Please, We Need a Daily Briefing

My piece in Commonwealth Beacon Magazine

Good morning. I hope you’re all holding up as well as you can be in a democracy under siege. Starting with the post I shared with you earlier this week, I did a more focused and fleshed-out version for CommonWealth Beacon yesterday. It’s linked here, and also pasted below in its entirety. - Joyce

It’s a coup. Plain and simple. Perhaps only the most engaged people understand this right now. The legacy media is failing us as they struggle to identify an assault taking place on multiple fronts at a dizzying pace. But marauders are marauding, stealing our information, abusing our civil servants, and flouting our laws.

We are watching with fear and horror as the world’s richest man, an unelected “special employee” of the government who holds billions of dollars in public contracts, along with a band of young tech bros, moves from agency to agency, connecting private servers to systems that contain the most intimate information about all of us. The regime is carrying out an unauthorized dismantling of the congressionally-established US Agency for International Development. The list goes on.

As this coup unfolds, the most crucial thing people need to combat it is reliable, centralized information.

Consider this an appeal to those of our elected leaders, specifically those in Congress, who recognize these events for what they are. We need you to develop a communications strategy with the utmost urgency. I know you are hearing the clamoring of thousands of sad, angry, and anxious constituents demanding that you do something, and I know that many of you are doing something.

We know lawsuits are being filed by brave attorneys general, non-profits, and unions, and we are grateful – though worried that the judiciary is compromised. We have been heartened, after what felt like a very slow start, to see many of you physically present and speaking up at the multiple sites where the coup is unfolding. It is equally heartening to see you cede the mic to younger colleagues, including some who have been previously sidelined.

It was also great to see people take to the streets on Wednesday in dozens of American cities, including Boston.

But the best analysis people like me are getting right now is coming from academics, public intellectuals, and brave, anonymous civil servants still on the inside, fighting for their lives. We will continue to consume all of this, but we also need to hear from you, with a frequent and unified message.

What would a concerted information and message dissemination operation look like?

You should be holding a daily public briefing, at the same time every day. You should appoint or hire a central spokesperson – a press secretary for the Opposition Party. That person should spend 30 to 60 minutes behind a mic every day, explaining what we know, what it means, and what the party, working together, is doing in response.

Though emotions are high, and some people are lashing out at you, most of us understand that you don’t have all the answers. That’s OK. We just need to know that you are working on it. Every day. Together. And we want you to know that we are here, gathering our people and our strength, ready to act, to take care of each other, and to support your efforts to save our democracy.

You should quickly assemble a Shadow Cabinet, as eloquently described by Yale history professor Timothy Snyder on his Substack and in his book On Freedom. These people should be subject matter experts, and they should be on hand to provide further context to all of us. They should be there to take questions from the press.

This will require discipline, and the setting aside of egos. Not everyone needs to speak. These should not be stump speeches or rallies. This is not about the party; it’s about the country. I hope there will be time to run for office later. Right now we have to protect your right to do that.

I worked at Boston City Hall, as part of Mayor Walsh’s team, during the deadly COVID pandemic. Every day, he would hold a press briefing, where he laid out the facts and took questions. In this case, it was the number of deaths, hospitalizations, meals served, testing sites, etc. It was clear, concise information that served to give people news they needed to get through the day, and to provide some level of direction and even comfort.

The information was compiled, and because we know for a variety of reasons we can’t always rely on media to tell the whole story, every senior leader in City Hall was asked to distribute it to their networks via email and social media.

In my case, hundreds of emails were sent every day to educational institutions, non-profits, arts organizations, community activists, and more. This is the model you should be following. I know you have the ability to communicate with us, because I have had multiple daily solicitations for small-dollar campaign contributions. Use those databases for this now.

In Anne Applebaum’s brilliant book Autocracy, Inc., she spends some time talking about the importance of graphic design as a means of communication in political movements. I can hear some of you laughing, but she is right. There are great artists and communicators in our midst. It’s past time to create and brand a movement.

I turned on Fox News Tuesday night. They were howling at what they call our overreaction to all of this. CNN was covering this like it’s normal news, with two sets of opinions to be presented. The splintering of the communications and media landscape demands that you control the message and not just react to events.

I have been a community activist since around the time I first began to form my own thoughts. I’ve been an active, contributing member of the Democratic Party since I was 18. I am the kind of person who people look to for solutions to our societal and political problems.

There are thousands of us. We are people who try to contextualize and analyze what’s happening in government, and then try to explain the nuance and the strategy that other people who aren’t as engaged sometimes miss. We’ve done a lot of work for you over the years. We are here now. I’d be lying, though, if I said I hadn’t thought about unenrolling in the party a dozen times in the past few weeks.

I am not even 100 percent sure the Opposition Party should be the Democratic Party. It should be bigger than that. But bipartisanship seems like a long-forgotten dream, and it has no place in Washington at this moment. Mitt Romney, Adam Kinzinger, and Liz Cheney have left the building, and if you ever needed an example of the futility of this dream, look no further than the reports of how Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy was coerced into providing the decisive vote to advance the nomination for health and human services secretary of Robert Kennedy Jr., who will catalyze the pain, suffering, and even death of some of our fellow Americans. I hope it’s temporary, but I fear it’s not.

We are living through an attempted coup. Hard stop. If you are an elected official and you are not using that word to describe these events, I think you might have some soul-searching to do. You swore an oath to protect and uphold our Constitution, and it really needs protecting right now.

Please help us, and let us help you.

Joyce Linehan is a member and former chair of the Ward 17 Democratic Committee in Boston.

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Author Sinclair Lewis was born this day in 1885. His novel, It Can’t Happen Here, about a demagogue who is elected president of the United States, was scary when it came out in 1935.

Have a good day. Be kind to everyone you meet. Kindness is resistance.