The Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, or HR 9495, has passed a vote in the House. If approved by the Senate, this bill would grant the Treasury Department broad powers to label nonprofit organizations, especially those that have been critical of Israel, as supporters of “terrorism” and strip them of their tax-exempt status without due process. What are the chances that HR 9495 will become law? If it does, will it be used as a weapon to target political enemies and quash political dissent under a second Trump administration, as critics fear? Journalists Chip Gibbons and Noah Hurowitz join the TRNN podcast to give a full breakdown of what this bill could empower the Trump administration to do, and how we can fight back. Noah Hurowitz is a journalist based in New York City and the author of El Chapo: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Infamous Drug Lord. His work has appeared in New York Magazine, Business Insider, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. His latest report at The Intercept is titled “The House just blessed Trump’s authoritarian playbook by passing nonprofit-killer bill.” Chip Gibbons is a journalist, researcher, and policy director of the nonprofit advocacy organization Defending Rights and Dissent. He is currently working on a book titled The Imperial Bureau, forthcoming from Verso Books. Based heavily on archival research and documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, it tells the history of FBI political surveillance and explores the role of domestic surveillance in the making of the US national security state. Post-Production: David Hebden Transcript The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible. Maximillian Alvarez: Welcome everyone to The Real News Network podcast. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. Before we get going today, I want to remind you all that The Real News is an independent non-profit viewer and listener-supported grassroots media network. We don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads, and we never put our reporting behind paywalls. Our team is fiercely dedicated to lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle around the world, but we cannot continue to do this work without your support, and we need you to become a supporter of The Real News now, just head over to therealnews.com/donate, and donate today. I promise you it really makes a difference. In a report for The Intercept harrowingly titled The House Just Blessed Trump’s Authoritarian Playbook by Passing Nonprofit-Killer Bill Noah Hurowitz writes, “A bill that would give President-elect Donald Trump broad powers to target his political foes has passed a major hurdle toward becoming law. The House of Representatives on Thursday passed the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act in a 219 to 184 vote, largely along party lines, with 15 Democrats joining the Republican majority. The bill, also known as H.R. 9495, would empower the Treasury Secretary to unilaterally designate any non-profit as a “terrorist-supporting organization,” and revoke its tax-exempt status, effectively killing the group. Critics say the proposal would give presidential administrations a tool to crack down on organizations for political ends.” Now, the bill is on its way to the currently Democrat-controlled Senate, where its fate is still very much uncertain, but after this month’s elections, Republicans will enjoy majorities in the House and Senate in the coming term, and there’s every reason to believe that they will keep pushing this kind of legislation until they get what they want. So what exactly is H.R. 9495? Will it be used as a weapon to target political enemies and quash political dissent under a second Trump administration? How well-founded are these fears? And if they are well-founded, how do we fight back, not just those of us in the nonprofit space, but across civil society? To talk about all of this today, I’m honored to be joined by two guests. First, we’re joined today by Noah Hurowitz himself, who’s been doing vital reporting on this for The Intercept, which we’ll link to in the show notes for this episode. Noah is a journalist based in New York City, and the author of El Chapo: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Infamous Drug Lord. His work has appeared in New York Magazine, Business Insider, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. We’re also joined once again by Chip Gibbons. Chip is a journalist, researcher, and policy director of the nonprofit advocacy organization Defending Rights & Dissent. He is currently working on a book titled The Imperial Bureau, forthcoming from Verso books, based heavily on archival research and documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. This book tells the history of FBI political surveillance, and explores the role of domestic surveillance in the making of the U.S. National Security State. Chip, Noah, thank you both so much for joining us today on The Real News Network. I really appreciate it. Noah Hurowitz: Thank you so much for having us. Chip Gibbons: Always a pleasure to be on The Real News. Maximillian Alvarez: It’s a real pleasure to have you both, but I’ll be honest, I’m kind of crapping my pants right now, as I imagine a lot of us are. Pardon my French, but we’re here to talk about this nonprofit killer bill, what it is, what it isn’t, how do we fight it, and you two have invaluable insight into this. I want, as we’re trying to do across the board here at The Real News, I want to help our listeners, and viewers, and readers move past the sort of immobilizing fear of the worst case scenarios that are coming at us, and help us navigate this moment, and understand what we’re really up against, and what we need to do to be prepared to fight it. So let’s start there. I want to start, Noah, with you, and then, Chip, I want to go to you, let’s just get the basics out on the table. For those who maybe don’t know about it, what exactly is this bill? What will it do? Where did it come from, and who exactly is pushing for it? Noah Hurowitz: H.R. 9495 was first introduced under a different name, sort of an earlier piece of legislation in November of 2023. It came about, obviously, shortly after Israel’s genocide in Gaza began, and was pretty explicitly targeted at pro-Palestine organizers and organizations. It has been repeatedly linked to that by its supporters. It’s not a conspiracy theory to say that this is about targeting pro-Palestine groups. As recently as last week, when in a statement about the bill from the House Ways and Means Committee, which is GOP-controlled, it linked to other hearings that had been taking place in Congress over the past year about alleged antisemitism on campus, about the so-called nexus between campus antisemitism and terror-funding. It’s very explicitly, and in their comments on the House floor, supporters such as Representative Jason Smith of Missouri, and the bill’s introducing co-sponsor Representative Claudia Tenney of New York, have both mentioned specifically pro-Palestine organizations, that I think we’ll get into later, those specifics. This bill was originally not much of a controversy. It was passed by the House under … So let me just back up. The bill itself has two main provisions. One is providing tax relief to Americans held hostage or imprisoned unjustly abroad. That part of the bill is not controversial, and a separate version of it has actually passed the Senate. It could be, as the critics of the bill pointed out, that portion of the bill could be passed today. The other half of it is what’s controversial. As you quoted from my piece, it empowers the Secretary of the Treasury to essentially unilaterally designate a nonprofit group as a so-called terrorist-supporting organization, which is defined as a group providing material support to terrorists, and by designating, the Treasury Secretary could then revoke the nonprofit status of that group, which is essentially the kiss of death for a group. People fear that that might be implemented. People also are worried about that as like a prior restraint on free speech. The organizations and individuals, through fear of being designated under that law, would moderate what they say, would avoid certain topics, so it’s both a fear of this chilling effect on free speech, and also how it could be implemented, which I think we’ll get into, but it’s rather broadly. So now the bill passed. There was a bill, H.R. 6408, which was the standalone version of the nonprofit provision in the bill, that passed in April from the House, 382 to 11. The only people who voted against it were 10 Democrats, which mostly members of the squad, and a few other left-leaning Democrats, and then Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who’s a Republican, but he’s kind of on a Tea Party Libertarian tip, and he’s actually been fairly good about breaking with his party on its staunch support of Israel. But obviously, 382 to 11 means that the vast majority of Democrats who were present on that day voted in favor of the bill. It was not controversial at the time. It got kind of tied up in the Senate. There was a separate bill introduced in the Senate, and it kind of languished in committee there. Then bringing us up to the President, the current bill, H.R. 9495, was introduced in the House combined with the tax relief provision in September, and it passed the House Ways and Means Committee, and came to a … in the wake of the reelection of Donald Trump, it was reintroduced for a floor vote in the House on November 12th. I got a tip about that vote coming up a few days beforehand. To be honest, at the time, I must say the ACLU, and a number of civil society organizations have been doing really important work advocating against the bill, but the vote kind of took people by surprise, and there was not a ton of momentum. There was not a ton of chatter about this bill. So my story came out on, the vote was on a Tuesday, and my story came out on a Sunday, and pretty immediately there was a really strong reaction to my story, and there was a really … The ACLU and other groups really harnessed a lot of energy and momentum in trying to advocate against the bill. Now, what had changed? What changed from April, when there was a 382 to 11 vote, and that Tuesday Donald Trump was elected? Suddenly a lot of Democrats had a lot of concerns about how this bill might be implemented if it was Trump in charge, if it was a Trump appointee being allowed to designate groups as terrorist-supporting organizations. Long story short, on Tuesday, November 12th, the bill came to a vote under suspension of the rules, which allows for a limiting of debate, but requires a two-thirds majority to pass, and a majority of Democrats in the House kind of flip-flopped against it, many of them citing the election of Donald Trump, and so they were able to block passage. They were able to prevent that two-thirds majority. There were 52 Democrats who voted in favor, 144 who voted against it, and then most Republicans voted for it, but it was pretty quickly reintroduced for a second floor vote, this won by simple majority. That was yesterday, Thursday, November 20th, and this time, significantly fewer Democrats voted in favor, but it wouldn’t have made a difference, the Republicans had the votes, and so it passed. Chip Gibbons: Yeah. I think that’s a really great procedural history of what happened. The only caveat I would make in the procedural history, is that from the very inception of this bill there’s been a massive mobilization of civil society groups against it. My group, Defending Rights & Dissent, ACLU, Charity & Security Network, a lot of groups have been mobilizing over the last, I guess, year now to fight this bill. I do think the election of Donald Trump certainly helped turn the tide against it, and the Democratic caucus, but I do want to make clear that there have been, something like 300 civil society groups opposed to this bill, who have, even before Donald Trump was the President-elect, have been really pushing on Congress. I know that when we first started talking about this bill at the Defending Rights & Dissent, we were thinking to ourselves, “Is there any way we can mobilize people against it because it seems so wonky?” We’re talking about (c)(3) status, do most people understand what that is? We started sending [inaudible 00:13:45] to our supporters, and we were shocked by the outpouring of outrage about it. I think this is one of the first few things I’ve worked on where people have actually called us on the phone to tell us how concerned they are about this bill. So there is a broad sense of concern throughout civil society, throughout the general public. It has gotten a boost from the impending Trump administration, but I do think the fact that we’ve gone from only 10 Democrats and Thomas Massie opposing it, to only 15 Democrats supporting it, I do think that is a story of civil society success and activist pressure. I do want to talk a little bit more about what the bill would do. The bill does allow for the Secretary of Treasury to unilaterally strip an organization of their 501(c)(3) status, which means they would not be a tax-deductible organization, they would not be a charity. They wouldn’t be shut down per se, they wouldn’t be in jail or anything like that, but they would lose the ability be a tax-exempt organization, which I think, Max, you can tell us how important that is for you and the work you do. The thing about it is it allows them to do this if you’re terror-supporting. You’re already not allowed to have tax-exempt status if you are a terrorist organization, and you’re not allowed to have tax-exempt status if you promote illegal conduct. The Republicans are trying to get the IRS to take tax-exempt status away from the Palestine Chronicle, from a whole host of pro-Palestine groups using all of this sort of other, and we’ll talk more about the anti-terrorism legislative landscape or regulatory landscape, so this is really an escalation. Now it’s not just you’re a terrorist, you are engaged in terrorism, you’re a terrorist-supporting group, and the Secretary of Treasury can make that designation. There’s something in here that’s really, well, this whole thing is disturbing to me, but there is something in here about what sort of notice requirement is required by law, and it says, “A description of such material support,” the material support to terrorism, “or resources to the extent consistent with national security and law enforcement interest,” which means that if there’s national security and law enforcement interest, the Secretary of Treasury can actually withhold from you what the evidence against you is. In the jurisdiction of the United States Court section about who has control over adjudicating cases under this case, it starts talking about classified information and the Classified Information Procedures Act. One of the really disturbing things we saw in the 90s in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which first introduced the concept of material support for terrorism, a foreign terrorist organization, into our legal landscape, is it also allowed for secret classified evidence to be used in deportation hearings. This was disproportionately used against pro-Palestinian Americans, not Americans, pro-Palestinian immigrants, Palestinians, and it was so abused that George W. Bush, in his debate with Al Gore, criticized the Clinton administration for their racial profiling against Arab Americans in their use of secret evidence. The other problem I have here, I have many problems, is that we know Israel routinely falsely accuses charities of being terrorists. We know that in prosecutions like the Holy Land prosecution, that Israel were able to get evidence from Israeli intelligence. In the past, they’ve derived evidence from torture, the Israeli torture of an American citizen to be used to sort of put OFAC, I’ll talk about what those are later, OFAC sanctions against them. So we have this sort of provision for secret and classified evidence, and we know that Israel, since the early 90s, has been repeatedly lobbying successive US administrations to shut down charities, claiming they were terrorists. The other thing that’s really troubling to me is that there is no intent requirement in this bill. Over the last 30 years, the intent requirement in these sorts of terrorism prohibitions has gotten less and less and less. Back in the days of the Communist Party in the Cold War, you used to have to have the intent to further an illegal purpose, then it just became, “We’re going to make a list of bad organizations. We’re going to make a list of terrorist organizations or sanctioned organizations.” If you have anything to do with them, even that activity is otherwise lawful, you’ve now broken the law, but you still had to intend to do that. There’s no mention of intent in this bill, so you could be a terrorist-supporting organization without ever intending to do so, and they could shut you down based off of secret evidence that they won’t show you, that they got from our friends, the Israelis, which is a nightmare scenario. That is, I think, very probable given how things like the Holy Land Foundation case has played out, given the sort of 30 year history of Israel lobbying US administrations to shut down domestic groups, as well as labeling international groups terrorist. Of course, we’ve seen this in the Gaza genocide where they bomb hospitals, they assassinate journalists, they attack UN workers, they say, “Oh, they were Hamas.” Maximillian Alvarez: Right. It’s like what we should learn from the harrowing days of the Cold War is that because you’re an average person they hear like, “Sure, we shouldn’t be supporting terrorist organizations. Organizations that get tax-exempt status should not be supporting terrorist organizations.” That sounds pretty easy and basic, and I think we could all agree on that. But it’s about, as Chip said, what we’re seeing playing out right now is like in the Cold War, in other past periods, it is the sort of redrawing of the terrain that categorizes someone or some organization as a terrorist organization just by nature of who they are or what they believe in, what they do. It’s not about keeping our noses clean, and just working harder to not support terrorism, it’s whether or not we’re going to be able to avoid the politically targeted designation as terrorist-supporting organizations because we don’t toe the line of the party in power, and that leads me to this next question. People, myself included, our supporters included, I’m hearing that you guys are getting the same sort of reactions from your readers and supporters, a lot of people are understandably freaking out right now about the ways that this bill, especially in the hands of Trump, and the fully MAGA-ified GOP, will be used as a weapon of political repression, and a tool to silence political dissent and critics of Trump. You guys started touching on this already, but I wanted to kind of zero in how well-founded are these concerns. What are the worst case scenarios here, and are there other scenarios that we could be facing? Chip Gibbons: Well, I’m just going to say I think the concerns are well-founded. I think whenever you have a bill like this, you have to be careful. We don’t want to inadvertently kill speech. It is your First Amendment right to oppose a genocide, and you should continue to use that right to oppose the genocide in Palestine, the apartheid policies that are imposed on the Palestinians. But we really are looking at a disturbing situation where a bill is being passed that is extremely easy to abuse, and the fact that there are already so many extremely easy to abuse tools to conflate support for Palestine with terrorism and crush speech, and the people pushing this bill are saying, “Oh, those are too cumbersome. Those are too protective. Those have too much bureaucratic process,” that is really very disturbing. As Noah has said, it’s not a conspiracy theory to say this is aimed at supporters of Palestine, they were very clear about this during the hearings. The United States Congress, the Ways and Means Committee continues to send letters to the IRS asking them to revoke the 501(c)(3) status of pro-Palestine organizations. There has been a big sort of panic about a nonprofit news outlet called Palestine Chronicle, because one of the contributors, and it’s not clear if this person was ever paid by them, was killed in a raid by the IDF to rescue a hostage. The IDF is claiming he was a member of Hamas, and he held the hostage in his house, which even if that’s true, that does not implicate the news outlet in that action. In the letters to the IRS, in the sort of reporting, in the sort of right wing McCarthyite press on this news outlet and on these publications, we continuously see the claim that they promote Hamas or are clearly connected to Hamas because they use the same language of Hamas. They say there’s ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and Hamas, as there’s ethnic cleansing in Gaza, therefore they’re promoting Hamas. They refer to armed groups in Palestine not as terrorists, but as resistance, and that’s obviously controversial. Even parties in the left, that’s a controversial point of view, but it is a First Amendment-protected point of view. Many people viewed the Irish armed groups or the South African armed groups as resistance, even though our government or the British government said they were terrorists. So there’s a long sort of history in the United States of debates about who is a freedom fighter, who is a terrorist, and we’re allowed to have them. The one thing that is, I think, really troubling is that there is a law criminalizing material support for terrorism, but the Supreme Court has been very clear that as broad as they’ve allowed that law to be enforced, it does not apply to independent advocacy. If you coordinate advocacy with a foreign terrorist organization designated as such by the State Department, you can go to jail, but if you’re engaged in independent advocacy, you are protected by the First Amendment. Instead of eliminating the intent requirement, I am looking at these letters to the IRS from these Republican members of Congress, I am really concerned we are increasingly seeing a situation where the people are saying, “You have X point of view, that’s Hamas’ point of view. You are supporting Hamas.” Now, if they actually revoke a nonprofit’s 501(c)(3) status on that basis, on the basis of pure political speech that was not coordinated with a foreign terrorist organization, I think there is a legal challenge there. I would say that the courts should uphold the Constitution and block that revocation. You don’t have a First Amendment right to 501(c)(3) status, but you cannot have that status revoked based on exercising political speech. Do I have faith in the current judiciary? You might find this surprising, but oftentimes I find, in cases of clear cut constitutional violations, myself on a different side than our current Supreme Court, and our current federal judiciary. We definitely do not want to get to a point where we are litigating individual cases, but I do think the worst case scenario is we enter a terrain where the Secretary of Treasury, under a Trump administration, although I hate to say it, a lot of the Democrats aren’t much better on Palestine and free speech, are revoking these 501(c)(3) status of organizations based on lawful First Amendment political speech, in no way connected to violence, or even connected to the overly broad anti-terrorism laws we have in this country, and are instead just sort of drawing this line, “Well, you said it was ethnic cleansing, and Hamas was ethnic cleansing. You said it was resistance, not terrorism, therefore you are terror-supporting.” Maximillian Alvarez: Well, let’s get concrete here because all three of us work at or with nonprofit organizations. If this bill becomes law, and if these newly granted powers to go after nonprofits are used to target organizations like ours, what is that going to mean in practical terms? What will that actually look like for the orgs that are being specifically targeted? What effect do you anticipate this having on the nonprofit world writ large? Because it’s a big world, it includes organizations like the three of ours, journalistic community support. It’s a broad spectrum. So yeah, Noah, talk to us a little bit about, let’s bring this down to eye level and talk about how this is going to impact the world that we’re all working in. Noah Hurowitz: Yeah. I can certainly speak in terms of journalism. When one pursues adversarial journalism, you have to be careful sometimes about how you pursue a story and what you say because you don’t want to open yourself up to lawsuits, to any kind of legal retaliation. Thankfully, there are really strong First Amendment rights, and there are really strong protections against being sued for defamation in the United States, at least. I know it’s different in other places, but in the US when we fact check a story we send it to legal, if we can back something up, we’re good, and I can reach out to anyone I want to if I can locate them.What really concerns me about this in terms of journalism is specifically the use of Palestine Chronicle as an example by the GOP, because as Chip said, there is no evidence that they had any, first, that they paid this guy, I think his name was Abdallah Ajamal. It’s a little murky what actually happened there. There’s certainly no indication that they had any knowledge of his family allegedly holding hostages. There was reporting in CNN that his neighbors didn’t know, and I find it hard to believe that he would tell his bosses that a nonprofit in the US … So all of that is to say that journalists talk to people in other places all the time. The Intercept has done great work talking to people in Gaza. Mainstream news outlets do the same all the time. During the Syrian Civil War, many of the fixers working in rebel-held areas were people who might not have had pretty unsavory connections. Are we going to say that CNN working with ex-Fixer or ex-contributor was providing material support? I would hope not. So what this does, I think, is it could add a layer of caution for news organizations in what they’re willing to report on, in who they’re willing to talk to, because it adds a new threat for nonprofit news organizations, that you could seriously jeopardize not just yourself, but the organization itself. That’s what we talk about when we talk about killing of free speech, is that you might take a step back from certain things. Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah. Just to add onto that from here at The Real News Network, in terms of just the basics of what it would mean to revoke a nonprofit tax-exempt status, it would mean a big giant bill that you got to pay that your financial structure may not currently allow for. For folks out there who are saying like, “Oh, that’s not that bad, you’ll have to restructure a bit, but maybe you’ll be liberated from the restrictions of a 501(c)(3), yada, yada, yada,” but a lot of our organizations may not even get there because if we get our tax-exempt status revoked, and suddenly we’ve got to find the money to pay for that, there are plenty of organizations that may not be able to. It could be like a just poison pill in that regard, to say nothing of the other sorts of ways that a nonprofit organization can get tied up in legal battles that require time and resources that are going to drain their ability to operate. There are other ways that heads of nonprofits could be targeted, and have their own taxes investigated. There are a lot of mechanisms, as Chip and Noah mentioned here, by which nonprofits can be targeted, and squeezed, and repressed. This, as Chip rightly mentioned, is just a significant escalation in the state’s ability to carry that out. But Chip, please hop back in here. Noah Hurowitz: I just wanted to say too, that that’s a really good point about not just the organizations themselves, but also the donors. Even if a group were to … The GOP and supporters of the bill kept making this point that, “Oh, but there is due process, there are ways to appeal. There’s this cure process, you can appeal to the independent IRS Appeals Office. You can go to the district court.” First of all, most small nonprofits are not going to have … they’re going to eat up all of their operating funds on legal bills trying to fight that, but there’s also going to be a black mark on their name. Most donors are not going to want to be giving money, especially larger foundations are not going to be wanting to give their money to groups that have this on their record because they could be liable. In their separate, but linked hearings in Congress over the past year, the GOP has gone after specifically a group that gives donations to smaller groups, including I think SJP, Students for Justice in Palestine, including Palestine Youth Movement, as a sort of umbrella funder of groups that they accuse of being supporters of terrorism. So we see this is not academic, we see already that they’re going after the larger … they’re going up the stream to donors, not just going after the organizations themselves. You can only imagine the effect that that would have on donors’ willingness to support organizations that have been accused of this. Chip Gibbons: I think Noah makes a really good point. Defending Rights & Dissents joined a number of civil society groups in signing onto a letter initiated by the ACLU. The way the letter explains it, I have to confess I’m not wearing my glasses at this moment so I’m squinting to read it, “The executive branch could use this authority to target its political opponents, and use the fear of crippling legal fees, the stigma of the designation, and donor-slinging controversy to stifle dissent, and kill speech and advocacy.” So if you are designated a terror-supporting group, you’re not only getting a big tax bill which could destroy a nonprofit because you don’t budget for a tax bill you don’t owe, you then also are going to be stigmatized as a terror-supporting group even if no criminal charges ever follow. People are going to say, “Oh, terror-supporting, that’s a crime. I don’t want to give money to this group. Will I be investigated for doing so? Will I be criminally charged for doing so?” Also, I don’t think most foundations are willing to give money to organizations that have had their 501(c)(3) status revoked or don’t have 501(c)(3) status. So not only do you get a tax bill, you lose your revenue stream. Again, you can fight this in court, you can fight this in whatever. Legal fees are expensive. The government has endless money to burn up fighting you in court. Some of these cases, you might be going to the Supreme Court over this. Imagine how much you’ll have to pay in legal fees to go through the IRS appeals process, the district court, a hearing of a panel of a circuit court, then an en banc hearing of a circuit court, then a Supreme Court, and it gets there like 20 some years later. Imagine the legal bill, it’s going to be even bigger than your tax bill, I fear. Then on top of that, they say there’s due process, but then there are multiple ways to go after nonprofits for supporting terrorism, processes designed explicitly to do that, and they’re saying those processes, all of which have been criticized for lacking in due process, all of which have been criticized for [inaudible 00:37:00] purely protected speech, all of which have been criticized for using guilt by association. They’re saying those processes are too bureaucratic and too cumbersome, so they are explicitly trying to do something that they already have processes to do by saying those processes afford too much due process. Knowing how little due process there is in the OFAC sanctions regime, knowing how little due process there is in the material support for terrorism regime, I really don’t feel comfortable when they turn around and say, “Oh, there’ll be some due process,” when the entire purpose of this bill is to eliminate due process so they can revoke the 501(c)(3) stages of groups they don’t like. Maximillian Alvarez: I think that was powerfully and chillingly put by both of you. I know there’s so much more to dig into here, and we’re going to be needing your voices for the next four years, and the next 50, so I hope that we can have more conversations like this. I hope everyone listening takes away from this, first and foremost, please support the organizations that you depend on, the ones that you believe are important. You can’t support all of them, and we’re not asking you to, but if you read Noah’s work, if you listen to the work that Chip has done, we last had Chip on when Assange was freed, who do you think has been there for years fighting for that? That’s Chip and Defending Rights & Dissent, that didn’t come from nowhere. The Real News has been around for over a decade. We are doing the best we can to bring media that activates people to get off the sidelines, and get into the fight to save this world before it’s gone. All of us are doing our best, but we can’t do it without you. We’re going to need your support now more than ever, especially as we face this potential political onslaught. Gentlemen, I want to sort of turn that into the final question here. Folks out there are scared. We know that. We are too. So what can we do to fight this? We could take the biggest or smallest means of resistance, but let’s leave folks with a note, not of helplessness, but at least an idea of what they can do to stop frustrate this process as we face down a second Trump administration. Chip Gibbons: Well, I’m going to start by saying that Defending Rights & Dissent was formed in the early 1960s as the national committee to abolish the House … national coalition to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee. A lot of people thought the House Un-American Activities or HUAC was unbeatable. People were terrified of it. They were afraid to take it on. We ended up abolishing it, and we did so by being unapologetic and opposing it, and standing in solidarity with those who are being victimized of it. I think the solution to state repression is solidarity amongst each other. I know in some of these prosecutions or other sorts of persecutions that fall short of a legal criminal prosecution, sometimes they pick low-hanging fruit, they pick people who they think won’t garner support, or have said or done controversial things in order to set that precedent. We have to be there when they come after them. There’s no saying, “Well, their First Amendment right is being violated, but I don’t like this pamphlet they gave out about this.” No, it is, “You are coming for one of us, you are coming for all of us. This is an unconstitutional assault on free speech. It is designed to make our society less democratic and we will not tolerate it, and we will stand together against it.” Noah Hurowitz: Yeah, I totally agree. I think I have heard from a lot of readers a certain level of despair or frustration, or anger or fear in response to this, and I hope that my reporting on it hasn’t in any way stoked that fear. It’s always a bit of a delicate balance when you’re talking about scary things, you don’t want to overpower people with fear and despair. Because, ultimately, the antidote to this, as Chip said, is solidarity, and the antidote is to continue to … If they are coming after a certain type of speech, that’s a good indication that they’re afraid of that speech. I think one thing that has been really striking in the past year is that I haven’t seen the media lie as much about an issue as I have since Iraq, since I was a kid. That’s not to say that the media has been perfect about other things over the past 10, 15 years, but it’s been really remarkable to see how afraid certain sectors of the media, and certain sectors of the political elite are of pro-Palestine organizing. So I think that’s an indication that you continue. Now, I will say, I think … Sorry, I’m trailing off there. Cut that. I think the most important thing is just to not, this bill pass the House, but it was a lot closer than it seemed like it was going to be. When I was watching the initial vote on Tuesday, November 12th, I was pretty surprised, and I think a lot of my sources who had been advocating against it were surprised, not because they hadn’t done work, not because they hadn’t been really strongly advocating against it for a long time, but because there was a really sudden flip. Obviously, that had to do with the election of Donald Trump. I wish that it was more about Democrats suddenly supporting pro-Palestine speech, but the fact that in a relatively short period of intensive action, between the time that people widely found out that this vote was going to happen, and when the vote actually happened, suddenly everybody was … there was a ton of chatter. I spoke to people in congressional offices this week, who said they were getting tons of calls. I think that as frustrating as it is that the bill passed, it’s really important to remember that this was one of the … I think this was a really important early mobilizing effort in this new era that we’re in, post-second election of Donald Trump. People really made their voices heard, and it’s really important that they continue to do so. Maximillian Alvarez: That is Noah Hurowitz, and Chip Gibbons. Noah is a journalist based in New York City, and the author of El Chapo: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Infamous Drug Lord. His work has appeared in The Intercept, New York Magazine, Business Insider, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. Chip Gibbons is a journalist, researcher, and policy director of the nonprofit advocacy organization Defending Rights and Dissent. He is currently working on a book that is titled The Imperial Bureau, forthcoming from Verso Books. Noah, Chip, I can’t thank you both enough for talking to us today on The Real News Network, and I’m sending nothing but love and solidarity to you all as we head into the fray, and we’re going to keep fighting. It’s an honor to be in the struggle with you. Thank you so much for your work. Chip Gibbons: Always a pleasure. Noah Hurowitz: Thanks so much for having us. Maximillian Alvarez: For all of you listening, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off for The Real News Network. Please, before you go, one more time, head on over to therealnews.com/donate, so we can keep bringing you important coverage and conversations just like this. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.