This is a lightly edited transcript of the January 29 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: Good morning. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic’s Right Now. I’m honored to be joined by one of the smartest people, I think, writing about politics and government philosophy. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is a professor of philosophy at Georgetown. He’s written these brilliant books about reparations and also about a concept he refers to as Elite Capture, but I have in mind to talk about something much less intellectual—which is a lot of his posts on social media these days.

He uses the phrase, “I regret to inform you that we’re going to win.” We are going to win. I’m not getting the words exactly right, but he’s emphatically been saying this over this last year as Trump has done radical thing after radical thing.

You’ve been one of the voices saying that everything’s not—go, the—things are—things that are bad are happening, but also that some resistance is working. Welcome, first of all.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Bacon: And so what phrase are you using most when on social media?

Táíwò: I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win. That’s what I’ve been saying over and over.

Bacon: And why do you use that phrase?

Táíwò: Honestly, the first time I used it was just playful in the moment—poking fun at the blenders on the right, of which there are plenty. And I think this is an important time to remember that’s the case. But people really seemed to respond to it.

So I just kept saying it. And more or less what I’ve had in mind is, I think we are appropriately responsive to the death and devastation. I think sending people to torture centers, breaking up families, killing people in the streets—that is absolutely the right response on a human level human.

But a thing that’s hard to keep in mind is that tactically, strategically, the point of that hyper-violence is to keep us there emotionally and to keep us from realizing how much power we have to resist them and how successful we cana, and in the case of recent weeks, are being resisting them. That’s the kind of thought behind why it’s important to say stuff like that.

Bacon: So talk about the last few weeks. Are we at an inflection point? And I guess maybe since the election—or really in Minneapolis—it does feel like something has changed. But it feels like Trump is on the defensive a little bit. It feels like there’s a—it’s not—we’re not quite at 2020 levels, and it feels like people are outraged in a certain way. What are you seeing when you look at where we are right now?

Táíwò: People are outraged. And I think it’s too early to tell for sure whether we’re at an inflection point. Only historians have the benefit of being sure about those sorts of things. But it does seem like that—and it seems like that because we’re seeing things on both the left and the right that we saw maybe inklings of before, but I think we’re seeing more dramatic versions of those updates.

On the right, there’s been this kind of shamelessness: We’re not going to fire people for having Nazi ties—a kind of attempt to institute a culture of impunity. And it’s never been total or absolute, right? They—just to give one example—Paul Garcia ended up suspending his potential nomination to a federal position because of what was leaked in Republican group chats. So they’ve never actually been able to project a total culture of impunity throughout the right.

But nevertheless, they themselves called attention to Minnesota with this extreme mobilization of a disproportionate amount of federal [law enforcement] leadership. That’s not a minor position. A position they themselves called attention to does show a level of vulnerability that they haven’t shown before in such a grandiose, charged way.

And they can probably read the polls. There was a YouGov poll that came out that showed them underwater with white people, with men, with demographics that are typically strong for the right wing. So those updates probably correspond with whatever internal polling they’re doing. Something is scaring them. And on the subject of something that’s scaring them, here’s the update on—let’s call it—the left.

We’re seeing an unprecedented amount of mobilization—mobilization not just from ragtag groups of activists, but being joined by people who didn’t previously have organizing experience, being joined by unions that were throwing their weight around. Minnesota had a general strike—in all but name, essentially—on one day. And the most recent murder of Alex Pretti is likely a response to the frustration that the federal agents felt from that incredible mobilization, right?

So we’re seeing levels of organized resistance that don’t really have much of a parallel in recent history. The last general strike was announced in the 1940s—maybe in the 1990s, depending on what you count as the general strike. So we’re seeing big changes.

Bacon: So you mentioned polls—why do you think polls matter? Because you’re a philosopher, I assume you don’t sit around and your actual work does not involve polls. I think there’s a couple indications that the resistance to Trump is working, but I think the one that........

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