SIO499: Trump Is Weaponizing Government Against Political Enemies. Nick Fish, President of American Atheists, on How to Be Prepared

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:13 Thomas: Welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 499. I'm Thomas Smith, and I've got a really, really interesting one for you today. This came about because when I was at a little event I go to each and every year in Sacramento called California Free Thought Day. Out this year also a few other people were invited that I knew. Seth Andrews, always fun to say hi hi to him, and Nick Fish, president of American Atheists. We just, you you know, we're chit -chatting and I then was kind of asking him about, you just something in the news at that time about the Republicans going after certain type like that. And Nick said like 10 incredibly interesting things about how he and the folks at American Atheists are thinking about preparing for this kind of thing, some so I asked him if we could do an interview, keeping in mind that some some of these things he can't share because it's literally about trying to stay one step ahead of what this administration might do. And maybe that could sound a little paranoid. American Atheists is a pretty visible organization, but it's not like huge or anything. There is absolutely every reason to be worried and there's every reason to prepare. And this was a really interesting conversation. What do you do when you're involved in an organization like that and the rules start to no longer apply in terms of congressional subpoenas or IRS going after you, all the ways that Trump and MAGA are abusing the system. There a way to be prepared for that? It turns out there's just really smart people in the world doing really smart PeopleThings. And one of those folks is Nick Fish. And I'm sure there are many others unsung heroes we never hear from. Nick was kind enough to come on and tell Tell us about what it's like and what it means to be operating an organization like American Atheists, who is Atheist aren't enemy number one for Trump and MAGA, but they're not enemy member million. You know, atheists are not super welcome in the white christian nationalist movement, which is what runs our country right now. It's good to be prepared. And there's all kinds of things you would never think of. All in all, Nick is just a super cool, interesting guy. Don't think I've ever had him on anything. Known And him for a long time now. And it's such a great opportunity to finally speak to Nick on air. So without further ado, we'll take our break. Please support the show, patreon.com/seriouspod. you want to support more work like this and avoid the ads, which you might hear right now. Right. After this break, we're going to take a break. We'll get on with Nick Fish.

0:02:40 Thomas: Fish, how are you doing today?

0:02:42 Nick: Great, Thomas. How you doing, yeah?

0:02:43 Thomas: Well. So happy to have you. Of course, president of American Atheists. And I just discovered as I was prepping that there's a different Nick Fish that comes up when like I Google. You know about this? Oh man

0:02:54 Nick: The yeah Portland Nick Fish yeah he's the he's the more famous Nick Fish he was

0:02:58 Thomas: What the hell you gotta kill him you gotta oh

0:03:00 Nick: I mean the you joke he's actually dead he he was was city councilman for Oregon and was a huge like housing advocate he was like a scion of the New York Fish family that is not my family I'm sure or, you know, go back far enough.

0:03:03 Thomas: Okay well darn oh going to they have no idea that I made a joke that turned out to be really bad in retrospect and they're just hearing how cool it is that we're paying tribute to this amazing man man.

0:03:24 Nick: This guy is. Yeah, yeah, has a housing development actually. That's called the Nick fish. Uh, that is a, an affordable housing development named after him. And so if you Google Nick fish, you'll either get me or housing development.

0:03:31 Thomas: Well, that's cool. Here's my question. Is it better to have like, if like, let's say Thomas Smith is just too common. So that doesn't, that was a bit like, let's Say I had a less common name and, and there's like one other of me that comes up. Is it best to have someone really cool or someone shitty?

0:03:49 Nick: I mean, yeah.

0:03:50 Thomas: That's tough.

0:03:50 Nick: Tough, tough. Yeah I mean if you Google president of American atheists, it's kind of a mixed bag, but if you Googled Nick fish pretty pretty good, I think.

0:04:00 Thomas: That's so funny well yeah speaking of I actually realized I don't know like a ton about your background I was wondering if we could start with just kind of like how'd you get into this where your story

0:04:09 Nick: Yeah. It's funny. I went to career day when I was in seventh grade and they said, here's some options. You can be a teacher, you can be a park ranger, and you can president of American Atheist. And I was like, that sounds great. Let's do that. And so I was on that fast track, professional development.

0:04:15 Thomas: Of america yeah damn you went to yeah that major in college yeah Yeah.

0:04:24 Nick: Yeah, it was straightforward. No, I feel like a lot of people, I believe you and I are probably close to the same age, us kind of quasi -geriatric millennials, which is not my preferred term. It makes me want to crumble into dust. But at the same time, I'm turning 40 next year and it's just like, oh my God, what's happening?

0:04:40 Thomas: We're literally the same age. Okay.

0:04:41 Nick: Yeah, yeah. So I think we approached and had the experience of religion for some of us. And I know your story to some extent, you were more religious and more conservative. For a lot lot of us, though, it was just kind of like this non-issue in our lives. And I think that's an increasingly common situation. And so my atheism is, and my desire to be involved in advocacy around this issue, is very much rooted in my kind of political formation and my political identity coming up during the Bush administration, during the kind of early years of the Obama administration. You know, the first election I could vote in was 2004, and literally everything I voted on lost. I mean, I grew up in rural Michigan. That was the year that the Bush administration, to kind of shore up its support among evangelicals, said, hey, you know what we should do is we should put ballot initiatives on swing state ballots to demonize gay people because we've got this horribleness out of Massachusetts and out of Hawaii where we're extending Supreme Court decisions at the state level to expand access to marriage equality. And boy, we need to stop that. And it worked. And that was the first election I ever voted in was one that my rights were taken away, which was not great. And I worked on the 08 election then in North Carolina, knocking on doors, registering voters, all that. And we won, which is awesome.

0:06:00 Nick: And at a certain point, I was really tired of sort of the partisan politic side of things. I got into politics, not just because of, oh, I liked Obama or whatever, ever, but because I was really pissed off about what was happening in the Bush administration, not just with the sort of Christian right side of things, but also the expansion of executive power, the warrantless wiretapping, the drone striking, all these things. And that was what I was really interested in and was really concerned about, this consolidation of executive power. And at some point after Obama was elected, everyone kind of went, well, listen, he's a constitutional law professor. Well, what's that could happen? And we sort of dropped And, you know, we kind of said, oh, well, would you rather we send boots on the ground into Iraq or would you rather we drone strike people? And I was kind of like, well neither is neither an option. And just sort of being required to carry the water of the administration in doing partisan work was not something I was interested in. And so I was looking around for issue advocacy. And, what I saw was that the issues I cared most about, whether it was public education, whether whether it was civil rights for LGBTQ people, whether it was abortion access and reproductive health, we're whether lying to kids about abstinence -only sex education or we have weird people showing up to school board meetings demanding that we ban books because they are indoctrinating children into satanic Marxism or whatever. Was all rooted in this far -right, what we would now call the Christian nationalist movement, and that common thread. And I was looking at ways to get involved. And I found this job in Washington, DC. I was living in Texas at the time. And I applied and I got the job at the Secular Coalition for America. And I packed up my car and I drove, you hours over two days to get up to DC and started ended my job on Friday, and I started the next one on Tuesday, because

0:07:43 Nick: Monday was a holiday. And so I did that. I that I was able to have a little bit of a backstop where if everything went south, I knew that I wouldn't be homeless because I could move back to Michigan because my parents would probably not throw me out is kind of where we were and take that risk. But I've been working on secular issues since 2011 and with American Atheists since late 2012 in a variety of roles. I've done fundraising, I've done program development, I have done events, I have done coalition work and now as president and really focused a lot on maturing American Atheists as an organization to make sure that what we're doing is putting our best foot forward on state level work, understanding that our community groups, the groups of activists and local folks who are on the ground in all 50 states are the ones that are best positioned to know how their community needs help. The ones who are most well -positioned to get involved at the local level, to engage with their elected officials and all that. It's not for us to tell them exactly what to do. Our job is to be a resource to them, to normalize our community's participation in civil society, in civic groups, in voting, in food pantries and this whole host of things that we do because we care so deeply about putting our money where our mouth is on this question of, you do care about making the world a better place because this is the one we've got? If the answer to that is yes, then let's do it. And that's a big part of how I've sort of seen my role as president of American Atheist, not to be the pope of atheism or something. I don't even have a cool hat, sadly, but to empower people to tell their stories, because I know that my story is not the only one, I'm that not the exemplar of how atheism is or the right way to do atheism. But I think we do a good job of representing where our community is on a wide range of issues, on representing what it is that atheists care about, and moving in a direction of really bold engagement on a host of issues that I think for a long time, people assumed that atheists just cared about, oh, there's a there's a giant cross up or somebody is saying something about the Bible or debate me because I'm an atheist. We kind of leaned in on some of those stereotypes and said, yeah, we are angry, but I think there's like a righteousness to that anger for sure. And that's okay. But also we care a lot about just helping out our communities, about making sure that people aren't going hungry while the government is ripping snap funding away from millions of Americans. And there are things we can do about that. And so we're trying to empower our communities to do that stuff.

0:10:15 Thomas: Yeah, so much there. I mean, for one, I, just quick thing. I didn't really grow up super religious. I don't know, did I wasn't sure if I misunderstood. Grew up conservative, it's and funny, because it, it might have blended in, just kind of, because the two go go hand in hand um women in my family are religious but the men never were for some reason um I mean I vaguely was like more sympathetic to it but I it was one of those things where I always tried to believe it because I thought like it would be nice like I think it would be if someone was in charge of everything um like that just not like you just look look at the world and it's like no that that's not happening um and it is really interesting how context dependent it is because I almost went Went maybe like the inverse of you because I I went from like more uh on atheism and then that led me

0:10:23 Nick: Conservative, yeah. Right. Interesting.

0:11:01 Thomas: To politics which is interesting because it's like I think, you know, and tell me how it's been from your perspective. But I think in terms of the online atheist world, it really is a different thing than like, you Know, just atheists out and about. And it feels like after a certain, you know year or somewhere in there, you Now, 2014 or something, it became clear that like there were people who were atheists because, you know, they didn't believe in God and they, They, you know, have had some other beliefs around that, but that was the main thing. And then there are people who are atheists because they liked feeling smarter than other people and liked insulting other people and dunking on other people. And like, you Know, there's always going to be a little of that. Everybody's going to do that to some degree. But do feel like that's kind of the key distinction there? It really feels like, You was where unfortunately a lot of the energy was there, you You know, and it felt like at a certain point when some of these prominent atheists showed kind of how shitty they are, a lot of people just kind of left. And then there's there's great organizations like like yours doing actual work, being like, hey, I thought we were doing actual good stuff, though. You know. Is that at all a fair representation of how kind of dichotomy happened there?

0:12:15 Nick: Want to draw a distinction between the people that found community and solace and a sense of belonging in online atheist spaces because it was the time that they were able to not feel alone. Was It a really powerful galvanizing tool for people that still to this day, I mean, I think those of us that, you know, you live in California, I live in Philadelphia and have lived on the East Coast for more a decade now. I think we sometimes forget just how isolating it can be when you're in rural Idaho, and we get emails like this, literally, yeah, period.

0:12:45 Thomas: Well, End of sentence. And it's just isolating being in rural Idaho. It doesn't even matter.

0:12:49 Nick: But if in Decatur, Georgia, or you're In Charleston, South Carolina, like not small cities, but cities that the civic culture of the city feels that it's sort of oriented and positioned around membership in a church period, where your employer leads you in prayer before you go out as part of your job as a lawn care person or as somebody who's doing maintenance on houses. I mean, these are stories that we get every single day. And in some cases, because they're small employers, they're in states that don't have more robust protections, there's nothing that can be done if it's an an employer that employs like 12 people and they say, before you we go out to do our lawn care for the day, we always pray. And you say, Oh yeah, I really don't do that. I don't want to do that. And they, can straight up say, listen, we don't hire atheists around here. We don't, we do that because the federal laws.

0:13:41 Thomas: You're saying this was already before the second Trump administration?

0:13:44 Nick: Yes.

0:13:44 Thomas: It was already that bad before that?

0:13:45 Nick: I mean, and it's, and, and people feel obviously like empowered. I think that's one of the things that has come out of the Trump administration and Trumpism writ large is this idea of sort of performative cruelty. You know, we've heard a lot from kind of the anti -woke crowd about, you virtue signaling. And I think like, yes, that's called living in a society where you put on like, this is a good thing and I want you to see me doing a good thing so that you also do treat people with decency and respect. The alternative that we've seen from Trump and from Trumpism and from some of those, you now, angry online people often is performative cruelty, is vice signaling of, I don't care what you think, man, I have successfully owned you because you are upset that I called you a racial slur.

0:14:28 Nick: And it's like, yeah, it's like, wow, yeah. You really owned me there by using a slur nice, nice work. That happens though. And we did this American Atheist did this giant survey a few years ago now, where we asked people about the experiences that they had stigmatizing events in in their lives. And what we found is probably no surprise that in rural communities, in the South, in highly religious communities, that people were far more likely to experience stigmatizing events at the workplace, in education, in interacting with basic social services, at the doctor's office, and so on. And that it had this just absolutely devastating effect on

0:14:27 Thomas: It did something horrible. Yep. Yeah.

0:15:02 Nick: Their mental health and well-being, that they felt increased loneliness. They were more likely to screen positive for signs of depression because they felt so isolated. And especially if they didn't have a support structure, whether it was an online atheist community or a local in -person atheist or humanist community, that was a tremendous insulating effect on the experiences of all these kind of stigmatizing and traumatizing events. That helped a lot. And so what we found is like, all right, these groups help people individually. They help us do our work. They improve outcomes in a macro sense where we're changing the law. Yes, absolutely. But we're also breaking down the and the stigma that people have still around atheists. We're sort of demystifying this idea of like, oh, yeah, no, I don't believe in God. I don'T go to church. But also I'm going out here and working at my local soup kitchen. I'm also doing all this work. I'm registering voters. I're showing up to government meetings to talk about whether or not we should have a bus stop here or those sorts of things that just people do. That's an important, really powerful factor that actually sociology points out that just basically highlighting that there are more atheists than people think actually reduces the negative feelings that people have about atheists.

0:16:16 Nick: That's great. And so if we can do that, then we should do that. And so that, you know, is what led us into this focus on our grassroots groups on providing them with resources, whether it's toolkits, or just, you know, networking connections, or whether it is just straight up, here is some money to do a project that you want to try to get your group going and to try this new thing. We want to be be there for them.

0:16:38 Thomas: I think that's true of all groups, really. I think it's why, I mean, certainly when I went to college, I became like actually more open to being liberal because I was raised so conservative. I became liberal on a few issues, more open to Being Liberal, and then that started that process. But yeah, it really is true. Like the best thing we can do as atheists to of improve that image, because I'm sure you could rattle off for me. I mean the opinion polling on atheists is still not great, right? Right. I mean, it's still.

0:17:05 Nick: It's not great. It's improving.

0:17:08 Thomas: We above pedophiles yet or. Oh, good.

0:17:10 Nick: Are, yeah, thankfully. I think we're sort of neck and neck, as always, with Muslims, which is not...

0:17:15 Thomas: Which is like solidarity. I don't know. It's a weird it feels like a lot of atheists were trying to actively decrease their number. You know, I think we should we should more go with a positive some version of stuff, you know, and like, you're rising tide. But certainly. But yeah. Oh, man. Man, so much to think about with that, because, started with, was something I was also going to bring up based on your first answer, which is like, it really is easy for me as a Californian to forget how much different it is, you know, in places in the South. Really is a reason why I think at times I'll just naturally go into a mode of like, yeah, is being an atheist really anything to care about? Like, should we even, you know, but it's like all you have to do. Uh, I'm, I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir for, for both you and our listeners is just, I get emails too. Like, Hey, I's out in the middle of nowhere, uh, or in the the middle of just christendom and it's uh it must be really isolating uh and so it's it's really cool to have uh like yours to improve on that so I do want to ask back to the opinion polling though on a good trajectory have we been doing better

0:17:18 Nick: I mean, yeah. Definitely. Solidarity with people who are Muslims or are perceived as Muslims. Sorry, sorry, Sikhs or ex -Muslims. Yep, seriously.

0:18:28 Nick: It's slowly creeping up. None of this happens overnight. We're talking about generational change here, but a lot of it just is we have to be better storytellers. I think our community for too long has said, well, all we have to do is be right. And I was like, well, no. Sometimes just being right, often just being right.

0:18:44 Thomas: You ever even been in a relationship like just not how humans work

0:18:49 Nick: Seriously, yeah. You lot about this because like our community's activism, our policy prescriptions, the way that we approach policy work for a long time was like oh, we'll sue somebody, right? And we get that all the time too of like well, why aren't you suing over this? And the answer is because we don't have standing, because this This would be bad law because there isn't an avenue for us to pursue this through the courts. And I know from your other podcasts covering a lot of legal things, people often will say, well, wait, why there a lawsuit here? And our community, the American atheists in particular, came out of the 1963 Supreme Court decision, Abington versus Shemp, which was consolidated with the case that our founder, Madeleine Marie O 'Hare, brought that was the identical case just in Maryland instead of in Pennsylvania. And was like the one time in American history where the Supreme Court was more or less -ish a source for positive social change. And if you talk to a lot of scholars and historians of the court, they'll point out that that is an aberration, that for most of our nation's history, the court has been standing, blocking on everything. Thing. And this was the one time that it wasn't. And then it's been slowly chipped away over time through the Rehnquist court and through the Roberts court of just rolling back or slowing the progress and then rolling back the that we made in the civil rights era, in church state separation, in reading the establishment clause out of the constitution. This is happening right now. And we have to get out of this idea that if we just present a good or the best, most compelling brief with all the correct facts that Justice Alito will read it and stamp his fist on the bench and say, oh, damn it, they got me

0:20:29 Nick: There. I have no choice but to admit actually, yes, the Establishment Clause is good. Don't care. They make up their own facts. And I don't want to go legal nihilism on everybody here, but we have to do a better job of improving public perceptions of atheists. And a big way of doing that is just living our lives as normal human beings, as the struggles that we face and how we have shared values with religious people, how it isn't some crazy, terrible, unheard of thing to just, yeah, I don't go to church. I don'T believe in God. And we still do all the things that think they make you a good person, that there's nothing weird about that. And building bridges to people that are different from us that share values, talking about things from a values perspective instead of from a theology perspective, I think is really important, especially as we're confronting rising authoritarianism and anti

0:20:29 Thomas: Dear god yeah yeah I'm close to that these days yeah yeah yeah

0:21:20 Nick: -democratic forces in the nation. Going to have to stand with people that are being targeted and be in conspicuous solidarity with those folks. Jokes. And that takes looking past some pretty big differences sometimes on that are important. And I don't want to pretend for a moment that the folks that suffer religious trauma, trauma at the hands of religious people that have been, have lost family and friends because they left their religion. I don'T want to present for a minute that they don't have the right to be angry, that nothing. It's a big deal. Also those of us that don't have that experience, that didn't go through that trauma, it's on us to be bridge builders, to be diplomats, to really the ties between people that are being targeted by this administration and being targeted the white Christian nationalist movement and recognize how we're all in this fight together.

0:22:09 Thomas: Yeah, I will say in terms of the public opinion on atheists, I'm not the biggest cable news watcher in fact I'd never watch it but I do feel like I don't see a whole lot of what used to happen which is just there'd be some you random ass topic that they do and they'd be like Like, here, we brought one atheist who's a total asshole to represent the angry asshole side of this atheism thing in a way that I think really did actively harm, you know, whether it was Dawkins, whether It was Hitchens. And, you Know, I'm not saying that those folks had any redeeming qualities. It's not at all what I'm saying. But I do think oftentimes it was a bit of a sideshow where it's like, let's put on, you Know, and that game. It's a thing they do a lot, especially Fox News, where they're like, let's find a feminist. And then they find for them like the worst example they can. And then that

0:22:18 Nick: It's for the best. Yeah. Yep,

0:22:59 Thomas: Person is obviously incentivized to like, hey, they get to be on TV, you know, they get but like they get To be the worst example of their group and then ruin it for everybody else. I feel like I haven't seen that in a while, but I could just be not watching cable news at all. I don't know.

0:23:11 Nick: Well, I have a story about that. Let me tell you this. So I done Fox News a number of times. Last time I did Fox News was I was on Hannity's show and they had me and Kristen Power, who is a commentator, who's a Christian, but she's sort of a democratic commentator. And they had us on and they wanted us to sort of like spar and go at it. And I don't remember exactly what the story was, but it was something to do with a town wanted to put In God We Trust on the outside of a building. And it was like the town hall and they wanting to slap In God we Trust on it. And I said, listen, I don't have a problem at all with churches doing this. If you want to be reminded of your faith in God on a church, great. But public buildings are supposed to serve everyone. And we know that 30%, 25 % of Americans are non -religious. A chunk of people are not Christians, don't believe in this God or some other form of religion. And it's exclusionary. And I don'T know why this needs to be up there. And she came back and said, no, I totally agree with that. I think

0:23:13 Thomas: Please. Right.

0:24:06 Nick: That's completely reasonable. And the host who was, it was a sub, it wasn't Sean Hannity said something like, well, you two aren't supposed to agree and said that like out loud during the segment. And it was like, Well, that's, you know, I think we're both pretty reasonable people. And you know where we can disagree about a lot of things, but this seems really stupid.

0:24:23 Thomas: But we need you to fight or we don't have a business model at all come on let's see what other issue wedge issue

0:24:24 Nick: And need you to fight. Yeah. Yep. They asked asked us about this other, just, I don't even remember what it was. It was like, somebody said some outrageous thing. And what do you think about this? And I said, honestly, I don't think about it at all. I think we've got bigger problems and this is a distraction. And goes, yeah, I totally agree. This is a distraction and whatever. And they just like, we're like, oh, uh, cut to commercial, cut to commercial. Yeah, exactly. And so was the last time I was on, I was invited on again and it was on a, they wanted me to come on Laura Ingram show.

0:24:42 Thomas: Cut to commercial we don'T KNOW HOW TO DO THIS FUCK oh god

0:24:57 Nick: Yeah, yeah. And this was the week after she got into that fight with David Hogg after the Parkland shooting.

0:24:57 Thomas: I hate her oh man I barely remember that like

0:25:08 Nick: Had said something about like, I think it was something about the Black Santa or something. It was –

0:25:12 Thomas: Santa what does that have to do with the shooting oh

0:25:15 Nick: But it was like – she was on break for like a week because she said something like shitty about David Hogg getting into Harvard or something. And everyone was trying to cancel like boycott advertisers and all this. And then they were like, we need to bring on just some red meat atheist stuff. And it was right after the – know I it was Trump that said something about like shithole countries. But she had said something About like immigrants make our streets dirty. And this was all happened like in a week. And she was then off the air for a week and her show coming back, they wanted me to come on and talk about something involving Santa Claus. I responded back and I said like, respectfully, no, I'm this has nothing to do with work that we do. And quite frankly, I don't want to be, I do not want to have any part in legitimizing what she has been doing. No, thank you.

0:26:04 Nick: I will pass. And never have been invited back on Fox. So, so there you go.

0:26:02 Thomas: Well done yeah yeah yeah and and it's tough because like I I'm glad that's what your story was gonna be because I I didn't I didn't know the end of that story but it's hard it's really I don't know how many leaders passed past or present of organizations would do that, you know, cause it's getting a chance to be on TV. And then, and then it's so easy to, to justify it, you know, oh, well, you know, it's, it gets getting exposure. It's blah, blah, and it's like, no, I mean, that's, it does suck that their business model is exactly what, you know, you've identified there and, and get on you for not participating in it there for

0:26:43 Nick: Don't get me wrong. Probably still do Fox. If it was like their hard news if it wasn't, you know, a literal white supremacist neo Nazi.

0:26:51 Thomas: I'm not even talking about like never going on. It does really matter what the context is. Yeah. And clearly if it's just like launder your reputation for these awful or just be a distraction to, for these offal comments, like, yeah, no.

0:27:03 Nick: Yep. Talk about real issues, not about culture war red meat to feed your base. Yeah.

0:27:20 Thomas: Well, there's so much to talk about, but I did, you know, we should talk about like the conversation that kind of made me think like, oh shit, we Should Totally Do This Interview. Um. Which is Because obviously in this day and age, things have probably never been harder to be in charge of your organization and not just your organization, any organization that's not, the fascist's favorite, because they really are going after different groups in so many ways. And you chatting and it just it was very interesting to hear how deeply you've thought about this and the extent to you know, it's emergency times right now in ways that I think maybe a lot of people like me don't even think about or know about. So I just wanted to start that conversation. Like, what has it been like in this second admin with, you gestures broadly at all the fucking fascism.

0:28:12 Nick: Yeah. The gesturing broadly, I think it's everywhere. It's constant. I think people are feeling rightly overwhelmed. Think it's obvious that that is an intentional decision on the part of this administration is to overwhelm us, to do everything it can to flood market, field flood so that we can't...

0:28:31 Thomas: Flood the zone with shit. That's what he always says.

0:28:33 Nick: Yeah, yeah. And for those of us that are doing advocacy work, for those OFUs that are engaged in civil rights work, it is a really scary time. And I don't just mean those OFUS that are sort of operating behind or with the sort -protection of a separate legal entity. I mean, even the on -the -ground people. We of faith leaders and community leaders standing silently in protest in front of ICE facilities and getting pepper balled in the face because they're just standing there. So that's sort of the micro level of it. But at the same time, they're sicking the machinery of the state on anybody who is standing in their way in the hopes that we will comply in advance that will fold, that will sell out our compatriots, that will silence ourselves. Seen it with law firms. We're seeing it with universities. We see it with media outlets, corporate media. We have seen it with some advocacy nonprofits, people engaging in what I would term as really important work in the first Trump administration have really backed off from some of that stuff. Kind of ask yourself, all right, Do you want to limp along doing nothing, saying something in the hopes that it another three years, or do you want not to do that? The calculus for us was we don't want to do that. We will fight and we will do everything we can to insulate and harden ourselves, make it as hard as possible. I don't wanna pretend that American Atheist is target number one on the Trump administration's list. I'm sure we're further down, quite a bit further down. They're picking off and picking on people that are small, minoritized, easily targeted communities intentionally. The votes of the world are picking picking and choosing their targets and the Texas legislature is picking their targets with a great deal of intention. People who are already kind of low on that, you know, public opinion polling that you cited of like, how do people trust? How do people thermostatically feel about individual groups? And are they a small enough group where people are like, eh, if we sell them out, who cares? We're seeing that with trans people, right?

0:30:43 Thomas: And it can be so random too. That is the other thing that has got to be really scary as an organization like yours. Sometimes it is just some random fucking shit, like some story or some rumor or some whatever that just like all of a sudden these, the universities it was a big one. It was like, you and they've, they've absolutely failed and how they've handled that. But like, all of a sudden it's like, wait, what, what did we do? You know? And it can be so capricious.

0:31:07 Nick: Know it's the sort of thing where it can feel that way But they and choosing targets in an intentional way, but they have a number of groups or people that they can go after in the moment, but the of broader targeting is intentional. Look at somebody like Libs of TikTok. Her is to pick out one person that they can amplify through a right -wing media ecosystem and echo chamber that then gets algorithmically boosted on Elon Musk's X and then gets boosted through Fox News and Newsmax and One America News and all these media, quote unquote, groups that exist for nothing other than to push this narrative. And that's what they do. And yeah, it can feel like a lightning strike. But just because it's a sort of random thing, you're not any less hit by lightning when it happens, right?

0:31:59 Nick: You are still burned to a crisp and need medical attention immediately because of trauma of it and all of that. And it's awful. And it really is devastating for the people that are targeted. And it rapidly spirals out of control because we have, again, the neo -Nazi manufacturing machine of Twitter X that literally is being used to dox and attack and harass people. And that's game now for Elon. They don't care about being responsible with this tool. And it's explicitly a right -wing, fascist, neo -Nazi enterprise at this point, which is why we're not on Twitter X anymore, because rotting people's brains. And the people that are, again, literal neo -Mazis getting in the comments and fighting over whether not it's actually secretly the Jews who are doing it, that's always a fun one, or it's the woke, or its trans people. And they just sort of cycle through these targets. That's what it's all about. And then the craziest thing about it is that you have government officials taking their marching orders from this online mob

0:31:59 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:33:05 Nick: Being ginned up by someone like Libs of TikTok. And even when you're victorious in a lawsuit or an investigation, it's an absolute slog start to finish. And it sucks. And think you and I both have had the great of engaging in litigation where it's terrible and you don't say a lot about things. In my case, you read the complaint and it's like, was this written in crayon? What's happening here? This is hilariously bad, but

0:33:29 Thomas: That's horrible. Wait, wait, I'm so sorry. Do I even know what this is? What

0:33:49 Nick: My, my predecessor sued me and American atheists. Oh yeah. I mean, yeah, that was great. Uh, highly recommend. No, no, don't, don'T do that. It's bad.

0:33:55 Thomas: I'm going to, I'll go check it out.

0:33:57 Nick: We sort of internally refer to it as a lawsuit because it was, you know, basically, God, anyway.

0:34:02 Thomas: A great term.

0:34:03 Nick: Um, just can't say anything for like a year while this is happening and deadlines, you Know, they'll ask for extensions and they grant the my God. But that's a civil lawsuit. And you're not worried about, am I going to go to prison?

0:34:15 Thomas: You're not sitting in jail or something. Yeah yeah

0:34:18 Nick: But I think people almost infinite resources that the federal government's enforcement mechanism and machinery has to harass people. And it's not just the criminal investigations, though. That's sort of the most pressing issue, weaponizing these criminal statutes, of which there are a billion criminal statures, speaking a little bit off the cuff. There's a lot. I don't think anyone could pretend to know what every law is. And then you're incorporating in the federal register, which is every sort and rule propagated by every individual executive department. And it makes violating those rules potentially a crime or a civil infraction or whatever. And a US attorney's office or the the investigative agencies of the agencies can dig in on you and request paperwork and all this stuff. Plus you have state level stuff. It's just, there are so many levels of government actor that if they are taken over and hijacked by bad actors can make it impossible or next to impossible for us to do our work.

0:35:22 Thomas: And the point is it doesn't matter if if they're totally full of shit, that's the key.

0:35:25 Nick: Doesn't matter. And yeah, that either way you are facing ruinous costs of hiring a lawyer. A perfect example of this is the utterly bullshit lawsuit and investigations against Media Matters for America that are happening in Texas inexplicably, but you have a friendly judge who can engage in judge shopping where you file a lawsuit or you file an action in this one compartment of one district court and you have a 95 % chance of getting this one guy, Reid 'Connor, who is an absolute unhinged lunatic. Is the guy that banned or shut down access to mifepristone.

0:36:03 Thomas: Mifepristone. Yeah.

0:36:03 Nick: Yeah, and just judge. Ironically, not appointed by Donald Trump. He was appointed by George W. Bush, but that's a... So pretend that this is a recent issue. This This is going back for a longer time. But anyway, they've friendly law firm. So they're getting like a friends and family discount to defend this lawsuit from Twitter where they published a report saying, hey, there's a lot of ads from big advertisers that appearing are appearing next to literal neo -Nazi shit on Twitter. That's true. It was.

0:36:31 Nick: But making them go through discovery and all these motions and everything. And it's gone up to the Fifth Circuit and back to the district court and back up to the Fifth circuit. And it's ping -ponging around. They've spent on the order of, I think it was like $5 million just on lawyers. And this is with like a discount law firm through getting a discount because they're working with like Mark Elias' law firm. And they're trying to defend themselves against the world's richest man, against the Attorney General of Texas, the Attorney General of Missouri, and like the Federal Trade Commission. It's a rounding error for all of these guys. It's the entire budget for an important media watchdog group. And that's the point. And so, you what we have to do is say, all right, do at the calculus here and do we just not do this? Do we not pick fights with Elon Musk? Do We not highlight the, literal neo -Nazi talking points that he's elevating himself or that his platform is elevating? Do WE just kind of look the other way? Like, what are we doing here? If we want want to continue doing other work? Well, and that's a question that a lot of groups are grappling with right now. And I know media matters. I don't want to speak for them, but they sort of did this and now are, according to reporting, kind of reevaluating and saying, okay, can we settle this? Can we end this? Like, what can we do? Or do we shut down? Do we we fold everything up and just move on and do something else? And a lot lot of funders are hesitant because they've talked about investigating Soros and his foundation because a lot of these organizations get tiny amounts of money. American Atheist was cited by a member of the house as a recipient of money from the Rockefellers. And it was like, guys, that's the Rockefeller Foundation, which is like a donor advised fund where a gazillion people donate their money to it, and then you make recommendations later of where you want your money to go. It's not that, quote unquote, the Rockefellers are giving American

0:38:23 Nick: Atheists money. It's that we had some number of donors who advised to their donor advised fund to give us $1 ,000 or $500 at a time over the course of years, and they frame it as, oh, American Atheists got $250 ,000 from the Rockefellers.

0:38:40 Thomas: The Monopoly man.

0:38:41 Nick: Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, they're just making shit up or they're using that kernel of truth of, is ironic because what the kernel of truth that they're going with is that there are unaccountable billionaires driving illegitimate or inorganic commentary or action on things. And it's like, yes, that's true, but it ain't on our side, right? So, you pushing back on that is, you know, and that's, that's the calculus that groups have to do. And, you are individuals on the ground that are faced with exactly the same question of like, to what extent do you push? What extent do you want to be have a public profile? Do you want To just kind of try to ride things out? That's that's a decision everybody has to make on their own. What we can do is try to provide people with the resources to not have have to worry quite as much about, you some of the legwork in the background, it as easy as possible for people to make that decision in kind of full knowledge of what the facts are and them resources to help them navigate really confusing, scary times so that they can, if they choose to continue engaging in this work, that theycan do that in a way that, again, themselves as much as possible, acknowledging that it's never ever going to be perfect that, the that, federal government can come down on us tomorrow and it would be, uh, impactful and really harm our ability to do anything. Absolutely. But you have to be prepared for that in this moment.

0:38:41 Thomas: Yeah it's ridiculous. Yeah yeah yeah and what are some of the actual tangible steps you know I know we mentioned a few of them and uh weren't 100 % sure like how much you could share you know because some of it you got to keep keep a little close, but you know, there's very real concerns. Um, oh, and I meant to say, did, did you happen to see the, the, just put out the cat, cat interview. Okay.

0:40:18 Nick: Yeah. I haven't listened to it yet, but I saw that it was out exactly the same thing.

0:40:21 Thomas: The, the media matters. Um. She, she actually lost her job there because of that, lawsuit, because literally. So I wasn't sure if that was why I was on, on your mind or anything, but it's so just nonsense. Like it'sjust absolutely infuriating, But, but anyway, yeah. So, um, what are some of the specific steps you're you, taking?

0:40:36 Nick: American Atheist has done, and this we've been working on this now for, it's been like a year and a half that we've been engaging in this sort of contingency planning and kind of thinking out and gaming out, what are some things that could happen to us? And just almost like having the and giving yourself the permission to engage in like throw it on the wall and see what sticks level of disaster planning. Maybe we'll call it contingency plan. So it has a slightly less terrible frame to it, but but thinking about what some of the challenges could be. And so we identified things of government regulation. We identified examples of financial threats, whether it's funders drawing back and reducing overall giving, whether its them not wanting to give to us specifically, whether it's concerns related to the broader market of a recession and a pullback from people giving money at all, whether itís a reduction in workplace giving. So just on the financial side as a a nonprofit, are those pretty easy. We always are thinking about that. But the identifying places of vulnerability. We looked at areas where we as a 501c3 that is incorporated in New Jersey and does fundraising and has employees all across the nation, what are some of the vulnerabilities for us? Are we really sure that we're dotting all of our I's and crossing our T's from a compliance standpoint? These are things that organizations need to do. And so if you're someone who's listening and you run a local community group, some of this is not going to apply. Some of you don't need to be a 501c3. Many states have nonprofit entities that can register and it doesn't require you to be federally recognized 501C3 because people aren't giving you money at a scale where having the tax write -off matters. If people are giving you 100 bucks, not they're claiming that on their taxes, so don't worry about it. Used to think of 501c3 status as this stamp of legitimacy. I think we need to get past that, especially in this moment. Think about alternative legal structures.

0:42:27 Thomas: Interesting.

0:42:27 Nick: And so that's something that a lot of groups are telling us that they're looking at at the local level is, really do need to be a federal 501C3? For many of you, no, probably not. You're not getting grants. You're getting money directly from groups that are limited to only giving to C3s, 501 C3S. And in fact, some groups say, hey, listen, we actually want to be able to engage in politics. We want to have a candidate forum or a roundtable. We want be able go out there and knock on doors. And so being a 501c3 would get in the way of doing that. Especially at this moment where everything is political, everything feels political, and things feel sometimes partisan. American Atheist remains a 503c3 in good standing. So I don't, in my capacity, comment on supporting or opposing candidates for elective office. But I will certainly engage in politics and politics is not necessarily partisan. We can talk about these issues without worrying about it. Like that is totally above board, but I'm not going to sit here as president of American Atheists and say, and therefore you should vote for or against this candidate. But people want to be able to do that in their communities. They want to being able to say, you person on our city council said explicitly to me that they don't think atheists are good people and have no place in our community. That's not reflective of our values here in this town. And we need to talk about that. And there's nothing wrong with doing that, especially in a place where, I mean, where I lived in New Jersey, I just looked at the results of the school board race. Winning candidates got something like 325 votes for a school board raise. And this was not a small town. It's

0:43:56 Nick: Just that no one voted for the schoolboard. And so you're able to do stuff like that, where if you're you're able to mobilize enough people, get the word out, literally go knock on doors. I mean, I looked at some of the state house and Senate races in the town that I lived in, lived in New Jersey. And again, like the winning margin or the total number of votes for winning candidates was like 1500 votes or like some, something absurd like that because New Jersey votes on odd years, right? They just voted. And so no one comes, no one turns out.

0:44:29 Nick: And actually sway the election. If you physically talk, you can talk to a thousand people, you know, in, in two weeks.

0:44:34 Thomas: You might have enough friends to just do that. Not me, but you know, someone who's known as popular, you know.

0:44:37 Nick: You just, yeah. Well, yeah, me neither. I'm yeah. Yeah, right. Exactly. But so like, that's what we're talking about. And, and those alternative means of engaging and, and means of structuring your organization are important, but whatever you pick, make sure you're doing it correctly. If if you are a nonprofit organization and we hear this all the time where where people say, oh yeah, we're incorporated. I think, okay, well, do you have your bylaws? Oh, no. Do you have a board of directors? No, Bill handles that. And it's like, Bill, a single person is your board of directores. That's no, that doesn't work. And so a lot of these groups just, it's really hard to find sometimes people that are willing to step into that role. And I don't want to say like step up into that role because I don' t want to put this sort of hierarchy of activism or hierarchy of action, sometimes it's just not what your group needs to be doing. You don't need to have somebody be the treasurer and the secretary and the president and on the board or whatever. Sometimes all we're doing is sort of informal mutual aid almost. What we'redoing is very casual, informal networks of support for people that are struggling or that just want a bit of social connection and want to be able to organize around a few key issues that they care deeply about, you don't need to be a 501c3. You don't even need to be incorporated to do that. Maybe you need just a bank account and the lowest level of state recognition that you can get and just do that, and that's fine. Don't worry so much about, oh, are we a formal nonprofit? Are we this? Are We that? For 95 % of groups, it doesn't matter. That's one thing we're trying to encourage people to reflect on and just make sure that that they're evaluating whether their current structures make sense in this current moment, make sense for what they're doing actually, and make changes and get that done. Have your bylaws and you'll have things like a dissolution clause of what happens if we the the organization. Sometimes those clauses are very restrictive. And do they need to be? Can we change these a little bit? It What say you need to have for your board of directors? If it says you need To have seven people on your board board of directors, but you only have three, any action that that board takes is presumably illegitimate. And you need to change that. So you you need evaluate all of your actual formal legal structures and start there. At the form of things and make sure that it actually reflects reality. And so we started with that. I mean, that's something that we should, we're always doing that. We're always kind of keeping in the back of our heads. That was sort of job number one, making sure that we're dotting our I's and crossing our T's, that our legal structure makes sense, and and exploring alternatives. American Atheist as an organization has been around for 60 plus years. We're not planning on folding or changing to something else entirely, but we have to have these conversations. That's part of what this exercise of contingency planning is all about, is acknowledging that, yeah, this is kind of unlikely, but мы can't not discuss it. That's sort of where would start is laying out all of these things and just making a list and sorting it and saying, all right, what broad buckets of problem do this fit in? Is it our people? Is that our legal entity? Is it big structural things that we have no control over? Is a natural disasters, and then the federal government not responding? I mean, that was something that we didn't think was, you know, we added as like, oh, that's, that never gonna happen. And then they, you gutted FEMA. Schema right so you the things that we put on that list we then kind of ranked and we said okay is this currently happening is this likely to happen is it kind of unlikely or is this just like a little bit you know loopy like this would never happen and then we said all right is this catastrophic if it happens is

0:48:16 Nick: It just bad is it we can manage or is it like oh it's a it's to fly. We don't care. So And you do all of that and you bring together some people to just have the conversation and you brings together, for us, it was people with a variety of backgrounds and expertise, law, messaging, people who've been through it. So if you have some kind of elder knowledge within your community, especially people that were part of the LGBTQ community back in the 60s and 70s, which we do, we're very fortunate to have board members that were were of that initial organizing around like trans issues, people that were setting up kind of underground support networks for LGBT people, especially trans people in the 1960s, right? We have people that have done this, that have been through this already and know what they did then, tap into those resources, lean on people that are part of your community, whether or not their official members or whatever, it's totally fine to ask for help and try to lean on expertise that you may not have right now and recognize that you don't have that person in the room and go try to find somebody to just engage in that initial thought exercise. That's where I would encourage people to start. Now, there's a lot more to that, obviously, but that's a starting point. And so I'll pause there.

0:49:42 Thomas: Backdrop of this is things that I'm sure eight years ago or pre -Trump especially, or maybe even pre -Trump too, you just never would have even imagined that you had to worry about. But when you're dealing with a theocracy, an aspiring theocracy it from, hey, let's see what progress we can make going to move things forward. And now it's like, well, just batten down the hatches and just, hope. Just I mean, there are literally, and it's so sad, it's sort of depressing, but there are generally trans people who had pending cases who just like like to drop them, like like were in litigation, who's I'm sure whose rights have been violated in some horrible way. And they looked looked at which way it's going and said, this is not worth even trying to do because it'll it could mean that the justices decide to take away even more of my rights, you know, as a trans person, I'm saying even more of their rights. And it's stuff like that where it's like, geez, it's What have we come to here where it is not just that we're you know it felt like through the 90s and 2000s and the Obama era and everything that in some sense, even though things were were bad in many ways, it felt like progress was inevitable, you know, and it just does

0:50:50 Thomas: Not feel that way anymore. And it feels almost like with these again aspiring theocrats, they're They're testing the limits of what they can do. And there pretty much is no limit because no one has any shame on their side. And so does that mean going after groups like yours because you're anti them in a way, not not explicitly as because you don't do partisan politics, as you said, of course. But but just the fact that people trying to make a theocracy are going to be huge fans of atheists, I don't think. And so it's it's it's kind of things where all of a sudden the weapons of the federal government, you never know when it's going to Be pointed at you. And it was just really interesting when we were talking to think about some of the ways that you're trying to protect yourselves and just, you you know, dotting every I and crossing every T, because even though it is true, like we said a moment ago, that even it doesn't matter if it'S bullshit, IT'S still going to be horrible. It does matter though, the level, like the if, difference between total bullshit and like, well, 2 % of of a case like is actually meaningful because the more they can make something out of some technicality, the harder it's going to BE to fight it. And so it's like, it's, it'S dotting all those I's. Not sure. Again, some of this is game planning that you talk about some of the other scenarios you're you're worried about

0:52:03 Nick: We have to divide this into two buckets of official action by government entities and the freelancing vigilante style stuff that the people that are well -organized disinformation artists are going to engage in attacking you and lying about you. We see that all the time. Let me start with the government side. One thing that American atheists and that and I'm sure many of our contemporaries in this space, and I know that a lot of other nonprofits are engaging in, is making sure that our privacy policies, our data retention policies, just making surethat them, number one, which we do, that we're following them, which we are, and that they meet our needs. There is no reason to keep emails around for ever, because what happens is you get a subpoena. Uh, so, you know, this is just to sort of speak in the abstract here, you'll get a Subpoena and are you, or how have you ever been a member of the communist party?

0:52:56 Thomas: Yeah.

0:52:56 Nick: Right. Have you ever interacted with this person? And you'll say no, not that I know of. And they'll say, well, we have this email here from, you 2004, uh, that we got from your emails, um, that we we got from Google. And it shows here that you did have a communication with them.

0:53:12 Thomas: They can subpoena.

0:53:13 Nick: Around.

0:53:13 Thomas: Right. Yeah. It's, it's Just to spell that out. Just so people know.

0:53:17 Nick: So like with American Atheist, with anybody, you know, we all have these like online providers that we use for everything, you now. It's our personal emails, whether it's out work emails, whether it is our membership database. Know, you have seen more and more the kind kind of targeting of the – it was ActBlue, I think it was, that Ted Cruz really had a hard -on for to laundering money through illegals fund to the Democratic Party. And it's like they're the payment processor. Just like if you were donating through however you're processing your credit cards through Square or through Stripe or through Visa itself or swiping it on a metal platform thing with the raised numbers like we're going Going back in time.

0:53:54 Thomas: I know what you're talking about. We're both just barely old enough to know what that is.

0:53:58 Nick: Just barely. And so that's what ActBlue is doing here. It's not that they're donating money to partisan organizations, but they wanted a list of all the donors. And the unfortunate reality is that in general, Congress as part of its lawmaking prerogatives is able to subpoena some of that stuff. And then they can leak it because because they're shitbags.

0:54:20 Nick: Or because it's the Epstein files, cough, cough.

0:54:19 Thomas: Right. And there's just no fucking consequences. Right?

0:54:24 Nick: We're recording this as certain things are happening. And so that can come out. And we don't want that. We know that people are targeting, that communities, whether they're atheists or religious minorities or whether they are trans people. And we have to ask ourselves, all right, do we really need this information where an email where somebody said, yes, I am a trans person who is an atheist living in Alabama. Do we need to have that email from five years ago?

0:54:48 Thomas: Wow.

0:54:48 Nick: No, probably not.

0:54:50 Thomas: I wouldn't even thought of something like that. That's, that's so good that you're thinking of that.

0:54:53 Nick: That's sort of on the micro level. But again, communications with donors. Was there any restriction on this money? No. Well, it says here that the person really liked this program. Are you sure that wasn't a restriction? No, I'm not sure about that. Do you have a letter? Well, no, I don't. These are the sorts of things where if you don't know, you don'T want to lie, but also you don' t want to proactively turn over a big of information to federal investigators who have dozens of lawyers combing through your emails for you making some sort of off -color remark about, oh, we're going to have a workshop about, I Molotov cocktails or something thing at our convention. Ah, engaged now in a RICO conspiracy to support terrorism and the violence that was happening at ICE where someone did Molotov cocktail an vehicle in front of this detention center. And are we connecting that? We need to investigate further. That's what they're talking about. And so having these policies in place, having a mechanism and And sort of like red lines for us as a national organization of like, what would we comply with? What would we not comply with? What would be absolutely raise an absolute shit fit about and go down swinging on? What would would we be willing to negotiate ahead of time on things? Those are the sorts of contingency plans that we have to develop. And I'm not going to go into specifics on that. But that's the sort of that if you're a national nonprofit dealing with minoritized communities, dealing with vulnerable people, those are the conversations that you you need to be having. Now for the person on the ground, for a local community group, you probably don't have that type of information, but it's why we always encourage people. Like if you have the ability to do so kind of firewall off some of this stuff, make using emails or you're doing anything that you have, like an email set aside, that's just for this. Don't use your personal Facebook for doing business things. Um, secure ish, uh、 communication methods. Invite random journalists to your secure messaging platforms just

0:56:48 Nick: To pick a random... Do.

0:56:47 Thomas: Or if you're a MAGA idiot, do do that. Please.

0:56:51 Nick: Please do.

0:56:52 Thomas: It's great.

0:56:52 Nick: If the Secretary of Defense, please do. That's great. Yeah. And so things like that of just thinking about, okay, how are we using technology? What are some vulnerabilities here where people could get bad actors, either whether they be state actors or whether they be people that are phishing, people that are spear phishing you, people that have an axe to grind, people that have vendetta, whether it's ideological or personal against your organization. What are the weak points? You have two -factor authentication in place? Do you have different passwords for everything? Are you reusing passwords? Here in Philadelphia, I think it was last week, an email went out to everyone on the University of Pennsylvania's and alumni and everything network. And because I'm a patient or I go to Penn for medical care, I got it four or five times as well. That was an email that someone had hacked into or used a targeted campaign to get login credentials for the marketing software to send out email blasts. Now, was my personal data, my health data compromised? No. But was my email accessible to them and my, you know, certain information about me. Yeah, probably. And they sent out this email that said, you is a shitty institution full of woke, you slurs here, who don't care about merit and are only hiring people for affirmative action. And oh, also, it's it's full of rich assholes, basically sent out an email that said that it was like, I have some of that I agree with, but not other parts, but fair enough. That's the sort of thing that can happen. And obviously, they turned over that information to the FBI. Who knows whether Kash Patel will find time in his busy schedule flying to UFC fights and weird ranches in Texas to investigate it. But that happened to anybody. And it goes back to dotting your I's and crossing your T's, even on things like personal digital security, do you have two two -factor authentication in place? Are you crossing the streams between personal and professional stuff? Are using your work email to do your nonprofit stuff? And then you lose your job and now you've lost all of your contacts and your email to doing the activism that you were doing. Don't do that. So basic things like that. I mean, that's a personal action that people people can take who are listening to harden themselves against these sorts of intrusions. One other area of this that, again, Penn has been here in Philadelphia. We have a hospital called CHOP, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, or Pennsylvania, I'm not sure which, but they were one of the early early or hospitals providing gender affirming care, they've been fighting a subpoena that was actually sealed for a long time. And it's just sort of spilled out now into the public docket, requesting really sensitive health information from patients. And the Justice Department was just kind of lying in the declarations about what CHOP was doing with relation to providing gender -affirming care to young people. And they essentially made up a lawsuit that someone had filed against CHOP saying that they had been, you know, someone had sued them for violating standards of care and all this. And it was just false. And

0:59:52 Nick: Yeah, I mean, it's a sworn declaration from a DOJ attorney. And the wild thing about it is this is like a career DOJ person. It wasn't somebody who, yeah ,I was stunned.

1:00:04 Nick: And all, and they're fighting it. And that's sort of the question that you have to answer.

1:00:03 Thomas: That's wow and sure a lot of this has probably come across as a little paranoid but you hear something like that and you're like there's there's no fucking limit to what they're gonna do if if again if you happened to come across their radar as a target and given how bizarre this stuff can be it's like it's to not be a little worried that it might just randomly happen. You know, who knows what tweet that high right chick does that happens to mention something that mentions something then all of a sudden you're on the list. You're on The Target list.

1:00:35 Nick: Mean, the whip of the Senate Republicans specifically mentioned American atheists in a vitriolic speech targeting the No Kings March before it happened, saying the Democratic Party is beholden to these radical activists that are demanding this shutdown, and they only answer to these extremists, groups like hashtag stop Trump or something, I don't and American atheists. And it was like, believe me, my brother, I wish that a political party was beholden to the wishes of American atheism.

1:01:05 Nick: I wish I had that sort of power. I do not.

1:01:05 Thomas: That'd be nice. Where is that party? Yeah, can

1:01:08 Nick: Help me out. Yeah, please. But now we're on the radar. Speaks to their desire to delegitimize actions being taken by millions of Americans because it doesn't fit within their white Christian nationalist view of who has the legitimate claim to wield government power. To their ideology is this notion that a select few, an elect, are the only people whose political will is legitimate in any way, and that anyone else's political actions should be scrutinized, should be subjected to recrimination or even violence, state violence. And this, again, this isn't new. This goes back to the civil rights era. Really

1:01:08 Thomas: You introduce me to it? Yeah. Yeah.

1:01:48 Nick: Tremendous writing about this in historical context of the theological underpinnings of the Jim Crow era in the United States that you had white pastors sort of carrying the water for developing a theological basis for this stuff. And like you said, you sometimes sound like a conspiracy theorist when you're talking about like, you know, I'm standing in front of my pin board with red It's all connected, man. But is. You sound crazy, but it's not. It is all connected and it goes back decades, which is really scary. And I don't want to, again, minimize what people feel about that. But I think that the thing we have to remind ourselves is that authoritarianism really thrives in these moments of powerlessness, of feeling powerless. Are desperate for us to feel that we can't do anything about this. The despondency that we feel sometimes are like, all right, fuck it. I can't deal with this right now. That's what fuels them. They are wanting us to disengage and for us to step aside and be overwhelmed, which is, as you said, why they zone flood with a never -ending stream of shit. And on that. And so I don't want to say we have to swing at every pitch and really mixing metaphors here, but that's okay. But we do have to pick and choose our battles and when we're willing to stand up and what our red lines are.

1:02:13 Thomas: It is now. Now, we to strike at every par that we touch down. I don't know.

1:03:12 Nick: Listen, I'm from the Midwest. I'm the rural Midwest. My dad is a never -ending just like fountain of folksy aphorisms. And so they get mingled in here and they just pour out. It's not great, but you me seem less threatening, so I'll take it.

1:03:25 Thomas: Well, I cannot believe how fast this time has flown by. And I wanted to, we're out of time, but could we go out on a good note? Is there any recent, you know, win or positive that you could maybe tell us about to give us a little bit of good and hope here?

1:03:42 Nick: I mean, I think that the thing that I would come away from is, you know, we've seen just a tremendous popular backlash to the most egregious actions being taken by this administration. And I think it's Jamal Bowie who's written about this and Adam Serwer to some extent has written about this as well. Jamal is with New York Times. Adam is with, I believe, The Atlantic. Just tremendous essayists.

1:04:03 Thomas: So. I can't remember.

1:04:04 Nick: Adam Adam is the one who coined the cruelty is the point. Them have highlighted that it's popular democracy is the thing that's holding back the tide of Trumpism, the thing is holding back this white Christian nationalist authoritarian bent, these attempts to take over our country. And that anytime it's a popular pushback, democracy, pluralism, secularism are winning. But anytime it is elite institutions, that's what's failing right now. Those are the ones who are failing to stand up for basic decency.

1:04:32 Thomas: Gosh, so true.

1:04:32 Nick: They're caving. And so want to say that, well, that's the ballgame, but it gives me a lot of hope. And hope, I think, is in short supply right now that there this popular pushback. And I think a lot of people are waking up and recognizing that this isn't just a little Band -Aid fix that we can't pretend that things are going to go back to normal. We're not going to do the Joe Biden thing of, of, oh, well, Joe Biden got elected, now everything is hunky -dory, and oh, my good friend's on the other side, we da-da-da. No, we need to think about really big structural reforms of our democracy. We need to recommit ourselves to democracy, to pluralism, to conspicuous signs of collaboration and conspicious signs of solidarity. I talked about that a lot with with folks in California that, if you think for one second that raids aren't coming for you, you're wrong. If you think, for one, second that living in a blue state in city means that you're safe, you are wrong. I mean, we have ICE agents every day in Philadelphia people off the street, not to the extent that we're seeing in a place like Chicago, and we certainly don't have the National Guard being deployed to Philadelphia where I live, But that's in part because they recognize how unpopular it is and that Philadelphia is in one of the most important swing states in America and that if they start deploying the

1:04:55 Thomas: If you just act normal, then it resets everything. Yeah yeah.

1:05:49 Nick: National Guard to and kidnapping people off the street and tear gassing peaceful protesters and pepper pepper balling faith leaders who are standing there praying, that they're going to lose every election in Pennsylvania. They're going to lose all these swing districts and going to get wiped out. And it shows the weakness of their actual position that they know that this isn't popular. And so they at straws. They are trying everything they can and they are recognizing that the popular pushback is working. And that's what we need to do. We need to be on the front lines of this popular push back. We We need to be standing, I mean, literally shoulder to shoulder with the people that are being targeted by this administration, being out in front. If you're a person who, like me, is in good health, again, I'm not that old yet, so I'm able to get out there and

1:06:39 Thomas: Pretty old. We're pretty fucking old. It's getting right.

1:06:42 Nick: It feels more and more like it every day. But getting out there, and literally putting your body on the line if you're in a position to do that and recognizing that, yeah, you might get arrested. Of engaging in civil disobedience is the recognition of the disobedience side of things, that it is breaking the law technically. And I'm not a lawyer, so I can certainly advise people to get out there. And if you feel that it's an unjust law, I think it's totally appropriate to break that law. My general counsel might say something different, but that's why I'm here and he's not. So I'm I'm not bound by the lawyer code of ethics because I ain't one. So there you go. Know, that's what gives me hope right now is this recognition of the majority of Americans, especially the people who are really engaged and waking up that, man, this is some scary stuff. And this isn't who we are. This isn't who we aspire to be. I of frame these conversations not as, oh, we have to constitution as this sort of hermetically sealed thing. No, we Have to protect to the promise of the constitution of perfecting our union. We didn't get it right the first time. There's a lot that we need to and continue moving in a positive direction, but I think we can do that and we have be willing to show the stakes, tell the stories, build bridges, build partnerships and do it. And it's hard. And there are people that are going to get caught up in some bad stuff while we're sorting it out and while we are trying to move in a positive direction. And I don't want to pretend for a minute that I'm okay with that because I'm not.

1:08:09 Nick: And so looking around and saying, okay, how can we help these folks while we re doing this other stuff too? That's, I think, what drives me to think about alternative ways of engaging in our work, whether it's mutual aid or just being in community with one another. That's an important component of this too.

1:08:25 Thomas: Fish, thanks so much. Is there any Any place you want to send people, anything people should do, feel free to toss out any plug you want for anything.

1:08:34 Nick: I'd say go to our website, atheist .org slash sign up. Sure you're on our list. If you want to get updates on what we're doing, I think that's a great spot do it. There's an opportunity there to volunteer as well if you have a unique set of skills that you can bring to the table. Or if you're just like, I want to do something, anything, and I'm willing to help, what can I do? We will make sure to point you in the right direction. And we're We're happy to connect you as well with folks in your area that are doing great work. If you're not quite sure where to start, job is.

1:09:01 Thomas: Liam Neeson, if you're listening, call in. A certain set of skills.

1:09:05 Nick: Yes, that is the unique set of skills. Exactly. Good to see you.

1:09:08 Thomas: All right. Thanks so much.

1:09:32 Nick: Like, wow, yeah. You really owned me there by using a slur nice, nice work.