On Fascism & Violence: Congresswoman Laura Friedman on Radio Abundance

Transcript

0:00 Welcome to Radio Abundance, a podcast by YIMBY Democrats for America. It's time to build again, folks. Fascism never made America great, but when progressives build, that's where you'll find American greatness. Tonight's guest is United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman. She sat down with Radio Abundance two days before the Charlie Kirk assassination to talk about the threats of both fascism and political violence. The result is a truly chilling historical document, untainted by the fervor unleashed since. In this interview recorded in person in Washington, D.C., both Congresswoman Friedman and our host describe their experiences with political violence. Congresswoman Friedman tells us how she finds the courage to keep going in an atmosphere that has already seen the murders of legislators this year, and both the Congresswoman and our host lay out the case for how Trump's administration is pursuing fascist escalations. This interview was recorded in person in Washington, D.C. on September 8, 2025.

1:00 Two days later, Charlie Kirk was murdered, and Donald Trump announced that everyone who had ever called him fascist was, quote, directly responsible for terrorism. You're going to want to listen to this one. That's coming up right now on Radio Abundance. Please welcome your host for the evening, YIMBY Democrats for America Executive Director Steve Boyle. Hello, and welcome to Radio Abundance live from Washington, D.C., and we are here with Congresswoman Laura Friedman. Congresswoman, welcome back to Radio Abundance. Thanks. I can't believe I'm back so soon, but it's a pleasure. I kind of can't either, right? We did the virtual audio podcast. You were one of our early guests. Very recently, we did a live stream to celebrate the Cut Red Tape for Housing Act. If I put all the words in the right order. And now we're sitting down in person. So we are running the gauntlet, and I sort of don't know what's left.

1:51 I feel like it's like become a show. Like, I like it. It's like an every week kind of show. It is becoming a show? Yeah. I told people for several months I didn't actually care about podcasts. They were very confused about what I'm doing. We're building a show. We're building a show. So thank you for kind of being one of the people most getting us there, because that is what we're doing. We're building a show. Here we are. Look, there's a flag. There's a studio. It's really cool. Because we've now seen each other a few times, you know, our mission is to be Democrats for America. We are only five months old. Wow. Amazing. A lot's happened this year, and we're going to talk about that. Not so much in regards to us as to the world writ large. Although there was a big conference here last week. Yes. And that's worth talking about. I mean, there were two. There were two. Yeah. And we will, because there was the Abundance Conference, which was great. It was bipartisan.

2:40 Yep. It was bipartisan, so you get all types. I got to hang out in the lobby with Libs the whole time. It was fantastic, and they did a spectacular job. The day before that, Congressman Jimmy Gomez threw a summit on housing affordability, which I assumed was planned around the conference. It was not. They just found out about each other, and Richie Torres and I appear to be the only people who were at both. But they were both sort of fantastic, genuinely.

3:07 You know, I bring up UNB Democrats being only five months old to mention that, like, we showed up on the scene with a couple of missions, right? Build America. Defeat fascism. Unleash the era of Progressive Abundance, which is to say, be very loud about the fact that abundance is progressive. Like, those were our missions. Right. And some of those seemed a little highfalutin five months ago, and they maybe don't now, right? There is a Build America caucus. That's cool. There is. Sometimes I get flack for abundance being too left-coded right now, right? Which is like a total victory, I think. You know, if you've got to roll back your victories, that's great news. And then there's the whole defeating fascism thing. Now, because we've seen each other a few times, we've already, I think, really well covered how you're building America and why abundance is progressive and why you are progressive and doing abundance.

3:55 So I think we have to talk about defeating fascism today. I agree. Now, Ezra Klein just kind of came out and threw down the gauntlet about, like, and he starts off, I think, by saying we are in the authoritarian consolidation phase. Now, we are not going to talk today about his proposed tactics because this is not the kind of thing you do off the cuff in an instant interview reaction. Like, we need to be thoughtful. But I take what Ezra's written and kind of thrown out, like, just in the last couple days to be about less, hey, do my suggested tactics, and more like, it's time to get some tactics. It is go time. And one of the things I've seen people say is just that if you just write down and say aloud what has already happened this year, say, in the past five months, nine months, however you want to call it, it's less than nine months.

4:43 Well, it's just today with a recent Supreme Court decision that just came down today. Tell us about it. Saying that ICE can racially profile and detain people based on their accent and if they work in manual labor. That that's enough. They don't have to have evidence that somebody's here illegally or that they're undocumented. If they maybe look like a recent immigrant, they can be taken into detention, and it's up to them then to prove otherwise. And that could take days. It could take weeks. It could take months. But they're saying that it's legal, whereas we've never done that before. Every other president and lower court decisions say, no, ICE have to have a real reason, a concrete reason, to take someone into detention, to stop someone who's driving, to maybe, you know, to question them. They have to have a reason.

5:29 Someone maybe has told them something or they have some evidence that the person is here illegally. But the Supreme Court today said, no, just working in manual labor is enough. They can literally stop people who work in manual labor, who have brown skin, and that's enough cause for ICE to detain them. And, of course, let's not look at any of these in isolation, right? So set that to the side here. And now let's talk about the fact that all year they have been detaining people and sending them to foreign concentration camps as well as their new fancy domestic concentration camp without trial. And if you put the chocolate and the peanut butter together, they can pick you up just for being vaguely olive skinned with an accent. And then they can do whatever they want with you, right?

6:16 That's what those two things together are. And the Supreme Court's just given them more license to do that. And what we've seen with a lot of these detentions is that people are separated from their attorneys. Sometimes it takes their attorneys quite a while to be able to locate them. We get people who come to our office who are immediate family members who have no idea if their relative was kidnapped or whether ICE has them.

6:37 And they don't – even minors. We've even had minors who have disappeared into this system who – we have parents who are the children of American citizens where the children can't find the parents and vice versa. But not being able to see your attorney or your attorney to know where you are or your elected representative to know where you are is something that we should all be concerned of because that is the definition of disappearing somebody. And, of course, their argument is like if they're illegal, if they're such and such, they don't get access to these rights. But, of course, that means if you can't prove that you are illegal, then all of us are illegal. And let's be clear, some of these people are not people who just appeared in this country and we don't know who they are. They're being picked up at their own court cases, meaning these are people who are in the system, who are in the process of applying for asylum, having their cases adjudicated.

7:29 We've had judges tell ICE you cannot remove this person only to have them be removed. So these are people who are trying to go through the process legally. These are people who are – some of them are green card holders. And ICE is saying, well, you had a DUI 15 years ago, 20 years ago, so now we're going to deport you. So these are permanent legal residents or people who are here on work visas. We just saw with this Korean battery plant where these were not people who are – let's be clear, they weren't working at a battery plant. This was a huge deal that was done to create American jobs. We didn't have the people who had the expertise to build the plant. It's a highly technical plant. There were also executives from the company here to oversee the building. They had visas.

8:15 Now, some of the visas may have been the wrong kind of visa because they've been waiting for the correct visas, but they were people who were here to build an American – to build a plant for Americans to work in. And they went and they arrested these people. They didn't just detain them. They literally put them into chains. You know, there's no – there's nothing that indicates that any of these people were dangerous. These were executives. These were people building a factory for American workers. And they were humiliated publicly. So these weren't people who snuck into the country. These were people who had paperwork that were given to them by our government. So what we're seeing is an incredible overstep, meant for optics, not meant for public safety.

9:01 In no sense of the word were any of these individuals a danger to the public. In no sense were they people who we didn't know their identities. I mean, these were people who had some paperwork. So what's happening is it's really bad for business in this country. You know, it's bad for other countries who might want to send business here. It's certainly bad for tourism. And we've seen a huge drop in tourism, people wanting to come to the United States to go to theme parks, to go to sporting events. You know, leading up to the Olympics, that should be very concerning to us. And it's not something that's making us safer. I mean, it is a humiliation ritual. And it is spectacle because he's a TV producer and that's the thing he knows about, right? I remember very early in this year, that first batch they sent to Seacott in El Salvador.

9:49 You know, the footage that came out looked like the kind of thing that a year, you know, if you ever did that in America's past, that would be like a news company coming out with a giant expose. No, they, you're a Hollywood producer. They self-produced that video. It was slick. The Geneva Convention against showing prisoners of war, the Trump administration claims that these are basically prisoners of war. That's their motivation, their justification for using the National Guard for many things, many of the things that they're doing. They're saying it's a national emergency that we're being invaded. Well, the Geneva Convention, you know, all of our conventions about warfare prohibit the use of foreign POWs in media. So Kristi Noem standing in front of people whose faces are recognizable is actually something that we're not supposed to do if we're at war, much less at peace. But these are not, there's no evidence that the majority of these people were here posing a threat or were leaders of drug cartels or anything like that.

10:41 We're talking about day laborers, people that are being picked up running taco stands, and don't forget that these are people that came to this country because we've held ourself up as a beacon of freedom around the world. They come here to escape terrible situations in other countries, sometimes oppression over their religion, their sexual orientation. There's a lot of reasons why people come to this country, fleeing the kind of foreign crime that we're afraid, that we're saying that we're trying to prevent here. These are people who were victims of drug cartels who are coming here for asylum. The United States has prided itself for 200 years of being the place that offers so much freedom and opportunity to the world that people want to come here.

11:26 And it seems like this administration is trying to say, no, no, we're going to be just as awful and oppressive as the places you're fleeing from, so don't come. And that's not the kind of country that we want to be. We want to be that beacon of hope for the world. And yet this administration seems hell-bent on making us into the kind of place that people flee. And that's really, really awful and frightening. Many of us, myself included, are the children of immigrants. My husband is an immigrant. I don't want to be a country where immigrants are saying, oh, yeah, you don't want to go to the United States. It's an awful place. It's a place where just people, they take people who are fleeing oppression and literally put them in chains and then show photos of them to the population to try to humiliate us.

12:13 We will talk a lot about the language of invasion because I think that's a lot of their electoral ballgame and I'd like to ask you about it. But while we're on the topic of, like, prisoners of war, enemy combatants, I'd be remiss if I did not mention, you know, the other day, right, somebody said to J.D. Vance on Twitter, hey, if you kill these cartel members, those are civilians. It's a war crime. And J.D. responded, I don't give a shit. Here's the thing. If J.D. Vance wanted to have a discussion about militarized non-state actors, he knows all those words. Most of my lifetime, we have been fighting a war on terror. If you wonder if cartels are fit in the legal category of a foreign military, civilians, or a terrorist organization like La Qaeda, I can get you 20 books from each opinion off my bookshelf.

12:59 That is a legal debate. He didn't have legal debate. He said, I don't give a shit because he doesn't give a shit.

13:08 They just think they can do whatever they want to whoever they want.

13:13 You haven't responded, so we'll go to invasion because you don't have to. On the invasion front, I just wonder, if their logic is that people in this country they don't like are foreign invaders, if we win the midterms and they think that victory comes from foreign invaders, are they going to seat us? Well, look, they clearly are setting the groundwork once again to claim in advance that an election was stolen. This has been their rhetoric going back to Trump's last loss. We know that Trump is deeply unpopular. Every poll says it. Polls of Americans say he's unpopular. So they need to find a way to cheat. And if their way of cheating is to lay the groundwork now to say that there's thousands of undocumented immigrants who are voting, there's certainly a scenario where they throw out any election result that they don't like.

14:06 And, you know, the evidence of widespread election fraud, there's no evidence of any widespread election fraud that would tilt any election. You know, one person here, one person there. By the way, most of those people voting mistakenly, people who, for instance, were felons in other states who cast a ballot not realizing that some states don't allow that. But the idea that someone who's immigrating to work in that taco stand would put their status and their freedom on the line to vote in an election is completely uncredible.

14:40 It just doesn't happen. And so, you know, if someone's going to throw out an election, they certainly need to be proof. Trump asserted that last time after asking a state representative in Georgia to find him more votes. So if there's any evidence of cheating, it's Donald Trump himself. So there's some scary things. But, you know, to go back to that, the killing of the 11 individuals on a boat coming from Central America, you know, that is something that's really terrifying. And there's evidence, you know, I'm certainly only reading about this the way that everybody else is in the media. But there's evidence that people told Trump, like, hey, that's, you know, you don't just blow up boats. And he ordered the Pentagon to do this. Now, in the past, people in the Pentagon would have said, listen, you know, Mr. President, respectfully, you can't do that.

15:28 You can't just have a killing of a random boat. Even if we have evidence that there's drugs being smuggled, we can easily, you know, we see the boat. We're the U.S. military. We can intercept that boat. It's not like they're carrying a nuclear bomb, right? Even if what they're thinking is happening is true, which we don't have any evidence of. But even if that was true, you can pick them up and then you put someone up for trial. There's no one left at the Pentagon to say no, because Trump and his administration have fired all of the sort of nonpartisan actors at most of these national agencies, whether it's the Pentagon or the Justice Department. They have fired the people who were political party neutral, who have been the longtime career leaders in these different agencies, and replaced them with ideologues loyal only to Donald Trump.

16:16 That's how fascist governments operate. And, you know, that in and of itself should be something that chills all of us, because if he is trying to, let's say, steal an election, there's no one to say no anymore. And we see a Supreme Court now that he's stacked that is overturning numerous lower court decisions, court decisions that are coming from conservative judges, Trump-appointed judges, Bush-appointed judges, judges that run the political gamut, but that are consistent in saying that this administration has overstepped the Constitution. And we've seen some higher court decisions from the Supreme Court back them up, but we've seen far too many that, without explanation, will say things like, oh, no, we think racial profiling is fine, without really commenting on why that is. So it is, it's a really scary time.

17:01 And the solution to this is winning the midterms. The Democrats have got to win the midterms, because we need to have checks and balances against what is clearly a rogue administration. Not just a rogue administration, but one that is unpopular with the American public. One that's not delivering on the promises that they made to people who said, yeah, I don't agree with you on all these other issues, but I can't afford my rent. So I'm going to vote for you, maybe something will change. They're not delivering on any of those promises. And so they are terrified they're going to lose the election. So they're trying to set up the public opinion to say that there is going to be widespread cheating. They're certainly trying to stack the races next year by doing unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting across the country. They're doing whatever they can to rig and cheat so that they can win.

17:50 And we can't let that happen. Yeah. So we've discussed both attempting to rig the actual midterms and to lay the groundwork to deny them later, right? And you were bringing up a second ago, you know, first of all, we know the invader, we know all that's bullshit. And then you kind of mentioned the, like, you know, four cases of somebody accidentally committing voter fraud and also they're all Republicans. Like, we don't even have to indulge that. It is obviously a lie. When they come out and say that the reason Trump was at the Epstein child rape parties was because he was an informant, they're not saying that because they think you'll believe it. They're saying that because they don't think it matters whether or not you believe it, right? So it is just bullshit. I do think, of course, like, we do have to win the midterms because otherwise this is moot. Right. But 2020, the 2020 election certainly taught me that there are two elections.

18:38 There's when we vote and there's when they're sworn in. And I'm a little worried about the double elections. But let's stay on the first one first. Yeah. Because it is interesting. We are, we know each other because of abundance. Yeah. And we want to build stuff. Yeah. And it is worth reminding, you know, I think, you know, some of this is about being like, hey, Democrats, when Republicans try to deregulate poisoning the water supply, that's bad. But when we want to deregulate building apartments for people, that's good. And like, I think I always assumed when we finally did win that debate with Democrats, Republicans would be there waiting for us to let us build things. And they are not. They have flipped. They are now making it as hard as possible to build things. Donald Trump is about as nimby and scarcity-minded as you can get. I would love to talk more about that. But I'm not in Congress.

19:24 So why don't you talk more about it? Yeah. It's interesting. You know, Republicans went along with Biden's infrastructure bill because he, in the bill, a lot of the projects were going into Republican states. And they want the kind of clean energy, for instance, that everybody wants, which is cheaper and cleaner and job providing. And so they were very happy about that. But this, unfortunately, the Republicans in Congress will do what Donald Trump tells them, and even if it means denying jobs in their own states. And that's what's happening with him canceling tax credits for clean energy across the country. You know, this was tax credits that were going to spur private industry, American companies, to build new generation of solar and wind, primarily, and hydrogen and some other energy sources.

20:14 And Republicans were all for that when it meant money into their district. But as soon as Donald Trump said windmills kill whales or whatever crazy thing he said, they're like, oh, yeah, windmills kill whales. We're going to stop with all of that. And they know it's wrong. They know it's going to hurt their states. They certainly know it's going to hurt their taxpayers, their rate payers. But because Donald Trump wants to just focus on yesterday's fossil fuels, they're willing to throw their own people under the bus. And that's awful because it's terrible for the planet, and it's terrible for rate payers. Because once that solar and wind is installed, it's much cheaper than fossil fuels, which are volatile in terms of pricing because they're a commodity. And any commodity means that if there is a dip or if there's demand from overseas, as we saw a few years ago with natural gas, the prices spike.

21:00 Whereas with wind and solar, once you build it, it's extremely inexpensive. And even Elon Musk, who's been not a friend of the Democrats, has been posting nonstop about how crazy it is that we're not doubling down on solar at a time when China is eating our lunch. They've built more solar in the last couple of years than we've built ever in America. So other countries see the wisdom of investing in renewables, and we're not. We're just stuck back in the 20th century. We're stuck in the 19th century. And that means more smog, more pollution. It means depleting a natural resource when we could have renewable, meaning it goes on forever, energy that will be much, much cheaper for rate payers. So Trump's policies are driving up energy costs. They're driving up energy costs, and they're hurting American companies that were poised to invest their dollars in standing up new energy generation.

21:51 Driving up energy costs and meaning we're going to have less energy, which feels important for all those wars the new Department of War is going to stumble ass-backwards into. I mean, if they were renaming it the Department of Burritos, we wouldn't be confused about whether they were going to make burritos. Yeah, look, oil has put money into countries that haven't always been great friends and allies of the United States. If we make our energy here in the U.S., it's good for our security, and the energy that we can make plentifully are renewable energies. We've got the land. We've got the sky. We've got the wind. These are things that, in conjunction with each other, along with a few other hard energy sources, can wean us off of imported sources of energy, and that's good for national security. Now, how do you think all those tariffs are going to affect housing prices?

22:38 Tariffs are definitely making the prices of everything go up. They're not driving down any prices. I have a city, Glendale, that had to go into open session. They're building a new energy plant. They're building a new natural gas plant, but it has a very large storage component. And because the battery comes from China, Customs was asking the city for millions and millions of dollars in fees to get that out. Those are costs that are going to be passed directly to rate payers, myself included, in my city. That's because of a tariff. So that's just one example. I just did a press conference with one of our school boards, a member of the Burbank School Board. The Burbank School Board is trying to fix leaky roofs for their aging public schools. So kids going to school where the roof is leaking, you know, it's dangerous for kids.

23:27 You can have mold. You know, we want to keep our schools safe for our kids, right? Well, guess what? That supply, the roofing supply, is being tariffs, being tariffed. This is materials that are not easy to source in this country right now. And so because of the tariffs, again, they're not able to fix all the schools. They can only fix now a portion of the schools. So that's hurting our kids. So these are costs that are being passed along. I've got, you know, in Los Angeles, we've got thousands of people that are trying to rebuild their houses after the devastating fires that we saw. And we're seeing those building costs skyrocket because wood comes from Canada. Many of the supplies come from overseas. Drywall comes from overseas. And they can't wait a few more years for that supply to become American. They need to rebuild now.

24:12 So we're punishing those fire victims all over again by driving up the costs for them to rebuild. And that's what Trump's nonsensical policies are leading to. It does feel like historians will be very confused that the 2024 election was fought over affordability, doesn't it? You know, you talked for a second about Republicans falling in line behind Trump. We have a mutual friend who I love who made this point. And I asked, oh, do you think that's just electoral concerns or that some of them might be actually genuinely a little scared for themselves, for their families? Not necessarily because of the administration, but maybe fans of the administration, maybe people with some tacit permission to intimidate them. And he said, no, no, I think it's just electoral. And I felt a little foolish. Was I foolish?

24:58 You can say so, but I'm curious. Well, look, I don't know. But we know that when judges hand down decisions that are counter to Trump and his administration, we know that they're doxed. We know that they're doxed so much and threatened so much, like physically threatened, that they have to have security. And I know that my colleagues have also been physically threatened, many of them, for being the resistance. And so we live in an age, unfortunately, where the rhetoric can get really out of hand. And Trump and Elon Musk and Stephen Miller think nothing of calling Democrats traitors and radical extremists and telling people that we, being Democrats, representing a large portion of the American population, are un-American and that we are traitors.

25:48 There are people who are going to hear that and take that to the next level. And so Republicans, I know, are getting the same kind of threats when they vote against their party, that they have constituents who know where they live and who threaten them. And I have heard this from people. So it happens to Democrats and it happens to Republicans. And it is completely unacceptable. And by the way, these kinds of physical threats are unacceptable. Whatever political party or people who subscribe to whatever political belief they might have, it's unacceptable, period. So, yes, I do think people are being threatened. I know that my colleagues are being threatened. And it's something that, you know, we need to take seriously. And members of Congress, we're out in the public all the time.

26:34 You know, we don't walk around with bodyguards. And it can be very intimidating and scary when you have someone screaming in your face, someone. I have people who troll me online who know where I live and talk about my house. So that's, you know, that can be very intimidating for people. But I'm not going to be intimidated by it. I'm not going to stop. There's way too much at stake. And I would expect everybody, no matter what side of the aisle you're on, to vote in the best interests of the American public, not to bow down to, you know, to threats. And I do think that there are members of Congress who have quit because it became too much for them. And, you know, that's, it's wrong. And I don't think that we should normalize that or say, hey, it's just the way that things are. It's not the way things are. Again, it's how the kind of countries that people flee to the United States from, it's how those countries operate.

27:22 And we can't get to that place. You know, we saw a couple of Democratic members of a legislature murdered, murdered because of their beliefs, but murdered because they were Democrats a few months ago. It sort of slipped out of the news cycle. But we can't normalize that or say that that's okay.

27:39 How do you find the courage to do it? And so I, like, I am a survivor of terrorism. I have, this shit happens. I have seen, I, and the story I would always tell was that I walked out of the London Underground that day with like a little bit of blood on my face, having seen people die. This summer I got to go back for the 20th anniversary. I brought my mother and we sat down with a guy I hadn't seen in a while who saw me on that day. I asked him to tell the story instead of me. And he said, Steve, your face was covered in blood and you look like you'd fallen down a chimney. This shit happens. You just mentioned we have seen it happen to Democrats this year and the administration did not give a shit. They celebrated it. They celebrated Nancy Pelosi's husband getting almost murdered in his home by a political extremist. I mean, they tried to gaslight Nancy Pelosi and her husband.

28:27 They made up all kinds of stories, tried to blame them and blame the victim rather than just condemn the violence. So, you know, we need Trump and his administration to say this is wrong no matter when it happens. And we certainly need them to stop demonizing the American public. Yeah. I mean, look, you weren't there the last January 6th. You might be there the next one. You don't, as you said, have a Praetorian Guard. And maybe that's a good thing. How do you find the metal to put? Well, look, I'm proud every day that I get to come to work. It's the biggest honor of my life to be doing this job. And by the way, I believe that the vast majority of Americans, Republicans and Democrats, are good people. You know, I have Republicans who I know, they are not bad people.

29:13 They don't believe in fascism. We have different political views. But at the end of the day, we're all Americans. And when we talk to each other face to face, we can find a lot more common ground than differences. A lot of the amplification that we've seen is coming from social media, from bots, from the selective showcasing of media that the Internet does, and, you know, the news, trying to get reactions. Look, when they show nice, happy stories, people don't watch. When they show things that makes people's blood pressure go up, that's what, you know, that's what gets eyeballs. So unfortunately, we have a consumption model of media and news that feeds into polarization. And I think it behooves all of us to try to resist that, to seek out media that is more moderated, that's more nuanced, to listen to each other and talk to each other, and to stop demonizing each other.

30:11 And I hate to see it, I try, look, I may demonize Donald Trump and many people in his administration, but I don't extend that same vitriol to the public, because people are seeing different things than I'm seeing. And I recognize that. It's much better to try to reach out and try to understand their feelings and their concerns and to express mine and to have that conversation. We're not going to win as Democrats if we're not willing to do that. To extend some grace to people who have different political beliefs than us, they're not necessarily all, they're not fascists. You know, they're seeing things differently. They're seeing media maybe that's skewed. You know, they see Los Angeles, for instance, where I'm from, and all they see is a crime-infested hellhole.

30:57 That's not Los Angeles. I'm there all the time. It's a wonderful place where people enjoy living for a variety of reasons. And yeah, we've got, you know, bad things and good things like every major city, like every place in the country. But it's certainly not what's being presented. I'd love to take people in the heartland to my Los Angeles and show them my L.A. I think that it would change their hearts and their minds. And I'm certainly always happy to go to their America, too. That's how we get past this. And I think we need to be willing to do that. But it does start at the top. And we need to make sure that, you know, this administration, you know, if they're going to demonize, like, a large portion of the country, I'm going to call that out. Because it's not right for Stephen Miller to say that Democrats are treasonous.

31:43 So this has all been very terrifying. And almost like a therapist, I see my job as being to get people to say it out loud. But I've been sort of nudging a little bit through this conversation. I want to take a big old step back and see, like, what on these threads. And it can be good stuff, bad stuff. But, like, what is on your mind? What is top of mind? What do you think about? What haven't I asked you? Like, that you are – it could be on topic or not on topic, right? But, like, so is yours. Well, I am terrified by the direction that this administration is taking this country. I do think that we're slipping not just into fascism from Donald Trump, but to oligarchy with the – They tend to go hand in hand, don't they? Yeah, the ultra-rich getting richer and richer and having many more tentacles into government. We're not seeing that separation between the oligarchs and the government.

32:32 We see Donald Trump pardoning his donors who have been, you know, convicted of crimes and criminally prosecuting people that he perceives as his enemy, weaponizing the Department of Justice, weaponizing the National Guard, threatening to invade Chicago because he doesn't like the governor of Illinois. You know, this is something that's wrong, and it should be decried by Democrats and Republicans. You know, we can have our differences in a lot of things, but that shouldn't be open to debate, that Donald Trump shouldn't be profiting off of being president in the way that he is. He shouldn't be enriching his donors and his friends at the expense of ordinary Americans. He should be a president for all Americans, and he's not. And I think that, you know, I think that I would love to be able to find more common ground with, you know, with America over this because it's going to have to be something that we all take control of better.

33:28 But I will say at the end of the day, I think that if we are successful in sort of beating back the worst impulses of this administration, I think we can rebuild a better America, one that has stronger checks and balances against exactly what's happening now. And by the way, the founding fathers were extremely wise, and they wrote a constitution to prevent kings. And Donald Trump is testing that and pushing at that every way that he can. But I have never seen how wise those founding fathers were until this administration. And I think that given that there are still places where it's not working, I think after this administration is gone, we have the ability to build a stronger government, to build one that has more checks and balances, and one that focuses more on ordinary people who are suffering right now with a lack of affordability, with a lack of housing, with a lack of access to health care.

34:23 You know, I would love for this to be the way that we can have nationalized health care at the end of this, fix our health care system, to where everybody can go to the doctor without worrying about being bankrupt. You know, we still have huge systemic gaps in the way that health care is delivered in this country. You know, as awful as it is that Donald Trump and the Republican Party are taking health care away from millions of Americans, at the end of this, we can use that crisis as a way to ensure that no one's ever denied health care again at the end of the day. You know, as much as they're cutting money that's going to housing and homelessness, at the end, maybe through abundance and YIMBY, we can come to a place where we have created an environment where everybody can have a roof over their heads.

35:09 You know, I think those are the things that we can use this crisis to, you know, to, you know, we can build back better at the end of this, to steal a catchphrase. We're so close, aren't we? And we were, I mean, the Biden years were tricky because I don't know if you remember this, but there was a plague. But towards the end, right, inflation was going down. Manufacturing was going up. Prices were coming. And now, and that's all reversed. Well, we still didn't have an economy that worked for everybody. You know, we still had people that were in stagnant jobs. We saw people slipping into service jobs, you know, lower paying service jobs and not the kind of upward mobility. And certainly the housing crisis is a huge part of that. People unable to purchase a home for a variety of reasons, but mostly because of a constrained supply in the areas where we have job centers.

35:57 And so, you know, we need to focus our attention, you know, as Democrats on rebalancing that, on giving people upward mobility, giving people access to health care, to higher education, to education, to better jobs, and to, you know, to ending the age of oligarchs. You know, I think that that's, you know, that's certainly what I would like to do in my time in Congress. And I think that it's, for Democrats, I think it's a winning message as well. Yeah, it does feel like if we can get past this, we know what we have to do, right? We know how to lower the cost of rent. We know how to increase both green energy and energy, right? And fight climate change and make energy cheaper and make people more capable and bring people together and grow the economy and lift wages and create more manufacturing.

36:47 We know how to do all this. Yep, we do. And we have to get through this somehow with our Constitution intact. Absolutely, because we know that what this administration is doing is the opposite of all of that. They're denying people health care. They're taking money away from homelessness and housing. They're creating winners and losers in terms of siding with, you know, these legacy energy producers and not allowing states, even red states, to create the clean energy. That will bring costs down for consumers. The tariffs that they're doing is hurting mom-and-pop shops and just ordinary people who just want to put food on the table. Everything they're doing is raising prices across the board and making life harder for people. And it's why they are deeply unpopular and why they're trying to rig elections.

37:33 And we just can't let that happen. You know, I like to say that I am very empathetic for people who are skeptical of abundance because it is very hard to wrap your head around something that has not existed in our lifetimes. Housing abundance is not something that has existed certainly in my lifetime and several decades before. But you know what has, an abundance of coffee, an abundance of toys, right? All these things that Trump is tariffing, all these things that Trump is introducing scarcity on, we're about to see what it's like to go to a world where those things felt infinite. And now there's not enough of them and the prices are going up. And then it seems like not that hard a jump to go, is that also what's been happening with housing? So maybe that'll help us. But I do think he's a scarcity king. I think he's very much a nimby king. And what I mean by that is, I mean, his whole worldview is that, like, actually, it's not possible for all of us to rise.

38:25 All of us Americans, all countries and people around the world, actually, there have to be losers. And it is better to consolidate your current privilege, right, and try to lock other people out. And maybe you lose a little, but they lose more. Except, of course, what we always see in nimbyism and scarcity is that the moment you try to build walls around your own privilege, it backfires on you as well as everybody else, right? Whether you want a world where everyone can win or you want a world where some people lose, I think you're going to get what you want either way. And so I think he's a symbol of nimbyism and scarcity and, I mean, sort of a sum of all fears.

39:02 Yeah, it's true. Our health care system has been such a mess for so long that it's very easy to say, hey, the reason that you're not able to access health care or why it's expenses is because these other people who don't deserve it are getting it, right? And you're absolutely right. Economically, it's actually wrong. It's incorrect because if you – there's two ways that this can happen. If there are people who can't afford health care, you can either let them die or you can treat them when they're much sicker in the emergency room, right, which is terrible for hospitals. It economically doesn't work. It's much better – it's a much better model to just keep everybody healthy, right, to give everybody more health care. Keep them healthy so that they don't get sicker. If you say to people, listen, it's really expensive to go to the doctor, only go to the doctor when you're really, really sick, you actually end up costing the system a lot more.

39:55 So what's happened over the years is health care has become not obtainable for many people. Now, the exchanges, the Affordable Care Act was a big step in helping address that, but it still wasn't enough. Some states were able to put subsidies in, like California, to help people, but other states didn't. So you still had, like you said, scarcity. And Donald Trump comes and he says, the reason that health care is expensive for you is because there are people who don't deserve it. All these immigrants who have come in, they don't deserve it. If you just get rid of them, it'll be much cheaper for you. The opposite is actually true, right? So we need to really fix those problems. We need to fix housing so that people don't think, you know, this idea they have now, if you deport all these people, the cost of housing will come down because there's just a bunch of illegal people in apartments.

40:42 It's not true. The apartments that most middle class people get are not the same apartments that an undocumented worker who's working, you know, standing in front of Home Depot is renting, right? So they're spurious connections, but they do push people. So you're absolutely right that when you create this mindset of there's just not enough to go around, people feel that they have to do things that they wouldn't normally do to get what they want. We're the richest country in the world. There's no reason why we can't have affordable food for everyone, a place that everyone can live that they can afford, and health care for everybody. We've just made policy choices to not do that over the years. We need to fix that. So we're coming to a close. We've talked about a lot of scary shit. There's two questions left that I'd like you to close with, right? One is just, you don't have to put all the cards on the table, but what are you doing about it?

41:33 And then another one that I think is a little bigger. So there's a camera right here. Hi, guys. And I would just love you to look into that camera and tell us normies outside of government how we can help and what you need from us. Thanks. Well, in terms of what I'm doing about it, you know, I am working on bills like the Cut Red Tape for Housing Act and many more that are focused at affordability, particularly in the housing world, because that is the biggest crisis in my district and in many places in the country. The rent is so high that it just affects people's ability to save and to have a good quality of life. Young families can't afford to buy a home and create that stability and future equity that so many people relied on over the years.

42:20 So I'm focused a lot on housing, but I'm working with my colleagues on things like border security and immigration reform. And we certainly have to have a way that we can more quickly actually vet people and have immigration policies that make sense, right, to make sure that people who truly are dangerous and shouldn't be in this country aren't let in, but that people who deserve to live here, people who contribute, have a path to citizenship. So we can fix that. We had a bipartisan bill last year. Trump derailed it because he didn't want to fix immigration. It's too good of a platform for him. I want to continue to work on medical access to make sure that people can go to the doctor when they need to, that they can stay healthy. I want to make sure that there's no such thing as medical debt in this country, and people still lose their homes because they get sick.

43:10 Can you believe that in this country? People are scared to go to the doctor. Elderly people don't know what's going to happen to them after they retire. So there are concrete policy proposals on every single one of these that have been vetted, that have been in the House of, that have been in Congress for years. We need to be able to have enough Democrats elected to get them passed. So I'm working with my colleagues right now. Until November, I'm focused on Prop 50, which is the California redistricting proposal, which will balance the scales over what Trump is doing to rig this election all around the country. And it's essential that that passes. Absolutely essential, because if he's going to try to rig the system, states that can should make sure that we have that balance.

44:00 And so we're going to show him that California is standing up. You know, if you poke the bear, we're going to punch back. And that's what California is doing. Give us a couple marching orders. So it sounds like Californians, you need to be mobilizing for Prop 50. Mobilize for Prop 50. It is absolutely essential that we balance the, I think, illegal, but certainly the unfair scheme that he has of trying to redistrict across the country and take away communities' voices and rig the next election because they think they're going to lose. That's number one. Until November, focus on Prop 50. But otherwise, you know, talk to your neighbors and make sure they understand what's happening. Face-to-face discussions. Get off the Internet. Go where people actually are. Go to the churches. Go to the synagogues.

44:45 Go to the grocery stores. Go to the town halls. Go to the school PTA meetings. Get out there in person and develop those relationships. We need to start talking to each other again. Focus on those down-ballot races, those school board races, those city council races. Those are all incredibly important because so much policy comes from the ground up.

45:06 That's the whole ballgame, isn't it? Two things. Say the thing out loud and also, like, meet new people and be friendly and say it to them. Yeah. Give people the grace. You know, listen to them. Hear what they're saying. Meet them where they're at. Don't write people off because they don't agree with you on every single thing. You're not going to get 100% agreement on everything. I don't agree with my husband 100%. I probably don't agree with him 75% of the time. But find the things that you can agree with and start those relationships. We are the Democratic Party. We're a big tent party. Let's extend that tent. When someone comes to us and says, hey, I'm a Republican, but I'm not really sure of this and that, don't say, hey, you voted for this. Say to them, hey, I hear you and I understand the reasons why you voted for Trump. And now, welcome to the Democratic Party.

45:52 We've got to be able to, we've got to extend that grace to people and meet people where they're at. Hold true to our values, certainly, but let's take the time to show the other, show people what our values are and why and listen to them about, you know, about any concerns that they have and about what they need to see also. And if they want to join us, let's bring them in. I should, you've given several great last words, but I, and I am going to give you the last word, but I have to tell you one more thing because it's so important. Sure. The human condition does not want, you do not want to believe fascism is happening and this is happening. Humans are good at normalizing things. We're good at adjusting. We're good at forgetting. It's okay. Right? So, for you to go to a friend of yours and say fascism, like, well, they will, the internet, they don't know what to think.

46:39 It's what somebody else says. If somebody they trust and like on other issues, who's good at sports trivia or good at being friendly, says, no, by the way, this is real. It's freaky. It's a lot to deal with. But the only way you're going to pierce through, I think, that natural instinct to say, no, it's fine, is to make it uncomfortable for people who like and trust you. And you just have to say it out loud and tell people because we got to get going now. Now, last words for you. Sure. You know, I think rather than talk about terms that might seem kind of esoteric to people like fascism, to just talk about America and what our values are and to say, look, America, our values are that we give people the benefit of the doubt and we don't just, we don't execute people without having a trial. In fact, we don't execute people for drug crimes, period.

47:25 You know, that we have been, we have for 200 years have this country that we're incredibly proud of because we do give people rights. We do have due process. Nobody's above anyone else, including the president and his family, that we all matter. And let's talk about how we think the policies of this administration are not respecting those values. I think if we talk about that in those terms and the things that people love about America, that that's a better way of showing people how this administration is not in keeping with the values of this country and certainly not with the values of the founding fathers enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. And so, you know, that's, I think when you talk to people who maybe aren't necessarily on your side, rather than going right to fascism, to just talk about, you know, what you love about America, what I love about America, and what's, and how this administration is not respecting, not respecting, you know, those values and the things that we, you know, hold dear about our country.

48:30 Hard to put it better than that. Congressman Laura Friedman, thank you, as always, for your time and candor and clarity and, I think, bravery. We're honored by the fact that you've hung out with us three times, and we're very honored by what feels like an important conversation today. Well, I love talking to you, and it's really nice to talk about something, you know, I love talking about abundance. I can go on forever about that. Yeah, I'd like to return to that. But it's nice to talk about, you know, kind of the bigger picture, too, and putting this in context. So thank you so much for having me back. Thank you. After we defeat fascism, then I think we'll do some building America. And thank you. Thank you for listening to Radio Abundance. I've been Steve Boyle. This has been Congresswoman Laura Friedman. You've been listening to Radio Abundance, which is the voice of Progressive Abundance. We are here to build America and defeat fascism.

49:18 And on that second one, folks, it's go time. Let's roll. Thanks for being with us.

49:23 Thank you for listening to Radio Abundance. Now it's time for you to join the movement. There's no time to lose. Head to yimbydemocrats.org slash join to sign up and make sure to follow us at radioabundance.substack.com. And thank you.