Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at Background Briefing.org. I'm Ian Masters,

and today on this Christmas Eve, we'll speak with the Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis,

co-chair with Reverend William Barber of the Poor People's Campaign,

a National Call for Moral Revival and the co-director of the Carous Center for Religions,

Rights and Social Justice. Having spent the past two decades organizing amongst the poor in the United States,

she's the author of Always With Us, what Jesus really said about the poor,

and most recently you only get what you're organized to take, lessons from the movement to end poverty.

Then we begin our retrospective from the archives of some of the outstanding interviews this year,

starting with January and working back to the present over the next few days.

We begin with an interview from January the 23rd of 2025

on the Trump-Musk presidency steamroller of reactionary initiatives,

flattening the Democrats and intimidating the press into

treating a sociopathic felon as a legitimate leader. We discuss a manifesto of persistence,

that is, resistance in order to stand up to the firehose of unpopular outrage as Trump is

inflicting on the land as he frees thugs and vandals and drug kingpins.

We were joined by Gil Duran, a San Francisco journalist who previously served as an editorial page editor of the Sacramento B and the San Francisco Examiner.

He currently writes the Frame Lab newsletter on Substack and regularly contributes to the San

Francisco Chronicle and other publications. He served as a press secretary for Kamala Harris when she was

the Attorney General of California and we discussed his article with George Lakoff at Frame Lab

Woody's New Year's resolution and ours.

Then we'll go to an interview from February the 27th of 2025 when we examined the performative

nature of Musk's evisceration of the US government under the pretext of cutting spending in order

...