The Dig Folgen

What is to be done? How can I get involved? Those are questions that a lot of people are asking now that Donald Trump is about to become president of the United States. Today, I speak to Nijmie Dzurinko, a Black woman who grew up poor in the deindustrialized Western Pennsylvania steel town of Monessen. Nijmie is one of the smartest and most experienced organizers we know. In the past, she has been Executive Director and organizer with the Philadelphia Student Union, was a co-founder of the Media Mobilizing Project, and is a co-founder and currently co-coordinator of the group Put People First! PA.

Presidents Bush and Obama both presided over an expansive War on Terror and a national security state with a lethal and global reach. Permanent war and warrantless snooping have become the bipartisan consensus backdrop of American politics—an immutable feature of everyday life rather than outrageous abuses to be resisted or, at least, debated. Soon, Donald Trump will become president, meaning that a man brazenly indifferent to the rule of law will be in charge of a killing and surveillance machinery that is already quite lawless. Today we are joined by Glenn Greenwald, a co-founding editor of The Intercept and one of the reporters who Edward Snowden entrusted with secret NSA documents exposing mass surveillance. Glenn is one of the country’s leading critics of the national security state—and the establishment media and political figures who helped pave the way to Trump’s win.  

Donald Trump launched his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and pledged to build a “a big, fat, beautiful wall” on the southern border that, of course, Mexico is going to pay for. It’s no surprise that Trump’s message struck a chord: right-wing nativism has been rising for decades and hardcore xenophobes had long since taken over the Republican Party. Worse yet, so-called immigration moderates on both sides of the aisle—including Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama—have sought to placate those reactionary forces by militarizing the border and orchestrating mass deportations. Now that Trump has won the presidency, undocumented immigrants are rightly worried and mobilizing to defend their communities. Today, we are joined by two guests who can help us understand where immigration politics are heading in the months to come and how we got here. César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández is a professor at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law and the author of the blog “Crimmigration.” Chris Newman, Legal Director at the National Day Labor Organizing Network.