Meeting Ron Wyden: Why 2025 Is the Year to Get Loud

I was a middle school protest nerd. Then I met a senator who understood why.

Ron Wyden walked into The Dangerous Ones studio, and I watched.

Not just listened—watched. Because I know what I’m looking for.

Politicians know how to smile, and they know how to really look you in the eye—but they rarely do both at the same time. Wyden did. He was present. He was fired up. And he wasn’t faking it.

This is not normal.

I’ve been around long enough to know that most politicians sell hope like a $300 air fryer—promises to change your life, but all it really does is reheat old crap in a slightly different way. Ron Wyden wasn’t selling hope. He was selling urgency.

And he was listening to ours.

The Senator didn’t just talk about grassroots power—he laid out exactly how we win. Because let’s be real: 2025 is not the year to play defense. The right-wing machine is coming for our democracy, and they’re not subtle about it. They’ve got money, power, media manipulation, and an entire propaganda network backing them.

But we’ve got something stronger: people. Organizing. Relentlessness. And in a year where the stakes are higher than ever, that’s exactly what Ron Wyden is counting on—our chutzpah. He knows political change doesn’t come from the top down. It comes from the grassroots up. It comes from YOU. It requires grit. Fortitude. A rebellious streak as red as the stripes on the American flag and the blood in our American hearts.

His 12 Rules of Chutzpah aren’t just a philosophy. They’re the blueprint for how we take back control.

Rule #1: If you want to make change, you’ve got to make noise.

Wyden didn’t just say grassroots matters—he laid out why it’s the only thing that ever does. Democrats are light-years ahead of Republicans in organizing real people, but the game is shifting. The GOP is dumping money into digital manipulation, and if we want to beat them, we have to out-organize, out-message, and out-mobilize.

That means showing up. To town halls. To campaign offices. To your neighbor’s doorstep if you have to. Because nothing changes unless we make it change.

I know this because I lived it.

In 8th grade, I started a petition to let our class use We're Not Gonna Take It by Twisted Sister as our graduation song. The teachers had given us the right to vote for whatever song we wanted—but when we actually chose that particular song, they vetoed it. So my little ass decided to fight back. And guess what happened? We won. We thought we were hot shit that day, stepping out of middle school singing along with Dee Snider. It was 1989, and the last words my acid tongue ever said to my middle school principal were: “You’re lucky it wasn’t Fuck Tha Police.”

By high school, I had leveled up. After Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, I learned about South African apartheid and launched a petition to remove Coca-Cola products from our vending machines until Coke pulled their financial involvement with apartheid or face a full student body boycott.

Did we win? Hell no. But the year after I graduated, increased global pressure—including high school and corporate boycotts—helped dismantle apartheid for good. Coincidence? I think not.

During that time, Ron Wyden visited my high school several times with the best damn superintendent the Portland Public School System has ever had, Matthew Prophet. And given the era—the early ’90s—it could only have been about drug initiatives or gang violence. When I told Wyden I remembered his visits, I think he thought I was lying.

Sir, please. There are swaths of my youth I don’t remember. But school? School was my peace. Of course I remembered.

Rule #6: Embrace the unscripted moments.

Wyden is sharp. He came ready. But he doesn’t do canned answers. When he talks about Portland, he’s not just listing talking points—he’s smiling, like he feels it. When I told him I was born, raised, and stayed, I saw it hit him. He beamed like a proud coach would. Like only someone who’s spent as many decades in the rain as they have in the stacks at Powell’s Books would beam. Walking the same streets under the same never-ending clouds—never carrying an umbrella, because we don’t do that here.

He looked at me the way Portland looks at its first unexpected burst of sunshine in April—the kind that stops you in your tracks. You drop what you’re doing, go outside, and stand in it because you don’t know when you’ll see it again.

That’s what Portland means to him. And in that moment, he knew it meant just as much to me. That’s what real connection looks like. And in a time where politics is so damn performative, it matters when someone drops the act and just is.

In 2025, face-to-face politics matters more than ever. Just look at Ron Wyden’s recent town hall in Sisters, Oregon—standing room only. Voters showed up with real concerns: the stability of our healthcare system, DOGE, the future of Social Security. And they didn’t hold back.

That’s the power of showing up. You get to see who’s real and who’s full of shit. You look them in the eye. You ask the hard questions. You hold them accountable. And when you find someone actually fighting for you? You get to remind them that we’ve got their backs—if they’ve got ours.

Rule #12: Political capital doesn’t earn interest—and it’s worthless if you don’t spend it.

Wyden doesn’t sit on his power. He spends it. He believes in The People—not in some fake, lofty, campaign-slogan way, but in a roll-up-your-sleeves, let’s-go-win-this-fight kind of way.

And if he’s willing to spend his political capital on us? Then we damn well better be ready to spend ours. Time. Effort. Showing up. Speaking out. Organizing like the stakes are everything—because they are.

2025 isn’t just another election year. It’s the most consequential political era in modern American history. No one gets to sit this one out. Especially not The Dangerous Ones. Not DemCast. Not Eleven Films. Not our Blue Dots. Not you.

The GOP is betting on our exhaustion. They’re banking on division, fear, and apathy while they gut the support systems that hold this country together—Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, Veterans’ services, public education.

But if we rise up together—if we amplify, organize, and weaponize every platform we’ve got, no matter the size—they will lose that bet. Because democracy isn’t something we inherit. It’s something we fight for.

They’re betting on silence.
But Chutzpah? Chutzpah doesn’t whisper.
Chutzpah kicks down the door and changes everything.

So yeah—meeting Ron Wyden was a reminder.

A reminder that the system doesn’t move unless we shove it. That real power doesn’t come from institutions—it comes from people. And that 2025 is not the year to play it safe.

The GOP is betting on our silence. Our fear.
But Chutzpah?

Chutzpah doesn’t whisper, and it isn’t scared of cracks, collapse, or consequence. It lives in the rupture—in that raw, breaking point between what is and what must be. It doesn’t fear the fracture.

It becomes it.

Watch now!