US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8349

Netroots Nation, the activist left's largest annual gathering, arrives in Atlanta this year with its clearest focus in years: how to resist President Trump.

Former Vice President Gore will speak about the threats to the planet from a president who dismisses climate change as a hoax hatched in Beijing. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) will ring alarm bells about domestic policy. And 14 separate sessions will discuss the best ways to fight the White House and Republican Congress. Jon Ossoff, the Democratic star who narrowly lost Georgia’s special House election in June, will also show.

“The last couple of years, much of the energy nationally was focused on social justice,” said Netroots Nation spokeswoman Mary Rickles. This year, the focus for nearly 3,000 attendees was back on politics: “How do we channel the energy of resistance into helping progressives win elections?”

At more than 80 panels and training sessions, activists will get updates from the “resistance” groups like Indivisible founded after the 2016 election, or those that have multiplied their membership since then, like the American Civil Liberties Union. One panel will go over ways to challenge Trump’s “xenophobic NAFTA narrative,” while another — more relevant given news from North Korea — will brainstorm ways to oppose Trump if a traumatic event causes people to rally around the flag.

[Trump’s threats to North Korea were spontaneous and not drafted by advisers, officials say]

“Hitler used the Reichstag Fire; Putin used the 1999 apartment bombings; and George W. Bush used 9/11,” reads the online description of the panel, which will feature leaders of MoveOn.org and the ACLU. “With Trump, [Stephen K.] Bannon and their allies in Congress, progressives must be prepared to fight back in the first hours and days of a national security crisis.”

The conference, which began in 2006 as a spinoff from the elections-focused Daily Kos blog, transformed in the Obama years into a showcase for labor and civil rights movements. In 2007, it hosted every major Democratic candidate for president for a traditional question-and-answer session, and more than a hundred reporters swarmed the halls to see where the Democratic base was directing its energy.

But as soon as Democrats took power, an invitation to Netroots meant a decent shot of being heckled by activists who demanded results on LGBT rights, on National Security Agency spying, or the failings of the Affordable Care Act. In 2015, when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) took questions, they were interrupted by Black Lives Matter activists — a scene that led to productive meetings between protesters and candidates, but unfolded awkwardly onstage. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign checked off the Netroots box with a three-minute video message.