The podcast showing what resistance looks like under Trump 2.0: ‘Where’s the progressive Project 2025?’ | Trump administration

IIn a recent episode of Unnamed and Unbound: Black Voters Matter Podcast, co-host Cliff Albright spoke with his guests about the power of resilience and building community in times of uncertainty. Resilience takes different forms, he explained, such as mutual aid campaigns or protests in Washington DC with go-go music during the continued deployment of the National Guard in the capital. “As food becomes more expensive and food programs are cut, whether it’s Snap or Meals on Wheels, many Black organizations and communities are asking, ‘How can we feed ourselves?’ ” said Albright, co-founder and executive director of the voting rights and community empowerment organization Black Voters Matter. “The best part of our resilience has always been taking care of ourselves, one way or another. »

After the November presidential election, the Black Voters Matter team got to work. In late January, Albright, his co-founder LaTosha Brown and the group’s legal director and chief of staff, April England-Albright, launched the voting rights and organizing podcast to help keep Black communities informed. Their goal is also to dispel misinformation by engaging people who may be vulnerable to the Trump administration’s propaganda, Albright said, and who need some “persuasion on how to interpret what’s happening around us.” For England-Albright, she would like activists to build coalitions that learn from the shortcomings of past movements. Ultimately, Brown hopes listeners feel a sense of belonging to the podcast and are encouraged to build community.

Some of their guests included Jennifer Wells of the community organizing group Community Change, Ife Finch Floyd of the policy advocacy organization Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, and Deante’ Kyle, host of the pop culture and politics podcast Grits and Eggs.

In addition to the podcast, Black Voters Matter also awarded nearly $4 million in grants to local organizations, including churches, neighborhood associations and NAACP chapters, to help organizers canvass and mobilize voters this year. The organization also provides technical support to grassroots groups, including training them to send mass political messages of a political nature. A documentary about Black Voters Matter, called Love, Joy and Power: Tools for Liberation, released this year, followed the organization’s work in 2020. Using it as a model for progressive organizers, Albright said, “is essential to the work we do now and to understanding how we can win” in future elections.

“I think there is a sobering reality for millions of people in this country: To create the nation that we desire and deserve,” Brown said, “it cannot possibly be built on the same foundation of corporate greed, race and white supremacy.”

Creation of the podcast began shortly after the election results were released, the day after the 2024 presidential race. Brown sat motionless in the kitchen of her Washington, D.C. hotel, shocked by Donald Trump’s victory after years of sounding the alarm. Before the election, she and the Black Voters Matter team traveled across the country to engage voters in an effort to build political power within Black communities.

A wave of emotions ranging from betrayal to bitterness to fear overcame him. “I just felt the full weight of this black woman being rejected when she was the best and the most prepared. She was the most patriotic. She was the most transparent,” Brown said. “It felt like white privilege, dancing in front of you.”

“Don’t we know what we have done? Brown remembers asking herself questions as she continued to watch the election results. She wanted others to know that they were not alone in their feelings of hopelessness. “I see our podcast as a beacon in the storm,” Brown said. It provides a space to discuss organizing strategies in today’s sociopolitical environment.

Ultimately, today’s movement builders are creating more underground networks similar to the Underground Railroad, Brown said.

“What we’ve decided is to focus on our own well-being and create alternatives for our community and for those who really want to see a multiracial democracy. So what we’re going to do is continue to build. We’re organizing, and when the time is right, you’ll know we’re there.”

For England-Albright, the podcast helps amplify Black Voters Matter’s coalition building by welcoming guests from other community empowerment organizations. “So often in this country, politics has not shown that we matter,” England-Albright said. “We have always wanted to serve as a beacon of hope and light that we matter in this country, regardless of politics. » His personal experience in government informed his views on Trump’s second term.

As a former supervising attorney in the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights during Trump’s first term, she said she had an insider’s view on how the Trump administration weaponized the powers of the executive branch during its second term. Project 2025, a conservative agenda released by the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation, laid the groundwork for the Trump administration “to radically reduce the number of federal government officials and replace them with individuals who would pass a loyalty test,” England-Albright said. “The reason he did this is because officials played a major role in preventing and stopping some of the darker things he originally wanted to do.”

To survive Trump’s second term, England-Albright said activists must build coalitions like “we’ve never had before.” In the past, organizations often focused only on issues such as saving the environment or protecting voting rights. But this time, it takes an amalgamation of forces, she said: “We need to find a way to merge all of our individual desires or major issues into one, to create the kind of wall that will be needed in this moment.” »

She wants to see progressives create a long-term strategy that will ensure their policies survive in right-wing administrations. “Where is the Progressive Project 2025? She asked. “We need to create permanent laws, whether they’re constitutional amendments, I don’t care, but we need to do something that ensures that our voices are permanent in this country.”

Despite his disappointment with the current state of politics, Albright maintains a sense of optimism in recognizing that a fight is necessary to overcome turbulence and pain. In the fifth and sixth episodes of the Unnamed and Unbound: Black Voters Matter podcast released earlier this year, Albright spoke to guests at a rally at the Dallas County Courthouse in Alabama to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. On March 7, 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led thousands of nonviolent civil rights protesters who were brutally beaten by law enforcement as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. “When I say love, you say power,” Albright said during a call and response to attendees. Love and power, Albright told the audience, are at the center of his work at Black Voters Matter. That weekend, Selma residents discussed their hopes and fears, focusing on the effects of gun violence on their community.

“Personally, I often call upon Dr. King’s quotes on love and power: “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love that implements the demands of justice,” Albright said. “So as long as we can be rooted in that, not in sentimental, anemic love, in love sustained by power, then we can get through this.”