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money in politics
History Won't Remember the Crowd: It Will Remember What the Crowd Built
If we want a nation of citizens and not subjects, we must do the slow, steady, unglamorous work of taking back our republic, one precinct, one institution, and one election at a time.
Oct 20, 2025
The No Kings Day protests last weekend were breathtaking. Seven million or more Americans filled streets across the country explicitly condemning the way Trump has been running our country. They carried handmade signs, sang freedom songs, and for one afternoon reminded the nation that resistance still burns hot.
But here’s the hard truth: that energy, that passion, that righteousness means very little if it doesn’t translate into structure and leadership. Movements that fail to coalesce around leaders and build institutions typically die in the glare of their own moral light or fail to produce results.
We’ve seen it before. The Women’s March drew millions. Occupy Wall Street electrified a generation. Black Lives Matter shook the conscience of the nation. But without leadership, durable organizations, funding networks, and consistent strategy, these movements faded from the political field as quickly as they filled it.
Protests without public faces and follow-through are like fireworks. Beautiful, brief, and gone before the smoke clears.
Real change doesn’t happen on the screen or even in the streets. It happens in the precincts, in the county offices, in the long nights where volunteers count ballots or knock on doors. With education, spokespeople, and specific demands.
The last time I saw my late buddy Tom Hayden was when we were both speaking in Dubrovnik, Croatia some years ago. I was doing my radio program live from there and we reminisced on the air about Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the organization he helped start with the Port Huron Statement and I was a member of in East Lansing.
Like the American Revolution, the Civil Rights movement, the union movement, and the women’s suffrage movements before it, SDS’ success in helping end the war in Vietnam didn’t just come from mass mobilizations (although they helped), but flowed out of an organizational structure and local and national leaders who could articulate a single specific demand to end the war.
As Frederick Douglass famously said in 1857, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” That demand must be loud, specific, recurrent, and backed by organization and leadership.
When the Occupy movement, for example, was taken over by a group of well-intentioned people who insisted that no leaders or institutions emerge within it, they doomed it to obscurity.
Trump’s neofascist administration understands this dynamic; it’s why they came down so brutally on student leaders in the campus anti-genocide protests. They succeeded in preventing either institution or leadership from emerging in a meaningful way.
Modern protests often reward attention, not action. Social media loves the march, the chant, the sign, and the photo that goes viral. Trump’s people complain and mutter about “hate America marches” but generally tolerate them, assuming they’ll fizzle out like Occupy did. The click feels like participation.
But power never bends to viral content. While the George Floyd protests did produce some changes, those (particularly diversity, equity, and inclusion) are aggressively being rolled back by Republicans with little protest because there’s no institution or leadership to lead the protest against their retrograde actions.
Authoritarian politicians understand this better than anyone. They know that a protest can be permitted because as long as it limits itself to protest it burns itself out. A million tweets feel like movement, but they evaporate by morning. The noise is cathartic, and the system stays the same.
Real change doesn’t happen on the screen or even in the streets. It happens in the precincts, in the county offices, in the long nights where volunteers count ballots or knock on doors. With education, spokespeople, and specific demands.
The campaign of Zohran Mamdani for New York City mayor is a great example; here we’re seeing real leadership and an effective organization that he’s built around his candidacy. It’ll be an inspiration for an entire new generation.
That’s the difference between the America that not just marched in movements but also created organizations with structure, leadership, and a specific vision of the future they’re fighting for.
The movements of the 1960s, for example, changed America because they had leadership, structure, and strategy. The civil rights, labor, and anti-war movements were powered by organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SDS, and the United Farm Workers. Leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Tom Hayden, and Dolores Huerta trained others, built networks, and turned protest into policy.
Those marches were not spontaneous. They were the culmination of years of organizing in churches, union halls, on campuses, and in living rooms. King’s March on Washington was not the movement; it was the exclamation point on a decade of strategy.
Today, our movements are broader, younger, and more diverse, but also largely fragmented and leaderless. Social media spreads outrage faster than ever, but it can’t replace the disciplined institutions that have historically held movements together. If we’re to save American democracy, we can’t only have bursts of energy without long-term direction.
It is not that people lack courage; they lack coordination. The right-wing oligarchs intent on destroying our democracy built their empire from the ground up with the Powell Memo and, more recently, Project 2025 as specific blueprints.
For more than 40 years, the Republican Party has been playing a long game. While Democrats chased the next election cycle, conservatives built a media empire.
They invested in talk radio, cable news, think tanks, and local media outlets. They funded the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and a constellation of dark-money groups that shape laws before most people even hear about them. They worked the school boards, city councils, and state legislatures. They didn’t just build candidates. They built infrastructure.
And it paid off.
When a bought-off, well-bribed Clarence Thomas delivered the deciding vote in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010 to legalize bribery of judges and politicians, that decision’s infrastructure became their weapon of choice. Suddenly billionaires and corporations could pour unlimited, even anonymous, money into the political bloodstream. And, most significantly, the right already had the arteries and veins in place.
While progressives held rallies, conservatives bought the megaphones, built the institutions, and found, elevated, and empowered leaders and spokespeople. The result is a minority right-wing movement that dominates America through structure and leadership, not popularity or protest.
Democrats have good people, good policies, and good intentions but lack a unified strategy and clear leadership. Too often, the party reacts instead of leads. It posts instead of plans. It wins headlines and loses legislatures. It’s most senior people often dither rather than project power and leadership.
Right now, when the right pushes disinformation and chaos, the left too often offers silence or even confusion. We need a structure that says: Here is the America we would govern, and here are the people ready to govern it.
Money is speech, the court told us. But that was a lie designed to cement oligarchy. Citizens United allowed the wealthy to flood elections with cash, to buy influence, to capture regulators, and to shape policy without accountability.
The result is an American political economy that serves the powerful and distracts the rest. Billionaires fund propaganda networks that pretend to be news. They back think tanks that write laws to protect monopolies and suppress wages. They fill campaign coffers so thoroughly that elected officials become their employees.
This is not a conspiracy theory: It’s an accounting statement. Follow the money and you’ll find the fingerprints of the same handful of billionaire and corporate donors behind almost every regressive policy of the last two decades.
The GOP didn’t just accept this system. They engineered it. And they exploit it to this day.
The right has been building its machine since the Powell Memo in 1971. The left must start today.
If democracy is to survive, Democrats—and small-d democrats—must build an infrastructure that competes on a similar footing. That means fundraising systems that depend on millions of small donors instead of a few billionaires. It means community-level leadership development. It means institutions that outlast elections. And it requires specific demands.
Real resistance begins with message discipline. Every Democrat, every progressive organization, every citizen who believes in democracy must be part of a single, steady chorus: Defend democracy, restore the middle class, protect the planet, guarantee healthcare and education for all, and—most important—get big money out of politics while establishing a legal right to vote.
The right repeats its talking points until they become accepted truth. We must do the same, only with facts, compassion, and moral clarity.
Endurance is just as essential, and in that sense Indivisible—the one organization that’s really emerged so far to lead this movement—has gotten us off to a great start.
The movement, however, can’t fade when the crowds disperse or when social media moves on. It has to grow in the offseason, in county offices, at organizing meetings, in living rooms, and in campaign trainings that prepare the next generation of leaders.
Change starts locally, which is where you can volunteer and show up. Conservatives understood long ago that power begins on school boards, city councils, and election commissions. They built from the ground up while progressives often looked to Washington. If we’re serious about reclaiming democracy, it must start in those same local arenas where laws are written and values are taught.
We must also be clear about what we stand for. Protest is not policy.
Real policy means repealing Schedule F, protecting voting rights, restoring oversight, enforcing antitrust laws, taxing concentrated wealth, defending reproductive freedom, guaranteeing healthcare and education for every American, making it as hard to take away your vote as it is to take away your gun, and finally removing the corrupting influence of money from our political system.
These are not slogans: They’re the foundation of a functioning democracy, which has been dismantled bit by bit over the years by the billionaires who own the GOP.
And none of this will succeed long-term without strong progressive media. We need to restore and support newsrooms and platforms that report truth, tell stories that matter, and counter the billionaires’ propaganda networks. If we fail to shape the narrative, those who profit from lies will continue to shape it for us.
Finally, real resistance requires action with purpose. Outrage alone changes nothing. When the powerful refuse to listen, we must act with the same courage that fueled the labor movement and the fight for civil rights. Strikes, boycotts, confronting violence with nonviolence, and coordinated economic pressure are how ordinary people force extraordinary change.
As Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Douglass, Jane Addams, King, Cesar Chavez, Huey Newton, and Hayden (among others) taught us, history moves when citizens organize, persist, and make injustice impossible to ignore.
The right has been building its machine since the Powell Memo in 1971. The left must start today. We must be as disciplined, organized, and relentless as they are, but with a moral compass that points toward democracy to counter their fascist project.
The No King Day protesters reminded the world that America still has a conscience. But a conscience without a plan is a sermon without a church.
The next phase of this movement must be structural. We need think tanks, training programs, legal defense funds, local newspapers, coordinated communication networks, and candidates ready to lead at every level. We need to replace despair with design and get inside and animate the Democratic Party.
Democracy is not defended by hashtags. It’s defended by hands, millions of them, building, voting, organizing, and refusing to quit when the cameras are gone.
The No King Day marches were righteous and inspiring. But history will not remember the crowd: it will remember what the crowd built.
If we want a nation of citizens and not subjects, we must do the slow, steady, unglamorous work of taking back our republic, one precinct, one institution, and one election at a time.
Volunteer for your local Democratic Party and become a precinct committeeperson. Join Indivisible. Run for local office and participate with local pro-democracy organizations. Show up.
That is the revolution worth marching for.
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Trump's Fossil Fuel Donors Are Getting Their Money's Worth
As promised, Trump is rewarding the industry for its campaign spending by adopting its policy agenda as his own.
Sep 18, 2025
Fossil fuel interests donated heavily to US President Donald Trump’s 2024 reelection bid. Months after his victory, oil and gas moguls have continued to pump money into his political coffers. Now, as promised by Trump during the campaign, his administration is embracing their policy agenda and governing in a way that is netting the industry billions.
Trump asked oil and gas executives in 2024 to raise $1 billion for his campaign and told them he’d grant their policy wish list if he won. The investment, he said, would be a “deal” given the taxes and regulation they would avoid under his presidency. He also offered to help fast-track fossil fuel industry mergers and acquisitions if he won.
The industry responded by spending lavishly to elect Trump, giving at least $75 million to his campaign and affiliated PACs, thereby making them a top corporate backer of his reelection bid and a crucial source of funding. Several oil tycoons gave millions on their own and hosted fundraisers with Trump and his associates. Some oil and gas executives who hadn’t given Trump money during previous cycles made major donations after attending fundraisers where he pledged to start acting on the industry’s policy priorities as soon as he retook the White House.
That’s just the spending we know about. The 2024 election saw record levels of “dark money” spending, where wealthy interests keep their role secret by funneling money through groups that do not disclose their donors. The fossil fuel industry has a history of deploying dark money tactics, and any such spending in 2024 would inherently be obscured.
The fossil fuel industry is reaping major returns on its investment in the Trump administration. But what about the costs?
Even after Trump’s victory in 2024, oil and gas interests have continued to pour money into his political operation. They gave $11.8 million to his inauguration fund, and even though Trump cannot run for a third term, his main super PAC has raked in millions more from the industry since he took office—including $25 million from oil producer Energy Transfer Partners and its CEO, Kelcy Warren.
As promised, Trump is rewarding the industry by adopting its policy agenda as his own. His signature legislative package—which one executive deemed “positive for us across all of our top priorities”—gives oil and gas firms $18 billion in tax incentives while rolling back incentives for clean energy alternatives. He’s placed fossil fuel allies in charge of the agencies that oversee the industry and fast-tracked drilling projects on public lands. In just his first 100 days back in office, Trump took at least 145 actions to undo environmental rules—more than he reversed during his entire first term as president. Before Trump even reentered the White House, the industry was reportedly pre-drafting executive orders for him to issue.
The profits are already rolling in for the industry. Take Warren and Energy Transfer Partners. Trump ended a Biden-era pause on liquefied natural gas exports and cleared the way for Energy Transfer Partners (which extracts liquefied natural gas) to extend a major project. Warren’s personal wealth grew nearly 10% after the administration green-lit the project as Energy Transfer Partners reported a boost in profits.
There’s also Occidental Petroleum, which donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, and whose CEO cohosted a major fundraiser for Trump in May 2024. Occidental is especially well positioned to see boosted profits from the sprawling array of favorable subsidies and tax incentives in his signature bill, passed into law this summer.
Now the Trump administration is taking its biggest swing yet for fossil fuel interests: repealing the “endangerment finding,” the federal government’s formal acknowledgement that global warming from greenhouse gases, produced by burning fossil fuels, endangers the public. The finding gives the government legal authority to set clean air rules, and it’s long been the subject of the fossil fuel lobby’s ire, surviving more than 100 challenges in court. Revoking the finding would erase scores of clean air rules that the industry opposes.
The fossil fuel industry is reaping major returns on its investment in the Trump administration. But what about the costs? Extreme weather events such as flooding, wildfires, and severe storms—which overwhelming scientific consensus has concluded are driven by global warming from fossil fuel usage—are becoming increasingly common, inflicting billions of dollars of damage on American communities and costing thousands of people their lives and livelihoods each year. Life-threatening summer heat affected more than 255 million Americans this year alone. It does not appear that these concerns are having any major impact on government policy, and instead, the administration fired hundreds of scientists tasked with tracking these issues.
Trump is far from the first president to use the office in ways that reward wealthy donors. Decades of harmful Supreme Court decisions, decaying anticorruption and campaign finance guardrails, and inadequate enforcement of existing rules around money in politics have enabled an unprecedented concentration of wealth and political power. So while Trump’s embrace of the fossil fuel industry’s agenda isn’t breaking entirely new ground, it offers yet another stark example of how wealthy interests are shaping policies that affect the lives of all Americans.
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The GOP Is Waging a War on Democracy
Gerrymandering is just one piece of a much larger democratic breakdown.
Sep 16, 2025
A few days before the Charlie Kirk murder, I was invited on the radio show Heroes and Patriots to discuss gerrymandering. It’s still a timely topic. Kirk’s killing has led to a frontal assault on speech and democracy by Trump, Vance, and the MAGA right. While this is a newer phenomenon, however, other assaults on democracy have been underway for quite some time. These fights can’t be won individually. They need to be seen as part of a greater whole.
Gerrymandering, as most people know, is the process of altering electoral maps to favor one party, most visibly in congressional race. a Republicans have been the most aggressive practitioners of this dark art in recent years, although Democrats have certainly also engaged in it. It’s newsworthy today because Trump, fearful of a midterm congressional loss, directed the Texas GOP to redraw that state’s already-contested map to find him five more seats—and because Gavin Newsom, with the help of Nancy Pelosi, is openly attempting to counter-gerrymander the California map in response.
In this rancid historical moment, Newsom’s move makes sense. It’s tilting at windmills to oppose gerrymandering on principle while your opponent openly defies even the pretense of democracy. But it’s also important to point out that Newsom’s response will remain little more than theater, or partisan positioning, as long as our political system fails to respond more effectively to public interest and public pressure.
In a tactical sense, what Newsom is doing makes sense. But all of this is still playing out at the level of theater, rather than values, as long as neither party chooses to confront the real challenges to democracy—along with economic inequality, genocide, climate change, racism, and structural violence—in anything but the most superficial terms.
Things won’t change without major political pressure. That won’t happen until advocates link democratic principles to people’s everyday struggles.
We haven’t had a functioning democracy for a long time. It’s broken, and gerrymandering is one piece of that brokenness.
A few examples out of many:
- 80 percent of voters want Congress to raise the national minimum wage, which hasn’t happened since 2009.
- 60 percent of voters oppose further aid to Israel, something both parties support, and half of voters believe (correctly, according to experts) that Israel is committing genocide.
- Two-thirds of all voters support unions, but Congress has passed no major pro-union legislation since the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978.
- More than 60 percent of those polled agree that “reducing the influence of money in politics should be a top goal for the president and Congress.” As Pew Research reports, “While there are wide partisan differences on most policy goals, 65 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of Republicans rate this as a top priority.”
Despite all of this, there are no plans to make this a top priority.
This is not to argue that there are no differences between the two political parties. Rather, the system itself limits political possibility. Gerrymandering is just one piece of a much larger democratic breakdown, alongside systemic issues such as the Electoral College and Senate, media monopolization, the hijacking of the judicial system, and the overall influence of big money (dark, light, and everything in between).
The hosts mentioned several reform proposals, such as Hendrik Smith’s advocacy for AI-assisted independent commissions, which in my opinion could fuel “next-generation” gerrymandering. Newsom and others have expressed interest in commissions or referendums to explore the issue, which they typically describe as “bi-partisan.” I prefer the “non-partisan” approach, since both parties depend on big-money donors.
In any case, things won’t change without major political pressure. That won’t happen until advocates link democratic principles to people’s everyday struggles. The fight against gerrymandering must be part of a larger vision—a truly representative democracy that works for everyone. Until then, I fear that the fight against gerrymandering—important as it is—will remain little more than a tactical skirmish within a broken system.
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