This week on the show we are featuring the recording of a panel Convergence Magazine hosted July 4th at the Socialism 2025 conference in Chicago titled Blocking the Right, Building the Base - The Work of Building Left Unity. The panelists feature leaders from Liberation Road, North Star Socialist Organization, the Socialist Majority Caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America, Rising Majority, and Movement for Black Lives discussing how their work is aligned with the “Block and Build” strategic framework and the need for both building membership bases while developing functional cross-sector unity.

Writer and organizer Asha Ransby-Sporn joins to talk about building durable political power in the five years since the 2020 uprisings, what those challenges look like in her city of Chicago (which elected progressive mayor Brandon Johnson in 2023), and what comes next.

This week's show was recorded live at the 22nd Century Conference. In this sobering discussion on the rise of political violence, Cayden is joined by Executive Director of 22nd Century Initiative and co-host of the Anti-Authoritarian Podcast (published by Convergence), Scot Nakagawa, Principal Research Advisor for Political Research Associates, Steven Gardiner, and Co-Executive Director of TakeAction Minnesota, Amanda Otero.

They explore the grief and responses to last week's attacks on lawmakers in Minnesota and other recent acts of stochastic violent terror. The panel discusses how we orient ourselves to keep doing movement work in a increasingly dangerous environment and the need to go on the offensive while maintaining nonviolent discipline.

This week on the show, Cayden is joined by Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, Hahrie Han. Her 2024 book Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church is a fascinating, ground level chronicle of the years-long effort in a Midwestern evangelical church to reckon with their city’s history of racial segregation and police violence.

This week we are joined by Brittany Ramos DeBarros, Interim Organizing Director at About Face: Veterans Against the War (@vetsaboutface). Since 2004, About Face (f.k.a. Iraq Veterans Against the War) has provided a political home to veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns who are opposed to US militarism and imperialism. We’ll discuss what her organization has been doing to respond to our current political conditions.

How to Support Immigrant Communities During ICE Raids

Get involved in About Face's upcoming direct action: Benefits Not Bullshit

We don’t have a full episode this week, but we wanted to drop a quick check-in for your podcast feed, because a lot is going on. We're celebrating pride and wrestling with the grief of Gaza and political violence, all while staving off the hypernormalization of creeping fascism.

So...how are you holding up?

This week, Cayden is joined by Suzanne Pharr, a longtime social justice worker from the South. Suzanne is one of the most astute observers of the political project of the far Right from a movement perspective, and someone whose work has spanned issue area and geography. At age 86, her work is relentless as she has recently published a 2nd edition of her book In the Time of the Right: Reflections on Liberation. The book constructs a progressive view of the politics of our time that is accessible to students, activists, and all who are trying to understand the threat to democracy by the Right.

In April we saw the largest demonstration against the second Trump administration since it started in the Hands Off! actions across over 1,400 locations nation-wide. One of the groups responsible for coordinating these efforts is Indivisible, an organization created in response to the first Trump administration in 2016 with the goal of saving American democracy.

In this episode, Cayden is joined by National Political Director of Indivisible, Dani Negrete. They discuss the work Indivisible did to coordinate such consistent mobilization across the entire country as well as how they plan to mobilize and prioritize that momentum.

Be a part of Indivisible's next big mobilization, June 14: No Kings.

This episode was recorded live at the Narrative Power Summit in New Orleans, Louisiana on May 9th, 2025.

In the episode, Cayden is first joined by colleagues at the summit, Program Specialist for ReFrame, Shaira Chaer and Creative and Brand Specialist at ReFrame, Ivie Osaghae. Narrative power is a crucial piece of the puzzle when it comes to the full picture of governing power. Governing power is more than just the task of winning elections: it’s about wielding that governing power to create structural change–and building a robust infrastructure to defend those changes until they can defend themselves. Coherent narrative power is a necessary component of winning and defending these structural changes.

Then to further discuss how some of these narrative strategies might look in practice, Cayden is joined by a panel of organizers discussing the narrative structures their work operates in and are looking to overcome.

Over the past month we’ve been co-publishing a series with our colleagues at The Forge examining “cancel culture.” The four part series entitled Because We Need Each Other is now available for free on both our sites.

Today Cayden is joined by the four coauthors of the series, Erika Sasson, Celia Kutz, Shilpa Jain, and Kazu Haga, to talk about the series–and answer your questions about their efforts to address this phenomenon specifically in the context of our organizations, coalitions, and communities.

Additional resources on cancel culture