Former Vice President Al Gore speaking at a climate summit in San Francisco.Khaled Sayed/NurPhoto/ZUMA Press
Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.
Twenty years after An Inconvenient Truth made a devastating case for climate action, American leadership on the issue has all but vanished. But former Vice President Al Gore, the film’s crusading star, hasn’t given up hope.
In a sit-down interview with Reveal’s Al Letson this week, Gore returned to a familiar theme from across his career in activism: people-powered change. “Sometimes the time frames, the time cycles, take a little bit longer than we’re comfortable with,” he admitted. “But I do believe in the resilience of American democracy, and I say all the time that political will is a renewable resource. It is.”
He cast the interview as a rallying cry ahead of this weekend’s No Kings events—nationwide protests against President Donald Trump’s sweeping consolidation of federal power. His message for those in the MAGA movement who have embraced what Gore has called authoritarianism was blunt: “There is a feeling on the part of some that we do need a king, we do need an autocrat,” he said. “Well, to hell with you, we do not. We’re Americans. And the whole spirit of these demonstrations is to reassert that fact.”
Gore pointed to the historic scale of the protest movement so far, noting that earlier demonstrations drew millions, and predicted an even bigger turnout this weekend. “Everybody’s kind of expecting that it’ll blow the roof off of those numbers,” he said. “I think these things matter.”
“If they think we’re going to put up with this, they think we’re fools,” he added. “You watch and see.”
For more from this interview, including Gore’s scathing assessment of Trump’s strategy in Iran, watch our previous clip below, and stay tuned for more on an upcoming episode of More To The Story with Al Letson. Subscribe here.
