The Best Way Out Is Always Through - Reflections On A Dark Week For American Democracy (New Video And Analysis)We need to be very, very loud today everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Morning all. There is a lot coming at us right now. To help us make sense of it all I’ll be operating at a slightly higher tempo in the coming days. We have two live events scheduled in the next two days: Today, 1pm EST - Rep. Adam Smith, ranking Member of the House Armed Services Committee, joins us to talk Trump’s ruinous foreign policy and report in from inside the House Caucus during a consequential week. Click here to join us right before 1pm. Friday, 11am EST - Lincoln Square’s Stuart Stevens joins us to bring his unique and powerful insights to this challenges moment. Click here to join us right before 11am. This morning I send along the video (above) and transcript (below) of my conversation last night with over a thousand proud patriots of this remarkable community. I am going to let my words from last night speak for me on this somber day. Get to them when you can. A few additional notes: We need to be very loud today. Congress must hear from us. They have to get a sense on the Hill that people are pissed. Pick your issue, whatever it is, and call, email, visit and then do it again. We need stories of phones jammed, angry callers, people demanding something better. THIS IS VITALLY IMPORTANT. Make your calls today. This is Renee Nicole Good in her Honda Pilot yesterday. May her memory be a blessing. And a rallying cry.
This is a video from a vigil last night in Minneapolis near where Renee Nicole Good was murdered by Trump’s armed militias.  Minnesota Senator Tina Smith posted this last night, speaking for all of us: Perhaps this will be the week - anniversary of Jan 6th, the killing of Renee Nicole Goode, Trump’s crowning himself Emperor of the Americas/Lord of the West Hemisphere and his seizing of Venezuela - that finally helps our national leaders overcome their reticence to fully engage Trump on his assault on democracy and freedom here and throughout the world. We can - and must - be both warriors for the middle class and great, patriotic defenders of democracy and freedom here and everywhere (No Kings). For as I discussed last night those consultants and data bros counseling Democrats to stay focused on affordability and health care are wrong, terribly, historically, dangerously wrong. We know from those who study autocracy, those who have lived it in their own lives, that we must summon the courage and resolve to contest the nascent authoritarian on all fronts, contest every action - for failure to do will be read by the regime as weakness, uncertainty, which then in turn invites escalation. Our failure to fight the regime’s rising authoritarianism head on actually emboldens them, and encourages them to do more, go further, and leave our great democracy further and further behind. Watch the video, read the transcript (below) and remember what they want more than anything else is for us give up, give in, disengage, obey in advance. But that’s not what we do here at Hopium, is it? For Hopium is hope with a plan. We don’t just hope tomorrow will better than today. We put our heads down, despite all the shit, and do the work to make it so…….. Let’s Get To Work Everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Winning The Midterms - Support Our Candidates
Expanding The Senate and Electoral College Maps, Winning In Red States and Red Places (2026-2032)
This recent post recapped our our very 2025 together. In three new essays (here, here, here) I look forward to next year and discuss how one of the ways we win the 2026 midterms is by providing early support to our candidates and parties to allow them to staff up, be loud, define the terms of the debate now, before the inevitable onslaught on AI slop, Russian disinfo, and Trumpian lies funded through bribes and corruption wash across the land. The midterms could be won or lost in these next few months - not in the fall of 2026 - and we need be fighting now with everything we got.
Winning The Big Arguments With Trump, Defend Our Democracy - We have two recommended actions today: 1 - Call Your Senators and Member Of The House And Demand They Act Upon Our Five-Part Agenda - We need to be loud people, very, very loud and make the case for our now five part agenda:
2 - Celebrate America, Our Constitution, Our 250th Birthday By Bringing Our Resolutions Project To Your Community - This July 4th America celebrates it’s 250th birthday. We need to make this holiday, a celebration of our Declaration Of Independence from a mad king, our day, and not allow it to become his. One way we can do this is by bringing our Resolutions Project to your community or state. Imagine if by July 4th of next year a large number of towns, counties and states had passed formal resolutions, in the spirit of our Declaration of Independence, defending our Constitution and condemning the “injuries,” “abuses,” and “usurpations” of our mad king. For as our Founders wrote in the Declaration:
So far Hopium members have introduced or passed resolutions in 85 communities in 23 states. In the coming days we will be convening to discuss how to bring this campaign to more places and start planning to Own The Fourth next year. Finally, please self-report your activities to our daily paid subscriber chat. These reports help inspire all of us to do more and fight harder! Keep working hard everyone. We have a lot of work ahead of us - Simon Transcript - Simon Rosenberg Presentation 1/7/26 7pm EST (this is just my opening remarks)Welcome everyone, Simon Rosenberg, Hopium Chronicles, back with our weekly gathering of our proud plucky patriots here of the Hopium community. I want to start tonight on a somber note, which is I just want to have a moment to remember Renee Nicole Good, who was 37 years old, who was shot and killed today by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. She left behind a four- or five-year-old son who’s now orphaned because her husband passed away several years ago. And I just want to start by marking this moment and taking a quiet moment of silence together… it’s an important way to start because I think this has been… I was a little shaken by what happened today. I’ve been shaken by the events of the last few days. We’re clearly entering the second phase of the return of Trump. And I think it’s marked in my mind… may her memory be a blessing. Yes, thank you. And for the people of Minnesota who have endured so much political violence in the state. This calm and kind of very warm and loving place, and for those of you in Minnesota tonight, my heart goes out to you and your families for all that you’ve had to endure in recent years. It’s kind of extraordinary. I was glad to be able to go lend my support to the Minnesota Democratic Party a few months ago as a way of expressing my just wanting to be there after someone, one of your most important political leaders in the state, was assassinated by a right-wing lunatic earlier last year. But you know in these sessions, I try to take a step back from the day-to-day and assess where we are in this battle for democracy and this battle against Trump. I want to start by grounding ourselves in the basic reality that I think Trump’s escalation of recent weeks is coming about in part or to a great degree because of his struggle, because of his soaring unpopularity, his clearly failed domestic policies, his inability to contain the fallout from the Epstein files, which continues to grind away and erode the integrity of his leadership and legitimacy. From the fraying of his coalition and seeing this major break with one of his most important public supporters in the country, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the fact that they were so profoundly rebuked… the Trump regime was so profoundly rebuked by Congress just a few weeks ago on the Epstein vote… which, by the way, was one of the most significant rebukes of a president by Congress in all of our history. And that came just a few weeks after the Senate voted to repeal the tariffs. These were significant legislative rebukes. He also lost a critical Supreme Court case right before the holidays where he had to withdraw the National Guard from California, Oregon, and Illinois. I think he went into the holidays with this sense that things weren’t working well, and he wasn’t doing well. Even the talk that he gave yesterday to the House Republicans, he openly talked about losing the midterm elections and what it would mean for him. He didn’t say, “We’re going to go kick their ass.” He openly talked about losing. And because we had had, and I neglected to mention in my laundry list, these extraordinary election results throughout the year, particularly in November and December, we won down in Miami a seat where his presidential library is supposed to go, in a place where we hadn’t won in 28 years. We routed them in the November elections, winning in New Jersey and Virginia by 13 and 15 points, and winning in four other states by more than 20 points. He’s aware that his foundation is eroding. On January 1st, the Wall Street Journal had this front-page story about his declining health. It was a brutal story for him. I think he’s aware that his powers are ebbing, that he’s in ill health, that he’s stumbling and struggling. He’s falling asleep repeatedly. He’s got his swollen ankles and everything else. There is this kind of manic need to restore his strength and power and manhood, as I write, his manliness, because it is escaping him and this has been harder for him than he anticipated. What’s happened just now with Venezuela and the aftermath of the public statements they’ve made, the threatening of Greenland, the NSS document that came out in late November… I’ve been writing about this and I just want to talk it out because I think it’s important that we say things out loud… and proclaim them to world. Donald Trump has, in essence, declared himself to be emperor of the Americas and lord of the Western Hemisphere, including the United States. I’m not exaggerating this. This is not a game. This is not funny. But it is a reasonable interpretation of what they’re saying and what Stephen Miller has been saying and what Trump himself is saying. In the NSS document, the National Security Strategy, and this is consistent with their public statements and things they’ve been doing and saying. They really see the world of democracies and the rule of law coming to an end. There is now a new era where there will be these powers that will compete with one another. Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Middle East, the United States, and the Americas. As I wrote over the last few days, as someone who grew up in the New York area, a lot of this has the feeling of what we know in New York as the seven real estate families or the nine real estate families… the dominant real estate holders in New York. Trump was not one of them, by the way. They would compete brutally with each other, but there was enough to go around where everyone got wealthy together. Trump is really treating the world now as if there are four or five real estate families that are going to control the world. And as Ruth Ben-Ghiat talked to us about when she came to visit a few weeks ago, she said that people like Donald Trump, strongmen like Trump, they see everything in their realm as theirs. For them, it is personal. The Congress, the government buildings that he is taking over, the golf courses in Washington D.C. that he is taking over, the Kennedy Center, which he is taking over, the oil in Venezuela. He just sees all of this as his own possessions. Women. He has done this through his whole life. We are now at a point where Stephen Miller has gone on television and has said that the era of law has ended and we are now in the era of power and force. They are now acting as if the Constitution, domestic United States law, the UN Charter, the international legal system, and Senate-ratified treaties that we have with other nations, none of these apply any longer. They are relics of a previous age. That we are now entering this new imperial age, with Donald Trump declaring himself emperor of the Americas and ruler over this new order and other grand powers. As I have written to you, and I know many of you think I may be going too far... this is not just about Venezuela or Greenland. It is about what happened today in Minneapolis, where we now have state-backed militias operating with impunity, terrorizing communities all across the country. In their own minds, they can shoot a thirty-seven-year-old woman driving a Honda Pilot on a residential street, shoot her three times in the face at point-blank range, and then be defended by the president and the Secretary of Homeland Security. This assassination is similar to the extrajudicial killings of people in boats over the past couple of months. We are entering a period where our leader, who is unhinged and clearly in cognitive decline, has declared himself above the law. He has rendered himself, and decreed that he is now emperor of the Americas and that Venezuela is now under his control. He sees Greenland as part of the Americas and has made a decision to try to seize it… he is acting lawlessly and acting completely outside the bounds of any legal framework. We are now in what I believe is the second phase… of his return to office. I think it is going to be really hard. The emotions that I am feeling today, that many of you are likely feeling, are valid. It is okay to be scared. It is okay to be shaken. It is okay to be worried about what is going to happen next. It is not just about the action itself. It is also about the defense of the action, the assassination of this woman, by the government and those around him. We are entering a more difficult phase in this fight, and everyone needs to practice self-care. Particularly because it is dark and cold in many parts of the country, those of you in warmer areas, that is great. But for those of us in darker and colder areas, we need to take care of ourselves because are entering a more difficult phase, and it is coming in part because of his incredible failure, his unpopularity, and also because of his clear decline. A friend of mine said this manic desire he has now to put his name on everything is a sign that he is fearing mortality. He is starting to recognize that his time is coming to an end. It is not just that he is a lame duck, which he will be, but there’s a real possibility also that he may not be around much longer. That could be part of all of this. It is textbook Mad King behavior. The entire reason this country was founded was to prevent a people from having to live under the rule of a narcissistic lunatic leader who decrees whatever he wants. He announced today that the oil sales from Venezuela will not even go to the U.S. Treasury. Instead, he is going to create a separate set of bank accounts under his control, outside the United States, for the money from these oil sales. He can then distribute it to his allies or do who knows what with it. I do not even think he knows what he is going to do. They are making this up as they go along every day. As dark as this description is of where we are, we have to recognize that it is coming about because of our success in our political movement this year. We have achieved remarkable things together, and we have to be heartened by that. We must use that sense of accomplishment and achievement to continue the work and stay in the fight, recognizing that this is going to be a challenging time. This month, as I have been writing, is going to be a very consequential month. We have to pass a budget, and I have no idea how that is going to happen, particularly because the Republicans in the House had only a two-person margin. Marjorie Taylor Greene resigned from Congress two days ago on Monday, dropping their number to two hundred nineteen. One of their members passed away suddenly over the weekend, bringing them down to two hundred eighteen. Another member, who is eighty years old, was in a serious car accident and is now out indefinitely, so they are down to two hundred seventeen. We are at two hundred thirteen. That means that on any vote, if they lose two people, they can’t pass anything. If they lose three, we may be able to get through our discharge petitions. Tomorrow, we hope there will be a discharge petition that passes, putting the House on record to restore three years of ACA subsidy cuts. It’s putting pressure the Senate. Senator Thune is making noises about a deal. We will see what happens, but this will be a very consequential month… I think our leaders in Congress had hoped we would be in a period of conventional legislative engagement, but we all know we are not. This isn’t like any period they have ever experienced on the Hill. We need to keep making calls every day and helping them understand what is expected of them now. This is something I am most proud of about this community. Since almost a year ago when Trump came into office, you all have been loud and proud, calling your representatives, your senators, your other elected officials, helping them know what is required of them now. We need to be very loud with Congress. Congress needs to hear from us. As we have discussed here, they not only record the calls and take the feedback, but they also notice when people are not calling. It means people are not agitated. We need to be very agitated. Everyone watching on YouTube, Spotify, or Substack, we need to be calling every day. In some ways, it does not matter what you are calling about. Just call about something you are passionate about. I give you a list of five things every day that you can call about. Impeaching or removing Robert Kennedy, defunding ICE, rolling back the tariffs, whatever it is. Be loud and proud in the coming weeks. It is going to be really important. Today we also expanded the list of candidates and parties we are supporting. I had some technical issues with the link, but I will work that out tomorrow. We hit our fundraising goals for key House races and state parties. I am grateful to all who participated. We added Ohio. There will be a link where you can contribute to Amy Acton’s race. David Pepper, our good friend, has joined her ticket as lieutenant governor candidate. With that one link, your contribution will go to Amy Acton, Jared Brown, and the Ohio Democratic Party. We will be expanding the number of races we are involved in over the coming weeks. We are working hard to give you more options. Also, remember that on our site you can find an incredible array of videos to watch from candidates on the front lines of the 2026 battle and from state party chairs who are leading us into critical races. We got good news that it looks like Mary Peltola may get into the Senate race in Alaska. We do not know for sure, but we have a chance. I think we need to start the year with clear political goals. Flip the Senate, flip the House, and win a majority of governorships. These are all possible. The House is the most likely. The Senate will be hard but not impossible. We can win a majority of governorships. We need to stay focused and turn all this anger, fear, worry, frustration, and profound sense of betrayal into daily, concrete action. It is a form of self-care, but also because we have to keep working. We need to keep our heads down and keep winning. We must continue to strengthen our state parties and candidates. Early money matters. Money coming in during the first quarter matters much more than in the fourth quarter. The earlier they get money, the more they can staff up, the stronger the campaigns are. This is not a fundraising pitch. It is just the basic reality. Set your budget for this quarter. I will be giving you good options. Also take care of your local races and what matters in your community. And finally, for Hopium going forward, I want to do a couple of things. First, I am going to try to bring on more people like the Heather Cox Richardsons and Timothy Snyders, who I have been reading, to help us make sense of this moment. We are now hurtling into a period that almost no American has ever really been through before. Functionally, our leader does not believe that he is bound by the laws and the Constitution of the United States any longer. We are going to have to come to a greater understanding of what is happening. I am going to be developing a whole series of thoughtful talks to help us expand our understandings and to make us more effective in our work together. The second thing I want to mention… I will be sending out an email this weekend that will create an open chat for things you think we should be doing and what we should be spending our time on together. The third area I want to explore intellectually and with all of you is how do we organize ourselves better. I mean all of us. I mean the whole pro-democracy movement. I do not want to say that we have struggled to meet the moment, because I do not think that is actually what I mean. I think that we are becoming aware of the limitations of how we fight this kind of centralized power when we are so disparate. Even though federalism has been one of the great bulwarks against Trump and autocracy, it also means that we are all scattered and we are all working on different things. Yes, we all come together every few months around the No Kings initiative, and that has been inspiring and remarkable. But the sum does not feel like it is greater than the parts right now. I think that part of Trump’s strategy is to divide and conquer, to isolate, to go after Minnesota, to go after Illinois. What I want to spend time on with all of you is learning from these new arrangements that have emerged. We have seen the Democratic Attorneys General organize themselves. They are now meeting on a weekly basis, the twenty-three of them, and there will now be twenty-four with Virginia. These are Democratic Attorneys General who are coordinating strategy, representing governments. These are not private citizens or nonprofit organizations. These are sovereign governments of the United States that are fighting for their constituents. I’ts one of the reasons they have been so successful… they have enormous standing. They are as responsible for the people in their states as Donald Trump is as president. The emergence of the Democratic Attorneys General and the coherence in which they have operated has been really important. We have also seen the Democratic Governors operating at the state level around climate change and clean energy. They are operating now in this new health cooperative that has been set up. They also now have a group for defending democracy that is in its early days. These kinds of arrangements are new. We can imagine that those of us who still believe in the rule of law and democracy and the great American experiment can use the power of banding together to fight against these threats….. to see ourselves not only in a pro-democracy movement here in the United States, but also in a global pro-democracy movement that, up until recently, we had been the leaders of. As a nation, we are no longer leading it. We need to create a sense of common cause with others who believe in democracy and the rule of law and no kings all around the world. I think we are going to need that. I have found that when I imagine myself being in the same journey as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Jefferson, Nelson Mandela, and other freedom fighters throughout history, I want to believe that I am fighting the same fight that President Zelenskyy is and that our European allies are. We are all fighting essentially the same fight that our founders fought, which is to create a good society where the people were sovereign and not kings, autocrats, or oligarchs. We are still in that same fight two hundred and fifty years later… one of the things we will be talking about is how do we make sure that we win the Fourth of July this year and that he does not. We want to make sure that he does not bastardize it and turn it into something that dishonors our country rather than honors our incredible contribution to the world. Our resolutions project is part of that. I need to revive that a little more as we go to the states in the coming weeks. What I want to end with is that I feel like I want to explore ways to imagine how we can band together more successfully in a global pro-democracy and domestic pro-democracy movement. That movement should put us in a place where we feel like we are in community not just with each other here at Hopium, or in your Indivisible communities, or your Democratic parties, or in the local groups that you are part of, but that you are part of this historic movement for democracy and freedom. That movement has been the core of the American project, which is now under siege by the people, unfortunately, in the White House. That leads me to my final point. I do think that if Trump and Stephen Miller and these others really believe they are creating a new post-democracy America, which is what Stephen Miller has said repeatedly this week, then we have to start being more purposeful about protecting the capital region and the capital itself. That capital is, in essence, two hundred and fifty years of buildings and monuments to democracy and freedom. If they believe that those monuments are for a bygone age, it may mean that we could see much more than just the East Wing being torn down or other parts of this global homage. I have lived in this capital city for over thirty years. When you drive down the National Mall, you see monuments to the progress of humankind and to people who have been warriors for freedom and democracy and for a better day. That is not the world Donald Trump lives in anymore. Those people are in opposition to him. Those monuments are in opposition to his politics. I think we have to start being more purposeful about creating protection around the physical monuments of our city because he has already shown that he is willing to tear them down, rename them, or desecrate them. As someone who grew up tearing buildings down and rebuilding them to make them shinier, we should take his assault on the physical capital as seriously as we take his metaphorical or legal assault on our democracy itself. That is something we will also be talking more about. This is not the happiest of all the Hopium gatherings we have had. I think this is a somber time. I think this is a hard time for our politics. I am going to stay with you all the way through this thing until we get to the other side, however we do, because we all know that the best way out is always through. We just have to keep our heads down and keep working as hard as we can. We are doing it for the future of our kids and our grandkids, and also because we are part of this. Our birthright is this great American experiment in freedom and democracy. And we are Americans. What do we do? We fight for freedom and democracy. That is who we are and what we do. Our job got a little bit harder in the last few weeks, and we have to buck up and rest up and get ready and go rumble together, everybody. Let me get to your questions. Thanks for being here tonight. You're currently a free subscriber to Hopium Chronicles By Simon Rosenberg. 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Thursday, January 8, 2026
The Best Way Out Is Always Through - Reflections On A Dark Week For American Democracy (New Video And Analysis)
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