A huge evening of organizing, action, and music is happening on June 14th — and don’t worry about lack of star power because, greats like Jane Fonda, are pulling out all the stops to celebrate the First Amendment.
Ezra Levin, Indivisible’s co-Executive Director, joins Tim Dickinson to unveil Rise Up & Sing, a counter-concert hosted by Indivisible and the Committee for the First Amendment on June 14th at 7:30 PM ET. Levin explains that participation is easy, just organize a watch party with your friends, family, and neighbors — or watch from the comfort of your own home — to support this joyful mass mobilization effort.
Levin and Tim also discuss Freedom Summer 2.0, May Day success, November midterm preparations, and Levin’s thoughts on Talarico’s chances at nabbing that open U.S. Senate seat in Texas.
Ezra Levin is the co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, a grassroots organization made up of thousands of group leaders and more than a million members taking regular, iterative, and increasingly complex actions to resist the GOPs agenda, elect local champions, and fight for progressive policies.
The following transcript has been modified for formatting purposes
Tim Dickinson
Hey, it’s Tim Dickinson for The Contrarian. Our guest today is Ezra Levin. Ezra, how you doing today?
Ezra Levin
Tim, other than the fascism, I’m doing great.
Tim Dickinson
So I understand you have a new, sort of, different, event on tap for us on the 14th of June. Tell us about that.
Ezra Levin
So, 14th of June, I think people know that is Flag Day. That is also… we’re heading into the 250th anniversary, obviously, of the founding of the country, the Declaration of Independence on July 4th. It is also the one-year anniversary of the first No Kings. That’s, the June 14th of last year was when Trump threw that ridiculous military birthday parade that was pathetic, and instead we showed up with the largest protest in American history. It was a good time. June 14th this year is, again, Flag Day. June 14th this year is, again, Donald Trump’s birthday, it’s his 80th birthday, and again, Donald Trump is using his position of power to put on a ridiculous spectacle, because there’s this one thing that this now octogenarian autocrat wants, and it’s all the attention in the world. He wants all of us looking at him on his birthday, and so he’s putting together this UFC fight on the White House lawn. You might have seen the construction of this giant stage on the White House lawn. Look, it is also pathetic, it is also a tragedy for our democratic institutions that this is a thing, and I can’t stop Donald Trump from holding this, but what I can do is deprive him of the attention he craves. And so, instead of giving him what he wants on this day, we and No Kings and countless other organizations, and thousands of leaders around the country. are going to be doing our own thing. We’re calling it Rise Up and Sing, we’re partnering with Jane Fonda and the First Amendment Committee to put on a counter-event, and this is something that anybody, anywhere in the country can participate in. You can hold a watch party, you can see cool artists like Jane Fonda, like Rufus Greenwright, like Patty Smith. We’re gonna have more folks being announced coming up, but this is an opportunity for us to build community. Instead of giving in to this fascist vision of what the country is, instead of giving Donald Trump what he wants for his birthday, we get to build a pro-democracy community. I hope people take an opportunity now to reach out to their community and build with us together as we head towards the midterms.
Tim Dickinson
And so, just to break it down, there’s a concert in New York with Rufus Ren White and Bette Midler and Jane Fonda will be there, and then the idea is that people are going to be hosting watch parties around the country and tuning in. Help understand, like, the texture and how people participate in this event.
Ezra Levin
That’s right. They’re watch parties, they’re community events, it’s an opportunity to reach out to people who maybe didn’t get involved before, maybe they’re not the protest type, you know, maybe they’re not the activist type, maybe they’re not the political type, but they don’t like what’s going on. They find what Trump is doing is ridiculous, is bad, is damaging, and they would welcome a chance to be part of something that’s fun and creative and based in their own community. So yes, that night, on June 14th, Sunday, June 14th, you can go and you can you can livestream, you can do it on your own, or you can be part of a group. I really am a big believer in doing part of a group, and this is… This is rooted in our understanding of the moment we’re in, because what authoritarians want is they want you to be alone. They want you doomscrolling. They want you isolated from your community, and I think our pathway out of this depends on people reaching out to their community and bringing them in. So whether there are 5 people at your event, or 50, or 500, or 5,000, I think this is a time for us to not look at the White House, not give Donald Trump This attention he so craves, but instead start building community and doing it in creative ways.
Tim Dickinson
This is a change in tactics, I mean, from a year ago, certainly. Talk me through a bit of the thinking about doing something a bit more subdued this year, rather than having millions of people pouring out into the streets again for Trump’s birthday.
Ezra Levin
Yeah, totally. So, I think of these mass mobilizations as both some of the… my proudest campaigns that I’ve been able to be part of. I mean, we had the first, second, and third largest protests in American history, or no kings. And also, I do think some people think that if we get a sufficient number of people on the streets on a Saturday, suddenly democracy wins! It’s game over! Trump will just announce the beat and resigned. And look, Tim, we both know, most of us know, that’s not the case. There’s not some magic figure of people that come out on a Saturday that suddenly you win democracy. Actually, what you need are people engaged and actively organizing, not just on the weekends, but connected to their community, so when Trump tries to, I don’t know, steal the election, sabotage the election, deny the results, it’s not just a Saturday response, you’ve got a thriving community that’s pushing back in red states and blue states and purple states. So I think of mass mobilizations like No Kings, and there’s a good chance we’ll do another one that looks something like that. They are a tactic, but they are one of many tactics that fit into a strategy. That strategy is organizing mass non-violent people power. And one way you do that is big, massive events, like we’ve done for No Kings 1, 2, and 3. Another way you do that is actually developing community infrastructure, so that when things go south. When Trump sees that he’s lost the election, but he doesn’t want to actually put up with that, when he sends ICE agents out, you’re not building community from scratch. You’re actually tapping into something that you’ve been constructing for the last several months, and this is in no small way inspired by the success of the organizing we saw in the Twin Cities. That wasn’t just showing up on one Saturday. Yes, they protested in the Twin Cities against ICE, but they did more than that. They showed up as a community across ideological ideological lines, across lines of difference, they showed up, and they pushed out the fascist attempt to take over their city. I think we’re going to have to match that kind of depth of organizing with the kind of breadth that we’ve seen with No Kings, and this is a step in that direction.
Tim Dickinson
So, if I’m hearing you right, it’s a way to sort of bring people together around an event with some joy, some singing, but also building muscle memory for perhaps a time when this is going to be a deeper, more serious situation.
Ezra Levin
Oh, absolutely. Look, people will be making art together, they will be, creating these visible neighborhood-based, events where people who haven’t been part of this before can feel welcome. And I… I do not build community for the sake of building community. I like community, I think it is a humanizing experience to be part of your local community, I think that’s important, but this is a strategic play to strengthen our democratic opposition to a fascist takeover of our federal government, and we have to have fun when we’re building this community, otherwise people aren’t going to want to be part of it, but this is serious work, Tim. This is how you actually construct the kind of infrastructure you need to safeguard our elections. So I do hope people have a blast. I hope people enjoy the concert. I hope people bring new folks in. I hope there are creative outputs coming out of this, creative projects coming out of this, and I hope new people see this and are like, oh, I want to be part of that. That seems kind of cool. I want to connect with my neighbor on that, or there’s a cool community event. Yeah, I can go and do that. I don’t know about a protest. I don’t know about going and calling my member of Congress, that’s not really my vibe, but sure, I can go to this house party, that seems fun.
Tim Dickinson
Is there an element of this? The 250th anniversary of the country’s coming up, there’s a way in which protesting Trump can somehow come across as protesting patriotism, and so is there a way that this is, like, trying to reclaim a sense of patriotism for this community?
Ezra Levin
Oh, a thousand percent, and I, you know, you don’t need to prompt me too hard to get me to defend our embrace of patriotism. At that first No Kings, Lee and I were in Philly, we had God knows how many American flags waving in the 100,000 crowd at Philly. We had this gigantic American flag behind us. Our speech was all about the meaning of Flag Day, and the meaning of the flag, and what it represented, and at the end of our speech. we led 100,000 people to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. I think it’s really important for us. who are on the left, or who are on the pro-democracy side of this fight, to embrace that patriotism. That doesn’t mean whitewashing American history and saying we’ve never made any errors or we’ve gotten all right, but it does mean affirmatively standing up and calling out what we believe this country is standing for, what we believe this country has been striving for, and doing it fiercely in non-violent, joyful events like we’re gonna see on June 14th.
Tim Dickinson
There are, in the South, a new Freedom Summer event is starting to ramp up, but I didn’t know if there was a lot of crossover between the No Kings movement and that Freedom Summer event, and I was wondering if you could just riff on that for me.
Ezra Levin
Oh, I’m really excited about this. So the folks at Black Voters Matter, who are just incredible, they’ve been leaders in the pro-democracy fight since Indivisible has been around. We’ve been partnering with them on Democracy Reform for quite some time. Cliff and LaTosha over there are phenomenal leaders, and I would highly, highly recommend people check out Freedom Summer. Look, this is largely in response to the aftermath of Calais, and Calais did not come out of nowhere. the Supreme Court’s coup de grace against the Second Reconstruction. We got the Voting Rights Act as a response to the end of Reconstruction in the late 19th century, as a response to Jim Crow and segregation and an attack on Voting Rights Act. It took us nearly a century as a country, but we finally created a pluralistic democracy where people had the right to vote in 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and immediately the right-wingers went to work dismantling it. That was from John Roberts, when he was a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, went to dismantle the VRA, and cut by cut, they eventually tore it down just to its studs with Calais, and I say all this to say, this is not a new fight for this country. We have been fighting over whether to have a pluralistic democracy or a democracy that’s led by white nationalists since our founding, and the question for us is, what do we do about it? And I think for those of us who were directly under attack, it’s very clear. I was out in Mississippi with Black Voters Matter and many other groups who were showing up in opposition to CalA and committing to the fight. But if you are not a Black or Brown or Indigenous American. this fight is still about you. I think it’s really, really important that those of us who are white, those of us who are native-born, don’t view this as somebody else’s fight. This is an attack on our democracy, and in moments when folks in the South are under attack, in moments when Black Americans, when brown Americans, when Indigenous Americans are under attack, we need to link arms and treat an attack on one like an attack on all. So I’m wild about Freedom Summer, I think it’s a really good move. I think that there are going to be a series of events that I’m looking forward to seeing Indivisible and No Kings plug into.
Tim Dickinson
There’s a working class solidarity that’s involved here, too. We just were talking about Trump’s 250th celebration plans, and his intention to start yielding horse statues in DC. And last time we talked was about May Day, and about working class solidarity, and I was out in Portland, and I was just… I was struck by how… there was a different kind of protest. There was sort of… where I was, there was sort of a gallery, like a farmer’s market, but it was all booths and people sharing ideas and getting together and talking to one another in a different kind of format. I wonder, what was your takeaway from the May 1st action, and what was learned strategically there?
Ezra Levin
Oh, great. Thank you for bringing it up. So I… this ties back into what we were talking earlier about, like, what’s the point of this tactic or that tactic? And I… I was really influenced by Hardy Merriman, who’s one of these, experts in anti-authoritarianism, and he, he made the point that, How do you judge the success of a pro-democracy movement during a time of authoritarianism? Because an authoritarian, almost by definition, will make you feel like crap on a daily basis. They will do damage, they will make advances against democratic institutions on a regular basis. So the way you actually judge whether or not a pro-democracy movement is successful is not, is the fascists gone? They’re not going overnight. You have to judge how are you making progress over time, and the answer is one. Are you bigger than you were before? Two, are you more unified than you were before? Three, is the fascist less popular than they were before? And four, are you innovating your tactics? Are you doing new stuff? Are you getting more advanced? And I think the May Day action, the intent of that was to not just do the exact same thing that we had been doing. Don’t just call your member of Congress or show up at their office. Don’t just show up, even in historic numbers, on one day to protest, but May Day was an attempt to, as you were saying, demonstrate class, solidarity, but also exercise your economic muscle. And I think in communities around the country, we saw innovative ways of exercising that muscle, using that tool at our disposal. I think it’s a tool that we’re going to have to use come November, because as I said, we expect Donald Trump to try to sabotage the election results. He is all but promising us that he will do that, and I’m convinced it’s not going to be enough to just show up on a Saturday and say, hey, don’t do that, and then go back home to work on a Monday. We’ve got to be developing tactics, and specifically economic pressure tactics, and that was the intent of May Day. I think we saw elements of success throughout the country of May Day, and also, we didn’t see enough. I mean, I’ll be honest, we need to build more. I don’t think this is something where you do it once, you’re like, okay, we’re good. for the election to be stolen. It’s something we ought to be building on, and I think Mayday was an important step in that direction as well.
Tim Dickinson
Talking about November, Indivisible is involved in a number of Democratic primaries.
Ezra Levin
Oh yeah.
Tim Dickinson
building up to the midterms. Can you talk a bit about the decision to weigh in on this sort of inter-party, internecine battle as people are getting geared up to potentially have a, sort of a real struggle with Trump come… come election season.
Ezra Levin
Look, I think it is existential for our democracy, for us to electorally smash this regime in the midterms. We’ve got to crush them, Tim. That is my goal this year. I want it to be very clear that the country as a whole successfully pushed back, exercised their democratic power to crush a fascist regime. I want to take the House, I want to take the Senate, I want to take state House races and Senate races all over the country. I think that’s really important. And also, we’ve got to look this problem square in the face, Tim. The Democratic Party has a lower approval rating than the fascists in the White House.
Tim Dickinson
Hmm.
Ezra Levin
I don’t like that, but I’m not gonna act as if it’s not a real problem. The least popular political figure in the country is not Donald Trump, it’s Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Democrats in the Senate. I cannot afford to go into the general election with a loser Democratic Party with a terrible brand that can’t convince voters to believe in them. And after 17 months of trying to convince the leadership of the party to come to their senses and treat this moment as an existential threat, we, and by we I mean indivisible broadly as a movement, came to the conclusion, we can’t ask anymore. We’ve got to make a demand, and the Democratic way to make a demand for a better party is through the primary system. Now, Indivisible is not like the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. I do not parachute into some district and say, that’s Ezra’s candidate, we’re all behind them. That’s not how we operate. There are plenty of races that I would love to get involved in, but the local Indivisible groups aren’t. They’re not there. And so we always say, look, if a local group is behind somebody. they can endorse them, they can then nominate them for a national endorsement, and if they pull us in, we’re there. We just endorsed Daria Lisa in New York’s 13, we’re behind Brad Lander, also in New York, we’re behind Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota, Julia Gonzalez in Colorado, behind Randy Villegas in California. These are all fights that we can win. We can elect Democrats who don’t take AI money, or APAC money, or crypto money, or corporate money. They’re gonna win in the general election if we get them through the primary, but we can take these fights at different times. We can smash the failed status quo of the Democratic Party in the primaries, then we can unify and smash the regime in November, and I don’t think those are in conflict. I think, actually, the primary work reinforces the work that we want to do in the general election.
Tim Dickinson
And so the idea is really to come up with sort of a Hungary-type result, where there’s just, like, it’s outside of the margin of shenanigans, is the hope.
Ezra Levin
Come the general election?
Tim Dickinson
Yeah.
Ezra Levin
That’s right. Look, I… well, here’s what I will say. We were in… we’ve been… we’ve been… partly yes, and we have been talking to some pro-democracy advocates in Hungary for quite some time now, and I will say the conventional wisdom heading to the Hungarian elections was, this guy’s gonna screw this up. He’s going to, in some way, sabotage the results, and it was a relief and a surprise that Orban didn’t in some way, try to sabotage the results afterwards, and I think you’re pointing to something real. which is the single best election protection you can do is massive, massive results. Historic-level wave results, because if it comes down to one or two seats in the House or the Senate, and that’s what control of the House or the Senate comes down to. I would bet that Trump is going to do something to try to change that outcome. But if we win the Senate by two seats, if we win the House by a dozen seats, it’s much, much more difficult for him to overturn it, and that’s what happened in Hungary, to your point. It wasn’t just a slight victory. They absolutely destroyed Orban. That said, I hope that we have free and fair elections, and our dear leader does not try to intervene. I’m not counting on it. I do not think we should count on that. So I think we should both be preparing to rehabilitate the Democratic brand in primaries. and then win in the elections in the midterms, and then prepare to respond to whatever sabotage comes our way. And if it doesn’t come our way, great, we’ll celebrate early, but let’s hold that celebration until we have a new people holding the gavel on January 3rd in the Senate and the House.
Tim Dickinson
You cut your teeth in Texas politics, and so I’m curious to get your read on the Tallarico race, and whether is this… is this another, you know, false hope, a flash in the pan, or do you think that there’s a real chance that Democrats take this seat this time statewide?
Ezra Levin
I will say, so, the short answer is there is a real chance. And I say that as somebody, as you said, my first real political job was working for Lloyd Doggett, this brilliant, progressive champion from the Austin area. He was targeted by Republicans again and again and again for defeat. They finally got him. They redistricted him out of a seat this last term, otherwise he would still be headed into Congress next year, I’m sure. But… Every 2 or 4 years, it seems like, 10 people are like, Texas is gonna turn blue this year, this is the time! And I’m sorry to be that guy, but I can’t help but say, this might be the time. This really might be the time. And I say that for 3 reasons. One, if you look at Texas politics. just about every cycle, it gets bluer and bluer and bluer. It’s not quite every cycle, 2024, I went in the wrong direction, but just about every cycle, it gets more in the Democratic camp. Not enough for us to win statewide, but it gets further in that direction. Other states that we’ve won in the past aren’t going that way. Like, I’m worried about Ohio. I’m worried about Florida. I think there’s reason to worry for that, but the overall trends in Texas look generally good for our side. Second, Tallarico is a generational talent as a candidate. He is an excellent, excellent candidate coming through, and I think he both has the ability to generate a lot of enthusiasm among the base, but also, he can actually reach out to people who are not that politically engaged, or even moderate Republicans, who are saying, well, I… I’m not really a Democrat, I don’t really like those guys in general, but Tallarico, I’m willing to hold my nose and vote for him because he seems like a good guy. I think he’s got the ability to convince folks to come over. And the third reason is Pexen’s an absolute disaster. Like, he has been attacked by members of his own party. I mean, the Texas Republican House voted to impeach this guy. He’s been caught red-handed engaging in the most egregious, illegal corrupt. behavior that I’ve seen of any Senate candidate since, gosh, the Alabama candidate, when we won! When we won, when the child molester lost, and we got in Doug Jones. So I… I… it’s not a sure thing, but I think this is the best chance we’ve had at winning a Texas Senate seat since I’ve been paying attention to Texas politics.
Tim Dickinson
Well, friend, thank you so much for your time today. I think people are looking forward to this concert on June 14th, and we’ll see you next time.
Ezra Levin
Appreciate you, Tim.
Tim Dickinson
Alright, take care.
