Community Before Strategy

And how to stop authoritarianism with this One Weird TACO.

The fam. (Photo by Hannah Yoest)

1. Chicagoland

The first time we tried getting Bulwark members together we did it at a baseball game in Washington. It was kind of a DIY mess: The Nationals reserved a section for us, people sent money to me via PayPal. I bought the ticket for them and then forwarded it. I think maybe 100 people came that night and we just hung out and watched a ballgame together.

It was great.

Last night a thousand people from this community came together in Chicago at a theater down the street from Wrigley. When we booked this place I thought the venue was too big for us; that we’d never fill it. We sold it out in 72 hours. Truth is, we could have gone bigger. If you want to watch the show, it’s here.

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I want to talk about two things.

First: Thank you. To all of you. Everyone who came out last night. Everyone who reads this newsletter. Everyone who convenes with us over podcasts or on YouTube. Everyone who talks in the comments or emails back and forth with me. From the bottom of my heart.

Second: This is how we fight back.

Over the weekend Carl Safina published a profound essay about resisting authoritarianism that drew on his work studying animal behavior.

One late afternoon long ago at the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, I was with a group of birders when we located a pride of sleeping lions. As evening approached, they yawned big-fanged yawns and slowly roused. About 10 in total, scarred veterans and prime young hunters.

It was time for them to hunt. But first they licked one another, pressed bodies and indulged in much face rubbing. They reaffirmed, “Yes, we are together, we remain as one.” Only then did they set off.

Their tawny bodies flowed up into the tall golden grass along the ridge of a low hill. One sat; the others kept walking. Ten yards on, another sat while the others walked. And so on until the ridge was lined with a hidden picket fence of hungry lions all attentively gazing onto a plain where a herd of unsuspecting zebras grazed. Then one, who’d remained standing, poured herself downhill. Her job was to flank and then spook the zebras into running uphill, directly into her veteran sisters and their spry younger hunters.

Rubbing noses does not catch a zebra. But only after the lions rubbed noses and reaffirmed a shared identity were the zebras in any danger. Those lions showed me that a sense of community is prerequisite for coordinated strategy.

And here’s his big point:

As individuals we cannot always formulate the full fix. But we can be a part of a movement to forge one. . . . [C]ommunity comes before strategy.

Yes. YES.

Say it again. Tattoo it on your eyelids. Put it on a pillow.

Community comes before strategy.

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A couple weeks ago on the Secret pod I was having kind of a dark week of the soul and Sarah asked me, If people are so terrible and everything is lost, then what are we even doing here?

I didn’t have an answer then. But I do now. We’re building the community. And as we build that power, we’ll figure it out.

That’s my ask. Come join us. If you can’t afford the membership, that’s fine. We never leave anyone out. Just hit reply to this email—it goes directly to me—and we’ll take care of you.

If you can afford it, come and stand with us. Build with us. Grow with us. Because when we’re united we’re powerful.

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2. TACO

TACO has the potential to hurt Trump.

(1) It’s simple. Trump Always Chickens Out. You can put that phrase anywhere, apply it to anything, and everyone knows what it means.

(2) It’s meme-able. You have the slogan. You have the word mark. And you have an universally recognizable image. Hell, there’s even a pre-built emoji for it. 🌮 You can put this thing anywhere and it will be a symbol of the democracy movement.

(3) It’s universal. You can apply it to any situation. Trump pulls back on tariffs? TACO. Trump gives in to Putin? TACO. Trump increases the national debt? TACO.

(4) It’s organic. No Democratic strategist came up with TACO. It’s an observation that emerged from the finance world—from the very same bros who voted for Trump in the first place. You can feel the disdain of his own supporters dripping off of it.

(5) It hits at something deep inside Trump. It’s about his soul. It’s about his weakness.

(6) It’s a provocation. Real talk: It’s usually good that Trump chickens out. It’s good that he didn’t try to use the military to remain in office in January of 2021. It’s good that he pulled the 150 percent tariffs back to 45 percent, or 30 percent, or whatever they’re at this morning.

But in the current dynamic, that’s how Trump wins. He says he’s going to do some insane thing, his supporters give him credit for doing it—but then he pulls back in order to avoid the worst real-world consequences.

By hitting him with TACO over and over, you (a) reveal his pull-backs as weakness and (b) dare him to go through with the stuff that will screw up the real world—and, in theory, create pain for his movement.

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Maybe it’s just the high from all the face rubbing last night, but I think TACO has the potential to be a real weapon. I want to put it on red hats in the MAGA font, put it on stickers, see it plastered all over the public sphere, guerrilla-style.

And from there, we see what happens.

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3. The Entity (cont.)

A Wired piece on AI and music.

Smith and Hay finished their album and called it Jazz. That fall, they released it on all the usual places—Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal—and as a physical album. Alas, it failed to take off. Smith and Hay weren’t total nobodies; a few songs they had coproduced for other artists years earlier had gotten some buzz. So the two men decided to retool Jazz and release an updated version, adding new songs.

Jazz (Deluxe) came out in January 2018. Right away, it shot up the Billboard chart and hit No. 1. Hay was elated. At last, real, measurable success had arrived.

Then, just as suddenly, the album disappeared from the ranking. “Nobody drops off the next week to zero,” says Hay, remembering his confusion. He called other artists to ask if they’d ever seen this before. They hadn’t. Questions piled up. If so many people had listened, why did they suddenly stop? He scanned the internet for chatter. Even a single freaking tweet would have been nice. Nada. Where were the fans? “No one’s talking about the music,” Hay realized.Pulling up Spotify’s dashboard for artists, Hay scrutinized the analytics for the pair’s work. Listeners appeared concentrated in far-flung places like Vietnam. Things only got stranger from there. Here’s how Hay remembers it: He started receiving notices from distributors, the companies that handle the licensing of indie artists’ music. The distributors were flagging Smith and Hay’s music, from Jazz and from other projects, for streaming fraud and pulling it down. Smith told Hay it was a mistake and that Hay had messed up securing the proper rights for samples. Hay frantically tried to correct the issue, but the flagging persisted.

Hay, panicking, badgered Smith to help him figure out what was happening. Finally, Hay says, Smith offered some answers: Smith had instructed his staff at the medical clinics to stream their songs. It didn’t sound like the full story.

Then, last September, Smith turned up at the heart of another music streaming incident, this one rather epic. The FBI arrested him and charged him in the first AI streaming fraud case in the United States. The government claims that between 2017 and 2024, Smith made over $10 million in royalties by using bot armies to continuously play AI-generated tracks on streaming platforms.

Read the whole thing.