
Which one are we doing? Is it like Mark Levin, like the great one, or Ezra Levin, like Sandy Levin?
You nailed it. First one, Levin.
Levin, I got it right. I am so excited to do this. You guys were in a room together. It was so cute. You're married and you started this together. And we're going to do kind of like a kissing booth type podcast situation. But, you know, for sound purposes, we've had to separate you. I want to start before we get into the very important work you're doing. Give people the background.
How did the Indivisible movement start?
How did this happen? What is it like to work with one's spouse in a high stress environment like running protests? Give us the origin story.
So, our background is that we both got our start as congressional staffers in the early Obama years on the Hill. Ezra worked for a member from Texas, I worked for a member from a deep red district in Virginia. Perriella, I saw that.
Tom Perriella, that's right. I worked in that district back in the day.
Oh, yeah.
You're not going to age me. I was a Republican then, too, so we're not going to talk about it.
We could go into that at a different time, yeah. Anyways, it was an education in a lot of ways, but the big one was that we interacted a lot with the Tea Party in our jobs. We saw them organize, we disagreed enormously with their bigotry, their violence, but we also saw some very effective organizing tactics. And each of us moved on. We went on to do other things in our lives. I worked on human trafficking, Ezra worked on poverty policy. But after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, we kind of like went back to that period in our lives and thought, Hey, there's some lessons that we can learn from this, right? We're in this moment where everything that we care about is under attack. And we've actually just seen a model of what it looks like to organize locally in a way that puts pressure on your local elected officials and significantly impedes the agenda of the other party. And so We basically took all the lessons that we had learned watching the Tea Party operate. We turned it into a how-to guide to organizing locally to stop the Trump agenda.
And we put it out on the Internet in December 2016. We thought our friends would read it. We thought they would maybe share it with their families when they went home over Christmas. We were not prepared at all for what happened next, which was that thousands of people started reading it and sharing it and using it as the basis of forming local groups, the
What strategies did Indivisible learn from the Tea Party?
title of the guide that we had put out was called Indivisible. Suddenly there were indivisible groups all over the country who were picking it up and gathering communities and starting to organize and hold their elected officials accountable.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
Who are Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin and what is Indivisible?
0:50–2:00
2
How did the Indivisible movement start?
2:00–3:42
3
What strategies did Indivisible learn from the Tea Party?
3:42–5:42
4
What are the challenges and successes of grassroots organizing?
5:42–10:48
5
How does Indivisible adapt to the current political climate?
10:48–19:54
6
What are the future plans for Indivisible in upcoming elections?
19:54–51:40
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Bulwark Daily
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