Episode Details

In our following episode, we speak with folks around the country about this unfolding reality. First, we catch up with Mia Wong, a journalist at It Could Happen Here, a daily podcast on Cool Zone Media about everyday resistance and the current crisis, then we speak with a participant in the publishing collective CrimethInc, about the emerging cracks in the current crisis and what this means about how we can respond, and finally we speak to folks in Olympia, WA and North Carolina about recent “Festival of Resistance” events that were organized in the lead up to Trump’s inauguration.

We are currently in the midst of a constitutional crisis. As we speak, the Trump administration is less than a month into its second term, and already the courts are running into roadblocks in their meager attempts to contain Trump’s blatant calls to disregard basic constitutional guard rails. As this is being recorded, multiple rulings by judges to stop the Trump administration freezing federal funds to basic government programs continue to be ignored. We are in the middle of the Rubicon being crossed: the executive branch is defying the orders of its own courts. What happens now is both determined by what people do and how the state responds to its own internal contradictions. Will the supreme court step in and side with Trump, or will the administration simply ignore any and all rulings, turning the state into a mechanism to carry out any and all of Trump’s dictatorial demands: as the US slips into an all out dictatorship with billionaires at the helm.

"Hundreds of Bakersfield area students walked out of classes Wednesday in protest of the Trump administration's policies on education and immigration, taking their flags, signs and shouts outside Kern County Superior Court on Truxtun Avenue." www.bakersfield.com/news/bakersf…

— It's Going Down (@igd.bsky.social) 2025-02-13T07:37:48.397Z

But resistance is building, and developing at various points of contestation. Across the country, as ICE ramps up deportations and is pushing to begin again deporting entire families and has begun setting up camps at Guantanamo bay, organizers are stepping up their organizing, forming Rapid Response Networks, organizing protests, and educating people about their rights. “Border Czar” Tom Homan even went on CNN recently to complain about people in Chicago being “too educated” about their rights, throwing a wrench into the gears of the deportation machine, as Trump demands increased numbers of removals. Communities in Colorado mobilized when ICE went door to door in an apartment complex at the center of far-Right conspiracies about “Venezuela gangs taking over” Aurora, CO, workin