Full Transcript for Episode 6: You Can't Evict an Idea

Brooke Lehman: The legacy of Occupy is really a culture shift. It wasn't a structural shift, but I think culture shifts make room for structural shifts. That’s Brooke Lehman, the anarchist activist and Lehman heir. Brooke Lehman: In that brief period of time, lots of things become possible that weren't possible. And then the gravity returns, the movements die back, but things have shifted. And then other organizations that are more capable of creating structural change can come in and move the needle in different ways. If you imagine a big gust of wind hitting a dandelion and the seeds being dispersed across a field – that’s what happened to Occupy. Activists carried their specific projects or ideas forward in new ways. Some were more radical, like occupiers who shut down some West Coast shipping ports to disrupt the commercial supply chain. Other Occupiers tried making structural changes through the more usual channels: crafting policy, lobbying, or running candidates. And while Occupy Wall Street never had demands, many of these offshoots did. I want to zoom in on some of them to illustrate how occupy’s principles of mutual aid, direct action, and inclusivity were sharpened and put into practice as our occupiers moved through the world after the eviction. Astra Taylor: Those moments of uprising are really important because they bring people into the fold. They energize people, they motivate people to come and kind of dream together. But then you have to do the hard work of, like, sustaining that and turning that into political strategy. Remember Astra Taylor? She was the filmmaker and writer who was certain that occupiers were going to get beat up and kicked out of the park the very first night. When they didn’t, she jumped into the action, herself. Astra Taylor: This was the second or third day of Occupy – somebody was standing in a corner of the park and shouting like a carnival barker, ‘Step right up and write down what you're worth to the 1%.’ So people were just stepping up and writing down their debts. And I had a lot, I felt this resistance in my chest to the idea of putting down the number. But Astra did write down how much she owed and saw that a lot of her peers were in even deeper debt. Together, they started questioning the conventional wisdom that being broke only happens to people who don’t take quote “personal responsibility” for their finances. Astra Taylor: Are we all just idiots who made mistakes or is there something wrong with this system that's driving us into debt for the necessities of life? Why do we have to take on debt to get an education? Or if we get cancer, we need to go to the doctor or just, you know, to put food on the table because we've lost our job because of the economic meltdown. You know, something's wrong here. Astra was recruited into a working group focused on debt. And together, they realized something. Astra Taylor: The vast majority of us who had come to the encampment were indebted, and you cannot separate the existence of a handful of billionaires from the existence of hundreds of millions of debtors. These are twin phenomenon. They started having what they called Debtors Assemblies, asking people to tell their stories. Their work evolved into a campaign called Strike Debt, which sought to erase medical debt for people who were underwater. Astra Taylor: So we, as part of Strike Debt, thought, well, what if we do something where we bail out the people, where we demonstrate, on a small scale, what it is that the government should have done. They came up with a brilliant and creative plan. Astra Taylor: So just as mortgages are bought and sold and bundled and treated as assets, as commodities for people to profit from, our other debts are as well, our medical debts, our student loans, our credit card bills, our utility bills, all of these things are sold by debt collectors on shady secondary markets. And so we basically figured out how to intervene in that market. Kind of like debt collectors except in order to buy the debts and erase them. Portfolios of people's overdue debts, from medical bills to phone bills, are bundled and sold. So, when you're finally paying that overdue medical bill, the money isn't going to the hospital, it's going to the owner of the debt who bought the debt for a fraction of what you are now paying back. Astra Taylor: We thought, wouldn't it be cool if we raised $50,000 and we were able to buy a million dollars of medical debt And we called this project the Rolling Jubilee. Our project went viral. We ended up raising something like $700,000 and buying and erasing over a period of about a year and a half over $32 million dollars worth of medical debt, payday loans, and other kinds of debts. And we sent these beautiful letters to just thousands and thousands and thousands of strangers saying, ‘This is a no strings attached gift. The Rolling Jubilee and Occupy Wall Street are setting you free of this debt as an act of, uh, mutual aid.’ And we called it a people's bailout. Imagine getting a letter like that. The medical bills you thought would bankrupt you, that kept you up at night, were suddenly gone. Astra Taylor: We had the most heartbreaking inbox of all time. We had people saying that they were contemplating suicide because of their debts. It was a real education of just the depth of the crisis, and how deeply devastating that debt is to people, not just their economic lives, but their emotional lives. They knew, of course, that this one project wasn't a solution to a systemic issue. There were billions of dollars of debt being bought and sold. But it was a public education, showing people that their debts were treated as assets and that it was possible to do things differently if there was political will. Astra Taylor: Why should the hospital sell off your debt for 3 cents on the dollar to a debt collector, to a predatory debt collector, but not to you? Their work led to other efforts, including a

student debt strike that pushed student debt relief onto the national political agenda. Astra Taylor: So just like the government can bail at banks, it can actually cancel federal student loans.​ That one small working group helped launch a national conversation about debt relief. By the end of the Biden administration, federal debt relief initiatives had provided relief to roughly 5.3 million borrowers. Astra Taylor: Those are absolutely direct consequences of Occupy Wall Street. And that was just one way occupiers put the principles of mutual aid and collective action into practice. I want to briefly turn to Marisa Holmes. She lives in Spain now – a move she made last year after realizing she was being investigated by the FBI because of her association with a local anarchist group. In the years after the eviction from Zuccotti Park, Marisa continued participating in Occupy movement actions. Marisa Holmes: I was involved in various offshoots, including Strike Debt and some of Occupy Sandy. Occupy Sandy illustrates mutual aid at work in another powerful way. In 2012, a storm surge from Hurricane Sandy left large parts of New York and New Jersey flooded and without power. Occupy activists organized a network of about 60,000 volunteers to help residents of the hardest hit areas. They provided hot meals, flashlights and other necessities, transportation, and eventually repaired or rebuilt homes. There were no leaders, no center of command, no bureaucracy – just immediate relief. In fact, Occupy Sandy volunteers were so fast, efficient, and numerous that the Department of Homeland Security wrote a glowing report about their efforts. It was proof that horizontalism and mutual aid could be incredibly effective. Marisa Holmes: During Occupy, and after there was this emphasis on mutual aid, which meant, like, self-organizing to meet each other's needs. Certainly a lot of that happened like in Occupy Sandy, and at the neighborhood level through assemblies. But also, you know, projects continue, like setting up like, like neighborhood associations, and cooking food or filling the fridges, or doing coat drives. I mean, it's just what people do when there's a crisis, when they're in distress, like to help one another. I mean, it's really kind of basic, like, if the state isn't going to help and corporations are certainly not going to help, what do you do? You know? Like you have to turn to your neighbors and, like, figure out how to survive. Of course, mutual aid is an old concept and Occupy was the 21st Century version of it: people self-organized through social media platforms, online donation systems, text loops, and shareable spreadsheets. And Occupy brought these skills to thousands of new people. These kinds of mutual aid projects also highlight where our government is failing. Whether a hurricane has flooded your city or you need expensive cancer medication, a functioning society should be able to rely on its government to help – not a GoFundMe or volunteer group, which brings us to another big way some Occupy activists pushed for economic justice. Instead of building alternatives outside the system, they wanted to take control of the system itself. They wanted to elect leaders who would expand the social safety net, challenge corporate power, and promote Occupy’s version of economic populism. Astra Taylor: For me, populism is a good word. I mean, I've done a lot of work on democracy. Populism is not a bad word. It means people being actually involved in politics. Astra explained in the first episode how the 2008 economic crash prompted the right wing Tea Party movement and then eventually inspired the left wing Occupy movement. Astra Taylor: We see that that moment after the financial crisis is the sort of genesis of these two populist strands. The Right had a two and a half year lead on populism because of the Tea Party, and they immediately went toward electoral politics. But Occupy lagged behind. Not only did it start later, but there was a lot of disagreement about whether or not to engage in electoral politics at all. Remember, many of the original Occupy organizers wanted to stay far away from party politics. The general assembly had passed a statement of autonomy declaring that Occupy wasn’t affiliated with any political party and/or candidate. Marisa didn’t even want politicians using the language of Occupy. Marisa Holmes: I don't think any politician can use the 99% without engaging in co-optation. That language comes from people who were engaging in a participatory and directly democratic experiment and one that was very explicitly counter to representative democracy. She doesn’t think the Democratic party, or any kind of political party, can solve the inequalities that capitalism has created. Marisa Holmes: The Democratic party is the establishment. If you're trying to build some kind of anticapitalist resistance or alternative, or if you're just trying to even capture, like, a populist wave, like you don't go through the Democratic party. It just doesn't make sense. Of course, at the time, many occupiers had more faith in the system and the big D Democrats than Marisa did. And those occupiers wanted the establishment Left to take up their cause. Manissa Maharawal: There was a moment of possibility there. There was a conversation about democracy, there was a conversation about economic inequality. Manissa Maharawal was a grad student who was part of the Occupy POC Caucus. She’s now an assistant anthropology professor at American University. She thought the surge of energy in the fall of 2011 presented an exceptional opportunity for the Democratic party. After all, there were Occupy protests in every single state. Manissa Maharawal: It really was a moment that showed the deep, deep, like, need for change. The deep way people were unhappy with the status quo. What if, in that moment, there had been like, oh, okay, yeah, we did bail out the banks. Okay. But now

we're gonna have a bailout of the people. Right? Like, what if that had been the message? And we are going to make housing affordable by having there be, I don't know, rent control across the country. Something big and exciting and maybe scary, instead of like, just the same tired, safe choices that people are presented with. The, like, democratic liberal Left writ large did not capitalize on that. Instead, they squashed the whole thing. There is a coordinated crackdown across the country with a Democratic president and Democratic mayors, and they quashed a movement about inequality. Still, there were plenty of Occupiers who went directly from Zuccotti Park into campaign offices. At first, they had the wind behind them. They were, again, making the impossible suddenly seem possible – like a democratic socialist who might actually win the presidency. Bernie Sanders: We know what our job is, and that is to bring the American people together to create a government that works for us, not the 1%. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders promised to break up the major banks on Wall Street, make billionaires and corporations pay their fair share in taxes, and get healthcare for all. By the time Bernie was running for president in 2016, Occupy energy had already translated to wins for some politicians. Nelini Stamp: Elizabeth Warren won a U.S. Senate race that nobody thought she was gonna win talking about corporate power, and then Bernie was able to run into 2016 with a lot of support from people who are part of Occupy. We created a mandate that you will no longer turn a blind eye to corporate power and corporate wealth and the richest of rich who keep getting richer. But in the presidential election, progressive populism ran up against exactly the kind of establishment thinking that proves Marisa right – Reporter: The Clinton campaign did rig the presidential nominating process by entering into an agreement to control day-to-day operations at the DNC. Both Bernie Sanders, an independent, and Hilary Clinton sought the Democratic Party’s nomination, but the party never gave Sanders a fair shake. The DNC let Hilary Clinton’s campaign essentially call the shots. ​Once Sanders was out of the running, it was down to Clinton or Trump. Clinton was seen as cozy with the Wall Street billionaires. And Trump – well, he was building his own brand of populism. Donald Trump: I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people who cannot defend themselves. I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens just like it was rigged against Bernie Sanders. He never had a chance. Never had a chance. But his supporters will join our movement. Trump's 2016 campaign channeled economic frustration toward immigrants, globalization, and political elites. He argued that American workers were losing out while the establishment ignored their concerns. And so about 12% of people who voted for Bernie in the primary did end up voting

for Trump in the general election. Manissa Maharawal: Democrats handed the Right a whole group of people. There were small towns in the middle of Red America that had little Occupies. I don't know where those people are now or like what they're doing now, but I can guarantee you that probably about half of them are now Trump supporters. Of course, there were plenty of other issues at play, but I think it’s fair to say that, in terms of national electoral politics, the Occupy energy hit a brick wall once Bernie was out of that race. Occupy didn't translate into many political victories at the ballot box. But it did something else: It taught a lot of people how to organize, mobilize, and spread a message online. And they put those skills to use consistently over the next 15 years. Nicole Carty: I look back and I only see success, honestly. It is the kickoff to, like, the sort of movement era that we've been in since 2011. Gloria Steinham / Women’s March: Just this march in Washington today required 1,000 more buses than the entire inauguration. 1,000 more! Astra Taylor: What we have seen since Occupy Wall Street is just an amazing renaissance of demonstrations. I mean, Black Lives Matter. Chants: George Floyd! Say his name! George Floyd! Say his name! George Floyd! Say his name! Speaker: We gather here today, respectfully and peacefully, to remember brother George Floyd! Astra Taylor: the anti-pipeline protests. [Drums, crowd from protest] Astra Taylor: Me too protests. Speaker: You tried to take me out because you thought I was alone. But not today! Astra Taylor: It became part of the American political vocabulary again. Nicole Carty: Like Gen Z was raised in that world, you know, like they looked around and they thought, oh yeah, we have social movements all over the place. And that is really only possible because of Occupy, Dissent generally became a lot less fringe and a lot more mainstream in the wake of Occupy. But the activists who were out in the streets also found themselves in the middle of a manufactured culture war, which became more intense with the election of Trump in 2016 and the COVID pandemic in 2020. Vaccine mandates, public education curricula, police reform, and trans rights became cultural lightning rods. Nelini Stamp: We have to play the economics and the issue and policy wars, and we also have to pay attention to what they're doing culturally because that might not seem important, but in five, 10 years, you see the seeds of that grow.​ After the eviction, Nelini rose in the ranks at the Working Families Party, which focuses on economic justice. She’s now the Strategic Director. Nelini Stamp: Our history is that we worked on bread and butter issues, like the minimum wage raises, like we were the first organization to get paid family leave. It passed statewide in Connecticut. It's Nelini’s job to build coalitions and bring people together under a common cause. Nelini Stamp: I always have a yes and mentality. I understand

people's inside strategy in a way that I didn't back during Occupy Wall Street. Whether it's inside government, inside corporations, I understand some of them, you know, like understanding that there's a spectrum of tactics. Basically, the idea of Occupy as totally autonomous – not working with advocacy groups, elected officials, corporations, or celebrities – felt too limiting to Nelini. She believes that progressives need to cultivate allies wherever they can. Nelini Stamp: We can't leave ceded ground. I feel like during Occupy I was like, oh, poo poo on institutional things, right? Or poo poo on kind of trusting government to do anything for you. And I still don't necessarily trust the government as a whole, but it's not beneath me if we need to do policy work and talk to elected officials, like, it's life. Nelini says building coalitions isn’t the problem now – it’s maintaining them when there are, inevitably, differences of opinion on exactly how to move forward. Nelini Stamp: We can't see it as any tactic that you disagree with is harm. There's a lot of people I disagree with tactically, but I'm not holding them back. Because sometimes that's what gets us fighting – is just people just disagreeing with tactics. And I'm like, it's okay to disagree. Just you do this and you do that and don't get in each other's mother mmm way. That willingness to work with people you 80% agree with has been challenging for leftist groups. Cancel culture and purity politics have disrupted all kinds of progressive groups. Nelini Stamp: And then the purity test. Ooh, this is something I talk about a lot. We need to meet people where they're at. Nelini said she’s had practice meeting people where they’re at in her own family, particularly with one family member who would often come to her full of misinformation. Nelini Stamp: My cousin Eddie, he's a 50-year-old man, Latino, who is targeted for misinformation. Instead of being like, ‘Oh, you're wrong. You're a terrible person!’ I was just like, ‘Hey, can I just explain to you how this is misinformation?’ And he fought it for a really long time until I started to be like ‘here.’ And then he'd be like, ‘oh,’ right. Like, right, it took him a while. Nelini’s love for pop culture has helped her meet people where they’re at. Nelini Stamp: We do this thing called fandom organizing. I organize Real Housewives fans, for example, with a project called Real Housewives of Politics. Bravo is the most watched network of women in the United States between the ages of 18 and 45. It is something that people love and it's not ideologically one way or another. There are fans of the shows who are completely right wing. There's a lot of fans who are just up for debate. So like I have a whole discussion about Real Housewives and then I'm like, ‘Hey, you're gonna vote, right? Okay, cool, cool, cool, cool.’ The Working Families party is doing this for all kinds of fandom groups, including Dungeons and Dragons players, and romantasy readers. They even introduced a democracy themed role playing game at a gaming conference and helped organize Disney fans to boycott Disney/ABC after they pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live. Nelini Stamp: There's all these micro communities that we need to start organizing in because the right wing is there. I mean, Trump went to a sneaker convention and that is a cultural community, sneaker heads. Like a lot of the occupiers we spoke with, Nelini is focused on building a big tent because we need as many people as possible to confront the huge threat we face: A president, an administration, and various actors across the three branches who are turning our flawed democracy into a full-on authoritarian state. The only way to counter that is by working together. We have to build a big tent. And we need to invite people into that tent the way Occupy invited people into Zuccotti Park. We have to listen to people’s stories the way the people’s mic enabled us to listen. And we have to do a better job of not letting in-fighting and infiltration undermine us. It’s easy to feel powerless right now, but Occupy proved that it is possible to move from cynicism to hope. On September 17, 2011, a lot of the people who showed up didn’t really believe they would have any impact at all. That’s certainly how Sandy Nurse felt when she arrived, but then she became an integral part of Occupy’s direct action team because the collective power of the group inspired her so much. And now Sandy is on the New York City Council. It’s a turn she calls – Sandy Nurse: Bizarre and unexpected. After Occupy, Sandy founded a nonprofit composting service staffed by young people of color and then joined the local community board. At some point, she was approached about running for office and agreed to try. She was elected to the New York City Council in 2021. Being a leader in a hierarchical, traditional structure, and being the center of so much attention, has been an adjustment. Sandy Nurse: It's been uncomfortable. You know, I'm a behind the scenes person. I'm not really the talking head. I was never like the best on a bullhorn, you know, like Nelni, great on the bullhorn, on the stage. That’s not me. She hasn’t forgotten the power of direct action. While Sandy avoided arrest the day of Occupy’s Brooklyn Bridge march when 700 other people were arrested, she was arrested last year. Sandy Nurse: First of all, in case anybody hasn’t said it, fuck ICE. Chants: ICE out of New York! ICE out of New York! Sandy, along with dozens of others, had been blocking ICE vehicles from entering or leaving a federal building. ICE agents had been arresting people who were on their way to scheduled immigration court hearings. The response to Trump's immigration crackdown has the DNA of Occupy in it. All over the country, especially as we saw in Minneapolis, people have been protecting their immigrant neighbors in similar ways. Ordinary people are engaging in direct action on a regular basis. They are

disrupting ICE operations, taking up space, making noise. And many of those efforts are happening in a de-centralized way, relying on crowd sourcing and encrypted technology to alert neighborhood networks when border patrol or ICE agents show up. It has often been effective. But it has also come at a steep cost: the lives of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The stakes are incredibly high. People are worried about their safety. Worried about being separated from their children. Many of us are afraid of our own government. And, again, rather than waiting for some kind of savior, people are providing mutual aid for one another. Manissa sees it among residents where she lives now in Washington, D.C. Manissa: At the elementary school, parents have started a walking bus where everyone signs up to walk kids home whose parents are nervous about leaving their houses. And it's a really, like, simple, sweet thing like, ‘We'll pick your kids up and we'll bring them home for you so you don't have to be worried about being out on the street where there's National Guard and ICE.’ There is a lesson in solidarity and inclusivity in that one small act. Manissa: It's a group of parents who are kind of like across the political spectrum, and there's something really beautiful about the simplicity of it that's not about, like, ‘Well what do you think about fascism?’ It's sort of just like, we gotta find a way to make sure that these kids get home. The walking bus is a reminder that it's easiest to find common ground around the simplest things – not ideology – but people’s material needs. If we want to build a big tent movement against facism, it makes sense to start by focusing on these kinds of concrete needs. A person drowning in medical debt needs a way out of that hole. A family whose home has been flooded needs refuge. A child needs to get home from school safely. In some ways, 2026 feels a lot like 2011. Here’s Marisa again: Marisa Holmes: There's a recession, there's a housing crisis, cost of living. And then the lack of, of political leadership and will and the part of Democrats to solve any of these problems. When I was watching a video of the final general assembly on the night of the eviction, it struck me how little has actually changed. Occupier 1: Mic check. We fight. (We fight.) For those who have no voice. (For those who have no voice) For the families that fall apart. (For the families that fall apart.) Because they can't pay their mortgages. (Because they can't pay their mortgages.) Occupier 2: I'm here. (I'm here.) Because my siblings. (Because my siblings.) Can't pay back their student loans. (Can't pay back their student loans.) Occupier 3: I am here. (I am here.) Because. (Because.) My mother. (My mother.) Has to choose between cancer medication. (Has to choose between cancer medication.) And our food. (And our food.) Since that day in 2011, the challenges have multiplied. The world's billionaires are four times richer than they were then. Billionaires, and now the world’s first trillionaire, have an unprecedented amount of influence in elections and in the White House. The president is brazenly profiting off of his office: he repeatedly hosts pay-to-play private events and sells Trump-branded merchandise. For everyone else, healthcare has become even less affordable. Inflation is outpacing wage growth. Many young people are deeply worried about the cost of living and they don’t trust the government to provide solutions. There is plenty of frustration, anger, and sometimes hopelessness to go around. But there is also this feeling – maybe you’ve felt it – like we’re waiting for something to happen. That something will interrupt the trajectory. Maybe it’s the midterm elections. Maybe it’s the MAGA movement collapsing in on itself. Or maybe it’s something that comes from the grassroots. Something like Occupy. Movements are not linear. They zig and zag, die down and then pop back up. Even though Occupy was labeled a failure by mainstream media and largely forgotten about, I don’t think the story of Occupy is over. I think it’s ready for a sequel. In 2011, a non-violent collective action woke up the world. It’s possible that we could do that again. Maybe not with an occupation, but some kind of radical collective action. Marisa Holmes: Ideally there's this kind of iterative process where people integrate things and learn over time. And so it's not a matter of just taking Occupy and putting it in the current moment. That would be a mistake. It wouldn't go anywhere. Whatever it looks like, it needs to be a kind of big tent coalition. And in a lot of ways, Occupy has prepared us to build that kind of coalition. It helped train an army of organizers whose work continues to be guided by the principles of mutual aid, collective power, and direct action. Here’s Nicole Carty, who went on to work in social justice nonprofits after her time at Zuccotti Park. Nicole Carty: So much of the literal infrastructure and human infrastructure of that movement has gone on to support other movements. The networks are still really live. I still know, and, like, have worked with a lot of the people that I met in Occupy. I still see them in movement organizing and nonprofit organizing. And, whatever it may be, the economic populism at the heart of Occupy should be the north star. Manissa Maharawal: We definitely need something. It needs to be exciting. It needs to be joyous. It needs to be powerful. It needs to be widely accessible. It needs to happen across the country. It needs to include red states and blue states. It needs to make people feel like they have a chance at changing things. And those are all things that Occupy did. I don't think it would look like Occupy now. I don't know what it would look like. I wish something like it would happen again. I think the most important legacy of Occupy is that it created a sense of possibility and collective power. We know that a small group of organized people can spark a worldwide movement. We know that a radical action can capture the imagination of our nation. And if it happened once, it can happen again. Marisa Holmes: It's one thing to read about or think about the idea of revolution and it's quite another to have an experience that feels like it. There's no going back from that. Like I can never say, like, it's not possible. It could never happen. I can't be cynical because, like, I know that it can, I know that people can make it happen. Chants: We are the 99%