What's Next, Los Angeles? with Mike Bonin
Los Angeles is at a turning point. We are living in a defining moment. What happens next is up to us. Over the past few years, problems and challenges have shaken this city -- and tremendous opportunities for change have presented themselves. How do we rise to this moment and emerge a better place to live? What will it take to create a more just and a more equitable community? Working together, how are we going to create a stronger, forward-thinking Los Angeles? Mike Bonin, writer, teacher, progressive activist and former City Councilmember, looks at the issues and problems facing Los Angeles, examines ideas, and talks with the people who will lead us to a brighter future.
Produced in partnership with LA Forward.
What's Next, Los Angeles? with Mike Bonin
Being a Dissident in the United States
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In this new age of repression, are you a dissident? What does that mean? What does it require? And how dangerous is it? In this episode, we talk with Ami Fields-Meyer, co-author of “So You Want to Be A Dissident?” in the New Yorker.
Ami also recently hosted a conversation titled “Concentration Camps and the Machinery of Repression: Lessons for Saving Democracy” with Julia Pitzer and Erica Chenoweth. You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/live/ESiZOQBZUYA?si=W5n9iC0HXAgCkSO9
What's Next, Los Angeles? is produced and hosted by Mike Bonin, in partnership with LA Forward.
In this new era of repression, are you a political dissident? What does that mean? What does it require? And how do you stay safe? We're going to discuss that today on What's Next, Los Angeles. Hi everyone and welcome. It's Mike Bonin. Thank you for joining me. We have entered the dark ages. Armed masked men in unmarked vehicles are snatching our neighbors off the streets, imprisoning them without charges or access to a lawyer, and shipping them to foreign countries. Children have literally been locked up. Shadowy agents of the state have seized people at bus stops, at parks, and on sidewalks. They have raided workplaces and churches. They have tried to enter our schools. The regime in power has threatened democratically elected representatives with arrest. They have jailed a prominent labor leader, physically accosted a United States senator, and dispatched federal troops to silence dissent and to begin to occupy the city of Los Angeles. They are targeting nonprofits and community organizations for persecution and possible prosecution. And over the past weekend, a gunman disguised as a cop murdered a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband in an act that Governor Tim Walls described as a political assassination. Every day it seems like this crisis gets much, much worse, and it's happening faster than almost anyone could have imagined. Our democracy is under siege. We are spiraling, teetering on the edge of the abyss and looking deep into it. It is happening so fast it can be hard to grasp this new reality. In April, my friend Amifields Meyer co-wrote an essay in the New Yorker titled So You Want to Be a Dissident. He and his co-author, Julia Angwin, grasped this emerging reality, and based on research and tons of interviews, they considered what it will take to navigate this reality, what it will take to remain outspoken and to stay safe, and to ultimately prevail over authoritarianism. I wanted to talk with Ami as soon as I read this essay, and he and I finally connected at the end of May. And although that now feels like a lifetime ago, the message of his essay and of this interview is even more relevant and more important now. Ami, thanks for joining me on What's Next Los Angeles?
SPEAKER_00It's great to be with you, Mike. I'm really, really happy to do this.
SPEAKER_01It's great to see you. By way of intro, for people who are listening, you are a son of Los Angeles. Tell us about your your ties to LA.
SPEAKER_00I grew up in West LA, grew up in C D5, the Pico Robertson area. Yep. And the Jewish community of LA, and got my start in politics and activism in Los Angeles, and in part working on stuff with you and your team. But I uh I worked in the California State Legislature or I worked in City Hall, the mayor's office. A lot of the work I did in the mayor's office was working to try to get folks to be more interested in building affordable housing and homeless housing in West LA. And I was an area rep, but then I was also a speechwriter for Mayor Garcetti, and I call LA home. Went on to work in the Biden Harris administration, did a lot of work on tech and civil rights and civil liberties during those years and easy issues at that time. We tried to do just the easiest stuff at all possible. Yeah. And we s and luckily we solved them, so we don't have anything else to discuss. And and now I'm I I ended up working for Vice President Harris for the latter part of that time, which was great. And now I'm at Harvard, uh, which I thought would be as a fellow doing some research, which I thought would be a quiet island to retire to for a bit, but have ended up getting to do a huge amount of thinking and reporting and research on democratic backsliding and spending all this time with dissidents from all over the world. And I think that's what brings us here.
SPEAKER_01Uh it is. Uh you uh published last month an essay in the New Yorker with a a co-author, uh Julia Angwin, called How to Be a Dissident. What prompted you, the the the two of you, to write this piece? The title was important because it it shifted sort of the dialogue for some people from resistance to something a lot more sort of stark and and existential. So, what what was the thinking behind doing this?
SPEAKER_00The thinking behind doing this is that it is stark and existential. And many of us woke up the day after the election and thought this is gonna be really bad. Obviously, this was true for the most vulnerable in society, and I think that everybody's felt this in some form or another. The way that Julia Engwin, who's a great tech journalist, who I who had who was my co-author for this piece, described it is that she had been reporting for years and years on surveillance and digital surveillance and privacy and how do we protect ourselves in the age of big tech, but woke up on November 6th and realized, oh my my threat model is wrong. This we don't have the tools for this, we don't have the skills for this, but this is not what we've been preparing for. Authoritarianism as it has manifested in the last several months is new for us. And so we wrote the piece uh at first to give ourselves advice. We just started talking to the dissidents, and I'm happy to say more about who it is. But the reason we use the term dissident is because the more we we talk to researchers and activists from around the world, the more you come to see that if you are in a backsliding authoritarian situation, the only real way out is for ordinary people to take risks and not just to take one risk here or one risk there or to be courageous about one thing or another, but actually to adopt an orientation that is fundamentally rooted in courage. And no dig at American culture or even American political culture, but uh that's not our thing for most of us, and certainly not our thing for those of us who uh have lived a relatively charmed existence up until this point. We wrote the piece to break political courage down into its component parts, spiritually and technically, and in the hopes that people, beginning with ourselves, would be able to ingest that a little bit better and have a playbook for when things got bad in their workplace or when they felt like there was an opportunity to speak up, but they weren't quite sure how to do it, because they for the first time were concerned that if they did so, we'll be putting their lifestyle or job or something else at risk.
SPEAKER_01So before we get into the details of what makes a dissident, the nature of political courage and the folks you talk to, just curious, given that the times we're in where things are are shifting so rapidly, like every day seems like a new dynamic, and we've we've said made an exident an exponential step into a different reality. Is some people may summon the courage and choose to be a dissident. Some people may just in the course of living their lives find themselves put in the position of becoming a dissident. What what is it that sort of triggers the attention of the government now? I mean, what risks are what risks are people taking on a daily basis that they might not even be aware of?
SPEAKER_00Well, I want to I want to say two things about this because I've been thinking about this ahead of talking to you. I will just say that I think among the people I've worked with in politics, if you could endure this compliment for one second, I think that among the people that I've worked with in politics, it is hard to think of a person who has embodied political risk taking and courage. And we can talk about some of the specifics. I'm interested in how you feel about this too, that than you, Mike. I mean, truly. And it's not like it was a walk in the park for you or that it has been a walk in the park for you or your family. But I it does feel important to acknowledge at the top that we talked to a million people for this piece. One of them was the son of a Soviet dissident, somebody who left the Soviet Union and came here. And so this is a a person in his mid-30s, late 30s, who is now working with dissidents around the world. And I asked him for advice, and he told me that there was a saying among Soviet dissidents that was everyone must do what they can, come what may. I really, really like that. It didn't make it into the piece, but I liked it. And I it honestly, Mike, it reminds me of you, and it reminds me of the work that you, the sort of really courageous work that you did on housing and so many other issues here, which is to say that what does it look like to stand up for the for the stuff that you believe in, knowing that the consequences could be significant? And I think that that's rare. So thank you for all that you've done in that regard. To answer the question, what's going on now? I will say this isn't the first time that the US government has weaponized fear against its own people. We've seen other eras of this kind. Post-World War II, we see government crackdowns against alleged Soviet spies, you know, across the government and McCarthyism. You see this a lot during the civil rights movement. Black dissidents and black protests organizing. You see it after 9-11. And so it's not to say that what we're going through right now, which we'll say more about, has never, nobody's ever experienced before. And it is true that some of the institutions and people who are beginning to feel this are feeling what other groups in the United States have felt for a long time. That said, it is different now. And I think what's different is that it's different in kind and in scope. For example, if you're working in the legal system, if you're a judge, there have been judges, you know, we've seen a judge arrested. If you're a uh young associate at a law firm, you have to think twice about whether you speak about your firm that's considering doing a deal with the president and the government to change the nature of its work at risk of losing your job or for the firm at risk of losing significant business. If you're a protester or if you're a person who's interested in expressing dissent in the United States, which is constitutionally protected, you now have to consider, especially it seems now, if you're not a citizen, but also perhaps if you are a citizen, whether you are ready to face deportation proceedings.
SPEAKER_01Right. Just writing uh uh an op-ed in a student newspaper.
SPEAKER_00Just writing an op-ed in the student newspaper. This is true all the way up to the top. We saw a U.S. senator who was getting ready to vote against Pete Heggseth, the defense secretary nominee, and then opted not to. And it was revealed during reporting, I think, in the Wall Street Journal, that he felt that there were credible death threats, basically from Trump Trumpists online. We're also banning words. So if you're just a person who's, for example, like our colleagues and friends who are running programs in local government or state government, or a nonprofit that's trying to house people, or the nonprofit that's trying to do it. If you're doing that work, that's just on the front lines. If you're a nonprofit executive or you're a program manager who is trying to get funding to be able to do your work to serve the most vulnerable in society, or to do an infrastructure project, or to build a bridge, or to build a homeless shelter, you have to be careful that you don't use a word, a banned word in this Orwellian sense that might trigger, that might make it impossible for you to do, to do your work. And so I think what I'm what we are what Julie and I are trying to describe here is a newly fear-soaked environment where everywhere you look, there is an opportunity to confront something really scary and to make a decision that's going to require a new risk calculus of you that you're not, that you're, that you haven't done in the past.
SPEAKER_01So to research this and to explain this and to write about it, who did you speak with? And what was some of the advice you got?
SPEAKER_00We talked to people all over the world. We talked to people who have opposed autocratic or authoritarian governments, Venezuela and Nicaragua. We talked to Hungarians, Iranians, Russians in exile. We talked to researchers here in the United States and elsewhere in the world, people who've done human rights and movement research who helped us understand the broader framework for this. We talked to some domestic activists in the United States. So we did a real survey. One thing that I think is important for folks to consider that I found helpful in our reporting is this term that Steve Levitsky and Luke and Wei in the last 10 or 15 years, the term is competitive authoritarianism. Competitive authoritarianism is a term for the kind of thing that's happening in Hungary. So Hungary is, under Viktor Orban, the president of Hungary, is the sort of model home that the American right that is now in power in the United States is trying to build a new country, is trying to model this country. And what competitive authoritarian means is that the competitive part of that term is that you still have elections. And you still have the trappings of a free society. So Hungary continues to have elections. The head of government has not disbanded the legislative body. There's still a media that operates decreasingly independently of the state. There are still courts, etc. But you see the that those institutions become much less meaningful and much less much less robust. And what happens in those institutions, because of some combination of oligarchy and corruption and other factors, mean that you can be living in a democracy without it really being a democracy. It's compending authoritarianism. And Orban himself calls Hungary an illiberal democracy. That's not a pejorative term that Western academics use to describe it. It's what he uses to describe it affirmatively. And that's what the American right would like to see.
SPEAKER_01And they seem to be making a lot of progress moving in that direction.
SPEAKER_00They're making a tremendous amount of progress in that direction. And maybe two important things to understand in the big picture before we talk about what individuals can do. The first piece of advice that we heard that we gleaned and that we that we wanted to share in the New Yorker piece is first, that autocratic leaders can be successfully challenged. There's nothing inevitable about the rise of authoritarianism. It takes a while to organize against. But there's a great researcher named Erica Chenowith, who's here at the ASH Center at Harvard, where I also sit. And Erica and a colleague did a massive study of over 600 mass movements. They're the first people ever to basically say, what works? We're going to study all of these movements, pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian movements, that were trying to unseat a leader or gain territorial independence, basically. And what they found was what has become known as the 3.5% rule, which probably many of our friends in domestic activism, people who've been involved in movement work in the United States may be familiar with because it's become this, it's be it's become this famous number that if 3.5% of a population gets involved in non-cooperation work, the no autocrat has survived that in the long term. So that's really hopeful. It means our work is cut out for us, but it's really hopeful. And they also found that that in general, nonviolence, actually more than in general, nonviolence is more effective than violence. And so both of those are hopeful. The place that I think dissidence comes in, or the reason that I want to be talking about being a dissident is that is the mechanics of how that movement works. And in general, the way that mechanic that the mechanics of how that move of that, how that for democracy movement works, is that you have to imagine it like this is how the the scholar Maria Stefan describes it, you have to imagine it like a Greek temple where you have, I know your listeners cannot see the triangle that I'm the isosceles triangle that I'm making with my hands, but you've got the top that's uh being upheld by multiple pillars, these sort of these columns. And each of those, if you want the temple to fall, right? If you want authoritarianism to fall, there are these columns that are upholding the authoritarian state. And those are they can be the military, they can be the government, they can be local government, judges, media, religious figures, religious institutions, business, etc. So the way that Safan talks about it is that you have to, each of those, at some point, each of those pillars needs to collapse. You need to erode support from each of those pillars in society so the whole thing comes down. So what does that take? Part of the reason that we want to write one to write this dissident piece is those pillars don't just come down. Those pillars are comprised of individuals, and those individuals are moved by individual acts of dissent and risk taking and courage. And the key term here is non-cooperation. Yep. So we saw in South Africa that we know about international boycotts that had a tremendous impact ultimately in bringing folks to the table. But there were also a lot of internal boycotts that built up over time that pressured people to the table. And so that was a sort of economic sector and the private sector took on multiple acts of non-cooperation that helped bring that building on. Student protesters built these really warm relationships with members of the military. And when Milosevic finally turned to his military and said, go get them, they stood down and they didn't because they had these relationships. That was an act of non-cooperation. So it takes many acts of non-cooperation to defeat an autocrat. The question is, what does that take for an individual person so that we can build this sort of swell, this wave of non-cooperation? And that's what we were trying to get at with the piece.
SPEAKER_01And in in the piece, you you talked about how one of the keys to challenging authoritarian regimes is for citizens to not cooperate or to decline to participate in immoral and illegal acts. What do you mean by that?
SPEAKER_00What we mean by that is part of what I just described, which is to say that M. Gesson writes for the New York Times about authoritarianism and their experience in Russia growing up in Russia, and wrote yesterday that part of what they see going on in the United States is what they saw beginning to happen in Russia in the early 2000s, mid-2000s, which is that things get really normal. At some point, you think, okay, well, this is just a backdrop of my existence. So some of what Maria Stefan is talking about when she says that, and we quote her, is to refuse to abide a world where that level of corruption and authoritarianism is normal. Sharon Browse, who's a rabbi in the United States, right, I was a rabbi in in Los Angeles, Adi Carr, gave a sermon that I think about all the time, right after Trump got elected for the first time, where she talked about a parable from the Talmud, where the there was basically there was tainted grain in a town, and it was getting more and more tainted, uh, more and more poisonous, but that's all they had. And so people just kept eating it and kept eating it. And at some point they built a tolerance to it, and they they still died, they still got sick, but they figured that's all we have. And instead of building, instead, she told it much better, but instead of growing somewhere else or buying from another town, at some point they just dealt with what was in front of them. And Sharon's exhortation is do not eat the tainted grain. You don't have to eat the tainted grain. There's always another option. Yeah. But refusing to abide and refusing to participate and decline immoral acts or legal acts can take act of courage. And I think that the way that that manifests in ordinary people's lives is, for example, you saw this woman, Rachel Cohen, who we didn't profile in the piece, I'm not sure it had even happened yet. Who was at one of these law firms and sent a firm-wide email when they when the law firm was getting ready to cooperate with the federal government on all of its terms on this sort of illegal and unconstitutional deal. And she she sent a firm-wide email. She tried to organize all of her fellow associates. She had just spent the last however many years, 10 years of her life trying to become a fancy lawyer to give it all up because she felt that it wasn't ethical or appropriate and that history wasn't going to look kindly on her. So that's what she means.
SPEAKER_01And the the amount of courage that that must have taken someone who's fairly low level in the bureaucracy to resist the federal agent right there at the school. I just I was so inspired by that.
SPEAKER_00It's deeply inspiring. We I did see that story. And we we spent time with a network in Massachusetts that is now calling itself Loose, but that just sort of evolved emerged in the last several months. And we spent time at a at an ICE training that we went to to sort of to see what exactly was a sort of ice watch training. So this is a network that has sprung up of ordinary people. Some people who are part of immigrant families or and some who aren't, but many, most who are not, who are getting trained in the art and science of getting deployed and showing up and videotaping when an ICE agent is sitting in an unmarked vehicle outside of church or in a heavily or a neighborhood where there are a lot of immigrant families and just to go up and ask questions and to try to document it and then to alert others. And essentially what's happening is that people are putting themselves somewhat in the in the line of risk in order to be able to collect the amount of information that's needed for other people to make their own risk analysis to decide whether I'm going to send my kid to school today or whether I'm going to walk down that that boulevard or whatever. And so and we've said we we profile and we talk in the piece about uh a situation where that network was activated and a local school teacher who was who had gotten that training and was on the basically the text chain showed up. The ice agents left, and they were able to give folks uh from a construction site a ride home and get them connected to know your rights trainings. So there's also this sort of inspiring reconfiguration of what it means to live in community that's what I was gonna ask about.
SPEAKER_01You wrote about the importance of finding a sort of a political home for non-cooperation. And when you mentioned loose, that's that that those weren't that wasn't an individual, that was an individual acting as part of a community that was a home. So talk a little bit more about that.
SPEAKER_00Well, I actually think that I've seen this modeled really well in LA. I know that LA gets a lot of shit for being you know politically apathetic or whatever, you know, whatever. Perhaps some of our friends and neighbors are, and and and sometimes there are friends and neighbors who maybe you wish wouldn't show up to you with that fall. But I do think that LA's political life has been a really good model for this. There are a lot of really incredible sort of community organizing homes that people have. LA Forward is one of them for sure. I was involved in Ben the Arc when I was living in LA and obviously Kiko Network and LA Voice. And so so LA has a lot of places to look to for this kind of work, but a lot of people are not fluent in this. And so the way that I talk about it and think about it is we just can't be expected to absorb the shocks and the waves of authoritarianism and corruption and autocracy on our own. And we don't do that in any other part of our life, or we, or we know at least we know we shouldn't, right? We we have a therapist or we have mental health support or we have a church or a mosque or a synagogue or some sort of a faith community, we have a weekly or monthly popluck with with friends, we have a parents' group, there's all kinds of places that where we get support. And for whatever reason, that we we don't, we generally don't think about our political lives in that way. And the reason that those other interventions and those other structures in our life work, we know that at some point we will have a crisis. Well, you lose your job or you lose your health insurance or you have a divorce, or something happens in your life that you are only prepared for and you're only resilient to because you have built this infrastructure of spiritual community and support. And so I think that you have to think about, and we heard this over and over again from dissidents around the world who said the hardest thing about this experience of stepping out against an authoritarian state or speaking out at my job or risk in some meaningful way, was the social isolation and loneliness that came of it. I have a friend who is a never Trump, a fairly prominent sort of never Trump Republican who has been outspoken, who told me that his best man at his wedding stopped talking to him after this. So that's you know, that's here in the United States, but the it's the it is a universal fact to a person among the people that we connected with. And so everyone talked about the importance of having a political home in part because then you're acting with others and in part because when the inevitable waves of shock come, you will not have to endure it alone.
SPEAKER_01And we draw sort of strength and inspiration from each other, right? When one of us is down, the others can bring us up, right? Um it that to me that was one of the the most significant parts of the piece was the the talk about the political home.
SPEAKER_00Have you had that experience, Mike? I'm curious about what that's been like for you.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, LA Forward has been a great political home for a lot of people who are sort of newer to political engagement over the past few years, and that's been really inspiring. I've seen during the pandemic or the homelessness crisis, the emergence of mutual aid societies in Los Angeles, just neighbors coming together to take collective action. And as a former elected, I do a lot of training and networking with elected officials around the country. And when progressive electeds come together into sort of a big convening, the fact that there are groups of people that they can talk to about the common struggle, the common dynamics, the challenges of you know being a minority voice in a conservative city or the vitriol on social media, that that that makes all the difference in the world in giving people the strength and resolve to go back home and and continue the fighting.
SPEAKER_00We try to figure out ways to write about this and talk about this in ways that don't feel cliche because it just feels so obvious. Find your people. But it is in many ways a sort of counter-cultural act in a society that is obviously deeply polarized, but also where at the end of the day we get home and we scroll on our phones. And so there is a radical inversion that needs to happen, where what does it look like to look outward toward each other and to have more of those encounters?
SPEAKER_01Well, and it's so easy to see in in other segments of society, right? If you're you know part of a softball league, or you know, I'm a 12-stepper, I've been sober for years. My husband knows when I've gone to a 12-step meeting because I come home and I'm in a I'm in a different space, I'm in a different mood. And the the sort of the power of sort of community is just enormous in giving us strength and courage and and hope.
SPEAKER_00Beyond the sort of like Robert Putnam bowling alone theory of this, and maybe that is the answer, but why do you think it is I mean, when you were sitting on the city council for I don't want to say that you were the only progressive on the city council because you were there for a while, but it's a very different city council now. I still follow, I've stepped away, and maybe there's a good argument that you were a beach head for that, you know, the beginning of that, and that created space for others to come in. Now they have more of a coalition to do a lot of the kinds of work they want to do, which has been really inspiring to watch unfold. Why do you think that we it's so hard for us to apply this principle that makes sense in other parts of our lives to our political lives? I'm not saying for people like you and me who are sort of live in this political mess, but for the regular engaged person, why is that not part of our why is that not a node in our broader social existence?
SPEAKER_01I think it's because the way in which so many people engage politically is online or in front of a television, right? That's become it used to be the town square. You know, it used to be, you know, I mean, town hall meetings can be a freaking nightmare, but that that used to be a place where where people engaged more regularly. Um and now, I mean, the predominant place where people express themselves politically is, you know, on Facebook, on on Twitter, or by their choice of, you know, which television news network they watch. But in in talking to people, there were there were a number of pieces of of advice that that you got from the dissidents and the others you spoke with. They talked about discretion and compliance and compartmentalization. Talk a little bit about those elements.
SPEAKER_00Authoritarians try to find dirt on activists to delegitimize entire movements. So there was a Venezuelan activist who told us that you have to be a nun or a saint. And so, you know, we we say clean up your life. I mean, everybody should be careful about their online life in general, but I think we're talking about discretion, we mean we live we live in techno-authoritarianism. It's not just it's a this is a new strain that has mutated because we're seeing this in the fact that we, you know, we we just opened up our federal government to be pillaged by Silicon Valley functionally. And so there are many books that have been written and that will be written on that, on that strain of authoritarianism. But you gotta be really careful. And so if you're deciding, I should say, these are all things that we say, if you are opposed to what is happening in this country and you have moved through the fear, and you're ready to step out in some way to take some risk, to do something at your job, to do something in the street, to write something, to do what I guess in this conversation we're calling an act or multiple acts or a posture of non-cooperation to be a dissident. What does it mean to have discretion? It means to be careful about what you're posting online, to be aware that the things that you say can and will be used against you, whether you meant them or not, to use encrypted messaging apps, to be careful about dating apps. We've seen James James O'Teefe at Veritas, which is a funny name for a uh malicious liar to take on as his moniker. And but you've got to be careful there and remove your name from databases. I mean, there are all kinds of ways of doing this so that it's harder to be docs. I mean, so that's just sort of like the lip, the Yiddish word is topless. It's just like the nuts and bolts stuff that you want to do to avoid that. In terms of compliance, this is another component of how to be smart about risk taking. This all has to do with what Julia called the sort of new threat model. So this is uh sort of counterintuitive, but I think it will make sense. In order to take a part in non-cooperation, comply with a lot of other stuff. So don't give them anything stupid to get you on. Pay your taxes, pay your parking tickets, abide by traffic laws. I mean, little stuff. In the United States, we have these executive orders that are coming out that are essentially fishing for a crime. They're telling law enforcement agencies in Washington to go search for some crime that someone the president doesn't like has committed. And so you have to have a sort of constructive paranoia in the context of those big dragnets that are coming down. And that's how we heard from, for example, we talked to a guy who runs a anti-corruption nonprofit organization NGO in Hungary. And he told, by the way, God's work, not anti-corruption NGO in Hungary. The government has just made it extremely difficult to do your work. Yeah. And part of the way they do that is that they're just constantly investigating. Constantly. They're investigating nothing. They're just investigating you because you, I mean, we're beginning to see that in this country too. And so he says, that guy says this is how they avoid dealing with the substantive issues and the substance of issues that by sort of being able to distract. Um the the the third thing that you asked about is a sort of compartmentalization uh question, which is it's not a fun way to live. We would all like to be trusting. And there are communities in which we can be more trusting. We spoke to a Russian, if you can believe this, a Russian free speech lawyer who is now living in exile in the UK. And she she told us that there is a phrase that she and her friends would use, the very Russian word, which is non-handshakeability. There's a Russian word for it. She basically said that she and her friends would describe people who they met or they came across as are they handshakeable or non-handshakable. And in in Russian political context, where we see poisonings at a much higher grade and actual sort of targeted political violence by the state, or clandestine political violence by the state, you can understand where why somebody would or wouldn't be handshakable. But she means it actually as much more of a sort of metaphorical, in a much more metaphorical sense. So you create her advice was there's a time period if you're fighting authoritarianism, you just have to figure out where your people are. It has to do with uh finding a political home, but it also has to do with understanding the values, sharing space with people who you trust. And the reason we say don't share information with anyone you trust, just one anecdote or sort of piece of reporting that we learned is that in the United States, in states where it's illegal to get abortions or to seek reproductive care of some kind, we are seeing much more frequently people get turned in. For listeners, I am these are massive scare quotes, but that is actually what it is. You get turned into the authorities by somebody that you have a disgruntled former partner or somebody in the community, then by some digital means, so by some means of digital surveillance. And so there are just some things that you wish that you didn't have to do. The one other thing I'll say is that we have uh we talked to a Venezuelan dissident who told us his friend, who was a prominent activist, used signal, used encrypted messaging, and ultimately got arrested when he like left his hiding spot and went out to a coffee shop in the light of day. And so obviously that's not funny, but it but it was told sort of to as this sort of absurd thing, which is to say that we we people can often be have there can be a mismatch in what people care about. Yeah. You know, you care about all these sort of clandestine how do we keep stay underground, but you're not thinking about things in a sort of common sense way, which everybody now needs to begin thinking about.
SPEAKER_01There was one other thing I wanted to ask you about, and you refer to it in the piece as a a fundamental tension of building a principled dissident culture. And you to you you talk about an oft-told story about Andrei Sakharov and about the concept of negative identity and positive identity. What is that and why is that so important to understand?
SPEAKER_00We wrestled a lot in this writing about whether to use the term dissident at all. And we did for all the reasons that we've discussed, and I'm glad that we did because I think that it's an important framing for people. Yeah. But the reason that we consider not using that term is because that most people you and I would call dissidents, many of them hate being called dissidents. And so, for example, in this in the Soviet dissident movement, the people who were most involved, often you know, often they were intellectuals and authors and academics. These are people who said, We are not opposing the state, we are insisting that the constitution that has been written be enforced as such. And you're the dissidents, right? The government are is the oppositional force, and we are the affirmative force. And that was really, really important for that movement, in part because they did not allow their identity to be defined by what they were not. But it also meant that once you win, I don't believe that there's an inevitability of success or that the arc of the moral universe necessarily bends toward justice. I think that we have a lot of work to do in the intro, and we have a lot to do with that. But it does mean that when you get to the end of the road, that you're not the dog that caught the car. You have a vision for what society should look like. And this is something that we on the broadly speaking, the American left struggle with intensely. So what does it look like? And I will say, I think there are people who have who we have seen take acts of public dissent, at least, in this country in the sort of early days of Trump too, are people who have a vision for what they think society ought to look like. You, Mike, are certainly one of them. Sure that that has sustained you and the other people that you've worked with, the kind of city that you want to see, the kind of opportunity that people should have, the way that people should be treated. But it is much, much more difficult to do the work if you aren't uh defined, if you aren't defining your work and the scope of your work by the vision that you ultimately hope to see. And the way that we end the piece is the is also a story about Soviet dissidents, which I love. So the way that they used to toast was uh before they would be sent off to the gulag or whatever, was to to the success of our hopeless cause, which is which is excellent. And by the way, within 10 or 15 years of those toasts, the the wall fell. Yep. Obviously, we find ourselves here again in a moment where we're in a global battle for free society, but I love that story because it's indicative of the sort of constant struggle.
SPEAKER_01It's a it's a great piece that you and Julia wrote, and I hope everybody reads it. And you made a very conscious choice of using the provocative term of dissident. You've got another event coming up on June 11th where you're using another provocative term. Tell us what that uh event is.
SPEAKER_00I don't think it's that provocative, but if you say so. Yeah, I I am hosting an event at the Allen Lab uh for democracy renovation at the AS Center at Harvard. And the event that is we're calling the event concentration camps in the machinery of repression, uh lessons to save democracy, or something like that. And basically, in in recent months, the logic of concentration camps has crept into the rhetoric and policy of the U.S. government. We're seeing it in the arbitrary detention of people who are sort of legally present in the United States and uh the ways that that people are being sent, non, you know, non-citizens are being sent overseas to SECOT. I don't I think your listeners are familiar with the general state of affairs. Yeah. There's a a writer named Andrea Pitzer who wrote a book in 2017 called One Long Night, a global history of concentration camps. And she wrote in New York magazine last month, and I'm just gonna read a sentence from what she wrote really quickly, about Seacott, about this Salvadoran prison camp that we are sending people to without due process, many of whom we know for a fact never committed any crimes here. She says that Seacot is the person who wrote the book on concentration camps. She says Seacot comes. Comfortably fits the bill for a concentration camp. And she said the defining characteristic of any concentration camp is one that detains civilians en masse without due process on the basis of a number of things, but one of them is supposed affiliation, which is part of what we're seeing here. There are a lot of other people, reporters and academics in the United States who agree that what we're seeing at Seacot is a concentration camp or a penal colony or a permanent prison camp. And so this is horrific. This is horrific. And this is not only corrosive of democracy, but we also know that many that the precursors to what have become the sort of most horrific places on earth started as places to arbitrarily detain people like political opponents and political dissidents in Russia and Germany and elsewhere. And so it's a dark trajectory, but we need to be really, really clear and honest and direct and straightforward and candid about what it is that we're looking at. And part of that requires using precise language to say what it is, to it because if it shocks us into awareness, then that's great. But I don't think we're using the language to shock people. I think that we're using the language to be intellectually honest, to say what something is, and to not enter into this Soviet Orwellian double speak in which we describe uh in which we use terms that uh are sort of corporatist or that make us feel better about ourselves because we should not feel better about ourselves until this human rights crisis is over.
SPEAKER_01And uh you're on Substack now. Uh, how can people follow you there?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm on Substack, omnifieldsmeyer.substack.com, and I bleat out a lot on um on on Witch Eye too, so people can find me there as well. But I'd love to uh I'd love to be able to be in touch with your listeners.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. I will put all that stuff in the show notes as well. Ami, thanks so much for joining me.
SPEAKER_00Mike, I'm I admire you so deeply, and I'm so glad to do this and hope we can do it again.
SPEAKER_01The event that Ami mentioned on America and the machinery of concentration camps was recorded the other night, and it's available online. You can find info in the show notes. Now, a few comments before we end the program, an angry one and I hope a hopeful one. First, the angry one. A lot of public officials have gone to great lengths to condemn acts of violence that have occurred at or after protests. They've denounced the graffiti and the vandalism and the burning of Waymo's, and they have rightfully denounced the throwing of rocks and water bottles or firecrackers at police officers. But way too few elected officials have condemned the acts of violence by the police, by the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. They have shot protesters and reporters with less lethal weapons, they have used flashbangs, and they have very likely violated state law by repeatedly using tear gas on crowds. This is dangerous, and this is part of a very long history of policing in Los Angeles using violence against protesters. It happened during the Justice for Janitors movement in the 1990s, it happened during the 2000 Democratic National Convention, it happened during the George Floyd protests in 2020, and it's happening now again. This shit has to stop. We cannot win a fight against a federal police state if we allow local police misconduct here to go unchecked. It is time to rein these guys in. On a brighter note. In Ami's article and in our conversation, he and I spoke about the importance of having a political home and of drawing strength from community. I cannot underscore that enough. In one of the ugliest weeks that I can remember, with families being torn apart and the federal government run amok, I attended several rallies and marches last week. A rally to free SEIU leader David Huerta, the No Kings rally in downtown Los Angeles, and a prayer vigil in Grand Park. Each was a celebration of our shared values and of our collective power. The events were beautiful, they were inspiring. They were manifestations of a beloved community asserting itself in the face of terror and abuse of power. It was our Los Angeles, and it is a place that I love. There will be another interfaith celebration this Wednesday and for subsequent Wednesdays at 6 p.m. at La Placita at 535 North Main Street in downtown Los Angeles. Organized by LA Voice in Pico, California, the event is meant to have us gather as public witnesses, uniting in prayer and nonviolence and in unwavering solidarity with our immigrant neighbors. You can find more info and you can RSVP in the show notes. I hope I'll see you there, together and in community. And that does it for this episode of What's Next Los Angeles. My thanks to Tonya Luisias for editing and producing this podcast. My thanks as always to LA Forward for sponsoring this podcast. I hope you'll also listen to LA Podcast, our sister podcast, also produced by Think Forward, a segment of LA Forward. On this week's episode, Alyssa Walker, Scott Frazier, Rachel Reyes, and I go into day-by-day detail of this horrendous last week in Los Angeles. You can find that wherever you listen to podcasts. I hope you get a chance to check it out. Until next time, take care and peace!