 So I'm here with Nellini Stamp, who is the National Organising Director of the Working Families Party. Nellini, how are you doing? Good! Thanks for hanging out. Pleasure. Pleasure to have you here, because I am fascinated by how your work spans lots of different spheres of organising in the US, trying to tackle this massive social and political crisis on so many different fronts. Can you talk to me more about how you see your work figuring into, I guess, solving this incredible political crisis in the US? Yeah, crisis is the same thing. But yeah, I mean, as my full-time job and what I do at the Working Families Party is that we find, identify and recruit candidates to run for office on a leftist politic. Candidates that are going to be committing to anti-racism, committing to smashing the patriarchy. I don't know if they would say that, but that's how we talk about them in that way. And making sure that we are actually governing and trying to govern the best way we can, even though our government was set up on the two sins of genocide, indigenous genocide and enslaved Africans. But we're using the system for what it is, especially since the Tea Party and all these kind of right-wing groups took over with Trump. And in other forms, too, is like supporting social movements. Like a political organization, a political party should not be in existence if they're not going to throw down with social movements. So from Occupy Wall Street to not one more, the immigration, like, you know, folks battling immigration crisis to the movement for Black Lives, we've tried to just throw down our support. That means showing up in the streets, whether that means supporting people with, you know, office space or printers, right? Like the basic things that you can and use our resources to actually say that, like, a political party stands with the movement that is down to take, you know, taking on racism that is taking on capitalism that is taking on the patriarchy. And in terms of characterizing, like, the particular nature of the crisis, because, like, a lot of the phenomena you've been pointing out that as, like, urgent horizons of struggle about, like, patriarchy and, like, white supremacy and capitalism have been, you know, the legacy of the basic infrastructure of America. But there's something particular about this moment that seems to be galvanizing people. And a lot of people are calling that, you know, a fascist moment. Do you think that that's a fair way of characterizing it? I definitely think that we're in a fascist moment in the United States. We have an authoritarian leader who, leader, it sounds so weird to say that, but like we have an authoritarian who was elected president of the United States, who empathizes and sympathizes with white supremacists when Charlottesville happened and Heather Hire was murdered in the streets, right, where we had anti-fascists that actually saved people's lives. There have been people on record that said if anti-fascists weren't there, they probably would have died. That level of seriousness, right? And they keep on coming out in the streets, the white supremacists. And so right now, I think we're in this crisis because the reality is, is that what fascists have been able to use, white supremacists, they've been saying that, you know, there is an economic crisis and we're all struggling and white people need to unite and our race is in trouble and all of these things. And they're using the fear that people really have because of the financial crisis 10 years ago, because of things like NAFTA and our trade agreements that took jobs away from people in the U.S. in the 90s, like, and they're basing that fear, they're using fear, economic fear and scarcity, and they're basing that fear on hatred of immigrants, on hatred of and rooted in the anti-blackness that the United States has. And they were able to do that because of, you know, having a black man president in the U.S., it was like a fuel for white folks to say, oh no, put the white back in the White House, right? Like that, a lot of people wear those shirts at Trump rallies. When you look at a Trump rally or you see it, it seems like a fascist rally, right? Like the propaganda, the people are holding up white supremacist symbols and insignia and like, there was people who've done the hyal. Like this is like, we're at this moment where like it is a fascist moment in the United States. It's also hard with the history that we have. We have a history of black folks in particularly first being enslaved, then redlining out of, you know, getting cut up into districts, segregation, you know, lynchings and mass incarceration that has existed to this day. The reality is, is that like, it's both a moment where it's a fascist moment and also we have to also recognize that some people like black communities feel like they've been living in a fascist state for a really long time. There is this kind of double side to the conditions that seems to have given rise to, I guess, a wake-up call to everyone but particularly to white America because a lot of people have said, you know, as you rightly point out that there are these underlying economic conditions that have provided, I guess, like a groundswell of justification to like fascist and far-right movements of all kinds. But there's also the, that wouldn't be possible or that wouldn't be possible on such an incredible mechanized scale without the other side of that heritage, which is like the extraordinary and extraordinarily violent infrastructure of policing and of deportation and of mass incarceration that has been going on for, you know, the establishment of the country. So it does seem that particularly in the US the distinction between fascism and like just good old-fashioned racial capitalism seems particularly slippery. So it seems like how do you combat fascism as like a separate formation and as like a particular kind of thing in and of itself and how do you separate those tactics out from like the struggle generally and like where do you like allocate those tactics and where do you allocate those resources, I guess, because when fascists are mobilizing in the streets it's tempting to just, I guess, treat symptoms rather than, I guess, treating the cause, which is where you get this veneration of the anti-fascist as like a college-age skinny white dude with a mask throwing a brick through the window, like that is the prime anti-fascist tactic. Yeah, I mean so getting, I just believe in the word radical means going to the roots of the problem, right, and not the leafs of the tree but the roots because it starts with the roots and I think what we were having in this moment right now, I wouldn't say if I'm organizing communities or in like in mass meetings or in organizing meetings, we wouldn't say, okay fascists are taking over, right, we've tried to now call the spade the spade which is white supremacy, right, because that was for years, like they were like all the white supremacists, that's a thing in the past, right, the hoods, the hoods are not out anymore, people don't need their hoods anymore, they are going out in public with their faces, with I mean and it's a whole movement, I mean when in Charlottesville before the night before Heather Hyred died, you know, when they were that photo of the Tiki torches, right, these folks are like dressing in a way together but it's a different form, they're tacky shorts and a collared shirt, it doesn't, they don't need hoods anymore, they have torches. Yeah, and they have the White House as well, the actual White House, which was built by enslaved Africans, right, and so I think, so for, I mean for us like the way that in terms of organizing and how we like do the different strategies to combat that, I think it's like one it's like I'm actually really relieved finally people are calling it what it is, right, the fact that we are, we had a national dialogue where we're like Trump is a white supremacist sympathizer, that's insane, like it hasn't happened in such a long time, even in, you know, even back in the day during the civil rights movement, there was, it was just, I mean people had to, they were white supremacist sympathizers but people weren't calling them, they weren't calling this baby this baby, they weren't saying, they weren't naming it, and so I think it's really important that we were able to get to this point where we're naming it, in terms of the different strategies to like get to the root, one is that we have to understand that our, the laws, like in the United States, like the Constitution, there's a 13th amendment that says that abolish slavery except for former punishment, the carceral state was literally built. What a get out clause. Yes, my God. What a get out clause, that is the 13th amendment in the United States, right? And so how do we change that? Kind of change the Constitution takes a lot. And so there's different strategies. What we do at the Working Families Party is on the electoral field, right? We're battling it out because we're taking out folks who are saying crazy things, like, you know, there are actual white supremacists who are running for office because they're inspired by Trump, who are like not, are saying like, yeah, I'm with the Nazi party, like that's the level we're doing, so that's a battle. Completely unapologetic. Absolutely. We need to be like at the Antifa movement in the United States where we're, when white supremacists come out on the streets, like they try to do in DC to celebrate the year anniversary, they were celebrating at the year after Charlottesville in August, the same dates and times, but they went to DC this time. And they were counter protested and it was bigger than Charlottesville in terms of the counter protest. That's good things. These are really good things. So we need to have the fight in the streets a lot of the times because we need to say that's not okay. You can't be out here like that, right? And then we also need to do the electoral movement. We have to build organizations of working class people that are led by, in my opinion, women of color, trans women of color, because these are folks who are dying every day and we're dying every day before Trump was elected, right? And so those are the folks who can connect the struggles and say this is how it has been and this is how it's radically changed now that Trump is in office because both truths are real and so multiple truths, right? And so I just think that we, and we're trying on a lot of fronts right now. And there is that sense that the initial shock has been, has given way to, I guess it's been a sort of gateway drug to a realization of just how normal this is for a lot of folks, especially, and that kind of gives us almost a key to strategies because it's not like, it's not like this has come out of the blue and that means that people have having, have been having to use strategies like just to survive, like just to survive in the conditions of like total objection. So it does seem that they're drawing together of different strands of movements that have been kind of marginalized, but from this, from my side of the Atlantic at least seem to be drawing together into some kind of coherent movement that isn't just antifascist, but treats, treats the future as something that has like more hope loaded into it than just maybe, maybe we won't have genocide, right? There's a drawing together of like antifascist movements and like the fight through 15 and the fight to like decriminalize marijuana as like a racial justice issue and that kind of thing. So yeah, no, I mean, I think that that is critical. We actually, I work with an organization called Mi Hinte, a Latinx organization that is pro-black, pro-indigenous, pro-queer, pro-pueblo, pro-worker, you know, like we try to be pro things instead of just anti, just to have that hope and that future. And when the immigration crisis again, I mean, we've been in immigration global migrant crisis because climate change and because of the war on drugs, all this stuff, lots of, lots of things. But we, you know, when the families were being separated, a bunch of people were like families belong together. But here's the thing, they don't belong together incarcerated. That's not my, they don't belong together in a fucking cell. Oh, excuse my language. Great, great. Awesome. I'm a New Yorker, so. And I like they don't belong together in a cell. So what we did was we went, we made an intervention with a coalition of organizations, including Working Families Party, who said, free our future. That's what we want to talk about. We want to talk about our future, you know, and I like alliteration. So, who does it? And so that was like really what it was about, right? It was about, it was like, free our future. Yes, that means abolishing ICE as a state. And people are like, oh, well, if ICE gets abolished, what's next, we're going to go back to NCIS. It's doesn't matter. ICE has had its time. They're basically almost the Gestapo, a Border Patrol agent. Literally, they found out that he was a mass murderer just this two weeks ago. He got arrested because he murdered like five immigrant women. Jesus Christ. Yeah. And I mean, and that precisely the kind of like power that you need to gift someone in order to do their job efficiently. Like it's not, it's not this kind of completely off the wall preposition that like a border guard could just like go in and like, you know, pick people off individually because that's kind of what they're trained to do. Completely go in within the role of the border guard. Absolutely. And again, when we look at to the root of what is, does policing come from? The slave patrols to capture, you know, slaves that escaped. So like when we actually, when we peel off the layers, and it takes a lot, right? I get it. After Trump got elected, a lot of people realized that there was oppression for the first time in the United States. They realized, and you know, I think we had like a hazy, there was a bunch of people who were like, Oh, it's Obama. Things are great. Things are fine. You know, even, even though a lot of us were either occupying Wall Street or, or, or in Ferguson, or, you know, all the movements that sprung up under Obama, and as a reaction to, Hey, you're not still the Porter and Chief. Yeah. You know, and so, but like the realities is like, we have to actually work with people. We have to meet people where they're at and peel off those layers, which is why I appreciate folks like within the Women's March in the United States. Shout out to Sophie doing like confronting white women hood, right? Like having that, that's it's super important because that needs to be done. I'm not going to do it. Yeah, you've got, you've got another thing to do. Like sounds exhausting. Yeah. No, white people get your own shit together. We always need trappers. But like, you know, I think that like, you know, I just think that we have to both peel back the layers, meet people where they're at, right? Meet people where they're entering, right? Because anybody who's entering our movement is a good thing. Yeah. It's a good thing. We just got to move them along a little bit quicker because the situation is in crisis. And we need to just think about giving an entry point for other people, because some people don't want to do the clashes in the streets. Some people want to, you know, make phone calls and figure out something, right? And we have to give people those strategies to maximize so we can actually beat back what I think is becoming, yeah, an authoritarian state right now in the U.S.