Maxwell Frost Says History Won’t Look Kindly on Dems Sucking Up to Trump

People want to see the maximalist action done up front, and I get it. I’m someone who’s been arrested multiple times in Florida, so I get it. But before I was arrested, I was a part of 80 or 90 protests and actions where I wasn’t arrested. I think sometimes, unfortunately, the online world romanticizes the most extreme parts of movement.

Florida congressman Maxwell Frost (Cover)
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We see this a lot with strikes. You see a lot of people online talking about strikes being a fun, cool thing. If you talk to any actual union organizer, you don’t want to get to a place where you have to be on strike. Strikes are hard on people. Strikes are hard on families, the workers, they’re risking being fired. They could be losing their pay. People don’t want to get to that point. It is a tool that could be used, but the whole point is, what’s before the strike? There’s tons of negotiations, there’s other direct actions, there’s demonstration pickets, there’s all these things that go on. You don’t just go to the thing that people have romanticized.

If I would have just stormed this gate — which, by the way, is at the Treasury Department, which is pretty much the White House — I can promise everybody not only would I have been arrested, but I would have been arrested and been made an example. I probably would have been charged with a felony of trying to storm a federal building.

The irony is, a lot of things that the January 6th-ers were charged with and were just pardoned for, I promise you, I would have been charged with the full extent of the law and be out of commission for a long time, taking up resources and attention on something that I don’t think will yield a great result in this moment.

People shouldn’t question if I’m willing to be arrested. I’ve been arrested, but it’s not about that. It’s not just about members of Congress making decisions to try to get on TV and stuff. We’re working with groups, working with unions. We’re trying to figure out, over the next four years, how are we going to resist, obstruct, protect our people? Let me do the next two years, because we want to take back the House and have real institutional power to stop what’s going on. But right now we don’t have the institutional power, we have the people power, which is so powerful, but we got to be strategic.

MF: It sucks that constituents have to reach out to their office and say, “Hey, this isn’t normal. Look what’s going on.” But unfortunately, there’s a lot of grifters in politics, and there’s a lot of people who see this moment and they want to curry favor with the authoritarian, which I think is what you’re seeing in the Senate with some people.

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