I consume a lot of media about politics and political culture. Throughout the last decade, the voices that I trust to help me contextualize our political moment have evolved—they’re more studied, more rooted in community, and more empathetic than the people I used to listen to. The media I’m focusing for this series of short posts is a perfect confluence of these qualities—it’s the incredibly timely podcast Apathy is Not an Option by the SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center).

We live among waves of misinformation and mountains of AI slop. Widespread corporate capture of media is reducing journalistic institutions to reactionary propaganda machines... the 2025 US media ecosystem is a shit show.

Apathy is Not an Option stands in stark contrast to all the bullshit. It focuses on the ongoing fight for civil liberties and democracy in the United States. By analyzing 20th century victories, this show literally maps out the ways in which the current fascist threat can be defeated.

The people who make this show are infinitely smarter and more equipped to resist fascism than I am... you should check out the show firsthand! But I hope documenting my thoughts can help others contextualize and apply some insights. This series of short posts highlights the key lesson I’ve learned from each episode of the show.

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For many working class people, the rise of the MAGA movement throughout the last decade has felt... ominous. Like the long-feared return of some ancient evil in a Hollywood fantasy trilogy. Unbelievable but also far too real.

During that time, a lot has been said about the second A in MAGA—make it great again. The mythical past at the center of the MAGA mythos is pitched to the Republican base as a time when the economy worked for them—an era that Trump claims he’ll revive. Ironically, supporters envision the domestic economy of the 1950s, when the greed of the wealthy upper class was held somewhat in check by the progressive policies of The New Deal.

In January 2025, high on confidence, Trump allowed himself some honesty. He said America was last “great” in 1896—a time of mass suffering for the working class due to the extreme greed of a handful of wealthy elites.

MAGA is working furiously to turn the clock back by at least a century. Through the years, I’ve learned a lot about their fascist methods, but it’s always felt like I was missing something. Could MAGA’s cultural tenets of greed and vengeance actually be enough to sustain such a massive societal regression? What holds it together?

For me, the first episode of this show made clear MAGA’s strategic centerpiece. Its specific organizing principle is pursuit of the destruction of the Civil Rights laws passed in the 1950s and 60s. That’s why MAGA exists—that’s the whole point.

Every one of the fascist movement’s goals—including authoritarian rule—hinges upon its ability to neutralize or overturn our Civil Rights laws (and a handful of constitutional amendments).

Racism and misogyny have always been the wealthy elite’s best tools for dividing and conquering the working class. Our Civil Rights laws frustrate their efforts. With our pesky legal protections gone, the wealthy elite would be free to dial up racist policy and keep us focused on fighting one another instead of those in power.

Life for the majority of Americans is already defined by economic anxiety. We are already beholden to billionaires. They slash our social safety nets. Our taxes subsidize their companies to line their pockets. Their endless greed is propagandized as noble capitalist ambition… meanwhile, working families struggle to choose between groceries and rent.

If MAGA is successful in its goal of Civil Rights destruction, the wealthy elite will accelerate today’s pervasive economic injustice in ways we can hardly imagine… unlimited wealth and power for a select few… and a lifetime of pain and poverty for you, me, and everyone we’ve ever loved.

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Recognizing this central goal of the MAGA movement feels like a big unlock... understanding its tactics makes me better at resisting its bullshit.

All power is up for grabs. But it sure seems like power is attracted to those who proclaim that the future is theirs... and then fight relentlessly to make it so. There’s no reason that we in the working class can’t be that delusional and courageous. Power can be ours once again.

Our present-day Civil Rights were once willed into existence by organized communities of everyday people like you and me. If MAGA strips away our rights, there will be pain… but we’ll rise up once again and reinstitute what was taken from us. We’ll make our rights more robust and resilient than ever before. We’ll learn from the victories and shortcomings of the 20th century, and we’ll pass hardened new laws against fascist overreach that protect our communities from corrupt billionaire interests. We can do this and so much more.

There are more of us than there are of them—there always will be.

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Indigenous resistance against imperialism and white supremacy is global and ongoing. This topic is a universe all its own, and has been for a very long time. With this post, I want to caveat that I don’t know shit, but I’m trying to learn. I hope that documenting my thoughts can help others—but if you want the good stuff, you should watch the interview yourself and hear directly from Peltier.

I don’t know much about Native American resistance against white supremacy. I know some things about the history of that struggle—but those few things which I’ve understood logically, I’ve never understood emotionally.

Like many Americans, I’ve spent much of my life intellectually and spiritually stunted by colonial myth and the allure of individualism. When I was growing up, my empathy toward the Native cause was heavily influenced by whether it felt relevant to my daily life—and often, it didn’t. I’m not proud of this, but it’s important to recognize it so I can unlearn that self-centered framing.

Today’s rising fascism has led me to assess history through a less selfish lens. Ironically, while I’ve been working to de-center myself in my understanding of the world, this interview with Leonard Peltier has made it abundantly clear that the topic of Native resistance actually is quite relevant to my daily life. It’s always been relevant — my life has always passively benefited from Native resistance.

That’s because—like struggles for women’s suffrage and those of the Civil Rights movement—the centuries-long fight for rightful Native sovereignty reinforces all other fights against fascism by pushing back against precedent-setting fascist overreach. Given the chance, fascists who target Indigenous people will also target me... and anyone else who doesn’t fit cleanly into their fascist mythos. This means that the Native cause has been shielding me from fascists my entire life.

Through various books and video essays, I’ve been learning about some of the many courageous activists whom the State has punished for their resistance to injustice. So many elements of Peltier’s story parallel the experiences of other activists. As I learn more of their stories, I’m realizing that the State always seems to use the same violent means to suppress their dissent. These stories contain recurring themes.

It’s becoming clear that activist’s fights for human rights are all connected, waged against a common enemy. Their enemy is the disproportionate power held by the ultra wealthy capitalist class which seeks to subjugate the human experience for profit. That ‘ultra wealthy’ part is pretty important of course—it allows those in power to proliferate white supremacist ideology for the purpose of dividing and conquering the working class.

All this shit is connected, and it’s becoming more obvious every day as oligarchs and politicians brazenly flaunt their wealth and slash at social safety nets.

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I encourage you to watch this interview firsthand. I learned history here that I knew basically nothing about—including details of the government’s formal push for assimilation and cultural destruction via Indian Termination policies.

Increasing my exposure to this history is helping me contextualize our current moment of 2025 Star-Spangled Domestic Fascism... I’m less scared when I understand these things as part of a bigger picture. I have more hope when I learn about the successes of activists like Peltier. The more I learn, the more I find myself genuinely hopeful about the future.

An important factor in my educational journey has been coming to terms with the fact that Israel is conducting a genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza—and that as a tax paying American, I am being forced to fund it. During this interview, Peltier describes the ongoing genocide of Palestinians as mirroring what was done to Native people in the Americas. This seems obvious in retrospect, but hearing it from Peltier hit me hard. In Palestine, we see so clearly how all the global struggles for freedom are so connected.

We have shit to fight for in 2025... we have work to do. Many activists like Peltier have known this their entire lives, while normie people like myself are just starting to wake up to these realities. Peltier’s interview helped me take another step in the right direction. Maybe it’ll help you, too.

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