What Gives You Hope?

We close out this year from hell with a grounded kind of hope, not wishful thinking. Ushering us into a better new year is a montage of organizers, journalists, and activists reminding us that history isn’t finished, and that power has always been built from the ground up.

We end with a simple reminder: convert hope into power through solidarity, defiance, and showing up, again and again. Be relentless, like water eroding rock. That is how we win. 

As we face the year ahead together, what’s giving you hope right now?

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Show Notes:



Andrea Chalupa (00:10):

Welcome to Gaslit Nation, a show about corruption in America and rising autocracy worldwide. I am your host, Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of Mr. Jones, a journalistic thriller about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine, the film the Kremlin doesn't want you to see, so be sure to watch it.

(00:29):

As we close out this year and look ahead to the next, we here at Gaslit Nation wanted to take a moment to reflect on where our hope still lives. This episode is a montage of voices from the past year. Organizers, journalists, writers, activists, people who refuse to give into despair, even when the stakes feel overwhelming. They remind us that history isn't finished. That power is built from the ground up and that change has always come from the people who choose to show up. We're heading into a new year with our eyes wide open and with real hope.

(01:07):

Hope for accountability, hope for solidarity, and hope for a blue tsunami in the midterms powered by organizing turnout and collective action in every community. No matter what comes next, Gaslit Nation will be here with you. Every step of the way, we'll keep telling the truth, amplifying resistance and building toward a future that's more just, more free, and more democratic than the one we were handed. Thank you for being part of this community. Let's take this hope and turn it into real power.

(01:48):

I want to start with the dose of hope from Erica Smiley, executive director of Jobs with Justice, and then Katherine Stewart, author of Money, Lies and God. They remind us to take lessons from history, draw inspiration from our ancestors and build power through collective force.

Erica Smiley (02:06):

Well, first of all, the first steps in winning a war is recognizing that you're in one. And while the violence and the canons of the US Civil War may have ended 160 years ago, the ideological battle of the Civil War has raged on and they're winning and they're winning a lot. And so now we need to think about our theater battle, not so much in the lens of can we just pass a piece of legislation or can we get someone elected, but actually need to think of the different battlefields. And one of the key battlefields that anyone running for office needs to recognize is that one of the primary sites of the fight for democracy is happening on the shop floor. It's happening where working people are trying to fight for decision making through the lens of a union contract or industry agreement or market agreement or whatever it needs to look like, community benefits agreement.

(02:52):

While so many people have checked out of our political democracy, because if you look at who got the most votes in the election, it wasn't even Trump. It was the no votes. It was the extensions of people who were eligible. That the same people who have checked out of our political democracy are actively clawing to democratize their economic lives and their workplaces. And that's where the fight is. And so anyone who wants the attention of working people needs to acknowledge that. They need to acknowledge people like Jennifer who works at Amazon in New York and not at AOU, but at a different location who almost had a miscarriage because the company refused to accommodate her pregnancy, which is a law. We just both federal and New York state law for them to do. Sancioni Butler, for a long time, built cars at Ford in Dallas, Texas said, while a lot of women were out in the 70s fighting for women's liberation in the streets, our women's liberation movement was right there on the shop floor when we got a women's bathroom put within walking distance to where we were operating.You've got Big Mike at Bessemer Alabama's Amazon facility who during the murder of George Floyd discovered with his coworkers the extent to which the company was using police surveillance to keep workers in line.

(04:00):

And he said very clearly, "Actually, as much as you guys march out there, this is our Black Lives Matter movement right here." And so these are concrete issues that are happening in the world, whether it's the Me Too movement, racial justice, gender justice, that actually the battles are live and fully raging in our economic lives, in our workplaces and in our consumer lives. And that for anyone who wants to argue that their job is to expand democracy, even through the political framework of electing new leaders, they need to also then see that whatever laws are passed need to actually be systemic and increasing people's ability to have decision-making power, not just hoping on some savior to save us in Congress or in the White House, but to actually think about how we're expanding majority rule everywhere. And look, I'll say this last bit here, it may seem bleak in this moment.

(04:49):

Sure, we've lost the Citadel in the context of, but the war's not over. There's still plenty of fight. And in fact, I have a lot of hope around it. I like to think about how my own ancestors, I'm African American, how my own ancestors would've managed during the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act where it looked like people were literally getting disappeared from northeastern streets and sent to plantations, even though they might've been born free in the north. And we're seeing the same thing with migrant workers being sent to, like Kilmar being sent to El Salvador, even though he's technically supposed to be here. And so I like to think about how my ancestors managed in that moment because there's no way they could have known in 1850 that the Emancipation Proclamation was 15 years away. There's no way they could have known that Reconstruction was coming.

(05:38):

And so in this moment, as Dire as it looks, to recognize the people who are fighting, to recognize the battlefields where the fight is happening is not necessarily in the capital in DC, but on shop floors in every town throughout the nation, then it's important for us to then think about, we have no idea what this will look like 15 years from now, but we have to keep fighting with that vision in mind. It can't just be about the next election. It actually needs to be about the next couple of decades and actually building a democracy we're fighting for.

Andrea Chalupa (06:09):

Katherine Stewart, author of Money, Lies and God.

Katherine Stewart (06:13):

I think we should be careful of all this hopeless talk because that's part of what they want. This shock and awe is intended to make us feel intimidated and feel like we don't have agency. Well, we still do. We still have the freedom of speech. We still have the freedom to get involved in political organizations. Infrastructure really matters. Action really matters. It's really time for everybody to get out of bed. I understand that right after the election, a lot of people needed to take a beat and just kind of regroup. And now is the time for moral courage. I think that hope is in action. And I think when you get engaged in the struggle for our freedoms and for our future, it takes away all of that feeling of hopelessness because you see how many wonderful people there are in this country who really are fighting for our democracy.

(07:03):

I also think that there's things are happening so fast with the administration. I think that a lot of people can actually see when they start cutting Social Security and Medicare in order to give tax cuts to billionaires when you have old people on the street because they get kicked out of their residences or when you have children who aren't being fed when you have public schools just collapsing because of the siphoning of funding from them, when the government stops working in the way that it should, as rights for the people in the workforce are eroded, I think we really have an opportunity. I don't think there are any guarantees, but I think we should take courage from the fact that there are more Americans who would prefer to live in a functioning democracy, not perfect, but at least guided by the principles of equality and pluralism and rule of law than those who would like to live in a cronyistic kleptocracy where public money is being siphoned off by people at the tippy top of the economic ladder.

(08:05):

So I think we really do have some opportunities and ...

Andrea Chalupa (08:09):

Keep fighting.

Katherine Stewart (08:10):

Yeah. There are things we can do as individuals again, but there are things we can really only do when we join together with others. Everybody's got to sort of figure out what their strengths are and find their lane and join together with others.

Andrea Chalupa (08:24):

Another place I find hope isn't, of course, our young people, Gil Duran, the journalist behind the Nerd Reich and Carter Sherman, a journalist and the author of The Second Coming, Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future, show us that even as the old guard fails, young people are organizing, fighting back, standing up their rights, running for office, and pushing forward progressive change. 2025 was a year of Gen Z revolution all over the world and they are just getting started.

Gil Duran (08:59):

Well, there are certainly a lot more of us than there are of them, and that's why I would encourage people not to feel defeated or afraid. I mean, I think this is going to take millions of people in the streets at some point to send the message that we're not going to just give up our country without a fight. And I think these people are cowardly, they're sheltered, they're not used to having pushback. And that's why I think the Democratic Party establishment has made a catastrophic mistake by laying down the job and hiding under Iraq. I think people are looking for answers, people are looking for leadership right now, and all the people who supposedly cared, all the people who are the leaders of the party are just nowhere to be found. And what are they doing? Waiting for a poll to show that you should save the country?

(09:40):

It's just stupidity and cowardice. And look, don't underestimate the degree to which a lot of the Democratic establishment, including the consulting class, is tied in with some of these guys as well. There's a lot of people, Democrat or Republican, who only care about making as much money as possible while they can. And so I think there are people who are not as alarmed as they should be because it's in their best economic interest or so they think to go along with it. We've seen a lot of Democrats being bought off by crypto. I've seen a lot of Democratic consultants that I know suddenly in league with all these tech guys in some way or another on their projects. It's very clever to go out and buy up the opposition smartest people and put them in your own employ and make sure they're conflicted out from working against you.

(10:25):

Then look at what the Democratic Party's doing now, trying to put up people like Alyssa Slotkin and Ruben Gallego as the future. Crypto Democrats, basically people who owe their ascendancy to crypto. The same crypto pack that took out Sherrod Brown and spent money to destroy Democrats all over the country, puts these two Democrats in office. And what do they do? They sound like Republicans. And we saw this in San Francisco. There's this whole idea that you create a new kind of Democrat who's basically a Republican with a D next to their name, and that's the new politics. So it's a way of winning without even having to fight there. You just kind of plant your own people. They've tried to redefine moderate to basically mean what a Republican would've been 20 years ago, and that's what a Democrat is supposed to be now. And I think it's, again, this is the kind of thinking that Democratic establishment types tend to lap up and fall for every time.

(11:15):

But if you notice, the middle always seems to be moving further to the right. I think if we keep going this way in 10 years, Democrats will have to be giving Hitler salutes just to be considered moderate and they'll probably do that if it comes to that. So I think it's getting pretty ridiculous, but I think things are going to change. I think with the economy starting to go south, I think that even the most cowardly Democrats will remember their basic political instincts to pounce at things like that. I mean, if this were happening under Kamala Harris, what would the news look like today? What would be happening all over TV? It would be a constant nonstop. The editorial boards would all be demanding her resignation. But instead, Trump has normalized dysfunction, chaos, and corruption, and so everyone's just sort of paralyzed and unable to act and or has to treat it like it's normal.

(12:03):

So I do have hope. And part of what I do in writing this stuff is to provide some real clarity to people on what's happening. But I do believe there'll be some accountability at some point for the things that are happening today, but only if we decide that there will be accountability. And I think people need to understand how much power we really have. We've already seen it, people taking down Tesla and these things aren't organized by Nancy Pelosi or Kamala Harris or Joe Biden. It's just people taking the initiative. And I think that's where the real leadership is going to come from. I think we're going to see a new generation of leaders come out of this because it's become very clear that our old leaders aren't up to the task. And I think that's a good thing.

Andrea Chalupa (12:43):

Given all that you've reported on for so long now, what, if anything, gives you hope?

Carter Sherman (12:51):

Give me a second to think about that. Of course. Take your time. Make sure to not edit that out. My long, long pause. I do think that talking to young people has given me hope because they are so much more active in politics than I was at their age. I really did not understand how my sex life related to the broader world and what resources could have been available to me. I was sexually assaulted in college. I was sexually harassed in college, and I didn't understand that I had rights and that I could have gone to the Title IX office sooner, but I don't think that is as true anymore among young people. I think people do know about the resources that are available to them and they are taking advantage of them. I went to Charlotte, North Carolina in 2022, and I talk about this in the book, and I was reporting on a school district that was plagued by sexual assault accusations and specifically accusations that young women were reporting that they had been sexually assaulted in K through 12 schools and that the school administrators were not taking them seriously and violating their federal rights when it comes to sex discrimination and freedom from sex discrimination.

(14:06):

And it was very hard to watch how these young women were trying to stand up and defend themselves and defend their friends and to see that they felt like they were not being heard. Literally, in some cases, they felt like they were being silenced. And yet it was also so heartening to see that they were trying, that they kept it up anyway, that they knew that they deserved to be treated fairly and equitably as full human beings. And I talked to so many activists across the country for this book who felt the same way, who were defending their rights as young trans people, who were defending their rights as young queer people, who were defending the rights of other people, who were men who were fighting for reproductive rights, and felt that that was something that they should spend their time on. And so to see young people rise up and fight for whatever cause that they believe in in a way that I just don't know that we've seen since the 1960s, that to me is heartbeat.

Andrea Chalupa (15:02):

And it's not just the youth. Sandy Bacon, a Nazi hunter featured here on Gaslit Nation, reminds us that our elders continue to inspire us with their strength, resilience, and lifelong commitment to resistance.

Sandi Bachom (15:15):

You know what David Duke said in Charlottesville? He said, "We are here to support the policies of Donald Trump. That's why we voted for him." He was the head of the Ku Klux Klan, the grand wizard, former Grand Wizard of Ku Klux Klan. When Trump was elected the first time, there were 100,000 people in the streets, 50,000 people at a march would show up. And I think people are starting to wake up seeing what's happening in Serbia and what's happening in Europe, a million people in the streets. And that's the way to bring down a despot is the people. Patty Smith, she sang this song at Occupy Wall Street. I'd never heard it before. It says, "And the people have the power to redeem the work of fools. It's decreed on the meek, the grace is showered. It's decreed the people rule." And we have forgotten that.

(16:17):

We have forgotten it's up to you to get your ass out into the street. If you're not going to get to the fucking polls, which eight million didn't, you can rectify that. Get out there, bring your ... There's one woman who's with Rise and Resist. Rise and Resist is a wonderful group in New York. They did The Die-In down in Wall Street that was on Rachel Maddow. They're relentless. Every Tuesday, they go to Fox News and they hold their signs up. And they started these Tesla protests. Well, Elon Musk put them on a list and now they're being investigated for domestic terrorism. The people in this group, they're 60s, 70s, 80s, and one woman is 92. And she went inside the Tesla dealership on her red walker and I've got video of her walking by the red Tesla Signal. And I said, "How old are you?

(17:14):

" She says, "92." I said, "When did you first start protesting?" She said, "The Vietnam War, which is my generation." So we still have hope.

Andrea Chalupa (17:23):

Despite devastating setbacks and reproductive rights, there's real energy and hope in collective feminist movements. Mona Eltahawy, the author of Bloody Hell, Irin Carmon, the author of Unbearable, and Kate Manne, the author of Down Girl, these fearless voices remind us that patriarchy is the road to fascism and how to fight back.

Mona Eltahawy (17:49):

I think this moment is the moment for feminism, but it is a feminism that does not appease. This is a feminism that terrifies, a feminism that terrifies patriarchy, feminism that terrifies fascism. Because I often say fascism is to control what feminism is to liberation. But I know someone who is a writer and a philosopher from Ghana who refuses to identify as a feminist because she sees feminism as a specifically, she actually says, "I don't like feminism because for me, it's like a white woman arguing with her husband, and feminism is beyond that. And this is a feminism that just focuses on misogyny. I want a feminism that focuses on patriarchy, not just misogyny. And for me, to define patriarchy, it is a system of oppressions that privileges male dominance. It's not men. It is a system of oppressions that privileges male dominance. And feminism isn't anything a woman does simply because she's a woman.

(18:44):

Feminism is the destruction of patriararchy. So this is why I say what gives me hope right now is feminism because I think this is the moment where we as feminists who want to terrify can get our message across to people that whether you are a fascist in the Gulf, whether you are a fascist in Italy where Georgia Maloney is the first female prime minister, but she's a fascist or a fascist in the United States or Argentina, feminism is the way to fight that fascism because it tackles everything that patriarchy represents. And for me, patriarchy is misogyny, capitalism, homophobia, ableism, all of those things that hold up what I call the octopus of patriarchy. For me, patriarchy is the head of the octopus is patriarchy and each of the tentacles is one of those oppressions. And so the rage that feminism fills me with, and it's a rage that I welcome is what gives me hope right now, because like I keep saying, rage and risk.

(19:35):

And I want people to see feminism as not something that just fights so that we can help women fight their husbands like my friend from Ghana says. It is a feminism that dismantles all of those systems of oppressions that have helped white Christian nationalism, that have helped Islamic nationalism or Islamic supremacy, that helps supremacy and exceptionism of any kind co-opt people by bringing them in and saying," I can benefit you.

Irin Carmon (20:00):

"One day I want to write a story about the long-term planning that is or isn't happening. But for now, I would just say that what gives me hope is that in the meantime, people can't wait for the healthcare and the respect that they need. I'm honestly not sure about the answer. I'm not trying to dodge it about whether there are people who are thinking about the long-term. It took the right 50 years to get to where they were and they were absolutely relentless and broke every possible rule and norm to get there. I don't see strategically that kind of focus, but what I do see is that at the grassroots, the abortion funds and the reproductive justice informed doulas and the midwives and the organizers at the local level where there is, at least it's not politically impossible or even where it sometimes feels like it is.

(20:54):

I think what inspires me, the people that I wrote about in Unbearable, my book, Jose, the fiance of one of the women I wrote about who lost her life giving birth in a completely enraging and preventable way because of an underfunded hospital and a broken system. Jose, despite this horrific bereavement, he's raising his children, he's got his hands full, has become a maternal health activist. He is lobbying for better legislation. He is mentoring other fathers who are in the same position of having lost the mother of their children. He is actually training to become a doula. And this is somebody who had no connection to activism before. He grew up working class. He's a tattooed guy who drove a truck before this all happened. And I'm so incredibly inspired by his vision and his dedication to this. It's only been, hasn't even been two years since the passing of his wife.

(21:55):

I'm really inspired by Dr. Yeshika Robinson, who's one of the other five women that I write about in Unbearable, who despite the fact that it would be so much easier for her to practice medicine, reproductive medicine, anywhere but Alabama refuses to abandon her patients. And similarly, Robin Marty, who's the director of the clinic in Tuscaloosa, both of them looked for ways to keep helping after abortion became illegal, and that included in Tuscaloosa, it's gender-affirming care and the post-miscarriage care that one of the other women I write about needed. And in the case of Dr. Robinson, it's so ironic. We talked about the control of medicine. We're familiar with the fact that the state passes all kinds of laws before they could actually ban abortion. They passed all kinds of laws to make it really hard to run an abortion clinic with all kinds of fake regulations, right?

(22:48):

Turns out that they were willing to do that when it came to opening up a birth center if it threatened the monopoly of doctors in the state of Alabama. And so she ends up looking at these laws about opening up a new birth center, which has not been allowed because again, doctors have such a stranglehold over birth. And she decides that she's going to go to court to fight it, just like she fought the abortion clinic restrictions. And finally, she was able to open up this birth center in the former abortion clinic's building. So instead of, obviously in an ideal world, she would continue to provide all kinds of reproductive healthcare, but instead of cutting and running ... And there's a lot of great providers in working in blue states for people and contributing in their ways. But for the women of Alabama, a state with a huge African-American population that is not getting the healthcare that they deserve, for them to have a highly qualified, brilliant black woman doctor who is going to fight for their right to have a safe birth, whether it's in a hospital or somewhere else, I find that to be really, really inspiring.

(23:56):

And it's so much harder than you would think it would be considering this is a place that loves to talk about how pro-life it is.

Kate Manne (24:04):

So I wrote a piece on my Substack just after the Trump election, is there hope to find hope? And I think hope has been written a lot about in philosophy by excellent philosophers such as Katie Stockdale and others, also by Rebecca Solnit, who I'm a huge fan of. But I think of hope as something which is very much about we have to define what the hope is for and about. So when people say," Do you have hope? "And they don't specify the propositional object of the hope, it gets a little vague. It's like, " Well, I don't have hope that things are going to get better over the next three and a half years, but I do have hope that we can not have the level of decimation that we would have were it not for our resistance efforts. So I have hope that we can kind of make the damage less terrible that we can do both some damage control and also some harm reduction if we fight really hard at the often local level to fight these kinds of, I think, real systemic evil that are targeting people who, again, just are living their lives, trying to get things like healthcare, education, and adequate access to opportunity.

(25:25):

Instead of seeing ourselves as hoping for an improvement in justice, I think we can hope for things not backsliding as radically. So that's what I hope for, and that's what keeps me fighting.

Andrea Chalupa (25:40):

Legal scholar, Leah Litman, author of Lawless, reminds us that history isn't inevitable. Countries that have faced autocracy have had very different outcomes. We have more influence, more agency than they want us to believe.

Leah Litman (25:55):

I'm glad you asked about comparative examples because I think the threat of sliding into autocracy has been something many countries and former democracies have confronted and grappled with. And honestly, the outcomes in those countries have been different. I would put a country like Hungary in the category of a country that is superficially a democracy. They have a media, that media isn't independent, they have a school system, that school system isn't independent, they have elections, but they're kind of rigged. And so that's a country that basically hollowed out its democracy by converting it into an effective autocracy. And it did so through similar mechanisms as you were describing in Putin's Russia. Now, there was a similar movement and a similar threat in Poland, which was also kind of the target of an autocratic takeover, but the end result in Poland was not a system of entrenched one party power.

(26:52):

It's instead a country that was able to steer itself back from the brink through a combination of a strong political opposition party that garnered enough support to stave off some of the changes that could have had more permanent effect like in Hungary or in Russia. So the way I've been thinking about it is, are we going to emerge from this second Trump term as a country with considerable damage where we are going to have to repair a lot of what has been broken or are we going to emerge like Hungary where all of the civic institutions have been so hollowed out, we are no longer operating as a liberal constitutional democracy. And I don't think the answer to that is clear or for ordained. I'd say there have been some encouraging signs like the drop in approval ratings that Trump has, including on issues like immigration, some Republican senators pushing back on, let's say, the appointment of interim US Attorney Ed Martin or on Medicaid cuts or his attempted takeover of the Library of Congress.

(27:58):

There are some encouraging signs, but it does require people to stay invested for people to continue to show off for protests and signal like Donald Trump does not have a support of the majority of the country. His agenda doesn't have a support of the majority of the country. But no, I think it's fair to say there are real questions about what we look like at the end of this and what it takes to kind of bring us back.

Andrea Chalupa (28:23):

Absolutely. And one question I often get from Gaslit Nation listeners is what do we do if Trump declares martial law?

Leah Litman (28:32):

So it depends a little bit like what you mean by declaring martial law and what do-

Andrea Chalupa (28:38):

The 2028 election's coming up, he wants to stay in. No election, it's him for life.

Leah Litman (28:44):

Right. Yeah. That is just converting the government into one whose dictats no longer have to be respected. So that is just going to require that scenario, mass resistance, organized protest, any kind of civil, uncivil disobedience. But again, there are so many different variations that they could be trying. He had this executive order that basically tried to have the president assert control over elections in a way that is obviously wildly unconstitutional, but would have undermined the ability of people to vote. Congress is considering the SAVE Act that too could jeopardize the ability of so many people to vote. That's not declaring martial law and canceling the 2028 election, but it is, again, making our country not function like a liberal constitutional democracy. And so I just think the responses to any of these possibilities look different depending on what the specific tactic is that he tries.

Andrea Chalupa (29:47):

And the SAVE Act would require a very strict ID, a birth certificate to vote. And that obviously puts up a barrier for millions of women to vote because they've changed their names due to marriage.

Leah Litman (30:00):

Ridge. Yes, exactly. And it would also require proof of citizenship and whatnot, even though you have to establish citizenship when you register to vote.

Andrea Chalupa (30:08):

Right. So given all of these barriers that Republicans are putting up, given that there's been essentially a 40 year or so plan to get here, we've documented it on the show. We've had historians like Anne Nelson who wrote The Shadow Network and others to talk about the Christian Nationalism Reagan Revolution, how it's all been playing together to chip away at our democracy so that America's like that frog in a pot of boiling water. And I know young people today, we're now in its spring, it's graduation season and you're of course at the University of Michigan, you're all around young people. And the stories about how depressed many young people feel about the world they're inheriting with fascism in America, with the climate crisis hitting us in more apparent ways. What advice do you give young people graduating into this world?

Leah Litman (31:01):

Yeah, I would say don't count on much of anything. Don't kind of resign yourself to, this is what my career is going to look like. The world is changing and it's changing so quickly. I think you have to have some real flexibility about what any particular plan makes sense, what any particular career trajectory makes sense. That's one thing. The second thing is to encourage them to be curious and flexible in certain ways. And what I mean by that is our institutions don't have to be the way they are. And I think if you make sure you are educated to understand how they have become this way, what they used to look like before and all the choices we have for how they might look different, that is very empowering and that could provide us with like a path to changing the situation that we find ourselves in now.

(31:52):

What I usually tell my graduating students is just put in the work, like dig in and try to make the world a better place. And those are things you are never going to regret and make sure you have the time and space to do that.

Martin Luther King, Jr. (32:10):

We shall overcome. Nor before this victory is won, some will have to get thrown in jail some more, but we shall overcome. Don't worry about us before the victories won. Some of us will lose jobs, but we shall overcome. Before the victories won even, some will have to face physical death. But if physical death is the price that some must pay. To free their children from a permanent psychological death, then nothing shall be more redemptive. We shall overcome. Before the victories won, some will be misunderstood and called bad names and dismissed as rabble rousers and agitators, but we shall overcome. And I'll tell you why. We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. We shall overcome because Carlisle is right. No lie can live forever. We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right. Truth crush to earth will rise again.

(33:14):

We shall overcome because James Russell law is right. True forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne. Yet that scaffold sways the future and behind the damn unknown stand if God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own. We shall overcome because the Bible is right. You shall reap what you soul. We shall overcome deep in my heart. I do believe we shall overcome. And with this faith, we will go out and adjourn the councils of despair and bring new light into the dark chambers of pessimism. And we will be able to rise from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope. And this will be a great America. We will be the participants in making it so. And so as I leave you this evening, I say, walk together children. Don't you get weary. There's a great chapel.

Andrea Chalupa (34:18):

Grassroots organizers and civil society groups are core to my hope. Ahmed Gatnash, co-author of the Middle East Crisis Factory, shows how people keep fighting for justice, even under brutal conditions. And Shawn Werner, the political director of Sister District, reminds us that collective action and sustained resistance give us our best shot at protecting democracy here at home, especially when we do this work together. When you look around and you talk to civil society organizers on the ground and some of these brutal dictatorships, what, if anything, is giving you hope right now?

Ahmed Gatnash (35:02):

Really, it's the fact that they continue to exist against all odds against their own governments and a world system, which hates them and would find it so convenient that they stopped existing and yet they continue to exist and they continue to advocate for justice and equality, not just in their own societies, but globally.

Shawn Werner (35:27):

If we allow ourselves to question even our ability to do the work, I think that that's exactly what they want. To see an unprecedented mid-decade redraw in Texas in Missouri, that is now full intention. While it is obviously his opportunity to hold the US House, it's also just to make us think that none of the institutions are going to be able to withstand his pressure. And if we are not doing the work, the work of talking to voters and making sure that we are protecting the vote in each of these states, I think that that allows him to win. And so I would love to be able to tell you and your listeners, "Hey, it's absolutely everything's going to be okay." I can't do that. The thing that gives me hope is that by seeing people collectively throughout our nation taking action and trying to stand for our democracy and to protect our democracy, that's what gives us the best shot.

(36:30):

But when I allow myself to get into that dark head space, I realize that I'm letting them win. And so then I talked to one of our volunteers or I talked to the candidates that still have faith in their community, in their states and in our country to wake up every day to do the hard work, talking to voters, raising the money to get out our message. And so I wish that there was a silver lining and it's something that is very simple for me to say, yes, I can promise you that. Unfortunately, I can't do that. But what I can promise is that if we all collectively do this work together, we give ourselves the best shot at making sure that our voices will be heard, that our democracy will be protected, and we can only do that together.

Andrea Chalupa (37:15):

So what is the ultimate solution? What do we focus on? How do we stay grounded? It's what has gotten civilization this far, and that is mother nature. The awe inspiring power of nature. Chernobyl growing back, despite the worst manmade nuclear disaster in history, the resilient power of nature. That's the solution. Get out in nature, meet others in nature. To your loved ones, sucked in the matrix, hold space for them. Be their lifeline in the real world. Meet up in the park, invite them on a hike, get them among the trees, a healing source of power. Nature, if you're looking for something to believe in, believe in the awe inspiring power of nature. Go back to those basics. I know this is the stuff of Thoreau, and this is where resistance movements have turned to time and time again to try to make sense of the world and hold onto something real when everything around them felt like it was falling apart.

(38:15):

It's nature. That's the ultimate rule. It's nature because the reality is earth will still be here. What's up for debate is the species and whether it will still be here. Earth itself will be fine and earth will go through changes and the cosmos will go through changes. Ultimately, nature is the powerful force that always prevails and we're just a blip here. And the other warning for these guys, remember how I'm always saying, we're lucky they're so stupid. We're lucky they're so arrogant. Well, that matters. I know these tech titans seem unstoppable. They seem inevitable. They clearly believe that and they want us to believe that. These tech oligarchs are up against. They act and behave like dictators. Dicttators like oligarchs want you to believe that they'll live forever, that they'll be your past, present and future, but it's not true. No, we know that it's not true because most of Europe used to be trapped under dictatorship, including for nearly 50 years under the Iron Curtain just recently.

(39:20):

While Frankenstein is obviously the cautionary tale for all of these tech fascists, so is a more recent chilling example for them to look to, to see the ghosts of Christmas Pass circling their bedroom. And that is Jack Welch. Who's Jack Welch? Well, I entered the workforce out of college back in the mid 2000s. Jack Welch was the master of the universe at the time. As the longtime leader of GE, that's General Electric. Jack Welch was the world's first celebrity CEO. All executives wanted to be like him. Why? Because Jack Welch's ruling philosophy wasn't just greed is good, but that fear is good. At GE, Jack Welch called fear a powerful motivator and would regularly call the bottom 10% of his workforce that was deemed as underperforming. And every time Jack Welch would carry out more mass layoffs, Wall Street loved it and it juiced GE stock price.

(40:29):

As Republican deregulation and Democratic Party complacency turned Wall Street into a gambling den, Jack Welch ran one of the hottest casinos, so to speak, carrying out these risky deals at GE when he needed his stock to soar, more layoffs. What was the result of Jack Welch 's fear is the best motivator philosophy? Well, it led to a lot of blame and infighting and lack of trust. How can a company be creative and innovative without collaboration and trust? And there's more. Let's look at just how powerful GE used to be and how Jack Welch, Mr. Celebrity CEO, not only screwed over this American giant, but his nonsense philosophy spread like a virus to other American corporations and contributed to America's current income inequality crisis. And all those CEOs trying to be Jack Welch, they only hurt themselves and the economy. Here's an excerpt from an NPR interview with David Gelles who wrote the book on Jack Welch.

Dave Davies (National Public Radio) (41:48):

If you're concerned about the growing disparities of wealth and income in the United States, as well as the decline in unionization and the fact that our economy seems dominated by corporations committed to downsizing, outsourcing, offshoring, and financial manipulation, our guest, New York Times correspondent, David Gelles, says that to a remarkable degree, these trends can be traced to the career of one man. Jack Welch was the chief executive of the General Electric Corporation for the last two decades of the 20th century. In a new book, Gelles says Welch's ruthless cost cutting and single-minded focus on quarterly earnings transformed GE and made him a celebrity CEO, a darling of Wall Street whose methods were widely praised and copied by other corporate managers. But Gelles argues that the spread of Welch's management principles was bad for workers, bad for the economy, and ultimately bad for GE and the companies that followed his lead.

(42:46):

David Gelles is a correspondent on The Climate Desk at the New York Times covering the intersection of public policy and the private sector. Before that, he was a reporter and columnist for the business section for eight years. Before joining The Times in 2013, he was a reporter for the financial times. His new book is The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America and How to Undo His Legacy.

(43:11):

Well, David Gelles, welcome to Fresh Air. Jack Welch took over General Electric in 1981, and I remember it as a company that sold toasters and appliances and dishwashers and refrigerators. This was a company founded by Thomas Edison almost a hundred years before. Give us a sense of GE's role in the American economy and American life back then.

David Gelles (43:34):

As I dug into the history of GE, I found it hard to overstate not only the impact that GE still had in 1981 when Jack took over, but really its role in the history of American industry for the better part of the century before that. This was the company that brought us electric light bulbs, power plants, x-ray machines. This was the company that introduced everyday products like the toaster oven. They were behind the mass marketing of radio sets and televisions, dishwashers. The list just went on and on, and that was just on the consumer side. When you looked at their influence on industry and government beyond what we might find in our kitchens, they were no less influential there as well. It was GE that helped put men on the moon, on the Apollo missions. You go back and look at those pitches and there are lines and lines of GE engineers working side by side with NASA engineers.

Andrea Chalupa (44:43):

So where is General Electric now? It's gone. It went from being one of America's most innovative, most powerful companies to being broken up and sold off for parts. The G Empire got hollowed out and turned into three different companies, and Jack Welch is now being taught as a cautionary tale. Elon Musk is the next Jack Welch. Sam Altman is the next Jack Welch. Mark Zuckerberg is the next Jack Welch. If they don't want to listen to Mary Shelley's warnings in Frankenstein, they can listen to the rattling chains of the Ghost of Jack Welch with Henry Kissinger in hell, warning that all masters of the universe eventually meet the great equalizer, known as Mother Nature and Nature always wins. Always.

(45:36):

So for 2026, everyone, I'm wishing you unity, solidarity, and defiance because that is how we usher in a new year from hell for the fascists who are we are going to overcome and defeat together.

(46:12):

Our discussion continues and you can get access to that by signing up at the truth teller level or higher on Patreon. Discounted annual memberships are available and you can give the gift of membership. Get bonus shows, invites to exclusive events, all our shows at free, and more at patreon.com/gaslit. That's patreon.com/gaslit. Thank you to everyone who supports the show.

(46:34):

To help Ukraine with urgently needed humanitarian aid, join me in donating to Razom for Ukraine at razomforukraine.org. To support refugees and conflict zones, donate to doctors without borders at doctorswithoutborders.org. And to protect critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the palm oil industry, donate to the orangutan project at theorangutanproject.org, and check your products for Palm Oil because it's everywhere.

(47:03):

Gaslit Nation is produced by Andrea Chalupa. Our associate producer is Karlyn Daigle and our founding production manager is Nicholas Torres. If you like what we do, please leave us a review on iTunes. It helps us reach more listeners.

(47:17):

Original music in Gasligh Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Vissenberg, Nick Barr, Damien Arriaga, and Karlyn Daigle. Our logo design was generously donated by Hamish Smythe of the New York-based firm order. Thank you so much, Hamish.

(47:33):

Gaslit Nation would like to thank our supporters at the producer level on Patreon and higher. Jans Allstrop Rasmussen, Katie Macurus, Anne Bertino, David East, Dawn Rosener, Deborah Schiff, Diana Gallaher, D.L. Singfield. Icepare is defiant. James D. Leonard, Jared Lombardo, Joe Darcy, Kevin Gannon, Kristen Custer, Larry Gassan, Thea Campbell, Leo Chaloupa, Lily Wachauski, Marcus J. Trent, Mark Mark, Nicole Spear, Randall Brewer, Sherry Escobar, Todd, Dan, Milo and Cubby. Work for better, prep for trouble. Ruth Ann Harnish and Tanya Chaloupa. Thank you all so much for your support of the show. We could not make Gaslit Nation without you.

Andrea Chalupa