GMT20240809-173226_Recording_640x360

The speaker discusses the organization's focus on democracy protection and combating anti-democratic extremism movements. They mention the need for clarity on the relationship between democracy protection, impact litigation, and the organization's existing programs. They also discuss the importance of not focusing on online spaces and extremist groups, but rather on mainstream actors who promote hate and bigotry through mainstream mechanisms. The speaker highlights the organization's role at the intersection of extremism, civil rights, and democracy protection, and their involvement in various coalitions. They mention thematic areas of focus, such as anti-Semitism and LGBTQ+ rights, and the evolution of their program's research topics. The speaker emphasizes the importance of focusing on democratic institutions and combating tactics that undermine civil rights in the United States. They compare their program's structure to that of a refugee protection program, with research and advocac And with that, we need to all be on the same page with what we're trying to accomplish with narrative and targets. And since it's our understanding that democracy protection includes the work that we've been doing with anti-democratic extremism movements, along with impact litigation and veterans for American ideals leveraging, we're all kind of trying to figure out how that works out since there's been a number of like changes with staffing around these things. You know, a few changes. Yeah. So we'll start with, from your perspective, and maybe this, if Jennifer is able to join us, a bigger picture thing, where are we at right now in terms of, are we just considering that like democracy protection is just rebranding of your program? Or is it your understanding that BFAI and impact litigation are also part of the mix of what we're considering democracy protection? I think in some ways a lot has changed, in some ways nothing's changed. So I think, at least how I'm seeing it, but we haven't had many, honestly, we haven't had many conversations about it with Jen and Sue to date. So things are still a little bit of a moving target. But I look at democracy protection and its relationship to litigation and BFAI in the same way that the extremism program was, right? Whereas like our program was kind of the lead on the issue, but there are, of course, going to be other areas of overlap, right? And ideally, so we don't have a BFAI, we don't have a contractor or consultant, any of that. I know Sue is committed to bringing someone on for that. I don't know what that's going to look like or when, but ideally if there was a BFAI, they could kind of be the implementing arm for us as we had hoped with extremism. And the same with litigation, right? Right now there is no litigation related to this, although one could argue that the Patriot Front litigation still falls under this because we're focused on, we are still in many ways focused on the same thing, the framing of our output will just change a little. But we are still focused on the anti-democratic extremist movement, frankly, aka the far right in the United States and the mainstreaming of that, the mainstreaming of hate and bigotry and all that. But hopefully our litigation, I know Sue is interested in doing more litigation in this space too, but we don't currently have anybody as of today at three o'clock with the expertise to help us kind of move that forward. But that would be great if we could do things a little bit more in that space. And just for like some background knowledge too, I think it's always helpful to talk a little bit about what we don't focus on in addition to what we do focus on, because that's been a little tricky before. So our program is like in some ways narrowly scoped to the mainstreaming of this anti-democratic movement, which means we're focused on how mainstream actors, although we call them extremists because they are, like politicians, et cetera, are using mainstream mechanisms like school boards, like state, local, federal legislation to kind of institutionalize hate and bigotry, to further anti-CRT, to further anti-LGBTQ plus things, right? They're really going after the trans community, basically any minority community, the call, immigrants, as part of some like criminal invasion, things like that. So this kind of mainstreaming of hate, that's what we're focused on. What we're not focused on is the online space, and there's a few good reasons for that, which I can get into, but primarily because it would take a lot more man hours than we have, and that environment is really saturated with about a dozen NGOs that just focus on that. So we're not focused on the online space. We're also not focused on the threat actors, right, or the extremist groups themselves. So with the exception of the Patriot Law or Patriot Lawsuit, our program is not focused on like tracking the Proud Boys, tracking the Patriot Front, tracking the Oath Keepers, any of those actual like legit extremist groups we are not focused on tracking. So kind of that stuff, and because there are dozens and dozens of groups that track actual extremists versus mainstream extremists like politicians or like school board members, like Montserrat Liberty School Board members, things like that. So to the extent when we look for grants and things, we don't want to do anything that would involve kind of tracking the threat or tracking the threat across the online space or whatever else. We just don't have the capacity, expertise, and what makes our program different is that we really have always sat at the intersection of kind of the network of organizations that look at extremism and the network of organizations that look at the civil rights space. And now we're adding the network of organizations that are really focused on this democracy protection space. So our program kind of sits at the intersection of all three of those. And we are already in those coalitions. So there's about six really large democracy protection coalitions that we're part of, which will, I think, kind of help frame, too, what we focus on, especially with litigation, right? There's no way we're ever going to build up the expertise that human rights first, let's say, protect Schedule F employees in the federal government is a really big thing that some of these groups are focused on, right, since Project 2025 is focused on more or less eliminating civil servants in the federal government that they think could have loyalties to anyone else, things like that, right? But anyway, so I don't know. So that's a little bit of that's where our program sits, the intersection. That's what we don't cover, what we do cover a little bit more of what we do cover. So, for instance, beforehand, we had we had our pillars. We have the strategy. We have our pillars. And underneath our pillars, we have thematic areas. I think we can still have our thematic areas, which were anti-Semitism, democracy protection, extremism in the military and veteran impacting the military and veteran community, um, misogyny slash LGBTQ plus. And there was one other, I think I already said anti-Semitism, xenophobia. Yes, thank you. Xenophobia, anti-immigrant xenophobia. But within that, so beforehand, actually, a kind of good kind of case study of the evolution of our program is HANA's most recent paper is originally when HANA did the paper, it was on the group Moms for Liberty, which is a mainstream group, right? It's in every county all across the United States. It was kind of how they're attacking public education. Then when we made a slight pivot, that the paper kind of turned into, well, OK, let's have it be broader than just this one group. Let's have it be about the broader anti-democratic parental rights movement, which is really a dog whistle for anything that's really actually trying to remove the rights of students and civil rights, basic civil rights, right? Like not like the removal of anything that talks about the U.S. history of enslavement in the United States or recognizes trans students identities, et cetera, et cetera. Then when we took on the democracy protection focus, and then poor HANA, this was like the worst thing that could ever happen to somebody, but her papers had rewritten so many times. And yet she's still here, which is really nice of her after all this. But anyway, then her paper took on this and her papers now framed under the scope of how this anti-democratic movement is attacking the institution of public education. So that is actually the focus of her paper. So all of that kind of long winded trajectory to say, we're going to try to focus more on these broader democratic institutions. And underneath that, we'll talk about the various different tactics that elements of this movement use to undermine them. But the umbrella will kind of be the various democratic institutions. And then again, the mainstream tactics, legislation, school boards, et cetera, that this movement is using to kind of roll back civil rights in the United States. But for our purposes, civil human rights, right? Because human rights is seen more as an external facing lexicon. Civil rights is more domestic focus. Oh, and we're not focused on anything overseas. Would this be like a good analogy where consider our refugee protection program that does advocacy and research that informs the kind of policy work that we're doing. It utilizes the refugee representation team to kind of do like the more armed base of like on the ground dealing with asylum and refugee representation. And then our litigation team, mostly Anwen, that when there are cases that utilize the research and the case studies from our clients to inform legislation, then that's something that we pursue. Would you say that that's similar to you have your program that's doing the research and the advocacy, utilizing Veterans for American Ideals to help mobilize some of these things on a grassroots initiative and then litigation would then elevate something based off of our research and advocacy, should there be a case that makes sense? I would say that's exactly the vision, but you know, there is no BSAI, so there's that. But yeah, exactly right. Like what Liz and Hana are doing is they're doing the research, then they're doing the advocacy on the Hill all the time. I think like last August they went to 25 congressional offices. Our big thing is the NDAA, you know, one of the only must pass bills in Congress and fighting against, usually it's fighting against harmful provisions like anti-trans things, et cetera, that go into the NDAA that Congress is trying to make law. The other kind of key element of that is our leadership in various coalitions in the intersection of kind of those three fields, like extremism, democracy, protection, civil rights. So those kind of three things. But then, as you just articulated, working with litigation when it makes sense, hopefully someday BSAI will become an implementing arm for us at the state and local level. And sorry, one other thing is I think historically we've focused mostly on the federal level. We're really trying hard to do what we can at the state level, which is why the legislative tracker is so important, because so much of this has been occurring for decades at the state level, at the federal level. It's almost just like the theater for it in many ways or the testing ground in some cases. But we'd really like to do more at the state level. So give us an example, because like with development, all of it is like creating that story, creating that picture, telling that narrative. So say, assuming that like we have the BSAI infrastructure that we're really looking for, we have this legislative tracker. Walk us through like how you're seeing all these things like fit in. Like give me just one example and then we could talk about a couple of others. But what's your dream of how your team's interacting with all these other elements? Sure. I mean, so one good example is there's this really bigoted piece of legislation happening at the federal level called the SAVE Act, and it requires proof of citizenship if it passes. It will require proof of citizenship before people can vote. Who that's primarily targeting is immigrants and minorities, right? It's a really anti-democratic, goes against their democratic, that's what we mean by anti-democratic, that it goes against their democratic ideals of like a pluralist, inclusive democracy, right? So the SAVE Act is this horrific bill that's happening at the federal level. So my team, and I should say there's copycat bills in about 12 different states right now. So what my team does is kind of identify that as an issue, identify the trends, research where it's happening. They will then do advocacy on the Hill to push back against that, make sure that the Democrats know that it's there and why it's harmful, et cetera, et cetera, and all the kind of first, second and third order implications. Ideally, if we had a BSAI, we would then say, listen, these are the 12 states where it's happening, where the bill has also been, copycat bills have also been introduced. And ideally, we would know, like in some states, it's just going to die. It's not going to go anywhere. But in some states, and so we could help identify which states where it was actually a threat to pass. We would then mobilize, because that means different things to different people. But anyway, we would have BSAI advocates go and talk to their kind of state and local representatives to talk about how harmful that bill was and to kind of push back against that. And then ideally, if it did pass, maybe if somebody, let's say, wasn't allowed to vote, we would then have litigation come in and represent them, something along those lines, right? That would be kind of an ideal scenario. And you could think that you could also like look at that with there's so much anti-trans legislation. That is like the real thing that the right wing is going after in a major way. But denying students' rights, and mostly in schools, that's why I say denying students' rights. But it's all across the place, right? So ideally, you could see something like that similarly happening at the federal level, copycat bills happening in the state level across our country. And then we step in to defend that individual or that family who has been persecuted in their own community. That's a great example. Okay, cool. Not to like, you know, I feel like I don't want to Well, it's helpful, right? Yeah. Yeah. And if you could like give us another example, because talking these things through are like really helpful for us, even if it's just like, this is a hypothetical situation. Obviously, if you have a couple of things in the hopper that are less than hypothetical situation, sure. But since we are trying to keep our eyes on the ground, we're trying to find you money. So like, the more stories, the better. Well, another one that we've talked about a lot is the Moms for Liberty and this whole parental rights movement is deeply problematic, right? They're just a bunch of bigots, and they're freaking everywhere. And every liberal state, well, oh, this is being recorded, I should watch my language. But anyway, but they're a bunch of bigots. It's okay, Charlie, it's fine. Okay, Charlie, you don't care. I mean, they're just flipping horrible and they're everywhere. And again, with a bunch of others. So like, they go to school boards. And like, you know, if you're even if you're in the D.C. area, and you've heard of Moms for Liberty versus if you're, you know, in upstate New York, I always kind of when I think of my audiences, well, that's in a slight tangent. When I think of our audiences, I think policymakers at the federal and state level. And then I think the general public, right? And we're not going to, it's a little bit of a myth that you can win over people on the other side. I don't, that's not like, no, not the way our society is right now. We're never going to convince the far right bigot that they should like join our cause. But we can potentially inform the, there's a lot of data that shows that a good portion of the population is apathetic, right? Or they just don't see why they should get involved, or how harmful things really are, or they think things are bluster. And those, that's really the community I want to try and help convince that they should become basically activists and advocates for our causes, right? But so one community I always think about are my generally liberal, but misinformed relatives in upstate New York, right? Where they'll think some misinformation is a little bit funny, because they have a cheeky sense of humor. And I'm like, no, that's actually bigotry, and here's what this is furthering. And then they're like, oh, shit, right? We should have actually like done something about this, and they just don't know. So I always think of like those people. Anyway, so like my crazy, well, but well-intentioned relatives in upstate New York, right? So like Moms for Liberty was coming to their school boards, and they had never heard of Moms for Liberty before. And they're like, well, why does it matter as much? Like, this isn't going to go anywhere. I'm like, this is part of a strategic effort to roll back our democracy and to roll back civil rights. So while you think that you might be, you know, giving someone an olive branch to let them sit on your board, this person is deeply, deeply harmful and will harm the minority members of your community, the trans members of your community, all this kind of stuff, right? Anyway, that's a little bit of context to say, ideally, then what we would do, right, is we would help like these Moms for Liberty members come with their talking points that they get. It's a federal organization, not federal, sorry, but it's a national organization. And they get like packets on how to start, what their talking points should be, all this kind of stuff. They show up to a school board. The school board is like, I don't know what to say in response to this. Like, do they know the ins and outs of the Constitution or what the state and local laws are? No, they have no idea. These people are like largely volunteers, right, or whatever else. So, we can help. One thing that I really wanted to do is, you know, we write these, like, reports, right, like Hannah's most recent report. Someday it will be published, Laura. God willing. And, you know, then along with that, we create a toolkit, right, a toolkit for board members, a toolkit for local government on these are the types of things that are said. This is the information about even just things like the misinformation around trans kids in sports. There's so much misinformation that sometimes actually sounds legitimate to people. But then we can kind of give them the talking points that sometimes it's worth going, doing that tip for tap back and forth. And sometimes it's, and sometimes you don't want to give that airtime, right. So, us working in coalition with our partners like HRC, Human Rights Campaign, and others who are also like real strong experts in this area can create these toolkits to kind of help inform the state and local practitioners that are actually dealing with this on a daily basis. I'm sorry, that was a super long-winded answer. No, again, this is all great. I want you to keep going in the sense of a little bit more about, so, we have the FBI has potential people who can help disseminate, create content, advocate on our behalf, like spread that word. What are other avenues that we currently have in place or avenues that we're looking to have in place that can help get the materials that we're producing to where they need to go to educate whoever our target audience is? Yeah, I don't, that's a good question, really, other than VSAI. And the only answer it would have would be our team. But that, you know, to date, that's, my team's already stretched so thin that it's not happening, right? Like, is there any coalition that we're part of that we could leverage to also help with that? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, that's, so, they do have, and they are starting to grow more of, so, with, so, in different orgs, what's funny, too, is there's also a little competition between orgs, and some orgs wouldn't necessarily help us out, right? So, for instance, if you take the ADL, the ADL is not going to help us out, right? They have their national org, and then they have to have either regional or state-level representatives. They're giving their folks their own thing, right? Which is not the same, but they don't want to also then share kind of the local spotlight, right? So, what I'm more excited about is the democracy protection coalitions. I don't know at this point that any of them really have a strong state presence, but I think, so, anyway, ADL, well, going back not to, like, completely, you know, suggest anything totally adverse about ADL, but, like, they're part of the extremism network, right? The extremism network of coalitions. The democracy protection coalitions are really receptive to this information. Do you want more help with this? They don't understand this stuff. So, they don't have the strong networks, but, like, things like Hannah just went to this conference in Florida or whatever, right? And from that, she was connected to all the, well, not all the, that's hyperbolic, but a lot of the, like, local LGBTQ plus networks and state and things like that. And so, the team is trying to kind of figure out who those people are and get introductions to those, but that's relationship building. That definitely takes time. But what I found to date, anyway, is that the national-level orgs, the FPLCs, ADLs, whatever, whatever, even if they do have kind of a state presence, they're not really interested in sharing other organizations' work. So, it's tricky, right? That's why, when we talked about a slight tangent, but when I talked to Paris about partners for the ledge tracker down the road for different versions, I'm like, not the extremism network of folks. Like, that's potentially problematic. But we could partner with the democracy protection kind of coalitions. And then, the same with the civil rights orgs. And what really helps, extremism shouldn't be viewed negatively, but the reframing really helps us with the civil rights orgs because, you know, there's so much history in the U.S. of just even being tied to anything, extremism could be seen as a liability for some of the civil rights orgs. So, by reframing, we're seeing less as a liability and more of a potential ally to those folks, too. So, I hope that with this reframing, more doors open up, too. And especially once we can really provide them with something tactical. But to date, we haven't really provided that tactical level of support in the forms of, like, toolkits and talking points and things like that. But I think that'll be beneficial moving forward to help us kind of build those relationships. And again, like, that's something that's very receptive in terms of, like, the comparing with the refugee protection work and the coalition building that they have with the kinds of toolkits that they create as well. I don't even know about that. That would be good to see. Oh, yeah. With, like, the Welcome with Dignity campaign. Yeah. They typically do a lot of that work in cooperation with the communications team. But short on time, I have one last question for you that will be super helpful for us. So, with democracy protection programs, if I'm a funder and I look at things like patriot front, disinformation, all of that as being, like, flashy and seemingly urgent, how does our program kind of cut above to get the attention of funders who are looking at democracy protection like that as opposed to how we're framing it currently? Why, as a funder, should I be drawn to this approach as opposed to the patriot front, Oath Keeper type work? Yeah. And today, that's a good question. Today, I haven't seen democracy folks focused on the extremism space. And actually, what I've heard from people, and you might know completely differently, but just my little window into this space, is that democracy folks don't want to touch extremism, which is also why we reprinted, right? So, like, they don't want to touch the actual extremist group like patriot front and things like that. There are other people kind of funding that type of work that we don't do, right? And so far, what I've seen in the democracy protection space is that they're really just funding litigation. And, like, the folks leading the coalitions in the space or the parts of the coalition are all litigation focused. So, there isn't too much, there's a little bit of work going on. Well, there's now, now there's a lot of organizations trying to figure out what to do about Project 2025 and things like that. I would say what makes us different is, again, where we sit at that intersection of all those three types of fields, so that we're looking at not only what's happening on the federal level, but what's happening at the state level and how this is a strategy by this movement to roll back our civil slash human rights in the United States. But not from necessarily solely a litigation point of view, but looking at how they're using mainstream tactics, like legislation, like policy, et cetera, to roll back these rights. So, I don't really think there are other orgs that are looking as extensively as we are at how they're using these mainstream tactics. There are some that pick off parts of it, but another thing, I guess, too, that makes us unique is we're looking at the totality of the movement. So, for instance, ACLU has a great tracker on all the anti-LGBTQ plus legislation that exists in the country. And other orgs are tracking the education parts of it or whatever, but there isn't, and so the legislation tracker is almost speaks to our program in the sense that we're looking at every part of this movement rather than just one, one small part of it, right? Sure. Any other questions from my team? Sorry, it's like more of an interview, but- Oh, no. I think that that's helped focus some of the questions that we've all had together. But Gal or Robin, if I've left anything out, or Kiana, if there's anything helpful for you to know in terms of anything. Well, for me, this is just very informative to just see what's coming down the pike. So, I'm really just here listening. So, thank you, Laura. Thanks for being here, Kiana. I mean, I have a bunch of questions for you, which we could save for our next one. And is it Hazel or Hazel? It's Hazel. Sorry? Hazel. Oh, Hazel. Okay, sorry. I think I've been mispronouncing that, so I apologize. I think I owe you something. I owe you an email today, which I will get to. See if there's a grant application. Yes. Ethan just put his parts, so it's- Okay, I will make sure I do that. Just review if you have any feedback. Always, always. Okay, I didn't want you to think I had forgotten. That has been top of my list of things that I need to make sure I do before I sign off today. And sometime, maybe our next call, I'd like to talk to you about how we can, like, before time, before all the changes, I never really found these meetings to be super, super productive, right? Because I didn't feel like I was bringing really much of anything to the table. You guys would be like, do you have anything? I'd be like, no. And then whatever else, right? So, I think it would be good to talk about, like, what- is there a strategy that we can make of- I don't know if it makes sense to look at institutions versus this versus that. Are there- that's weird. I just got a meeting invite for Jen Quigley via Teams, and she does not use Teams. But- or are there things that I should be doing on my end every week, right? Like, you know, Mike would always say, you have to do fundraising, you have to do fundraising. Cool, I'm happy to. I don't know what that looks like, or, like, how to be helpful. Are there relationships I should try and be building, or things that- and, like, historically, when development did do things, I would never see them 90% of the time, or maybe I would have, like, before they went out, right? And then, okay, hopefully I'd be here, but because our team is so small, maybe I wouldn't be, right? So, I want to make sure that I'm giving you guys what you need, and that I'm doing my part. And I don't think to date I really have been, so I'd love to talk to you more about, like, how me, my team could do more to help development and give you guys the information that you need, and vice versa. Yes. So, really quickly for that, there have been a number of prospects that we've either sent LOIs out to, or in the process of doing that. Those are the prospects that would be important to, like, casually engage with. So, if we put out an LOI with an organization, and they came back and said, hey, cool, but, you know, not today, those are the kind of program officers that we should be sending occasional updates to. If there's something that's new to the program, something that's particularly of interest to that particular donor, that's a key way to stay engaged with somebody, even though you know that they might not be funding at that particular time. A lot of funding comes invitation only. So, this is opportunities for us to be in line for future invitations. So, that's a really quick thing. I will say that I think that these meetings going forward will be more effective, because it's always been disjointed having a VFAI call, and then this call, when there's been so much overlap, because it did seem more of, like, you know, you have one that's going off to do policy, where that other team also seems to be doing policy, but not really implementing it together, whereas this kind of makes it a lot easier to have that more comprehensive planning conversation along the way with that. Yeah, and if we do get, well, when we do get a VFAI, I should say, we should just have them maybe join this meeting, too. No, no, no, this is the meeting. Okay, perfect, perfect. There will not be a separate VFAI meeting. It will be the Democracy Protection Meeting. I think that that's very important to make sure that everybody is on the same page, that there's no silos, that it's part of the same. That's great, yeah. It's like a very specific thing comes up that ends up being just so minute. Sure, we'll have, like, a separate meeting, but the intention for this is that, like, this should be whoever the VFAI counterpart is, Jennifer Quigley for Bigger Picture, you, and we want to invite you to that. That would be great, and then, sorry, one last thing is it might make sense, too, moving forward to have, like, if we have, like, special projects, to have a meeting about that. So, for instance, I would love to talk to you guys. I think right now we're a little siloed with the ledge tracker, and I want to make sure you're getting accurate information and comprehensive information about that. So, we should probably have a meeting about fundraising for that and where we are timeline-wise and things like that. Yeah, and honestly, since that kind of fits into what I'm sort of understanding with, like, the Bigger Picture goals of how this program will work and be successful, there definitely should be, like, some representative from that team on this call just so that way it's all part of the same thing. That may or may not be Jason. I don't know if he's been working with somebody else who's been more closely aligned with the development of that program. It's all of them. Okay, yeah, we'll pick one, and then they can report back. So, maybe Paris. Maybe we'll pick Paris. Okay, all right, great. Well, yeah, we'll move forward with this. Thank you so much for taking the time to catch us all up and meet. Yeah, sorry, I have to deal with the deans. Yeah, thank you. All right, well, have a good weekend all, and huzzah, I will get you that email shortly. All right, thank you. Have a good weekend. Bye.