From Washington Post interview: Andy Zee Refutes Lies and Distortions about November 4:
“We formed this organization around two main points… One is that the nightmare must end, and second, in the name of humanity we must refuse to accept a fascist America.”
While Nov. 4 has become a rallying point on the conservative landscape — complete with a hashtag “civilwar2017″ — down on the other far end of the political spectrum, the reality is equally significant. The left-leaning group Refuse Fascism is planning rallies across the country on Saturday, the first step in a large-scale, long game demonstration organizers hope will achieve nothing less than the unseating of the Trump administration.
“We formed this organization around two main points,” Andy Zee, one of the group’s organizers, told The Washington Post. “One is that the nightmare must end, and second, in the name of humanity we must refuse to accept a fascist America.”
Zee maintains that Refuse Fascism is committed to nonviolent protest, and scoffs at the ideas floating through the far right of antifa super-soldiers waging war on mainstream society. If anything, the jarring disconnect over Nov. 4 shows how easily facts are eaten alive by social media and regurgitated as conspiracy theory. The possible violence coloring that disconnect illustrates how truly ideologically isolated the two sides are from one another.
“It’s absurd. Calling for a civil war?” Zee said. “Pick a date for a civil war? Honestly, what do you say to this?”
Zee’s group does have big plans for the weekend — and beyond. He tells The Post the group is organizing demonstrations on Saturday in more than a dozen locations, including New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle and San Francisco.
Tapping the same kind of energy unleashed in the Occupy Wall Street movement and Women’s March, Refuse Fascism hopes to spark regular protests against the administration, daily actions that will snowball until “every day there are tens of thousands of people protesting, creating a political crisis in the country with international repercussions, and where you do get a reaction from those in power that they have to do something about it,” Zee said.
The blueprint here, Zee told The Post, is the South Korean mass protest movement that began in October 2016 and eventually led to President Park Geun-hye’s removal from office in March. “What we are trying to unleash is a process of continuous protest,” Zee said. “We can’t just wait for the other shoe to drop. We’ve been saying from the beginning, with fascism, it can be too late.”
Zee is admittedly less clear on what that peaceful regime change would look like in the United States. “Impeachment, the 25th Amendment — they will determine the means and ways when it becomes clear there is a tremendous crisis of confidence,” the organizer said. The key is sending the message.
… Infowars provocateur Alex Jones announced in a video that antifa was “going to lose on November 4 and every day after that, because they’re a bunch of meth-head pieces of crap.”
Refuse Fascism’s Zee denies all that speculation.
The organization is engaged with a broad coalition of groups, including the Revolutionary Communist Party, but it has committed to Refuse Fascism’s nonviolence stance.
Zee told The Post his group does “uphold the legal right to self-defense, but we don’t initiate violence and we oppose violence.” He added violence would only feed into the negative image of the group. “We are not looking to get involved in that kind of situation,” he said. “We are in the fight for hearts and minds of people to recognize the stakes.”
Still, the online hysterics over Nov. 4 have put the potential demonstrations in the crosshairs of extremists.
“It’s utter lunacy on these sites. If you read their stuff, and people are believing it,” the organizer added. “They are calling for people to bring their weapons to the demonstrations. We just have to outnumber them.”