Cayden is out this week so we're featuring an episode of The Fascism Barometer, the new podcast from friend of the show Ejeris Dixon. We hope you find it useful. If so, check out the links below to subscribe and connect with The Fascism Barometer resource hub on their website.

The Fascism Barometer, Episode 5: Keeping Ourselves Safe as Fascism Rises

Che Johnson-Long and Ken Montenegro, two longtime community security and safety practitioners, join The Fascism Barometer to discuss ways to increase our safety in the face of rising fascism.  Ejeris, Che, and Ken discuss safety planning tips for individuals and organizations, including resistance and survival strategies that can be combined to make us safer in the short and long term.

The Process is the Punishment, a new podcast from Mainline, documents the struggle of the ATL 61 through interviews with five defendants, and attorneys connected to the case. The ATL 61 were indicted under the state of Georgia’s RICO Act in August 2023, for their protest against the controversial police training facility known as “Cop City.”

In this episode we offer a preview of The Process is the Punishment, and Cayden talks with Mainline founder Aja Arnold and podcast producer Tåsi Chargualaf about the project, and about the movement to stop Cop City.

Episode one is available to stream now on Mainline's Patreon and Substack for their paid subscribers.

Contribute your thoughts to Mainline's Movement Media Training Survey

This week on the show, we are joined by Executive Director of Media Justice, Steven Renderos, to discuss the latest nefarious activities of the FCC. Then the Executive Director of Women’s March, Rachel O’Leary Carmona, joins to discuss what the impact of mass demonstrations can be for organizing in this moment; following on the heels of their recent People's March in Washington D.C. earlier this month.

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On the show this week, Cayden talks first about Convergence Magazine's recent publishing collaboration with In These Times, The Forge, and The Real News Network. Together, we published a collection of writing and podcast episodes entitled Left Out: The Missing Election Narratives – available in the latest print edition of In These Times and in full and online.

Then we're joined by Vice President for Institutional and Sectoral Change at Race Forward, Cathy Albisa, as well as federal workers Lauren Leib, President of NTEU Chapter 340 and Chris Dols, President of IFPTE Local 98, to talk about their efforts to protect vital state services - and our democracy - in this coming period.

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This week on the show Cayden is joined by fellow Convergence editorial board members Max Elbaum and Jon Liss. We recently published a collective editorial statement called Block & Build 2.0. The piece lays out the many ways the Block & Build strategy has to re-orient to the seismic shifts in the political landscape that are happening as we enter a 2nd Trump term this coming week. Max and Jon walk us through some of our most important strategic adjustments as well as wrestle with some of the areas we still face questions and uncertainty.

This week on the show Cayden is joined by one of the editors of the new anthology We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition, out now from Haymarket Books, Maya Schenwar. The book brings together a remarkable collection of voices revealing the complex tapestry of ways people are living abolition in their daily lives through parenting and caregiving. Ranging from personal narratives to policy-focused analysis to activist chronicles, its writers highlight how abolition is essential to any kind of parenting justice.

For those impacted by the Los Angeles area wild fires, mutual aid and other resources are being actively updated by Los Angeles Climate Week and Collidescope Foundation, or you can give to a central fund run by the Movement Innovation Collaborative.

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Cayden is joined this episode by organizer and strategist, as well as co-founder of MediaJustice and founder of the Radical Loss Project, Malkia Devich-Cyril and journalist and author of From The Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, Sarah Jaffe. Together, they seek to grapple with the political and cultural implications of grief, both individual and collective, arising from everything that’s happened to us, collectively, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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This week on the show Cayden is joined by the Principal of Ejerie Labs, Ejeris Dixon. Ejeris recently launched The Fascism Barometer, a podcast and resource hub project working to educate communities already feeling authoritarian impacts about what fascism is and how we stop it. We’ll explore the history of creeping fascist trends in our society and politics and how we all should think about our relationship to state power.

Before that, Cayden is joined by Ju-Hyun Park, a Movement Media colleague at The Real News Network and organizer with Nodutdol about what’s been unfolding in South Korea since the unsuccessful coup attempt by President Yoon Suk Yeol on December 3. Read Ju-Hyun's full story at People's Dispatch.

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This week on the show we’re exploring the challenges of building a progressive media ecosystem and mainstreaming movement narratives in existing corporate media. First, Adam Johnson, co-host of the Citations Needed podcast, joins Cayden to help us understand the current state of play in media and public relations work and why it’s against us by design.

Then Cayden talks with Hermelinda Cortés, Executive Director of ReFrame, about her organization's research on the ways narrative links traditional and social media to create the social “weather” conditions for our movements. They dig into ReFrame's post-election efforts to help build deeper, more powerful, and farther-reaching movement narratives.

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This week on the show we’re looking at how our strategies need to adapt in the coming months. First, we are joined by Senior Political Director for United We Dream, Bruna Bouhid, about their vital lame duck session advocacy. Then we take a bit of a longer view of what movement work needs to look like during the second Trump administration with Senior Fellow at Future Currents, LJ Amsterdam. Her soon-to-be-published report about the changing nature and strategy behind direct action holds some key learnings for all of us preparing for next year.

Connect with United We Dream by texting "Here To Stay" to 787-57

Get in touch with Future Currents for more info for you or your organization: [email protected]

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