Below is the transcript from the first part of our new podcast, The Called Activist! It will soon be on Spotify and other places you get podcasts so you can sign up. We are also now on Substack as well! 

Welcome to the Called Activist Podcast! This is a podcast of the Festival Center, and you have tuned into the first one so I am so excited you are here. My name is Bill Mefford and I am the Executive Director of the Festival Center, a faith-based community center in Washington DC where we help build movements for justice. This podcast is produced by the amazing Marcelo Marcelo Jauregui-Volpe who works with Hola Cultura and he hosts an incredible podcast called The Climate Divide so check that out!

Here is what I hope we do through this podcast. We want to interview activists, organizers, advocates, and agents of change and hear why they do what they do – what makes them tick, why are they passionate about what they are passionate about.

I feel that one of the best ways we find encouragement and hope is to hear how people have been transformed, to hear what sparked the passion that fuels them to create change. Hope is in short supply right now so my prayer is that this podcast can help spark some hope in you and others.

But I also want to start off each of our podcasts with some grounding in truth. We are currently living under an administration that functions on misinformation and lies. So, for each monthly podcast, I will offer some kind of historical or theological grounding truth on which we can rely and learn from.

So, here is the grounding truth I am in right now.

Well, my friends, we are living in hard times. Never before, at least as far as I know, has the federal government in the United States been so focused on causing terror and harm to the people within the United States. In just over two months (but which have felt like two years) there has been a daily barrage of lies, cruelty, incompetence, and corruption. Here is a little of what has stood out to me that has also been a little lost in all of the outrage:

• trump’s Department of Justice has eliminated the part of the DOJ which worked on environmental justice. There is an excellent new podcast called trumpland where the host, Alex Wagner, looks at the real impacts of trump’s policies on real people. She went to what is called Cancer Alley in Reserve, Louisiana where predominantly Black neighborhoods that surround a rubber plant formerly owned by Dupont, and now owned by Japanese chemical company Denka, have experienced dramatically higher cancer rates compared to other parts of the state. Wagner talked to one woman who had lost every single member of her family to cancer. What’s more, the chemical plant was built on the home of a former plantation, meaning that the generational racism and harm done to Black families has been continued due to chemical plant owners. Some sins just never die. They dropped the lawsuit which had originated during the Biden administration and which was set to go to trial in April, leaving the people in cancer alley, including the woman who has lost every member of her family to cancer, without recourse. The people that live there will continue to die of cancer and the federal government wants it that way.

• trump’s Department of Homeland Security has illegally detained and renditioned hundreds of mostly Venezuelan migrants to secret prisons in El Salvador, including US citizens and legal residents. El Salvador’s president Bukele, a trump-puppet, has agreed to not just take undocumented immigrants but also US citizens as well. From the DHS’s own website, “Human trafficking involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion” for the purpose of some kind of exploitation. DHS is now fully engaged in human trafficking.

• In their efforts to fight supposedly woke policies, they are literally whitewashing history. While this current Cabinet is the richest and , removing mentions of Jackie Robinson or the Native Americans who served as Code talkers on the Department of Defense website and

• trump is shutting down the Department of Education, which should come as no surprise since trump famously said he loves the poorly educated. I guess now he will have way more people to love.

And what is not seen are the hundreds, even thousands of stories of individual people whose lives have been thrown upside down in and around DC and across the country even, because of the stupidity and incompetence of this administration and their slash and burn approach to destroying peoples’ careers. Some of those fired, work at the Festival Center as co-workers. These are people who work hard to coordinate care and help in other parts of the world. They have been uniquely gifted for these roles and and in the infinite stupidity of the trump administration they have decided their work no longer matters.

The question that seems to linger most with folks I talk with is, in the face of such blatant abuses of power, what can I do? There is an underlying feeling of smallness, of being overwhelmed by the sheer power of this administration and their utter refusal to adhere to laws, much less basic morality.

So, since we are the season of Lent I am reminded of what Jesus did when he came face to face with immense and entrenched power. In John’s Gospel, when Jesus is brought before Pontius Pilate, Pilate clearly does not want anything to do with judging Jesus. Finally though, after Jesus is flogged and made to wear a crown of thorns, he comes back to Pilate and there is this interchange:

Pontius Pilate says, “Do you not know that I have power to release you and power to crucify you?” Jesus answered him, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above.” (John 19:10-11)

Think about this statement Jesus proclaims to the strongest power of his time: “you would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above.” I believe this statement must become ours. It must become our creed. Before we decide how we will make a difference, we have to state the truth that like Pontius Pilate, trump has no power over us except that which is allowed him by God. We serve a power that is higher and demands greater allegiance than the power he misuses to abuse and mistreat others.

Now, this statement of truth does not serve as a shield against harm – far from it! We only have to remember that this statement came after Jesus was beaten and just before he was crucified. Acknowledging the limited power of trump’s administration is not a get-out-free jail card, but it is a statement of liberation; liberation from immobility, liberation from paralysis, liberation from fear.

We are liberated to join with others to make a difference and to create long-lasting change. And, I am happy to share, this is happening not only around the country in response to the federal governmental overreach; this is happening around the world. In places like Serbia and Hungary – countries that have trump-approved dictators – people are rising up and saying to the existing oligarchs, “you have no power over us.”

So, let this be our statement of truth and may that statement bring forth actions and movements for liberation and justice. For ourselves and for all those whom our wanna-be dictator-in-chief has harmed and seeks to harm, may the truth that he has no power over us free us to resist.

This is the truth right now that is grounding for me.