Elizabeth Wilkins: "People are looking for different ideas. The bad version is that an undermining of people's faith in democracy leads to authoritarianism. The good version is that we get together to think about what we need in terms of power the ideas and the people to create a... new common sense -- one that brings us back for the modern era to that marriage of democracy and capitalism, where democracy shapes markets for the public good."show more

I'll be tweeting clips from @PatrioticMills's "How to Beat the Broligarchs" event this morning in this thread as part of my partnership with @SnapStream. Follow along!

@SnapStream Patriotic Millionaires founder Erica Payne: "Here's what happened. Doesn't matter who's in charge. Tax rates for the rich always go down."

@SnapStream Payne highlights a chart showing how labor productivity has become decoupled from wages

Erica Payne on the origins of Patriotic Millionaires: "In 2010, President Obama decided he was gonna cave to Republican demands to extend the Bush tax cuts & that pissed me off. It pissed off 56 million other millionaires who signed a letter that said, 'for the good of the country, raise my taxes.'"

@SnapStream Erica Payne: "If you're running a business, and you're not paying somebody something they can afford to live on, you don't have a business. You have a human exploitation scheme. And we need to all get that straight."

@SnapStream Erica Payne: "This economy should be judged on how well it takes care of people, not on how many billionaires it prints in a calendar day. Every great country starts with a great economy."

@SnapStream Jesse Eisinger: "Then you've got these cabinet officials like Howard Lutnick and these advisers like Steven Witkoff -- Spiro Agnew would be fired for a lack of ambition in this administration."

@SnapStream Jesse Eisinger: "I think that Donald Trump is a direct result of our elite impunity failure and our failure to prosecute white collar crime ... if we had adequate white collar prosecutions in this country, there could not be the phrase 'President Donald Trump'"

@SnapStream Donald Sherman of CREW: "The struggle for democracy will not be won in Washington ... the courts will not save us."

Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center: "This was the first time since the 1800s that the incumbent party lost the White House three times in a row. There is in other words a deep disquiet in the country ... if we ignore the system reform element of what is needed, we will find ourselves running up against the timidity and cowardice of people in power."

@SnapStream Michael Waldman: "It's the progressives, when given a chance, who back off far more often, and we need to hold them to account for their own rhetoric or we're gonna find ourselves having the same conversations in the same ballrooms decade after decade."

@SnapStream Ruth Ben-Ghiat: "It's not about good governance. It's about amassing power, keeping yourself safe, they need to reorganize governance around being able to commit corruption and enrich themselves from office. Those are the principles."

@SnapStream Nancy MacLean of Duke details the throughline that runs all the way from the Confederacy to Trumpism

@SnapStream Ruth Ben-Ghiat: "The speed and scale of what's happening in this country doesn't have a parallel even in the early months of the autocrats we know and do not love today ... this is somebody in partnership with Putin."

@SnapStream Nancy MacLean on the authoritarian attack America is enduring right now: "It ends in economic eugenics."

@SnapStream Nancy MacLean: "They are actually tremendously vulnerable. Remember -- this is a minority. They know the majority doesn't want their world. That is why they must they must leverage every prejudice."

@SnapStream Brooke Harrington: "The anti-DEI stuff is part of this colonial ideology -- some people are innately born to rule others. We're getting the high tech version of that when Elon Musk talks about high T alpha males. That's what he means."

Mass immigration to the West is a concept developed by R.N. Coudenhove-Kalergi in his 1925 book, "Practical Idealism." The original German version, "Praktischer Idealismus," is still in circulation today. I have translated one such copy into English.