Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.

I'm Adam Johnson.

You can follow Citations Needed on Twitter and Blue Sky at CitationsPod.

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Through patreon.com slash citations needed podcast, all your support through Patreon is so incredibly

appreciated as we are 100% listener funded. We do these news briefs in between our regularly

scheduled full-length episodes of citations needed. And today, we are thrilled to have a guest

with us to talk about labor, organizing, and the power of unions, especially at this time

in our history, our present, whatever we want to say, this new era Trump redux, Musk as dictator,

and what that means for our workforce, what it means for our union power.

Yeah. So we've talked about, I guess, the kind of right-wing populism rebrand. We did an

episode in 2021 about it, specifically focusing on J.D. Vance and Trumpism and Josh Holly, which is

what we consider a kind of cynical, largely superficial attempt to kind of become their

self-professed party of the working class.

And what we argued is that it's largely an aesthetic. It is about a kind of idealized white worker

distance and abstract from things like the NLRB or OSHA protections or other things that actually protect workers and unionization itself,

rather than what we identified as this kind of Oren-Cass astroturf attempt to use the aesthetics,

language, and rhetoric, and the occasional token policy support to pick off this kind of labor

or labor-adjacent demographic in order to shore up the so-called

white working class base among Trump and Trumpism and the Republican Party more broadly.

And so this, of course, manifested in the recent election of Trump in certain ways.

Trump has been good at kind of both in 2016 and 2024.

...