The #OUTNOW Movement Has Been Born –

Now It Must Grow By Leaps and Bounds to Achieve This Demand:

Trump/Pence #OUTNOW!

Also see at the end of this report, a piece by Sarah Roark: Five Saturdays of Action – We’ve Found Them, Now We Must Forge Them

On November 16, around 500 people of different ages, diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds, and a wide range of political views came out for the fourth week in a row in over a dozen protests around the country raising the single unifying demand: Trump/Pence #OUTNOW! The five weeks of protests were kicked off in Los Angeles and New York City by RefuseFascism.org co-initiators Andy Zee, Carl Dix and Cornel West.

The 4 weeks of national protests put the demand “Trump/Pence #OUTNOW!” on the map and advocated for and modeled that only mass sustained, nonviolent protest across the country can stop the nightmare of the Trump/Pence regime.    Several times the #OUTNOW! movement broke into major media, reaching hundreds of thousands and even millions, through coverage of actions on CNN, Newsweek, The  Washington Post garnering headlines through our concurrent actions such as a quickly organized protest at Trump’s appearance at Madison Square Garden, to our protest @ UCLA against Trump Jr.’s book tour as well as national reporting of the the vicious attack on the kickoff LA event where a gang of fascist thugs attacked #OUTNOW! spraying protesters with the potentially lethal bear repellent.   RefuseFascism/#OUTNOW! media appearances on The Young Turks, Pacifica stations, and local newspapers and social media spread the word further.

The crowds who came to the weekly protests were diverse in every way.  Very important for the future: new cores of a committed leaders of the movement are beginning to coalesce.  And, other individuals and organizations from religious leaders, artists and musicians,  to anti-Trump organizations have begun conversation with #OUTNOW! as to how to do in this country what people are doing around the world to remove fascist regimes.

Yet, the launch never achieved the geometric growth in numbers necessary to drive out this regime.

Andy Zee said at the 1/16 rally in NYC of the 5 week launch of #OUTNOW!:  We have begun but we have not won, and, driving this regime from power is our only purpose…What remains to be done is work together with all of you and thousands of others to solve the big problem that no one has solved as yet: How to move hundreds of thousands into the streets in sustained protest as is being done in other countries.”  To this end,  we have called for critical #OUTNOW! meetings on Sunday afternoon 11/24 to dig into this question.

There are tough questions that must be solved together with all kinds of people and social forces  to scale the great and urgent challenge that remains ahead. Thousands, and soon millions, need to be shaken out of their complicity of going along with business as usual as fascism is hammered into place with lives destroyed, rights stripped away, the planet itself imperiled, and a point at which it becomes too late to stop this fascist remaking of society. We invite everyone who wants to see the Trump/Pence regime #OUTNOW – from different organizations, points of views, backgrounds and ages – to join with us at this meeting and in this great endeavor.

In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America!

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Five Saturdays of Action – We’ve Found Them, Now We Must Forge Them

by Sarah Roark

Five Weeks of Action – We’ve Found Them, Now We Must Forge Them

We are now three years into the Trump regime, and its crimes have not slackened off. On the contrary, they’ve multiplied, in number, depth and speed – even the beginning of impeachment hearings in the House has only hardened their determination to destroy human rights and rule of law.

As the fascists in our executive branch redoubled their efforts to destroy any mechanism that might take power out of their hands, we at Refuse Fascism decided to take the momentous step of launching a multi-week, multi-city campaign of protest, with the object of modeling and establishing the basis for the only kind of force that can actually end this national and global nightmare: a sustained, disruptive, nonviolent mass movement of the people with enough determination and numbers to shut down business as usual until our demand that this illicit regime be removed is met.

Our members and volunteers have been exercising their determination and creativity in many ways in order to place a crucial truth before the American people – that this is quite literally a fascist regime rapidly destroying democracy, and no regime that is destroying democracy can be legitimate, or allowed to continue – and then challenge people to act in accordance with the truth.

The task was all the more difficult because the truth we are bringing is the one everyone needs to hear, not the one everyone wants to hear. The holidays are upon us all. Impeachment hearings are capturing the breathless attention of our more politically-minded loved ones and neighbors. The signal-to-noise ratio steadily increases in favor of noise. Even at this very late hour many are telling themselves (and being told by eager pundits on MSNBC and elsewhere) that Trump is being successfully contained, or is even on his way out.

We can’t underestimate, in such a moment, how important it was to do what we’ve just done.

We put the demand Trump/Pence #OUTNOW on the map – not before all of society, but in a wide-reaching way. In major media outlets including Newsweek and CNN, we broke the sound barrier and got this message out in front of hundreds of thousands. We were publicly endorsed by respected people of conscience such as Cornel West and Yusef Salaam, and several well-known performers graced our events. We were a live, high-visibility example of exactly the sort of sustained program of protest we are calling for, one that comes back and back without stopping until it has accomplished its aim. The story unfolded differently in different cities, with groups ranging from half a dozen to a couple hundred, and roughly 500 coming out repeatedly and consistently over the five weeks of the push…sometimes stepping out for the very first time in brand new places.

The repeat attendees especially are a welcome and crucial development, because they and their tenacity are the forming core of a true movement base. One with the solidity needed to stabilize our gains, develop them and carry them forward – and one that can work with the much larger inflow and outflow of those whose commitment is still embryonic, but has the potential to grow into so much more.

Many people who never realized that a way to end this nightmare might lie within their own hands, and they don’t have to passively witness their own society’s fascist collapse, heard that message for the very first time. Others who were already aware or half-aware had it sharply brought back to front-of-mind, even as they watch the sad limits of the official process underway become more exposed than ever. Organizations doing their own internal wrestling about the troubling shortcomings of the anti-Trump “Resistance” are paying new attention to what we do. We know that our message connected with some of our fellow Americans in a very deep way, because we have a new wave of people coming forward to join us. Which is excellent news, because we need them!

What we don’t have, still, is the thousands and ultimately millions this is going to take to finally succeed in compelling the removal of the Trump/Pence regime before it’s too late for humanity. This is the challenge that all of us who refuse to accept a fascist America must put to ourselves now. Too many lives – in fact, the fate of the planet itself – rests on our not merely “fighting the good fight,” but finding the way to WIN – to bring an anguished public to lose its adjustment to and normalization of the atrocity in progress and rise up in broad coalition to drive the fascist Trump/Pence regime from power.

Why has that larger effort fallen short up till now? In part, because there are many of our fellow Americans that we haven’t yet connected with. (If it were easy to do, it would already have been done.) We are also trying to break through the fog of powerful political narcotics, as well as the sheer human denial of inconvenient realities. It’s become sadly clear that people simply will not embrace the truth of this threat, and what it will take to end it, as long as they still have one shabby lie or shiny distraction left to cling to. They would rather tell themselves fables about how the system will correct itself, the opposition will discover a long-lost conscience, the “institutions” will hold, the “grownups in the room” know exactly what to do and have it handled. The impeachment will solve everything. The election will solve everything. At any rate it’s all going to be okay somehow – without our having to do anything uncomfortable or unusual.

In December, we will continue our program of bold and unrelenting actions, but add elements designed to target this daze and denial head on. With love, rigor, and a commitment to reality as it is – not as we wish it were – we must develop and enact polemics, dialogues and interventions that disrupt the trance and make room for an entirely different conversation…one that’s still fraught and difficult, but carries an actual hope for humanity. This won’t and can’t be a passive process of receiving instructions from organizers who receive instructions from committees. Just the opposite. Beginning with our meetings of Sunday, November 24^th, we’ll be putting our heads together, actively soliciting your problem-solving – bringing our strongly diverse skills and perspectives to bear on the obstacles that still stand in the way of people recognizing this need and taking up this call as their own. Each of us has our own unique experience of trying to “wake up” those we know and encounter in our communities, sometimes as a lone voice, sometimes not…and these encounters have taught us more than we often realize. The time has come to assemble these puzzle pieces, and then proceed directly from the new overarching understanding they bring us into forging plans for the weeks ahead that are specifically, consciously directed by that understanding.

These December Disruptions will focus both on the actions themselves, and on the ways they can become part of part of more fully embracing our members – both the new ones, and the ones who are newly growing in understanding and commitment – and finding their “homes” and roles within this movement. Every person we’ve brought forward over these last weeks has unique talents that we lacked before; personal and social circles we might never have reached otherwise; and strength they may not even know they possess! These people, who have the courage and insight to join this effort in a phase when so many others still remain inert, are the ones who can be forged into the strong core our organization needs: a core resilient enough to multiply in stage after stage, until the full numbers are achieved that we know we must have to make our inescapable need and demand a reality:

Trump/Pence Out Now! In the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America!

 

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Mass Meetings on Driving the Trump-Pence Regime #OUTNOW!

This call for mass meetings was issued at #OUTNOW protests across the country on November 16

Making History Is NOT A Spectator Sport…
You Are Needed To Help Drive Out A Fascist Regime 

Sunday November 24

Times and places

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Announcing #OUTNOW

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