Rashad Robinson, thank you so much for talking with us.

Thanks for having me.

You know, you've been described as an activist, as an organizer.

For people who don't know what you do, what do you do?

Every day I try to find ways to help win more social change.

I build campaigns.

I identify the stories that hopefully move more people into feeling like they can make change.

And also look for the openings, the possibilities that if we push in this direction or we push in that direction, we can pass policies, we can make society more fair and more equitable.

That's what I've been doing for the last several decades.

I've been doing it inside of organizations.

I've been doing it through public speaking and I've been doing it by trying to bring people together.

You have worked with existing organizations like GLAAD that existed before you got involved with them, focused on LGBTQ rights, not just rights, but also sort of presence in society.

And then you also have sort of helped build organizations like Color of Change.

Would it be fair to say that the reason you wrote this book is that your side is losing more than it's winning?

I absolutely wrote this book because we're losing more than we're winning, and I'm tired of losing.

And every day when I see losses, I see things like magical thinking or a misunderstanding of power, how power operates.

And you can continue to sort of operate inside the context, continue to try to build campaigns, or you can step back and think about sort of how do I disrupt the current set of thinking, the current conventional wisdom, and give us a new way of thinking about power that is modern, that is updated, and moves us in a different direction.

So when did you start to feel this way?

Because it's not exactly a secret that a lot of the progressive initiatives and goals have really seen a setback in the current moment.

I mean, you could trace it to President Trump's first election, but it's not just his election per se.

It's just the rapidity with which that he and his and his allies have been able to achieve legislative gains to sort of normalize certain language that was considered unacceptable in the public sphere.

So I'm just wondering what was what was it was there like a eureka moment for you where you just said, wow, we are really losing here.

They've been so consequential in what they've done.

And I think the moment when I knew I had to write this book was right after Trump's first victory.

I went to the White House shortly after his victory as he started to name his cabinet officials.

I also went and met with folks like Senator Schumer.

And in each of those conversations, I felt like I was in a different universe.

I was also inside lots of conversations inside of the sort of the progressive or the left movement, as we might talk about it in the United States.

And in each of those conversations, people were either treating his victory, Trump's victory, like, "Oh, this is, we'll do, we'll negotiate and we'll set up our structures the same way we did during the Bush administration."

Or I would hear folks talk about things like, "We've made so much progress on things like criminal justice.

The country has changed.

Many of those policies are things that we can count on continuing to move forward."

I recognized that in that moment, people had really misread what was happening, misread Trump, misread power, misread what was going to happen next.

And it's really hard to run and build campaigns in that context.

And I knew that I had to do something different besides just the day in and day out of trying to run campaigns that sometimes win and sometimes lose.

So that was 10 years ago, though.

What have you been doing to respond to that moment since then?

Every day I've been working and fighting and building.

During the Trump years, I led campaigns to force corporations to quit Trump's business council, led campaigns that forced corporations to stop processing fees for white nationalist groups, led one of the largest boycotts in American history, taking on Facebook and big tech.

And along the way, have had wins and losses and continue to try to write this book.

But you gotta, in some ways, step back.

It's really hard to run the campaigns and to do the sort of thinking about how to bring all of these stories together in ways that are going to be useful for people and are going to help people not just have the context and the analysis that they need, but are going to help people apply it.

And that's what this book really is.

This book is not just a set of stories and not just a set of principles, but it's a guide.

The first thing you say that people are confused about the difference between presence and power is that they're not the same thing.

isn't about how many people we mobilize to take action.

It's about who we mobilize and what actions they take and whether those actions create the kind of leverage necessary to force change.

So say a little bit more about that.

And I think I need to say specifically, you're talking about people on the left, because I think part of your analysis is people on the right are not confused.

- I don't think people on the right are confused the way we are.

I think there's a incentive structure in society around retweets, shout outs from the stage, visibility, getting your story on the front page of the paper.

Presence is not bad.

But we mistake presence for power.

We can think something has happened that hasn't actually happened.

We can confuse a black president for thinking that we are post-racial.

We can think that a black celebrity who announces that she's pregnant on the internet stops means that America is as comfortable with monetizing and celebrating black culture as they are with black people.

And those two things are different.

Power is the ability to change the rules.

It's the written rules of policy, the unwritten rules of culture.

And when we mistake presence for power, it's one of those fundamental things that sort of traps us into celebrating things that are not actually wins.

Celebrating a bunch of people showing up to a protest, but not actually getting to a place where we've made change.

Like an example being what?

The Women's March?

Yeah, an example is a lot of our marches.

And so, you know, the thing about a lot of our marches is that they are steps sometimes on the road.

They are about getting people together, sometimes getting people socialized.

But over this current period, we're going to have to direct our marches to places where we actually build leverage, continuing to show up at state capitals or Capitol Hill, where it's almost like choreography.

Those were technologies and tools that worked during a different era.

But if we are not placing the right energy and the right focus on corporations, on the forces that are enabling what is happening in our society, I think what ends up happening is that we don't build the necessary leverage to force something different to happen.

We force sort of a choreography of the left is outraged, we march in a certain place, the march is over, everything gets cleaned up, people go home, and nothing actually gets forced.

No one is nervous about disappointing us.

The other thing that has happened is that our opponents have changed their tactics because nothing is static.

And so what has really happened is on the right is that they have made their engagement almost like the spectators are on the field in a new way.

You go to the gym and people are turning on Fox News or conservative TV in the gym.

You go out in the streets and people are wearing their red caps.

They're wearing their jerseys.

It's almost like a lifestyle.

And I hear a lot of people on the left say things like when we win.

When we win, all these things will happen.

And you hear folks on the right never talk about when they win.

And it's sort of like if you follow Marvel or you watch, you know, any of like an action movie, it's hard to be in a battle with someone that never thinks the war is going to end and you think the war is going to end.

The right is on the field every day.

And we have to think very differently.

So yes, our marches are not necessarily a bad thing, but they are presence and they are just presence alone.

And unless we actually force that energy to the places that we can build leverage to force those in power to be nervous about disappointing us, then we're not going to actually move that energy of people showing up into something different.

As an example of what you say, sort of turning belief into action or sort of turning narrative into action.

After the murder of Trayvon Martin, which was just a traumatic and seminal event in the lives of many people, Trayvon Martin, who went out to the store to get some snacks for his little brother and was shot by a vigilante on his way home.

You said instead of focusing only on the shooter or prosecution, you trace the issue to ALEC, a powerful network that brings corporations and state lawmakers together to kind of write and promote legislation, legislation that's already drafted, you sort of hand it to your preferred legislators and they can sort of move it through the legislative process.

And you wanted to focus on stand your ground laws.

So how did you make the sort of the pivot from people are outraged about this thing, they understand what that thing is, to moving to a strategy around something that they may not even know exists?

Yeah, and this attention economy, it's something that I talk about is respond, build, pivot and scale.

Responding to moments that exist in the world, helping people understand what's at stake.

And so in that moment, of course, we fought for justice for Trayvon and we called on the Department of Justice and we tried to get folks involved.

But we recognize that if you're just fighting these individual moments and not raising the floor on what's acceptable and pushing up the ceiling on what's possible, you're almost playing whack-a-mole.

So we wanted to both fight for justice for Trayvon and also deal with the fact that we were living in a society where there would continue to be more Trayvons.

And so we looked at how the Stand Your Ground policy got in place.

And it came in place through the American Legislative Exchange Council, which at the time, most of its money came from the biggest corporations in the country, corporations that came to black communities and said, buy our products or use our services.

And we began communicating with them behind the scenes, really helping them understand what was at stake.

And we built enough of a campaign by understanding what they would say back to us, that by the time we went public, we were able to force over a hundred corporations to divest from ALEC, forcing a different conversation about the role that those corporations were playing on these racial justice issues, not letting them hide behind the other reasons they may have been part of ALEC.

And that also opened up a different narrative story that allowed us to go into Hollywood and have a conversation about representation in the media and crime TV shows.

My goal sort of in all of this is how do you make these issues as salient to as many people as possible?

How do you help tell a full story to people about why things are happening the way they are?

And how do you help people understand not just who's behind it, but who's enabling it?

You have all kinds of nuggets in this book.

I mean, too many to name, but one of the ones that stood out to me is name the villain.

If you don't tell people whom to blame, they are going to blame you.

Say more about that.

I mean, every year, sort of during the Biden years, I would talk to the folks at the domestic policy shop and I would say things like, "You've got to be really clear with us during these speeches around why we haven't gotten the George Floyd Act, why we haven't gotten the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, why some of these other things that we need, that folks voted for are not happening.

We've got to name the corporations, the police unions.

We've got to name the forces that are sort of standing in the way on the other side.

People have to understand that story and understand the pain.

And I would often get pushback.

Well, that's not really the way we like to do things.

But on the other side, Trump is constantly naming a villain.

And he's naming, you know, in his own way, he's naming, you know, trans kids.

He's naming black people and women's equality and immigrants and all of these folks.

He's naming and he's telling a story that has a hero and a villain.

And on our side, we're talking about Republicans versus Democrats in the right versus the left and not being clear and specific with people.

We have to tell stories that make sense, help people understand what's in the way of change.

And then we also have to run campaigns to take those forces on, give people real things to do.

That's part of what actually has to change if we're really serious about winning victories that matter and being in a position to enforce them and make them stick.

One of the central arguments of the Democratic Socialists movement in the United States is that it's money.

It's basically corporate money that both parties are fueled and funded by the same people.

You know, to your point, you say, OK, well, so the Democrats get one third of the pot and the Republicans get two third.

But the Democrats are happy with that one third.

And the real issue is that they're still funded by all the same.

It's really the money.

Do you think that's true?

I think a piece of that is true.

And when I talk about it in the profiteering section, I think profiteering is about money.

But profiteering is also about a different type of hierarchy.

I think of Stephen Miller, who works for Trump, as a profiteer.

And I don't think Stephen Miller is in it for the money the way that Elon Musk is in it for the money.

I think Stephen Miller wants his kids to have access to certain type of opportunities and not many other kids.

I think he wants it to be a hierarchy of how men are treated in society versus women.

And I think that there are many folks that we are battling that are in the sort of profit are profiteers, but operate from a hierarchy perspective.

If I think if we only see it as money, then we say things like, you know, those working class white people are voting against their interest, and not like fully thinking about well, maybe their interests are a multitude of things.

And so racial and gender hierarchy and sort of the ways in which society is structured so some people get the benefits and the rewards and other people don't is also part of profiteering.

So yes, it is about the money.

But I think if we only think about it as money, then we miss so much of how this country was built and formed, how its laws developed, and how the money was made in the first place.

So before I let you go, you still seem like a happy warrior.

I mean, if you really take this book on its whole, this is actually a pretty damning testimony.

That the left has invested a great deal of money, time, and energy in sort of pointless strategies, however worthy the goal from their perspective.

And I'm just wondering, as a person who's been at this for 20 years, how are you sitting with this?

And how is it that you still seem to be so optimistic?

I am optimistic.

I believe in change and I do this work because I believe in the possibility of change.

The last, the conclusion, the last chapter, the end of the book is about backlash and hope.

That's how I think about it.

And backlash only happens when you've won some things.

The backlash is to your wins.

And it's when your opponents develop forces, they get better at predicting what you're doing next and they disrupt your wins.

But you also have to recognize that we've won some things.

We've pushed things forward.

Things are different.

My life and the life I get to live and the life that so many people get to live is fundamentally different than the life of the generations before us.

But I also don't wanna be Pollyanna-ish.

I don't wanna just talk about these possibilities in flowery ways.

I want to really be clear that we are losing and it doesn't have to be that way.

And part of why we are losing is because we want things to be true that simply aren't.

We want them to be true about our opponents, they want them to be true about ourselves, we want them to be true about the corporations and the brands that we give our money to.

And if we can get more honest about all of those things, then we can make better decisions about the path forward.

And this is my both invitation, and it's gonna be my work to help us disrupt magical thinking and to, you know, in some ways, not just mistake presence for power, but actually translate presence into power.

- Rashad Robinson, thank you so much.

- Thank you.