Friends, you need to watch this.
This is the first of seven Substack Live videos I’m co-hosting with
and the indomitable Trygve Olson, who is now on Substack at .Olson knows about autocrats, he used to train Eastern Europeans on how to throw off the yoke of decades of Soviet oppression and foster freedom and liberty, instill it in the culture. (As Trygve notes in our talk, it’s hard for us Americans raised in a culture of freedom to even comprehend it vanishing, but anyone who’s worked overseas, in dictatorships, or lived under dictators, knows how rare and gentle freedom is.)
Trygve (TRIG-vee) distilled the tactics of freedom fighters into seven key lessons.
This is the first,
“Rule #1: Play the Game You Are in, Not the One You Wish or Want to Play - This means when one side is playing the zero-sum, illiberal game, there is no win-win to be played. You will either win, and democracy survives, or you lose to the autocratic forces.”
What does that mean?
Don’t behave as though things are normal. They’re not.
Contravening the Constitution to abolish agencies written in law, without going to Congress to seek their removal — as the Constitution mandates — is not normal. Going back and forth with foreign countries on import taxes (tariffs) is, that’s *largely* determined by the executive branch of government, is normal (because that power has been granted in law by Congress.)
Among Trygve’s teachings:
Adjusting to the new reality starts with a habit, one act of standing up, like Sen. Thom Tillis refusing to vote in favor of Jan. 6th lawyer Ed Martin to be D.C.’s U.S. prosecutor.
Don’t be swayed by the “illusion of democracy.” Plenty of dictators, like Maduro and Putin, “hold elections.”
The Founding Fathers understood that power is craven and a zero-sum game, which is why they divided it among three branches of government with clear separations of power and checks and balances on each branch.
Have empathy, it is hard for most Americans to even put a name to what we’re seeing, because we have not seen this here before.
Courage is contagious
Pushing past the performance art and mini-scandals of the day requires talking directly with Americans to understand they’re concerns. (Something certain political elites have been notoriously bad at.)
Make sure to subscribe here so you receive notice for our second video in the series, outlining Trygve’s second rule for fighting autocrats.
24sight Programming Notes
Make sure to stop in tomorrow, Wednesday, at Noon ET for a discussion with
author of the Virginia Political Newsletter on Substack for an update on the Virginia races (the primaries are fast approaching, June 17th.)Then stop by Thursday for a special dispatch from 24sight’s
, author of “Hill Pass”, with a readout of all the action in Congress on taxes, the budget and more.On Friday, we’ve got
of All Rise News on to run through what’s happening with the legal challenges to the Trump White House, including the latest on immigrant flights, orders to free student protesters like Rümeysa Öztürk and Mohsen Mahdawi and more.
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